Milestones

By Melissa August, Harriet Barovick, ELIZABETH L. BLAND, Clayton Neuman, Logan Orlando

NAMED. TAI SHAN ("Peaceful Mountain"), the panda, now 13 lbs., born in July to Tian Tian and Mei Xiang at the National Zoo; in Washington. The choice was made in an online poll by more than 200,000 votes.

PLEADED NOT GUILTY. Former dictator of Iraq, SADDAM HUSSEIN, 68, on the first day of his long-awaited trial; to the torture and murder of 148 men and teenage boys after a 1982 attempt on his life; in Baghdad. Before the eyes of many stunned Iraqis who were watching on television, a gaunt but defiant Hussein refused even to acknowledge his name, declaring, "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, which wanted more time to prepare--was made evident a day after the trial's start, when a lawyer for one of Saddam's co-defendants was abducted by as-yet-unknown assailants. He was later found shot to death.

SENTENCING REORDERED. For MATTHEW LIMON, 23, who was convicted in 2000 of having sex with a 14-year-old boy and sentenced to 17 years in prison; by the Kansas Supreme Court, which unanimously struck down a state law setting harsher punishments for underage homosexual sex than for underage heterosexual sex; in Topeka. The court ordered equal sentencing, saying "moral disapproval" did not justify the treatment of Limon, who would have received a maximum of 15 months in jail if he had had sex with an underage female.

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 family life. A shining comeback in the late 1980s, when she signed with Verve, led to numerous honors, a Grammy and a popular 1991 album, You Won't Forget Me, that featured a cameo from Davis, her lifelong champion, recorded shortly before he died.

DIED. JEAN-MICHEL FOLON, 71, commercial artist whose humanistic, whimsical designs appeared in galleries, opera houses and subway stations around the world; in Monaco. In much of Folon's work, which included posters for UNICEF and covers for TIME and other magazines, his blank-faced Everyman, often dwarfed by modern structures, caricatured the chaos of urban life.

DIED. ALEKSANDR YAKOVLEV, 81, Communist-turned-democratic-reformer known as the "Godfather of Glasnost" for his role in formulating and promoting Mikhail Gorbachev's program of political liberalization in the Soviet Union in the 1980s; in Moscow. After rising through the ranks of the Communist Party as a propagandist and censor, Yakovlev embraced perestroika, or restructuring, and supported political competition, encouraged artists and freedom of the press, and repeatedly publicized abuses perpetrated during the Soviet era.

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.