Milestones

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SWORN IN. SAMUEL ALITO, 55, conservative federal appeals court judge; as a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, replacing Sandra Day O'Connor; by fellow newcomer, Chief Justice John Roberts; in Washington. The 58-42 Senate vote, largely along party lines, included votes to confirm from just four Democrats, constituting the lowest total for an opposition party in modern history.

RE-ELECTED. TARJA HALONEN, 62, as President of Finland; in Helsinki. The Social Democrat's low-key campaign emphasized Finland's ties with neighboring Russia, the European Union and NATO, to which the country has moved closer in recent years. Ceding victory, former Finance Minister Sauli Niinistö, kissed Halonen's hand and said, "The man has lost."

BANNED. MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA, the Hollywood film; from distribution in China; in Beijing. Chinese officials reversed an earlier approval by the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television to allow the film in the country, reportedly over concerns that the portrayal of Japanese geishas by ethnic Chinese actresses might spark anger in China, where anti-Japanese sentiment remains strong.

DIED. BETTY FRIEDAN, 85, icon of postwar American liberalism who wrote the 1963 best seller The Feminine Mystique, which explored the "sense of dissatisfaction" among midcentury women who "made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children," while secretly wondering, "Is this all?"; in Washington. Born in Peoria, Illinois, Friedan—whose mother quit her newspaper job to be a housewife—was once fired after she asked for maternity leave. Mystique began as research for an article on what had happened to her classmates in Smith College's class of 1942. The book made her a hero to a generation of educated, middle-class women and helped launch the modern feminist movement in the '60s. A co-founder of the National Organization for Women and the group later known as the National Abortion Rights Action League, Friedan eventually switched her attention to the plight of older people and wrote 1993's The Fountain of Age, which explored how the aged were patronized in the same way women had been.

DIED. CORETTA SCOTT KING, 78, widow of Martin Luther King Jr. and advocate for civil rights; at a hospital in Rosarito Beach, Mexico. After breaking free of rural poverty in Alabama, King met her preacher husband while she was a graduate student at the New England Conservatory of Music. Following the Rev. King's assassination in 1968, she sought to sustain her husband's legacy—largely through the King Center for Non-Violent Social Change, which she founded in Atlanta—while pushing for gender and racial equality under the banner of the civil-rights movement.

DIED. MOIRA SHEARER, 80, Scottish ballet dancer, actress and writer famed for her role as the ballerina in the 1948 classic The Red Shoes; in Oxford, Britain. Flame-haired and strikingly beautiful, Shearer danced iconic parts for London's Sadler's Wells (now Royal) Ballet in the 1940s. But she popularized the art with Oscar-winning The Red Shoes, based on Hans Christian Andersen's tale of a girl forced by her shoes to dance until she died. "Here was this apparition," recalled Shearer's husband, writer and broadcaster Ludovic Kennedy, "with ... a figure like an hour-glass, blue-green eyes the size of saucers, the prettiest of noses and a most pleasing voice."

Numbers
$36.1 billion Profit reported by Exxon Mobil for 2005, the largest ever for an American company
$22.9 billion Profit reported by Royal Dutch Shell for 2005, the largest ever for a U.K.-listed company

$12.3 million Amount spent by the Kenyan government on a fleet of luxury cars for its staff between January 2003 and September 2004, according to a report by Transparency International Kenya and the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights
25,000 Number of Kenyan children for whom the same investment would have provided eight years of schooling

1:1 Ratio of open jobs to applicants in Japan last December—the first time its labor market has reached equilibrium since 1992

360,000 Copies sold of British band Arctic Monkeys' debut album in its first week of release, making it the fastest-selling first album in British history