Milestones

By Harriet Barovick, Elizabeth L. Bland, Sean Gregory and Unmesh Kher

RENAMED. AOL TIME WARNER, parent company of TIME; to Time Warner; by the company's board of directors, three years after the announcement of the trouble-plagued corporate merger; in New York City. Of expunging the name of its online unit--which will mean changing the company's ticker symbol (to TWX) and its logo--CEO Dick Parsons said, "We believe that our new name better reflects the portfolio of our valuable businesses and ends any confusion between our corporate name and the America Online brand name."

RESIGNED. RICHARD GRASSO, 57, as chairman and CEO of the New York Stock Exchange; after an uproar over his recently disclosed $140 million pay package and other benefits, which critics contended were excessive and inappropriate for a financial regulator whose job was, in part, to set an example of responsible corporate management; in New York City.

WOUNDED. AKILA AL-HASHEMI, 50, one of three female members of Iraq's U.S.-backed Governing Council and a leading candidate for the job of Iraq's U.N representative; by a bullet to the abdomen, fired by gunmen near her home in western Baghdad as she was being driven to work; in the first assassination attempt on a member of the interim government. Doctors said al-Hashemi was in critical but stable condition after surgery.

DIED. YETUNDE PRICE, 31, eldest sister of tennis stars Venus and Serena Williams, to whom she was a part-time personal assistant; after being shot as she sat in a van with her companion, Rolland Wormley, 28, outside a suspected drug house about a mile from the tennis courts where Venus and Serena rose to fame; in gang-plagued Compton, Calif. The motive for the shooting was unclear, but police arrested and charged an alleged gang associate, Aaron Michael Hammer, 24, with Price's murder.

DIED. GARNER TED ARMSTRONG, 73, silver-haired TV evangelist; of complications from pneumonia; in Tyler, Texas. The son of radio evangelist Herbert Armstrong, whose Worldwide Church of God earned more than $70 million a year by the late 1970s with its predictions of an imminent apocalypse, he became the star of the church's widely distributed radio and TV show The World Tomorrow. Allegations of his sexual misconduct later led his father to excommunicate him from the church. Yet he stayed on the air, most recently as founder of the Intercontinental Church of God.

DIED. PAUL CONKLIN, 74, the Peace Corps's first official photographer, whose famous shot of a Vietnam War protester placing a daisy in the barrel of a National Guardsman's gun crystallized the antiwar sentiments of a generation; of cancer; in Port Townsend, Wash.

DIED. SHEB WOOLEY, 82, actor and comedic singer-songwriter whose 1958 novelty hit, The Purple People Eater, about an alienlike creature, tapped into America's fascination with outer space and sold 3 million copies; of leukemia; in Nashville, Tenn. His string of wry country songs included the theme for TV's Hee Haw, but he had an equally successful career as a TV and movie actor--notably playing outlaw Ben Miller, who menaces Gary Cooper in High Noon, and a trail scout in the 1959-66 TV series Rawhide, which helped launch Clint Eastwood's career.

DIED. JAY MORTON, 92, writer and artist for the Fleischer animation studios who, after deciding against using lightning as a metaphor for speed, coined Superman's famous cartoon introduction, "Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound"; in Charlotte, N.C.