Milestones

By Melissa August; Peter Bailey; Elizabeth L. Bland; Unmesh Kher; Nadia Mustafa

UPHELD. OREGON'S DEATH WITH DIGNITY ACT, by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals; in San Francisco. The endorsement of the U.S.'s only assisted-suicide law, which lets doctors prescribe lethal drugs to terminal patients requesting them, was a rebuke to Attorney General John Ashcroft, who tried to block the law.

APPOINTED. BERNARD CARDINAL LAW, by the Vatican, to become the archpriest of St. Mary Major Basilica in Rome. Cardinal Law was forced to resign in 2002 as head of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston after numerous revelations of sexual abuse involving members of his clergy.

DIED. UMBERTO AGNELLI, 69, chairman of ailing Italian automaker Fiat; of cancer; in Turin, Italy. Agnelli, the dynasty's quiet member who took the reins after the death last year of his dashing older brother Giovanni, had been helping turn around the troubled company.

DIED. JOEL DEAN, 73, whose fancy SoHo food store, Dean & DeLuca, made epicures of American shoppers; of a staph infection; in New York City. In 1976 he quit a publishing job to open an upscale market with his friend Giorgio DeLuca. It became a destination for food lovers, the flagship of the 19-store chain and a thriving catalog and Web business.

DIED. S.C. JOHNSON, 76, head of the floor-wax company of the same name; of stomach cancer; in Racine, Wis. The company, named for and founded by his great-grandfather, became famous for Johnson Wax but, under Johnson's direction, branched out to other products such as Raid bug sprays. A friend of the environment, he stopped using chlorofluorocarbons three years before they were prohibited, costing the company millions in the short term but earning consumer trust.

DIED. SAM DASH, 79, former chief Watergate counsel, whose probe into the Oval Office's secret taping system helped set the stage for President Nixon's resignation; in Washington. The lifelong Democrat later drafted the independent-counsel law and in the '90s advised counsel Kenneth Starr on the Whitewater investigation of President Clinton.

DIED. ROGER STRAUS, 87, the dominant force in the publishing house Farrar, Straus and Giroux; in New York City. An heir to the Guggenheim fortune, he teamed up with John Farrar to form one of America's most prestigious independent publishers, whose roster of celebrated authors included T.S. Eliot, Nadine Gordimer and Isaac Bashevis Singer. "Newspapers wrap up fish," he once said. "Books are in the library forever."

DIED. DAVID DELLINGER, 88, antiwar activist and one of the Chicago Seven tried for inciting a riot at the 1968 Democratic Convention; in Montpelier, Vt. Born to privilege, he was drawn to civil disobedience as a student at Yale, where he committed himself to nonviolence after hitting someone after a football game. A former divinity student who was 20 years older than his Chicago Seven comrades, Dellinger organized the 1967 march on the Pentagon depicted in Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night.