Milestones Aug. 14, 2006

FIRED. Floyd Landis, 30, when a second urine sample the American cyclist provided after Stage 17 of the Tour de France also tested positive for synthetic testosterone, a banned performance-enhancing substance; by his Swiss team, Phonak. The top Tour official says he no longer considers Landis the champ, but the decision to officially strip the title rests with the International Cycling Union. Landis says he’s innocent, suggesting cortisone shots, whiskey, dehydration and human error as possible explanations. Says his spokesman Michael Henson: “As an ethical athlete and human being, he’s maintained cleanliness throughout.”

PLEADED GUILTY. Claude Allen, 45, former Bush White House domestic-policy adviser, in a plea agreement, to one misdemeanor count of theft for defrauding Target stores by stealing items and then attempting to get refunds for them; in Rockville, Md. Allen last week ascribed his behavior to job stress and sleep deprivation in dealing with the fallout from Hurricane Katrina.

RETIRED. U.S. Major General Geoffrey Miller, 56, former commander of detention facilities at Guantánamo Bay and deputy commanding general for detainee operations in Iraq; from the U.S. Army; in Washington. The interrogation techniques the two-star general helped organize at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib were so controversial that Miller retired rather than face rebuke. Army officials, insisting Miller was wrongly taking the fall, awarded him with the Distinguished Service Medal at his Pentagon retirement ceremony.

DIED. Jason Rhoades, 41, wildly irreverent conceptual and performance artist who rose to fame in the 1990s art scene; of heart failure; in Los Angeles. His most recent installations were a riotous clash of civilizations in which visitors became part of his work, in a gallery transformed “like Ali Baba’s cave,” said Gary Garrels, senior curator at UCLA’s Hammer Museum, “with neon lights, rugs, Mexican tourist souvenirs, American Indian dream catchers, hookah pipes … Every cultural ideal was up for challenge.”

DIED. Susan Butcher, 51, champion musher who won the Iditarod dogsled race four times, the first in 1986; of complications from a bone-marrow transplant to treat polycythemia vera, a rare blood disease; in Seattle, Wash. Of the grueling, 1,152-mile slog through the Alaskan wilderness Butcher once said, “I do not know the word quit. Either I never did, or I have abolished it.”

DIED. Arthur Lee, 61, psychedelic rock pioneer and leader of the 1960s Los Angeles band Love, regarded as having influenced the Rolling Stones and the Doors; of leukemia; in Memphis, Tenn. Lee never reached the fame of his contemporaries, but his 1967 album Forever Changes, which blended folk melancholy with rock verve, is one of the genre’s most important albums. In May 2006, as part of his leukemia treatment, he became the first adult in Tennessee to receive a stem-cell transplant.

DIED. Lieut. Colonel Besby Frank Holmes (ret.), 88, fighter pilot in the 1943 mission to kill Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the mastermind of the Pearl Harbor attack; in Greenbrae, Calif. Holmes was in church in Oahu on Sunday morning, Dec. 7, 1941, when he heard the bombers. Less than two years later, he was part of a mission that flew 400 miles to intercept and shoot down the admiral’s plane. Controversy erupted over which U.S. pilot scored the kill, but as Holmes proudly noted, “the Japanese did not win a single major engagement after the demise of Admiral Yamamoto.”

DIED. Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, 90, luminous, lustrous-voiced soprano and diva of renown–and fiery temperament–comparable to that of Maria Callas, but whose membership in the Nazi Party would haunt her reputation; in Schruns, Austria. Schwarzkopf made her operatic debut in 1938 at the Berlin State Opera and quickly became recognized as the supreme interpreter of Strauss and Mozart. Questions of her ties to the Nazis surfaced periodically; she ignored them for decades. But when confronted in 1983, she told the New York Times, “It was akin to joining a union, and exactly for the same reason: to have a job.” The woman known as “Opera’s Garbo” leaves behind a famous nephew: retired U.S. Army General Norman Schwarzkopf.