Starting Time

Monday, Dec. 31, 2001

ILLUSTRATION FOR TIME BY JERRY SWAFFIELD

Person of the Week
GOING DOWN Already pilloried for political gaffes and indecisiveness, Argentine President Fernando de la Rua was forced to resign last week after his economic austerity measures prompted riots and looting across the country. The big question now: What will happen to Argentina's $132 billion debt?

Noted
"We declare the suspension of martyrdom attacks ... until further notice."
HAMAS,
militant Palestinian group, calling for a temporary halt to suicide bombings in Israel

Prime Number
$1.6 million is the average amount to be awarded�tax-free�from the Sept. 11 Victims Compensation Fund to each family of those killed or injured in the attacks

Omen
According to Kabul judge Ahamat Ullha Zarif, adulterers in post-Taliban Afghanistan will still be stoned to death, "but we will use only small stones"

Winners
LUIS FIGO
Portuguese playmaker wins FIFA's footballer-of-the-year award. He passes up sponsors wanting him to promote thick, sweet dessert wines
JEAN-MARIE MESSIER
French media baron nabs part of USA Networks. His best deal since he bought his name off that guy with the kick-ass slap shot
TOMMY LEE
Court grants heavy metal rocker permission to visit his kids. Judge accepts his argument that with his career over, he has plenty of time
Losers
DICK CLARK
American Bandstander sues Michael Jackson for skipping awards show. Talk about a sore winner�most hosts would pay to get that lucky
GERALDO RIVERA
Admits he flubbed a story from Afghanistan becase of the "fog of war." Apparently, the climate's been terrible throughout his career
PRINCESS BUNIAH AL-SAUD
Saudi royal charged in Florida for beating her maid. Back home, the princess would have been beheaded or praised for good management

Everybody's Business?
Honey, Get My Good Side
Being in the public eye was like oxygen for Chu Mei-feng. She had her Diane Sawyer moment as a reporter and newsreader on Taiwanese television, followed by Hillary Clintonesque stints as a city councilwoman in Taipei and, last month, as an unsuccessful candidate for the island's legislature. But too much oxygen can start a bonfire, and Chu is now nothing less than the Taiwanese counterpart to Pamela Anderson.

The unmarried Chu, 35, had a steamy affair with a local Internet businessman. What the two didn't know was that someone installed a spy camera in Chu's bedroom. Earlier this month, footage of an adroit assignation appeared on the Net. (For a few days, it was the obsession of Taiwanese Web surfers, many of them deeply impressed by the two lovers' passion and technical expertise.) Then tabloid magazine Scoop Weekly gave its readers a free vcd with 47 minutes of Chu and her beau going at it. The government confiscated unsold copies but it was too late: pirated versions are selling like hotcakes. Chu intends to sue the magazine, and the boyfriend (who is married) has gone into hiding. Police say they don't know who planted the camera, but the damage has been done. Chu's career is now in tatters�unless, of course, Tommy Lee is looking for a new babe.

56 Years Ago in TIME
The hunt for another evildoer, Adolf Hitler, ended on April 30, 1945, when the increasingly unstable Nazi leader took his own life in Berlin.

"Fate knocked at the door last week for Europe's two fascist dictators. Mussolini, shot in the back and through the head by his partisan executioners, lay dead in Milan. Adolf Hitler had been buried, dead or alive, in the rubble of his collapsing Third Reich ... If he were indeed dead, the hope of most of mankind had been realized. For seldom had so many millions of people hoped so implacably for the death of one man.

If they had been as malign as he in their vengefulness, they might better have hoped that he would live on yet a little while. For no death they could devise for him could be as cruel as must have been Hitler's eleventh-hour thoughts on the completeness of his failure. His total war against non-German mankind was ending in total defeat ... Seldom in human history, never in modern times, had a man so insignificantly monstrous become the absolute head of a great nation. The suffering and desolation that he wrought were beyond human power or fortitude to compute. The bodies of his victims were heaped across Europe from Stalingrad to London. The ruin in terms of human life was forever incalculable. It had required a coalition of the whole world to destroy the power his political inspiration had contrived."

Time, May 7, 1945

Milestones
By NEIL GOUGH

OVERTURNED. Death sentence of MUMIA ABU-JAMAL, 47, former journalist and black-rights proponent whose conviction for the 1981 shooting death of a police officer has been decried as racist and politically motivated by activists and celebrities worldwide, by order of U.S. District Judge William Yohn Jr; in Philadelphia. The decision marks Abu-Jamal's first victory in an almost 20-year legal battle.
DIED. GILBERT BECAUD, 74, famed French singer and prolific songwriter whose career spanned more than half a century and included work with Charles Aznavour and Edith Piaf; in Paris. Becaud, whose most famous song was recorded as What Now My Love by many, including Frank Sinatra, was saluted by President Jacques Chirac as a "talented ambassador of French chanson."
DIED. ANDRES FELIPE PEREZ, 12, Colombian boy whose fruitless search for his father, kidnapped from a rural village by Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia rebels nearly two years ago, had captured national attention, of cancer; in Buga, on the Pacific coast. As he lay dying, emaciated and disease-ridden, Perez's last words were to his mother: "I'm going to sleep. If Dad calls wake me up."
DIED. DICK SCHAAP, 67, laureled print and broadcast journalist, renowned sports commentator and prolific author whose career spanned four decades; in New York. Known for the lasting friendships he formed with those he profiled, Schaap's legacy is as large as his coverage was varied�from Super Bowls to the White House to the Great White Way.
DIED. STUART ADAMSON, 43, Scottish guitarist and singer for the expansive 1980s rock bank Big Country, whose bagpipe-like sound won two Grammy nominations in 1984; in Honolulu (see eulogy).

Eulogy
By PTOLEMY TOMPKINS

Big Country entered the early '80s alternative music scene like a Celtic marching band on a mixture of steroids and ecstasy. The group specialized in the kind of anthemic, fist-in-the-air fare that other post-punk acts like The Alarm and the then fledgling U2 were making popular on American college and alternative radio stations. But The Alarm and U2 were protest bands�even if we weren't always sure what it was they were protesting. Big Country might have had bones to pick about social issues too, but what mattered to us was the band's sheer, unapologetic exuberance. No group had ever managed to sound quite this loud, and quite this happy. With later albums, Big Country's singer and chief songwriter STUART ADAMSON tempered that optimism with grief and anger. But news of Adamson's apparent suicide still comes as a terrible contradiction. His is a name, and a voice, we will always associate with joy.