Unicef

Frederick Daniel Hatfield Jr., 87, of West Deptford, a retired business owner, died Wednesday, March 9, of complications from surgery at Underwood-Memorial Hospital in Woodbury. For 30 years, until retiring in 1995, Mr. Hatfield operated Jersey Maid Foods in Cherry Hill. The firm distributed bulk candy to grocery stores. Previously he was a salesman for Brach's candy in New Jersey and for Necco candy in Massachusetts. Mr. Hatfield grew up in Belmont, Mass., near Boston. Though he lived most of his life in New Jersey, he never lost his New England traits, including his Boston accent and his love of fresh seafood, his daughter Janice said.

Celebrity has its perks. You can jet anywhere, stay in the finest hotels, eat the most delicious food. Everybody knows you - so much so that simply catching a glimpse can make a tired working stiff's day. Just ask the crowd that packed the Inquirer building's lobby Thursday when rock star Bono visited Philadelphia to collect the Liberty Medal. It's popularity. It's curiosity. It's celebrity. It's power. Bono has power. He - and other celebrities of substance - use it to help push humanitarian crises from the periphery of American public interest toward the center.

Audrey Hepburn, the swanlike, Oscar-winning actress and UNICEF ambassador who described herself as a "skinny broad" or "the other Hepburn," died yesterday of colon cancer at her Swiss villa. She was 63. For a generation that, like her, survived World War II, the woman with the mockingbird laugh and dancing fawn eyes redefined femininity, glamour and political activism. Miss Hepburn, reed-thin, was not slim for fashion's sake, but because of childhood malnutrition. The Belgian-born daughter of Anglo-Dutch parents had endured World War II in food-deprived Arnhem, the Netherlands.

Many Americans seem to see the United Nations' 50th anniversary celebration this weekend as an over-the-hill party. That's sad and shortsighted, and scarily close to being U.S. policy. The U.S. right often regards the U.N. as a clutch of wasteful bureaucracies at best, and a stalking horse for Big Brother at worst. And many onetime advocates just acquiesce in treating it as a mere vehicle for furthering U.S. aims and especially for getting other countries to foot the bill to use U.S. forces abroad.

Tickets are on sale for the NBA players exhibition game Dec. 19 in Atlantic City. Finally. And talks between the league's owners and the locked-out players might just continue today or tomorrow. Thankfully. Commissioner David Stern and National Basketball Players Association executive director Billy Hunter were among the principals at a secret five-hour meeting Thursday in New York. "We agreed not to discuss any of the details, and I don't want to break that pledge," deputy commissioner Russ Granik said.

While agents David Falk and Arn Tellem worked on a Dec. 19 charity exhibition game in Atlantic City, representatives of the NBA and the locked-out players were meeting secretly in New York. Although league officials declined to comment, sources confirmed that commissioner David Stern and National Basketball Players Association executive director Billy Hunter attended the meeting and that it appeared some progress had been made. One source indicated additional discussions could be held during the weekend.

Fred Grandy, who played Gopher on TV's Love Boat before serving four terms in the U.S. House, signed a three-year contract last week to become president and CEO of Goodwill Industries International Inc. beginning July 1. He left Congress last year to run for governor of Iowa but lost the Republican nomination to Gov. Terry Branstad. "This is a real point of departure for me," said Grandy. "I've been in the private sector and the public sector. This is somewhere in between. " Goodwill provides disabled people with job training and rehabilitation.

After her mother married for the second time, Aline Kabila felt her life would be better. But in this war-ravaged nation, where poverty and superstitions are plentiful, her stepfamily saw her as a curse: another mouth to feed, another body to clothe. So members of her stepfamily branded the 11-year-old girl a witch. They starved her. They beat her. And when the girl's half-brother fell deathly ill, they said she had cast a spell on him. That's when they decided to purify her of the demons they thought were inside her. Her step-uncle poured acid over her head, face and right arm, almost killing her. Across Congo, thousands of girls and boys, some as young as 4, are accused by their families of practicing witchcraft.

Kent Rogers remembers, with a tug on his heart, the swarms of hungry children he saw on the streets of Nepal. Many were bone-thin from severe malnutrition. Some stuck out their tiny hands to beg for money, food - anything. One little girl followed him home for a mile, hoping he would feed her, Rogers said. A three-month visit in 1997 was the turning point for Rogers and his philanthropic group, the Loving Arms Mission. It sealed the group's decision to set up an orphanage in Nepal, even if it could help only a handful of children at a time.

Susannah Rouse is like a cold glass of sparkling apple cider: crisp, refreshing, snappy. She's candid and funny and the anchor of the private life of this city's most famous businessman. Until now she's avoided the spotlight that has courted her husband so relentlessly. She's often stepped aside when photographers took pictures of Bill - "Who wants to open up a newspaper and say, 'Oh, God, is that what I look like?' " she jokes - and shielded their family from scrutiny. Part of it was "my nature.