Starting Time

Person of the Week
THE OSCAR FOR BEST HOBBIT IN A SUPPORTING ROLE GOES TO …Peter Jackson’s first third of the Lord of the Rings epic picks up 13 Oscar nominations, leading the pack this year. J.R.R. Tolkien, who died in 1973, likely didn’t imagine this final twist in his novel’s enduring and lucrative life

Noted
“Our country shouldn’t be catering to America’s needs.”
AHMED OMAR SAEED SHEIKH,
Pakistan-based radical, who admits to kidnapping Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, explaining his motivation

Prime Number
250 million monarch butterflies were killed in a freak storm in Mexico, threatening the species, according to the World Wildlife Fund

Omen
Austria’s notorious far-right populist politician and inveterate headline-grabber Jorg Haider visited Iraq this week for a friendly meeting with Saddam Hussein

Winners
JENNIFER LOPEZ
Pop queen’s new release, J to tha L-O! The Remixes is the first album of its kind to debut at No. 1. At No. 2?no joke?Ultimate Manilow
BOB MACKIE
Glitzy designer’s Broadway-inspired fashion show draws raves. Whatever?as long as he keeps conceiving sequin headdresses for Cher
LENNOX LEWIS
Champ wins $8 million lawsuit against his promoter. At issue: promoter’s deal to have Lennox drink Yuban coffee between rounds
Losers
JACQUES CHIRAC
Le Monde runs photo of French prez with sleazeball scandal-magnet. Chirac is getting off easy. Those naked, bongo pics? Still hidden
JULIAN AND STEPHEN MARLEY
Sons of the deceased reggae legend Bob Marley busted for smoking weed. Other charges: sitting on sofas, giggling, really getting into Memento
ROBERT MUGABE
President of Zimbabwe kicks out E.U. election-observers in the run up to his re-election bid. Well, that’s one way to stay in office

Asia’s Winter Medal Hopes All Adrift
Somehow It All Seemed Easier in Nagano

If they gave out medals for endurance, the undisputed champion of Salt Lake City would be Japanese moguls skier Teppei Noda. On his big day last week, Noda wiped out on his first jump, losing a ski. Displaying plenty of gaman, Noda sidestepped back up the hill, strapped back in and continued his run?only to veer wildly off across the mountain. Finding his way back to the piste, he resumed once more. Needless to say, he didn’t make the cut. It was an apt encapsulation of Asia’s performance: doing nothing right, over and over. True, tiny dynamo Hiroyasu Shimizu won silver for the 500-m speedskate, losing to American Casey FitzRandolph by only 0.03 seconds. But Shimizu, on painkillers for a back injury, got gold four years ago in Nagano, when Japan won five gold medals in all. This year it will be lucky to get any. The big Asian upset came in the women’s 1,500-m short track speed skate, expected to be dominated by a Chinese pair of Yang Yangs. Yang Yang (S) banged into the side with four laps to go while Yang Yang (A) proved to be all Yin and never threatened. Instead, the race was won by the only athletes so far to truly claim an event for Asia, Koreans Ko Gi-Hyun, who took gold and at 15 became the youngest ever winner, and Choi Eun-Kyung, who smashed the Olympic record by six seconds in the semis. “Olympic athletes used to be role models,” seethes Yosuke Yamaguchi, a former physical education instructor in Tokyo. “Now they’re part athletes, part comedians.”

Daring to Win
A SHAME OF TWO HALVES If there’s one arena where little Hong Kong was never supposed to challenge Beijing, it was on the playing field. Clerical prowess, perhaps. Rolexes per capita, definitely. But last week at home, the former British colony’s notoriously lackluster soccer team trounced the mainland in the Carlsberg Cup, a tournament generally more impressive for copious refreshments than any sporting achievements. So it was that the Hong Kong side, a group of expats and locals even fans describe as “total no-hopers,” took on a Chinese World Cup squad whose recent form earned coach Bora Milutinovic the nickname “the miracle worker.” It’s true more than half China’s top players and Milutinovic stayed home. But it’s also true that 240 million Chinese television viewers, and probably a few soccer-crazy apparatchiks, never foresaw such a late-game loss of face. China was 1-0 up for just five minutes until Hong Kong leveled , only to then depart totally from script by slaying the mighty dragon 4-3 on penalties. How Hong Kong Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa explains this one might determine if the territory continues to get fresh water and receive flu-ridden poultry or whether crossing into the mainland gets harder in the run-up to the “glorious” 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Milestones
By PENNY CAMPBELL

DIED. WAYLON JENNINGS, 64, grizzled Grammy-winning country singer who recorded Nashville’s first platinum album (Wanted: The Outlaws); in Chandler, Arizona. With his black Stetson and brash persona, Jennings, along with Willie Nelson, led country’s outlaw movement of the late ’60s and early ’70s?a honky-tonk response to country’s slick pop sound. Among his 16 No. 1 singles was Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys. Jennings was scheduled to be on the 1959 plane that killed Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens, but gave up his seat to another musician.
DIED. VICTOR POSNER, 83, corporate raider who was once one of America’s highest-paid executives but was later convicted of tax fraud; in Miami. Over three decades, Posner built an industrial empire worth $4 billion but in 1987 pleaded no-contest to tax evasion charges and was banned in 1993 from serving as an officer in a public company.
DIED. VERNON WALTERS, 85, retired Army lieutenant general who was U.S. ambassador to the U.N.; in West Palm Beach, Florida. Walters’ military career began at the outset of WW II, and his linguistic abilities?he spoke seven foreign languages?led him to become a globe-trotting envoy for U.S. Presidents from Harry Truman to Richard Nixon?who appointed him deputy director of the cia in 1972. He retired after four years and in 1981 started a 10-year stint as a diplomat including three at the U.N.
DIED. NANDOR HIDEGKUTI, 79, legendary Hungarian footballer who was part of the Hungarian squad that won gold at the 1952 Olympics, but was famed as a member of the”Golden Team” that inflicted on England its first defeat at home by an overseas side when it beat them 6-3 at Wembley Stadium in 1953; in Budapest.
DIED. TRAUDL JUNGE, 81, Adolf Hitler’s secretary from 1942-45, who took his last will and testament in a Berlin bunker two days before he committed suicide; in Munich. Junge died hours after a documentary on her life had premiered at the Berlin Film Festival.
DIED. MICK TUCKER, 54, drummer with leading 1970s British glam-rock band The Sweet, which had a string of hits with songs such as Fox on the Run and Blockbuster, of leukemia; in Welwyn Garden City, England.
DIED. JACK HENRY ABBOTT, 58, philosophical U.S. criminal whose unsettling letters to Norman Mailer about prison life were turned into a best-selling book, In the Belly of the Beast, from suicide by hanging himself in his prison cell; in Alden, New York State. With Mailer’s help Abbott, serving time for armed robbery and murder, won parole in 1981. Six weeks later he was back in jail after stabbing a waiter to death. He wrote that prisoners “cannot be subdued, only murdered.”

78 Years Ago in TIME
Today the Winter Olympics get major stories in TIME and wall-to-wall television coverage. For the very first Winter Games, held in Chamonix, France, in 1924, TIME covered the events in a single column. JOHN HESSIN CLARKE, U.S. Supreme Court Justice from 1918-22, was featured on the cover.

The Winter Sports division of the Olympic Games closed at Chamonix, with Norway the decisive victor, having scored 134 1/2 of the 391 points allotted … The great event of the week was the final in hockey, in which Canada defeated the U.S., 6-1. It was a contest between Canadian teamwork and American individual stars. In twenty seconds after the play began a Canadian was sent sprawling. Before two minutes had elapsed an American was laid out by a Canadian’s stick. From start to finish the players knocked each other about so that the game was a succession of man-ruled-out-for-two-minutes and man-retired-for-injuries. The only U.S. goal came when Drury took the puck down the ice through the Canadian team. The Canadian goals came as the result of short, accurate, decisive passes …

In fancy skating for women, Mme. Herman Szabo-Plank of Austria won first, with Miss Beatrice Loughan, American, second and Miss Theresa Blanchard of America, fourth.

–TIME, Feb. 11, 1924