Magnate

MOSCOW - One day after Russian President Vladimir V. Putin criticized human rights groups in a speech, two masked men in the city of Kazan, 450 miles east of Moscow, entered the offices of the Kazan Human Rights Center. "Don't move," one of the intruders ordered the lone employee left in the office late Thursday afternoon, according to an account by a lawyer for the group. Then the masked men smashed two computers, a scanner, television and printer. And left. The attack is highlighting the precarious position of human rights groups in Russia.

The new Michael J. Fox film "For Love or Money" asks th question: Which is more important? And it answers: Both of them. I like a movie that takes a stand.A true case of having the cake and eating the cake, the movie isn't so much a comedy as a not-so-bad moral dilemma that recalls some of the more cantankerous works of that most misanthropic of directors, the great Viennese-American cynic Billy Wilder.Specifically, it recalls Wilder's brilliant "The Apartment," in which a great man's gofer and his mistress, each beholden to him in smarmy ways, view each other from the compromised platform of their corrupted states, but fall in love anyway.

ATHENS, Greece - In a landmark ruling that Greece hopes will allay fears of violence before next summer's Olympic Games, a Greek court found 15 members of a radical group guilty yesterday of a string of assassinations, car bombings and rocket attacks that stretched over nearly three decades. Among those convicted were one of the founders, as well as the chief assassin, of the group known as November 17. After its first killing, of a CIA station chief in Athens in 1975, the leftist gang waged a hit-and-run terror campaign believed to have claimed 23 victims, including a Greek shipping magnate, a British brigadier and three other American officials.

It must have been quite a sight in baggage claim at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport. Crane Kenney, Tribune Co.'s general counsel and corporate secretary, was on his mobile phone getting yelled at by Chicago billionaire Sam Zell, who was calling from a jet cruising at 35,000 feet. Kenney had just arrived in Arizona, where he had gone 2 1/2 weeks ago to oversee the Cubs in spring training. He earlier had called the real estate magnate's right-hand man, Bill Pate, with what ostensibly should have been good news.

Every newspaper reporter has wanted at one time or another to write a political story, a society story, an obituary or a sports story that really told the truth.Alexander Woollcott, a bon vivant of the New York literary scene in another day, once edited a book for World War II soldiers. In the American fact section, he inserted Robert Quillen's version of the truth, a real wedding story that used fictitious names. No dummy, Mr. Quillen was worried about libel and assault, but didn't want to do the same old wedding story.

Super-talented Samuel L. Jackson, the hardest-working actor since Michael Caine and Gene Hackman in their take-the-money-and-run days, has as much of a right as anyone to indulge his yen for lucrative employment. But his straight shooter in S.W.A.T. is packing blanks. You get everything you need to know about him from his John Wayne-esque nickname, "Hondo." He's a confident, no-bull team commander who will home in on a black-sheep officer like Jim Street (Colin Farrell) and give him a second chance at elite service in S.W.A.

As Rick Santoro, an Atlantic City police detective who has the city in his pocket and the world on a string, Nicolas Cage roams the town's biggest casino and sports arena like a Rick of another era.Like another anti-hero of cinematic yore, Cage moves through his world with assurance and primal physical power, unencumbered by the demands of any guiding personal ethic. Bursting with the joie de vivre reserved for naifs and scoundrels, he belongs squarely in the latter camp. He's a reluctant hero who would rather give in to corruption than fight it.Any resemblance to Rick Blaine of "Casablanca" is strictly intentional.

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia -- It may seem like a scene out of "Alice in Wonderland," but wealthy U.S. businessman Milan Panic -- a one-time defector from Yugoslavia who has now been appointed its prime minister -- firmly believes he can end the civil war and bring peace and democracy to his old country.Last week, on his first day in office, Mr. Panic, 62, set out to assert himself. When British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd put him on notice that he would meet only with Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, during a visit to Belgrade, Mr. Panic told Mr. Hurd bluntly that he would stop him from coming.

It was a time when Peter G. Angelos was known as the "king of asbestos." He was cast as a civic white knight, using the millions he had earned representing workers with asbestos-related illnesses to return the Baltimore Orioles to local ownership. On Aug. 2, 1993, Angelos and his band of merry Marylanders bought the club at an auction in New York for $173 million - nearly $50 million more than had ever been paid for a baseball team. "It's like another era, isn't it?" Angelos said in a recent interview in the conference room of his Charles Center law offices, which, interestingly enough, features a statue of Johnny Unitas and a LeRoy Neiman painting of the Three Tenors, but nothing that says baseball.

Singer Art Garfunkel, a real estate magnate and an investor are putting $2 million in gold bullion on the line to inspire researchers to cure blindness by 2020, establishing through Johns Hopkins Medicine one of the world's largest prizes for a scientific advancement. The men, one-time roommates at Columbia University, intend for the prize to trigger research into the variety of diseases that cause blindness — 80 percent of which are preventable — in 39 million people around the world.