By HANNAH BEECH

ELECTED. JOSEPH BLATTER, 62, Swiss longtime soccer administrator, as head of FIFA, the world governing soccer body, by nearly 200 fifa members; in Paris. The close two-man race between Blatter and the president of the European soccer union (UEFA), Lennart Johansson, was heavy on the mudslinging, reflecting conflicts between Blatter's wish to keep FIFA highly centralized and Johansson's desire to devolve decision-making.

CAPTURED. ALBERTO ORLANDEZ GAMBOA, 43, one of Colombia's last suspected drug bosses still on the loose; in the northern Colombian port city of Barranquilla. Orlandez, who tried to elude police by undergoing hair implants and shedding many kilos, has been indicted in Miami on charges of drug trafficking and money laundering and could face extradition to the U.S. Colombia wants Orlandez on murder and kidnapping charges.

DIED. CARDINAL AGOSTINO CASAROLI, 83, unflappable former Vatican Foreign Minister, who defrosted relations with communist regimes and choreographed a historic meeting between Mikhail Gorbachev and Pope John Paul II in 1989; in Rome. As Vatican envoy under four popes, Casaroli also distinguished himself by making the Roman Catholic Church an effective mediator in international conflicts, most notably in Argentina and Chile in 1984.

DIED. MARSHALL GREEN, 82, the U.S. State Department's consummate old Asia hand, who countered the image of the "ugly American" by keeping a low but effective profile during various foreign service stints; in Bethesda, Maryland. Green was witness to some of Asia's biggest 20th-century landmarks--from the bloody revolution in Indonesia that brought Suharto to power in the mid-1960s to Nixon's historic lifting of the bamboo curtain in 1972.

DIED. CATHERINE COOKSON, 91, prolific English author whose rags-to-riches tales mirrored her own storied life; in Newcastle upon Tyne. Personal trials with illegitimacy, poverty and drunkenness imbued her novels with an authentic working-class feel that appealed to readers, who borrowed her books more often than any others in British libraries.

FORMALLY UNVEILED. ASTANA, mosquito-ridden town of 130,000 in northern Kazakhstan, as the new capital of the Central Asian republic, replacing Almaty, an earthquake-prone city of 1.2 million near the Chinese border. Kazakhstan's northern flank bubbles with Russian separatists, and President Nursultan Nazarbayev is thought to have chosen Astana to better suppress any insurrectionist moves.

RE-INTRODUCED. WOODY WOODPECKER, 58, animated avian whose piercing ha-ha-ha-HA-ha chortle tickled a generation of American cartoon viewers, by Universal Studios, who put the impish bird on hiatus in 1979. "A hip, contemporary Woody" will star in 40 new episodes starting in November, featuring a miscellany of other kooky characters, including Chilly Willy, Buzz Buzzard, Splinter and Knothead.

TIME CAPSULE

RICHARD NIXON's historic first trip to China 26 years ago was a shocker but didn't stir as much controversy as Bill Clinton's upcoming visit to Beijing--and to the site of the bloody 1989 crackdown in Tiananmen Square.

"The scene in Peking's Great Hall of the People last week certainly had to be one of history's great ironies. There, while a Chinese army band played America, the Beautiful, a U.S. President merrily clinked mao-tai glasses with his Chinese hosts, long considered the true 'baddies' of the Communist world. Nor was it just any American President either; it was a conservative Republican who has long had a reputation as being the perfect cold warrior...The American public could be excused if it found its neck wrenched and its equilibrium upset by the...spectacle of Nixon chumming it up with former enemies and sitting patiently through a revolutionary ballet in Peking."
--TIME, March 6, 1972