Milestones

By Melissa August, Harriet Barovick, ELIZABETH L. BLAND, Clayton Neuman

SWORN IN. JOHN ROBERTS, 50, as the 17th Chief Justice of the U.S.; following a Senate confirmation vote of 78 to 22, making him the youngest Chief Justice since 1801, when John Marshall was confirmed at age 45; in Washington.

SENTENCED. LYNNDIE ENGLAND, 22, Army private photographed grinning beside naked detainees at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, who said her participation in the abuse was prompted by a desire to please her then boyfriend, jailed ringleader Charles Graner; to three years in prison and a dishonorable discharge; in Fort Hood, Texas.

RESIGNED. EDDIE COMPASS, 47, New Orleans police chief, after unrelenting criticism of his role in the chaotic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and 26 years at the police department in his hometown. Though he gave no specific reason for the move, his press conference came on the same day police announced that 250 cops would be investigated for unapproved absences following the storm.

KILLED. ABU AZZAM, whom U.S. and Iraqi officials describe as a top al-Qaeda lieutenant in Iraq; in a shootout with U.S. and Iraqi forces who tracked him to a high-rise Baghdad building and shot him when he opened fire.

DIED. GEORGE ARCHER, 65, towering golf champ known for his exacting putting stroke; of Burkitt's lymphoma, a rare form of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma; at his home in Incline Village, Nev. Though the 6-ft. 5-in. Archer tried to follow his father's advice to pursue basketball--"where the hole is way up there," as the son recalled him saying--he went on to win 12 P.G.A. championships, including the 1969 Masters, and 19 events on the 50-and-older Champions Tour.

DIED. M. SCOTT PECK, 69, ex-military psychiatrist credited with pioneering publishing's self-help genre with his best-selling 1978 life manual, The Road Less Traveled; of pancreatic and liver cancer; in Warren, Conn. Although he freely admitted he was not always able to heed his own advice--he acknowledged having such bad habits as drinking and womanizing--Peck differed from his successors by emphasizing the arduous task of self-examination, insisting that "life is difficult."

DIED. DON ADAMS, 82, ex-stand-up comic who achieved eternal pop-culture fame, and three Emmys, as the bumbling yet vain secret agent Maxwell Smart ("Sorry about that, Chief") on TV's 1960s spy spoof Get Smart; in Los Angeles. Unlike James Bond, Adams' hilariously unsuave Agent 86 ate classified messages before remembering to read them, dialed calls on a phone hidden in a pair of high-tech but often malfunctioning shoes and insisted that his partner, 99 (Barbara Feldon), let him handle the delicate jobs--which he promptly botched. Adams' later roles included the voice of Inspector Gadget in the 1980s TV cartoon series.

DIED. CONSTANCE BAKER MOTLEY, 84, trailblazing lawyer, New York State Senator and federal judge who, with her intricate knowledge of the law and unyielding persistence and elegance, helped fight, and often win, many of the most significant civil rights battles in U.S. history; in New York City. The first black woman appointed to the federal bench, by Lyndon Johnson in 1966, she received funds for college after a local philanthropist, Clarence Blakeslee, heard the then teenager speak at a community center. As a young lawyer for the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense and Educational Fund, where she worked for two decades, she assisted Thurgood Marshall in preparing the landmark school-desegregation case Brown v. Board of Education and, following that 1954 ruling, took on what she called the "second civil war." Of the 10 school-desegregation cases she argued before the Supreme Court, she won nine, among them James Meredith's fight to attend the University of Mississippi--a victory that rocked not just Ole Miss but also a state well known for its intractable racism. Later, in a high-profile 1978 decision as a U.S. judge, she ruled that female sports reporters be given access to major league baseball players' locker rooms.

DIED. LEO STERNBACH, 97, chemist and inventor of the widely used antianxiety drug Valium; at home in Chapel Hill, N.C. Born in Austria and educated in Poland, he began his career with Hoffmann-La Roche Inc. in Switzerland before coming to the U.S. Sternbach collected 241 patents in his career; he also developed the tranquilizer Librium, the sleeping pill Mogadon, Klonopin for epileptic seizures and Arfonad to control bleeding during surgery.

DIED. URIE BRONFENBRENNER, 88, psychologist whose theory, which he dubbed the "ecology of human development" and is now called bioecology, changed the perception of the necessary factors for a child's development; in Ithaca, N.Y. With his belief that growth was informed not just by psychological factors but also by social, economic, political and cultural ones, he was instrumental in founding the U.S. school-readiness program Head Start, which since the 1960s has served 20 million children and families.

By Melissa August, Harriet Barovick, Elizabeth L. Bland and Clayton Neuman