Milestones
RESIGNED. BISHOP CARLOS BELO, 54, outspoken East Timorese Bishop for the Vatican and spiritual leader of his country's largely Roman Catholic population; claiming ill-health and the need for "a long period of recuperation"; in Dili, East Timor. A staunch defender of human rights, Belo, who won the Nobel Peace Prize with Foreign Minister Jose Ramos-Horta in 1996 for their efforts to bring peace to the region, is revered for standing up to the Indonesian military during its harsh rule of East Timor before the territory's in-dependence in 1999.
APPOINTED. HENRY KISSINGER, 79, Nobel Prize-winning former U.S. secretary of state who served under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford; by President George W. Bush to head a new independent commission to investigate intelligence and security failures over the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks; in Washington D.C. While Kissinger was Bush's first choice, critics on both sides of the Atlantic have jumped on the appointment, pointing to Kissinger's penchant for secrecy during the Nixon era. Kissinger insists: "We are under no restrictions, and we will accept no restrictions."
DIED. HARRIET DOERR, 92, American author who achieved literary fame at the age of 73 after her first novel won the 1984 National Book Award; in Pasadena, California. Doerr's Stones for Ibarra was a poignant semi-biographical tale of a couple whose new life in Mexico quickly becomes overshadowed by the husband's dis-covery that he has leukemia.
DIED. KAREL REISZ, 76, Czech-born film director who was a seminal figure in the renaissance of gritty British cinema in the 1960s; in London. Reisz is perhaps best known for directing Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), which launched British actor Albert Finney's career, and The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), an acclaimed adaptation of the John Fowles novel.
DIED. JOHN RAWLS, 82, influential American thinker and Harvard University professor best known for his groundbreaking 1971 book A Theory of Justice; in Lexington, Massachusetts. The book provided fresh insights into the concepts of justice and equality at a time when the morality of the Vietnam War was being hotly debated in the U.S. Some critics regard Rawls as the best writer on the subject since German philosopher Immanuel Kant two centuries before.
DIED. ROBERTO MATTA ECHAURREN, 91, Chilean painter whose hallucinatory images of cosmic dream worlds made him a leading Surrealist artist; in Civitavecchia, near Tarquinia, Italy. Matta lik-ened his images to the experience of clasping one's eyes shut against the light.
Numbers
$153.46 millionis the amount revealed to have been left for family and charities in the will of ex-Beatle—and appar-ently very wealthy guy—George Harrison
30 is how many minutes shorter flights between Asia and Europe will now be, thanks to new, cost-cutting flight route changes
70% is how much export sales of kava have dropped for South Pacific islands ever since the release of a German report last year that claimed the popular medicinal root could cause liver damage
30,000 is the number of unlucky people victim-ized in the largest case of "identity theft" in U.S. his-tory, the government an-nounced, after a suspect was charged with the mas-sive fraud last week
$40,000 is the amount spent by an entrepreneurial Philadelphia man in his quest to develop a doorbell for pets
12 is how many of the $32.50 devices have sold since they went on sale on his website three months ago
Omen
U.S. security experts have recommended that Americans consider carrying "terror beepers." The devices would warn their wearers of an imminent biological or nuclear attack—or even a tornado
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