Milestones

By Melissa August; Harriet Barovick; Jeninne Lee-St. John; Eric Roston

RESIGNED. MICHAEL POWELL, 41, as Federal Communications Commission chairman; after four turbulent years highlighted by his battle to loosen media-ownership restrictions and a controversial crackdown on broadcast indecency; in Washington. "Everything's political," he told TIME. "Maybe that's a lesson."

CHARGED. RICHARD HATCH, 43, charmingly Machiavellian, often naked winner of the first Survivor, CBS's hit reality show; with tax evasion, in which he allegedly failed to report earnings, including his $1 million winnings from the show; in Providence, R.I. Though he could receive 10 years in jail, the U.S. Attorney's office said it would recommend a lesser sentence as part of a deal in which Hatch agreed to plead guilty.

DIED. CHARLIE BELL, 44, former chief executive of McDonald's; of colorectal cancer; in Sydney, Australia. Bell, who stepped down in November to fight his illness, spent just seven months on the job after replacing James Cantalupo, who died of an apparent heart attack last April.

DIED. VIRGINIA MAYO, 84, Hollywood blond of the 1940s and '50s who inspired the Sultan of Morocco to write her a fan letter in which he called her "tangible proof of the existence of God"; in Thousand Oaks, Calif. She played opposite stars from Bob Hope (The Princess and the Pirate) to James Cagney (White Heat) but won her greatest critical acclaim as Dana Andrews' cheating wife in the Oscar-winning World War II drama The Best Years of Our Lives.

DIED. DENNIS FLANAGAN, 85, visionary editor of Scientific American who transformed it from a prestigious but little-read journal into an influential mainstream magazine with a circulation of 600,000 and set a model for making complex scientific ideas understandable to all; of prostate cancer; in New York City.

DIED. ZHAO ZIYANG, 85, once the great hope of Chinese political reformers, who lost his post after he publicly sided with the 1989 Tiananmen Square protesters; in Beijing. Zhao joined the Communist Party in 1938 and eventually rose to be its General Secretary, a leader fondly remembered by many Chinese. Peasants in Sichuan used to say, "Yao chi liang, Zhao Ziyang," a rhyming pun that means, roughly, "If you want to eat, look for Zhao." After trying to prevent the brutal Tiananmen crackdown, he was purged and placed under house arrest, where he remained for the rest of his life.

DIED. WALTER WRISTON, 85, financial guru who as chairman of Citicorp from 1967 to '84 redefined the way Americans use banks and set the stage for the company, now named Citigroup, to become the world's largest financial institution; of pancreatic cancer; in New York City. Witty, widely read and dedicated to hiring minorities and women--he was known to sneak women into management posts by using only their initials in correspondence--he expanded bank branches worldwide and offered diversified services like credit-card lending, mortgage banking and real estate development. But his most popular innovation came in 1977 when Citibank introduced the first network of automated teller machines.

DIED. RUTH WARRICK, 88, who made her film-acting debut in Citizen Kane but went on to greater fame with a 35-year run in ABC's soap All My Children; in New York City. After playing Orson Welles' icy first wife in Kane, she had a middling film career before finding her m??tier as All My Children's overbearing socialite Phoebe Tyler Wallingford, who once barred a chauffeur from her library because he was wearing jeans. "You say Phoebe," Warrick said, "and 50 million people know what you mean."

DIED. ELIZABETH JANEWAY, 91, influential social critic and early feminist; in Rye, N.Y. Starting out as a novelist, she befriended Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan and developed an interest in the burgeoning women's movement. In 1971 she wrote Man's World, Woman's Place, the first of six nonfiction books on gender and power that brought her national acclaim.