1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000
Egypt's deputy prime minister for foreign affairs Boutros Boutros-Ghali, 69, takes office January 1 as secretary general of the United Nations, participates January 31 in the first Security Council Summit, and is invited to analyze the UN's capacity for preventive diplomacy, peacemaking, and peacekeeping, and to recommend ways to strengthen that capacity in Africa, Asia, Central America, and Europe. Within 2 years the number of peacekeepers will have grown from 11,500 to 72,000, straining the UN's financial resources.
Macedonia declares her independence from Yugoslavia in January and requests recognition from the European Union; Greece blocks the country with its population of some 2 million from entering the United Nations, claiming exclusive rights to the name Macedonia (part of Greek territory is so named), Macedonia will finally join the UN in 1993 under the name Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, but Greece will impose an economic blockade until the Macedonians cut a 16-pointed star in their national flag down to eight points.
Voters in Bosnia and Herzegovina opt for independence from Yugoslavia February 29, provoking fresh hostilities in the Balkans as Europe tries to deal with the end of the cold-war bipolarity on which political relationships have been based for nearly 50 years (see 1991). Serbia and Montenegro form a new Federal Republic of Yugoslavia April 17. Croatia, Slovenia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina gain UN membership May 22; Washington that day revokes landing rights for Yugoslav national airline planes and orders expulsion of Yugoslav military attachés to punish Serbia's president Slobodan Milosevic, who has sent troops into Bosnia. The troops besiege Sarajevo for most of the year as both sides commit atrocities while other European countries dither about how to end the fighting. President Bush warns Milosevic that violence against Kosovo's Albanian population may provoke military intervention; Milosevic wins reelection December 21 despite widespread condemnation in the West (see 1993; Kosovo, 1998).
Moldova's president Mircea Snegur authorizes military action against Trans-Denstran rebels, who gain support from contingents of Russian cossacks and the Russian 14th Army to consolidate their control over disputed areas (see 1991). Snegur's attempts to obtain United Nations intervention fail, and he has to settle for a combined Russian-Dnestr-Moldovan peacekeeping force (see 1994).
Czechoslovakia's president Vaclav Havel resigns July 17 following June elections in which the voters have decided to end the 74-year federation and create two independent republics, a break to become official January 1, 1993. Prime Minister Vladimir Meciar will head the Slovak republic, Vaclav Klaus the Czech republic. Former Czech president Alexander Dubcek dies at Prague November 7 at age 70.
Former Polish prime minister Piotr Jaroszewicz, 82, and his journalist wife, Alicja Solska, are found shot to death at their Warsaw home September 2. Police say he was strangled to death after being tortured and his wife was shot with a hunting rifle.
Former East German spymaster Erich Mielke goes to prison after being convicted of having played a role in the killing of two Berlin policemen in August 1931 (see 1957). Now 84, the short but muscular Mielke escaped to Moscow after the killing; he will be held until 1995 at the old Moabit Prison.
Former West German chancellor and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Willy Brandt dies of intestinal cancer at his home in Unkel October 8 at age 78.
German Green Party leader Petra Kelly is found dead of a gunshot wound at age 44 October 19 in the apartment at Bonn that she has shared with Gert Bastian, 69, who has either murdered his partner and then killed himself or died with her in a mutual suicide pact (no note is found). A former major general who was forcibly retired from the German Army in 1980 for opposing any deployment of U.S. cruise missiles in West Germany, Bastian has joined Kelly in speaking out against the increasing incidence of anti-foreigner violence in Germany. Kelly served in the Bundestag until 1990, when the pragmatic western wing of the Green Party was ousted in the first election after the unification of Germany.
British voters reelect the Conservatives April 9 despite an economic recession that is worse than America's. A truck bomb explodes outside the 248-year-old Baltic Exchange April 10, killing three, injuring 91, and destroying the exchange's building. The House of Commons gets its first female speaker in April: Betty Boothroyd, 62, is a onetime dancer and a Labour member of Parliament since 1973; she has a record of support for women's rights, but only 60 of Parliament's 651 members are women.
Former Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze returns from Moscow to his native Georgia in March (see 1989; Georgia, 1991), the leaders of the new republic's military council install him as chairman of the state council, Georgian and Russian diplomats sign an agreement in June establishing a peace-keeping force to maintain South Ossetia as a buffer zone, Georgians elect Shevardnadze president in October, but Muslims and others continue sporadic fighting against the new government at Tblisi, which tries to control a population of about 5 million in a country of some 26,900 square miles (69,700 square kilometers). The northern Abkhazia region declares independence from Georgia, Shevardnadze imposes martial law on all government ministers in December, and civil war will continue for more than a decade as Georgia's economy declines from prosperity to penury (see 1993).
Afghan rebels surge into Kabul from April 23 to 25, the communist president Mohammad Najibullah takes refuge in a United Nations compound somewhere in the city, guerrilla groups and mutinous army units under the command of Ahmed Shah Massoud, 37, control most of Kabul by April 25, but disputes arise over how fundamentalist the new Muslim regime should be. Sporadic street fighting continues through April 30 as Massoud's forces battle those of fundamentalist leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. More than 2 million Afghans have been killed fighting communist government forces from 1979 to 1989, 6 million (about one-third of the surviving population) have fled to Iran and Pakistan, and the new Taliban government begins to restore order, using repressive measures based on a strict Islamic interpretation of the Shariah to end the chaos (see 1996).
Cambodian statesman Prince Norodom Sihanouk heads a Supreme National Council under terms of a UN agreement signed at Paris calling for the Council to hold power until free elections can be held next year, but Sihanouk surprises the nation by siding with the Vietnamese-backed government against the Khmer Rouge as the UN deploys troops to keep order and clear away land mines.
Presidents Bush and Yeltsin agree June 16 to drastic cuts in their respective nuclear arsenals, scrapping key land-based missiles and reducing long-range warheads. They sign an arms-reduction accord at Washington June 17, and a second Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START 2) announced at Geneva December 29 calls for mutual reductions of nuclear warheads (see 1993).
Algeria's president Chadli Benjedid resigns January 11 following Islamic fundamentalists' victory at the polls (see riots, 1988). Runoff elections are canceled January 12, former National Liberation Front dissident Mohammed Boudiaf, 73, returns from 27 years of exile and is sworn in as president January 16, a court dissolves the Islamic Salvation Front March 4, and President Boudiaf is assassinated at Annaba June 29, leaving the nation in turmoil (see 1995).
Israeli helicopter gunships fire on a motorcade in southern Lebanon February 16, killing 39-year-old Hisballah (Party of God) secretary-general Sheik Abbas al-Musawi along with his family and bodyguards (the Shiite organization has engaged in kidnapping and other terrorist activities against Westerners since the early 1980s); a car bomb explodes in front of the Israeli embassy at Buenos Aires March 17, killing 29 people and injuring another 220. A Lebanese Shiite group announces that an Argentine "martyr struggler" carried out the attack to avenge Musawi's slaying. Lebanon's 99-member parliament has held office since 1972, the country holds its first parliamentary elections since then to select a 125-member body in which Christians and Muslims will have equal representation, even though Christians account for only 30 percent of the population, but Christians fear a loss of economic domination and boycott the polls, charging that Syria is manipulating the elections. About 40,000 Syrian troops remain in the country under terms of an agreement made in May of last year; critics claim that the pact represents a de factor annexation of Lebanon by Syria. President Elias Hrawi names a billionaire Sunni Muslim businessman prime minister October 22: Rafik al-Hariri, 48, has made his fortune as a building contractor in Saudi Arabia and become a Saudi citizen, but he financed and organized the conference that ended Lebanon's civil war in 1989, and names a 30-minister cabinet that is evenly divided between Christian and Muslim. Hariri will serve until late in 1998, spending much of his own money to rebuild Beirut and educate thousands of Lebanese students at home and abroad.
Former Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin dies of heart failure at Jerusalem March 9 at age 78; former U.S. Middle East peace negotiator Philip C. Habib of a heart attack while vacationing at Puligny-Montrachet, France, May 25 at age 72. Israel's Labor Party defeats the Likud Party in elections June 23; President Bush has threatened to withhold $10 billion in loan guarantees if Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir did not freeze settlement building on the West Bank, this has contributed to Shamir's defeat, and Yitzhak Rabin becomes prime minister after campaigning on a willingness to exchange land for peace with Israel's Arab neighbors. PLO leader Yasir Arafat has lost his Soviet patron, and his rich Gulf State patrons have cut off funding since his support of Saddam Hussein in last year's Gulf War. Official Mideast peace negotiations falter in December as Israel deports 415 Palestinians following the murder of an Israeli policeman by militants, bringing condemnation from the United Nations; Lebanon refuses to accept the deportees; Middle East history professor Yair Hirschfeld breaks Israeli law by meeting in a London hotel with a Palestine Liberation Organization member (Ahmed Kriah, head of the PLO's economics department) (see 1993).
Washington bans Iraqi flights south of the 32nd parallel in August to protect Shiite Muslims from air attacks, Iraqi jets breach the no-flight zone December 27, and a U.S. F-16 shoots one down.
Thai troops fire on pro-democracy demonstrators in May, killing at least 52 people and perhaps as many as 200. More than 400 people disappear, and rumors abound that their bodies have been fed to crocodiles. A coalition led by pro-democracy forces wins election in September and installs a new government headed by Prime Minister Chuan Leekpai, which works to suppress drug trafficking and child prostitution.
Philippine voters elect Gen. Fidel V. Ramos, 64, to succeed Corazon Aquino as president; he takes office June 30 in the first peaceful change of Filipino government since November 1965.
Chinese hard liner Li Xiannian dies at Beijing June 21 at age 82, having helped lead opposition to Deng Xiaoping's efforts at economic reform. Communist Party official Deng Ying-chao dies at Beijing July 11 at age 88; widow of the late Zhou Enlai and adoptive mother of Prime Minister Li Peng, she was a veteran of the Long March (as was Li Xiannian) and once dominated the party's women's program.
Japanese Liberal Democratic Party vice president Shin Kanemaru, 77, resigns August 28 after admitting that he accepted nearly $4 million in illegal donations from Sagawa Kyubin, a trucking company that sought exemptions from rules and approval of new routes, and distributed the money to lawmakers; Japan's most powerful politician, Kanemaru is convicted only of a misdemeanor and fined $1,700—less than the highest penalty for overnight parking in Tokyo. Accusations then surface that he employed gangsters to help install Noboru Takeshita as prime minister in 1987 (see 1993).
South Korean opposition leader Kim Young Sam wins election as president in December, defeating his rival Kim Dae-jung, who announces that he will retire from politics (see 1987; 1993).
Laotian president Kaysone Phomvihan relaxes some government controls and releases certain political prisoners, including some army officers from the pro-Western regime who have been held in detention camps since 1975; he schedules elections for the Supreme People's Assembly but dies at Vientiane November 21 at age 71.
Mali holds free elections in April and elects former teacher Alpha Oumar Konaré, 46, president (see 1991). His onetime student Gen. Amadou Toumani Touré (known universally as A.T.T.) steps down and devotes his efforts to fighting Guinea worm disease and mediating regional disputes.
Sierra Leone lapses into a civil war that will continue for more than 8 years (see commerce, 1972). A military coup d'détat April 29 brings down President Joseph Momoh, who is exiled to Guinea, rebel leader Foday Sankoh's Revolutionary United Front captures Kono district diamond fields and finances its activities with illegal diamond exports, Sankoh declares that the civilian government has mismanaged the affairs of the world's poorest country, his five-member junta establishes the National Provisional Ruling Council, and rebel guerrillas wreaking havoc in the tiny West African nation (see 1995).
Angola's Marxist president José Eduardo dos Santos retains office after UN-sponsored elections in September, but U.S.- and South African-sponsored UNITA rebel leader Jonas Savimbi rejects the election results in October and resumes the civil war that has devasted the country since 1975.
Peru's president Alberto Fujimori suspends the nation's constitution April 5 and assumes dictatorial powers as he struggles to fight corruption and the Maoist Sendera Luminosa guerrillas. Washington suspends aid to Peru. Lima police capture Shining Path leader Abimael Guzmán Reynoso September 12 but some of his cohorts remain at large and continue to disrupt the country.
A new Paraguayan constitution goes into effect June 20, replacing a 1967 constitution (see 1989). The new document states that the country is a representative and pluralistic democracy with executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government, its president is to be elected by a simple majority for a 5-year term, his reelection is specifically barred, and the executive or Congress may declare a state of exception only in the event of international armed conflict or internal unrest serious enough to jeopardize constitutional rule. The death penalty is abolished, and the constitution guarantees the rights of Indians, the right to strike, and basic civil liberties. President Rodríguez adopts certain democratic measures, legalizes all political parties (although his own Colorado Party remains dominant), repeals some repressive laws, frees the country's remaining political prisoners, ratifies the human rights treaties of the United Nations and the Organization of American States, and declares freedom of the press, but he does almost nothing in the way of land reform, and 78 percent of farm and ranch land remains in the hands of a few rich families and corporations, smuggling remains widespread, and the Rodríguez government continues to interfere with labor unions (see 1993).
Bahamas prime minister Lynden Pindling loses power August 19 after 25 years in office—the longest-serving democratically elected leader in the Western Hemisphere. Now 62, he has allegedly accepted millions of dollars from Colombian drug lords, the islands are in the midst of an economic recession with high unemployment, Pindling's Progressive Liberal Party has been upset in parliamentary elections, and he is succeeded by his protégé Hubert A. Ingraham, a 45-year-old lawyer whose center-right Free National Movement wins a landslide victory.
Brazil's Chamber of Deputies impeaches President Fernando Collor de Mello September 29 on charges of having accepted millions of dollars in illegal payments. Brazilian Press Association president Alexandre Barbosa Lima, now 95, has urged Collor's impeachment; relieved of his powers pending trial by the Senate, Collor resigns December 29 and his vice president Itamar Augusto Cautiero Franco, 62, takes over as recession and near-hyperinflation continue to wrack the country. The Movement to Restore Ethics to Politics founded by social activist Herbert José "Betinho" de Souza, 57, has helped to unseat the corrupt Collor de Mello. Driven into exile after the military coup of 1964, Souza returned under a general amnesty in 1979; a hemophiliac, he was infected with HIV through a transfusion of contaminated blood 6 years ago and has been working to raise consciousness about AIDS in Brazil, but his reputation will be tainted next year when it comes to light that his AIDS advocacy group accepted a $58,000 donation from racketeers.
Guyana's voters return the People's Progressive Party (PPP) to power in October in an internationally supervised election, and former British Guiana prime minister Cheddi Jagan becomes president with U.S. support after years of misrule and corruption have brought one of the western hemisphere's poorest countries close to economic collapse (see 1985). Now 73, Jagan has a Marxist agenda that antagonized U.S. authorities for nearly 30 years, but he defeats People's National Congress leader Desmond Hoyte and will hold power until his death in 1997, introducing economic reforms to encourage foreign investment in sugar cultivation, bauxite mining, and other enterprises while curtailing direct government participation in the economy (see 1997).
Ruby Ridge, Idaho, makes headlines after a federal marshal shoots the pet Labrador retriever of local resident Samuel Weaver, 14, August 21. Young Weaver returns fire by most accounts and is shot dead. Kevin Harris, 25, a family friend, fires on the marshals by most accounts and kills William Degan, 42. Hundreds of federal agents surround the house and when white-separatist Randy Weaver, 44, goes out the next morning to inspect his son's body he is wounded by an FBI sharpshooter but gets back to his cabin with his friend Harris. The agent then kills Weaver's wife, Vicki, 43, who is holding their 10-month-old daughter, and wounds Harris. Weaver and Harris will be acquitted next year of murder charges; Weaver has refused to surrender to authorities and face charges of illegal gun sales; he will become a hero to conspiracy buffs and members of unregulated militia groups opposed to government of any kind (see 1995; Waco, 1993).
Former New Orleans district attorney and Kennedy-assassination conspiracy theorist Jim Garrison dies of heart disease at his New Orleans home October 21 at age 70.
The Cuban Democracy Act signed by President Bush October 23 tightens the 30-year-old embargo against trade with the communist-controlled Caribbean nation. Congress has passed the law under pressure from Florida's politically powerful Cuban community. The UN General Assembly votes 59 to 3 November 23 to rebuke the United States, whose new law covers foreign subsidiaries of U.S. companies (see 1994).
U.S. voters elect Arkansas governor William Jefferson (Blythe) "Bill" Clinton, 46, to the presidency, rejecting George Bush's reelection bid as economic recession shows few signs of abating. Bush wins 18 states with 168 electoral votes to Clinton's 370, while taking 38 million popular votes (37.4 percent) to Clinton's 44 million (43 percent). Dallas billionaire Ross Perot entered the race October 1 and gets 18.9 million votes. President-elect Clinton has been smeared during the primary campaign in New Hampshire with allegations by Little Rock cabaret singer Gennifer Flowers in a supermarket tabloid that he had a 12-year extra-marital affair with her beginning when she was a TV reporter. Clinton has denied the allegations while admitting to having had troubles in his marriage over the years. He has objected to being penalized for keeping his marriage together "in the way that divorced people once were for having had marriages that failed." His Chicago-born wife, Hillary (née Rodham), 45, has stood by him and faced down his attackers, campaigning with him and (after a gaffe in which she has seemed to disparage homemakers) helping to bring in women voters chilled by the Reagan-Bush stand on abortion rights (47 percent of women vote for Clinton, 41 percent of men).
California voters elect two women to the U.S. Senate; former San Francisco mayor Dianne Feinstein (née Goldman), 59, and congresswoman Barbara Boxer (née Levy), 52, are both Democrats. Washington State elects Democrat Patty Murray, 42, and Illinois elects Democrat Carol Braun (née Moseley), 45, who becomes the first black woman U.S. senator. All four candidates have benefited from contributions by Emily's List, whose membership has swelled to 24,000 by year's end—up from 3,500 in 1990 and from 12,000 in the spring—in large part because of outrage over the treatment of Anita Hill in last year's Senate confirmation hearings of Justice Clarence Thomas.
President-elect Clinton names more women to his cabinet than any previous president. Among them are Philadelphia-born economist Alice Rivlin (née Mitchell), 61, as deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget; University of Wisconsin at Madison chancellor Donna E. Shalala, now 51, as secretary of Health and Human Services; and Connecticut corporate lawyer Zoë Baird, 40, as attorney general (see 1993).
Former Georgia governor Ellis G. Arnall dies of pneumonia at Atlanta December 13 at age 85.
President Bush grants pardons December 24 to former secretary of defense Caspar W. Weinberger, now 75, and five other Reagan administration officials who have been indicted (and in some cases convicted) of lying to Congress in connection with the Iran-Contra affair of the mid-1980s. Independent Counsel Lawrence E. Walsh, 80, condemns the pardons, which fuel doubts about Bush's own involvement in trading arms for hostages in the 1980s and using proceeds of the sales to arm Nicaragua's contras.
South Africa's whites vote 2 to 1 March 18 to give President de Klerk a mandate to end white-minority rule. A massacre in the black township of Boipatong June 17 ends with more than 40 residents shot or hacked to death. Nelson R. Mandela charges police involvement, the African National Congress pulls out of talks on majority rule for the nation, and de Klerk later admits police participation in township violence. British-born anti-apartheid leader Helen Joseph dies of complications from a stroke at Johannesburg December 25 at age 87.
Guatemalan Quiché political and human rights activist Rigoberta Menchu, 32, receives the Nobel Peace Prize. Says the prize committee, "She stands out as a vivid symbol of peace and reconciliation across ethnic, cultural, and social dividing lines" in her own country and abroad.
Japanese history professor Yoshiaki Yoshimi, 40, reveals in January that beginning in the mid-1930s the imperial army forced young women and girls into sexual slavery as "comfort women" to provide sex for the military and thus keep soldiers from raping civilians in Japanese-controlled areas of China (see 1991). Between 100,000 and 200,000 such women—mostly children and teenagers from Korea and China but some from Japan—were eventually lured or forcibly sent to battlefronts across East Asia, obliged to live in filthy shanties, and sometimes required to have sex with soldiers at 15-minute intervals day and night. Sexually-transmitted disease was rampant, and thousands of women died, including many who were apparently killed by soldiers. Survivors were generally unmarriagable because non-virgins in Korea found it almost impossible to find husbands. Yoshimi's evidence (an official document entitled "Regarding the Recruitment of Women for Military Brothels" and bearing the hankos [personal stamps] of high-ranking officers) forces Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa to concede that the government has covered up the situation for more than 40 years and he offers an apology to the Korean people, saying that Tokyo will have to find a way to redress the women's grievances but not promising any financial reparations. The new emperor Akihito is burned in effigy.
Sexual harassment in the Japanese workplace draws censure April 16 as a district court rules in favor of an unmarried woman in Fukuoka who has claimed that a male employee at the small publishing company for which she worked had spread rumors that she was promiscuous. It is the first such case ever filed in Japan.
The mayor of Manila shuts down the city's notorious red-light district, and Philippines president Fidel Ramos issues a law later in the year making it easier to prosecute men who have sex with children (see 1990). Manila's thriving child prostitution industry moves to other neighborhoods, where it serves local clients (see international conference, 1996).
Vice President Dan Quayle gives a speech at San Francisco's Commonwealth Club May 19 and assails the Murphy Brown TV series for glamorizing unwed motherhood. He was quoted 3 years ago as saying about his wife, Marilyn, that she "has a very major cause and a very major interest that is a very complex and consuming issue with her. And that's me." Feminists say Quayle has an agenda hostile to women and that he exaggerates the problem of unwed mothers; his critics argue that marriage can sometimes make matters worse, as in a case where a woman is married to an abusive man.
Revelations about last September's Tailhook sex scandal lead the U.S. Senate to hold up the promotions and transfers of roughly 9,000 Navy and Marine officers until they can prove that they were not involved. Lt. Coughlin has persuaded a sympathetic admiral to launch an investigation, President Bush has met with her at the White House June 26, she has gone public with her accusations, the secretary of the navy resigns, and the Pentagon's inspector general takes over the investigation. Two admirals are fired and one reassigned in late September as the investigation into the incident continues (see 1993).
A November 22 Washington Post story contains allegations by 10 women that they have been the objects of improper sexual advances by Sen. Bob Packwood (R. Ore.), who was reelected November 5 after having denied such allegations. A staunch campaigner for women's rights, Packwood now apologizes for his behavior, without specifying what that behavior was, and does not dispute the women's charges. Demands for his resignation will continue, and more women will report having received uninvited sexual advances from the senator (see 1993).
Serbian forces in Bosnia open concentration camps and impose "ethnic cleansing" measures to rid the country of Muslims and other opponents. Serbians rape and impregnate thousands of Muslim women as a matter of policy, and many Muslim men kill their sisters rather than allow them to bear Serbian-fathered children.
German neo-Nazis, "skinheads," and other xenophobes attack resident gypsies and Turkish working-class families in an upsurge of violence that includes anti-Semitic outbursts (even though the nation's Jewish population has fallen to 40,000). Hundreds of thousands of Germans march to protest the bigotry.
Russian economic czar Yegor Gaidar urges liberalization of prices early in the year to transform the nation's command economy into a free-market economy (see 1991). Russia and other former Soviet nations struggle with inflation and unemployment as they try to follow Poland's more successful example of moving from a state economy to a market economy, but millions of people have lost the security they enjoyed under state-controlled economies, they have no use for the "gangster capitalism" that has taken over, and they yearn for the system under which they grew up. Elevated to deputy chairman March 2, Gaidar shares power briefly with Gennady Burbulis, who is removed in April, whereupon Gaidar seizes the opportunity to promote a rapid transition in the face of massive opposition. President Yeltsin signs a decree June 15 before going abroad that makes Gaidar acting chairman, but Yeltsin discharges him December 14 (see 1993).
Nobel economist-author Friedrich von Hayek dies of a heart ailment at his Freiberg, Germany, home March 23 at age 92.
IBM announces July 28 that it will reduce its workforce by nearly 10 percent before year's end, laying off 32,000 employees. The world's largest computer company has cut 63,000 other jobs since its payroll peaked at 407,000 in 1986.
A French referendum nearly derails the European Monetary Union agreed upon last year at Maastricht. Britain's chancellor of the exchequer Norman Lamont announces August 28 that the European Monetary System (EMS) will not be realigned. He issues a denial September 10 that the pound sterling will be devalued, Prime Minister Major supports the decision, but Germany's central bank (the Bundesbank) reduces two significant interest rates September 14 in return for a 7 percent devaluation of the Italian lira, which comes under downward pressure against the mark, as does Britain's pound sterling. The Bank of England makes two sharp increases in interest rates but fails to stem the fall of the pound below its floor in the EMS and Exchange Rate Mechanism, Britain suspends the pound from participation in the EMS September 16, Italy and Spain follow suit September 17, Lamont denies September 17 that floating the pound is equivalent to devaluation, Britain cuts her benchmark interest rate one point to 9 percent September 22, and she withdraws from the EMS, abandoning efforts to stabilize the pound sterling in a move to reinvigorate the flagging economy. British interest rates fall to their lowest level since 1988 and are lower than German rates for the first time in a decade. New York investor George Soros has speculated that the pound sterling would fall, his 23-year-old Quantum Fund makes a profit of $1 billion overnight, and many blame Soros for undermining Britain's currency; now 62 and an avowed atheist, Soros has become a major philanthropist, contributing larger sums worldwide than any governmental or church instrumentality to help establish civil liberties, multiparty democracies, and independent newspapers in the former communist countries of Eastern Europe.
Prime Minister Major announces October 18 that 10 coal mines will be closed at a cost of 7,000 jobs. All 31 of Britain's mines are uneconomic but a massive popular protest and Conservative Party objections have discouraged Major from closing the rest.
The top 20 percent of Britons commands 42 percent of the nation's total income, the bottom fifth 8 percent—the biggest gap since 1949, but the top 20 percent of Americans commands 47 percent of total income, the bottom fifth only 3.9 percent.
Queen Elizabeth agrees in late November to start paying taxes on her private income and to pay $1.3 million of the royal family's expenses, breaking with tradition, but British taxpayers will bear the estimated $90 million cost of repairs to Windsor Castle, which has been damaged by fire.
The U.S. national debt tops $3 trillion, up from $735 billion in January 1981 as a result of borrowing by the Reagan and Bush administrations to finance current operations.
Women account for 42 percent of the U.S. workforce; 58 percent of women aged 16 and older are in the workforce, up from 51 percent in 1979, and the percentage of working women between 35 and 44 has risen to 77 percent, up from 64 percent (the percentage of men in the workforce has fallen from 78 percent to 76 percent).
The U.S. Census Department reports that 47 percent of families headed by single mothers live in poverty as compared to 8.3 percent of families headed by two parents.
Japanese companies lay off workers and cut salaries as recession deepens in Japan and Germany even while it eases in America. Tokyo's Nikkei 225 stock index bottoms out August 18 at 14309, down 63 percent from its record year-end 1989 high of 38915.9.
Wall Street's Dow Jones Industrial Average closes December 31 at 3301.11, up from 3168.83 at the end of 1991. The Nasdaq closes at 676.95, up 15.5 percent.
R. H. Macy Co. files for bankruptcy in January. Chairman and CEO Edward S. Finkelstein, 67, resigns April 27 after a 12-year career in which he has acquired a reputation as a merchandising genius (but not a financial wizard), Macy's enters Chapter 11 protection to avoid paying creditors' bills, and it will merge with Federated Department Stores in 1994.
Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom in March and dies of bone cancer and leukemia at Little Rock, Ark., April 5 at age 74, having amassed a family fortune of more than $23 billion since 1962. Wal-Mart sales surpassed those of Sears, Roebuck last year, and there are now 1,735 Wal-Mart stores in 40 states, but critics note that the chain has prospered by selling clothes sewn by child laborers and putting traditional Main Street stores out of business, destroying a sense of community that existed in many towns. By 1998 Wal-Mart will have annual sales of $118 billion, more than those of the next three largest retailers combined, as it grows to be the world's largest enterprise of any kind.
Mall of America opens in August at Bloomington, Minn., after 7 years of construction. The $500 million shopping mall, largest in the world, will soon have 400 stores (including Bloomingdale's, Macy's, Nordstrom, Sears, The Limited, Victoria's Secret, and Benetton) encircling an amusement park (Knott's Camp Snoopy), attracting shoppers from all over the world (many come from Japan on package tours), and taking in $2 million per day. By year's end, the United States has 38,996 shopping centers, including 1,835 large regional malls with more than 400,000 square feet of retail space and at least one department store (National Research Bureau figures).
The Yankee Nuclear Power Station at Rowe, Mass., shuts down permanently February 26 and will be decommissioned beginning next year after more than 31 years of producing electricity for New England consumers.
Spain's high-speed Alta Velocidad Espanola (AVE) train begins nonstop operation April 21 between Madrid and Seville, reducing the time on the 471-kilometer route to 2¼ hours.
The International Civil Aviation Organization announces a goal of having all international flights nonsmoking by July 1, 1996 (see Air Canada, 1988; Air France, 1990).
The 171-kilometer (106-mile) Europa Canal opens to link Bamberg on the Main River (a tributary of the Rhine) with Kelheim on the Danube, thereby creating a commercial waterway that permits barges to move 3,500 kilometers (2,500 miles) through 15 countries between the North Sea and the Black Sea (see Ludwig Canal, 1837). Construction began in earnest 32 years ago after nearly 40 years of planning; one of the most ambitious civil engineering projects ever undertaken, the canal (also called the Main-Danube Canal, or Main-Donau Kanal) reaches a height of more than 406 meters (1,332 feet) as it crosses the Swabian Alps south of Nuremberg and has 16 locks, each about 190 meters (625 feet) long and 12 meters (40 feet) wide.
Billionaire shipowner Daniel K. Ludwig dies of heart failure at his Fifth Avenue, New York, apartment August 27 at age 95.
IBM releases version 2.0 of its OS/2 operating system as it struggles to compete with Microsoft, which introduces a Windows 3.1 operating system superior to the Windows systems it introduced in 1986 and 1990. The Federal Trade Commission investigates charges that computer makers using Microsoft programs must pay license fees based on the total number of PCs they produce, whether those PCs use MS-DOS or Windows; Microsoft will agree in July of next year to charge a license fee only if a PC actually contains one of its operating systems (see 1995).
Mathematician and pioneer computer programmer Rear Admiral Grace M. Hopper (ret.) dies at Arlington, Va., January 1 at age 85 (she retired from active duty at age 79); BASIC computer language co-inventor (and Dartmouth College president) John G. Kemeny dies at Lebanon, N.H., December 26 at age 66.
Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory astrophysicist George Smoot, 47, announces April 23 that microwave receivers mounted by his team on satellites have located the sites where huge clusters of galaxies began to form about 300,000 years after the universe began. Smoot's discovery advances the controversial theory that the universe began with a "Big Bang" and then ballooned in a fraction of a second from a size smaller than an atom to one much larger than astronomers can see with the most powerful telescopes. The first Keck telescope (Keck I) is installed at the Keck Observatory on the summit of Hawaii's Mauna Kea volcano. Operated as a consortium under the leadership of the California Institute of Technology and the University of California, the observatory has been funded primarily by the W. M. Keck Foundation, established by the late Superior Oil Co. founder William Myron Keck (Keck II will be completed in 1996).
The National Institutes of Health files for patents February 12 on 2,375 more human gene fragments, and Human Genome Project director James D. Watson quits April 10 after National Institutes of Health director Bernardine Healy orders a review of his private investments (see 1991). Owning stock in some biotechnology companies that are also involved in gene sequencing might constitute a conflict of interest, Healy has said; Michael M. Gottesman of the National Cancer Institute's cell biology lab replaces Watson on a temporary basis. Britain's Medical Research Council applies in July for rights to 1,100 gene fragments, but the scientists have merely identified the order of molecules that comprise the sections which they want to patent, they have not determined the physiological roles played by the molecular strands, and the U.S. Patent Office rejects the NIH patent applications in September. Human Genome Project scientists release the first two maps of human chromosomes: results obtained by French researchers with help from scientists in Japan, Spain, and the United States are published in Nature October 1. The map of the Y chromosome produced by researchers at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Mass., appears in Science October 2 (see 1993).
Oceanographer Henry Stommel dies at Woods Hole, Mass., January 17 at age 71; Nobel biochemist Peter Mitchell at Bodmin, Cornwall, April 10 at age 71; Nobel geneticist Barbara McClintock at Huntington, N.Y., September 2 at age 90.
A study reported in the British medical journal Lancet January 4 shows that hormones and drugs used to treat breast cancer remain effective for at least 10 years—long after the treatment has ceased. Benefits of the synthetic hormone tamoxifen, or a combination of chemotherapeutic drugs, are even more striking in the second 5-year period than in the first.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) orders a moratorium in January on silicone breast implants (see 1991). FDA Commissioner David Kessler has been shown internal Dow Corning memos and documents revealing that the company's subsidiary rushed a new silicone-gel implant to market in 1975, delayed doing certain safety tests for years, and misled plastic surgeons about the risk that silicone could ooze out and spread to other parts of the body. Some women have blamed ruptured (and even intact) implants for carpal tunnel syndrome (a connective-tissue disease), lupus, arthritis, swollen joints, chronic hepatitis, sclerderma, facial rash, hair loss, night sweats, chronic fatigue, and breast, ovarian, liver, and uterine cancer. FDA issues an order in April that silicone-gel breast implants be removed from the market; a Houston woman wins a $25 million verdict against Bristol Myers Squibb December 23 over silicone-gel implants (see 1996).
The National Breast Cancer Coalition wins $300 million more in federal funding after financing a seminar and gaining support from U.S. Senator Tom Harkin (D. Iowa), who proposes that the $25 million budgeted by the army for screening and diagnosis be increased to $210 million for breast-cancer research (see 1991). The Coalition sets out to obtain 175,000 signatures—one for each U.S. woman who will be diagnosed as having breast cancer this year (46,000 will die of the disease)—and winds up delivering 600,000 signatures to Washington in October, which is "Breast Cancer Awareness Month." Congress votes 87 to 4 to transfer $210 million from the defense budget to the domestic budget for breast-cancer research.
Australia's federal cabinet votes February 11 to eliminate a $1.96 ($2.50 Australian) per-visit copayment fee introduced last year by former prime minister Bob Hawke. Prime Minister Keating opposed the fee, and beginning March 1 Medicare restores rebates to physicians for every patient seen.
U.S. healthcare spending tops 14 percent of national economic output, up from 9.6 percent in 1981, 12.2 percent in 1990 (when Canada, France, Germany, and Sweden spent 8 to 9 percent, Japan 6.5 percent, and Britain 6.1). An estimated 37 million Americans have no health insurance, and the number grows as layoffs surge. President-elect Clinton says health care is the major crisis facing America (see 1993).
Nobel physiologist Daniel Bovet dies at Rome April 8 at age 85; surgeon George Crile Jr. of lung cancer at his native Cleveland September 10 at age 84; former Canadian minister of health and welfare Paul Martin at Windsor, Ont., September 14 at age 89; Pentothal co-developer Ernest L. Volwiler at Lake Forest, Ill., October 3 at age 99.
France bans smoking in public places beginning November 1, but French smokers generally defy the ban despite mounting costs of health care due to smoking.
Pope John Paul II admits October 31 that theological advisers to his 17th-century predecessor Urban VIII made errors when they condemned Galileo Galilei as a heretic in 1633 for endorsing the Copernican view that the Earth revolves around the sun. In 1979 Pope John Paul II said that the Church might have misjudged Galileo, and the pope set up a commission to study the case. Now, in addressing the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Pope John Paul II says the Church failed to differentiate between the Bible and its interpretation, but he notes that the theologians were working within the limited knowledge of the time. He does not admit that the Church erred in convicting Galileo because of his belief.
A new universal catechism issued by the Vatican November 16 is the first since 1563; it is designed to address modern-day issues.
Militant Hindus demolish a four-century-old Muslim mosque in northern India December 6, triggering waves of shootings, stabbings, and arson that leave more than 1,000 dead. India has a secular constitution, but her people are deeply religious and pressures mount to make her a Hindu theocracy (see 1993).
Yale University president Benno C. Schmidt Jr. announces May 25 that he will resign by year's end to head Christopher Whittle's Edison Project (see 1991), giving up the $187,000 position he has held since September 1986. Educational Alternatives, Inc. takes over the operation of nine Baltimore public schools September 1, but the city will cancel the private company's 5-year contract in 1995.
Vice President Dan Quayle visits an elementary school at Trenton, N.J., June 15 and corrects a pupil in a spelling bee by adding an "e" to the word potato.
Virginia-born New Jersey industrialist Henry M. Rowan, 68, announces July 6 that he and his wife, Betty, are giving $100 million to Glassboro State College. An MIT graduate who founded Inductotherm Industries and is its CEO, he makes the largest cash gift ever to a public college (Emory University received $107 million in 1979); Glassboro State announces that it will change its name to Rowan.
Women still make up only 7 to 13 percent of professors at U.S. Ivy League universities (excluding medical schools), despite sharp gains since 1972, and while male professors at Harvard average $93,600 per year, women of equal rank average $79,900. At colleges nationwide, more than half of all students are female, but only 27.6 percent of faculty members are women.
The English satirical magazine Punch shuts down after 151 years of publication. Circulation has dropped to 33,000, down from 175,000 in the 1940s, and its owners, United Newspapers Group, has decided to cut its losses (see 1996).
Mad magazine founder William M. Gaines dies at his native New York June 3 at age 70; Russian journalist Victor Louis (Vitaly Yevgeynevich Lui) after a heart attack at London June 18 at age 64.
A bankruptcy judge declares October 28 that a new owner will not be bound by an 18-year-old agreement to give printers lifetime job guarantees at the New York Daily News, since the paper is in bankruptcy (see 1991); she thus clears the way for purchase of the paper by the brash, flamboyant, Canadian-born Boston real estate developer and publisher Mortimer Zuckerman, now 55, who has acquired the Atlantic Monthly and U.S. News and World Report.
The VCR Plus+ launched in November by the 4-year-old Pasadena, Calif.-based Gemstar Corp. enables even the most unsophisticated TV viewers to seek out, tape, and play back television programming. Chinese-born TRW mathematician (and Boston Red Sox fan) Henry Yuen, now 41, set his VCR to record a Red Sox-Oakland As playoff series in 1988, returned from a weekend trip to find that he had recorded only "snow," and came up with the idea for a simpler VCR based on plugging in numbers that corresponded to those for shows listed in local newspaper program guides. Yuen and his University of Wisconsin friend Daniel Kwoh did research for the defense contractor TRW on ocean-wave theory while still at college, started Gemstar to produce electronic devices, have perfected the VCR Plus+ and persuaded some TV set builders to incorporate its program-access circuitry into their sets, and will persuade the New York Times and other newspapers to carry the numbers in their program listings.
VCR pioneer Charles P. Ginsburg dies at Eugene, Ore., April 4 at age 71; veteran CBS radio-TV news correspondent Eric Sevareid of stomach cancer at Washington, D.C., July 9 at age 79.
America Online (AOL) licenses the text of the 70-year-old (but updated) Compton's Encyclopedia to make its information available to Internet users (see 1983; Britannica, 1994).
Nonfiction: The End of History and the Last Man by Chicago-born political scientist Francis Fukuyama, 39, who predicts "a very sad time" as people turn to solving technological troubles rather than fighting ideological battles; Hard Line by former assistant secretary of defense Richard Perle; Sound and Fury: The Washington Punditocracy and the Collapse of American Politics by Queens, N.Y.-born critic Eric (Ross) Alterman, 32; The Age of Missing Information by Bill McKibben, who says the reason that most people know so little about environmental problems is that their chief source of news is television; Make-Believe Media: The Politics of Entertainment by Michael Parenti; Reinventing Government: How the Entrepreneurial Spirit Is Transforming the Public Sector by Boston writers David Osborne and Ted Gaebler; Two Nations, Black and White by Queens College professor Andrew Hacker, 62; Loose Canons by Henry Louis Gates Jr., who argues for the inclusion of black literature in the Western canon; The Diversity of Life by Edward O. Wilson; In My Place by Public Television reporter Charlayne Hunter-Gault, who in 1961 helped desegregate the University of Georgia; Make No Law: The Sullivan Case and the First Amendment by New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis; Women of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America by Cleveland-born New York author Ellen Chesler, 45; Revolution from Within by Gloria Steinem; The Silent Passage by Gail Sheehy explores the psychological and social significance of female menopause; Women Who Run with the Wolves by Indiana-born Denver Jungian analyst Clarissa Pinkola Estés, 49, reinterprets myths and folk tales in terms of women's psyches.
Author Alex Haley dies of a heart attack at Seattle February 10 at age 70; author-philanthropist Philip M. Stern of brain cancer at Washington, D.C., June 1 at age 66; author-columnist Max Lerner of a stroke at New York June 5 at age 89; philosopher William Barrett of cancer at Tarrytown, N.Y., September 8 at age 78; biographer W. A. Swanberg of heart failure at Southbury, Conn., September 21 at age 84; political philosopher Alan Bloom of AIDS-related liver failure and peptic ulcer bleeding at Chicago October 7 at age 62.
Fiction: The Emigrants (Die Ausgewanderten) by W. G. Sebald; The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje; The Piano Tuner by California medical student-turned-novelist Daniel Mason, 26; Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha by Irish novelist Roddy Doyle, 34; Regeneration by English novelist Pat Barker, 59; All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy; Outerbridge Reach by Robert Stone; Postcards by Vermont novelist E. (Edna) Annie Proulx, 57; The Republic of Love by Carol Shields; The Volcano Lover by Susan Sontag; Bastard out of Carolina by Greenville, S.C.-born novelist Dorothy Allison, 43; Waiting to Exhale by Terry McMillan; My Sister the Moon by Sue Harrison; The Secret History by Mississippi-born novelist Donna Tartt, 28, who began the book as a Bennington undergraduate and has received a $450,000 advance; The Pelican Brief by John Grisham; All that Remains by Miami-born novelist Patricia Cornwell, 36, features the medical examiner Dr. Kay Scarpetta.
Novelist and short-story writer Angela Carter dies of cancer at London February 16 at age 51.
Poetry: Looking for Luck by Maxine Kumin; Noon Crossing Bridge and Portable Kisses by Tess Gallagher; Strands by Keri Hulme.
Poet Eve Merriam dies of cancer at New York April 11 at age 75.
Juvenile: Fear Street by Ohio-born author R. L. (Robert Lawrence, "Jovial Bob") Stine, 48; The Stinky Cheese Man: And Other Fairly Stupid Tales by Flint, Mich.-born author Jon Scieszka, 38; The White Mercedes by Philip Pullman.
Author Esther Averill dies at New York May 12 at age 89; Rosemary Sutcliff at her home outside London July 23 at age 71; Mary Norton of a stroke at her home in Hartland, Devon, August 29 at age 88; author-illustrator James Marshall of a brain tumor at New York October 13 at age 50.
Painter Francis Bacon dies of a heart attack at Madrid April 28 at age 82, leaving $16.9 million worth of paintings to his best friend and favorite subject, John Edwards, 45; abstract expressionist Joan Mitchell dies of lung cancer at Paris October 30 at age 66.
Theater: The Kentucky Cycle by Tennessee-born playwright Robert Schenkkan, 39, 1/6 at the Mark Taper Forum, Los Angeles, with a cast of 20 in nine interconnected one-act plays set in the years 1775 to 1975; Two Shakespearean Actors by Richard Nelson 1/16 at New York's Cort Theater, with Victor Carver as Edwin Forrest, Brian Bedford as William Macready (see Astor Place riots, 1849), 29 perfs.; The Baltimore Waltz by Washington, D.C.-born Greenwich Village playwright Paula (Anne) Vogel, 40, 2/1 at the Circle Repertory Theater, with Cherry Jones as a schoolteacher, Richard Thompson as her HIV-positive librarian brother, Joe Mantello; Jake's Women by Neil Simon 3/12 at New York's Neil Simon Theater, with Alan Alda, Brenda Vaccaro, Joyce Van Patten, Canadian-born ingénue Helen Shaver, 41, 245 perfs.; Conversations with My Father by Herb Gardner 3/29 at New York's Royale Theater, with Judd Hirsch, 402 perfs.; Two Trains Running by August Wilson 4/13 at New York's Walter Kerr Theater, with Augusta, Ga.-born actor Laurence "Larry" Fishburne, 31, Roscoe Lee Browne, 160 perfs.; White Woman Street by Dublin-born playwright Sebastian Barry, 36, 4/23 at London's Bush Theatre; Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and Other Identities by Baltimore-born playwright-actress Anna Deavere Smith, 42, 5/2 at New York's Public Theater with Smith assuming a variety of roles; The Fastest Clock in the Universe by Philip Ridley 5/14 at London's Hampstead Theatre; Someone Who'll Watch Over Me by Frank McGuinness 7/10 at London's Hampstead Theatre, with Alec McCowen, Hugh Quarsie, Stephen Rea; Oleanna by David Mamet 10/25 at New York's off-Broadway Orpheum Theater, with Florida-born actor William H. Macy, 42, Rebecca Pidgeon; Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes by New York-born playwright Tony Kushner, 34, 11/8 at the Mark Taper Forum, Los Angeles, with Ron Leibman, Stephen Spinella, Cynthia Mace, Ellen McLaughlin (the play about AIDS is in two parts, Millennium Proposals and Perestroika).
Actress Judith Anderson dies at Santa Barbara, Calif., January 3 at age 93; Dame Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies at Halstead, Essex, January 27 at age 101 after an 80-year acting career that has made her a legend in the English theatre (she has not appeared on stage since 1970 but taped her last television appearance only last year); Nancy Walker dies of cancer at her Studio City, Calif., home March 25 at age 69; Sandy Dennis of cancer at her Westport, Conn., home March 2 at age 54; Molly Picon at Lancaster, Pa., April 5 at age 93; Morris Carnovksy at his Easton, Conn., home September 1 at age 94; Shirley Booth at her Chatham, Mass., home October 16 at age 94; Eddie Mayehoff at Ventura, Calif, November 12 at age 78; Vincent Gardenia of an apparent heart attack at his Philadelphia hotel room December 9 at age 70.
Television: Barney & Friends in April (daytime) on PBS features a giggling, guffawing six-foot purple (or magenta) plush dinosaur with a green belly that originally appeared in a 1988 video. Taped in a Dallas suburb and produced by Connecticut Public Television, the show appeals to toddlers aged 18 months to 3 years and by July has a nationwide audience of 1,847,000 viewers as compared to 1,249,000 for the far more sophisticated Sesame Street; NBC Tonight Show host Johnny Carson draws some 55 million viewers (his largest ever) 5/22 for his final appearance, his last guests are Bette Midler and Robin Williams, and he retires after nearly 30 years, giving way to comedian Jay Leno; Melrose Place 7/8 on Fox with Grant Show, Courtney Thorne-Smith, Andrew Shue, Vanessa Williams in a spin-off of Beverly Hills, 90210 (to 5/24/1999); Martin 8/27 on Fox with Tisha Campbell, Martin Lawrence as host of a radio talk show (to 5/1/1997); The Addams Family (animated) 9/12 on ABC in a show based on cartoons by the late Charles Addams; Picket Fences 9/18 on CBS with Tom Skerritt as sheriff of Rome, Wis., Kathy Baker as his M.D. wife in a series created by David E. Kelley (to 4/24/1996); Mad about You 9/23 on NBC with Paul Reiser, 36, as Paul Buchanan, Helen Hunt, 29, as his wife, Jamie (to 5/24/1999).
Comedian Benny Hill is found dead of heart disease at his London flat April 18 at age 68.
Films: Neil Jordan's The Crying Game with Stephen Rea, Jaye Davidson, Forest Whittaker; Mike Newell's Enchanted April with Josie Lawrence, Miranda Richardson, Joan Plowright, Polly Walker; Juzo Itami's The Gentle Art of Japanese Persuasion (Minho no onna) (five yakuza gangsters attack the director with knives for his harsh portrayal and leave him badly scarred on his face and neck); James Foley's Glengarry Glen Ross with Al Pacino, Jack Lemmon, Alec Baldwin, Ed Harris; Stephen Frears's Hero with Dustin Hoffman, Geena Davis; James Ivory's Howards End with Emma Thompson, Vanessa Redgrave, Anthony Hopkins; Woody Allen's Husbands and Wives with Allen, Blythe Danner, Judy Davis, Mia Farrow (with whom Allen has a nasty and highly publicized legal battle over his relations with their adopted daughter and custody of their son Satchel); Régis Wargnier's Indochine with Cathérine Deneuve, Linh Dan Pham; Michael Mann's The Last of the Mohicans with Daniel Day-Lewis; Penny Marshall's A League of Their Own with Geena Davis and Lori Petty as catcher and pitcher, respectively, of the Rockford Peaches in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League; Alfonso Arau's Like Water for Chocolate with Regina Torne and Lumi Cavazos; Robert Rodriguez's El Mariachi with Carlos Gallardo; Spike Lee's Malcolm X with Denzel Washington; Antonio Tibaldi's On My Own with Matthew Ferguson; Robert Altman's The Player with Tim Robbins; Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs with Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth; Martin Brest's Scent of a Woman with Al Pacino; Gianni Amelio's Stolen Children (Il Ladro di Bambini) with Enrico Lo Verso, Valentina Scalici; Zhang Yimou's The Story of Qiu Ju with Gong Li; Nora Ephron's This Is My Life with Julie Kavner, script by Ephron and her sister Delia; Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven with Eastwood, Gene Hackman, Morgan Freeman; Ron Shelton's White Men Can't Jump with Wesley Snipes, Texas-born, Ohio-raised actor Woodrow Tracy "Woody" Harrelson, 31.
Actor José Ferrer dies at Coral Gables, Fla., January 26 at age 80; Mae Clarke of cancer at Woodland Hills, Calif., April 29 at age 84; Marlene Dietrich at Paris May 6 at age 90 (she is buried at Berlin but not given a state funeral because her coffin is draped in the French tricoleur); director John Sturges dies of emphysema at his San Luis Obispo, Calif., home August 18 at age 81; Anthony Perkins of AIDS at Hollywood September 12 at age 60; Denholm Elliott of AIDS-related tuberculosis at his home in Ibiza, Spain, October 6 at age 70; director Hal (Harold Eugene) Roach of pneumonia at Los Angeles November 2 at age 100; actor Sterling Holloway at Los Angeles November 22 at age 87.
Film musicals: Peter Chelsom's Hear My Song with Ned Beatty as Irish tenor John Locke; Ron Clements and John Musker's Aladdin, with Disney animation, Robin Williams's voice (the Genie), music by Alan Menken, lyrics by Tim Rice, songs that include "Friend Like Me," and "A Whole New World."
Broadway musicals: Crazy for You 2/19 at the Shubert Theater, with Harry Groener, Jodi Benson, old Gershwin songs, book by Ken Ludwig, 1,822 perfs.; Jelly's Last Jam 4/26 at the Virginia Theater, with Chicago-born performer Tonya Pinkins, Savion Glover, Gregory Hines as the late "Jelly Roll" Morton, music by Morton, lyrics by Susan Birkenhead, 569 perfs.; Falsettos 4/29 at the John Golden Theater, with Michael Rupert, Stephen Bogardus, Chip Zien, music and lyrics by William Finn, book by Finn and James Lapine, 486 perfs.
Soprano Patricia Brooks dies at Mount Kisco, N.Y., Janaury 22 at age 54; composer John Cage at New York August 12 at age 79; dancer Hanya Holm at New York November 3 at age 94.
Popular songs: Ropin' the Wind and No Fences (CDs) by Oklahoma-born country singer and songwriter (Troyal) Garth Brooks, 30, whose single "Friends in Low Places" is a huge success; "Tears in Heaven" by rock star Eric Clapton, now 47, and Will Jennings; Unplugged (CD) by Clapton; "Layla" by Clapton and Jim Gordon; Hear My Song (CD) by Josef Locke, now 75; "Creep" by the English alternative rock band Radiohead (Thom Yorke, Colin and Jonny Greenwood, Ed O'Brien, Phil Selway); "End of the Road" by the rhythm & blues group Boyz II Men (for the film Boomerang); Dangerous (CD) by Michael Jackson; Ingénue (CD) by Canadian vocalist k. d. lang (Katherine Dawn Lang), 30, includes the single "Constant Craving"; Wynonna (CD) by Los Angeles-born country-western singer Wynonna Judd, 27, includes the singles "She Is His Only Need," "What It Takes," and "All of This Love from Here." Wynonna has appeared since the early 1980s with her family group The Judds, which broke up last year when her mother, Naomi, retired with chronic hepatitis; Come On Come On (CD) by Mary-Chapin Carpenter, now 34, includes "He Thinks He'll Keep Her," a sarcastic song about a perfect wife who walks out on her husband but finds no satisfaction in a menial job; Mon coeur s'envoie (CD) by Charles Trenet, now 79; The Chronic (CD) by Los Angeles-born rap artist Dr. Dre (Andre Romel Young), 27, includes the singles "Nuthin' But a 'G' Thang" and "Let Me Ride."
Australian-born songwriter-entertainer Peter Allen dies of an AIDS-related illness at San Diego June 18 at age 48; rock drummer Jeffrey Porcaro of cardiac arrest at Los Angeles August 5 at age 38 (physicians attribute his death to an allergic reaction to pesticides he was using to spray his garden); country music singer-songwriter Roger Miller dies of cancer at Los Angeles October 25 at age 56; country music singer-songwriter-fiddle player and Grand Ole Opry veteran Roy Acuff at Nashville November 23 at age 89; blues guitarist Albert King after a heart attack at Memphis December 21 at age 69.
Washington beats Buffalo 37 to 24 at Minneapolis January 26 to win Super Bowl XXVI.
Chicago Bulls guard Michael Jordan leads his team to a second NBA championship June 14, defeating the Portland Trailblazers 97 to 93 after having trailed by 15 points at the start of the fourth quarter.
Puerto Rican-born jockey Angel Cordero Jr. retires at age 49, having ridden 7,057 races that included two Kentucky Derby, three Preakness, one Belmont, and four Breeder's Cup races.
Former Wimbledon tennis champion Kitty Godfree dies at her native London June 19 at age 96.
Andre Agassi, 22, (U.S.) wins in men's singles at Wimbledon, Steffi Graf in women's singles; Stefan Edberg wins the U.S. Open men's singles title, Monica Seles the women's.
The Olympic Games at Barcelona attract more than 14,000 athletes from 172 nations. South African athletes return to the games, and for the first time since 1972 there is no boycott. Contestants from the Unified Team from former Soviet nations win 45 gold medals, U.S. athletes 37. American basketball's "dream team" wins the gold as professional players compete for the first time.
Cricketer William J. O'Reilly dies at Sydney October 6 at age 86.
The Toronto Blue Jays win the World Series, defeating the Atlanta Braves 4 games to 2.
Evander Holyfield loses his heavyweight boxing title to Riddick Bowe, 25, November 13 at Las Vegas.
Former U.S. chess master Samuel H. Reshevsky dies at Suffern, N.Y., April 4 at age 80; onetime world chess grand master Mikhail Tal of kidney disease at Moscow June 28 at age 55.
The Foxwoods Casino opens on the Pequot reservation at Mashantucket, Conn., where by some estimates it will soon be taking in $1 billion per year as its slot machines, blackjack tables, and roulette wheels challenge those of Atlantic City and Las Vegas.
Disneyland Paris (initially EuroDisney) opens at Marne la Vallée, 45 minutes east of the French capital, competing with the 3-year-old Parc Astérix. Built at a cost of $3.9 billion, it comes under attack for failing to serve wine with meals and trying to foist American culture on the French, but its operators will learn from their mistakes and the theme park will become Europe's biggest tourist attraction, although it will take huge French government subsidies to keep it solvent (see Walt Disney Studios, 2002).
Fashion designer Emilio Pucci dies of a heart attack at Florence November 29 at age 78, having seen his 1960s designs enjoy a revival. His daughter Laudomia takes over the firm's design functions.
Britain's prime minister John Major announces December 9 that Prince Charles and Princess Diana have separated after 11 years of marriage but will not divorce. Charles's 42-year-old sister Anne, the princess royal, has won an uncontested divorce in April from her husband, Capt. Mark Phillips, and marries Timothy Laurence, 37, a Royal Navy commander, in mid-December, becoming the first high-ranking member of the modern-day British royal family to divorce and remarry. A fire earlier in the year has damaged Windsor Castle. Elizabeth II calls 1992 "annus horribilis."
Japan moves in March to crack down on the yakuza—gangsters who have for decades engaged more or less openly in extortion, prostitution, gambling, and drug dealing.
A Miami jury convicts former Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega April 9 of having assisted Colombia's Medellín cocaine and heroin cartel. Witnesses at the trial have testified that they gave former prime minister Lynden O. Pindling millions of dollars in direct payoffs to allow them to use Norman's Key in the Bahamas as a landing strip for U.S.-bound planes carrying narcotics (see 1978).
A California jury acquits Los Angeles policemen of charges brought in connection with last year's beating of Rodney King. LAPD chief Daryl F. Gates hears the April 29 verdict and isolates himself in his office for 3 hours before going off to a fundraiser in Brentwood, leaving no instructions. Rioters meanwhile chase police from the intersection of Florence and Normandie avenues, Mayor Tom Bradley and Gov. Pete Wilson try to reach Gates to discuss calling in the National Guard, the police fail to shut off roads leading into south-central Los Angeles, and helicopters relay live footage of black mobs stoning whites, Asians, and Latinos in the worst violence and looting thus far in U.S. urban history: 54 people are killed, 2,328 treated for injuries in hospital emergency rooms, and 50 square miles devastated; property damage exceeds $1 billion (Korean shop owners receive no police protection and sustain nearly half the damage), far worse than in the 1965 riots (from which the Watts section has never recovered).
Merrick, Long Island, high school senior Amy Fisher, 17, approaches the Massapequa home of her lover, auto mechanic Joseph "Joey" Buttafuoco, May 19, chats with his wife, Mary Jo, 36, pulls out a .25-caliber semiautomatic pistol, hits her with it, and then—accidentally or deliberately—shoots her in the head. Joey turns Fisher in, she will be convicted of manslaughter and given a 5- to 15-year prison sentence, he will be acquitted.
Italian crime fighter Judge Giovanni Falcone, 53, is murdered May 23 by a remote-controlled bomb that tears up a highway, killing also Falcone's wife and three others. Some 40,000 protesters march at Palermo June 27, demanding an end to omertà, the Mafia vow of silence that has kept criminals from being identified. Rome sends 7,000 troops into Sicily to suppress the Mafia, but chief prosecutor Paolo Borsellino is murdered by a remote-controlled bomb July 19, and investigator Giovanni Lizzio is gunned down July 28, allegedly on orders from Mafia boss Salvatore "Totó" Riina, 61 (see 1998; politics, 1993).
Former Chicago Mafia boss Anthony Accardo dies of heart failure at his native city May 27 at age 87. Indicted many times on charges ranging from racketeering to murder, he had his 1960 conviction for tax evasion overturned on appeal.
New York Mafia boss John Gotti is sentenced June 23 to life imprisonment without parole after being convicted April 2 of murder. The Gambino crime family tries to find a new, less conspicuous boss.
The U.S. incarceration rate reaches 455 per 100,000—five times greater than the rate in most industrialized nations. California, New York, Texas, and Florida each has a prison population that would rank it among the top seven countries in the world in terms of penal systems, the vast majority of convicts are blacks and Hispanics serving time on drug-related charges, yet most Americans believe that the nation's penal system treats convicted criminals leniently.
Brazilian paramilitary police put down a riot October 2 at São Paulo's House of Detention (Casa de Detencio), the largest prison in South America. Built in 1960 to accommodate 3,500 prisoners, it holds twice that many, conditions inside are squalid, there have been reports of deliberate and systematic executions, and when the prisoners heard that troops were on their way to suppress a reported "gang fight" they shut off the prison's power and set fire to a barricade of blankets, furniture, and mattresses they had erected. The troops use dogs, helicopters, machine guns, and tear gas, and within an hour or two have killed at least 111 inmates (initial reports say 200). The prison will remain in use until September 2002.
Unemployed Detroit steel worker Malice Green, 35, is beaten to death with a heavy metal flashlight November 5, provoking charges of racially motivated police brutality against the drug user. Mayor Coleman Young grants Green's family a $5.25 million settlement and dismisses two policemen before legal proceedings begin, the city's streets remain calm, officers Walter Budzyn, 46, and Larry Nevers, 52, will be convicted of second-degree murder in August of next year and sentenced to long prison terms, but the verdicts against the two men will be overturned in 1997.
Robbers get into an armored car warehouse in Brooklyn's Greenpoint section December 27 and take $8.3 million.
Architect James Frazer Stirling is knighted June 13 but dies of a heart attack at London June 25 at age 66.
Hong Kong's 78-story Central Plaza is completed at year's end; it is Asia's tallest building.
Earthquakes in eastern Turkey March 13 and 15 kill 4,000, but a much stronger (7.4) quake June 28 in California's Yucca Valley kills only one.
The Chicago River breaks into the city's 60-mile-long freight tunnels April 13, 250 million gallons of water rise into sub-basements of downtown buildings, the flood produces power blackouts, and it shuts down subways, the Board of Trade, the Mercantile Exchange, and many businesses.
An Earth Summit at Rio de Janeiro ends June 14 with agreements to increase aid to third-world countries in their efforts to clean up the global environment.
Hurricane Andrew strikes the Bahamas August 22, killing four, and hits south of Miami August 24, killing 15, leaving 250,000 homeless, and causing $20 billion in damage before blowing into Louisiana; Hurricane Iniki flattens the Hawaiian island of Kauai September 11, killing two, injuring 98.
A Nor'easter strikes New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, and New England December 11 with hurricane-force winds, killing at least 15, destroying 12,000 homes, and causing widespread beach erosion.
An earthquake December 12 in Indonesia's Flores region registers 7.5 on the Richter scale, causing a tsunami to run 300 meters inland with waves 25 meters high. The death toll is 2,500 (see 2004; Krakatoa, 1883).
Canada's minister of fisheries and oceans declares a moratorium July 2 on cod fishing off Newfoundland until the spring of 1994. Overfishing by Canadians and encroachments by foreign trawlers have depleted stocks of northern cod, and colder water temperatures off Newfoundland have kept the fish away. The Ottawa government will spend $1.5 billion on a 5-year retraining program for 33,000 unemployed Atlantic fishermen and fish-plant workers, with far more going to pay for assistance checks (see United States, 1993).
The United Nations bans use of the 40-mile drag nets that have killed sea creatures in enormous numbers. Commercial fishermen continue to use nets as long as a mile and a half as well as longlines, baited with hundreds of hooks, that can stretch 25 to 40 miles. Until the 1960s, nearly all swordfish landed by fishermen were adult fish caught by harpoons, but the longlines take 98 percent of Atlantic swordfish, more than 80 percent of the female swordfish caught are killed before they can breed, and one in four fish—including marlin, giant tuna, and sharks—is discarded.
Southern Africa has its worst drought in this century. Crops fail on the eastern side of the continent from South Africa to Egypt. The lack of rainfall in the planting season is linked by meteorologists to El Niño—the warm water current in the Pacific which affects global atmospheric circulation. South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Kenya, which usually are all food exporters, are forced to import large quantities of grain.
Zimbabwe's sugarcane crop falls to 12,000 tons, down from 450,000 tons last year, and exports are halted.
U.S. dairy cows decline in number to 9.8 million, down from 10.8 million in 1980, but the average annual milk yield per cow climbs to 15,423 pounds, up from 11,891 in 1980 (Japanese cows average 17,464 pounds, Swedish cows 14,399, Dutch cows 13,892, Danish cows 13,605, cows in India only 2,095). Wisconsin remains the leading U.S. dairy state, but California is now close behind.
Former secretary of agriculture Charles F. Brannan dies at his native Denver July 2 at age 88.
Famine kills more than 300,000 in Somalia as the nation falls into anarchy and armed thugs prevent world food aid from relieving starvation. Scenes of starving people appear on world TV screens, the UN Security Council moves December 3 to approve U.S.-led military intervention, and the first of some 28,000 troops arrive in Somalia December 9 (see politics, 1993).
Civil war in Sudan starves hundreds of thousands, similar conditions prevail in Angola and Mozambique, but television does not show them.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture introduces the Food Pyramid to replace the four basic food groups that have been touted for decades as the basis for a healthy diet: complex carbohydrates—bread, cereal, rice, and pasta dishes (six to 11 servings per day)—represent the base of the pyramid; fruits and vegetables (five servings) the second layer; milk, yogurt, and/or cheese (two to three servings) and other protein (two to three servings) the third; fats, oils, and sugars are to be used "sparingly."
The U.S. Public Health Service recommends in September that women of childbearing age consume extra folic acid.
Average per-capita U.S. consumption of whole milk falls to 79.6 pounds, down from 168 in 1975, but consumption of lowfat milk reaches 99.3 pounds, up from 53.2, and of skim milk 25 pounds, up from 11.5 as Americans try to curb their butterfat intake.
The Nutrition Labeling and Education Act that goes into effect for most U.S. foods December 31 is designed to curb misleading health claims (see Proxmire Amendment, 1976). Sen. Orrin (Grant) Hatch, 58 (R. Utah) has obtained a 1-year moratorium for makers of dietary supplements (his state has a $900 million supplement industry), with the understanding that beginning December 20, 1993, such manufacturers will be allowed to make health claims for their products only if the claims are supported by "significant agreement" within the scientific community (but see nutrition, 1993).
President Bush visits a National Grocers' Association convention while campaigning in Florida and reportedly expresses astonishment at a state-of-the-art electronic scanner. More ordinary scanners are now commonplace in U.S. supermarkets and a New York Times report makes it look like Bush has never seen one. Although the story may not be true, cartoonists, satirists, and late-night television comedians ridicule the president, who has denied that his programs favor the rich over the middle class.
Former Tupperware sales manager Brownie Wise dies at Kissimmee, Fla., in December at age 79.
The U.S. Coast Guard begins returning Haitian refugees to their homeland May 24, saying that the detention camp at the navy base in Guantánamo, Cuba, cannot accommodate any more. Thousands have left Haiti to escape political oppression and economic collapse.
Ireland's attorney general obtains an injunction February 7 to prevent a 14-year-old girl from traveling to England for an abortion, although no efforts have been made in the past to prevent thousands of Irish women from getting legal abortions in England and Wales. The girl was raped in December by a friend's father in a middle-class Dublin suburb, and her family has approached police to inquire if genetic material should be obtained from the aborted fetus for possible use as criminal evidence. Irish law permits abortion only in cases where the mother's life is in danger. A judge upholds the injunction February 17. President Mary Robinson tells a meeting of women's groups at Waterford February 20, "We must move on to a more compassionate society," pop singer Sinéad O'Connor joins demonstrations at Dublin that day and tells the media about her two abortions in Britain. The Catholic Bishops' Conference says it opposes restrictions on travel and that the Church cannot coerce people to obey its teachings, and Ireland's Supreme Court rules February 26 that the girl is free to leave the country for her abortion.
A pro-choice demonstration sponsored by NOW at Washington, D.C., April 5 brings out a crowd of 750,000 activists—the largest march ever held at the capital—to hear speeches by NOW president Patricia Ireland and others against opponents of legalized abortion.
Poland's state-financed hospitals stop performing abortions in May (see 1991); private abortionists flourish, but the cost is so prohibitively high that many women travel to Ukraine or Czechoslovakia, where the procedure is much cheaper. Deaths from bungled attempts at self-administered abortion increase (see 1993).
Sweden permits marketing of the abortifacient drug RU-486 (mifepristone; 1990; 1993).
The U.S. Supreme Court reaffirms its 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling on abortion; although its 5-to-4 decision June 29 in Planned Parenthood v. Casey supports 1988 and 1989 Pennsylvania laws that limit a woman's right to abortion it strikes down a requirement that a married woman notify her husband of her intention to abort a fetus, calling this an "undue burden." Justices Blackmun and Stevens concur in the majority opinion written by Justices O'Connor, Kennedy, and Souter; Chief Justice Rehnquist dissents, as do Justices Scalia, Thomas, and White. The Court December 7 lets stand a Mississippi law requiring a 24-hour waiting period, which effectively bars many poorer women from obtaining legal abortions.
The injectable contraceptive hormone Depo-Provera wins FDA approval November 4; it inhibits ovulation and has been available for years in many other countries.
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People's Chronology. Copyright © 2005 by The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
