Starting Time

Person of the Week
CHOSEN ONE Tapped to head the six-month interim Afghan government, ethnic Pashtun Hamid Karzai quickly promised amnesty to rank-and-file Taliban, and Western justice for top leaders and foreign fighters. But the rickety Bonn agreement could collapse at the whim of rogue warlords

Noted
“To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: your tactics only aid terrorists.”
JJOHN ASHCROFT,
U.S. Attorney General, defending his expanded emergency powers

Prime Number
525 million pages of secret U.S. government documents should have been released under current declassification laws but are still under wraps

Omen
The body of a Japanese woman was found frozen in a Minnesota snowbank; she had set out in search of the fictional loot from the 1996 black comedy Fargo

Winners
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN
The Boss gives poor New Jerseyans $1 million. But no matter how much he does, he can’t change the fact that they’re still stuck in Jersey
EUAN BLAIR
PM’s son gets homework help from Defense Ministry. If our dad was PM, we’d get way better perkslike “borrowing” MI6’s hover Porsche
MARK SHUTTLEWORTH
South African mogul set to be second space tourist. He’ll boldly go where no man with a net worth of less than $1 billion has gone before
Losers
DEAN KAMEN
Inventor’s top-secret scooter “Ginger” elicits yawns in its debut. He plans to add a V-8 engine and gigantic fins and market it as a “Cadillac”
TALIBAN
British racehorse with the bad name is snubbed by gamblers. The big beard slows it down, and it needs a Kalashnikov as a starting gun
MARILYN MANSON
Music’s favorite freak is sued for lewdly gyrating with a security guard’s head. Fully 2% of the world is truly shocked by his behavior

Annals of Sport
Pulling Japan Out of Economic Doldrums?
By HIROKO TASHIRO

The deferential Japanese housewife is at the end of her rope. Her hopeless husband is unemployed, her once promising children are bugging on mushrooms and even the dreamy Koizumi looks likely to leave her at the economic altar. How does she respond? By taking her destiny in two petite hands and yankinghard. Tug-of-war, the sport of ancient warriors and sadistic gym teachers, is enjoying a renaissance around the world. An Olympic sport from 1900 to 1920, there is strong sentiment to bring tugging back to the Games. That would be welcome news in bored and poor Japan, where 3,000 teams are on the pull. None yanks harder than a band of Japanese middle-aged women called the Oita Cosmo Ladies. Since starting out in 1986 as a hobby for the wives of a landscape gardening company’s employees, the Ladies have outpulled almost everyone fool enough to touch the other end of their rope, from professional wrestlers to martial-arts experts. Despite less-than-Amazonian builds, the Ladies won the world tug-of-war championship in 1999. Their secret: arduous training and unflinching team resolve. Three nights a week, the Ladies yank against a homemade 650-kg weight, building arm muscles and samurai spirit. They dropped this year’s World Games to Spain, but the Ladies will be ready for 2002, to be held in Ireland. “It will be a chance for revenge,” says team captain Yachiyo Hata. Japanese companies may be dropping like flies, but for the Ladies from Oita, failure is not an option.

The President’s a Hunk
All along, we thought taiwanese President and dpp leader Chen Shui-bian’s rise to political prominence was due to his steely competence. This was a man, his smug eagerness and wire-frame spectacles seemed to say, who could solve Taiwan’s problems as easily as he performed differential calculus. He never actually wore a slide rule in his pocket, but we knew it was there, in spirit at least, close to his heart. Two years and a few gdp contractions later, that aura of can-do confidence has been chipped away and we are left wondering, why, exactly, did voters grant his dpp a solid legislative win two weeks ago?

One word: sex. A recent rerelease by Taiwan Colors Music of the 1986 11-song dpp compilation Oh! Formosa packages Chen the sex symbol rather than Chen the A-student. The handsome, well-coiffed A Bianmake that Ahhhhh!-Bianis posed on the cover, emanating halos of mojo, windbreaker coolly unzipped, hands hitched smugly in his low-slung slacks. As he warbles Lover’s Pillow in his adenoidal tenor to Casio keyboard accompaniment, it all begins to make sense. The Taiwanese people must have known that inside the mild-mannered technocrat was a musky he-man whoand please, don’t make him do itcould arouse the economy with one smoldering glance.

Milestones
By ERIN KILLIAN

DIED. PETER BLAKE, 53, a two-time America’s Cup winner and New Zealand sailing hero, shot by masked pirates who raided his 40-m yacht on the Amazon; near Macapa, Brazil. A U.N. goodwill ambassador, Blake was on a worldwide expedition to monitor global warming and pollution. He won the Jules Verne Trophy in 1994 for sailing a catamaran nonstop around the globe in record time.
DIED. JUAN JOSE ARREOLA, 83, a fiercely nationalist Mexican author who wrote 16 books of short stories and won Mexico’s distinguished National Linguistics and Literature Prize in 1976; in Mexico City. Arreola ‘s Varia Invencion spawned a literary genre of poetry and prose woven intricately into story form.
DIED. GERHART RIEGNER, 90, the honorary vice president and former Secretary-General of the World Jewish Congress, remembered for cabling the U.S. Vice Consul in Geneva with the first authoritative warning of the Nazi holocaust; in Geneva. The Aug. 8, 1942 telegram described Hitler’s intent to deport and exterminate four million Jews in Eastern Europe, however, at the time, the U.S. was unable to verify Riegner’s allegations.
RESIGNED. PAT ROBERTSON, 71, as president of the Christian Coalition, a staunchly conservative political group he founded in 1989 a year after his failed U.S. presidential campaign, to devote time to ministry; in Virginia. Recently Robertson fueled controversy following the Sept. 11 attack when he espoused televangelist Jerry Falwell’s accusations that liberal groups were partly to blame for the tragedy.
RETIRING. GERALD LEVIN, 62, the ceo of AOL Time Warner (Time’s parent company), after 30 years as a top corporate executive and a mastermind behind Time Inc.’s transformation into the world’s No. 1 media company; in New York. Richard Parsons, the co-coo, will succeed Levin as the head of the company in May 2002.
ARRESTED. CLAYTON LEE WAAGNER, 45, an escaped convict and one of the fbi’s 10 Most Wanted fugitives, for allegedly mailing more than 550 hoax anthrax letters signed “Army of God” to about 280 abortion clinics; in Cincinnati, Ohio. Waagner, found with $8,986 in cash and a .40-caliber loaded semiautomatic pistol, had escaped from an Illinois jail in February.
CONVICTED. A. ALFRED TAUBMAN, 76, the former chairman of Sotheby’s, of conspiring with rival auction house Christie’s to fix commissions paid by fine art sellers; in New York. His net worth at the time of the scam was $700 million and he allegedly stole as much as $400 million in charges from 1993 to 1999. He faces up to three years in prison.
CAPTURED. JOHN PHILIP WALKER LINDH, 20, an American who was among 80 Taliban survivors of the Qala-i-Jangi prison revolt; in Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan. Lindh, who gave his name as Abdul Hamid, converted to Islam at 16 and traveled to northern Pakistan via Yemen to study Arabic and the Koran, where his divorced parents had lost touch with him. He faces possible charges of treason, but cannot be tried by the U.S. special military tribunals.