By HANNAH BEECH

DIED. TREVOR HUDDLESTON, 84, visionary Anglican Archbishop, whose blistering attacks on the South African minority-ruled regime helped force apartheid's horrors onto the world stage; in Mirfield, England. The cleric's unwavering commitment to the downtrodden inspired leading lights of the anti-apartheid movement--including Bishop Desmond Tutu, President Nelson Mandela and late African National Congress leader Oliver Tambo--and made them realize, as Tutu eulogized, that "not all white people are the same."

DIED. CONSTANTINE KARAMANLIS, 91, revered Greek ex-Premier who achieved savior-like status for coaxing the country out of postwar devastation and nurturing democracy; in Athens. During his spirited 60-year political career, the pro-NATO Karamanlis survived many of Greece's 20th century flashpoints, including Nazi occupation, communist insurgency, military dictatorship, a clash with Turkey over Cyprus and the abolition of the monarchy in 1974.

DIED. LINDA MCCARTNEY, 56, incandescent wife of ex-Beatle Paul McCartney who served as his romantic muse; near Tucson, Arizona. Despite her success as a photographer and cookbook author, "Lovely Linda" was inexorably linked to her heartthrob husband--and he to her. During their 29-year marriage, the couple reportedly spent only 10 days apart.

DIED. LUIS EDUARDO MAGALHAES, 43, skilled congressional coordinator of Brazil's reform-minded governing alliance; in Brasilia. Magalhaes' fatal heart attack came just two days after the death of Communications Minister Sergio Motta, 57, dealing a double blow to President Fernando Henrique Cardoso's coalition, which hopes to ram privatization and social-security reforms through Congress before the October general elections.

DIED. JAMES EARL RAY, 70, petty pilferer who pleaded guilty to the 1968 assassination of civil-rights hero Martin Luther King Jr. but later recanted and claimed his confession was forced; in Nashville, where he was being incarcerated. In recent years, the King family had supported Ray's plea for a retrial: King's son Dexter said in 1997 that he no longer thought Ray had killed his father, and King's widow, Coretta, pushed for a new trial, so "justice [can] run its course in this tragedy."

SENTENCED. SAN SAN, 58, outspoken Burmese democracy advocate, to 25 years in prison, after she broke conditions of an earlier amnesty by participating in a British Broadcasting Corporation interview labeled by the ruling junta as "fabrications and distribution of false information"; in Rangoon. Although San San won a parliamentary seat in 1990 as a member of Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi's opposition party, the military never recognized the elections and she was sentenced to 20 years' imprisonment for "high treason" before her amnesty release in 1992.

--By Hannah Beech

APPRECIATION

THE MEXICAN SPIRIT If J.D. Salinger took the pulse of the carefree American psyche, if Fyodor Dostoyevsky cradled the weighty Russian soul in his arms, then Octavio Paz identified the essence of the roaming Mexican spirit. Like his native land, the quixotic writer who lived at the crossroads of poetry and politics was steeped in contradictions.

So when Paz died of cancer last week at age 84, Mexico ("a nation where the sun abounds, a prodigious sun, but also a dark and black country") lost a national spokesman, and a little of its maverick elan. The searing brilliance of Paz's epochal essay "The Labyrinth of Solitude," not only spoke of his grasp of Mexico's dark forces but also revealed the influence of the many years he lived abroad, in Spain, India, the U.S., France and Japan. The inspirations for his more than 40 volumes of poetry and essays were culled from myriad sources--a shard of pre-Columbian pottery, a detail of an Indian tantric painting, a news report on New Guinea aborigines. The resulting pastiche, a sensual and evocative effort that would earn him a 1990 Nobel Prize, came to represent the complex patchwork of his land and stands as a tribute to all that is Mexican.