PLEADED NOT GUILTY. SADDAM HUSSEIN, 68, former Iraqi dictator, on the first day of his long-awaited trial; to the torture and genocide of 148 men and teenage boys after a 1982 attempt on his life; in Baghdad. Before the eyes of many stunned Iraqis who watched on television, a gaunt but defiant Hussein refused even to acknowledge his name, mocking court officials as the puppets of U.S. "aggressors" and telling the chief judge, "I am not going to answer to this so-called court." The intense emotion surrounding the trial—now adjourned until Nov. 28 at the request of the defense—was made evident a day after the trial's start, when a lawyer for one of Saddam's co-defendants was abducted and shot to death by as-yet-unknown assailants.
DIED. SHIRLEY HORN, 71, smoky-voiced jazz diva famous for her elegant, achingly slow renditions of songs that she said "painted a picture"; in Washington. After getting her start opening for Miles Davis, Horn made records and played clubs around her native Washington, then largely retreated to spend time with her family. A shining comeback in the late 1980s led to numerous honors, a Grammy, and a popular 1991 album You Won't Forget Me, featuring a cameo from Davis, her lifelong champion, recorded shortly before he died.
DIED. JEAN-MICHEL FOLON, 71, Belgian-born painter and graphic artist whose work was familiar to millions from poster campaigns and magazine covers for The New Yorker, Esquire and TIME; in Monaco. An unwilling student of architecture, Folon left his hometown of Uccle, near Brussels, for Paris at the age of 21, but first found success in the U.S. with his eye-catching, whimsical pictures of birds, flying men, rainbows and billowy landscapes. Always prolific, Folon's style survived translation onto postage stamps, giant subway murals and, in later years, to animated films and sculpture.
DIED, ALEXANDER YAKOVLEV, 81, ally in President Mikhail Gorbachev's democratic reform and restructuring of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s; in Moscow. Badly wounded fighting with the Red Army in 1943, Yakovlev joined the Communist Party and rose quickly, serving as acting head of propaganda from 1965 until his increasingly liberal views saw him sidelined as Soviet ambassador to Canada in 1972. Gorbachev met Yakovlev there in 1983 and recalled him as a trusted collaborator, later promoting him to the Politburo. Together the pair set about the reform process described by Yakovlev as "trying to dismantle the 1,000-year-old Russian paradigm of unfreedom."
DIED. BA JIN, 100, Chinese literary giant; in Shanghai. A member of the young intelligentsia that criticized China's pre-Communist society, he studied anarchism, and wrote Family, a brutal 1931 novel about feudal life that was his seminal work. During the Cultural Revolution, he was condemned by the Communist leaders who had once hailed him, but he regained his stature in the 1980s, publishing dozens of essays and winning election as a leader of the country's official Writers Association.
Numbers
40% Decline in the number of armed conflicts since the end of the Cold War, according to a recent study; international terrorism is the only form of political violence that has increased
330,000 Number of pre-packaged meals for Hurricane Katrina victims from the U.K. rejected by U.S. aid agencies due to a U.S. ban on British beef over mad cow disease
882 millibars Minimum barometric pressure of Hurricane Wilma last week, the lowest ever recorded for an Atlantic hurricane. The lower the pressure, the stronger the storm
22 Number of named Atlantic storms and hurricanes this year, breaking the 1933 record
833% Increase in government-controlled fuel prices announced in Burma last week, in response to rising global energy costs
25% Proportion of American adults who named coffee the thing they'd hate to give up most in a recent survey
19% Proportion who said they would least like to give up sex