- Genres: Rock
- Representative Albums: "Please Stand By," "1994"
1994
| Artist: 1994 |
| Discography: 1994 |
| World Chronology: 1994 |
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A plane carrying Rwanda's president Juvénal Habyarimana and Burundi's new president Cyprien Ntaryamira crashes as it comes in for a landing at Kigali airport April 6; Habyarimana has ruled since 1973, Ntaryamira came to power October 22 of last year in a coup by elements of the Tutsi-dominated military, and the two men have been in Tanzania for discussions aimed at ending ethnic warfare in their countries (Hutus hold a majority of 85 percent to 14 percent Tutsi in both nations; see 1993); both presidents die; the Rwanda government says the plane was shot down by rocket fire, it calls on every Hutu to kill Tutsi, and violence ensues at the Rwandan capital, Kigali. Within a week, an estimated 20,000 have been killed, including the prime minister, UN peacekeepers, Red Cross workers, nuns, and priests; relief workers say more than 100,000 have been killed since last fall, when Burundi's first Hutu president Melchior Ndadaye was killed in an abortive Tutsi coup attempt. The United States demands a full UN withdrawal April 15, opposes helping other nations that might intervene, and deletes the word genocide from UN statements. Last year's failure in Somalia makes the United Nations and President Clinton loath to intervene, events escalate quickly, and the horrific killings go on for more than 100 days. Neighbors, co-workers, and even family members cut each other down with knives and machetes in a genocide unknown since the years of the Nazi Holocaust before Rwanda's Tutsi-dominated rebel front routs the Hutu-controlled Rwandan Army in July after 4 years of intermittent hostilities. The carnage has reached at least 500,000, more thousands are massacred as Rwandans flee to neighboring Zaïre for refuge, and the final death toll exceeds 800,000.
African National Congress leader Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, now 75, is sworn in as president of South Africa May 10 following the nation's first free elections. Violence by whites has terrorized Johannesburg, but Mandela's Zulu rival Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi has called off a threatened boycott of the election and accepts a cabinet post (Home Minister) in Mandela's coalition government, as does the president's estranged wife, Winnie. Archbishop Tutu heads a Truth and Reconciliation Commission established to hear testimony on the abuses committed during the years of apartheid.
Malawi's self-proclaimed president for life Hastings Kamuzu Banda steps down in late May after 30 years of autocratic (and oppressive) rule after Western nations cut off aid to enforce demands for democratic reforms (see 1966). Voters have elected businessman Bakili Muluzi, 51, to succeed Banda, who is now about 87. A former protégé of Banda's who resigned from the cabinet in 1982 because he feared being killed (his successor was murdered), Muluzi immediately releases all remaining political prisoners.
A mortar shell explodes in Sarajevo's central market February 5, killing at least 68, wounding hundreds of others, and bringing new demands for intervention to relieve the Bosnian capital's 22-month siege by Serbian forces. The Serbs withdraw most of their heavy siege guns February 19 after a NATO threat to use air strikes, hostilities ease, but although 200,000 Bosnians have been killed and some 2 million left homeless the Muslims have not resorted to the suicidal terrorist bombings encouraged by Islamic extremists elsewhere. The conflict soon resumes.
Moldova's communist-led Agrarian Democratic Party wins the country's first free parliamentary elections in February (see 1992). A referendum in March shows that 90 percent of voters support an independent Moldova that includes the Trans-Dnestr region, and in April the parliament suspends the 1989 law that made Romanian the nation's official language.
Belarus holds her first democratic elections in July following adoption of a constitution early in the year (see 1991). Former collective farm director Aleksandr Grigoryevich Lukashenko, 39, has spoken out against corruption, made false accusations against President Stanislav Shushkevich, defeats Shushkevich and four other candidates, becomes president, doubles the minimum wages to "stabilize the economy," reverses Shushkevich's few economic reforms, and will hold office into the 21st century, re-imposing Stalinist state controls (see 1997).
Milan-born media magnate Silvio Berlusconi, 57, leads a coalition of right-wing parties to victory in late March elections, takes office May 10 to head Italy's 53rd government since World War II, but resigns December 22 after his coalition loses in regional elections. Owner of the nation's third-largest business empire (construction, insurance, TV networks, advertising and publishing companies, supermarkets, and a champion soccer team), he has campaigned on promises of 1 million new jobs, tax breaks, and a return to Roman Catholic family values (see 1995; Berlusconi, 2001).
Former East German head of state Erich Honecker dies of liver cancer at Santiago, Chile, May 29 at age 81. He was freed from house arrest last year because his health was failing and allowed to join his wife and daughter in exile; former Czechoslovakian premier and "Prague Spring" reformer Oldrich Cernic dies at Prague October 19 at age 72.
The Irish Republican Army (IRA) lays down its arms at midnight August 31 after announcing that it is ready to abandon its bellicose tactics after 25 years and enter into peace talks on the future of Northern Ireland. While the British have tried to address Catholic grievances in the province by investing heavily in housing and public education, violence between paramilitary groups has persisted, with Irish-Americans providing financial support to the IRA. Gerry Adams, 45, heads the IRA's political arm Sinn Fein, and says the struggle to get the British out of Ulster is not over but has entered a "new phase."
Former British cabinet member Keith Sinjohn Joseph dies at London December 10 at age 76, having converted the Conservative Party from Keynesian economic policies to the free-market monetarism of Chicago economist Milton Friedman.
U.S. authorities arrest high-living CIA officer Aldrich (Hazen) Ames, 52, and his wife, Maria (née del Rosaria Casas), 42, February 20 on charges that he has compromised some of the agency's most closely-guarded secrets and given classified information to Russian agents since 1985. Ames has disclosed the identities of operatives working abroad for the agency and he will be found to have received upwards of $2.7 million from Moscow in the largest such "mole" case ever unearthed. The CIA continues to run spy networks in the former Soviet Union, despite the end of the cold war (see Hanssen, 2001).
Former House majority leader Thomas Philip "Tip" O'Neill dies of cardiac arrest at Boston January 5 at age 81; former president Richard M. Nixon of a stroke at New York April 22 at age 81; former State Department official George Ball dies of abdominal cancer at New York May 26 at age 84.
Deputy White House counsel Vincent Foster, 48, is found dead July 20 in suburban Virginia's Fort Marcy Park. The Justice Department, FBI, and Park Police announce jointly in August that the death was a suicide. Attorney General Janet Reno appoints Texas-born former U.S. solicitor general (and onetime federal judge) Kenneth Winston Starr, 48, independent counsel under the 1979 Ethics in Government Act to investigate charges of felonious actions on the part of President Clinton before and after taking office. Starr is sworn in August 9 and begins a series of probes into the so-called "Whitewater" land deal, dismissal of several career employees in the White House travel office, the transfer of files on Reagan and Bush administration officials to the Clinton White House, and other matters; his investigations will confirm that Vince Foster's gunshot wound was self inflicted, but conspiracy theorists will insist that Foster was murdered to keep him from talking about wrongdoing by the president or first lady and that his body was then moved to the park. When he cannot turn up much evidence of any felonious activities, Starr will turn his attention to the president's private life (see 1998).
Zapatista National Liberation Army peasant forces take over several towns in Mexico's impoverished Chiapas Province January 1, demanding hospitals, clinics, housing, roads, electricity, potable water, and an end to discrimination against Indians in a part of the country that was not touched by the revolution of 1911 or subsequent reforms. Mexican government troops confine the rebellion and reach an accord with the rebels March 2, but the fatal shooting of PRI presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio Murrieta, 44, at Tijuana March 23 throws the nation into turmoil. Voters choose Colosio's campaign manager, Yale-educated economist Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de León, 42, to succeed Carlos Salinas de Gortari as president August 21 in orderly voting, but PRI secretary general José Francisco Ruiz Massieu, 48, is assassinated September 28 (see crime, 1995).
President Clinton tightens the screws on Cuba in August, barring charter flights from the United States to that country and transfer of funds from Americans to Cubans (see 1992). Domestic political concerns (specifically, the votes of Florida's Cuban-Americans) have driven U.S. policy; some 20,000 Cubans try to leave the island by September 1, and even the staunchly anti-communist Wall Street Journal joins the chorus of voices urging normalization of relations with Cuba (see 1996).
The United Nations Security Council imposes a trade embargo against Haiti May 6, Haiti's military government orders a joint OAS and UN mission out of the country July 11, and a UN Security Council resolution adopted July 31 authorizes "all necessary means" to restore democracy to Haiti (see 1993). Haitian priest Jean-Marie Vincent, 49, is cut down by automatic-weapon fire at Port-au-Prince August 28 as the United States and Caribbean nations ponder the pros and cons of invading the island to oust its murderous military government. Father Vincent has been a supporter of Jean-Bertrand Aristide. U.S. forces occupy Haiti beginning September 19 following last-minute negotiations by former president Jimmy Carter and others with Gen. Cédras to avert a military invasion. Cédras agrees to step down by mid-October and permit resumption of power by President Aristide, who has agreed to comply with Haiti's constitution and not seek a second term; a United Nations force returns Aristide to power October 15, the Security Council lifts the trade embargo against Haiti October 16, and UN Secretary General Boutros-Ghali arrives November 15 to discuss the multinational force that is due to take over from U.S. troops in preparation for national elections. Aristide will break his word, win reelection, and remain in power until early 2004.
Former Colombian president Carlos Lleras Restrepo dies at his native Bogotá September 27 at age 86.
Brazilian voters elect former finance minister Fernando Henrique Cardoso, 63, to the presidency October 2. Cardoso is widely credited with having reduced the nation's inflation rate to 1.5 percent, down from 45 percent in June, and has vowed to spend billions on education in a country where two-thirds of the electorate has not finished primary school.
Former Uruguayan president Julio Maria Sanginetti narrowly wins election to another term in November as the National Party loses to the Colorado Party. President Lacalle's austerity program and privatization of state-run enterprises have addressed the country's economic stagnation and rising inflation, but labor leaders have called a series of general strikes to protest Lucalle's measures.
Republicans win control of the House for the first time in decades. Young women staffers of the National Republican Congressional Committee, led by four-foot-eleven-inch Maria Cino, 37, engineer much of the strategy that leads to victory. They instruct their candidates to campaign as strongly against President Clinton as against their incumbent Democratic opponents.
Israeli-Palestinian peace talks halt after an armed Jewish extremist walks into a Hebron mosque February 25 and opens fire with an automatic rifle on hundreds of praying Muslims. Brooklyn, N.Y.-born physician Baruch Goldstein, 37, leaves his home in the West Bank settlement of Qiryat Arba, enters the mosque at the Cave of the Patriarchs, kills 29 (three more are killed in the stampede to escape), and wounds 98, some fatally, before being killed himself by blows from the Muslims (Israeli settlers on the West Bank are permitted to carry weapons, and police may not fire on them; Palestinians have no such rights). Violence ensues at Jerusalem, Palestinians refuse to discuss peace unless the discussion includes the issue of the West Bank settlements, President Clinton invites the parties to resume their negotiations at Washington, and the Israeli government outlaws two radical Jewish groups March 13, making it illegal to belong to any group whose goals include "the establishment of a theocracy in the biblical Land of Israel and the violent expulsion of Arabs from that land." Palestinians retaliate for the Hebron massacre with attacks on Israelis.
The driver of a car crossing New York's Brooklyn Bridge March 1 fires through his own window at a van full of Hasidic students and wounds four of them, one fatally. Police arrest Lebanese livery driver Rashad Baz, 28, the next day and charge him with the assault.
Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin signs an accord with Yasir Arafat at Cairo May 4 ending his nation's 27-year occupation of Jericho and the Gaza Strip, but remarks by Arafat at the inauguration of President Nelson Mandela raise questions about his peaceful intentions. A truck bombing at Buenos Aires July 18 wrecks the seven-story Jewish Mutual Aid Association community center, destroying irreplaceable archives and killing 85 people in the deadliest single anti-Semitic incident since the end of World War II (see 1992). A witness will testify in 2002 that the Iranian government organized and carried out the bombing and then paid President Carlos Saul Menem $10 million to cover it up (an Argentine judge will indict four Iranian officials in March 2003). PLO leader Khaled al-Hassan dies at his home in Rabat, Morocco, the night of October 7 at age 66. Jordan and Israel sign a peace treaty October 26 in the border area between Eilat and Aqaba, ending a nominal state of war that has existed since 1948, but tensions persist. President Clinton attends the ceremony and visits Syria's president Hafez al-Assad at Damascus in an effort to speed the peace process. Iraq's Saddam Hussein has moved troops to the Kuwaiti border earlier in October and President Clinton has sent U.S. forces to oppose him (see 1991). France, Russia, and Turkey have favored lifting economic sanctions against Iraq, but Saddam's action combined with evidence of his cruelty to his own people cools enthusiasm for such relief, despite evident starvation and lack of medicines in Iraq.
Japan's prime minister Morihiro Hosokawa announces April 8 that he will resign following revelations of financial wrongdoing (see 1993). He has promised to rid the nation's political system of corruption and bureaucratic restrictions, his downfall threatens to stall reforms that would empower consumers and urban voters, but Liberal Democrats help elect Socialist Party leader Tomiichi Murayama prime minister in June.
Cambodia's Khmer Rouge steps up attacks in the western part of the country beginning in May, forcing 55,000 to flee their homes (see 1993; 1996).
North Korea's Kim Il Sung dies of a heart attack July 8 at age 82 only weeks after conferring with former president Jimmy Carter, allowing UN observers to inspect his nation's nuclear facilities, and agreeing to hold talks with South Korea's president Kim Young Sam. The "Great Leader" has ruled the Democratic Republic since 1948, his son Kim Jong Il, 52, was designated the dictator's successor 10 years ago and takes over as head of state with army backing despite questions about his mental stability. Questions also persist about possible North Korean nuclear-weapons production, despite signing of a pact with the United States October 21 providing for U.S. aid and the opening of North Korean facilities to international inspection after an 18-month standoff over the issue. Kim Il Sung had announced that he was withdrawing plutonium-rich fuel rods from one of his nuclear reactors, enabling him to produce nuclear weapons in violation of the non-proliferation treaty that his officials signed, and had threatened to turn Seoul into a "sea of fire." President Clinton selected Sen. Sam Nunn (D. Ga.) and Sen. Richard Lugar (R. Ind.) to visit Pyongyang, both are knowledgeable about arms control, but Kim Il Sung would not allow them entry and Carter was sent instead as an unofficial emissary. Terms of the October 21 U.S.-North Korean Agreed Framework call for normalization of diplomatic and economic relations between the two countries and construction of two new 1,000-megawatt light-water reactors under U.S. oversight, with South Korea and Japan providing most of the $4 billion cost, a freeze on all activity at the five-megawatt graphite-moderated reactor at Yongbyon, dismantling by 2003 of a reprocessing facility at Yongbyon that has the capability of converting used nuclear fuel into weapons-grade plutonium, and suspension of work on separate 200-megawatt and 50-megawatt reactors in return for free crude oil to be supplied by the United States in enough volume to meet North Korea's energy needs until the reactor at Yongbyon is shut down and the two new light-water reactors become operational. President Clinton says the pact will "help achieve . . . an end to the threat of nuclear proliferation on the Korean Peninsula," but congressional critics object that loopholes allow North Korea to keep spent fuel rods from the Yongbyon reactor for an unspecified period of time and that these could be taken from their sealed containers and used to produce nuclear weapons on short notice should Pyongyang choose to violate the agreement, but congressional opposition will prevent normalization of relations and hawks in North Korea will press for resumption of that country's nuclear-weapons program (see 2002; famine relief, 1998)
The Sri Lankan People's Alliance Party forms a new government August 19 (see 1993), it appoints Chandrika Kumaratunga prime minister, and she runs for president in November; now 49, she wins a record 62 percent of the votes and struggles to deal with the Tamil Rebellion (see 1996).
A Jackson, Miss., jury of eight blacks and four whites convicts white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith, 73, February 5 of having murdered NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers in 1963. Two all-white juries deadlocked in 1964 and Beckwith has been free ever since.
Former Arkansas governor Orval Faubus dies at Conway, Ark., December 14 at age 84, having tried to defend his 1950s segregationist record in a 1991 book.
Norwegian soldiers help celebrate International Women's Day March 8 in a voluntary protest that begins with a greeting by the nation's defense minister. Uniformed officers and enlisted men display campaign posters expressing solidarity with women, especially rape victims in Bosnia and other war zones. They knock on doors to collect money for women victims of violence.
The U.S. Supreme Court rules April 19 that the Constitution's guarantee of equal protection under the law bars excluding a potential juror on the basis of gender. The 6-to-3 decision in J.E.B. v. T.B. is based on the Equal Protection Clause in the Fourteenth Amendment.
New York's governor Mario Cuomo signs a bill in May protecting a woman's right to breast-feed her infant in public.
President Clinton announces May 26 that he is renewing China's most-favored-nation (MFN) status despite continuing human-rights violations and says MFN status will no longer be linked to human rights. The move represents a reversal of Clinton's campaign position but he insists that it will actually lead to improved human rights in China.
A federal district court judge at Seattle rules June 1 that the Washington State National Guard must reinstate Col. Margarethe Cammermeyer, 52, to the job she held in 1992. Col. Cammermeyer served for 15 months as a nurse in Vietnam and was awarded a bronze star; she acknowledged in a 1989 security-clearance hearing for admission to the Army War College that she was a lesbian. Her honorable discharge in June 1992 was based solely on prejudice, the judge says, and clearly violates the Constitution's equal protection clause.
Mexican women give PRI candidate Ernesto Zedillo his margin of victory in his election to the presidency. Zedillo has publicly questioned the justice of a society in which "women have suffered discrimination, prejudice, and even violence," and in which "women don't have the same rights as men, even though the constitution guarantees it." Women have had voting rights since 1953; they represent 51 percent of the population but 52 percent of the nation's 45.7 million registered voters.
South Korean women throw eggs and shout slogans in front of the Japanese Embassy at Seoul August 31, rejecting as inadequate a $1 billion plan to finance cultural and student exchanges by way of atonement for forcing up to 200,000 women into brothels for Japanese soldiers before and during World War II (see 1992). The women have demanded direct compensation, and Filipina women have also protested the plan.
Leningrad-born cosmonaut Sergei Konstantinovich Krikalev, 34, flies on a U.S. spacecraft February 3, becoming the first Russian to do so.
President Clinton acts February 3 to end the 19-year-old U.S. embargo on trade with Vietnam, which has turned strongly capitalistic despite the victory of communist forces in 1975.
Motorola Inc. and a Japanese company reach an accord March 10 giving Motorola expanded access to Japan's cellular telephone industry and averting threatened U.S. trade sanctions against Japan, but economic tensions between the two countries continue as Japan shuts out imports to protect her own industries, many of which are in deep economic distress.
The average U.S. chief executive officer earns 187 times as much as the average worker, up from 30 to 40 times in 1980. The gap between rich and poor Americans has been widening since 1986, and the average male high school graduate now actually earns less in real dollars than male high school graduates earned in 1963.
Britain institutes a national lottery modeled on state lotteries in America. Critics condemn it as regressive taxation; supporters note that it merely takes business away from private soccer pools and betting establishments.
Nobel economist Jan Tinbergen dies at Amsterdam June 9 at age 91; lawyer Louis Nizer at New York November 10 at age 92.
Congress overwhelmingly approves a seventh General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) (the Senate votes 76 to 24 December 1), and Japan and other nations follow suit: the gradual elimination of agricultural subsidies and lowering of tariff barriers promises to expand world trade, create jobs, and benefit everyone.
California's Orange County files for Chapter 9 bankruptcy protection December 6 after losses to investment pools in which the county, 200 school systems, cities, and agencies entrusted $1.64 billion. It is the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history, lawyers will sue Merrill Lynch for mishandling its funds, the county will not emerge from bankruptcy until June 12, 1996, and Merrill will pay $30 million in 1997 to settle claims against it.
President Clinton gives approval December 8 to tariff-cutting provisions of the GATT Uruguay Round.
Wall Street's Dow Jones Industrial Average closes December 30 at 3834.44, up a mere 80.5 points (2.1 percent) from its 1993 year-end close of 3654.09. The Nasdaq reaches a record high of 487.89 but closes the year at 477.15, down 3.2 percent.
A Russian Tupolev-154 jet bound for Moscow slams into a farmhouse near Irkutsk in January, killing all 124 aboard. Aeroflot has broken up into more than 350 carriers since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and few are competently managed; a Russian Airbus crashes early in the year while the pilot's 15-year-old son is learning to fly, and the International Airline Passengers Association recommends in April that no one fly over any part of the former Soviet Union, warning that "overloaded airplanes, lack of cockpit discipline, pilot error, aging aircraft," and the like are all common. It is the first such warning ever issued by the association.
A China Airlines Airbus A-300 bound from Taipei for Nagoya in central Japan crashes near its destination April 26, killing all but nine of the 271 on board; a Dragonair Tupolev-154 bound for Guangzhou crashes near Xian June 6, killing all 160 passengers and crew members in China's worst single air disaster; a USAir Boeing 737-300 from Chicago nosedives into a wooded hillside outside Pittsburgh September 8, killing all 132 aboard.
United Airlines personnel buy a 55 percent interest in the airline in July, making it the first employee-owned U.S. air carrier. After 7 years of labor strife, management has agreed to a deal by which the 54,000 employees put up $4.9 billion wage and benefit concessions over a 5½-year period. Now the world's largest airline, United has like most other U.S. carriers been losing money (losses since 1991 have totaled $1.3 billion, and the nine major carriers collectively have lost more than $12 billion), but profits have begun to rebound (the most profitable route is between Chicago and Tokyo).
A Laotian highway bridge across the Mekong River opens at Vientiane to connect the capital with the Thai railhead at Nong Kai, replacing the ferry that heretofore has been the only means of crossing to the right bank.
The Santa Monica Freeway reopens to traffic April 12, less than 3 months after the devastating Northridge earthquake that has caused endless delays for Los Angeles truck drivers and motorists. Construction crews have worked round the clock to repair roadway damage, and although use of mass transit increased significantly for a few weeks it quickly dropped off as Los Angelenos reverted to their old habits.
The average price for a new car paid by a U.S. individual purchaser peaks at $20,247 in the third quarter of the year, partly because 42 percent of all light vehicles sold are higher-priced mini-vans, pickup trucks, and sport utility vehicles.
An Estonian ferry carrying either 982 or 1,049 passengers (accounts differ) capsizes September 28 and sinks in the Baltic Sea while en route from Talinn to Stockholm; only 141 are rescued in Scandinavia's worst maritime tragedy to date.
The Eurotunnel (or "Chunnel") under the English Channel opens to rail traffic November 14 between Folkestone, England, and Calais, France (see 1880). The world's longest underwater tunnel (31 miles, or 50 kilometers), it consists of three bores (one is a service tunnel) through limestone sediment several hundred feet below the seabed; what is hailed as an engineering marvel has cost an estimated £4 billion over its initial budget of £4.7 billion, but it enables rail passengers to travel between London and Paris in 3 hours (to Brussels takes 15 minutes longer), with only about 20 minutes in the tunnel itself. Trains on the French side of the tunnel travel as fast as 186 miles (300 km) per hour, and Parliament moves in December to modernize the 68-mile English rail link that limits speed to 50 mph. Eurostar—a consortium of French, British, and Belgian railway companies—charges £95 for an economy-class round-trip ticket, making it comparable to fares normally charged by airlines, but some airlines drop their fares in a move to discourage Chunnel travel, and Dover-Calais ferries charge foot passengers as little as £3, losing money on each fare. "Le Shuttle," carrying 120 to 180 motorcars through the Chunnel, begins operating four times per hour in December.
Apple Computer licenses its Mac operating system for the first time, having blundered earlier by not following IBM's example of permitting competitors to produce "clones" of its computers.
Nuclear physicist Lee A. DuBridge dies at Pasadena, Calif., January 23 at age 93, having helped develop radar in World War II and headed the California Institute of Technology from 1946 to 1969; mathematician-logician Stephen C. Kleene dies at Madison, Wis., January 25 at age 85, having helped to lay the foundations of theoretical computer science with his work on recursion theory; Nobel chemist Dorothy C. Hodgkin dies at Shipston-on-Stour, Warwickshire July 29 at age 84; Nobel biochemist Richard L. M. Synge of myelodysplastic syndrome at Norwich, Norfolk, August 18 at age 79; Nobel chemist (and peace prize winner) Linus C. Pauling of prostate cancer near Big Sur, Calif., August 19 at age 93, the only man ever to have won two unshared Nobel prizes; Nobel cellular biologist André Lwoff dies at Paris September 30 at age 92; scientist and former MIT president Jerome Wiesner at his Watertown, Mass., home October 21 at age 79.
The Health Insurance Association of America trade group unveils new television commercials January 24 that feature "Harry and Louise" disparaging President Clinton's healthcare plan as bureaucratic, costly, and government controlled (see 1993). Former congressman William "Bill" Gradison (R. Ohio) resigned from Congress a year ago to head the insurance lobbying association, he meets with Clinton administration healthcare officials January 24, and although he announces February 1 that the meeting was "productive," the negative advertising continues.
The Food and Drug Administration says February 25 that cigarettes may be subject to regulation as a drug (see 1993). There is mounting evidence, declares FDA head David Kessler, that tobacco companies manipulate the nicotine-content of cigarettes and that they are sold to satisfy an addiction. Former secretary of health, education, and welfare Joseph A. Califano Jr. issues a report March 10 showing that youths aged 12 to 17 are 50 times more likely to use cocaine and 12 times more likely to use heroin if they are tobacco smokers. Seven tobacco company chief executives testify unconvincingly in congressional hearings April 14 that cigarettes are not addictive, but Kessler receives a visit May 18 from former Brown & Williamson Tobacco research chief Jeffrey Wigand, 51, who supplies the FDA with documentary evidence that the company not only relied knowingly on nicotine to hook smokers but added ammonia-based chemicals to boost the potency of the nicotine in cigarettes (see tobacco, 1995).
The FDA warns April 8 that while tamoxifen helps prevent recurrence of breast cancer it also doubles or triples a woman's chances of getting uterine cancer, a relatively rare disease (31,000 cases diagnosed in 1993, most of them in the endometrium, versus 180,000 cases of breast cancer). The benefits outweigh the risks, the FDA says, but women who have taken the drug must be sure to get gynecological checkups, watch for symptoms of uterine cancer, and not take tamoxifen as a preventive.
The World Health Organization's Pan American Health Organization announces September 29 that the poliomyelitis virus has been eradicated in the Western Hemisphere (no case has been reported in the United States since 1979, and no new cases have been reported elsewhere in the Americas since August 1991, when polio was diagnosed in a 2-year-old Peruvian boy, who survived. An immunization program in Peru since then has reached every child under age 5). Polio remains a problem in sub-Saharan Africa and central Asia, but the WHO uses a stronger version of Jonas Salk's original 1955 vaccine to give people shots against the disease and foresees the possibility of worldwide eradication by the end of 2000 (see 1997).
Nobel immunologist Niels K. Jerne dies at Castillon-du-Gard, France, October 7 at age 82.
A Death with Dignity Act approved by Oregon voters allows adults with incurable diseases to obtain lethal drugs from their physicians if their life expectancies are 6 months or less. The physicians may prescribe the drugs but not administer them under the law, which will become effective in 1997 and be used by about 30 patients per year despite efforts by opponents to block implementation (see 2004).
U.S. Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders resigns under pressure December 9 after saying at a UN conference on AIDS that she supports teaching schoolchildren about masturbation. (Many if not most sex-education courses already include that in their curricula.) No politician, Elders has consistently spoken out on subjects about which others kept silent.
The Church of England ordains 32 female deacons as priests March 12 at Bristol Cathedral—the first women Anglican priests in the denomination's 460-year history. The Church has a total of 10,200 priests, a few of whom have resigned.
Former senator Barry Goldwater tells U.S. News and World Report, "If [the Religious Right succeeds] in establishing religion as a basic Republican Party tenet they could do us in." And in an interview with the Washington Post he says, "When you say 'radical right' today, I think of these moneymaking ventures by fellows like Pat Robertson and others who are trying to take the Republican Party and make a religious organization out of it. If that ever happens, kiss politics goodbye."
A stampede of Muslim pilgrims May 26 at the Saudi Arabian village of Mina, outside Mecca, leaves 270 dead (see 1990). The pilgrims, most of them Indonesians, have been on their obligatory hajj, they were rushing to participate in the ritual "stoning of the devil" and some have been trampled to death (see 1997)
Hasidic Jewish leader Menachem Mendel Schneerson dies at New York June 12 at age 93. Seventh in a line of so-called "grand rebbes," Rabbi Schneerson took over the small Lubavitch sect in 1951 and built it into an international organization with considerable political influence. His followers thought he might reveal himself as the Messiah before his death, but he did not; his passing leaves the sect without any effective leadership.
The Citadel at Charleston, S.C. admits its first female student January 20 as Shannon Faulkner, 19, begins classes as a day student. She applied without mentioning her gender, the admissions office accepted her but reversed itself upon discovering it, she sued, and Supreme Court Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist has ordered the school to admit her, but it refuses to take her as a cadet (see 1996).
The School to Work Opportunities Act signed into law by President Clinton May 4 is intended to broaden vocational training opportunities for students not planning to attend college; it provides $300 million for fiscal 1995 to help states create programs for such students.
Canadian press lord Conrad Black acquires the Chicago Sun-Times as he continues to expand his publishing empire (see 1978; Sun-Times, 1947). Now 50 and a columnist for the Toronto Globe and Mail Report on Business magazine, Black published his autobiography last year under the title A Life in Progress. His London Daily Telegraph cuts its price from 48 pence to 30 in June as the price-war started last year by Rupert Murdoch threatens to reduce the Telegraph's circulation below 1 million; billionaire Murdoch responds by cutting the Times of London's price to 20p, circulation of the Independent falls to a low of 267,000 in August and cuts its price from 50p to 30p, and the Times tries to raise advertising rates to offset lower revenue from newsstand sales (see 1995).
Korean newspaper publisher Kim Sang-Man of Dong-A Ilbo dies at Seoul January 26 at age 84; Meet the Press founder Lawrence E. Spivak at Washington, D.C., March 9 at age 93.
In Style magazine begins publication in June at New York. The new Time, Inc. publication is a virtual catalogue of designer dresses, fashion accessories, cosmetics, home furnishings, restaurants, and vacation spots but will have a paid circulation of more than 700,000 by December of next year and in 4 years will have a circulation of 1,151,024.
Netscape Communications Corp. has its beginnings in Mosaic Communications Corp., founded at Mountain View, Calif., April 4 by James Clark and Marc Andreesen (see 1993). Silicon Graphics founder Clark, now 47, had originally proposed to produce software for interactive television subscribers, Andreesen has convinced him that there is more potential in making browsers and servers for the Internet, and Clark has put up $5 million to start the company, which will soon rename itself because the University of Illinois claims rights to the Mosaic name and grow from three employees to 200 by May of next year. Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates has seen no way to make any money from the Internet, but his technical assistant Steven Sinofsky has returned from a visit to Cornell in February and reported to Gates that "Cornell is wired"; Microsoft executives hold their first retreat April 5 to ponder a response to the Internet phenomenon and the company signs a consent decree with the Department of Justice July 17, agreeing to give computer manufacturers more freedom to install programs from other software companies; Microsoft makes slight alterations in its licensing contracts. Netscape ships its Navigator browser September 12, and it works well with Mackintosh computers and Microsoft Windows as well as with more costly Unix machines used by academics and engineers. Microsoft's Explorer 1.0 has its beginnings October 8 as a team of six programmers and a veteran software developer start writing a code for the company's browser, and Microsoft obtains a license December 18 from Spyglass to help it develop a Web browser (see 1995).
World Wide Web creator Tim Berners-Lee moves to MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science and starts the World Wide Web Consortium (see 1991). The group's mission is to lay the foundation of open standards for sharing and identifying information and keep the Web from being so commercialized that open standards are sacrificed.
Yahoo! Inc. is founded by former Stanford University Ph.D. candidates Jerry Chih-Yuan Yang, 26, and David Filo, 27, to capitalize on the power of the Internet (see Excite, 1993). Having heard about Netscape and its Navigator browser, they design a system for Internet-based businesses, will put "advertising banners" on their Website beginning next year, and by 1998 will have the lion's share of gateway sites (see AltaVista, 1995; Ask Jeeves, 1996; Google, 1998).
Lycos Inc. is founded July 20 at Pittsburgh with a catalogue of 54,000 documents. A Carnegie Mellon University team headed by Michael "Fuzzy" Mauldin, 35, has developed the Internet search engine (its name comes from that of the wolf spider Lycosidae and relates to the World Wide Web), Mauldin announces the service to the comp.infosystems.announce Usenet Newsgroup August 14, it explores a virtual world made up of hyperlinked pages, it answers questions about these pages, and within a month the web crawler has more than 390,000 documents in its index, a number that will soon seem miniscule as Lycos generates more than $50 million revenues for Carnegie Mellon.
The Federal Communications Commission gives approval October 20 to a so-called "video dialtone," reversing a decision made in 1983 by Judge Harold Greene to bar regional Bell operating companies from entering the information and entertainment industries.
The 226-year-old Encyclopaedia Britannica releases Britannica Online for Internet users who pay annual subscription fees (seeCompton's, 1992). Within a few years there will be no more salespeople calling door to door with offers of multi-volume ink-on-paper sets at special prices (which are not really "special" at all).
Nonfiction: The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life by Iowa-born Harvard sociologist Charles (Alan) Murray, 51, and his late colleague Richard J. Herrnstein, whose book creates a controversy by claiming that genetic differences account for the fact that blacks achieve lower I.Q. scores than Caucasians and Asians; Arrogant Capital: Washington, Wall Street, and the Frustration of American Politics by Kevin Phillips; Divided We Fall: Gambling with History in the Nineties by Haynes Johnson; The Tyranny of the Majority: Fundamental Fairness in Representative Democracy by New York-born University of Pennsylvania law professor (Carol) Lani Guinier, 44; Land of the Idols: Political Mythology in America by Michael Parenti; Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe by Washington, D.C.-born journalist Anne Applebaum, 30, who becomes a London Daily Telegraph columnist; The Dream that Failed: Reflections on the Soviet Union by historian Walter Lacquer; Rethinking Life and Death: The Collapse of Our Traditional Ethics by Peter Singer, who argues that 20th century advances in medicine and technology have made Judeo-Christian ideas with regard to the value of human life obsolete. He suggests adding new commandments to the original 10, including one allowing for a person's will to live or die, one permitting only wanted children to be born, and one that bans discrimination against other species; No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II by Doris Kearns Goodwin; The Book of Virtues by Brooklyn, N.Y.-born former secretary of education and drug czar William (John) "Bill" Bennett, 50, whose book will have sales of 2.3 million copies in the next 2 years; Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by New York writer John Berendt, 54, whose book is partly fiction. It will have hard-cover sales of more than 2.5 million copies in the next 4 years.
Self-styled "conservative" author-journalist Russell Kirk dies of congestive heart failure at Mecosta, Mich., April 29 at age 75, having taken a dim view of former president George H. W. Bush's 1991 Gulf War and opposed Bush's reelection; critic Cleanth Brooks dies at New Haven, Conn., May 10 at age 87; psychoanalyst-author Erik Erikson at Harwich, Mass., May 12 at age 91; anthropologist-author Colin M. Turnbull at Kilmarnock, Va., July 28 at age 69, having spent his latter years in Hawaii, Samoa, and India, where he became a Buddhist monk; philosopher Sir Karl Popper dies of complications from cancer at Croydon, England, September 17 at age 92, having had a great influence on the thinking of philanthropist George Soros.
Fiction: The Cunning Man by Robertson Davies; Diana by Carlos Fuentes draws from the author's affair with the late Jean Seberg; Extension of the Battlefield (L'Extension du Dumaine de la Lutte) by Réunion-born French novelist Michel Houellebecq, 36; The Ice Storm by Rick Moody; The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy; The Waterworks by E. L. Doctorow; A Frolic of His Own: A Novel by William Gaddis; A Way in the World by V. S. Naipaul; House of Splendid Isolation by Edna O'Brien; A Change of Climate by Margaret Drabble; A Private View by Anita Bookner; One True Thing by Anna Quindlen, who resigns from the New York Times to become a full-time novelist; Insomnia by Stephen King; One for the Money by Hanover, N.H., detective novelist Janet Evanovich, who has written romance novels under the pen name Steffie Hall.
Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhnitsyn, now 75, returns to resume residence in his homeland May 26 after 20 years' exile (he has lived as a recluse in Vermont), only to find postcommunist Russia awash in corruption, crime, and discontent.
Novelist Ralph Ellison dies of pancreatic cancer at New York April 16 at age 80; Juan Carlos Onetti of a heart attack at Madrid May 30 at age 84; James Clavell of cancer at his home in Vevey, Switzerland, June 9 at age 69; Nobel novelist-playwright Elias Canetti at Zürich August 14 at age 89.
Poetry: The Inferno of Dante: A New Verse Translation by Robert Pinsky, now 54, with illustrations by Michael Mazur; Loose Woman by Sandra Cisneros.
Poet-novelist Charles Bukowski dies of leukemia at Los Angeles March 9 at age 73; Amy Clampitt of ovarian cancer at Lenox, Mass., September 10 at age 74.
Juvenile: Going into a Dark House by Jane Gardam; The Daydreamer by Ian McEwan; The Tin Princess by Philip Pullman; Hairs: Pelitos by Sandra Cisneros.
Author Eilis Dillon dies in her native Galway July 19 at age 74.
Amazon.com is founded at Seattle by Albuquerque-born entrepreneur Jeffrey P. Bezos, 31, a former Wall Street hedge-fund operator who sees the World Wide Web growing at a rate of 2,300 percent per year and decides to use the Internet to sell books.
Conceptual artist Ed Kienholz dies of a heart attack while hiking at Hope, Idaho, June 10 at age 66; painter-teacher Lin Haisu at Shanghai August 7 at age 99 (approximate); abstract expressionist Sam Francis of prostate cancer at Santa Monica, Calif., November 4 at age 71; sculptor-graphic artist-industrial designer-architect Max Bill on a visit to Berlin December 9 at age 85.
Sculpture: Policeman by Duane Hanson.
The QuickTake 100 camera introduced February 17 by Apple Computer is the first digital camera for consumer use (see Kodak, 1991). It works with a home computer via a serial cable, it will be followed March 28 of next year by the Kodak DC-40, the Casio QV-11 with an LCD monitor will appear late next year, and Sony Corp. will launch its Cyber-Shot Digital Still Camera in 1996. Without paying for film or processing, an amateur or professional can take hundreds of color pictures, view them immediately, erase the unwanted ones, have the keepers printed out, and with the right hardware and software be able to scan images into a computer, crop, lighten, darken, or otherwise edit them without a darkroom, and transmit them over the internet. As prices come down, digital cameras made by computer companies as well as traditional camera manufacturers will overtake conventional cameras.
Theater: My Night with Reg by Birmingham-born playwright Kevin Elyot, 42, 3/31 at London's Royal Court Theatre (to Criterion 11/15); Three Tall Women by Edward Albee 4/5 at New York's Promenade Theater, with Chicago-born actress Myra Carter, Marian Seldes, Jordan Baker; Ghost from a Perfect Place by Philip Ridley 4/7 at London's Hampstead Theatre; Broken Glass by Arthur Miller 4/24 at New York's Booth Theater, with Amy Irving, Ron Rifkin, 73 perfs.; Molly Sweeney by Brian Friel 8/9 at Dublin's Gate Theatre, with Catherine Byrne as a 40-year-old blind woman in Ballybeg; Killer Joe by Tulsa-born playwright Tracy Letts, 29, at London's Traverse Theatre (to Bush Theatre 1/20/1995); New England by Richard Nelson 11/5 at London's Pit Theatre in the Barbican.
Actor-director Ezra Stone is killed in an automobile accident at Perth Amboy, N.J., March 3 at age 76; playwright Eugene Ionesco dies at Paris March 28 at age 81; playwright Robert E. Lee of cancer at Los Angeles July 8 at age 75; actress Jessica Tandy of cancer at her Easton, Conn., home September 11 at age 85; Julie Haydon of abdominal cancer at LaCrosse, Wis., December 24 at age 84; playwright John Osborne of diabetes complications at Shrewsbury, England, December 24 at age 65.
Television: Ellen (initially titled These Friends of Mine) 3/29 on ABC with Ellen DeGeneres, Arye Gross (to 5/13/1998; see 1997); Chandler and Company 7/12-8/16 on BBC-1 with Margot Flynn as Dee Tate, Catherine Russell as her sister-in-law and detective-agency partner Elly Chandler; New York Undercover 9/8 on Fox with Malik Yoba as detective J. C. Williams, Michael DeLorenzo as Eddie Torres in a series created by Dick Wolf, now 49 (to 6/5/1998); ER 9/19 on NBC with Anthony Edwards, George Clooney, Sherry Stringfield, Eriq La Salle in a hospital series created by novelist Michael Crichton; Chicago Hope 9/19 on CBS with Mandy Patinkin, Adam Arkin, E. G. Marshall in another hospital series, this one created by David E. Kelly (to 5/4/2000); NYPD Blue 9/21 on ABC with David Caruso, Dennis Franz, Nicholas Turturro, James McDaniel, Amy Brenneman in another police show created by Steven Bochco, now 50; Touched by an Angel 9/21 on CBS with Roma Downey as Monica, Della Reese as Tess; Friends 9/22 on NBC with Courtney Cox, 30; Jennifer Aniston, 25; David Schwimmer, 27; Lisa Kudrow, 31; Matt LeBlanc, 26; Matthew Perry, 25 (to 5/6/2004); Party of Five 10/17 on Fox with Matthew Fox, Neve Campbell, Scott Wolf, Lacey Chabert as orphaned siblings in a series created by Chris Keyser, 34, and Amy Lippman, 32 (to 5/3/2000).
Actor Telly Savalas dies of prostate cancer at Universal City, Calif., January 22 at age 70; William Conrad of a heart attack at his Hollywood home February 11 at age 73; radio satirist Henry Morgan of lung cancer at New York May 19 at age 79; TV writer Dennis Potter of pancreatic and liver cancer near Ross-on-Wye, England, June 7 at age 59 (he has suffered since 1969 from psoriatic arthropy, a debilitating form of arthritis and psoriasis); Harriet Hilliard Nelson of heart failure and emphysema at her Laguna Beach, Calif., home October 2 at age 85.
Films: Gillian Armstrong's Little Women with Winona Ryder as Jo March, Susan Sarandon as her mother. Also: Woody Allen's Bullets over Broadway with John Cusack, Dianne Wiest; Robert Zemeckis's Forrest Gump with Tom Hanks; Mike Newell's Four Weddings and a Funeral with Hugh Grant, Andie MacDowell; Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures with Melanie Linskey, Kate Winslet, Sara Peirse; Lars von Trier's The Kingdom with Ernst-Hugo Jaregard, Kirsten Rolffes; Ken Loach's Ladybird Ladybird with stand-up comic Chrissie Rock as a British welfare mother; Michael Apted's documentary Moving the Mountain with Chinese dissident Li Lu, who demonstrated in Beijing's Tiananmen Square in 1989; Michael Radford's The Postman (Il Postino) with Massimo Troisi (who dies of heart disease before the film is completed), Philippe Noiret (as poet Pablo Neruda); Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction with John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson, Uma Thurman, Tim Roth, Harvey Keitel, Christopher Walken, Bruce Willis; Patrice Chereau's Queen Margot with Isabelle Adjani, Daniel Auteuil, Jean-Hugues Anglade, Virna Lisi; Robert Redford's Quiz Show with Ralph Fiennes, John Turturro, Rob Morrow, David Paymer; Jan De Bont's Speed with Dennis Hopper, Keanu Reeves, Sandra Bullock.
Walt Disney Studios executive Frank Wells dies in an accident in April and chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg resigns in September following a dispute with Disney CEO Michael Eisner, having worked with Eisner and Wells to build Disney from a financially troubled $2 billion company into a $22 billion multi-media empire. Now 44, Katzenberg quickly teams up with director Steven Spielberg and record impresario David Geffen to create DreamWorks, a new enterprise that will produce films, animation, TV shows, and records along with interactive computer-based entertainment.
Actor Cesar Romero dies of a blood clot while being treated for pneumonia at Santa Monica January 1 at age 86; silent film star Esther Ralston dies at Ventura, Calif., January 14 at age 91; actor-director Jean-Louis Barrault of an apparent heart attack at Paris January 22 at age 83; Joseph Cotten of pneumonia at Los Angeles February 6 at age 88; John Candy of heart failure while on location at Chupedios, Mexico, March 4 at age 43; Melina Mercouri at Athens March 6 at age 68 after undergoing surgery for lung cancer; Fernando Rey of cancer at Madrid March 9 at age 76; former actress-studio head Devika Rani at Bangalore March 9 at age 85; Mai Zetterling of cancer at London March 17 at age 68; MacDonald Carey of lung cancer at Beverly Hills March 21 at age 81; Woody Woodpecker's creator Walter Lantz of heart disease at Burbank March 22 at age 93; Giulia Anna "Giulietta" Masina of cancer at Rome March 23 at age 73; Bill Travers at Dorking, England, March 29 at age 72; George Peppard of pneumonia at Los Angeles May 8 at age 65; Gilbert Roland of cancer at Beverly Hills May 15 at age 88; director Lindsay Anderson of a heart attack August 30 at age 71 while vacationing in France's Dordogne region; actor Tom Ewell dies at Woodland Hills, Calif., September 12 at age 85; Burt Lancaster of a heart attack at his Los Angeles home October 20 at age 80; director-actor Sergei Bondarchuk of a blood disease at Moscow October 20 at age 74; Julie Haydon of abdominal cancer at LaCrosse, Wis., December 24 at age 84; Rosanno Brazzi of a neurological virus at Rome December 24 at age 78.
Hollywood musical: Roger Allers and Bob Minkoff's The Lion King with Walt Disney animation, music and lyrics by Tim Rice and Elton John, songs that include "Can You Feel the Love Tonight?"
Broadway musicals: Beauty and the Beast 4/18 at the Palace Theater, with Susan Egan, Terence Mann, music by Alan Menken, lyrics by the late Howard Ashman and Tim Rice, 4,500+ perfs.; Passion 5/9 at the Plymouth Theater, with Tom Aldredge, Donna Murphy, Jere Shea, Marin Mazzie, book by James Lapine, music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, 280 perfs.
Entertainer-composer Donald Swann dies at London March 23 at age 70; onetime Broadway musical star and producer Peggy Fears at Montrose, Calif., August 24 at age 91; Martha Raye of complications from a stroke and circulatory ailments at Los Angeles October 19 at age 78; Raul Julia at Manhasset, N.Y., October 24 at age 54 following a stroke.
Barcelona's Gran Teatre del Liceu opera house is destroyed by fire January 31 after nearly 150 years as the heart of the city's social life.
Ballet: Ocean in May at the Cirque Royal, Brussels, with choreography by Merce Cunningham, now 75, music by the late John Cage as completed by composer Andrew Culver.
Dancer-choreographer Pearl Primus dies at New Rochelle, N.Y., October 29 at age 74; former Royal Ballet star Michael Somes of a brain tumor at London November 18 at age 77.
Popular songs: "The Power of Love" by Celine Dion, who makes her New York debut 2/28 singing at Town Hall; Mellow Gold by Beck; Definitely Maybe by the British rock group Oasis (vocalist Liam [originally William John Paul] Gallagher, 21, his brother Noel, 27, and others); Monster (CD) by R.E.M., whose members embark on their first world tour in 5 years; Cracked Rear View (CD) by the rock group Hootie and the Blowfish (Darius Rucker, et. al.); "MTV Unplugged" by singer Tony Bennett, now 68; "All I Wanna Do" by Sheryl Crow; Longing in Their Hearts (CD) by Bonnie Raitt; "Can You Feel the Love Tonight?" by Elton John; Vitalogy (CD) by Pearl Jam; MTV Unplugged in New York (CD) by Nirvana; Whip-smart (CD) by New Haven, Conn.-born songwriter-vocalist Elizabeth Clark "Liz" Phair, 27, and her male trio (guitar, bass, drums); "Streets of Philadelphia" by Bruce Springsteen (for the film Philadelphia); Dookie (CD) by the California punk pop band Green Day (Billie Joe Armstrong, 22; bassist Mike Dirnt [Michael Ryan Pritchard], 22; drummer Tré Cool [Frank Edwin Wright III], 21); CrazySexyCool (CD) by the rhythm & blues trio TLC (Des Moines-born T-Boz [Tionne Tenese Watkins], 24; Philadelphia-born Left Eye [Lisa Nicole Lopes], 23; Atlanta-born Chilli [Rozanda Thomas], 23) includes the single "Waterfalls;" Ready to Die (CD) by Brooklyn, N.Y.-born crack-cocaine dealer-turned rap artist Christopher Wallace, 22, who calls himself The Notorious B.I.G.; Black Reign (CD) by rap artist Queen Latifah includes her single "U.N.I.T.Y."
Singer Dinah Shore dies of ovarian cancer at her Beverly Hills, Calif., home February 24 at age 76; rock singer-songwriter-guitarist Kurt Cobain of the Seattle group Nirvana recovers from a drug-induced coma in March but is found dead April 8 at age 27, having killed himself with a shotgun; veteran jazz saxophonist-arranger Earle Warren dies of a stroke and kidney failure at his native Springfield, Ohio, June 4 at age 79; composer Henry Mancini of pancreatic cancer at Beverly Hills June 14 at age 70; singer Dorothy Collins of a heart attack at Watervliet, N.Y., July 21 at age 67; songwriter-performer Domenico Modugno on the island of Lampedusa south of Sicily August 6 at age 66; singer and bandleader Cab Calloway at Hockessin, Del., November 18 at age 86; Modern Jazz Quartet drummer Connie Kay of cardiac arrest at New York November 30 at age 67; songwriter Antonio Carlos Brasiliero Almeida Jobim of heart failure at New York December 8 at age 67.
Farmington, Conn., figure skater Nancy Kerrigan, 24, is struck in the leg from behind by an assailant January 6. The attack is linked to Kerrigan's rival, Tonya Harding, 23, who wins the U.S. championship in Kerrigan's forced absence. Kerrigan goes on to win a silver medal in the winter Olympics at Lillehammer, Norway in early March; Harding places eighth but will be banned from future competition. Speed skater Bonnie Blair wins her fifth Olympic gold medal at age 30, becoming the most successful U.S. woman in Olympic history.
The Dallas Cowboys beat the Buffalo Bills 30 to 13 in Super Bowl XXVIII at Atlanta January 30.
Australian tennis great Lewis Alan "Lew" Hoad is found in January to have a rare, virulent form of leukemia and dies at Fuergirola, Spain, July 3 at age 59.
Pete Sampras wins in men's singles at Wimbledon, Conchita Martínez, 22 (Sp), in women's singles; Andre Agassi wins the U.S. Open men's singles title, Arantxa Sánchez Vicario, 22 (Sp), the women's.
Brazil wins in World Cup football (soccer), defeating Italy at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena by a penalty kick in a "shoot-out" when the teams remain scoreless after an overtime period.
Chicago Cubs star second baseman Ryne Sandberg retires in June at age 34, saying that he has lost his desire to play. Major league baseball players go on strike August 12, protesting a decision by owners to impose salary caps (the average player now earns $1.2 million per year, the minimum is $109,000, and some earn as much as $7.29 million). The two sides fail to reach agreement by September 9 and the remainder of the season is canceled. There is no World Series for the first time in 90 years.
Cypress, Calif., golfer Tiger Woods, 18, wins the U.S. Amateur Golf Championship August 27 at Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla.—the youngest man (and first black) ever to win.
Olympic gold medalist runner Helen Stephens dies at St. Louis January 17 at age 75; Olympic gold medalist track star Ira Murchison at Harvey, Ill., March 28 at age 61. Surgery for colon cancer ended his sprinting career in 1959 and he has coached high school and college track teams. Football (soccer) veteran-sportscaster William Ambrose "Billy" Wright dies at London September 3 at age 70; runner Wilma Rudolph of a malignant brain tumor at her Brentwood, Tenn., home November 12 at age 54; cricketer Peter B. H. May at Liphook, Hampshire, December 27 at age 64.
Former Arkansas state clerical worker Paula Jones (née Corbin), 26, appears at a Washington, D.C., news conference February 11 to charge that President Clinton made sexual advances at a Little Rock hotel in May 1991. She files a sexual harassment suit in May but there are discrepancies in her story, the White House flatly denies it, and suspicions are rife that right-wing opponents of Clinton have put Jones up to telling the story to embarrass the president.
Former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis dies of lymphoma May 19 at age 64 in her Fifth Avenue, New York, apartment and is buried beside her first husband May 23 in Arlington Cemetery at Washington, D.C. Mourners include her longtime companion Maurice Tempelsman, 64, a Polish immigrant and Orthodox Jew whose financial advice has helped "Jackie O" quadruple her fortune.
The unisex light perfume CK One introduced by Calvin Klein has a clean citrus scent, sells for $35 per 3.4 ounce bottle, has first-year sales of $100 million, and will be widely imitated.
Jacksonville (Ala.) State University student Heather Whitestone, 21, is crowned Miss America at Atlantic City September 17 in the 74th contest of the annual beauty pageant. Almost completely deaf since she was 18 months old, Whitestone is the first contestant with a major physical disability to win the title.
California's governor Pete Wilson signs a "three strikes" or "three-time loser" law in March (see Polly Klaas murder and Washington State law, 1993). The new legislation, says Wilson, will "send a clear message to repeat convicts: Find a new line of work because we're going to turn career criminals into career inmates," but the law will fill the state's prisons with people sentenced to long terms even when their third offenses were in some cases no more serious than stealing a pizza. Legislation signed by President Clinton in September mandates life sentences for felons convicted of three violent federal crimes; by October 1995 more than 14 states will have adopted "three-strike laws" like those of Washington State and California.
Los Angeles police arrest onetime football star O. J. (Orenthal James) Simpson, 46, on murder charges June 17 after he has led them on a 90-minute chase that television stations have carried worldwide. The 1967 Heisman Trophy winner who retired from professional ball in 1979, Simpson disappeared before his scheduled arraignment; he is charged with having killed his ex-wife, Nicole (née Brown), 36, and her friend Ronald L. Goldman, 25, outside her Brentwood home 5 days earlier. Millionaire Simpson pleaded no contest in 1989 to a charge of beating his wife and threatening her life (police had come to the Simpson house eight times in response to calls from Nicole), he was sentenced to probation, paid a fine of $700 and performed some community service, the couple divorced in 1992, and the case brings renewed attention to the question of spousal abuse (1,432 U.S. women were murdered by their husbands or boyfriends in 1992 and thousands were admitted to hospitals for injuries sustained from battery by husbands and boyfriends) (see 1995).
Computer DOS inventor Gary Kildall walks into a Monterey, Calif., bar July 6, gets into an altercation with some bikers, and dies of injuries to the head at age 52.
The kidnapping, rape, sodomizing, and grisly murder of 7-year-old New Jersey schoolgirl Megan Kanka July 29 prompts many states to pass "Megan's Laws" requiring that communities be informed when convicted sex offenders move in. Jesse K. Timmendequas, now 34, will be found guilty in June 1997 of the grisly and fatal attack on Megan Kanka in a Trenton suburb.
The Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) program launched by the Clinton administration is a federal grant program designed to put 100,000 more police officers on U.S. streets. The program will be successful in reducing crime in many cities, but half the grants will be given to communities of 150,000 and less, and the number of new police will fall far short of the projected 100,000 number.
Union, S.C., housewife Susan Smith (née Vaughn), 23, tells police October 25 that an "armed black" carjacker has kidnapped her sons Michael, 3, and Alex, 14 months. She subsequently fails a lie-detector test, and although she tells a national TV audience November 3 that she would never do anything to hurt her children, she breaks down under police questioning a few hours later and admits that she drove the car into a lake, where it is found in 18 feet of water with the bodies of the drowned boys inside.
Suburban developer William Levitt dies of kidney disease at Manhasset, Long Island, January 28 at age 86; architect Pietro Belluschi at Portland, Ore., February 14 at age 94.
The Euralille trade and transportation center is completed at Lille, France, to designs by architect Rem Koolhaas, now 50, whose influential new book S, M, L, XL is illustrated with work by Koolhaas and his Rotterdam-based firm the Office for Metropolitan Architecture.
The American Center in the Bercy neighborhood of Paris is completed in limestone, concrete, stucco, steel, and glass to designs by Frank Gehry, who is awarded the first Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize and receives $250,000 October 12.
Massachusetts voters end rent regulation in Boston, Brookline, and Cambridge November 8 in a referendum that passes by 51 to 49 percent but loses in the three affected areas. Cambridge has had the most stringent controls, with most of its apartments covered (Boston and Brookline have had vacancy decontrol), and a coalition of small-property owners has pushed for relief. About 100,000 units will be decontrolled as of January 1, 1995, rents will double within a few years, deteriorating neighborhoods will improve, but many poorer people will have to move to more distant communities.
An earthquake jolts Los Angeles January 17, killing 62, injuring thousands, and leaving some 20,000 homeless. Measuring 6.7 on the Richter scale and centered in the San Fernando Valley, the Northridge quake cracks roads and building foundations, collapses freeway overpasses, and causes an estimated $42 billion in property damage, making it the costliest natural disaster thus far in U.S. history.
The Energy Policy and Conservation Act signed into law by President Clinton March 8 mandates that toilets sold in the United States use no more than 1.6 gallons of water per flush—less than half the flow of existing toilets—and that shower heads be changed to restrict water flow; the new law will provide a bonanza for plumbers and toilet manufacturers, but consumers will find that they have to flush the new plumbing fixtures repeatedly, negating any benefits of water conservation. Many in northern states will drive across the border to Canada and return with high-flow toilets, and although any plumber who installs such a toilet is subject to a $2,500 fine and suspension of his license the law is difficult to enforce.
Indian game wardens succeed January 1 in bringing under control a herd of some 50 elephants that were stampeded by a forest fire in late December of last year, leading them into a forest about 60 miles north of Calcutta (Kolkata). The country has about 22,000 elephants living in reserves; these particular animals have rampaged for 125 miles through hundreds of villages, trampling at least six people to death in the biggest incident of its kind ever reported.
Indonesian forest fires produce smoke that blankets much of southeast Asia from August to November, forcing schools to close and disrupting airline schedules. Burning out of control, the fires destroy an estimated 1.5 million acres of tropical woodland. Jakarta blames the fires on nomadic farmers who employ slash-and-burn practices, but ecologists blame timber companies that start fires to cover up their illegal harvesting of trees in the world's second-largest rain forest (279 million acres).
An international Convention on Desertification signed at Paris in October by some 100 nations establishes a "global mechanism" to prevent loss of agricultural lands, but some scientists insist that it is simply lack of rain—not overgrazing, overplanting, poor irrigation, and deforestation—that is creating problems in arid countries such as many in Africa. Rich nations pledge only modest amounts to fund the effort.
A flotilla of fishing boats chugs into Boston Harbor March 28 with signs protesting new federal rules restricting catches of cod, haddock, hake, and other bottom-feeding fishes, whose numbers have been sharply depleted (see Canada, 1992). In an effort to save the centuries-old Georges Bank fishery, Washington has imposed a moratorium on new fishing permits and cut by half the number of days that fishermen can spend at sea. Species formerly despised as "trash" fish—skate, ocean catfish (or wolffish), conger eel, and spiny dogfish—now attract purchasers unable, or unwilling, to pay as much as $9 per pound for fresh cod and even more for fresh haddock. President Clinton says March 21 that New England's fishing industry is in "virtual collapse" and offers $30 million in federal aid.
President Clinton calls the Washington State coastal area a disaster area as catches of pollock, salmon, and other Pacific species plummet, partly as a result of overfishing, partly because power projects have blocked spawning runs of anadramous fish (see Alaska, 1993).
The genetically-altered Flavr Savr tomato wins approval from the Food and Drug Administration May 18 (see 1993).
Canada agrees August 1 to restrict sharply her exports of wheat to the United States for 1 year following a dispute that arose in January at Shelby, Mont. A grass-roots uprising there threatened to precipitate a trade war, possibly involving California wine and Arkansas poultry; the U.S. International Trade Commission visited Shelby in April, and although the six commissioners split evenly on whether the grain imports were disrupting the overall U.S. wheat market, it was clear that the Canadian wheat was posing problems for Montana and North Dakota wheat farmers and for U.S. taxpayers. Mostly because of poor U.S. wheat crops, Canadian wheat exports to the United States totaled about 100 million bushels in the fiscal year ending May 31, up from about 17 million in 1989 (a trifle compared to annual U.S. wheat exports of 1.2 billion bushels), and some of the commissioners concluded that the imported Canadian wheat had depressed the price of domestically-grown wheat and cost U.S. taxpayers $170 million in additional farm payments over a 2-year period. U.S. trade representative Mickey Kantor says the reduction in Canadian imports will not have "any appreciable cost to consumers," but some consumer advocates disagree, noting that while only 6 percent of U.S. wheat imports come from Canada, that country accounts for 40 percent of imported durum wheat, used to make pasta. Semi-processed durum wheat, represents one-fourth of the cost of box of pasta and has nearly doubled in the past year because of poor U.S. harvests, say pasta makers, but wheat farmers note that the cost of raw wheat represents only 8¢ of a $1.50 box of pasta.
Russian farmers struggle to survive in a market economy as production of grain, meat, milk, and vegetables declines for a fifth straight year (see 1993). Fewer than 5 percent of the nation's 10 million farm workers own even a small farm, the State Agriculture Ministry says that 68 percent of all farm machinery is more than 21 years old, tractor and fertilizer companies have gone out of business, fuel prices have soared, vegetables rot in the fields before they can be harvested, and Moscow imports Western surpluses. Russia's grain harvest falls to about 90 million metric tons, down from 99.1 million last year, but the Ministry of Agriculture and Food says in early September that it will import only 6 million tons. Imported grain cost on average 275,000 rubles ($170) per ton in the first half of the year, whereas grain procured locally cost only 72,000 rubles, but the ministry is quoted by the ITAR-Tass news agency as saying that it does not expect bread prices to increase substantially despite lower grain supplies.
U.S. farmers harvest record crops of corn, rice, and soybeans, and near-record crops of wheat; the number of farms drops to 1.9 million, the smallest number since 1850.
The Crop Insurance Reform Act signed into law by President Clinton October 13 is an effort to make the program begun in 1938 so attractive to farmers that there will be no further demand for emergency farm aid. Having passed eight consecutive ad hoc disaster bills, Congress expands the program from just a few major crops to more than 70 crops, dramatically increases subsidies to help farmers pay the insurance premiums, and turns the program over to private insurers, with the government continuing to pay administrative costs and to share much of the underwriting risk (see Freedom to Farm Act, 1996).
U.S. hog prices fall 33 percent to their lowest levels in 20 years, but retail pork-product prices in most areas outside of Iowa decline by only 2 or 3 percent, frustrating hopes of the National Pork Council, farm-state legislators, and farm groups that lower prices will boost consumption. The lower hog prices benefit meat packers, grocers, and restaurants, but U.S. food prices generally increase by about 2 percent. Hog farmers produce a record 17.5 billion pounds of pork as big corporations expand their operations, mostly in Missouri and North Carolina. Family farmers increase their herds and modernize to compete, but hog prices fall far below break-even levels for many farmers.
Subsidies to farmers cost consumers and taxpayers in the industrial countries more than $348 billion (about $394 per capita), down about 2 percent from last year; many economists urge reform to reduce market distortions caused by direct subsidies and price supports, but some say that food prices would be higher without such supports (see 1996).
The International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) at Texcoc, Mexico, announces in July that it has developed new strains of corn that can increase crop yields up to 40 percent in regions where drought and acidic soils present problems. Since half the 150 million acres of corn planted in the developing world are subject to drought, CIMMYT officials estimate that the new strains could feed 50 million more people per year.
The International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) at Los Baños in the Philippines announces in October that it has developed a new rice variety with the potential of increasing yields by 20 to 25 percent.
Florida's $8 billion orange, lemon, lime, and grapefruit industry comes under attack from the citrus leaf miner, a moth measuring only one-tenth of an inch long that disrupts photosynthesis by burrowing into the leaves of young trees. Entomologists suggest that the moth arrived from West Africa in 1992 with help from Hurricane Andrew but suggest that it may be controlled through biological means, as it has been in Australia and Southeast Asia, by using various species of wasps that lay eggs on the moth's larvae (newly hatched wasps eat the larvae). Florida's Citrus Commission has hired right-wing radio-TV commentator Rush Limbaugh as its spokesman, sparking calls for a national boycott, and the state's citrus industry faces increasing competition from Mexico and Brazil (the Brazilian orange crop now exceeds that of Florida).
Brazil's coffee crop suffers its worst frost damage since 1975, causing a jump in U.S. coffee prices as roasters anticipate higher costs.
Thousands of Rwandans die of hunger and related diseases as Hutu tribesmen slaughter Tutsis and then flee with their families into neighboring Zaïre to escape retribution from a new Tutsi government.
Japan's Imperial Palace announces in early March that "with the consent of their Majesties, the Emperor and Empress," royal meals will be served beginning the week of March 21 with rice grown in the United States, Thailand, and China. Pure Japanese rice has been scarce since last year's disastrous harvest, farmers have held back on deliveries, and the cabinet orders that distributors must mix their rice to include at least 20 percent foreign rice, the price of at least one especially desirable type of Japanese rice soars to $7.75 per pound, black markets spring up to sell such rice, but a bumper crop of domestic rice depresses sales of imported rice, most of which winds up in warehouses.
Cubans flee their island in makeshift rafts as food shortages worsen following the collapse of the former Soviet Union. A tightening of the U.S. embargo has blocked food imports and contributed to a lack of hard currency with which to pay for such imports; Cuba's climate is not conducive to producing wheat and many other staple food commodities. The individual food ration for July is six pounds of rice, 10 ounces of beans, half a pound of oil, one ounce of coffee, and three pounds of sugar; many Cubans barter other goods to obtain enough food.
Provisions of the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act take effect May 2 and impose new U.S. labeling rules on makers of dietary supplements, who may no longer make therapeutic claims without providing the Food and Drug Administration with the same kind of proof required of food and pharmaceutical companies (see 1992; 1993). The $4 billion vitamin-supplement industry spreads false fears that the FDA is planning to make their products available only by prescription, and some Congressmen are deluged with letters of protest, often through campaigns orchestrated by the industry. The FDA has sought to ban health claims unless they are backed by "significant scientific agreement"; the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act passed by Congress in early October allows "general" health claims; while the new legislation bars labels claiming that any product can prevent or cure a specific illness, it weakens obstacles to deceptive and misleading health claims, putting the burden of proof on the FDA rather than on the manufacturer (see consumer protection [ephedra ban], 2003).
The Clinton administration announces June 6 that new Department of Agriculture rules will set limits on the fat, cholesterol, and sodium content of school lunches—the biggest changes since the School Lunch Program was created in 1946 (it has grown to serve about 25 million students in 93,000 schools) (see 1993). Senate Agriculture Committee chairman Patrick J. Leahy (D. Vt.) has insisted that the USDA address concerns voiced last year by dietitians, students, and parents in four public hearings; he introduced a bill in April that would encourage schools to restrict or ban the sale of soft drinks and other items of "minimal nutritional value" in schools (dietitians say children who fill up on soft drinks and snack foods are less likely to eat nutritious meals that cost taxpayers $4.5 billion per year), but many schools are under pressure from fast-food chains to turn over their school-lunch programs to McDonald's, Burger King, and the like.
A provision of the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act that takes effect in August requires that foods labeled "light" (or "lite") contain no more than half the fat content of the original product, and while some companies comply with the law by reducing fat content, others simply rename their products.
A critic of anti-fat and anti-cholesterol efforts notes that life expectancy in France is 74 for men, 82 for women, despite high intakes of animal fats, butter, cream, cheese, and red meat; in Switzerland, where diets are similar, life expectancy is 76 for men, 83 for women, and in Japan, where diets are low in animal fats, butter, cream, cheese, and red meat but high in rice, seafood, and soy products, life expectancy is 77 for men, 82 for women.
More Americans are overweight than ever, according to a study by the National Center for Health Statistics in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. One in three adults aged 20 to 74 were obese (meaning at least 20 percent overweight) in 1991, up from fewer than one in four in 1962 and just over one in four in 1980, according to the study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association July 18. The percentage among black, non-Hispanic women was 49.6, up from 41.7 (among black men, 31.5 percent were obese, up from 22.2). Among Mexican-American women, 47.9 percent were obese, up from 41.4 percent in 1980 (among Mexican-American men, the percentage was 39.5, up from 31.0). A Norwegian study has shown that people who are somewhat overweight actually have longer life expectancies than those who meet "desirable" weight standards, but despite growing awareness that obesity has a negative impact on health, and despite a diet industry whose revenues total $40 to $50 billion per year, a professor of medicine at Columbia University says in a JAMA editorial that "The proportion of the population that is obese is incredible. If this was about tuberculosis, it would be called an epidemic . . . The problem with obesity is that once you have it, it is very difficult to treat. What you want is to prevent it." With the federal government allotting each state a mere $50,000 for nutrition education in schools, and the food industry spending $36 billion per year to tempt U.S. consumers with advertising, prevention is difficult.
The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) reports in July that food at so-called Tex-Mex restaurants is higher in saturated fats and sodium than hamburgers or other traditionally high-fat foods. An order of beef nachos has the fat content of 10 glazed Dunkin' Donuts. Defenders of Mexican cuisine insist that real Mexican food contains far less fat, and "health-Mex" restaurant chains that avoid lard in favor of such things as low-fat yogurt capitalize on the CSPI findings.
Beijing's authoritarian government evicts McDonald's from its restaurant in Tiananmen Square—the world's biggest McDonald's—to make way for a commercial complex, abrogating the company's 20-year lease.
An Albuquerque, N.M., jury awards $2.9 million in August to Stella Liebeck, 81, who in 1992 ordered a 49¢ cup of coffee at a drive-in McDonald's window and received third-degree burns when she removed the lid to add cream and sugar and spilled the scalding-hot coffee on her lap, obliging her to spend 7 days in the hospital and have skin grafts. McDonald's sells 1 billion cups of coffee per year and says in its training manual that coffee should be brewed at 195° to 205° F. and held at 180° to 190°. The National Coffee Association says McDonald's coffee conforms to industry temperature standards, but a law student has found that no other Albuquerque restaurant served coffee closer than about 20° to the 180° level at which McDonald's poured its coffee. The judge in the case reduces the jury award to $500,000; McDonald's appeals.
McDonald's and other fast-food restaurant chains impose no-smoking rules in company-owned outlets; many if not most franchisees follow suit. Red Lobster claims to have been the first national restaurant chain to provide no-smoking sections, and virtually all U.S. restaurants above a certain size now offer patrons the option of eating in a relatively smoke-free environment.
Maryland bans smoking in restaurants and bars beginning July 21. Other states—including Vermont, Utah, Washington, and California—have enacted legislation that forbids smoking in public places but have exempted bars and restaurants (although in some U.S. cities there are no such exemptions). Philip Morris and R. J. Reynolds own a major part of the processed food industry and try to raise fears that the government may also try to control alcohol, caffeine, or foods high in saturated fats or cholesterol; they mount legal challenges to restrictions on smoking and gain support from some restaurant owners, who fear they will lose business, but other restaurant owners welcome the ban, recognizing that while 34 million Americans still smoke they represent a dwindling minority of adults, that more affluent Americans tend to be nonsmokers who appreciate dining out in a smoke-free environment which permits them to smell and taste what they eat, that 80 to 90 percent of nonsmokers ask to be seated in the no-smoking section of a restaurant when one is available, and that even the best ventilation system cannot eliminate exposure to secondhand smoke.
The U.S. Supreme Court rules unanimously January 24 that groups trying to impede access to abortion clinics are subject to prosecution under the Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act signed by President Nixon in 1970. A Houston jury orders Operation Rescue to pay $1.01 million in punitive damages to a Planned Parenthood clinic May 9, President Clinton signs legislation May 26 barring interference with entry to abortion clinics, six antiabortion protesters at Milwaukee June 4 are charged June 6 under the new Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, but abortion doctor John Bayard Britten, 69, is shot dead with a 12-gauge shotgun outside a Pensacola, Fla., clinic July 29 along with his bodyguard, retired Air Force Lieut. Col. James H. Barrett, 74 (police seize former Presbyterian Church minister and anti-abortion protester Paul J. Hill, 40). U.S. marshals are deployed to protect abortion clinics nationwide, and the nation's abortion rate falls to its lowest level since 1976, partly because legal abortion services are simply not available in much of the country. Former senator Barry Goldwater tells the Los Angeles Times, "A lot of so-called conservatives don't know what the word means. They think I've turned liberal because I . . . believe a woman has a right to an abortion. That's a decision that's up to the pregnant woman, not up to the pope or some do-gooders or the Religious Right."
Cuba's president Fidel Castro gives a speech August 11 indicating that his government is lifting restrictions on emigration, beginning an exodus to the United States that threatens to rival the Mariel boatlift of 1980. President Clinton announces August 19 that would-be Cuban immigrants will hereafter be treated like other would-be immigrants, ending the special status which they have enjoyed since 1966; the Coast Guard begins picking up refugees on the open sea, and they are taken to the U.S. naval base at Cuba's Guantánamo Bay, where they are to be detained indefinitely, like Haitian refugees, in tents and barracks. Panama agrees to accept some of the refugees on a limited basis.
Canada revamps her immigration rules after years of welcoming more immigrants per capita than any other major industrial nation. Ottawa announces that preference will be given hereafter to those with higher education or skills that will benefit the nation's economy, although spouses and children of immigrants now living in Canada will continue to be admitted without restriction.
A report issued August 17 by the United Nations Population Fund says the best way to avert a catastrophic global population explosion is to give women more choice in determining family size and greater access to education and health care. The world's population has reached an estimated 5.66 billion and is growing at a rate of 94 million per year—the highest rate of increase in history. Overall fertility rates are declining, and annual population growth will begin slowing by 1997, the report adds, but it warns that future fertility rates are hard to predict: the world's population may reach 12.5 billion by 2050 or it may only reach 7.8 billion.
The International Conference on Population and Development held at Cairo September 5 to 13 attracts an estimated 20,000 foreign dignitaries and brings general agreement that people tend to have fewer children when given enough information and access to contraception, but that women must have more education and more power if the conference is to achieve its goal of stabilizing world population at 7.27 billion by 2015.
1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000
| Sci & Tech Chronology: In the year 1994 |
Anthropology
Gen Suwa of the University of Tokyo discovers the first fossil of Ardipithecus ramidus at Aramis, Ethiopia, at this time the oldest known hominid. A. ramidus lived 4,400,000 years bp in woodlands mixed with patches of savanna rather than in the true savanna, which previously had been thought to have been the place where early ancestors of humans first developed. See also 1992 Anthropology; 2001 Anthropology.
AstronomyComet Shoemaker-Levy 9, broken into 21 large fragments, slams into the far side of Jupiter in July, causing fireballs and persistent storms on that planet and permitting scientists on Earth to determine some characteristics of Jupiter's atmosphere.
At the U.S. National Observatory on Kitt Peak in Arizona, the 3.5-m (128-in.) WIYN telescope uses computerized adjustments to its mirror to produce unusually sharp images.
On January 25 the joint U.S. military and science satellite Clementine is launched to map the Moon from lunar orbit. Later it is supposed to visit the asteroid 1620 Geographos, but a malfunction terminates that portion of the mission. See also 1996 Astronomy.
On November 1 the satellite WIND is launched into a figure-8 orbit around Earth and the Moon, where it studies the solar wind. See also 1996 Astronomy.
The Baikal Neutrino Station (NT-200), a.k.a. Baikal Deep Underwater Neutrino Telescope (BDUNT), begins operations in Lake Baikal, Russia. It features underwater detectors at a depth of 1200 m (4000 ft) that monitor about 1,000,000 m3 (35,000,000 cu ft) of water for Cerenkov radiation (flashes of light) caused when neutrinos collide with atoms and produce muons that move faster than the speed of light in water. See also 2000 Astronomy.
BiologyThree new species of large mammal are captured alive for the first time. One is the saola, or forest goat, from Vietnam, identified just the previous year. Also from the Vietnamese forest, scientists locate the first live specimens of the giant muntjac, or barking deer. The third newly captured mammal, from New Guinea, is the black-and-white tree kangaroo, known previously only from a photograph. See also 1993 Biology.
Alfred G. Gilman [b. New Haven, Connecticut, July 1, 1941] and Martin Rodbell [b. Baltimore, Maryland, December 1, 1925, d. December 7, 1998] are awarded the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for discovering G-proteins, chemicals that help cells convert extracellular signals into cascades of internal reactions by which cells grow, differentiate, and perform other essential life processes.
ChemistryPeter Armbruster and Sigurd Hofmann at the Gesellschaft fuer Schwerionenforschung (GSI) in Darmstadt, Germany, announce the creation of a few atoms each of element 110 and element 111. In 2003 element 110 will be officially named darmstadtium (Ds).
George A. Olah [b. Budapest, Hungary, May 22, 1927] is awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for his use of superacids and cryogenics to create and stabilize carbocations, important fragments of hydrocarbons that normally occur in the creation of fuels and other chemicals from crude oil, but which could not be studied without the techniques developed by Olah in the early 1960s.
CommunicationA group of more than a hundred software producers, including IBM, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems, form the World Wide Web Consortium to maintain and set standards for use of the system devised in 1990 by Tim Berners-Lee, who is installed as director of the consortium. See also 1991 Communication.
Sun Microsystems introduces JAVA, which takes its name from a slang term for coffee, a staple part of programmers' diets. JAVA is the first universal software language -- the same program will run on any computer platform, including Windows, Macintosh, and UNIX.
ComputersLeonard Adleman demonstrates a biological computer based on DNA that can solve a difficult problem in mathematics. PCR is used to extract the solution to the problem from the DNA.
Apple introduces the first personal computer to use the Power PC RISC chip, the PowerMac.
Earth scienceSeismology reveals that the boundary between Earth's outer core and the mantle is not smooth but is covered with hills and valleys, some as much as 6 km (3.5 mi) high or deep.
Ecology & the environmentTwo species are removed from the U.S. Endangered Species List: the Arctic peregrine falcon (Falco peregrinus tundrius) and the gray whale (Eschrichtius robustus). The falcon population had declined rapidly after the introduction of DDT, which caused reproductive failure through eggshell thinning, but began recovery after DDT was banned in the early 1970s. The gray whale had twice been hunted to the edge of extinction, first in the 1850s and again in the early 1900s, but was given protected status in 1947 and slowly recovered its Pacific population, although the Atlantic population is now extinct. See also 1987 Ecology & the environment; 1995 Ecology & the environment.
MathematicsPeter Shor [b. August 14, 1959] of AT&T Labs devises the first algorithm for factoring large numbers that would use a hypothetical quantum computer. With a quantum computer, the algorithm would solve such problems in a manageable amount of time (known as polynomial time) even for numbers expressed with a very large number of digits. See also 1996 Computers.
Medicine & healthMany people in Hungary are stricken with lead poisoning when a manufacturer uses the red oxide of lead called minium to improve the color of paprika. See also 1991 Ecology & the environment.
PhysicsBertram N. Brockhouse [b. Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada, July 15, 1918] and Clifford D. Shull [b. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, September 23, 1915, d. Medford, Massachusetts, March 31, 2001] are awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for their use of neutron scattering to determine atomic structure.
ToolsCharles K. Rhodes of the University of Chicago develops an X-ray-emitting laser based on exposing xenon clusters to ultraviolet laser light; this produces a burst of hard X rays. See also 1988 Tools.
TransportationThe Russian space program continues its series of extended missions aboard Mir. On January 8 Soyuz TM 18 lifts up to Mir carrying Viktor Afanasyev, Valeri Polyakov, and Yuri Usachyov. Polyakov returns aboard Soyuz TM 20 while the others return on July 9. July 1 brings Soyuz TM 19 carrying Yuri Malenchenko and Talgat Musabayev, who return November 4. The October 3 mission is on Soyuz TM 20 with Yelena Kondakova, Alexander Viktorenko, and Ulf Merbold (of the European Space Agency). Merbold returns aboard Soyuz TM 19 while the others descend on March 22, 1995.
The U.S. space shuttle Discovery is launched February 3 carrying Charles Bolden, Jr., Franklin Chang-Diaz, Jan Davis, Kenneth Reightler, Jr., Ronald Sega, and Sergei Krikalev (the first Russian to fly aboard the U.S. shuttle). It fails in an attempt to deploy the Wake Shield Facility for growing semiconductors. On September 9 Discovery returns to space with Blaine Hammond, Jr., Susan Helms, Mark Lee, J.M. Linenger, Carl Meade, and Richard Richards, who release and recover an astronomical satellite. The crew also uses an instrument to study Earth's atmosphere.
Columbia is launched on March 4 with a crew of Andrew Allen, John Caspar, Charles Gemar, Marsha Ivins, and Pierre Thuot. The crew tests technologies that will be needed for construction of the International Space Station (ISS). On July 8 Columbia is again launched, this time with Robert Cabana, Leroy Chiao, James Halsell, Jr., Richard Hieb, Donald Thomas, Carl Walz, and Chiaki Naito-Mukai (Japan's first female astronaut) aboard. They study the effects of microgravity on a variety of living organisms.
Endeavour flies on April 9 with Jay Apt, Kevin Chilton, Michael Clifford, Linda Godwin, Sidney Guitierrez, and Thomas Jones. It carries the Space Radar Laboratory (SRL-1), which scans about 12 percent of Earth's surface. On September 30 Endeavour's crew consists of Michael Baker, Daniel Bursch, Thomas Jones, Steven Smith, Terrence Wilcutt, and Peter Wisoff. This is the second flight of Space Radar Laboratory (SRL-2), which scans for changes in Earth sites monitored in the April mission.
Atlantis is launched on November 3 with a crew of Curtis Brown, Donald McMonagle, Scott Parazynski, Joseph Tanner, and Jean-François Clervoy (of the European Space Agency). They study environmental changes on Earth.
The 50-km- (30-mi-) long Eurotunnel (a.k.a. the Chunnel) under the English Channel is opened, linking France and the United Kingdom. See also 1990 Transportation.
| US Literature Chronology: 1994 |
Drama and Theater
- Edward Albee: Three Tall Women. A powerful woman dominates this play, first as a young adult, then in middle age, and finally as an aging matriarch. Albee has confessed that the character is based on his rather difficult adoptive mother, a figure--like the character in the play--prone to great hatreds and paranoia. At the same time, though, she is impressive for her extraordinary self-confidence and stamina. The play also contains Albee's trademark absurdist humor. Critics consider it his finest work in thirty years.
- Rita Dove: The Darker Face of the Earth. Dove's first play, a verse drama, is a version of the Oedipus myth set during slavery, as the white wife of a plantation owner has a black son who is sold into slavery. He returns twenty years later for a fateful confrontation with his origins.
- Cormac McCarthy: The Stonemason. In a departure of genre and subject, the novelist offers a domestic drama examining the lives of four generations of a black family in Louisville during the 1970s.
- Terrence McNally: Love! Valour! Compassion! McNally, the master of ensemble performances, brings eight gay men together during summer holidays in the home of an aging choreographer and his young companion. They explore the nature of masculine love and friendship and the search for solidarity. A Tony Award winner, the play is considered one of McNally's major achievements.
- Arthur Miller: Broken Glass. Miller's first full-length play on Broadway since The American Clock (1984) explores the impact of the Holocaust from the perspective of the physical and sexual paralysis of a woman as a result of the persecution of Jews in Germany during and after Kristallnacht, the "night of broken glass," in November 1938.
- Anna Deavere Smith (b. 1950): Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992. Smith's one-woman show depicts various viewpoints on the Rodney King case and the riots following the verdict, by which the policemen responsible for his beating were acquitted. Smith has been a director, an actress, and a teacher of acting at New York University and the University of Southern California.
- Stephen Sondheim: Passion. Although critics are divided over the merits of what one calls a "chamber opera," others declare it a work of great distinction. Passion explores the nature of love--both its transcendent power and its destructiveness--as an army officer is ordered out of town and has to leave his lover. Even as he writes letters to her, sustaining their love, he is stalked by Fosca, a revolting, self-pitying woman who has fallen in love with him.
Fiction
- Sherman Alexie: Reservation Blues. Alexie wins the American Book Award for his first novel, about the meteoric career of an Indian rock 'n' roll band. It would be followed by Indian Killer (1996), a murder mystery set in Seattle, depicting tensions between the white and Indian communities there.
- Julia Alvarez: In the Time of Butterflies. Alvarez's novel treats an incident in Dominican history in which three sisters who denounced dictator Rafael Trujillo are persecuted.
- Louis Auchincloss: The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss. The author's fiftieth book collects nineteen stories published over the course of a long and accomplished career. The oldest, "Maud," had originally appeared forty years earlier, and the most recent are reprinted from Auchincloss's collection Tales of Yesteryear (1994).
- John Barth: Once upon a Time. Barth sets sail yet again in this fictional memoir of a middle-aged writer's recollections during an autumnal cruise of Chesapeake Bay with his wife. It presents a vintage Barthian review of life and its many fictions.
- Thomas Berger: Robert Crews. Berger updates Defoe's Robinson Crusoe for the 1990s, depicting the survival experiences of a middle-class man when the plane carrying his fishing party in the wilderness goes down. It would be followed by Suspects (1996), about a homicide investigation.
- T. Coraghessan Boyle: Without a Hero. Boyle's fourth story collection is marked by the same black humor he brings to his longer fiction. Of special note is a parody of Ernest Hemingway's book about big-game hunting (The Green Hills of Africa, 1935) and "Filthy with Things," in which a wealthy California couple bring in a "specialist in aggregation disorders" to help them cope with their collectibles.
- Harold Brodkey: Profane Friendship. Brodkey's second (and final) novel dramatizes the affair of an American novelist and an Italian actor in Venice. As reviewer Guy Manne-Abbot observes, "Brodkey interrogates the limits of truth and love with great power."
- Robert Olen Butler: They Whisper. A Vietnam War veteran recounts the breakdown of his marriage and his search for sexual and religious fulfillment in Butler's follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (1992).
- Caleb Carr (b. 1955): The Alienist. Carr brings his talents as a military historian to bear on this best-selling mystery, the story of the hunt for a serial killer in New York City in 1896. Intermingling historical figures such as Jacob Riis and Theodore Roosevelt with fictional characters, the novel achieves some of its best effects through an accretion of historical detail, reminding many of E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime.
- Edwidge Danticat (b. 1969): Breath, Eye, Memory. The Haitian-born writer's acclaimed first novel tells the story of a young woman who leaves her island community to be reunited with her mother, forcing her to confront her past and her mixed heritage.
- E. L. Doctorow: The Waterworks. Set in New York City in 1871, the novel centers on Augustus Pemberton, a tycoon presumed to be dead until his son spots him one day on a Manhattan street. Doctorow grandly re-creates the world of Boss Tweed and waterfront taverns, the era of robber barons and the mansions they erect in their capital of capitalism. The mystery is never quite solved, even though the novel's detective does penetrate the waterworks, the venue for the metropolis's conniving financiers.
- Bret Easton Ellis: The Informers. Ellis's collection of loosely related stories, depicting the lifestyles of the young and feckless in Los Angeles, reflects the author's characteristic deadpan prose style, describing fashionable ennui that regularly explodes into graphic violence.
- Louise Erdrich: The Bingo Palace. The fourth in Erdrich's series of novels portraying contemporary life on a Chippewa reservation in North Dakota finds Lipsha Morrisey returning home to deal with his family, his heritage, and his romance with Shawnee Ray.
- William Gaddis: A Frolic of His Own. Gaddis's National Book Award-winning novel addresses the subject of law through the author's customary methods of indirect, nearly free association. The result is a pleasing, accessible story about a man who contrives to have his own car run him over, only to focus then on whom to sue for the accident.
- William H. Gass: The Tunnel. Narrated by William Frederick Kohler, a history professor at a Midwestern university and an expert on Nazi Germany, the novel portrays Kohler as a kind of fascist at home, contemptuously dominating his wife, family, and colleagues. Critics consider it a brilliant study in solipsism.
- Ellen Gilchrist: The Age of Miracles. Gilchrist's story collection features Rhoda Manning, the child in Victory over Japan (1984) and the wife and mother in Net of Jewels (1992). She is now a divorced, middle-aged writer coping with aging and with failed relationships.
- David Guterson (b. 1956): Snow Falling on Cedars. Guterson's first novel concerns a murder and anti-Japanese prejudice on a small island in Puget Sound in the 1950s. The novel, a bestseller and a critical success, wins the PEN/Faulkner Award. Born in Seattle, Guterson taught high school English and was a contributing editor of Harper's Magazine.
- Joseph Heller: Closing Time. A sequel to Heller's 1961 classic Catch-22, the book resurrects the earlier novel's protagonist, Yossarian, now living alone in Manhattan. Twice divorced, he is facing his mortality. Time magazine reviewer Paul Gray finds the sequel "an alternately appealing and annoying bag of mostly old tricks."
- John Irving: A Son of the Circus. Irving assembles his characteristic cast of eccentrics in a series of often bizarre situations, as an Indian-born orthopedic surgeon living in Canada returns to Bombay to study the genetics of dwarfism among Indian circus clowns. Bharati Mukherjee calls the novel Irving's "most daring and most vibrant" but also his "least satisfying"--he "India-surfs himself into exhaustion until the subcontinent becomes, for the reader as well as for one of his characters, neither symbol nor place but a blur of alarming images."
- Jonathan Lethem (b. 1964): Gun, with Occasional Music. Lethem's debut novel combines science fiction with the conventions of hard-boiled detective stories. Chosen by Publishers Weekly as one of the best books of the year, this novel about what Lethem calls a "Private Inquisitor" is set in the twenty-first century and includes oddities such as a trench-coat-wearing kangaroo named Joey Castle and the abolition of both memory and questions. Born in New York City, Lethem would win the National Book Critics Circle Award for his novel Motherless Brooklyn (1999).
- Barry Lopez: Field Notes. In this story collection, nature writer Lopez translates his close observation of natural phenomena into close observation of other observers, each of whom--like the anchorite in the story "Teal Creek"--has devoted himself or herself to a numinous location in the manner of Annie Dillard in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974).
- Cormac McCarthy: The Crossing. This second novel in the Border trilogy concerns Billy Parham, a young horseman dragging a trapped wolf from New Mexico to the Sierra Madre of Chihuahua, Mexico. On the way he encounters several characters, many of whom reflect on the nature of life in the West--a place of dazzling beauty and hope but also the territory of beasts and incredible violence. More discursive than All the Pretty Horses, the novel presents a sharp-eyed revision of the meaning of the West in the American consciousness.
- Howard Norman: The Bird Artist. Ethnographer-turned-novelist Norman employs details of northern island life he learned while researching a remote Inuit whale-hunting community. This unconventional love story set in Newfoundland is a finalist for the 1994 National Book Award.
- Joyce Carol Oates: What I Lived For. Oates's twenty-third novel concerns a middle-aged everyman named Corky Corcoran, who on Memorial Day 1992 discovers why he is so driven to consume food, sex, and drink and to demand attention and respect in an attempt to escape the past. New York Times reviewer James Carroll calls the novel's conclusion "a ringing affirmation of the most basic law of private and public morality and also of fiction: that character is destiny."
- Tim O'Brien: In the Lake of the Woods. O'Brien's novel about a Vietnam War veteran charged with his wife's murder is called by Time magazine the best work of fiction in 1994. O'Brien's most wide-ranging and ambitious work, it blends fictional and nonfictional elements in the manner of John Dos Passos's U.S.A.
- Grace Paley: Collected Stories. A National Book Award nominee and a Pulitzer Prize finalist, Paley's collected stories prompt renewed critical appreciation for her mastery of the short fiction form.
- Jayne Anne Phillips: Shelter. This initiation novel involves a drifter, two young sisters, a feral boy, and violence at a summer camp in West Virginia in 1963. Praised for its atmospherics, it is also condemned by some critics for being too self-consciously literary. Nonetheless, this second novel by the much-praised author of the story collection Black Tickets (1979) wins several awards.
- Tom Robbins: Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas. Robbins's comic fantasy depicts Gwen, a stockbroker, torn between straitlaced Belford and his born-again monkey and Larry Diamond, who offers her a trip to Timbuktu. As reviewer Karen Karbo observes, "To love this book, the reader must be entranced and entertained by Diamond's pontificating about, for example, the visit by amphibian aliens to a village in sub-Saharan Africa, occasionally punctuated by Mr. Robbins's breathtakingly nonsensical metaphors."
- Henry Roth: Mercy of a Rude Stream: A Star Shines over Morris Park. The first major work by Roth to appear since his highly influential novel Call It Sleep (1934) is an autobiographical bildungsroman about a Jewish writer in New York in the 1920s and 1930s. It is the first work in a projected six-volume cycle. A second volume, A Diving Rock on the Hudson, would be published in 1995; a third, From Bondage (1996), and a fourth, Requiem for Harlem (1998), would appear posthumously.
- Peter Taylor: In the Tennessee Country. Taylor's last completed work is an expanded version of a short story, "Cousin Aubrey," which had appeared in 1993. Set in the Tennessee of 1916 and concerning the narrator's obsession with a lost cousin, the novel evokes the genteel South of a bygone era.
- John Updike: The After Life: And Other Stories. Updike's eleventh short fiction collection contains stories about middle age and--like many of Updike's works--is highly autobiographical. Like one of his early collections, Pigeon Feathers (1962), many of the stories include a fictionalized version of Updike's own mother.
Literary Criticism and Scholarship
- Louis Auchincloss: The Style's the Man: Reflections on Proust, Fitzgerald, Wharton, Vidal, and Others. Novelist Auchincloss writes entertainingly about literary fashion, discussing the once overlooked, now fashionable Edith Wharton and making a case for the seemingly superannuated Ivy Compton-Burnett (1892-1969).
- Harold Bloom: The Western Canon: The Books and Schools of the Ages. Bloom calls this defense of classic literary texts by "dead white men" a polemic against "the recent politics of multiculturalism." It predictably provokes the wrath of academics whom Bloom labels "the School of Resentment"--feminists, Marxists, New Historicists, deconstructionists, semioticians, and others.
- Gerald Early (b. 1952): The Culture of Bruising: Essays on Prizefighting, Literature, and Modern American Culture. Early's collection takes a novel and notably eclectic approach to contemporary art and life, combining disparate elements in this engaging collection, which wins the 1994 National Book Critics Circle Award. Born in Philadelphia and educated at the University of Pennsylvania and Cornell, Early is a professor of English and African American studies at Washington University.
- Louise Glück: Proofs and Theories. This award-winning collection of essays on poetry examines the work of modernist masters such as T. S. Eliot and offers a tribute to Glück's teacher and mentor, Stanley Kunitz.
- Irving Howe: A Critic's Notebook. This posthumously published collection of essays, edited by Howe's son, is notable both for its insights and for its argument against formalism. According to Howe, "If you are caught discussing a fictional character in the way that you might talk about a human being, you will probably be convicted of being a 'naive reader' by new formalist critics."
- J. E. Lighter (b. 1949): Historical Dictionary of American Slang. The publication of the first of three volumes of Lighter's study is enthusiastically received by scholars on both sides of the Atlantic as a landmark book. The chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary proclaims the work "one of those rare books which prompts the realization that you have never seen the subject in sharp focus before." Lighter is a professor of English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Nonfiction
- Shari Benstock (b. 1944): No Gifts from Chance. Benstock's biography of the novelist Edith Wharton takes its title from a poem by Matthew Arnold, describing someone who "conquered fate." It is the first Wharton biography to draw on unpublished sources, which Benstock uses to buttress her thesis that the novelist underwent a "self-transformation" from her supposed destiny as a society matron. Benstock is a professor of English at the University of Miami.
- John Berendt (b. 1939): Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Berendt's portrait of Savannah, Georgia, including a murder case in which a respected antique dealer is accused of killing his young companion, proves to be breakout hit, remaining on the bestseller list for more than 186 weeks. Edmund White calls it "the best non-fiction novel since In Cold Blood." Berendt had been an editor of New York Magazine (1977-1979) and a columnist at Esquire (1982-1994).
- Elizabeth Bishop: One Art: Letters. Beginning with correspondence the poet wrote while still an undergraduate at Vassar and ending with a letter written the day she died, this collection constitutes a kind of autobiography, filled with personal revelations and insights into Bishop's work.
- David J. Garrow (b. 1953): Liberty and Sexuality. In his detailed study of the landmark U.S. Supreme Court abortion case, Roe v. Wade, Garrow, a professor of political science at Duke University, covers uncharted ground, interviewing minor players and coming up with telling details that breathe new life into this modern battleground of morality.
- Henry Louis Gates Jr.: Colored People: A Memoir. Gates provides an account of his childhood and upbringing in a West Virginia mill town during the 1950s and 1960s. It is an authentic portrait of black life before integration and black liberation.
- David Gelernter (b. 1955): The Muse in the Machine: Computerizing the Poetry of Human Thought. In 1993 the author had survived a mail-bomb attack by the antitechnology terrorist known as the "Unabomber." Gelernter spent the next year recuperating and finishing this book, which establishes operative principles for human consciousness. It identifies a high-focus mode of human thought for rational ideas and an opposite low-focus mode as the source of creative ideas.
- Doris Kearns Goodwin: No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt; The Home Front in World War II. Goodwin's Pulitzer Prize-winning joint biographical portrait during the war years offers an unprecedented glimpse inside the couple's marriage and the Roosevelt administration.
- Lucy Grealy (1963-2002): Autobiography of a Face. Grealy memorably recounts the story of a childhood cancer that left her horribly disfigured. Some thirty reconstructive surgeries later, Grealy explores not only her own trauma but "the deep bottomless grief... called ugliness."
- bell hooks: Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. hooks argues for a participatory model of education, in which students are actively involved in the process and not seen merely as the recipients of knowledge. Her work wins praise for its impassioned intellectuality.
- Erica Jong: Fear of Fifty. The author supplies autobiographical reflections along with a consideration of aging. It is described by one reviewer as "funny, wise, candid, poignant, brash, painful, soul-baring, occasionally moralistic, but never dull." Jong would follow it with an essay collection, What Do Women Want?: Bread, Roses, Sex, Power (1998).
- June Jordan (1936-2002): Technical Difficulties: African American Notes on the State of the Union. A self-confessed radical and part of the cultural left, the Harlem-born poet, novelist, and essayist sets out a program for state-supported family life and employment and attacks the record of the Reagan-Bush years. While critics take issue with her politics, they find her personal essays, reminiscences, and vivid re-creation of neighborhood life in Brooklyn compelling and supportive of her political opinions.
- Paul Monette: Last Watch of the Night. Monette's book is devoted to the state of the nation during the AIDS crisis as well as his own illness. Monette castigates institutions--such as the Catholic Church--that have failed him and others.
- Sherwin Nuland (b. 1930): How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter. Physician Nuland draws on personal and professional experience to demythologize death in his National Book Award-winning book. Nuland had been a surgeon at the Yale-New Haven Hospital before beginning a writing career. He is the author of Doctors: The Biography of Medicine (1988) and How We Live (1998).
- Reynolds Price: A Whole New Life. Novelist Reynolds Price provides a chronological narrative of his being stricken with spinal cord cancer in 1984.
- Brent Staples (b. 1951): Parallel Time: Growing Up in Black and White. New York Times editorial writer Staples writes a coming-of-age memoir about his estrangement not only from his highly dysfunctional family but from the white world he had found so inviting. After the death of a younger brother involved in the drug trade, Staples raises the question that informs this memoir: where does the family end and the individual begin?
- Gloria Steinem: Moving Beyond Words. Steinem's collection of essays treats the various ways in which gender distinctions operate in modern American society. Included are essays such as "The Masculinization of Wealth," "Sex, Lies, and Advertising," and "What If Freud Were Phyllis?"
- Jonathan Weiner (b. 1953): The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time. Weiner's profile of evolutionary biologists Peter and Rosemary Grant and their study of finches on the Galapagos Islands wins the Pulitzer Prize. Weiner, a senior editor of The Sciences, is the author of the column "Field Notes."
- James Welch and Paul Stekler: Killing Custer: The Battle of the Little Big Horn and the Fate of the Plains Indians. Blackfoot novelist Welch brings a different perspective to the Indian wars in this narrative of the Battle of Little Big Horn, tracing both the foreground and the aftereffects of the battle, along with Welch's family history.
- John Edgar Wideman: Fatheralong. Wideman provides "a meditation on fathers and sons, race and society." Combining autobiography with social commentary, Wideman's book continues the memoir he had begun with Brothers and Keepers (1984).
- Edward O. Wilson: Naturalist. Prominent biologist Wilson applies the principles of sociobiology to his own life, describing how a lonely nature-loving boy grew to become a world-class scientist. Reviewer Alan Lightman declares the book "one of the greatest scientific autobiographies ever written."
- Tobias Wolff: In Pharaoh's Army. Wolff continues the memoirs begun in 1989 with This Boy's Life, recalling his army service in Vietnam, where as a special forces soldier he was consigned to a muddy backwater with a great deal of time to meditate on the enemy and his own absurd experiences.
Poetry
- John Ashbery: And the Stars Were Shining. In the title poem of his sixteenth volume Ashbery declares, "We sure live in a bizarre and furious / galaxy." The remainder of the collection's fifty-eight poems are briefer than this one but arrive at similar gnomic conclusions in a typical display of Ashbery's free association.
- Amy Clampitt: A Silence Opens. Clampitt's fifth and final collection before her death shows the poet's characteristic wry and challenging meditations on the forces of history and life's odd juxtapositions. These are revealed in "Discovery," which connects the perspective of a manatee with the liftoff of a space shuttle.
- Carolyn Forché: The Angel of History. This Los Angeles Times Book Prize-winning poetic sequence reviews modern history, including the Holocaust, Hiroshima, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the Chernobyl disaster, and genocide in El Salvador, meditating on the challenge of shaping language to deal with these events.
- Joy Harjo: The Woman Who Fell from the Sky. This collection of prose poems is based on an Iroquois myth about the descent of a female creator and deals with the forces of creation and destruction in contemporary society.
- Edward Hirsch (b. 1950): Earthly Measures. This collection of poetic meditations on the manifestations of the divine in everyday life is one of only a handful of contemporary poetry volumes that critic Harold Bloom considered worthy enough to include in his controversial book The Western Canon (1994). Born in Chicago, Hirsch teaches English at the University of Houston.
- Richard Howard: Like Most Revelations. The verse in this collection takes the form of dramatic monologue and alternates between elegies for friends who have recently succumbed to AIDS and other more mundane concerns, such as the wealthy foreign tourists summed up in Centenary Peripeteia and Anagnoresis Beginning with a Line by Henry James. The review in Poetry calls the volume "limber, literate, jubilantly crafted, wry, and above all, densely populated."
- Galway Kinnell: Imperfect Thirst. Kinnell's collection offers reflections on the past, relationships, music, language, sex, and mortality, containing works such as "My Mother's R & R," "The Night," "Rapture," and "The Cellist."
- Kenneth Koch: One Train. This collection of new verse is one of two volumes Koch publishes this year, the other being a selection of poems from the period 1950-1988. The first collection, which brings him the Bollingen Prize, includes the Chinese-influenced "One Step" and a series of short verse collectively called "On Aesthetics."
- Philip Levine: The Simple Truth. The poet's fifteenth collection is elegiac but unsentimental. A fitting companion to his autobiographical essays, The Bread of Time (1994), the book is awarded the Pulitzer Prize.
- W. S. Merwin: Travels. Merwin's collection features narrative poems based on historical figures such as Arthur Rimbaud, David Douglas, and Manuel Cordova. Other poems include "The Hill of Evening," "A Distance," "Another Place," and "Immortelles."
- Cathy Song: School Figures. Song's collection treats the Hawaiian-American experience in poems on the poet's childhood and family, including such admired works as "The Grammar of Silk," "A Conservative View," "Sunworshippers," and "Journey."
- James Tate: Worshipful Company of Fletchers. Tate's National Book Award-winning poetry collection is full of his trademark inventiveness, which one critic declares, "solicits the reader with the familiar, then proceeds to act as trail guide to other worlds."
| Wikipedia: 1994 |
| Millennium: | 2nd millennium |
|---|---|
| Centuries: | 19th century - 20th century - 21st century |
| Decades: | 1960s 1970s 1980s - 1990s - 2000s 2010s 2020s |
| Years: | 1991 1992 1993 - 1994 - 1995 1996 1997 |
| 1994 by topic: |
| Subject: Archaeology - Architecture - Art |
| Aviation - Film - Home video - Literature (Poetry) Meteorology - Music (Country, Metal) Rail transport - Radio - Science - Spaceflight |
| Sports - Television - Video gaming |
| Countries: Australia - Canada - Ecuador - India UK - United States - Zimbabwe |
| Leaders: Sovereign states - State leaders |
| Religious leaders - Law |
| Categories: Births - Deaths - Works - Introductions |
| Establishments - Disestablishments - Awards |
1994 (MCMXCIV) was a common year starting on Saturday (link will display full 1994 Gregorian calendar).
The year 1994 was designated as the "International Year of the Family" and the "International Year of Sport and the Olympic Ideal" by the United Nations.
| Contents: |
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Events of 1994
January
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- January 1 – The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) goes into effect.
- January 1 – The Zapatista Army of National Liberation begins their war in Chiapas, Mexico.
- January 6 – In Detroit, Michigan, Nancy Kerrigan is clubbed on the right leg by an assailant, under orders from figure skating rival Tonya Harding's ex-husband.
- January 8 – Soyuz TM-18: Valeri Polyakov begins his 437.7 day orbit, eventually setting the world record for days spent in orbit.
- January 11 – The Irish government announces the end of a 15-year broadcasting ban on the Provisional Irish Republican Army and its political arm Sinn Féin.
- January 11 – The Superhighway Summit is held at UCLA's Royce Hall. It is the first conference to discuss the growing information superhighway and is presided over by U.S. Vice President Al Gore.
- January 14 – U.S. President Bill Clinton and Russian President Boris Yeltsin sign the Kremlin Accords, which stop the preprogrammed aiming of nuclear missiles toward each country's targets, and also provide for the dismantling of the nuclear arsenal in Ukraine.
- January 15 – The SS American Star breaks tow in the Atlantic Ocean and is beached at Fuerteventura in the Canary Islands a few days later.
- January 17 – The 1994 Northridge earthquake, magnitude 6.7, hits the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles at 4:31 a.m., killing 72 and leaving 26,029 homeless.
- January 18 – Cando event: Witnesses claim to have seen a fireball in the sky lasting for almost 1 minute in Cando, Spain (a possible bolide impact).
- January 19 – Record cold temperatures hit the eastern United States. The coldest temperature ever measured in Indiana state history, −36°F (−38°C), is recorded in New Whiteland, Indiana.
- January 20 – In South Carolina, Shannon Faulkner becomes the first female cadet to attend The Citadel, but soon drops out.
- January 21 – Lorena Bobbitt is found not guilty by reason of insanity on charges of mutilating her husband John.
- January 25 – U.S. President Bill Clinton delivers his first State of the Union address, calling for health care reform, a ban on assault weapons, and welfare reform.
- January 26 – A man fires 2 blank shots at Charles, Prince of Wales in Sydney, Australia.
- January 28 – The first trial of accused murderer Lyle Menendez ends in a mistrial. He and his brother Erik are later found guilty and sentenced to life in prison without parole.
- January 30 – Super Bowl XXVIII: The Dallas Cowboys hand the Buffalo Bills their fourth consecutive Super Bowl loss, 30-13.
February
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- February 1 – In Portland, Oregon, Tonya Harding's ex-husband Jeff Gillooly pleads guilty for his role in attacking figure skater Nancy Kerrigan. He accepts a plea bargain, admitting to racketeering charges in exchange for testimony against Harding.
- February 3 – William J. Perry is sworn in as the United States Secretary of Defense.
- February 4 – The Federal Open Market Committee raises the Fed Funds target rate for the first time since May 1989. The rate is raised by 25 basis points to 3¼ percent [1].
- February 5 – Byron De La Beckwith is convicted of the 1963 murder of civil rights leader Medgar Evers.
- February 6 – Markale massacres: A Bosnian Serb Army mortar shell kills 68 civilians and wounds about 200 in a Sarajevo marketplace.
- February 9 – The Vance-Owen Peace plan for Bosnia and Herzegovina is announced.
- February 12 – Edvard Munch's painting "The Scream" is stolen in Oslo (and is recovered on May 7).
- February 12 – February 27 – The 1994 Winter Olympics are held in Lillehammer.
- February 22 – Aldrich Ames and his wife are charged with spying for the Soviet Union by the United States Department of Justice. Ames is later convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment; his wife receives 5 years in prison.
- February 24 – In Gloucester, local police begins excavations at 25 Cromwell Street, the home of Fred West, suspects in multiple murders. On February 28, he and his wife are arrested.
- February 25 – Israeli Kahanist Baruch Goldstein opens fire inside the Cave of the Patriarchs in the West Bank; he kills 29 Muslims before worshippers beat him to death.
- February 27 – Australian Federal Sports & Environment Minister Ros Kelly resigns over "The Sports Rorts Affair", where it was alleged that she apportioned money for community sporting projects in a pork barreling fashion.
- February 28 – United States F-16 pilots shoot down 4 Serbian fighter aircraft over Bosnia and Herzegovina for violation of the Operation Deny Flight and its no-fly zone.
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- March 1 – A lone terrorist kills Ari Halberstam during an attack on 14 Jewish students on the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City. [2]
- March 1 – South Africa cedes Walvis Bay to Namibia.
- March 1 – Mary Ellen Withrow begins her term of office as Treasurer of the United States, serving under President Bill Clinton.
- March 5 – A gunman takes 9 people hostage in the Salt Lake City Public Library Hostage Incident.
- March 6 – A referendum in Moldova results in the electorate voting against possible reunification with Romania.
- March 7 – Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc.: The Supreme Court of the United States rules that parodies of an original work are generally covered by the doctrine of fair use.
- March 12 – A photo by Marmaduke Wetherell, previously touted as 'proof' of the Loch Ness monster, is confirmed to be a hoax.
- March 12 – The Church of England ordains its first female priests.
- March 14 – Apple Computer, Inc. releases the first Macintosh computers to use the new PowerPC Microprocessors. This is considered to be a major leap in personal computer, as well as Macintosh history.
- March 15 – U.S. troops are withdrawn from Somalia.
- March 16 – In Portland, Oregon, Tonya Harding pleads guilty to conspiracy to hinder prosecution for trying to cover-up an attack on figure skating rival Nancy Kerrigan. She is fined $100,000 and banned from the sport.
- March 20 – Italian journalist Ilaria Alpi and TV cameraman Miran Hrovatin are assassinated in Somalia.
- March 21 – The 66th Academy Awards, hosted by Whoopi Goldberg, are held at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles, California. Steven Spielberg's Holocaust drama, Schindler's List, wins 7 Oscars including Best Picture and Best Director (Spielberg).
- March 23 – Green Ramp disaster: Two military aircraft collide over Pope Air Force Base, North Carolina causing dozens of fatalities.
- March 27 – TV tycoon Silvio Berlusconi's right-wing coalition wins the Italian general election.
- March 27 – The biggest tornado outbreak in 1994 occurs in the southeastern United States; 1 tornado hits a Goshen United Methodist Church in Piedmont, Alabama, killing 22 people.
- March 27 – The Eurofighter takes its first flight in Manching, Germany.
- March 28 – Shell House Massacre: Inkatha Freedom Party and ANC supporters battle in central Johannesburg South Africa.
- March 31 – The journal Nature reports the finding in Ethiopia of the first complete Australopithecus afarensis skull (see Human evolution).
April
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- April 5 – Kurt Cobain, lead singer and guitarist for Nirvana, commits suicide with a shotgun blast to the head.
- April 6 – Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana and Burundi President Cyprien Ntaryamira die when a missile shoots down their jet near Kigali, Rwanda. This is taken as a pretext to begin the Rwandan Genocide.
- April 7 – The Rwandan Genocide begins in Kigali, Rwanda.
- April 8 – Michelangelo's Universal Judgement is reopened to the public after 10 years of restorations.
- April 8 – Kurt Cobain, songwriter and frontman for the band Nirvana, is found dead at his Lake Washington home.
- April 16 – Voters in Finland decide to join the European Union in a referendum.
- April 20 – Paul Touvier is found guilty of ordering the execution of 7 Jews when he served in the Vichy France Milice.
- April 21 – The Red Cross estimates that hundreds of thousands of Tutsi have been killed in Rwanda.
- April 25 – Sultan Azlan Muhibbudin Shah ibni Almarhum Sultan Yusuff Izzudin Shah Ghafarullahu-lahu ends his term as the 9th Yang di-Pertuan Agong of Malaysia.
- April 25 – The largest high school arson ever in the United States is started at Burnsville High School, in Burnsville, Minnesota, resulting in over 15 million dollars in damages. The same arsonist also goes on to set arsons at Edina High School and Minnetonka High School. [3]
- April 26 – Tuanku Jaafar ibni Almarhum Tuanku Abdul Rahman, Yang di-Pertuan Besar of Negeri Sembilan, becomes the 10th Yang di-Pertuan Agong of Malaysia.
- April 26 – China Airlines Flight 140, an Airbus A300, crashes while landing at Nagoya, Japan, killing 264 people.
- April 27 – South Africa holds its first fully multiracial elections, marking the final end of apartheid.
- April 29 – Commodore International declares bankruptcy.
- April 30 – Formula 1 driver Roland Ratzenberger is killed while qualifying for the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix.
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- May 1 – Three-time Formula One world champion Ayrton Senna is killed in an accident during the San Marino Grand Prix in Imola, Italy.
- May 3 – Japan signs the 200th treaty between itself and the African nation of Chad, making this day known as JapaTreaty 200.
- May 5 – The Bishkek Protocol between Armenia and Azerbaijan was signed, effectivelly freezing the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
- May 6 – The Channel Tunnel, which took 15,000 workers over 7 years to complete, opens between England and France, enabling passengers to travel between the 2 countries in 35 minutes.
- May 10 – Nelson Mandela is inaugurated as South Africa's first Black president.
- May 10 – Illinois executes serial killer John Wayne Gacy by lethal injection for the murder of 33 young men and boys.
- May 10 – An annular eclipse of the sun is visible across much of North America.
- May 12 – Ice hockey becomes Canada's official winter sport.
- May 12 – U.K. Labour Party leader John Smith, 55, dies of a heart attack. Deputy leader Margaret Beckett stands in until an election can be held. Smith is succeeded by Tony Blair, the 41-year-old Scottish-born Member of Parliament for Sedgefield in County Durham.
- May 17 – Malawi holds its first multiparty elections.
- May 19 – Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis dies in her home of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma at the age of 64.
- May 21 – Italian former minister and Christian Democrat leader Giulio Andreotti is accused of Mafia allegiance by the court of Palermo.
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- June 6 – June 8 – Ceasefire negotiations for the Yugoslav War begin in Geneva; they agree to a 1-month cessation of hostilities (which does not last more than a few days).
- June 12 – Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman are murdered outside the Simpson home in Los Angeles, California. O.J. Simpson is later acquitted of the killings, but is held liable in a civil suit.
- June 14 – Hacker Kevin Poulsen pleads guilty to 7 counts of mail fraud, wire and computer fraud, money laundering, and obstruction of justice.
- June 14 – The New York Rangers defeat the Vancouver Canucks at Madison Square Garden, New York in Game 7 of the 1994 Stanley Cup Finals, winning their first Stanley Cup Championship in 54 years and ending the Curse of 1940.
- June 15 – Israel and the Vatican establish full diplomatic relations.
- June 17 – NFL star O.J. Simpson and his friend Al Cowlings flee from police in his white Ford Bronco. The low-speed chase ends at Simpson's Brentwood, Los Angeles, California mansion, where he surrenders.
- June 17 – The 1994 FIFA World Cup begins in the United States.
- June 22 – The Houston Rockets defeat the New York Knicks at The Summit in Texas in Game 7 of the 1993–94 NBA season, to win their first NBA Championship.
- June 23 – The International Olympic Committee celebrates their first centennial.
- June 24 – U.S. Air Force pilot Bud Holland crashes a B-52 in Fairchild Air Force Base, Washington as a result of pilot error.
- June 28 – Members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult release a sarin gas attack at Matsumoto, Japan, killing 7 and injuring 660.
- June 30 – An Airbus A330 crashes during a test flight near Toulouse, France, where Airbus is based, killing the seven-person crew. The test was meant to simulate an engine failure at low speed with maximum angle of climb.
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| 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 |
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- July 2 – Colombian footballer Andrés Escobar, 27, is shot dead in Medellín. His murder is commonly attributed as retaliation for the own goal Escobar scored in the 1994 FIFA World Cup against the United States.
- July 6 – Fourteen firefighters die in the South Canyon wildfire on Storm King Mountain in Colorado. The event inspires the 1999 book Fire on the Mountain.
- July 7 – 1994 civil war in Yemen: Aden is occupied by troops from North Yemen.
- July 15 – July 21 – The planet Jupiter is hit by 21 large fragments of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 over the course of 6 days.
- July 17 – Brazil wins the 1994 FIFA World Cup, defeating Italy by 3-2 in penalties (full time 0-0).
- July 18 – In Buenos Aires, a terrorist attack destroys a building housing several Jewish organizations, killing 85 and injuring many more (see AMIA Bombing).
- July 19 Four 26-pound ceiling tiles fall from the roof of the Kingdome in Seattle, Washington, just hours before a scheduled Seattle Mariners game.
- July 20 Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9's Fragment Q1 hits Jupiter.
- July 25 – Israel and Jordan sign the Israel-Jordan Treaty of Peace, which formally ends the state of war that has existed between the nations since 1948.
August
| August | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mo | Tu | We | Th | Fr | Sa | Su |
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 |
| 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 |
| 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 |
| 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 |
| 29 | 30 | 31 | ||||
- August – Wollemia nobilis, a "fossil tree", is discovered by bushwalker David Noble, only 150 km from the largest city in Australia.
- August 1 – Fire destroys the Norwich Central Library in the United Kingdom, including most of its historical records.
- August 1 – The University of London founds the School of Advanced Study, a group of postgraduate research institutes.
- August 5 – Groups of protesters spread from Havana, Cuba's Castillo de la Punta ("Point Castle"), creating the first protests against Fidel Castro's government since 1959.
- August 12 – Woodstock '94 begins in Saugerties, New York. It is the 25-year anniversary of Woodstock in 1969.
- August 12 – Major League Baseball players go on strike, eventually causing the cancellation of the World Series.
- August 20 – In Honolulu, Hawaii, during a circus international performance, an elephant named Tyke crushes her trainer Allen Campbell to death before hundreds of horrified spectators, at the Neal Blaisdell Arena.
- August 23 – Eugene Bullard is posthumously commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the United States Air Force, 33 years after his death, and 77 years to the day after his rejection for U.S. military service in 1917.
- August 31 – The Provisional Irish Republican Army announces a "complete cessation of military operations."
- August 31 – The Russian army leaves Estonia.
September
| September | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mo | Tu | We | Th | Fr | Sa | Su |
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | |||
| 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 |
| 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 |
| 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 |
| 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | ||
- September 3 – Cold War: Russia and the People's Republic of China agree to de-target their nuclear weapons against each other.
- September 4 – Kansai International Airport in Osaka, Japan opens. All international services are transferred from Itami to Kansai.
- September 5 – New South Wales State MP for Cabramatta John Newman is shot outside his home, in Australia's first political assassination since 1977.
- September 8 – USAir Flight 427, a Boeing 737 with 132 people on board, crashes on approach to Pittsburgh International Airport; there are no survivors.
- September 13 – President Bill Clinton signs the Assault Weapons Ban, which bans the manufacture of new weapons with certain features for a period of 10 years.
- September 16 – Danish tour guide Louise Jensen is abducted, raped and murdered by British soldiers.
- September 17 – Heather Whitestone becomes the first hearing impaired contestant to win the Miss America entitlement. Whitestone becomes Miss America 1995.
- September 19 – American troops stage a bloodless invasion of Haiti in order to restore the legitimate elected leader, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, to power.
- September 28 – The car ferry MS Estonia sinks in the Baltic Sea, killing 852.
- September 28 – Jose Francisco Ruiz Massieu, Mexican politician, is assassinated on orders of Raul Salinas de Gortari.
- September–October – Iraq disarmament crisis: Iraq threatens to stop cooperating with UNSCOM inspectors and begins to once again deploy troops near its border with Kuwait. In response, the U.S. begins to deploy troops to Kuwait.
October
| October | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mo | Tu | We | Th | Fr | Sa | Su |
| 1 | 2 | |||||
| 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 |
| 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 |
| 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 |
| 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 |
| 31 | ||||||
- October 1 – In Slovakia, populist leader Vladimir Meciar wins the general election.
- October 4 – In Switzerland, 23 members of the Order of the Solar Temple cult are found dead, a day after 25 of their fellow cultists are similarly discovered in Morin Heights, Quebec.
- October 5 – UNESCO inaugurates World Teachers' Day to celebrate and commemorate the signing of the Recommendation Concerning the Status of Teachers on October 5, 1966.
- October 8 – Iraq disarmament crisis: The President of the United Nations Security Council says that Iraq must withdraw its troops from the Kuwait border, and immediately cooperate with weapons inspectors.
- October 12 – NASA loses radio contact with the Magellan spacecraft as the probe descends into the thick atmosphere of Venus (the spacecraft presumably burned up in the atmosphere either October 13 or October 14).
- October 15 – After 3 years of U.S. exile, Haiti's president Aristide returns to his country.
- October 15 – Iraq disarmament crisis: Following threats by the U.N. Security Council and the U.S., Iraq withdraws troops from its border with Kuwait.
- October 29 – Francisco Martin Duran fires over 2 dozen shots at the White House; he is later convicted of trying to kill President Bill Clinton.
- October 31 – An American Eagle ATR 72 crashes in Roselawn, Indiana, after circling in icy weather, killing 64 passengers.
- October 31 – The Duke of Edinburgh attends a ceremony in Israel, where his late mother, Princess Alice of Battenberg, is honoured as "Righteous among the Nations" for sheltering Jewish families from the Nazis in Athens, during World War II.
November
| November | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mo | Tu | We | Th | Fr | Sa | Su |
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | |
| 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 |
| 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 |
| 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 |
| 28 | 29 | 30 | ||||
- November 3 – A French magazine publishes photo of President François Mitterrand's secret daughter.
- November 3 – The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 is enacted in the UK. The whole of Part V, which covers collective trespass and nuisance on land, includes sections against raves, including the "succession of repetitive beats" definition.
- November 4 – San Francisco: The first conference devoted entirely to the subject of the commercial potential of the World Wide Web opens. Featured speakers include Marc Andreessen of Netscape, Mark Graham of Pandora Systems, and Ken McCarthy of E-Media.
- November 4 – Sydney's third runway opens, ensuring protests about noise levels.
- November 5 – A letter by former U.S. President Ronald Reagan, announcing that he has Alzheimer's disease, is released.
- November 5 – George Foreman wins the WBA and IBF World Heavyweight Championships by KO'ing Michael Moorer becoming the oldest heavyweight champion in history.
- November 5 – Johan Heyns, an influential Afrikaner theologian and critic of apartheid, is assassinated.
- November 6 – A flood in Piedmont, Italy, kills dozens of people.
- November 7 – WXYC, the student radio station of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, provides the world's first internet radio broadcast.
- November 8 – Georgia Representative Newt Gingrich leads the United States Republican Party in taking control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate in midterm congressional elections, the first time in 40 years the Republicans secure control of both houses of Congress. George W. Bush is elected Governor of Texas.
- November 13 – Voters in Sweden decide to join the European Union in a referendum.
- November 13 – The first passengers travel through the Channel Tunnel.
- November 13 – Michael Schumacher wins his first Formula 1 World Championship.
- November 16 – A Federal judge issues a temporary restraining order, prohibiting the State of California from implementing Proposition 187, that would have denied most public services to illegal aliens.
- November 20 – The Angolan government and UNITA rebels sign the Lusaka Protocol.
- November 28 – Voters in Norway decide not to join the European Union in a referendum.
December
| December | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mo | Tu | We | Th | Fr | Sa | Su |
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | |||
| 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 |
| 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 |
| 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 |
| 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | |
- December 1 – Ernesto Zedillo takes office as President of Mexico.
- December 2 – The Australian government agrees to pay reparations to indigenous Australians who were displaced during the nuclear tests at Maralinga in the 1950s and 1960s.
- December 11 – Russian president Boris Yeltsin orders troops into Chechnya.
- December 11 – A small bomb explodes on Philippine Airlines Flight 434, killing a Japanese businessman. The bombing was a field test done by Ramzi Yousef to test explosives that would have been used in Project Bojinka.
- December 13 – The trial of former President Mengistu begins in Ethiopia.
- December 13 – Fred West, 53, a builder living in Gloucester, is remanded in custody, charged with murdering 12 people (including two of his own daughters) whose bodies are mostly found buried at his house in Cromwell Street. His wife Rose West, 41, is charged with 10 murders. Police believe that the murders took place between 1967 and 1987, and suspect that they may have killed up to 30 people.
- December 14 – A Learjet piloted by Richard Anderson and Brad Sexton misses an elementary school and crashes into an apartment complex in Fresno, California, killing both pilots and injuring several apartment residents.
- December 14 – A runaway Santa Fe freight train rear ends a Union Pacific train at the bottom of Cajon Pass, California.
- December 14 – British Home Secretary Michael Howard announces that Myra Hindley will serve a whole life tariff for the Moors Murders of the 1960s.
- December 15 – The first version of web browser Netscape Navigator is released.
- December 19 – A planned exchange rate correction of the Mexican Peso to the US Dollar, becomes a massive financial meltdown in Mexico, unleashing the 'Tequila' effect on global financial markets. This prompts a US$ 50 billion 'bailout' by the Clinton Administration.
- December 19 – The Whitewater scandal investigation begins in Washington, DC.
- December 19 – Civil unions between homosexuals are legalized in Sweden.
- December 21 – A homemade bomb explodes on the # 4 train on Fulton Street in New York City.
- December 26 – French anti-terrorist police storm a hijacked jet at Marseille and kill 4 Islamist terrorists.
- December 31 is skipped by the Phoenix Islands to switch from the UTC−11 time zone to UTC+13, and by the Line Islands to switch from UTC−10 to UTC+14. The latter becomes the earliest time zone in the world, one full day ahead of Hawaii.
Undated
- Tropical Storms Alberto & Gordon cause very damaging floods, intense winds and extensive problems directly over the Southeastern United States and the Caribbean Islands. The death tolls are unusually severe and damages are extreme in both tropical storms.
Ongoing
Fictional
The following are references to year 1994 in fiction:
- Thundarr the Barbarian (1980-1982): According to the series' premise, a large asteroid passes between Earth and the Moon in 1994, causing the Moon to split into two large fragments. The event also causes major upheavals in Earth's climate and geography, as well as severe alterations in tidal forces, due to the gravitational effects of both the asteroid and the shattered Moon.
- The character Faye Valentine from Cowboy Bebop is born in 1994.
- The Blair Witch Project (1999): Three student filmmakers disappear in the woods near the town of Burkittsville, Maryland in October whilst filming a documentary named The Blair Witch Project. A year later, their footage is recovered.
- The opening scene of the Golan-Globus film The Apple (1980) is set in the 1994 Eurovision Song Contest.
- Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991): The scene where the Terminator goes back in time to save 10-year-old John Connor from the T-1000 takes place in 1994.
| Gregorian calendar | 1994 MCMXCIV |
| Ab urbe condita | 2747 |
| Armenian calendar | 1443 ԹՎ ՌՆԽԳ |
| Bahá'í calendar | 150 – 151 |
| Berber calendar | 2944 |
| Buddhist calendar | 2538 |
| Burmese calendar | 1356 |
| Byzantine calendar | 7502 – 7503 |
| Chinese calendar | 癸酉年十一月二十日 (4630/4690-11-20) — to —
甲戌年十一月廿九日(4631/4691-11-29) |
| Coptic calendar | 1710 – 1711 |
| Ethiopian calendar | 1986 – 1987 |
| Hebrew calendar | 5754 – 5755 |
| Hindu calendars | |
| - Vikram Samvat | 2049 – 2050 |
| - Shaka Samvat | 1916 – 1917 |
| - Kali Yuga | 5095 – 5096 |
| Holocene calendar | 11994 |
| Iranian calendar | 1372 – 1373 |
| Islamic calendar | 1414 – 1415 |
| Japanese calendar | Heisei 6 (平成6年) |
| Korean calendar | 4327 |
| Thai solar calendar | 2537 |
| Unix time | 757382400 – 788918399 |
- In Godzilla vs SpaceGodzilla, Godzilla cells fly through a black hole in 1994.
- "Ticker" Troon wins a posthumous Victoria Cross foiling a Soviet attack on a British space station, in John Wyndham's The Outward Urge.
- Silent Hill 2 is set in this year.
Births
January–June
- January 14 – Samir Patel, American spelling prodigy
- January 16 – Qiu Cui Ling, Taiwanese singer
- January 21 – Marny Kennedy, Australian actress
- February 5 – Saki Nakajima, Japanese singer
- February 10 – Makenzie Vega, American actress
- February 14 – Paul Butcher Jr., American actor
- February 14 – Allie Grant, American actress
- February 23 – Dakota Fanning, American actress
- February 27 – Hou Yifan, Chinese chess player
- March 12 – Tanveer K. Atwal, American actress
- March 14 – Louis Spencer, Viscount Althorp
- March 14 – Frankie Ryan Manriquez, American actor
- March 31 – Caden Waidyatilleka, American actor
- April 4 – Risako Sugaya, Japanese singer
- April 11 – Dakota Blue Richards, English actress
- April 12 – Moises Arias, American actor
- April 12 – Saoirse Ronan, Irish actress
- April 12 – Airi Suzuki, Japanese singer
- April 16 – Liliana Mumy, American actress
- May 4 – Alexander Gould, American actor
- May 4 – Pauline Ducruet, Monaco heir
- May 12 – Drew Mikuska, American actor
- May 21 – Tom Daley, British diver
- May 24 – Cayden Boyd, American actor
- June 11 – Ivana Baquero, Spanish actress
- June 17 – Jiordan Anna Tolli, Australian actress
- June 21 – Chisato Okai, Japanese singer
- June 23 – Jamie Borthwick, English actor
- June 28 – Sophia Lorentzen, British heiress
- June 28 – Prince Hussein bin Al Abdullah II, prince of Jordan
- June 28 – Madeline Duggan, English actress
July–December
- July 6 – Camilla and Rebecca Rosso, English twin actresses
- July 9 – Akiane Kramarik, American poet and painter
- July 13 – Ridge Canipe, American actor
- July 16 – Mark Indelicato, American actor
- July 27 – Princess Mafalda-Ceceilia of Bulgaria
- August 9 – Forrest Landis, American actor
- August 25 – Jetseta Gage, American kidnapping victim (d. 2005)
- August 25 – Josh Flitter, American actor
- August 28 – Jessie Flower, American actress
- September 1 – Bianca Ryan, American singer
- September 13 – Mitch Holleman, American actor
- September 17 – Taylor Ware, American singer and yodeler
- September 19 – Alexander Nathan Etel, British actor
- September 22 – Danielle Van Dam, American murder victim (d. 2002)
- September 25 – Jansen Panettiere, American actor
- October 5 – Zachary Isaiah Williams, American actor
- October 9 – Jodelle Ferland, Canadian actress
- October 20 – Morgan Featherstone, Australian model
- November 11 – Connor Price, Canadian actor
- November 17 – Raquel Castro, American actor
- November 30 – Nyjah Huston, American skateboarder
- December 3 – Jake T. Austin, American actor
- December 15 – Flora Ogilvy, British heiress
- December 15 – Toby Linz, American actor
- December 15 – Emma Lockhart, American actress
- December 17 – Nat Wolff, American actor, Singer-songwriter, and keyboardist
Deaths
January–June
- January 1 – Arthur Espie Porritt, New Zealand politician and athlete (b. 1900)
- January 1 – Cesar Romero, Cuban-American actor (b. 1907)
- January 1 – Edward Arthur Thompson, British historian (b. 1914)
- January 5 – Tip O'Neill, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives (b. 1912)
- January 5 – Elmar Lipping, Estonian statesman and soldier (b. 1906)
- January 5 – Brian Johnston, British cricket commentator (b. 1912)
- January 8 – Pat Buttram, American actor (b. 1915)
- January 9 – Johnny Temple, baseball player (b. 1927)
- January 15 – Harry Nilsson, American musician (b. 1941)
- January 17 – Helen Stephens, American runner (b. 1918)
- January 20 – Matt Busby, Scottish football manager (Manchester United) (b. 1909)
- January 22 – Telly Savalas, American actor (b. 1924)
- January 23 – Brian Redhead, British journalist and broadcaster (b. 1929)
- January 25 – Stephen Cole Kleene, American mathematician (b. 1909)
- January 27 – Claude Akins, American actor (b. 1914)
- January 28 – Hal Smith, American character actor and voice-over artist {b. 1916)
- January 29 – Ulrike Maier, Austrian alpine skier (b. 1967)
- January 30 – Pierre Boulle, French author (b. 1912)
- February 1 – Olan Soule, Character actor (b. 1909)
- February 6 – Joseph Cotten, American actor (b. 1905)
- February 6 – Jack Kirby, American comic book writer and illustrator (b. 1917)
- February 7 – Witold Lutosławski, Polish composer (b. 1913)
- February 9 – Howard Martin Temin, American geneticist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (b. 1934)
- February 11 – Sorrell Booke, American actor (b. 1930)
- February 11 – William Conrad, American actor (b. 1920)
- February 11 – Neil Bonnett, American race car driver (b. 1946)
- February 14 – Andrei Chikatilo, Russian serial killer (executed) (b. 1936)
- February 17 – Randy Shilts, American author and activist (b. 1951)
- February 22 – Papa John Creech, American fiddler (b. 1917)
- February 24 – Jean Sablon, French singer (b. 1906)
- February 24 – Dinah Shore, American actress and singer (b. 1916)
- February 25 – Baruch Goldstein, American-born mass murderer (b. 1956)
- February 25 – Jersey Joe Walcott, American boxer (b. 1914)
- February 26 – Bill Hicks, American comedian (b. 1961)
- March 4 – John Candy, Canadian comedian and actor (b. 1950)
- March 6 – Ray Arcel, American boxing trainer, was active from the 1920s through the 1980s (b. 1899)
- March 9 –