Milestones

ELECTED. Felipe Caldern, 43, conservative, Harvard-educated lawyer and member of the ruling National Action Party, as President of Mexico; beating leftist rival Andrs Manuel Lpez Obrador by less than one percentage point; in Mexico City. Lpez Obrador, the Mexico City Mayor, has refused to accept the results of the hotly contested poll and vowed to challenge the vote in court, a move that could plunge the nation into an electoral crisis similar to the disputed U.S. elections of 2000.

LAUNCHED. Discovery, American space shuttle, in the 115th mission for the ill-fated NASA shuttle program and the second since the 2003 destruction of the shuttle Columbia; carrying supplies and personnel to the International Space Station; at Cape Canaveral. The shuttle, the launch of which was twice delayed due to weather and safety concerns, will also test new inspection techniques to prevent a repeat of the Columbia disaster, in which seven astronauts were killed when their craft burned up on re-entry.

REOPENED. Nathu Pass, on the border between Tibet and the Indian state of Sikkim; in the Tibetan county of Yadong. The Himalayan pass, part of the ancient Silk Road trading route linking Europe and Asia, was closed in 1962 following a brief border war between India and China. While not commercially significantthe primary goods traded across the 4,500-m-high frontier will be farm tools, livestock and ricethe historic opening symbolizes the thawing relations between the world’s two most populous countries, between which two-way trade grew 37% last year to nearly $19 billion.

APPOINTED. Jos Ramos Horta, 57, Nobel laureate and East Timor’s former Foreign and Trade Minister; as interim Prime Minister, after Prime Minister Mari Alkatiri resigned under pressure over violence in the nation’s capital that has killed at least 21; in Dili. Ramos Horta, a founder of the ruling Freitlin partyalthough no longer a member of itis widely seen as a unifying candidate who, it is hoped, can quell the political unrest that has rocked the world’s newest nation since March.

ARRESTED. Marco Mancini and Gustavo Pignero, officials with sismi, Italy’s military-intelligence agency; for involvement in the 2003 kidnapping in Milan of Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, a radical Egyptian cleric suspected of ties to terrorism; in Milan. Italian prosecutors are also seeking the arrest of 26 Americansmost of them believed to be CIA operativesin connection with the abduction of Nasr, who was spirited to Egypt, imprisoned and, he says, tortured under interrogation by U.S. agents about his alleged terrorist ties.

DIED. Theodore Levitt, 81, legendary Harvard Business School professor who was credited with coining the term globalization in a 1983 Harvard Business Review article; in Belmont, Massachusetts. A provocative teacher and scholar, Levitt wrote eight books on marketing. He contributed 25 articles to the Review, including the influential “Marketing Myopia” in 1960, which argued that companies suffer because executives defined their businesses too narrowly and has sold 850,000 reprints.

DIED. Kenneth Lay, 64, founder and ex-CEO of Enron, who was convicted in May of fraud and conspiracy in the spectacular 2001 collapse of the mammoth energy company; while free on a $5 million bond as he awaited his October sentencing; of heart disease; in Aspen, Colorado. Born to a poor family in rural Missouri, Lay became a friend to Presidents (George W. Bush famously nicknamed him “Kenny Boy”) and a Wall Street darling whose renown grew in step with Enron’s soaring stock price. But the emergence in 2001 of the truth about Enron and its scandalous business practices ruined that reputationalthough Lay maintained his innocence to the end. Legal experts say his death vacates his conviction, since he cannot take part in any appeals. But his estate may still have to fight civil claims by former Enron employees as well as the U.S. government.

Numbers
44% Proportion of British respondents who ranked U.S. President George W. Bush’s leadership as “terrible” in a recent survey. 33% rated him “pretty poor”

77% Proportion of British in the survey who no longer see America as a “beacon of hope for the world”

$140 Retail price of the Adidas +Teamgeist soccer ball, the official ball used at this year’s World Cup in Germany

$200 Monthly wage for the employees who assemble the +Teamgeist in a Thailand factory

102.7 db Volume of the loudest shriek emitted by tennis player Maria Sharapova during a Wimbledon quarterfinal against fellow Russian Elena Dementieva. Sharapova won the match

100 db Typical volume of a jackhammer in use

$1 billion Cost of an unsuccessful campaign to eradicate Afghanistan’s opium crops, which one Western counternarcotics official has called “an absolute disaster”

$3 billion Expected profit from this year’s Afghan opium crop, the largest yield in history