By DAVID BAUDER
NEW YORK, Sept 9 (AP)
Five-time Grammy winner Lauryn Hill continued her winning streak Thursday when her slinky video for �Doo Wop (That Thing)� earned four video awards during MTV�s invasion of the Metropolitan Opera House.
Puff Daddy replaced Pagliacci and the Backstreet Boys elbowed out �La Boheme� as the raunchy awards show took over opera�s epicenter. Instead of �Faust,� the audience was treated to Kid Rock in a white fur coat and a dozen male Madonna impersonators.
Hill won the night�s big award, video of the year, and also won for best female video, best rhythm �n� blues video and art direction. The video shows her simultaneously dressed in �60s and �90s outfits.
Acceptance speeches are getting redundant for the rap-soul diva, who only seven months ago dominated the Grammy Awards.
Dance artist Fatboy Slim won three awards for �Praise You.� Ricky Martin�s video of dancers undulating to �Livin� La Vida Loca� and Korn�s arresting �Freak on a Leash� video featuring a slow-motion animated bullet each won two awards.
Comedian Chris Rock, dressed as Rigoletto from the Verdi opera in a huge poster in the lobby but all in white on stage, was the host.
�I may be the first black man in history to take the stage of the Met without a mop,� Rock quipped.
Madonna, somewhat flustered by an over-enthusiastic fan in the audience, won an award for her salaciously comic dance with Mike Myers in �Beautiful Stranger.� Later, she was ushered out for an appearance by male impersonators dressed in a series of outfits from her videos.
�All I have to say,� she said, �is it takes a real man to fill my shoes.�
With the award ceremony�s usual home, Radio City Music Hall, under renovation, MTV went uptown for a new venue this year. The clash between high and low culture gave producers a rich vein of material.
In the venerable hall�s lobby, the display cases stuffed with opera costumes were cleaned out in favor of moments from MTV�s past: the hip-hugger pants Madonna wore to the 1995 video awards, Busta Rhymes� red crushed velvet ensemble from his appearance at the podium with Martha Stewart two years ago.
Usually, MTV�s annual special is the program where awards are less remembered than wardrobes or attempts to shock the censor. Perhaps intimidated by the surroundings, the rockers and rappers were somewhat tame.
Only rock�s fun couple, Tommy Lee and Pamela Anderson Lee, shaked things up. Lee wore a furry pink hat and her husband a trench coat. He flashed her backstage as she talked to reporters, causing her to run off the podium.
One well-dressed stage crasher made it to the stage before the Backstreet Boys, obliquely urging the audience to �wake up at 3.�
For the second straight year, a Beastie Boy delivered a political lecture. Adam Yauch talked about nonviolence at last year�s show, and this year Adam Horwitz�s topic was sexual assault: he urged musicians to talk to promoters about protecting women at concerts after the reports of rapes at Woodstock �99.
Ten years after winning MTV�s first video award for rap music, actor Will Smith won best male video for his tropical tribute, �Miami.�
�I never killed nobody in none of my records, I never used profanity in none of my records, and still I managed to get up here,� he said.
Rock poked fun at white rappers and boy bands, although Kid Rock fought back with a raucous collaboration featuring members of Aerosmith and Run-DMC.
�I want to know who will be the real Backstreet Boy, the one who gets Britney Spears pregnant,� he said.
A wrinkled, shaggy-haired David Bowie, looking slightly lost as he sauntered onstage to introduce a performance by Hill, was a visual reminder of how time passes quickly in MTV�s world of pop music.
�Yo,� he said softly in a British accent. Earlier Stories
By Alessandro RAIMONDI
BERN, September 11
(THE GLOBE)
The Swiss army of the next millennium is being outlined these days. Indeed the Defense Dept. has presented the Federal Council with the report it has just recently completed. On this basis the Dept. chief, Adolf Ogi, has publicly announced the innovations contained in it, on which now the two chambers of the Federal Parliament will cast their votes.
Following the philosophy of internal and international co-operation to match the challenge of a completely changed scenario, requiring Switzerland to adjust to it, the direction toward the planners of the �2000 Security Policy� report have gone, has been �less autonomy and more integration�. An integration that the Swiss military will pursuit both abroad and at home.
In the Confederation the army will strengthen its engagement in civil protection activity (avalanches, floods, surveillance of foreign diplomatic missions threatened by terrorism, assistance to refugees), while abroad the basic lines of intervent will cover surveillance of Swiss diplomatic missions in risky countries, such as Algeria, and humanitarian activity on refugees camps in Kosovo, Albania and Macedonia.
The use of Swiss troops on foreign territories is the core of the question: traditionally neutral, the Swiss population is proud of this heritage and seems to be afraid of loosing it by flanking whatever side on �armed� humanitarian missions. The debate is mounting and groups such as �Action for a neutral and independent Switzerland� see as a danger both an approach to NATO and the adhesion to the European Union. Adolf Ogi, however, throws water on fire: �We have no intention to supplant our direct democracy system�, another Swiss treasure. A referendum on the issue is on the horizon?
September 14, 1959 - The Soviet Lunik II becomes the first manmade object to reach the moon when it impacts with the lunar surface. It is another first for the Soviet space program, which two years before had successfully launched the world�s first artificial satellite, Sputnik I, into orbit around the Earth.
September 15, 1928 - Scottish bacteriologist Alexander Fleming discovers, by accident, the antibiotic effects of the penicillin mold. The antibiotic penicillin revolutionizes medicine, saving countless people from fatal infections. For his discovery Fleming is knighted by King George VI of England in 1944, and shares the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1945.
September 15, 1935 - Nazi Germany enacts the Nuremberg Laws, which strips all German Jews of their civil rights, and establishes gradations of �Jewishness.� �Full Jews,� people with four �non-Aryan� grandparents, are deprived of German citizenship and forbidden to marry members of the �Aryan race.� German Jews, already barred from government, medical, and legal professions, experience total economic exclusion by 1938, shut out from every area of public life.
September 16, 1908 - This was the day that General Motors was founded. The man responsible for the beginning of the huge auto manufacturing company (maker of Cadillac, Oldsmobile, Buick, Pontiac, Chevrolet) was William Crapo �Billy� Durant.
From September 14 to October 14.
The Kosteyev State National Museum. The exhibition of private picture-galleries: �Gallery parade � �99�
The Kosteyev State National Museum. Exhibition of S. Kalmykov, I. Itkind, and V. Eifert�s works, and Rudolf Nuriev�s painting.
From 10.00 a.m. to 6.00 p.m. Closed on Mondays.
All Over the Globe is published by IPA House.
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