Milestones

RECLAIMED. RECORD TEST-MATCH SCORE IN A SINGLE INNINGS, by BRIAN LARA, 34, captain of the West Indies cricket team; in St. John's, Antigua. Lara's total of 400 runs (not out) against England broke the record of 380 set by Australia's Matthew Hayden against Zimbabwe last October. Lara, whose score of 375 was the highest total until Hayden's feat, is now one of only two players to twice score more than 300 runs in a test match.

WON. PHIL MICKELSON, 33, the Masters tournament, his first victory in any of golf's four "majors," after 47 tries; in Augusta, Georgia. One year after his worst season, he acquired a new swing and a slimmer physique and, with a dramatic birdie putt on the 18th hole, won the coveted green blazer.

RESIGNED. MA FUCAI, 57, as president of China National Petroleum Corp., the country's largest oil-and-gas producer; after assuming personal responsibility for a gas blast in Chongqing last December; in Beijing. The explosion, which released a toxic cloud of hydrogen sulfide that killed 243 people and forced the evacuation of 60,000 villagers, was blamed on insufficient use of drilling fluids and on the removal of crucial safety equipment. Ma, whose rank in the Chinese bureaucracy was equivalent to a minister in the central government, offered to quit several times before his resignation was accepted by the State Council, China's Cabinet.

DIED. SEIN LWIN, 81, former Burmese President and army general known as the "Butcher of Rangoon"; in Rangoon. A member of the military junta that seized control of Burma in 1962, Sein Lwin was behind some of the army's bloodiest massacres of civilians. These included the killings of hundreds of students protesting the 1962 coup and of an estimated 3,000 people in street demonstrations in 1988, during which Sein Lwin replaced strongman Ne Win as President. But he was unable to quell the political agitation and stepped down after only 18 days in office.

DIED. PHIL SOKOLOF, 82, who spent millions of his own money to wage war against fat; in Omaha, Nebraska. After a heart attack at age 46, the self-made millionaire, who suffered from high cholesterol, began buying full-page newspaper ads with such headlines as: "McDonald's, Your Hamburgers Have Too Much Fat!" His work led some fast-food chains, including McDonald's, to begin frying potatoes in vegetable oil rather than beef tallow and other companies to stop using highly saturated tropical oils in packaged snacks. He also was credited with helping bring about mandatory nutritional labels on food packaging.

DIED. EILEEN DARBY, 87, photographer of Broadway stars; in Long Beach, New York. Known for her snapshots of Broadway sets and stars for publications like Life magazine, Darby often put her subjects' interests above her own—refusing once to photograph Ingrid Bergman for fear of passing on a cold. Darby stopped taking photos in 1968, saying she had lost her enthusiasm for the theater after seeing the musical Hair.

55 Years Ago in TIME
Many years before 9/11 and its aftermath, the FBI was the focus of concern over its ability to balance the need for security with that of privacy. As this 1949 TIME cover on J. Edgar Hoover shows, that worry extends to the earliest decades of the law-enforcement agency.

FBI men reassuringly point out that the bureau's file of 112,500,000 fingerprints is used to identify amnesia victims and mangled corpses as well as such underworld characters as Airbrake Smith and Rooster Face Fannie. But what no tourist will see is the bureau's investigative file covering thousands of ordinary U.S. citizens. It was the existence of those files—important strands in the nation's gigantic net to catch a few disloyal citizens—which gave even the most ardent admirer of the FBI a slightly uneasy feeling. It was not that very many people objected to flushing out Communists and potential saboteurs. It was a suspicion that any such collection was bound to damn the innocent as well as the guilty ... But without the assurance of the FBI's eternal vigilance, the U.S. might feel uneasier still.
—TIME, Aug. 8, 1949

Numbers

$128 million Amount to be paid for a London mansion by British-Indian steel tycoon Lakshmi Mittal, the most ever paid for a house anywhere in the world

3 Number of North Korean nuclear devices Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan says he was shown during a visit to Pyongyang five years ago

22 People killed in a stampede in Lucknow, India, when women rushed to collect free saris handed out to celebrate the birthday of Lalji Tandon, a close associate of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee

13 Age of an Australian girl allowed to begin sex-change treatment after a controversial court ruling last week

34 kilograms Weight of a 600,000-word book entitled GOAT, an homage to Muhammad Ali, which is touted as the heaviest book ever published

$7,500 Cost of one of the first 1,000 copies

$1.1 million Purchase price at an online auction for the Chinese mobile-phone number (135) 8585 8585, which in the Shanghainese dialect sounds like "let me be rich, be rich, be rich, be rich, be rich"