Informant38

three deaths
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Father Ronald P. Pytel, 56, a pastor of Holy Rosary Roman Catholic Church in Southeast Baltimore whose recovery from a life-threatening heart condition was declared a miracle by Vatican authorities four years ago, died of kidney cancer Monday at a home he had restored in Middle Way, W.Va.

Diagnosed with a degenerative aortic valve and congestive heart failure in the mid-1990s, Pytel underwent surgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital and recovered � all while praying to Faustina Kowalska, a Polish nun who recently had been beatified.

The Holy See determined Pytel's case to be a miracle, and it was used to further the nun's canonization as a saint in 2000.
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Roy Lucas, 61, a lawyer who was instrumental in shaping the "right to privacy" legal argument that was used in the Supreme Court's landmark Roe vs. Wade ruling, which legalized abortion in the United States, died of a heart attack Monday in Prague. A resident of Washington, D.C., he was doing research in the Czech Republic.
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The Columbia, S.C., native made his argument in a research paper for a class on litigation while he was a third-year law student at New York University. The North Carolina Law Review published the paper in 1968.
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He filed the first abortion-rights lawsuit in New York in 1969, and participated in most of the abortion-rights lawsuits filed around the country over the next four years.
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Joanna Lee

She had to struggle to get started as a director and producer, careers dominated by men, but gradually developed a strong sense of mission as a filmmaker. To some extent her own life was the impetus. A twice-divorced single mother with two children, Lee began to focus on social problems, particularly those that affected women.

She made a firm decision "that the women I write about are winners. I want women to win in life," she said in a 1976 interview with The Times.

She wrote the script for "Cage Without a Key" (1975), about a girls reform school. She went on to write and produce "I Want to Keep My Baby" (1976), the story of a teenage girl who decides to give up her child for adoption.
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Her Hollywood career began in the late 1950s, after she took acting classes and got roles in...science fiction movies...including..."Plan 9 From Outer Space" (1959).

�LATimes 11.08.03