News In Brief

SHUTTER BUGS GUARDS The call to action was swift. Two unidentified men were spotted snapping photos of the American Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, where a terrorist bomb last August killed 213 people. Alert Marine guards called police to set up a roadblock. The photographers were interrogatied for hours. And? They turned out to be US government agents, assigned to evaluate security at diplomatic missions overseas. No one had told the Marines that the picture-taking was authorized.

HEIR LIFT Oft-criticized for heavy-handed rule, President Alberto Fujimori of Peru found himself involved in a different sort of human-rights situation last weekend. In a helicopter with other senior officials, he was inspecting a badly flooded town, one of whose residents was in labor and cut off from the hospital. Fujimori invited the mother-to-be aboard - then looked on as the baby arrived before the chopper could get her there.

Dustin Hoffman honored for lifetime achievement in film

Dustin Hoffman, known in Hollywood as a perfectionist on the movie set, is the latest recipient of one of the industry's most prestigious honors: the American Film Institute's Lifetime Achievement Award. Hoffman is perhaps best known for his starring roles in "The Graduate," "Midnight Cowboy," "Tootsie," and "Kramer vs. Kramer." The last 10 recipients of the award, which was first conferred on director John Ford in 1973:

1990 Sir David Lean

1991 Kirk Douglas

1992 Sidney Poitier

1993 Elizabeth Taylor

1994 Jack Nicholson

1995 Steven Spielberg

1996 Clint Eastwood

1997 Martin Scorsese

1998 Robert Wise

1999 Dustin Hoffman

- Reuters