1995

1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000

political events

Peace comes to Bosnia, but only after months of renewed fighting (see 1994). Serb forces resume their attacks on Sarajevo and other targets in March, and when NATO bombers strike at their ammunition dumps the Serbs take nearly 200 members of the UN peacekeeping force hostage for more than 2 weeks; longtime Yugoslav communist dissident Milovan Djilas has denounced Serbia's president Slobodan Milosevic but dies of heart ailments at his Belgrade home April 20 at age 83. The Drina Battalion of Bosnian Serbs overruns the UN-protected "safe area" of Srebrenica July 11; its deputy commander, Col. Radislav Krstic, is promoted to major general (see human rights, 1998). Croatian forces invade the Serbian-held territory of Krajina August 4 to recover territory seized by the Serbs in 1990, retake the entire area by August 7, and force 150,000 Serb refugees to flee, heightening fears that the conflict will spread. NATO planes attack Bosnian Serb ammunition and fuel dumps August 30 (the largest military action thus far in NATO's 46-year history) following a mortar shelling of Sarajevo that killed 37 civilians, and they resume their attacks September 5. A new cease-fire takes effect October 12, gas and electricity are restored in Sarajevo, and the three major participants (Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia, Alija Izetbegovic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Franjo Tudjman of Croatia) initial a U.S.-brokered peace accord at Paris and then sign it outside Dayton, Ohio, November 21, ending 43 months of savage, genocidal warfare in which 250,000 have died and nearly 2 million lost their homes. The peace accord has been negotiated by New York-born diplomat Richard (Charles Albert) Holbrooke, 54, a onetime U.S. State Department assistant secretary who was managing director of the New York investment bank Lehman Brothers until appointed ambassador to Germany in 1993; the accord provides for a virtual partitioning of Bosnia and the deployment of a multinational implementation force (IFOR) to keep the warring factions apart and protect war-crimes investigators. Anyone under indictment for war crimes is to be barred from holding public office after scheduled elections, all parties are required to cooperate with the International War Crimes Tribunal, and Sarajevo is to be reunified under the control of the Bosnian government. The UN Security Council promptly votes to lift economic sanctions on Serbia as long as she abides by the accord. Some 50,000 NATO troops, including Russians and 20,000 Americans, begin to monitor the fragile peace in December despite widespread U.S. opposition to any military commitment in the area (see 1996; Kosovo, 1998).

Russian troops raise a flag over the charred remains of Chechnya's presidential palace at Grozny January 19 after more than 3 years of efforts to crush a rebellion (see 1993). President Yeltsin has had little popular support for his war against the small breakaway republic but insists that bringing Chechnya back into the Russian Federation is vital to preserving national integrity (and preventing any stoppage of oil shipments from Baku). An estimated 120,000 people continue to live in Grozny despite unexploded shells, lack of electricity or running water, and other problems. Islamic rebels agree to a truce July 30, but hostilities resume in late November (see 1996).

Florentine-born economist Lamberto Dini, 63, heads a new left-of-center Italian government that takes office January 17 and will continue for 16 months (see 1994). Seven-time Italian prime minister Giulio Andreotti goes on trial at Palermo September 26 on charges that he secretly acted as political godfather for the Sicilian Mafia (see 1993; 1999).

French voters end 14 years of socialist rule May 7, electing longtime Paris mayor Jacques Chirac to the presidency (see 1986). Now 62, Chirac succeeds the ailing François Mitterand, now 78, who has held office since 1981 (see 1996).

Former British prime minister Harold Wilson, Baron Wilson of Rievaulx, dies at London May 24 at age 79, having fought cancer since the mid-1980s; former prime minister Alexander F. Douglas-Home, Lord Home of the Hirsel, dies at his Berwickshire, Scotland, home October 9 at age 92.

Former Polish communist apparatchik Aleksandr Kwasniewski, 41, wins the presidency November 19, having used slick western-style campaign tactics to gain a narrow victory over Lech Walesa, now 52, in his bid for reelection.

The U.S. Senate votes March 23 to give the president power to veto specific items in spending bills (the "line-item veto"), but the measure languishes while Congressional Republicans and Democrats squabble all year over the issue of how large a role government, especially federal government, should play in such areas as health, education, public assistance, environment, and workplace safety. Republicans act on the premise that, despite the low turnout of voters last year, they have a "mandate" to enact a 10-point "Contract with America," which few voters had even heard about last year and which calls for rolling back social programs in order to lower taxes and still have a balanced budget in 7 years.

Oklahoma City's nine-story Alfred P. Murrah federal office building collapses April 19 as a 5,000-pound car bomb explodes, killing 168, including 15 infants in a second-floor daycare center. Police and FBI agents arrest members of a U.S. right-wing militant group suspected of wanting to avenge the April 1993 FBI attack on Branch Davidian religious fundamentalists at Waco, Texas; the tragedy draws attention to the growing power of heavily armed, unregulated militia groups which oppose government interference of any kind. President Clinton gives orders May 20 barring vehicular traffic in front of the White House. A grand jury indicts former Army buddies Timothy J. McVeigh, 27, and Terry L. Nichols, 40, August 10 on 11 charges each, and evidence emerges that McVeigh was inspired in part by neo-Nazi and white supremacist William Pierce's 1978 novel The Turner Diaries (see 1997). The Department of Justice then announces that it will pay Randy Weaver $100,000 and each of his daughters $1 million (see 1992). Saboteurs who leave a note signed "Sons of Gestapo" cause Amtrak's Sunset Limited to derail as it passes over a trestle in the Arizona desert October 9, killing a crewman and injuring dozens. FBI agents search for the perpetrators, whose note makes reference to Waco and Ruby Ridge.

Former secretary of defense Les Aspin dies following a stroke at Washington, D.C. May 21 at age 57; former U.S. Supreme Court chief justice Warren Burger of congestive heart failure at Washington, D.C., June 25 at age 87.

The CIA releases deciphered 1940s cables from the Soviet Union July 11 in a public ceremony at its Langley, Va., headquarters. CIA director R. James Woolsey has resigned January 10 and been succeeded May 10 by Brussels-born chemist John M. (Mark) Deutch, 56, who has been deputy secretary of defense since last year and will head the Central Intelligence Agency until late next year. Included in the intercepted messages are names (and cover names) of 200 U.S. spies, among them Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, but critics question the credibility of the material.

The Korean War Veterans Memorial is dedicated on the mall at Washington, D.C., in July; it is composed of 19 stainless steel figures, each weighing half a ton, and unlike the Vietnam wall unveiled in 1982, it honors survivors as well as the deceased.

Former Indian prime minister Morarji Ranchodji Desai dies at Bombay (Mumbai) April 10 at age 99 after surgery for a blood clot on his brain.

Sino-American relations sour after Washington permits Taiwan's president Lee Teng-hui to make a private visit in June over Beijing's objections. President Jiang Zemin says he has been double-crossed; now 69, he is considered likely to succeed the ailing Deng Xiaoping.

A Beijing court sentences Chinese dissident Wei Jingsheng, 45, to 14 years in prison December 13 after a closed trial. He is charged with having conspired "to subvert the government."

Former Laotian president Souphanouvong dies in Laos January 9 at age 85; former Burmese prime minister U Nu at his home in Yangon (Rangoon) February 14 at age 87. Burmese authorities release opposition leader (and Nobelist) Daw Aung SanSuu Kyi July 10 after nearly 6 years of house arrest. Now 50, she is free to come and go as she pleases, they say.

President Clinton extends full diplomatic recognition to Vietnam July 11, normalizing relations with the communist nation 22 years after U.S. disengagement from the war with Hanoi.

Former Japanese premier Takeo Fukuda dies of chronic emphysema at Tokyo July 5 at age 90; former Japanese foreign minister Michio Watanabe of heart failure at Tokyo September 5 at age 72.

Japanese-American relations are strained following the September 4 rape of a 12-year-old Okinawan schoolgirl by two U.S. marines and a sailor. Citing the end of the cold war, critics question the need to keep 45,000 U.S. troops in Japan and even more in South Korea.

South Korean police arrest former president Roh Tae Woo November 16 on charges of having accepted at least 282 billion won ($370 million) in bribes. Now 62, Roh is credited with having helped to transform his nation into a democratic republic, but he has been caught by reforms which he himself promoted. His predecessor Chun Doo Hwan, who ruled from 1980 to 1988, is arrested December 3, and Roh Tae Woo is indicted December 5. Also indicted are Samsung Group chairman Lee Kun Hee, Daewoo Group chairman Kim Woo Choong, and five other business executives (see 1996).

Emigré Iraqi banker Ahmad Chalabi, 51, organizes a Kurdish uprising against Saddam Hussein in the northern part of the country. CIA officials call off the revolt at the last moment, and thousands of Iraqi National Congress members lose their lives. A Shiite Muslim, Chalabi left Iraq for Jordan at age 12 or 13 and has been living at London. The Swiss federal banking commission withdrew the license of a Chalabi bank at Geneva in April 1989 and it collapsed. Jordanian authorities charged him with taking $200 million (£127 million) 4 months later for currency speculation. They shut down the Petra Bank he cofounded in 1977; a Jordanian military court tried him in absentia 3 years ago; it found him guilty of fraud, embezzlement, and misuse of depositor funds as chairman of the bank, and it sentenced him to 22 years' imprisonment, but he has insisted that the Iraqi government trumped up the accusations and that Jordan's king Hussein ordered prosecution only after Chalabi's brother appeared on the U.S. television program 60 Minutes and accused the king of taking bribes to sell arms to Iraq (see 2004).

Qatar has a bloodless palace coup June 27 as Crown Prince Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, 45, ousts his father and makes himself head of the tiny Persian Gulf emirate whose natural-gas reserves are the world's third largest. Former emir Sheik Khalifa, 63, issues a statement from Geneva insisting that he is still the legitimate ruler, but he transferred some of his powers to his son 3 years ago. The new emir wins pledges of allegiance from other members of the ruling al-Thani family and in the next 7 years will lift laws that have prevented women from voting, driving, or holding jobs in which they would supervise men. He will also abolish censorship, lift the prohibition against alcohol consumption that prevails in Islamic countries (such as Saudi Arabia) in which the dominant religion is Wahabism, and permit construction of U.S. military bases.

A bomb explodes in a Paris Latin Quarter subway station July 25, killing eight and wounding 86. Algerian militants claim responsibility for the Métro atrocity, and similar bombs wound six dozen other French civilians, some of them gravely, in the next 2 months as civil war continues in Algeria, where close to 40,000 have been killed since 1992. Defying threats from militant extremist groups who boycott the election, Algerians go to the polls November 16 and overwhelmingly reject Islamic fundamentalists; Gen. Liamine Zeroual, 54, wins reelection as president with 61 percent of the vote, but the nation's 25 percent unemployment rate, 30 percent inflation rate, falling industrial production, and food shortages foreshadow future trouble.

France conducts nuclear tests beginning September 5 beneath atolls southeast of Tahiti in French Polynesia, breaking a 1992 test moratorium despite worldwide protests from environmentalists.

A federal jury at New York finds Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and nine other militant Muslims guilty October 1 of conspiring to carry out a campaign of terrorist bombings and assassinations aimed at forcing Washington to abandon its support of Israel and Egypt. Now 57, the blind Egyptian clergyman and his followers have not been accused of blowing up the World Trade Center in 1993 but the cases overlap.

The United Nations celebrates its 50th anniversary at New York October 24 with a gathering of more than 140 heads of state (the largest such gathering in world history), including Boris Yeltsin, Jiang Zemin, Tomiichi Murayama, Jacques Chirac, John Major, Nelson Mandela, Fidel Castro, and Yasir Arafat but not Helmut Kohl, Hosni Mubarak, Kim Jong Il, Saddam Hussein, or Muammar Qaddafi. Former U.S. senator and UN champion J. W. Fulbright (D. Ark.) has died at Washington, D.C., February 9 at age 89 (more than 250,000 international Fulbright scholarships have been awarded). The UN under Boutros Boutros-Ghali has extended its peacekeeping operations, but the secretary general is unpopular, some countries are in arrears on their dues, the United States is more than $1 billion behind (Congress has withheld funding in an effort to force reforms on the UN's inefficient bureaucracy), growing neoisolationist sentiment hinders efforts to get the much-needed congressional appropriation, and while most people recognize the value of the UN not only to resolve disputes but also to fight the spread of weapons, disease, and unfair labor practices, some groups foment fears that U.S. sovereignty may in the future be subordinated to that of a "world government."

Quebec votes October 30 to remain part of Canada, but provincial separatists lose only by a hair's breadth (50.6 percent to 49.4) and vow to continue their efforts (see 1967; Meech Lake Accord expiration, 1990).

Israel releases 900 Palestinian prisoners October 10 but President Ezer Weissman has acted October 6 to hold up the pardon of two women arrested for anti-Israeli violence, contravening a core provision of a pact signed in September. Widespread Palestinian protests ensue, and all but one of 23 imprisoned women refuse to sign a statement promising to abstain from further terrorism and respect the law. (The exception is an 18-year-old who has been held in solitary confinement and did not know about her sisters' defiance.) They vow to stage a boycott until all Palestinian female detainees are freed.

The assassination of Israel's prime minister Yitzhak Rabin by a right-wing Jewish extremist after a Tel Aviv peace rally November 4 shocks the world. Israel and the PLO have initialed an agreement September 24 for withdrawal of Israeli troops from the West Bank following U.S. mediation, Rabin and Yasir Arafat signed the accord at Washington 4 days later, the Israeli parliament approved the pact by a slim 61-to-59 margin, Israel's religious right has insisted that God gave "Judea" and "Samaria" to the Jewish people 2,000 years ago and Rabin was a traitor for giving it away. His assassin claims to have acted alone, but police suspect a right-wing Jewish conspiracy and make other arrests. Some Arabs continue to deny the legitimacy of Israel's very existence, but progress toward self-rule in most Arab-populated areas of the West Bank continues despite the loss of Rabin and despite opposition by hardliners on both sides.

Turkey's prime minister Tansu Ciller resigns December 26 following a narrow electoral victory by the Islamic Party (see 1993). She agrees to work toward a coalition government in an effort to keep the Islamic Party from taking power and turning the 72-year-old secular republic into a theocracy that would be at odds with the West (see 1996).

Former Somalian dictator Mohamed Siad Barre dies in exile at Lagos, Nigeria, January 2 at age 84 (approximate).

Nigeria's military government executes nine of its critics at Port Harcourt November 10, prompting international protests. The dead include author-playwright Ken Saro-Wiwa, 54, who has campaigned for a more equitable distribution of the nation's oil wealth and against environmental damage wrought by foreign oil companies.

Sierra Leone employs a private army (Executive Outcomes) to drive rebel forces from parts of the Kono district diamond fields whose gems have been sold to finance the insurrection (see 1992; 1996).

Mexico's President Zedillo sends troops into Chiapas in February to suppress the Zapatista National Liberation Army, led by the ski-masked guerrilla known as "Subcommander Marcos" (presidential aides say he is actually Rafael Sebastián Guillén, 36, a middle-class furniture salesman's son) (see 1994). Marcos eludes arrest, more than a million Mexicans participate in a nationwide poll in August, and a majority votes that the Liberation Army should become a peaceful political party; Marcos emerges from the Lacandon forest September 29, says the government cannot be trusted, and outlines plans for a civilian movement of unions, civil rights groups, middle-class debtors, and others to push for more democracy. He then quickly slips away, dashing hopes that the government can easily co-opt the rebels in new peace talks. Authorities seize another rebel leader (Fernando Yañez Muñoz, 51) October 24, and critics say the arrest undermines chances for a peaceful resolution.

Former Argentine president Arturo Frondizi dies of a heart ailment at Buenos Aires April 18 at age 86. President Carlos Saul Menem wins reelection in May but with little public enthusiasm despite an upsurge in the economy since 1991.

Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide's hand-picked successor René Preval, 51, wins election December 17 with about 80 percent of the vote in a 14-man race (see 1994). The constitution has prevented any president from having two consecutive terms, but more than three out of four eligible voters stay away from the polls (illiteracy and unemployment rates are both about 75 percent) (see 2000).

human rights, social justice

Refugees from war-torn Bosnia report atrocities that include mass killings of men and gang rapes of their wives and daughters by soldiers dressed in appropriated UN uniforms. Bosnian Serbs overrun the UN-declared "safe area" of Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia in July, expelling tens of thousands of women and children and slaughtering more than 7,000 Muslim boys and men, many of them elderly or incapacitated, with axes, crowbars, and knives in the largest concentrated massacre of the Yugoslav War. The victims had sought refuge at UN headquarters in the northern end of the "safe area," but the 110 Dutch peacekeepers there looked on while the boys and men were carted off to killing sites (the Dutch government opposed air strikes lest their troops be taken hostage). Barbarities attributed to Croatians and Bosnian Muslims as well as to Serbs have continued since 1991.

Croatian forces launch an attack in August on Serbs living in the Krajina region which they have inhabited for 500 years; within 4 days, they have driven out 150,000 people in a savage act of "ethnic cleansing." A UN War Crimes Tribunal at the Hague has indicted leaders on all sides, the Dayton accord signed at Paris December 14 bars them from taking political office, but the accord upsets many by giving apparent validity to "ethnic cleansing" (see 1996)

Retired Argentine Navy captain Adolfo Francisco Scilingo, 48, reveals in March that prisoners arrested between 1976 and 1983 were systematically drugged, stripped, and dropped into the Atlantic from military planes (see 1983). President Menem calls him a crook, but no one refutes Scilingo's story. He estimates that between 1,500 and 2,000 people "disappeared" this way; what became of an estimated 7,000 to 7,500 others during the 7½ years of dictatorship that ended in December 1983 remains a mystery, and the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires continue to press for answers.

Singapore authorities hang Filipina housemaid Flor Contemplacion, 42, March 17 after a court has convicted her of murdering another Filipina maid and a 4-year-old Singaporean boy. Later testimony suggested that the boy drowned accidentally and the maid was killed by the boy's father, Philippines president Fidel V. Ramos has asked for a delay in execution, but authorities say that Contemplacion's conviction was based on her confession. Ramos calls her a "heroine," and Contemplacion's death creates a furor as stories come to light about mistreatment of Asian women working in menial jobs throughout East Asia,, Japan, the Middle East, the Netherlands, and Britain.

North Carolina judge James B. McMillan dies of cancer at Charlotte March 4 at age 78, having seen his 1965 order to bus school children in order to achieve racial desegregation upheld by higher courts and become common practice.

The U.S. Supreme Court rules June 11 that federal programs that favor people on the basis of race are presumably unconstitutional. The 5-to-4 decision in Adarand v. United States gives support to opponents of affirmative action. President Clinton declares July 19 that affirmative action has been "good for America," but the University of California's Board of Regents votes July 20 to end preferential treatment of minority applicants.

The U.S. Supreme Court rules 5 to 4 June 29 that using race "as a predominant factor" in drawing congressional districts should be presumed to be unconstitutional.

France's president Jacques Chirac issues an official statement July 16 acknowledging that Paris police helped to round up some 13,000 Jewish men, women, and children July 16, 1942, cramming them into an indoor cycling stadium, interning them in suburban Drancy, and then deporting them to death camps. Denouncing the role played by the French in the deportation of some 76,000 French and foreign Jews, Chirac says, "Yes, the criminal folly of the occupiers was seconded by the French, by the French state."

Swiss banks meet secretly with the World Jewish Congress and agree in September to look for more unclaimed accounts of Holocaust victims (see 1962; 1996).

South Korea frees what Amnesty International calls the world's longest-held political prisoner August 15 to celebrate the end of World War II. Kim Sun-maong, 71, has refused to renounce his belief in communism.

Gray Panthers founder Maggie Kuhn dies at her Philadelphia home April 22 at age 89.

Pope John Paul II issues a letter at Rome July 10 saying that equality for women is no longer simply a question of justice but an absolute necessity. The pope assumes responsibility for centuries of discrimination against women by the Roman Catholic Church and gives credit to the women's movement for its "substantially positive" achievements. He urges women to protect what he calls their special role in the family and in society, where the "feminine genius" can have a humanizing influence against the demands of "efficiency and productivity." Spokesmen for the Vatican have criticized the draft document of a forthcoming UN world conference, saying that it has been overly influenced by Western feminist thought.

Japan's prime minister Tomiichi Murayama gives a speech at Tokyo August 15 extending his "heartfelt apology" for atrocities committed by his countrymen in World War II. Murayama apologizes November 14 for the suffering endured by Korea during Japanese occupation from 1910 to 1945. Revelations emerge in October that Japan established government brothels after her surrender in 1945 and recruited "patriotic" young women to serve as "comfort women" for G.I. occupation forces and thus "protect the purity of Japanese blood" from defilement. The secret program lasted only 7 months before U.S. military authorities, alarmed about sexually-transmitted disease, declared the red-light districts off limits, thus giving a boost to privately owned brothels.

Three U.S. servicemen plead guilty November 7 to charges that they conspired to kidnap and rape an Okinawan schoolgirl. Adm. Richard C. Macke, 57, commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific, is forced to take early retirement November 17 after stating, "I think that it was absolutely stupid, I've said several times. For the price they paid to rent the car they could have had a girl" (meaning a prostitute). Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D. Calif.) has told the press that she was stunned by the remark condoning prostitution: "I would say to Navy Secretary John Dalton, 'Your guys still don't get it. You better teach them, or else. Rape isn't about money and it isn't about sex. It's about power over women, and it's a very degrading, terrible, major felony.'"

The UN's Fourth World Conference on Women opens September 4 outside Beijing with 20,000 women, including 5,000 official delegates from more than 180 countries. The U.S. delegation is headed by First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton despite criticism of her going to a country whose government policies on women's rights are among the most oppressive in the world (Chinese women have no political voice, female infants are commonly allowed to starve to death so that couples may be free to have male offspring, and slave or convict labor is used to manufacture products exported to overseas markets). Clinton gives a rousing speech September 5, not mentioning China specifically but leaving no question that her attacks on state repression of dissent and reproduction rights apply to the Beijing government.

Sen. Bob Packwood resigns in tears September 7 after a recommendation by the Senate Ethics Committee that he be expelled for sexual misconduct and abuse of office (see 1993).

South Africa's Supreme Court rules in late September that imprisonment of debtors is unconstitutional, ending a system that has put as many as 660,000 people per year behind bars, 80 percent of them for debts of $200 or less.

The acquittal of O. J. Simpson October 2 polarizes Americans, with most whites calling the verdict a miscarriage of justice, while many blacks take satisfaction in the exposure of a Los Angeles police officer as a racist whose testimony damaged the prosecution's case. Women had hoped that a guilty verdict would send a message to men who abuse their wives and girlfriends. Whites represent 74 percent of the U.S. population, blacks 11.8 percent, Hispanics 9.5, and Asians 3.1 (1992 Census figures).

A Million Man March on Washington October 16 brings at least 400,000 African-American men (a remarkable 4.3 percent of the 9.3 million U.S. black males age 18 and older) together on the mall for speeches urging them to give up spousal abuse and shoulder the responsibilities of raising their families, but many shun the demonstration because it is led by Bronx, N.Y.-born minister Louis Farrakhan (originally Louis Eugene Walcott), 62, a onetime Calypso singer who heads the 20,000-member Nation of Islam and whose anti-Semitic, anti-white, sexist, and homophobic remarks have alienated him from those seeking racial harmony.

Ireland's electorate votes by a narrow margin in November to end the nation's ban on divorce (no other European country has such a ban), but only after 4 years' legal separation.

exploration, colonization

Florida-born astronaut Norman Thagard, 51, arrives at the Mir space station March 16 and is given the traditional Russian welcome of bread and salt (see 1990); he is the first American on Mir (see Krikalev, 1994). Cosmonaut Valery Polyakov, 52, returns to Earth March 22, having set a record of 439 consecutive days in space; the U.S. space shuttle Atlantis docks with Mir June 29, creating a spacecraft with a combined weight of 225 tons in the first of a projected nine such U.S.-Russian space linkups (see 1996); the Galileo probe reaches Jupiter December 7 after a 6-year journey from Earth.

commerce

The World Trade Organization (WTO) comes into existence January 1, succeeding the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) that has existed since 1947 as a neutral body for resolving international trade disputes. Japan and the United States resolve a dispute regarding sale of U.S. auto parts in the Japanese market June 28 without recourse to the WTO after Washington has threatened a 100 percent tariff on Japanese luxury motorcars.

Mexico verges on default of paying interest on its government bonds but is rescued by President Clinton, who sidesteps Congress, which has failed to approve $40 billion in loan guarantees to prop up the peso, and uses his own emergency authority January 31 to lend (or guarantee loans) of up to $20 billion—the largest non-military U.S. international commitment since the Marshall Plan of 1947. Other emerging-world markets rally on the news, but Mexican interest rates rise to 100 percent, creating a disaster for homeowners with variable-rate mortgages, and some 500,000 Mexicans lose their jobs.

Wall Street's Dow Jones Industrial Average closes above 4000 (4003.33) February 23, up from 2000 in early 1987 and 3000 in mid-April 1991, as a slowdown in the U.S. economy suggests that the Federal Reserve Board may stop raising interest rates. The Standard & Poor 500 index reaches 500 March 24.

The U.S. dollar falls to historic lows in April against the yen and deutschmark, making U.S. exports cheap, reducing costs for Japanese and German tourists in America, but discouraging U.S. tourists from going abroad. The dollar regains strength beginning in August.

An accident at a South African gold mine May 10 kills more than 100 workers, raising questions about safety practices in the industry (see 1986). Cables controlling a 12-ton, battery-powered, underground train snap at the Anglo-American Corporation's huge Vaal Reefs Mine 95 miles southwest of Johannesburg, the cars hurtle down a 7,000-foot vertical shaft onto a two-story elevator, and those inside are crushed to death. Most were from Botswana, Lesotho, and South Africa. Some 69,000 mine workers have been killed in work-related accidents since 1911, say mining officials, including 485 last year.

A predawn raid by California investigators on a garment sweatshop at El Monte, Calif., August 2 finds 72 illegal aliens, mostly Thai women, working in virtual peonage. Smuggled into the country by an organized crime gang that confiscated their passports and took part of their earnings, the workers have been held in a group of apartments surrounded by a fence and razor wire. Federal labor authorities announce in September that routine inspections of 50 legally registered garment factories have turned up wage and overtime violations at 46 sites, where 600 workers were shortchanged by more than $500,000. Experts say the problem is widespread from California to New York. Secretary of Labor Robert B. Reich meets at New York September 12 with large retailers and manufacturers who say they might consider voluntary compliance programs, but California governor Pete Wilson has vetoed bills making such programs mandatory lest they "drive the garment industry out of state."

President Clinton vetoes a bill November 13 that would have granted a temporary increase in the government's legal debt limit and refuses that evening to sign a continuing resolution (or stopgap spending bill) that would have provided funding for 2 more weeks of government operations. Congressional Republican leaders have been pushing for what the president calls "extreme proposals" that would "impose their priorities on our nation," attaching riders that would reduce taxes and favor special interests while imperiling consumer safety, federal aid to education, the environment, Medicare, and the like; House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R. Ga.) says the Republicans were elected last year to "change politics as usual" and accuses the president of playing "political games"; the impasse forces a partial shutdown of the government November 14, some 770,000 federal employees (about 30 percent of the total) are sent home, national parks and monuments are closed, but about 1.9 million remain on the job, Amtrak trains continue to operate, and Secretary of the Treasury Robert E. Rubin taps two federal retirement funds to avoid default on government bonds (see 1996).

London's 232-year-old merchant bank Baring Brothers fails February 26 after its Singapore trader Nicholas W. Leeson, 27, loses upwards of $1 billion. Newly promoted to trader, Leeson was supposed to have arbitraged the difference between very similar securities traded on the Singapore, Osaka, and Tokyo exchanges, buying the cheaper version and selling the more expensive one, but Barings has had little experience trading in the synthetic securities called derivatives, nobody at London has asked Leeson why he was borrowing money for his transactions, and he has risked twice the bank's net worth in speculations on the Tokyo exchange. Pleading guilty in November to two charges, Leeson is sentenced by a Singapore court to 6½ years' imprisonment.

New York's Chase Manhattan and Chemical banks announce a $10 billion merger August 28 in what amounts to a takeover of Chase by Chemical, which retains the Chase name and becomes the largest U.S. bank (the world's fourth largest) (see Morgan, 2000).

IBM agrees June 11 to pay $3.5 billion in cash for Lotus Development Corp., a major producer of computer software, including the 1-2-3 Spreadsheet and Notes. The acquisition positions IBM to challenge Microsoft for leadership in the software industry.

The United Auto Workers, Steel Workers, and Machinists announce July 27 that they will merge and invite other unions to join them in the next 5 years to increase their collective bargaining power, but less than 16 percent of the U.S. labor force now belongs to unions, down from nearly 25 percent in the early 1950s, and while a person who earned $25,896 per year in 1979 may have received wage raises in the past 16 years he or she is now earning only $24,700 (measured in constant, inflation-adjusted dollars), and the richest 5 percent of Americans, measured on the same basis, now earns on average $177,518 per year—up from $137,482 in 1979. Service Employees president John Sweeney, 61, is elected president of the AFL-CIO October 25 to succeed Lane Kirkland, who retired under pressure in August.

Bethlehem Steel's 88-year-old mill on the Lehigh River at Bethlehem, Pa., produces its last heavy-duty steel beam October 20 and shuts down, idling nearly 1,800 workers. The town has made steel since 1873, and the mill specialized in single-piece H-beams used for such structures as New York's George Washington Bridge and Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, but the company cites weak demand for structural steel.

The 92-year-old Malden Mills plant at Lawrence, Mass., catches fire December 11 on the Spicket River about 25 miles north of Boston; 45-mile-per-hour winds whip the flames from one building to the next, injuring 33 people, leaving three of the eight buildings in ruins and apparently destroying the livelihoods of 3,100 workers. Mill owner Aaron M. Feuerstein, 71, announces that he will not take the $300 million in insurance and relocate to Mexico but, rather, will rebuild; within a year all but 400 of the employees will be back at work, producing the company's patented Polartec and Polarfleece synthetic thermal fabrics (see everyday life, 1981).

Wall Street's Dow Jones Industrial Average tops 5000 (5023.55) November 21 and closes December 29 at 5117.12—up 33.5 percent from its 1994 year-end close of 3834.44 as low inflation combines with high corporate profits to give investors confidence, but while the U.S. unemployment rate in September is only 5.7 percent (compared with 6.6 in the Netherlands, 8.2 in Britain, 9.1 in Sweden, 9.2 in Greece, 11.3 in Italy, 11.4 in France, and 22.2 in Spain), U.S. paychecks have barely managed to keep up with inflation.

retail, trade

The Seoul department store Sampoong collapses June 29 while packed with shoppers in South Korea's worst peacetime disaster. Some 260 bodies are recovered by mid-July but the government announces July 13 that nearly 700 are dead or missing in the collapse, which is blamed on shoddy building and inspection practices.

eBay has its beginnings September 4 (Labor Day) in AuctionWeb, founded by French-born, Maryland-raised computer programmer and entrepreneur Pierre Omidyar, 29, who has seen an opportunity to match would-be buyers and sellers via the Internet more efficiently than by conventional retail buying and selling. His concept is that users will go on line and bid for items offered by sellers, with his company providing no search engine, charging no fees, settling no disputes, and not guaranteeing the quality of anything offered for sale. AuctionWeb's only effort to market itself is to list itself on the What's Cool site of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, it has no customers until October, but Omidyar's Canadian-born employee Jeffrey S. Skoll, 30, has recently received an MBA from Stanford, devises a business plan, and by February of next year the company will be charging fees to recoup its increasing Internet service-provider costs (see 1996).

transportation

Denver International Airport opens March 1, replacing 65-year-old Stapleton Airport. Finished 16 months late, the 53-square-mile facility has cost $4.9 billion—$2 billion over budget—and is 23 miles from downtown Denver.

Aviator Douglas "Wrong Way" Corrigan dies at Orange, Calif., December 9 at age 88.

An American Airlines Boeing 757 from Miami crashes crashes 50 miles from Cali, Colombia, December 21, killing 160 of the 164 aboard.

Shanghai's first subway opens April 10 with 10 miles of track and 13 stations, all built in 5 years with help from a German consortium. More than 10,000 workers have worked day and night to build the $680 million system.

The Kalindi Express bound for New Delhi stops suddenly August 20 after striking a cow, a train from Puri plows into the first train, and more than 340 people are killed in the collision, which injures more than 400 and draws attention to a lack of modernization on India's 37,000-mile rail system, the world's fourth largest.

Amtrak discontinues the Broadway Limited after September 10 to cut costs, ending more than 93 years of daily rail service between New York and Chicago. Passengers must now change trains at Pittsburgh and lay over there for nearly 2 hours.

A Baku subway fire October 28 kills about 300 and injures at least 250 in the Azerbaijan capital; most are victims of carbon monoxide fumes from burning toxic materials, and although government officials blame the fire on an electrical malfunction the Times of London reports October 31 that Azeri investigators found a blackened hole in one subway car that could have been caused by a bomb.

New York City transit fares increase to $1.50 November 12, up from $1.25 and the largest increase ever.

A $6 billion highway bill signed into law by President Clinton November 28 repeals the federal 55-mile-per-hour speed limit in place since 1974 but widely flouted, especially in Western states. Clinton expresses concern that ending the limit will lead to more highway accidents, deaths, and injuries.

The number of registered automobiles worldwide reaches 647 million, up from 127 million in 1960; automobile ownership has risen more than twice as fast as the world population.

technology

Intel introduces the Pentium Pro microchip containing 5.5 million transistors (see 1993; 1997).

Microsoft introduces Windows 95 with great fanfare August 24. A great advance over the Windows program introduced in 1986, the new operating platform makes IBM-compatible computers more "user friendly" (see 1994) but requires more capacity than most existing personal computers possess; although critics complain that it takes too long to boot up and is prone to crash, Windows 95 sparks a rush to upgrade PCs or buy new ones. Bill Gates has sent a memo to his top executives May 26 advising them that establishing dominance on the Internet must be the company's top priority, and Microsoft has met June 21 with Netscape, allegedly making an illegal offer to divide the browser market. The Internet Explorer 2.0 introduced by Microsoft in December is clearly inferior to Netscape's Navigator but signals Microsoft's intention to challenge Netscape for domination of the worldwide Internet browser market (see 1996).

Sun Microsystems introduces Java, a new cross-platform computer programming language created by Calgary-born Sun programmer James Gosling, 39, and a team of other programmers specifically for the world of the Internet (see Sun, 1982). Unlike other computer languages, Java can "run anywhere," says Sun CEO Scott McNealy, and although he initially promotes Java as a technology for improving the appearance of Web sites, he will soon push the idea of a simplified network computer that will store and access files and programs on a network rather than on a hard drive. Netscape's Marc Andreesen, Oracle Systems CEO Larry Ellison, and IBM form an alliance to embrace Java as a way to counter what they perceive as a stranglehold by Microsoft on the computer software industry (see 1996).

Mathematician and computer scientist George R. Stibitz dies at his Hanover, N.H., home January 31 at age 90; computer co-inventor J. Presper Eckert Jr. of leukemia at Bryn Mawr, Pa., June 3 at age 76; physicist and computer pioneer John V. Atanasoff at Frederick, Md., June 15 at age 91; former Texas Instruments president John Erik Jonsson at Dallas August 31 at age 94.

science

Scientists at the private Institute for Genomic Research at Gaithersburg, Md., announce May 24 that they have decoded the entire DNA sequence for the complete gene set (genome) of a free-living organism. Denied funds for the project by the National Institutes of Health (see 1991), former NIH scientist J. Craig Venter has joined forces with Johns Hopkins University Nobel biologist Hamilton O. Smith, now 63, to decode the sequence for Hemophilus influenzae, a bacterium that causes ear and upper respiratory infections in young people and pneumonia in older ones. The sequence has 1,830,121 DNA base pairs. Venter and Smith announce their achievement at a meeting of the American Society for Microbiology, and Venter says they have done it in less than a year, using computer software which has allowed them effectively to omit the mapping stage generally needed for sequencing generic material (see Celera, 1998). Venter announces also that his wife, Claire (née Fraser), has headed a separate team which has in just 3 months decoded the complete DNA sequence of another free-living organism, the harmless bacterium Micoplasma genitalium which has 580,067 DNA pairs (see yeast decoding, 1996).

The MIT research team that discovered "left-handed" DNA in 1979 reports that it has found a biological role for so-called Z-DNA: the DNA with the zig-zag backbone helps an "editor" protein to change the genetic message of RNA (see 1999).

Fossils and stone tools found last year at Gran Dolina indicate that human ancestors were in Europe as early as 780,000 B.C.—far earlier than had been thought—according to reports published in Science magazine August 11 (Gran Dolina is a cave site in the Atapuerca mountains near Burgos, Spain). Fossil remains unearthed in Kenya have revealed that a new species of human ancestors, little bigger than chimpanzees, stood erect and walked on two legs 4 million years ago, says an article in Nature magazine August 17. Archaeologists call the new hominid Australopithecus anamensis; a team led by fossil hunter Richard Leakey's wife, Maeve, made the discoveries near Lake Turkana (see 1998).

Algerian-born French physicist Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, 62, and his colleagues at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, cool helium to within 18 millionths of a degree above absolute zero (see Chu, 1985; Phillips, 1988). They have explored an apparent discrepancy in atomic theory and devised new mechanisms for trapping atoms with laser light. Combined with those of the Americans Steven Chu and William D. Phillips, the French efforts enhance scientific understanding of the interaction between light and matter, making it possible to build instruments such as atomic clocks that are capable of ultra-high degrees of precision.

University of Colorado, Boulder, scientist Carl E. Wieman, 44, and National Institutes of Standards and Technology scientist Eric A. Cornell, 33, break new ground in quantum physics June 5 by producing a curious state of matter that does not exist in nature but whose existence was predicted in the 1920s by Albert Einstein and the late Calcutta physicist Satyendra Nath Bose. German physicist Wolfgang Ketterle, 37, at MIT replicates their finding a few months later, and there are suggestions that the Bose-Einstein condensate may lead to the creation of ultra-precise clocks, greater miniaturization of electronics, and super-fast quantum computers.

Nobel nuclear physicist Eugene P. Wigner dies of pneumonia at Princeton, N.J., January 1 at age 92; Nobel astrophysicist Hannes Alfvén at Djursholm, Sweden, April 2 at age 86; Nobel astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar of a heart attack at Chicago August 21 at age 84; nuclear physicist Sir Rudolph E. Peierls of kidney disease at Oxford September 19 at age 88.

medicine

Zaire has a new outbreak of Ebola virus in late April or early May (see 1976; Sudan, 1979). The World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announce May 10 that at least 50 people have died of the deadly disease; as many as 300 patients, physicians, nurses, and other healthcare workers have fled hospitals in the area of Kikwit, 250 miles east of Kinshasa. The final death toll after 6 months is about 250 (malaria kills more than 20 times that many Africans every day).

German prosecutors announce August 9 that they have filed three charges of murder and 5,837 of attempted murder against two company executives for selling blood plasma contaminated with the AIDS virus. Nine batches of untested blood from a donor infected with HIV were sent to various clinics between 1986 and 1987, shortly before testing became mandatory, say the prosecutors. Of the 14 patients who received the blood, three died of AIDS-related illness and two others contracted AIDS.

Nobel immunologist Georges J. F. Köhler dies at Freiburg im Breisgau March 1 at age 48; virologist Jonas E. Salk of heart failure at La Jolla, Calif., June 23 at age 80. He has been studying ways to boost immunity to the AIDS virus HIV.

Spontaneous Healing by Philadelphia-born alternative-medicine guru Andrew Weil, 53, touts good nutrition along with a sensible life style and enjoys huge sales despite its lack of scientific support.

religion

American Atheists Inc. founder and president Madalyn Murray O'Hair goes missing from Austin, Texas, August 27 along with her 40-year-old second son, Jon Garth, and his daughter, whom Madalyn has adopted. Now 76, O'Hair has left a note saying they were going to San Antonio, she and Jon have allegedly taken more than $625,000 in organization funds, Jon orders $600,000 in gold goins from a San Antonio jeweler in September but takes delivery of only $500,000 worth, nothing more is heard of them, and O'Hair's elder son, William, will file a missing persons report in December of next year. The three are presumed dead, probably having been murdered by a person or persons unknown who kidnapped them and forced them to withdraw the missing funds before killing them. Ex-convict David Roland Waters worked at the organization's Austin office and will eventually plead guilty to lesser charges before leading police to the bodies of the three victims on a remote Texas ranch in January 2001.

Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth's Last Days by evangelical preacher and author Tim LaHaye, now 69, and former sportswriter Jerry B. Jenkins, 45, begins a series of adult and juvenile Left Behind novels (all published at Wheaton, Ill.) that promote religious fundamentalism and will have sales of more than 62 million copies in the next 10 years, at least 70 percent of them in the South and Midwest. Having written dozens of non-fiction books (some of them with his wife, Beverly), LaHaye starts building a huge fortune.

Chinese authorities proclaim a 6-year-old boy the 11th Panchen Lama in ceremonies November 29 at Lhasa, Tibet, challenging the choice of the Dalai Lama, who has been exiled since 1959.

education

Namibian schools adopt English for all classes except religion beginning in January, but few teachers can speak English and must read from books to uncomprehending pupils. The minister of education has decided that English is far more useful than Afrikaans, the language of Namibia's historic oppressors.

The Illinois State Legislature passes a bill in June giving Chicago's mayor Richard M. Daley complete control of the nation's third-largest school system and one of its most troubled.

The U.S. Department of Education finds that 32 percent of Asian high school students at Albuquerque, N.M., receive "native-language" instruction in Spanish. Many English-speaking Hispanic students in some states are placed in bilingual classes simply because of their surnames, violating Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Fire at a school ceremony in an Indian village 185 miles northwest of New Delhi December 23 kills at least 538. Mourners blame corrupt officials.

communications, media

The U.S. first-class postal rate rises January 1 from 29¢ to 32¢.

Maxim magazine begins publication early in the year at London with backing from Felix Dennis, now 47 (see 1985). He will bring out a U.S. edition of his girly publication in 1997, promote it by giving free subscriptions to radio disk jockeys, push its circulation through the million mark by mid-1999, force competitors such as Esquire and GQ to put scantily-clad women on their covers, and watch circulation top 2 million by 2001 (seeThe Week, 2001).

George magazine begins publication at New York with a cover photograph of model Cindy Crawford dressed as George Washington. Developed by John F. Kennedy Jr., 35, and Michael J. Berman, 38, after a presidential inaugural dinner last year, the consumer-oriented publication about politics has financial backing from Hachette Filipacchi Magazines, projects a circulation of about 250,000, and within 18 months will have a rate base of 400,000 (versus 101,000 for the New Republic, 196,000 for the National Review).

Working Woman's paid circulation falls to 764,000, down from its peak of more than 900,000 in 1988, as U.S. general-interest magazines with broader appeal pay more heed to women's issues.

Toronto-based Thomson Corp. announces July 27 that it will sell 21 of its newspapers as part of a reorganization plan, 19 of them (in Ontario and Saskatchewan) to Conrad Black's Hollinger Inc. Thomson retains control of the Toronto Globe and Mail (see 1980).

Newsprint prices increase sharply worldwide, increasing by 50 percent between March and year's end. Some papers reduce page numbers and print runs, some switch from broad-sheet format to tabloid size, some increase prices, some cut staff or cut back on travel budgets for foreign correspondents; the higher cost of newsprint slows a fierce British price-war begun by Rupert Murdoch 2 years ago, Murdoch's News International gives away copies of its Times of London August 24 (Microsoft has sponsored the entire issue to launch its Windows 95) but shuts down its 9-year-old, labor-supporting paper Today in November.

The syndicated column "Ask Martha Stewart" launched in November will be in 212 newspapers by 1998.

Syndicated newspaper columnist Victor Riesel dies of a heart attack at his New York apartment January 4 at age 81; New Yorker magazine cartoonist George Price at Englewood, N.J., January 12 at age 93; public relations pioneer Edward L. Bernays of bladder cancer at Cambridge, Mass., March 9 at age 103 (he has reportedly been sexually active until age 101); journalist-author George Seldes dies at Windsor, Vt., July 2 at age 104; speed-reading teacher Evelyn Wood at a Tucson, Ariz., hospice August 26 at age 86; former New York Times Washington correspondent James B. "Scotty" Reston Jr. of cancer at his Washington, D.C., home December 6 at age 86 (he retired in 1989 after 50 years at the Times).

The History Channel launched on cable television in January by Hearst Corp., ABC, and NBC has an initial subscriber-viewer base of 1 million viewers; by 2005 it will reach 87.5 million homes with an average of nearly 1.2 million viewers (mostly older men) tuning in each night.

Former BBC TV news anchor Peter Holmes Woods dies of cancer at Yeovil, England, March 22 at age 64; former television news anchor (and onetime Timex Watch spokesman) John Cameron Swayze at his Sarasota, Fla., home August 15 at age 89.

Walt Disney Co. announces July 31 that it will pay $19.2 billion to acquire Capital Cities/ABC, whose properties include cable TV companies such as ESPN (see sports, 1979) as well as the ABC network.

Congress tries to rewrite U.S. communications laws, reducing regulation of cable television, allowing local telephone companies to enter the long-distance market, and the like. More than 63 percent of U.S. households have cable TV service, up from less than 20 percent in 1980.

Being Digital by MIT Media Laboratory cofounder Nicholas Negroponte predicts "smart homes" that will be wired in ways that people's refrigerators will tell their motorcars that they are low on milk, that news will be tailored to individuals' particular interests, that electronic butlers will screen people's phone calls, etc.

The AltaVista search engine has its beginnings in the spring as Digital Equipment Corp. Research lab scientists at Palo Alto, Calif., devise a way to store every word of every page on the entire Internet in a fast searchable index (see Yahoo!, 1994). Their patented discovery will lead to the development of the first searchable, full-text database on the World Wide Web and the first one able to support Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages, but AltaVista will soon have powerful competition in the search-engine market (see 1996).

Microsoft's new Windows 95 provides access to the company's new Internet (MSN), competing with America Online (AOL), CompuServe, Delphi, e-World, Prodigy, Netscape, and other "cyberspace" networks that permit computer users to communicate with each other via telephone modems. Former McCaw Cellular and Federal Express executive James L. Barksdale, 51, has joined Netscape as president and CEO January 11 to give the company some adult guidance. AOL progenitor William F. Von Meister dies of melanoma at his Great Falls, Va., home May 18 at age 53, leaving a pile of debts. A May 26 memo from Microsoft's Bill Gates to his top executives advises them that the Internet is the company's top priority (see 1994). Netscape Communications goes public August 9; it has yet to show a profit with its Navigator Internet browser, but sale of stock in the company brings in $2 billion, making Marc Andreesen and James Clark enormously rich.

The Excite Internet browser is introduced in October by former Stanford University Ph.D. candidates Graham Spencer and Joe Kraus, both 23, to challenge the 18-month-old Yahoo! with backing from America Online and the Tribune Co. but mostly from private venture capitalists. Spencer and Kraus will wind up with just 15.4 percent of the company.

Microsoft begins shipping its Internet Explorer 2.0 browser in November; Bill Gates unveils his Internet strategy December 7 with an all-day program for analysts, customers, and journalists to show that Microsoft intends to win the Internet race (see 1996). By next year the Internet will be a collection of more than 100,000 individual computer networks owned by governments, universities, nonprofit groups, and companies, all adhering to the same basic technical standards.

literature

The New York Public Library begins in November to offer Internet services in all of its 87 branches. The Internet is soon being used for 150,000 searches per month.

Nonfiction: My American Journey by Gen. Colin L. Powell, U.S. Army (ret.), who has received a $6 million advance for his memoirs and announces November 9 that he will not run for president in 1996, disappointing many who had hoped that having a black man in the White House might help heal America's racial divisions; On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace by Lithuanian-born Yale classics and history professor Donald Kagan, 63; Paper and Iron: Hamburg Business and German Politics in the Era of Inflation, 1827-1927 by Glasgow-born Oxford historian Niall Ferguson, 31; The Romanovs: The Final Chapter by Robert K. Massie; The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School by Neil Postman; In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam by former secretary of defense Robert S. McNamara, now 78, whose mea culpa is criticized by some for opening old wounds; Hiroshima in America by Niagara Falls, N.Y.-born New York editor Greg Mitchell, 47, and Robert Jay Lifton contends that the U.S. government deliberately concealed Japan's human suffering in 1945 to make nuclear weapons more palatable to Americans; The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution by Harper's magazine executive editor Michael Lind, 32, an apostate "conservative" who says today's multiculturalism is "plutocracy tempered by tokenism" and calls the "caste-like" U.S. educational system the "final redoubt of oligarchy"; The Gravest Show on Earth: America in the age of AIDS by Philadelphia-born journalist Elinor Burkett, 51; Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Fact by Vine Deloria Jr.; The All-American Skin Game; or, The Decoy of Race: The Long and the Short of It by Stanley Crouch; Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time by New York-born former New York Times science reporter Dava Sobel, 48; It Takes a Village(And Other Lessons Children Teach Us) by Hillary Rodham Clinton; River Out of Eden by zoologist Richard Dawkins, who has created controversy with his views of evolution and his atheism (he has compared religious belief to the childishness of needing someone to blame for anything inexplicable) but is appointed the first Charles Simonyi professor of public understanding of science at Oxford.

Author George Woodcock dies at Vancouver, B.C., January 28 at age 82; naturalist-author Gerald M. Durrell of complications from a liver transplant at St. Helier, Jersey, January 30 at age 70; James Herriot at his Yorkshire home near Thirsk February 23 at age 78; pioneer paperback publisher Ian Ballantine of cardiac arrest at his Bearville, N.Y., home March 9 at age 79; biochemist-historian Joseph Needham at Cambridge, England, March 24 at age 94; John Chamberlain at his native New Haven, Conn., April 9 at age 91.

Fiction: Too Far Afield (or A Broad Field, Ein weites Feld) by Günter Grass, whose view that German reunification was a mistake creates a furor that produces sales of 350,000 copies in 1 year; The Rings of Saturn (Die Ringe des Saturn: Eine Englische Walifahrt) by W. G. Sebald; The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald is about the late 18th-century German poet Novalis and his hapless love for an adolescent girl; The Island of the Day Before by Umberto Eco; Blindness (Ensalo Sobre a Cegueira) by José Saramago; Sabbath's Theater by Philip Roth; Rule of the Bone by Russell Banks; Independence Day by Richard Ford; Mrs. Ted Bliss by Stanley Elkin; Mr. Ives' Christmas by Oscar Hijuelos; Of Love and Other Demons by Gabriel Garcia Marquez; Behind the Scenes at the Museum by York-born English novelist Kate Atkinson, 44; The Ghost Road by Pat Barker; The Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kinkaid; The Moor's Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie; The Information by Martin Amis; The Master of Petersburg by J. M. Coetzee; The Polish Officer by Alan Furst; Raising Holy Hell by Milwaukee-born novelist Bruce Olds, 43; The Hundred Secret Senses by Amy Tan; Moo by Jane Smiley; Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon; The Ring of Brightest Angels around Heaven (novella and stories) by Rick Moody is about AIDS, drugs, despair, rock music, and artistic ambitions in New York's bohemian East Village.

More than 7,600 new fiction titles are published in the United States, up from 5,764 in 1990.

Novelist Patricia Highsmith dies of leukemia at Locarno, Switzerland, February 4 at age 79 (she leaves her entire estate to the Yaddo art colony at Saratoga Springs, N.Y., where she did much of her writing); Calder Willingham dies of lung cancer at Laconia, N.H., February 14 at age 72; novelist-historian Paul Horgan at Middletown, Conn., March 8 at age 91; Max Braithwaite at Brighton, Ont., March 19 at age 83; Stanley Elkin at St. Louis May 31 at age 65; Brigid Brophy August 7 at age 66 in the Lincolnshire nursing home where she has been confined with multiple sclerosis; Henry Roth at Albuquerque October 13 at age 89; Sir Kingsley Amis at London October 22 at age 73 after breaking two vertebrae in a fall; Walter Braden "Jack" Finney dies at Greenbrae, Ohio, November 14 at age 84; novelist, playwright, and man of letters Robertson Davies of a stroke at Orangeville, Ont., December 2 at age 82.

Poetry: The Art of Drowning by Billy Collins; A Scattering of Salts by the late James Merrill; The First Four Books of Poems by Louise Glück; Passing Through: The Later Poems, New and Selected by Stanley Kunitz, now 90.

Poet James Merrill dies of AIDS at Tucson, Ariz., February 6 at age 68; Ralph B. Gustafson at North Hatley, Quebec, May 29 at age 85; Sir Stephen Spender of a heart ailment at his native London July 16 at age 86; May Sarton at York, Me., July 16 at age 83; Earle Birney at Toronto September 3 at age 91; poet-critic Donald Alfred Davie at Exeter, Devon, September 18 at age 73.

Juvenile: The Golden Compass by British schoolteacher-turned-author Philip Pullman, 48, is the first of a trilogy in which organized religion is the villain; Yolanda's Genius by Carol Fenner; Trupp: A Fuzzhead Tale by Janell Cannon; The Amazing Christmas Extravaganza by Washington, D.C.-born Los Angeles author David Shannon, 35.

Author Michael Ende dies of stomach cancer at Stuttgart August 28 at age 65.

art

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art opens in January. Designed by Italian architect Mario Botta, 51, it has impressive gallery space and some notable works but its ground floor has no room to display paintings or sculpture.

Sculpture: Heir, State Line, Voyage by Robert Rauschenberg. The French sculptor César erects a 520-ton barrier of compressed automobiles at the Venice Biennale.

Congress reacts to the controversy over publicly financed art by cutting its appropriation for the National Endowment for the Arts by 40 percent to $99 million; it eliminates all fellowships to individuals except for those to writers, a few jazz musicians, and a dozen "traditional artists."

photography

Eastman Kodak introduces the DC40 digital camera at less than $800 (see 1991). Digital imaging remains in its infancy (see Sony Mavica, 1997).

Photojournalism pioneer Alfred Eisenstaedt dies at Oak Bluffs, Mass., on Martha's Vineyard August 23 at age 96.

Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates acquires the Bettmann Archive through his Corbis Corp. with a view to building a library of digitally-stored images that may be sampled and sold via computer disks or over the Internet.

theater, film

Theater: Love! Valour! Compassion! by Terrence McNally 2/14 at New York's Walter Kerr Theater (after a run at the Manhattan Theater Club), with Nathan Lane, Stephen Bogardus, John Glover, Anthony Heald, 248 perfs.; Dealer's Choice by London-born playwright Patrick Marber, 30, in February at London's Royal National Theatre, Cottlesloe; Indian Ink by Tom Stoppard 2/27 at London's Aldwych Theatre, with Felicity Kendal; Defending the Caveman by comedian Rob Becker 3/26 at New York's Helen Hayes Theater, with Becker in what began as a stand-up act at San Francisco's Improv, 674 perfs.; The Steward of Christendom by Sebastian Barry 4/5 at London's Theatre Upstairs (later at the Royal Court Theatre), with Donal McCann; Skylight by David Hare 5/4 at London's Cottesloe Theatre, with Michael Gambon, Lia Williams, David Betts; Valley Song by Athol Fugard in August at Johannesburg, with Fugard, Lisa Gay Hamilton; The Food Chain by Philadelphia-born playwright Nicky Silver, 33, 8/24 at New York's Westside Theater Upstairs, with Hope Davis, Phyllis Newman, Rudolf Martin, Patrick Fabian, and Tom McGowan; Moon Over Buffalo by Ken Ludwig 10/1 at New York's Martin Beck Theater, with Carol Burnett, Philip Bosco, 309 perfs.; Mrs. Klein by Cape Town-born British playwright Nicholas Wright, 55, 10/24 at New York's off-Broadway Lucille Lortel Theater, with Uta Hagen, now 76, as psychoanalyst Melanie Klein; Riff Raff by actor-playwright Laurence Fishburne 11/1 at New York's Circle-in-the-Square Downtown; Master Class by Terrence McNally 11/5 at New York's Golden Theater, with Zoë Caldwell as the late diva Maria Callas, 598 perfs.

Broadway playwright-director-actor-producer George Abbott dies of a stroke at his Miami Beach home January 31 at age 107; playwright Bob Randall of AIDS at his New Milford, N.Y., home February 13 at age 57; playwright Jack Gelber at Los Angeles February 14 at age 62 following a stroke; playwright Robert Bolt of a heart ailment at his home near Petersfield, England, February 20 at age 70; playwright Sidney Kingsley of a stroke at his Oakland, N.J., home March 20 at age 88; actor Sir Michael Hordern of kidney failure at Oxford May 2 at age 83; Eric Porter of colon cancer at London May 15 at age 67; actress Genevieve Tobin at Pasadena, Calif., July 21 at age 95; Esther Muir at Mount Kisco, N.Y., August 1 at age 92; Jeremy Brett of heart failure at London September 12 at age 59; playwright John Patrick by his own hand at a Delray Beach, Fla., adult-care center November 7 at age 90; playwright Charles Gordone of cancer at his College Station, Texas, home November 17 at age 70.

Television: Cybill 1/2 on CBS with Cybill Shepherd, now 44, as an unsuccessful TV actress, Alicia Witt, Dede Pfeiffer, Ivan Sergei, in a sitcom created by Chuck Lorre (to 7/3/1998); NewsRadio 3/21 on NBC with Canadian-born actor Dave Foley, 32, Phil Hartman, 46 (to 5/4/1999); Caroline in the City 9/21 on NBC with Lea Thompson, Eric Lutes, Malcolm Gets, Amy Pietz (to 4/26/1999); JAG 9/23 on CBS with David James Elliott as Lieut. Harmon Rabb of the U.S. Navy's Judge Advocate General's corps (on CBS 1997 to 4/29/2005); Xena: Warrior Princess 9/23 on MCA stations with New Zealand-born actress Lucy Lawless, 26 (to 6/23/2001).

British radio disk jockey-TV comedian Kenny Everett (Maurice James Christopher Cole) dies of AIDS-related illness at Liverpool April 4 at age 50; former U.S. game-show host Art Fleming of pancreatic cancer at his Crystal River, Fla., home April 25 at age 70; actor Paul Eddington of skin cancer at London November 4 at age 68.

Films: Ron Howard's Apollo 13 with Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon, Ed Harris; Ang Lee's Sense and Sensibility with Emma Thompson, Hugh Grant. Also: Marleen Gorris's Antonia's Line with Willeke van Ammelrooy, Jan Decleir; Chris Noonan's Babe with James Cromwell and a pig; Amy Heckerling's Clueless with Alicia Silverstone, Stacy Dash (who speak like in the as if vernacular of California Valley Girls); Terry Zwigoff's documentary Crumb about underground comic-book artist Robert Crumb; Ronald Harwood's Cry, The Beloved Country with James Earl Jones, Richard Harris; Barry Sonnenfeld's Get Shorty with John Travolta, Gene Hackman, Danny DeVito; Michael Mann's Heat with Al Pacino, Robert De Niro; Gianni Amelio's Lamerica with Enrico Lo Verso; Mike Figgis's Leaving Las Vegas with Nicolas Cage; Roger Michell's Persuasion with Amanda Root; Alfonso Cuaron's A Little Princess with Liesel Matthews, Eleanor Bron; John Lasseter's Toy Story with computer-animated toys (voices by Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Don Rickles, Wallace Shawn, et. al.).

Actor Donald Pleasence dies following heart surgery at Worksop, England, February 2 at age 75; David Wayne of lung cancer at Santa Monica, Calif., February 9 at age 81; director Jack Clayton of heart and liver ailments at Slough, England, February 25 at age 73; Burl Ives of cancer at Anacortes, Washington, April 14 at age 85; Ginger Rogers at her Rancho Mirage, Calif., home April 25 at age 83 (she made more than 70 films in her career); Elisha Cook Jr. dies at Big Pine, Calif., May 18 at age 92; Elizabeth Montgomery of cancer at her Los Angeles home May 18 at age 57; animation pioneer Fritz Frelung at Los Angeles May 26 at age 89; Sunday Times film critic Dilyn Powell at London June 3 at age 93; Lana Turner of throat cancer at her two-bedroom Los Angeles condo June 29 at age 74; Ida Lupino of cancer at her Burbank home August 3 at age 77; Eva Gabor of respiratory illness and other infections at Los Angeles July 4 at age 74; actor Eijo Okado in Japan September 14 at age 75; Viveca Lindfors of rheumatoid arthritis at Uppsala October 25 at age 74; screenwriter Terry Southern of respiratory failure at New York October 29 at age 71; director Louis Malle of lymphoma at his Beverly Hills home November 23 at age 63; Butterfly McQueen of burns suffered in a fire at her Augusta, Ga., home December 22 at age 84; Dean Martin of acute respiratory failure at his Beverly Hills home December 25 at age 78.

music

Hollywood musical: Mike Gabriel and Eric Goldberg's Pocahontas with Disney animation, music by Alan Menken, lyrics by Stephen Schwartz, songs that include "Colors of the Wind," "If I Never Knew You."

Broadway musicals: Smokey Joe's Cafe 3/2 at the Virginia Theater, with Brenda Braxton, B. J. Crosby, DeLee Lively, music and lyrics by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, now both 61, 2,036 perfs.; Victor/Victoria 11/17 at New York's Marquis Theater, with Julie Andrews, now 60, Tony Roberts, book by Blake Edwards, music by Henry Mancini, lyrics by Leslie Bricusse, songs by Frank Wildhorn that include "Trust Me," "Louie Says," and "Living in the Shadows," 734 perfs.

Composer Ulysses Kay dies of Parkinson's disease at Englewood, N.J., May 20 at age 78; onetime Broadway (and West End) musical star Dorothy Dickson at London September 25 at age 102, having long since become a chum of the Queen Mum.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum opens September 1 at Cleveland in an $84 million, 150,000-square foot building on Lake Erie designed by I. M. Pei. A concert at nearby Municipal Stadium September 2 features veteran performers who include Chuck Berry, Aretha Franklin, and Bruce Springsteen.

Popular songs: Jagged Little Pill (CD) by Canadian vocalist Alanis Morisette, 21, who scores a smash hit with her song "You Oughta Know"; The Woman in Me by Windsor, Ont.-born singer-songwriter Shania Twain, 30; A Boy Named Goo (CD) by the Buffalo, N.Y., alternative rock band Goo Goo Dolls (singer-guitarist John Joseph Theodore "Johnny" Rzeznik, 29, and singer-bassist Robby Takae, 30); What's the Story (Morning Glory) (CD) by Oasis includes the singles "Wonderwall" and "Don't Look Back in Anger;" Daydream (CD) by Mariah Carey; "Kiss from a Rose" by the singer Seal; Dreaming of You (CD) by the late U.S. Tejano singer Selena (Selena Quintanilla Perez); Now That I've Found You: A Collection (CD) by U.S. country soprano and fiddler Alison Krauss, 23, and her group Union Station; "Let Her Cry" by Hootie and the Blowfish; "For Your Love" by Stevie Wonder; Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness (two-CD album) by Smashing Pumpkins; HIStory, Past, Present & Future (CD) by Michael Jackson; Fais la vie (album) by Charles Trenet; Mirror Ball (CD) by Pearl Jam with Neil Young, now 49, who in the 1960s was part of the vocal quartet Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Annual growth in the U.S. recording industry falls to 2 percent, down from 20 percent last year.

Jazz drummer Art Taylor dies at New York February 6 at age 65; songwriter Kendall L. Hayes of liver cancer at his Danville, Ky., home February 2 at age 59; U.S. Tejano singer Selena (Selena Quintanilla Perez) is shot dead at Corpus Christi, Texas, March 31 at age 23 by the 35-year-old head of her fan club; Taiwanese pop singer Teresa Teng (Deng Lijun) dies May 8 at age 43 after suffering an asthmatic attack in Chaing Mai, Thailand. Beijing has banned her Mandarin love songs but recordings have been smuggled into the People's Republic via Hong Kong; alto saxophonist Marshall Walton Royal dies of cancer at Inglewood, Calif., May 8 at age 82; country singer Charlie "Silver Fox" Rich of a pulmonary aneurysm at a Hammond, La., motel July 25 at age 62; Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia gives his final concert July 10 at Chicago and dies of an apparent heart attack at a California drug-rehabilitation center August 9 at age 53; bandleader-comedian Phil Harris dies of a heart attack at his Rancho Mirage, Calif., home August 11 at age 91; comedian-singer-impersonator George Kirby of Parkinson's disease at Las Vegas September 30 at age 71; jazz trumpeter Don Cherry of liver failure at Malaga, Spain, October 19 at age 58; Maxene Andrews of the Andrews Sisters of a heart attack at Hyannis, Mass., October 21 at age 79.

sports

The San Francisco '49ers beat the San Diego Chargers 49 to 26 in Super Bowl XXIX at Miami January 29.

Basketball legend Nat Holman dies at New York February 12 at age 98.

Michael Jordan returns to the Chicago Bulls, wearing No. 45, and scores 19 points against the Indiana Pacers March 19, but the Pacers win 103 to 96 in overtime and Jordan will reclaim his No. 23 jersey for the playoffs. He scores 55 points at Madison Square Garden March 30, helping the Bulls defeat the New York Knicks 113 to 111, but the Bulls are eliminated by the Magic in May, despite good efforts by Jordan and Scotty Pippen (see 1996).

Pete Sampras wins in men's singles at Wimbledon and Flushing Meadow, Steffi Graf in women's (Graf wins her third successive Grand Slam).

Onetime tennis great Pancho Gonzalez dies of stomach cancer at Las Vegas, Nev., July 3 at age 67; tennis player Bobby Riggs of prostate cancer at Leucadia, Calif., October 25 at age 77.

Wisconsin-born thoroughbred trainer D. (Darrell) Wayne Lukas, 59, becomes the first to win U.S. racing's Triple Crown with different horses (Thunder Gulch in the Kentucky Derby and Belmont Stakes, Timber Country in the Preakness).

Former sports broadcaster Howard Cosell dies of a coronary embolism at New York April 23 at age 77 (he had a malignant chest tumor removed a few years ago); sportscaster Lindsay Nelson dies of complications from Parkinson's disease and pneumonia at Atlanta June 10 at age 76.

Baseball resumes major-league play April 26 following a truce between team owners and players that has ended a 234-day player strike, but the season is abbreviated from 162 games to 144, making it impossible for anyone to set a record, and outstanding issues remain unresolved. Ballpark attendance drops sharply, and TV viewer ratings slip. Baltimore Orioles infielder Cal Ripken Jr., 35, plays his 2,131st consecutive game September 6, beating the record of the late Yankee "Iron Man" Lou Gehrig.

The Atlanta Braves win the World Series, defeating the Cleveland Indians 4 games to 2.

The Boston Garden closes September 29 after nearly 67 years as New England's top center for basketball, hockey, the circus, and such (it will be demolished in November 1997); the $160 million, 18,624-seat FleetCenter opens with a gala September 30 to provide a new home for the Bruins of the NHL (they play the New York Islanders October 7 to a 4-4 tie) and the Celtics of the NBA as well as offering a venue for entertainment events and political conventions.

everyday life

Kennedy family matriarch Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy dies at her Hyannisport, Mass., home January 22 at age 104 of complications from pneumonia.

IBM abandons its ironclad dress code February 3, permitting employees to wear more casual clothing in place of white shirts and dark ties.

Russian chess grandmaster Mikhail Botvinnik dies at his Moscow home May 5 at age 83.

Fashion designer Adele Simpson dies at her Greenwich, Conn., home August 23 at age 90.

Britain adopts the metric system October 1, but many if not most Britons continue to calculate in inches, feet, miles, yards, acres, ounces, and pounds.

Kitty Litter creator Edward Lowe dies after surgery for a cerebral hemorrhage at Sarasota, Fla., October 4 at age 75, having increased the popularity of cats as house pets (the United States last year had 63 million cats, only 54.2 million dogs). The product introduced by Lowe in 1948 accounts for 55 percent of the $600 to $700 million, 2.5 billion-pound U.S. market for cat box fillers; sodium bentonite, or attapulgus (originally from Attapulgus, Ga.) accounts for 40 percent.

Princess Diana gives a candid, televised interview November 20 to BBC's Panorama program. The estranged wife of Charles, Prince of Wales, attracts an audience of 15 million.

tobacco

President Clinton issues an executive order August 10 giving the Food and Drug Administration broad powers to curb sales of tobacco to children (see 1994). A survey has reported that 34.8 percent of high school students said they had smoked in the past month, up from 27.5 percent in 1991. "Cigarettes and smokeless tobacco are harmful, highly addictive, and aggressively marketed to our young people," Clinton says, calling use of such products a "pediatric disease." "One-third more eighth graders and one-quarter more tenth graders are smoking today than four years ago . . . We must act now, before another generation of Americans is condemned to fight a difficult and personal battle with an addiction that will cost millions of them their lives."

crime

Mexican police arrest former president Carlos Salinas de Gortari's playboy brother Raul in March on charges connected with the murder in September 1994 of his brother-in-law José Francisco Ruiz Massieu, who was the second highest-ranking official in the ruling Industrial Revolutionary Party (PRI). Now 45, Raul deposited $100 million in foreign accounts during his brother's corrupt 6-year term and is widely suspected of having obtained the money from connections with the drug trade. He will be convicted of murder and sentenced to a 50-year term while his brother Carlos lives in retirement in Ireland.

A rush-hour nerve-gas attack in Tokyo March 20 kills 12 subway riders and injures some 5,500. No group claims responsibility, but police raid headquarters of the 11-year-old Aum Shinrikyo religious sect in Yamanashi Prefecture March 21 and find byproducts of sarin, the gas used in the attack. Founder Shoko Asahara, now 39, and other leaders of the sect deny any involvement. Police mobilize 80,000 men to prevent any repetition and arrest Asahara May 16 on murder charges.

A well-dressed gunman shoots former Guccio Gucci SpA chairman Maurizio Gucci in cold blood outside his luxurious Milan apartment house March 27. Dead at age 46, Gucci has sold his 50 percent stake in the company for an estimated $160 million, police investigate his financial dealings, but it will turn out that the gunman and his associates were paid 500 million lire ($300,000) by the victim's estranged wife, whom he married against the wishes of his father, the late Aldo Gucci. Patrizia Reggiani Martinelli, now 47, will be arrested in January 1998, convicted of premeditated murder after a sensational 5-month trial, and sentenced to a 29-year prison term that will be reduced to 26 years.

Mentally-disturbed, Ethiopian-born Harvard College junior Sinedu Tadesse stabs her Vietnamese-born Dunster House roommate Trang Ho 45 times May 28 and then hangs herself in their bathroom shower stall.

The body of a Central Park jogger is found September 17 and later proves to be that of Brazilian shoe-store employee Maria Isabel Pinto Monteiro Alves, 44. Police are stymied, but New York's crime rate is markedly lower than in recent years.

Los Angeles jurors find O. J. Simpson not guilty after a 9-month trial (see 1994). The celebrity murder case has transfixed TV viewers; many are outraged by the verdict, reached October 2 after less than 4 hours of deliberation and announced the following day while a record-size TV audience watches. So much public attention has been focused on the Simpson trial that major political and economic developments have gone almost unnoticed.

architecture, real estate

Celebration, Fla., opens November 18 with nearly 5,000 would-be residents vying to obtain houses built for the Walt Disney Co. along with public buildings constructed to designs by prominent architects such as Michael Graves, Philip Johnson, and Robert Venturi. Attracted by Disney hoopla, many have sold their homes and given up their jobs for the chance to move into the new planned community, even though its houses are shoddily built, cost one-third more than market price, and are in a mosquito-infested area. Residents who accept the offer of free computers and cell phones must agree to live with a "Zeus box" that monitors every telephone call they make and every Web site they visit, others must conform to standards that include white curtains in their windows and specified ratios of grass, shrubs, and trees on their property. But although Disney has recruited big-name educators to design the local school curriculum, parents will force the company to give up its chaotic progressive schooling and revert to more conventional teaching methods.

environment

Japan's deadliest earthquake since 1923 shatters Kobe and the surrounding Kinkki region January 17. Registering 6.9 on the Richter scale, it creates landslides and liquefaction, kills 6,433, injures more than 25,000, leaves an estimated 316,000 homeless, and causes by some estimates as much as $100 billion in property damage; a quake measuring 7.5 rocks Sakhalin Island May 27, killing 1,989.

An iceberg that breaks off the Antarctic's Larsen Ice Shelf in March is 48 miles long, 23 miles wide, and 600 feet thick; some atmospheric scientists discount suggestions that this is proof of global warming (see 1988), but more and more agree that such warming is a result of human activity—notably emission of greenhouse gases—and not entirely due to natural causes (see Kyoto Protocol, 1997).

Fires destroy an estimated 2 million square miles of Brazil's Amazon rain forest.

Montserrat's Soufrière Hills volcano begins erupting in July after 4 centuries of dormancy. The hot lava and ash cause no fatalities, but many residents begin leaving the 39-square-mile Caribbean island (see 1997).

Britain has her third warmest summer since the government began keeping records in 1659 and the driest since rainfall records were first kept in 1727. High temperatures in July and August break U.S. records; Chicago has 550 heat-related deaths, many of them among old people who dare not go out at night or open their windows for fear of crime.

Hurricanes Luis and Marilyn wreak havoc on Antigua, Barbuda, St. Thomas, and other Caribbean islands in late September; Hurricane Opel smacks into the Florida Panhandle October 4 with winds gusting up to 145 miles per hour that kill at least 18 and cause nearly $2 billion in property damage. Not since forecasters first began naming hurricanes in 1950 have they reached the letter O, and some atmospheric scientists predict that the worst storm season since 1933 may presage even stormier seasons to come, with a recent building boom on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts putting more people and property in jeopardy.

marine resources

The Canadian Coast Guard seizes a Spanish trawler March 9 just outside Canada's territorial waters east of Newfoundland and late in the month cuts another Spanish trawler's nets, worth an estimated $76,000 plus the value of the fish—mostly Greenland halibut (erroneously called turbot), which the Spanish sell to buyers in Japan. Ottawa has unilaterally declared the area off limits to protect dwindling fish populations, the disappearance of cod and some other species has idled some 50,000 east coast Canadian fishermen, Spanish ships have long been notorious for using fine-meshed nets, and Canada says conservation measures must be backed up by tough international enforcement.

agriculture

Oregon and Washington State apples go on sale at Tokyo January 10 as Japan eases restrictions on fruit imports. Shoppers line up to pay the equivalent of 80¢ or more per apple (apples produced in Japan fetch about $1 each but can sell for more than seven times that much, and apple consumption is one-fifth to one-third less than in Europe or America). Japan imports for the year total 12,000 to 15,000 tons—about 1 percent of the U.S. apple crop. Japan has been importing U.S. cherries for more than 15 years, and the total Japanese market for cherries has tripled.

"We must have both a political and strategic understanding of the food question," China's Communist Party president Jiang Zemin tells an emergency conference in February. China's grain output fell to 444.5 million metric tons last year, down from 456 million the year before, and the nation's population is growing at the rate of about 15 million per year. "Agriculture has become the weakest link in the national economy," says China's new agricultural czar. The nation has 450 million farmers, but many are leaving the land for better paying jobs in cities, where they can double or even quadruple their annual income, and urbanization in Sichuan (Szechwan) Province alone has consumed 10.6 million acres of arable lands since 1978.

Ukrainian farmers barter pigs for gasoline as fuel shortages continue to cripple production. The Kiev government is unable to pay for Russian oil, which is no longer subsidized, and peasants rely on small, private plots to raise the food for their families.

Cotton subsidies to U.S. growers depress world prices, causing a hardship for growers in developing countries.

U.S. farm lobbyists work to stymie congressional efforts to reduce crop subsidies to farmers, which last year cost taxpayers about $10 billion (down from a peak of $25 billion in 1986), but although subsidies were established in the 1930s to protect farmers from wild price gyrations, and the subsidies are credited with helping to keep food costs low (Americans spend only about 12 percent of their budgets on food, far less than many foreigners), some U.S. farmers favor returning to a market-oriented economy (see 1996).

Flooding of the Illinois, Mississippi, and Missouri rivers in May and early June prevent movement of barges loaded with corn for export markets, but the flooding is less severe than in 1993.

Forecasts that world stocks of wheat will fall to 93 million metric tons by year's end—the lowest in 20 years—push up prices as China and other countries rush to order foreign grain. Drought in Russia leads to the worst grain harvest in 30 years (66 million tons, down from a weak 80 million last year); Kazakhstan and Ukraine also have dismal harvests. Russian officials announce October 9 that the nation will remain self-sufficient in grain until next year's harvest, but less grain will mean higher meat prices.

British fruit and vegetable prices rise sharply as heat and drought kill off crops.

food availability

A House agriculture subcommittee votes March 7 to cut the U.S. food-stamp program by $16.5 billion over 5 years and require recipients of the stamps to meet strict new work standards. The program last year helped 27.8 million Americans at a cost of $24.5 billion, but the "Contract with America" manifesto that helped Republicans gain control of Congress in November of last year proposed to eliminate the individual entitlement to food stamps, replacing it with a nutrition block grant to the states. Farm lobbyists and consumer groups try to thwart such moves and resist efforts to turn the 49-year-old federal school lunch program (which last year had 25.3 million participants and cost $4.9 billion) and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (6.5 million participants, $3.2 billion) over to states, many of which would inevitably cut funding for the safety net that keeps millions of people from going hungry.

North Korea has famine in some provinces following August floods—by some accounts the worst in 100 years—which inundated 75 percent of the country, leaving some 500,000 homeless and facing starvation (see 1996).

nutrition

A 14-year study by Harvard School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School researchers published February 8 in the Journal of the American Medical Association reports that women who gain 11 to 18 pounds after age 18 have a 25 percent greater chance of suffering, or dying of, a heart attack than women who gain less than 11 pounds, and men who gain weight are at even greater risk.

The average U.S. woman's height is five feet, six inches, and guidelines issued in 1990 by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Health and Human Services raised the acceptable weight for adults of that height age 35 to between 130 and 167 pounds, up from 118 to 150 (for women) in 1985, but the Harvard study's chief investigator warns that gaining weight in middle age is not acceptable.

Results of a rigorous obesity study published in the New England Journal of Medicine March 9 by Rockefeller University researchers confirm that each human body naturally maintains a given weight equilibrium, adjusting its metabolism to burn calories more slowly after weight loss and more rapidly than normal after weight gain. Excessive dieting does not change this equilibrium, nor do obese people have slow metabolism. From 65 to 70 percent of the calories consumed each day go simply to maintain heart, brain, kidney, and liver functions.

Studies published in late July in Science by Amgen, Inc. and Rockefeller University scientists show that grossly obese mice lost 22 to 40 percent of their weight after a month of daily injections with a genetically-engineered hormone. The experiment confirmed the scientists' belief that a gene isolated and cloned in December from both mice and humans produces a hormone that helps regulate bodily storage of fat, and news of it raises hopes that a new treatment for obesity may be on the horizon.

The FDA leans toward easing approval rules for a new generation of diet drugs, such as dexfenfluramine, which may boost levels of the brain chemical serotonin to reduce cravings for carbohydrate (see 1994).

consumer protection

Consumer advocate F. J. Schlink dies at Philipsburg, N.J., January 15 at age 103.

food and drink

The U.S. Supreme Court rules unanimously in April that brewers may list a beer's alcoholic content on its label, upsetting a 60-year-old ban on grounds that it violates the First Amendment. The victory by Adolph Coors Co. raises alarm among public health officials as brewers increase alcohol levels as a marketing ploy. U.S. beer generally contains about 3 to 5 percent alcohol, but the new "ice" beers run 5 and 6 percent, malt liquors are as high as 7 percent, and some Canadian beers have raised their alcoholic content above 7 percent, although most brewers consider anything higher than 6 percent too harsh for U.S. tastes.

Popcorn magnate Orville Redenbacher is found dead in the bathtub of his house at Coronado, Calif., September 19 after a heart attack at age 82.

restaurants

No-smoking rules take effect April 10 in New York restaurants seating 35 or more (see 1994); most restauranteurs and patrons obey the new city ordinance, which allows smoking only in some separate bar areas. California and Utah ban smoking in all public places except bars.

population

Nobel chemist and sex-hormone pioneer Adolf F. J. Butenandt dies at Munich January 18 at age 91. His isolation of the hormone estrone in 1929 paved the way for oral contraceptives (forced by the Nazi government to refuse the 1939 Nobel Prize for chemistry, he was able to accept it 10 years later).

The U.S. Supreme Court rules unanimously January 24 that groups such as the Pro-Life Action League and Operation Rescue that try to block access to abortion clinics may be prosecuted under the Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act signed by President Nixon in 1970 (National Organization for Women v. Scheidler). Legislation signed by President Clinton May 26 makes it illegal to impede entry to an abortion clinic, with punishment of as much as life imprisonment and $200,000 fine for anyone who uses threats or intimidation against someone who wishes to have an abortion. Pro-life forces immediately file suit on grounds that the new law violates their First Amendment rights.

RU-486 goes into clinical trial in May at the University of California, San Francisco, as a "morning after" contraceptive pill (see 1994). The U.S. trial is part of a worldwide study involving 2,100 women at 14 locations and attempts to determine whether the drug is equally effective at a lower dosage. Nearly 30 of every 1,000 pregnant U.S. girls aged 15 to 19 obtain abortions, as compared with 18.5 in Britain, 10.5 in France, 6.8 in Germany, 6.3 in Italy, 4.5 in Spain (World Health Organization and Centers for Disease Control figures), but some Eastern European countries have rates even higher than 30 per 1,000.

Dallas marketing executive Norma McCorvey, 47, announces August 10 that she has joined an anti-abortion group and been baptized by its leader. McCorvey's conversion attracts attention because she was the "Jane Roe" in the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision, but she says she still believes in a woman's right to an abortion in the first trimester.

A study reported in the New England Journal of Medicine August 31 reveals that treatment with two cheap, widely available prescription drugs (methotrexate and misoprostol) terminated pregnancies safely and without surgery in 96 percent of 178 women. Methotrexate interferes with cell growth and division, misoprostol (an ulcer drug) causes uterine contractions. Used in combination over a 7- to 10-day period, they provide an alternative to the French drug RU-486, which has yet to receive FDA approval (see 1996); treatment can begin as soon as a woman knows that she is pregnant and is most successful in the first 9 weeks.

A Dallas jury orders abortion protesters to pay $8.6 million to physician Norman Tomkins, 62, who claims that he and his wife, Carolyn, have been pursued and harassed by the protesters since October 1992 (see 1994). The October 25 award is the largest such judgment thus far.

Canadian police tighten security on abortion clinics after two shots from an assault rifle rip through a Vancouver gynecologist's window November 8, seriously wounding him.

Italy's president Oscar Luigi Scalfaro signs a decree November 18 that would restrict illegal immigration by permitting expulsion within 6 to 10 days of immigrants convicted of crimes carrying prison sentences of fewer than 3 years.

1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000

Anthropology

Because of concerns that roots or animals may be damaging them, one section of the fossil footprints at Laetoli, Tanzania, of three Australopithecus afarensis individuals are excavated, photographed, and carefully mapped, then reburied in sand. The same treatment will be given to the other section in 1996. See also 1979 Anthropology.

Swiss astronomers Didier Queloz [b. February 23 1966] and Michel Mayor [b. Lausanne, Switzerland, January 12, 1942] discover a planet half the mass of Jupiter orbiting the star 51 Pegasi at a distance of 50 light-years. This is the first known planet orbiting an ordinary star other than the Sun (such planets later will be known as extrasolar planets or as exoplanets). See also 1987 Astronomy; 1997 Astronomy.

The Hubble Space Telescope photographs giant pillars in the Eagle Nebula that are thought to be 1,000,000,000,000 km (6,000,000,000,000 mi) high.

The Giant Meterwave Radio Telescope is installed north of Pune, India. It contains 30 parabolic 45-m (148-ft) antennas arranged in a 25-km (15-mi) Y, which are combined with radio interferometry.

In the Creighton Mine at Sudbury, Ontario, astronomers begin operations of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, which employs 9600 photomultiplier tubes embedded in 1000 metric tons (1100 short tons) of heavy water. The object is to observe Cerenkov radiation produced by muons traveling faster than the speed of light in the heavy water. The use of heavy water allows detection of all three types of neutrinos (electron, muon, and tauon).

COAST (Cambridge Optical Aperture Synthesis Telescope), a combination of four telescopes (a fifth will be added later), makes its first images, the first astronomical images with high resolution obtained with optical interferometry. See also 1988 Astronomy. (See essay.)

In July the Galileo space probe, in orbit about Jupiter, drops a capsule onto the giant planet to analyze the composition of its atmosphere. It descends through the atmosphere on December 7, measuring pressure and abundance of helium and hydrogen. The main surprise is that there is no evidence of clouds, although abundant clouds are observed from Earth; scientists think that the probe simply passes through a cloudless region. Wind speeds reach 720 km (450 mi) per hour. See also 1993 Astronomy; 1998 Astronomy.

On March 18 the Japanese satellite Infrared Telescope in Space (IRTS) is launched. It operates successfully for 28 days. The European Space Agency's Infrared Space Observatory (ISO) is launched on November 17. It extends the work of the earlier space-based observatory IRAS. The ISO is nicknamed Europe's Hubble. See also 1983 Astronomy.

On December 2 the European Space Agency and U.S. satellite the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), which was built in Europe, is launched by NASA. It studies the Sun from an orbit about 1,500,000 million km (930,000 mi) from Earth, circling close to the L1 Lagrangian point. This gives the satellite a completely unobstructed view of the Sun at all times. See also 2001 Astronomy.

On December 30 the United State launches its first X-ray telescope since the Einstein Observatory, the Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer (XTE). It studies X-ray sources in the Milky Way Galaxy, including stars, pulsars, and black holes. See also 1978 Astronomy; 1999 Astronomy.

A team lead by Craig Venter publishes the first complete sequencing of the entire genome of a free-living organism, Haemophilus influenzae. Previous successes had all come with sequencing the genomes of viruses. See also 1997 Biology. (See biography.)

In December Danish scientists Peter Funch [b. Copenhagen, November 10, 1965] and Reinhardt M. Kristensen [b. December 6, 1948] announce the discovery of a microscopic animal that lives attached to the mouthparts of the Norwegian lobster. They name it Symbion pandora and, because it is so different from other animals (for one thing, its cilia-ringed mouth is adjacent to its similarly ringed anus), they recommend it be classified in a new phylum, Cycliophora.

Edward B. Lewis [b. Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, May 20, 1918], Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard [b. Magdeburg, Germany, October 20, 1942], and Eric F. Wieschaus [b. South Bend, Indiana, June 8, 1947] are awarded the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for identifying the genes that guide embryonic development in fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster).

In August a group of physicists at the University of Oregon report an exceptionally high data-storage density of 8 gigabits per square inch. By using a laser beam containing data in the form of different frequencies, they store data as patterns of excited atoms in a frequency-sensitive medium. This medium is a YAG crystal containing thulium atoms for storing the data, and a commercial GaAlAs diode laser is used for writing the data in the material.

Competing groups agree on standards for the DVD (then known as the digital video disk; later its name will be changed to digital versatile disk).

Various teams of geologists studying North America recognize that large regions of the west coast of the continent, called terranes, were originally small landmasses in the Pacific Ocean that had been moved by plate tectonics and pasted onto the continent. See also 1987 Earth science.

James Cochran and coworkers at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory establish that India and Australia are on two partly separated plates rather than on one as previously believed. See also 1963 Earth science.

Scientists from the American Museum of Natural History discover that a fossil previously brought back from the Gobi Desert is of a dinosaur brooding a nest of eggs. See also 1926 Anthropology.

The United Nations Working Group I of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports that "the balance of evidence suggests that there is a discernable human influence on global climate." The report makes it clear that that influence can be characterized as global warming. See also 1992 Ecology & the environment; 1997 Ecology & the environment.

Three species of kangaroo, the eastern gray, the western gray, and the red, are removed from the Endangered Species List because of population recovery. See also 1994 Ecology & the environment; 2001 Ecology & the environment.

F. Sherwood Rowland, Mario Molina, and Paul Crutzen [b. Amsterdam, December 3, 1933] are awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for the recognition of chemical pathways that chlorofluorocarbons take in the upper atmosphere that destroy the ozone layer, permitting additional harmful ultraviolet radiation to reach Earth's surface. See also 1974 Ecology & the environment.

Shoji Nakamura and coworkers at Nichia Chemical Industries in Japan develop blue-light laser diodes that have lifetimes of several dozen hours, too short for most commercial applications but capable of being improved. Later versions will become standard for DVDs, where their short wavelength makes them able to read and write smaller dots. See also 1991 Energy.

Junji Kido of Yamagata University in Japan and coworkers combine three different diode layers, including a blue-light-emitting diode the group invented, to create white light.

Andrew Wiles publishes a corrected version of his 1993 proof of Fermat's "Last Theorem." See also 1993 Mathematics.

Jonathan and Peter Borwein calculate π up to 10,000,000,000 decimal places. See also 1987 Mathematics; 1999 Mathematics.

R. Sherrington, Peter H. St. George-Hyslop, Gerald D. Schellenberg, and many colleagues isolate and characterize two genes responsible for early-onset, familial Alzheimer's disease. See also 1907 Medicine & health.

The FDA approves alprostadil (Caverject), the first drug for treatment of male impotence. It must be injected into the penis. See also 1998 Medicine & health.

Eric A. Cornell [b. Palo Alto, California, December 19, 1961] and Carl Wieman [b. Corvallis, Oregon, March 26, 1951] create a new form of matter: a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) of about 2000 rubidium atoms at 20 nK (nanoKelvins) -- that is 0.00000002°C (0.000000036°F) above absolute zero -- that behave as a single "superatom." A few months later Wolfgang Ketterle [b. Heidelberg, Germany, October 21, 1957] creates a Bose-Einstein condensate with sodium atoms. See also 1924 Physics; 1997 Physics. (See essay.)

Edward Witten [b. Baltimore, Maryland, August 26, 1951] and Paul Townsend separately introduce a superstring theory as a limit of 11-dimensional supergravity theory with quantized membranes, an idea that becomes the start of M theory and branes. M theory and brane theory begin with the concept of membranes in 11-dimensional space as the fundamental entities of reality but becomes more abstract. Many physicists feel that these theories are the true bases of physics. See also 1984 Physics.

Nine antihydrogen atoms are obtained at CERN by Walter Oelert and his team. Xenon atoms are fired at an antiproton beam, creating electron positron pairs, whereby the positrons combine with the antiprotons, forming antihydrogen atoms. These move too swiftly to be analyzed for properties, however. See also 1934 Physics; 2002 Physics.

The top quark is observed at Fermilab near Chicago; it is produced by colliding protons and antiprotons. The top is the last of the predicted six quarks to be found. See also 1977 Physics.

Martin Perl is awarded a share of the Nobel Prize in physics for his discovery of the unpredicted tau particle (a heavier version of the electron and muon). Frederick Reines is the cowinner of the prize for the first observation of the neutrino (with Clyde Cowan, who died before the prize was awarded). The neutrino had been accepted as existing since 1930, but it interacts so little with matter that no one had been able to detect it before Reines and Cowan. See also 1977 Physics; 1956 Physics.

The Monopole Astrophysics Cosmic Ray Observatory (MACRO) starts operation in the Gran Sasso tunnel at Abruzzo, Italy. Some 10,000 m² (1308,000 sq ft) of detectors are used in the search of magnetic monopoles as well as other particles, including cosmic rays and neutrinos.

Drama and Theater

• Horton Foote (b. 1916): The Young Man from Atlanta. A Pulitzer Prize winner, Foote's play is set in the east Texas of his boyhood. Willy Kidder, who has been compared with Willy Loman, is fired from his job by the son of his old boss. Willy's son commits suicide, and the play becomes a study in how Willy deals with this tragedy. The Texas-born writer is best known for his film work, including To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), Tender Mercies (1983), and The Trip to Bountiful (1985).
• David Mamet: Cryptogram. The playwright wins the Obie Award for best play for this drama set in Chicago during the 1950s, about a child's emotional abuse. Reviewer Vincent Canby calls it "a horror story that also appears to be one of Mr. Mamet's most personal plays."
• David Mamet, Elaine May (b. 1932), and Woody Allen (b. 1935): Death Defying Acts. Three authors each write one one-act play: Mamet, An Interview (in which a lawyer is sent to hell); May, Hotline (in which a hooker tries to gain solace from a neophyte phone volunteer); and Allen, Central Park West (a comic attack on Manhattan's upper crust). The plays are unified by an astringent, hard-boiled, big-city attitude.
• Emily Mann: Having Our Say. The Delany Sisters' First 100 years. Mann's best-known and most highly praised drama is this adaptation of the best-selling 1993 memoir by Sarah and Elizabeth Delany, chronicling the lives of two elderly African American sisters.
• Donald Margulies: The Model Apartment. Margulies's play about two Holocaust survivors in Florida and their schizophrenic daughter wins the Obie Award for best drama.
• Terrence McNally: Master Class. McNally's play re-creates a class taught by the opera diva Maria Callas as she reminisces about her great career. Critics find the play an extraordinary animation of the artist's biography and sensibility and a deeply romantic work about a suffering artist.
• Neil Simon: London Suite. Essentially a deftly written farce, the play is about a famous actress who reconciles with her gay ex-husband. The plot becomes complicated when the ex throws his back out and remains immobile on the floor while all around him turns to chaos. Critics admire Simon's blending of sentiment and humor.
• August Wilson: Seven Guitars. Wilson continues his chronicle of African American life, focusing on blues musician Floyd "Schoolboy" Barton, his musical colleagues, and their neighbors in Pittsburgh in 1948.

Fiction

• Madison Smartt Bell (b. 1957): All Souls' Rising. Bell's novel about the Haitian revolution of 1791-1804 is told from a variety of perspectives and focuses on the second-generation slave leader of the rebellion, Toussaint L'Ouverture. It is the first of a projected trilogy devoted to the historical event. Master of the Crossroads would follow in 2000. The Tennessee-born writer's other novels include The Washington Square Ensemble (1983), Soldier's Joy (1989), and Save Me, Joe Louis (1993).
• T. Coraghessan Boyle: The Tortilla Curtain. Boyle's novel concerns the clash between California nouveau riche and illegal Mexican immigrants, whose labor the wealthy exploit but whom they otherwise try--literally--to wall out of their lives. It is a kind of latter-day version of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939).
• Christopher Bram (b. 1952): Father of Frankenstein. Bram's biographical novel re-creates the final days of horror film director James Whale. Told in the present tense, the book mimics a film script; like Billy Wilder's 1950 film Sunset Boulevard, it takes the discovery of Whale's body floating in a swimming pool as its jump-off point. The novel is also notable for its treatment of Whale's homosexuality, which in 1950s Hollywood was necessarily kept in the closet and perhaps contributed to his death. The book would be adapted as the film Gods and Monsters (1998).
• Michael Chabon (b. 1964): The Wonder Boys. Chabon's novel tells the tale of an English professor's search for an ending to his novel--eight years in the making and also called The Wonder Boys. Chabon's witty use of pop-culture vernacular is noted by Hollywood, which would adapt the popular and critically acclaimed book into a film in 2000. Born in Washington, D.C., Chabon graduated from the University of Pittsburgh and the University of California at Irvine. His first novel was The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988), and he would win the Pulitzer Prize for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000).
• Pat Conroy: Beach Music. Conroy continues to mine personal and family traumas in this story of Jack McCall, who returns to South Carolina from his exile to Italy following his wife's suicide. He deals with his mother's impending death and the legacy of the past among his family and friends.
• Edwidge Danticat: Krik? Krak! This Haitian American writer's collection of stories reflects, in its title, the call-and-response form of Haitian storytelling. Its subject matter--stories mostly relating to Haitian life--offer a unique perspective in modern American letters.
• Stanley Elkin: Mrs. Ted Bliss. Elkin's final novel, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, presents his finest female portrait, the sweet-natured eighty-year-old Dorothy Bliss, a widow living in a Miami retirement community. Her sale of the family car tests her resourcefulness and humanity.
• Rosario Ferré (b. 1938): The House on the Lagoon. Set in the author's native Puerto Rico, this is the first of Ferré's books composed in English. Flavored by magic realism, the novel presents a history of modern Puerto Rico from the vantage point of a woman writing a novel on her Puerto Rican family. Eccentric Neighborhoods, a family saga of linked stories capturing Puerto Rican social and political history, would follow in 1997.
• Richard Ford: Independence Day. Ford's novel continues the story of Frank Bascombe, the main character of Ford's acclaimed The Sportswriter (1986). Bascombe seeks a reconciliation with his estranged and uncooperative son, which proves extremely difficult. Bascombe himself cannot quite overcome his fixation on the past or adjust to life in the suburbs. Ford is praised for subtle use of psychology and an acute sense of place.
• Mark Helprin: Memoir from Antproof Case. Helprin's novel features an elderly American in hiding in Brazil, reviewing his life: his childhood in New York, his stay in a Swiss asylum, his involvement in World War II, his marriage, and the circumstances resulting in his aversion to coffee.
• Thom Jones: Cold Snap. Jones's second collection shifts the focus on Vietnam found in The Pugilist at Rest (1993) to Africa, where several of the stories deal with characters associated with humanitarian aid to Rwanda. Joyce Carol Oates compares certain scenes with "the paintings of Bosch and Goya, the terrifying portraits of Frances Bacon."
• Jamaica Kincaid: The Autobiography of My Mother. Kincaid's shocking semi-autobiographical novel is about the casual cruelties of early-twentieth-century Caribbean life, related in the first person by a bitterly angry woman. Reviewer Michiko Kakutani observes that this woman is more than an absent mother; she "represents... a connection to earlier generations of women and blacks who endured the indignities of colonial and post-colonial oppression."
• Chang-Rae Lee (b. 1965): Native Speaker. The Korean-born writer's first novel explores modern Asian immigrant experiences. It wins more than six major literary prizes, including the PEN/Hemingway Award and the American Book Award.
• Bruce Olds (b. 1951): Raising Holy Hell. Olds's first novel is a fictionalized account of the career of abolitionist John Brown. Named novel of the year by the American Library Association and nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, the novel features a collage technique made up of diaries, newspaper articles, songs, poems, internal monologues, and eyewitness recollections. Born in Wisconsin, Olds is the author of Bucking the Tiger (2001), about western gunfighter "Doc" Holliday.
• Philip Roth: Sabbath's Theater. Roth tells the story of a suicidal, priapic New Jersey puppeteer. The book wins a National Book Award but also inspires severe criticism for its deliberately offensive--some say pornographic--obsession with sex.
• Jane Smiley: Moo. Smiley's academic satire surveys a Midwestern agricultural "cow-college," filled with professional rivalries and pretenses.
• Amy Tan: The Hundred Secret Senses. Tan's novel contrasts two Chinese half-sisters, one thoroughly Americanized, the other a mystic who can communicate with the spirit world.
• Anne Tyler: Ladder of Years. Tyler's novel describes the fate of middle-aged Delia Grinstead, who walks out on her obnoxious husband and uncaring teenage children to start a new life--only to be drawn back to her family for a reassessment of her identity and relationships.
• Edmund White: Skinned Alive. This collection of tales about gay life at home and abroad is a series of what White has called "auto-fictions," which blur distinctions between autobiography and imagination.

Literary Criticism and Scholarship

• Kelly Cherry (b. 1940): Writing the World. This collection of essays and reviews explores what it means to be a writer and, more particularly, a Southern female writer. As poet and novelist Cherry concludes, "To be a writer in America is to be marginal."
• Alfred Kazin: Writing Was Everything. Part memoir and part literary criticism, Kazin's collection gives thumbnail sketches of the literary and critical fashions Kazin had witnessed from the 1930s through the 1990s. The more recent decades come up short in his view. "Only in an age so fragmented," Kazin laments, "so ignorant of the unloseable past working in us, can presumably literate persons speak of Dante, Beethoven, or Tolstoy as 'dead white European males.'"

Nonfiction

• Bill Bryson (b. 1951): Notes from a Small Island. Bryson's humorous memories of two decades of residence in Britain, recalled during a return trip, is both a notable piece of travel writing and a kind of latter-day The Innocents Abroad. Born in Iowa, Bryson had moved to Britain in 1977, where he worked as a journalist and travel writer.
• Andrew Delbanco (b. 1952): The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil. This prodigious work of intellectual history appears, to great notoriety. The book adds to Delbanco's growing reputation, culminating six years later when Time magazine would name him America's best social critic.
• David H. Donald: Lincoln. Publishing the first full-length biography of Lincoln in a generation, Donald receives high praise for shedding new light on Lincoln's development, particularly on his legal career before his presidency.
• David Gelernter: 1939: The Lost World of the Fair. Gelernter chronicles the cultural significance of the 1939 World's Fair, dedicated to conceptions of the future, through a fictional composite character's tour of the exhibits.
• Stephen Jay Gould: Dinosaur in a Haystack. Gould's seventh collection of essays continues his fluent, eloquent writing about complex scientific concepts, turning natural history into an art form.
• Garrett Hongo: Volcano. Hongo returns to his roots in a little village named Volcano on the Big Island of Hawaii, using his poet's eye to describe not just the natural history of his birthplace but also the gritty details of Japanese American life in the twentieth century.
• Mary Karr (b. 1965): The Liars' Club. This frank look at the author's Texas childhood tells of a father who hung out at the local American Legion "Liars' Club" and a mother who fancied herself a sort of "Bohemian Scarlett O'Hara." The book spends many weeks on the bestseller list and is generally credited with sparking a vogue for memoirs. A second volume, Cherry, would appear in 2000.
• Jonathan Kozol: Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation. Kozol supplies a sobering account of time spent in Mott Haven, an impoverished neighborhood in the South Bronx, and a meditation on poverty and race in America.
• Li-Young Lee (b. 1957): The Winged Seed. This memoir by a writer better known for his poetry recalls how his mother, a member of the former Chinese nobility, and his father, once physician to Mao Zedong, fled the country in the 1950s, only to be persecuted in Indonesia for their Christian faith. Reviewer Lisa Sack compares the effect of Lee's book with that of Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior (1976), which two decades earlier had broken the code of silence governing filial piety among Chinese Americans.
• Lyle Leverich (1920-1999): Tom. The first book of a projected two-volume authorized biography of Tennessee Williams is published after a long delay, owing to squabbles between the biographer and the Williams estate. Leverich would die before completing the second volume of his award-winning work.
• Norman Mailer: Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery. Mailer's massive biography of Lee Harvey Oswald, accused assassin of John F. Kennedy, draws on formerly secret files of the Russian KGB in an attempt to discover Oswald's true character and resolve the question of his guilt. Mailer also publishes Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man, a long-delayed biography of the painter, which receives mixed reviews. Many critics complain that the biography contains little that is new and that Mailer had missed an opportunity to bring something original to a subject with whom he had much in common.
• Jack Miles (b. 1942): God: A Biography. Controversy ensues when the Pulitzer Prize in biography is awarded to Miles's book. Based on biblical interpretation, it treats God as a character in a work of literature, who has evident faults, internal contradictions, and a split personality yet nonetheless is able to develop and mature. Many critics regard the title of the book as not only audacious but a marketing ploy. Nevertheless, Miles, a former Jesuit and renegade biblical scholar, finds a wide popular audience for his biographical portrait.
• Elaine Pagels (b. 1943): The Origin of Satan. This scholarly but still accessible work critiques the concept of evil and how it has changed over time. Pagels would become a recognized popularizer of theological history in 1997 with her award-winning The Gnostic Gospels.
• Robert D. Richardson Jr. (b. 1934): Emerson: The Mind on Fire. Richardson's biography wins plaudits for breathing life into the seemingly stale biography of the "Sage of Concord," revealed here as a man of passionate personal attachments. Richardson, a former professor of English at the University of Denver, is the author of Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (1986).
• Alan Taylor (b. 1955): William Cooper's Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic. Taylor, a professor of history at the University of California at Davis, wins the Bancroft Prize and the Pulitzer Prize for this combined biography of William Cooper, founder of Cooperstown and father of James Fenimore Cooper, and the social history of the settlement of upstate New York.
• Gore Vidal: Palimpsest. This gossipy memoir, which Vidal had once said would never appear in print, is published out of what reviewer Christopher Lehmann-Haupt calls "revenge." Others delight in the spectacle of a writer's mind sifting through the shards of memory.
• Terry Tempest Williams (b. 1955): Desert Quartet: An Erotic Landscape. The popular nature writer asks the rhetorical question "How might we make love to the land?" Her evocative writing about her native Utah would lead to a presidential invitation the next year to speak at the dedication of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.
• Al Young (b. 1939): Drowning in a Sea of Love: Musical Memoirs. The book collects the novelist and poet's previous memoirs, Kinds of Blue (1984), Things Ain't What They Used to Be (1987), and Mingus/Mingus (1989), in one volume, together with several new essays about his relationship with music. With his long history of writing about American music in fiction and poetry, Young's memoirs provide an especially welcome venue for his meditations on the visceral art of music.

Poetry

• Billy Collins: The Art of Drowning. Collins solidifies his reputation as both a critically acclaimed and popular poet with this collection of poems, which John Updike praises as "lovely in a way almost nobody's since Roethke's are. Limpid, gently and consistently startling, more serious than they seem, they describe all the worlds that are and were and some others besides."
• Rita Dove: Mother Love. The poet renders the myth of Demeter and Persephone in startlingly vivid and deeply personal terms. Critics admire the flexibility Dove shows in adapting the sonnet form to contemporary idiom, and overall the collection wins high marks for its unity and character.
• Jorie Graham: The Dream of the Unified Field. Graham's Pulitzer Prize-winning collection selects poems from five collections published over the past two decades, demonstrating, as one reviewer observes, that Graham's gifts range from a "great vision like Blake's" to "Dickinsonian philosophical introspection."
• Donald Justice: New and Selected Poems. Justice's collection from three decades of work supersedes his Pulitzer Prize-winning Selected Poems (1979) and prompts reviewer Michael Hoffman to declare that Justice "probably has few peers when it comes to the musical arrangement of words in a line" and another to call the collection "probably the definitive Justice."
• Stanley Kunitz: Passing Through. The National Book Award-winning collection is released to coincide with the poet's ninetieth birthday. It is a spare collection of some of the best of Kunitz's works from the three preceding decades, including the sequence "The Layers" (1979).
• Philip Levine: The Simple Truth. Levine's fifteenth volume, awarded the Pulitzer Prize, is made up of elegies and meditations on the past, drawing on the poet's recollection of his life in Detroit.
• James Merrill: A Scattering of Salts. Published posthumously, this is the last of Merrill's works. In it the poet meditates on his art in poems such as "Nine Lives," a work that assigns him only a small role in the great drama of life.
• Adrienne Rich: Dark Fields of the Republic. Rich's collection combines lyrical celebrations of women with large, sweeping odes filled with the public voices of historical personages such as the political activist Rosa Luxemburg, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt, and Ethel Rosenberg, executed as a spy.
• Charles Wright: Chickamauga. Wright's collection uses the Civil War battle as the backdrop for meditations on the impact of history and the challenge to discover permanent values. Awarded the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets, it would be followed by Appalachia (1998), Wright's revisiting of landscapes from his past.

Millennium:	2nd millennium
Centuries:	19th century - 20th century - 21st century
Decades:	1960s  1970s  1980s  - 1990s -  2000s  2010s  2020s
Years:	1992 1993 1994 - 1995 - 1996 1997 1998

1995 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 Ireland - Malaysia - New Zealand - Norway - Pakistan - Singapore - South Africa UK - United States - Zimbabwe

Leaders:    Sovereign states - State leaders

Religious leaders - Law

Categories: Births - Deaths - Works - Introductions

Establishments - Disestablishments - Awards v • d • e

1995 (MCMXCV) was a common year starting on Sunday.

Contents:
Events of 1995 -  Jan. . Feb. . March . April -  May . June . July  .  Aug. -  Sept. . Oct. . Nov. .  Dec. -  Undated . Ongoing . Fictional Births Deaths Nobel prizes -  Templeton Prize Right Livelihood Award -  Fields Medal See also -  Notes -  External links

Events of 1995

January

• January 1 – The World Trade Organization is established to replace the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).
• January 4 – The 104th United States Congress, the first controlled by Republicans in both houses since 1953 to 1955, convenes.
• January 6–7 – A chemical fire occurs in an apartment complex in Manila, Philippines. Policemen led by watch commander Aida Fariscal and investigators find a bomb factory and a laptop computer and disks that contain plans for Project Bojinka, a mass-terrorist attack. The mastermind, Ramzi Yousef, is arrested 1 month later.
• January 9 – Valeri Polyakov completes 366 days in space while aboard the Mir space station, breaking a duration record.
• January 16 – An avalanche hits the village Súðavík in Iceland, killing 14 people.
• January 17 – A magnitude 7.3 earthquake called the "Great Hanshin earthquake" occurs near Kobe, Japan, causing great property damage and killing 6,434 people.
• January 25 – Norwegian rocket incident: A rocket launched from the space exploration centre at Andøya, Norway is briefly interpreted by the Russians as an incoming attack.
• January 29 – Super Bowl XXIX: The San Francisco 49ers become the first National Football League franchise to win 5 Super Bowls, as they defeat the San Diego Chargers at Joe Robbie Stadium in Miami, Florida.
• January 30 – John Howard becomes leader of the Liberal Party of Australia to challenge Paul Keating for the 1996 Federal Election and the position of Prime Minister of Australia.
• January 31 – U.S. President Bill Clinton invokes emergency powers, to extend a $20 billion loan to help Mexico avert financial collapse.

February

• February 1 – Lyricist/guitarist Richey Edwards of the Welsh alternative rock band Manic Street Preachers goes missing from a hotel in Bayswater, London on the eve of a planned tour of the United States. His car is found 2 weeks later at Severn View services in Aust.
• February 9 – STS-63: Dr. Bernard A. Harris, Jr. and Michael Foale become the first African American and Briton, respectively, to walk in space.
• February 13 – A United Nations tribunal on human rights violations in the Balkans charges 21 Bosnian Serb commanders with genocide and crimes against humanity.
• February 15 – Hacker Kevin Mitnick is arrested by the FBI and charged with breaking into some of the United States' most "secure" computer systems.
• February 15 – Taiwan's deadliest fire, at a karaoke restaurant in Taichung, kills 64.
• February 15 – In Dublin, a Republic of Ireland vs. England football match in Lansdowne Road is abandoned, due to violence and rioting.
• February 17 – Colin Ferguson is convicted of 6 counts of murder for the December 1993 Long Island Rail Road shootings and later receives a 200+ year sentence.
• February 21 – Serkadji prison mutiny in Algeria: Four guards and 96 prisoners are killed in a day and a half.
• February 21 – Ibrahim Ali, a 17-year-old Comorian living in France, is murdered by 3 far-right National Front activists.
• February 21 – Steve Fossett lands in Leader, Saskatchewan, Canada, becoming the first person to make a solo flight across the Pacific Ocean in a balloon.
• February 23 – The Dow Jones Industrial Average gains 30.28 to close at 4,003.33 -- the Dow's first ever close above 4,000.
• February 26 – The United Kingdom's oldest investment banking firm, Barings Bank, collapses after securities broker Nick Leeson loses $1.4 billion by speculating on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.
• February 27 – In Denver, Colorado, Stapleton Airport closes and is replaced by the new Denver International Airport, the largest in the United States.
• February 28 – Members of the group Patriot's Council are convicted in Minnesota of manufacturing ricin.

March

• March 1 – Polish Prime Minister Waldemar Pawlak resigns from Parliament and is replaced by ex-communist Jozef Oleksy.
• March 1 – In Moscow, Russian anti-corruption journalist Vladislav Listyev is killed by a gunman.
• March 1 – Yahoo! is founded in Santa Clara, California.
• March 2 – Nick Leeson is arrested for his role in the collapse of Barings Bank.
• March 3 – In Somalia, the United Nations peacekeeping mission ends.
• March 6 – On an episode of The Jenny Jones Show ("Same-Sex Crushes"), Scott Amedure reveals a crush on his heterosexual friend Jonathan Schmitz. Schmitz kills Amedure several days after the show.
• March 13 – David Daliberti and William Barloon, two Americans working for a military contractor in Kuwait, are arrested after straying into Iraq.
• March 14 – Astronaut Norman Thagard becomes the first American to ride into space aboard a Russian launch vehicle (the Soyuz TM-21), lifting off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
• March 16 – Mississippi ratifies the Thirteenth Amendment, becoming the last state to approve the abolition of slavery. The amendment was nationally ratified in 1865.
• March 20 – Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway. Members of the Aum Shinrikyo religious cult release sarin gas on 5 subway trains in Tokyo, killing 12 and injuring 5,510.
• March 22 – Cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov returns after setting a record for 438 days in outer space.
• March 24 – For the first time in 26 years, no British soldiers patrol the streets of Belfast, Northern Ireland.
• March 26 – The Schengen Agreement, easing cross-border travel, goes into effect in several European countries.
• March 27 – The 67th Academy Awards, hosted by David Letterman, are held at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, California, with Forrest Gump winning Best Picture.
• March 30 – A police officer tries to assassinate Takaji Kunimatsu, chief of the National Police Agency of Japan.
• March 31 – Tejano superstar Selena is killed by the president of her own fanclub, Yolanda Saldívar.

April

• April 2 – An explosion in Gaza kills 8, including a Hamas leader.
• April 5 – The U.S. House of Representatives votes 246-188 to cut taxes for individuals and corporations.
• April 7 – House Republicans celebrate passage of most of the Contract with America.
• April 19 – Oklahoma City bombing: 168 people, including 8 Federal Marshals and 19 children, are killed at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. Timothy McVeigh and one of his accomplices, Terry Nichols, set off the bomb.
• April 24 – A Unabomber bomb kills lobbyist Gilbert Murray in Sacramento, California.
• April 28 – In Daegu, South Korea, a gas explosion at a subway construction site kills 101 persons, mostly teenage schoolboys.

May

• May 1 – Jacques Chirac is elected president of France
• May 7 – Finland wins the ice hockey world championship.
• May 11 – More than 170 countries agree to extend the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty indefinitely and without conditions.
• May 13 – An earthquake hits the regions of Kozani and Grevena in Greece, with an intensity of 6.6 on the Richter scale.
• May 14 – The Dalai Lama proclaims 6-year-old Gedhun Choekyi Nyima as the 11th reincarnation of the Panchen Lama.
• May 14 – Team New Zealand wins the America's Cup in San Diego, beating Stars and Stripes 5-0.
• May 16 – Japanese police besiege the headquarters of Aum Shinrikyo near Mount Fuji and arrest cult leader Shoko Asahara.
• May 17 – Shawn Nelson, 35, goes on a tank rampage in San Diego.
• May 20 – U.S. President Bill Clinton indefinitely closes part of the street in front of the White House, Pennsylvania Avenue, to vehicular traffic in response to the Oklahoma City bombing.
• May 21 – Pope John Paul II canonizes John Sarkander during his visit to Olomouc, the Czech Republic.
• May 23 – Oklahoma City bombing: In Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, the remains of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building are imploded.
• May 24 – AFC Ajax wins the UEFA Champions League in the Ernst Happel Stadium in Vienna by defeating AC Milan 0-1 by a goal of Patrick Kluivert. This was the third consecutive win of AFC Ajax over AC Milan that season, ranking AFC Ajax on the 4th place on the list of European Cup and UEFA Champions League winners.
• May 25 – Egan v. Canada: The Supreme Court of Canada rules that discrimination based on sexual orientation is prohibited under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
• May 27 – In Culpeper, Virginia, actor Christopher Reeve is paralyzed from the neck down after falling from his horse in a riding competition.
• May 28 – A 7.6 magnitude earthquake in Neftegorsk, Russia kills at least 2,000.

June

• June 1 – The busiest hurricane season in 62 years begins.
• June 2 – United States Air Force Captain Scott O'Grady's F-16 is shot down over Bosnia and Herzegovina, while patrolling the NATO no-fly zone.
• June 2 – SS Captain Erich Priebke is extradited from Argentina to Italy.
• June 6 – U.S. astronaut Norman Thagard breaks NASA's space endurance record of 14 days, 1 hour and 16 minutes, aboard the Russian space station Mir.
• June 8 – Downed U.S. Air Force pilot Captain Scott O'Grady is rescued by U.S. Marines in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
• June 13 – French President Jacques Chirac announces the resumption of nuclear tests in French Polynesia.
• June 15 – During his murder trial, O.J. Simpson puts on a pair of gloves that were presumably worn by the person who murdered his ex-wife and her friend Ron Goldman.
• June 15 – A powerful earthquake, registering a moment magnitude of 6.2, hits the city of Egion, Greece, resulting in several deaths and significant damage to many buildings.
• June 20 – Oil multinational Royal Dutch Shell caves in to international pressure and abandons plans to dump the Brent Spar oil rig at sea.
• June 22 – Japanese police rescue 365 hostages from a hijacked All Nippon Airways Flight 857 (Boeing 747-200) at Hakodate airport. The hijacker was armed with a knife and demanded the release of Shoko Asahara.

Atlantis docked to Mir for the first time on June 29, 1995.

• June 24 – The New Jersey Devils sweep the heavily favored Detroit Red Wings to win their first Stanley Cup in the lock-out shortened season.
• June 24 – South Africa wins the Rugby World Cup.
• June 29 – Lisa Clayton completes her 10-month solo circumnavigation from the Northern Hemisphere.
• June 29 – STS-71: Space Shuttle Atlantis docks with the Russian Mir space station for the first time.
• June 29 – The Sampoong Department Store collapses in the Seocho-gu district of Seoul, South Korea, killing 501 and injuring 937.
• June 29 – Iraq disarmament crisis: According to UNSCOM, the unity of the UN Security Council begins to fray, as a few countries, particularly France and Russia, become more interested in making financial deals with Iraq than in disarming the country.

July

The Taiwan Strait

• Iraq disarmament crisis: Iraq threatens to end all cooperation with UNSCOM and IAEA, if sanctions against the country are not lifted by August 31.
• Midwestern United States heat wave: An unprecedented heat wave strikes the Midwestern United States for most of the month. Temperatures peak at 106 °F (41 °C), and remain above 94 °F (34 °C) in the afternoon for 5 straight days. At least 739 people die in Chicago alone.
• July 1 – Iraq disarmament crisis: In response to UNSCOM's evidence, Iraq admits for first time the existence of an offensive biological weapons program, but denies weaponization.
• July 4 – UK Prime Minister John Major wins his battle to remain leader of the Conservative Party.
• July 5 – The U.S. Congress passes the Child Protection and Obscenity Enforcement Act, requiring that producers of pornography keep records of all models who are filmed or photographed, and that all models be at least 18 years of age.
• July 10 – Burmese dissident Aung San Suu Kyi is freed from house arrest.
• July 11 – Bosnian Serbs march into Srebrenica while UN Dutch peacekeepers leave. Large numbers of Bosniak men and boys are killed in the Srebrenica massacre.
• July 13 – Dozens of cities, most notably Chicago and Milwaukee, set all-time record high temperatures. Hundreds in these and other cities die as the Chicago Heat Wave of 1995 reaches its peak.

• July 17 – The Nasdaq Composite index closes above the 1,000 mark for the first time.
• July 21–26 – Third Taiwan Strait Crisis: The People's Liberation Army fires missiles into the waters north of Taiwan.
• July 23 – David Daliberti and William Barloon, 2 Americans held as spies by Iraq, are released by Saddam Hussein after negotiations with U.S. Congressman Bill Richardson.
• July 27 – In Washington, DC, the Korean War Veterans Memorial is dedicated.
• Iraq disarmament crisis: Following the defection of his son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, Saddam Hussein makes new revelations about the full extent of Iraq's biological and nuclear weapons programs. Iraq also withdraws its last UN declaration of prohibited biological weapons and turns over a large amount of new documents on its WMD programs.

August

• August 4 – Croatian forces launch Operation Storm against Serbian forces in Krajina, with the cooperation of the ARBiH, and force them to withdraw to central Bosnia and Herzegovina.
• August 5 – Croatian forces take Knin and continue to advance.
• August 6 – Hundreds in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Washington, D.C., and Tokyo mark the 50th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb.
• August 7 – Operation Storm ends with a UN-brokered ceasefire; remaining Serbian forces start surrendering.
• August 11 – The Russell Hill subway accident results in 3 deaths and 30 injuries in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
• August 14 – An avalanche buries Alison Hargreaves, the first woman to climb Mt. Everest without oxygen; she is reported dead.
• August 24 – Microsoft releases Windows 95.
• August 28 – A Serbian mortar bomb near a Sarajevo market square kills 37 civilians.
• August 29 – Eduard Shevardnadze, the Georgian head of state, survives an assassination attempt in Tbilisi.
• August 30 – The NATO bombing campaign against Serb artillery positions begins in Bosnia and Herzegovina, continuing into October. At the same time, ARBiH forces begin an offensive against the Bosnian Serb Army around Sarajevo, central Bosnia, and Bosnian Krajina.

September

• September – The DVD, an optical disc computer storage media format, is announced.
• September – The European Parliament elects the first European Ombudsman, Jacob Söderman, who takes up office in September 1995.
• September 4 – eBay is founded.
• September 4 – The Fourth World Conference on Women opens in Beijing with over 4,750 delegates from 181 countries in attendance.
• September 6 – NATO air strikes continue, after repeated attempts at a solution with the Serbs fail.
• September 6 – Cal Ripken Jr of the Baltimore Orioles breaks the all time consecutive games played record in MLB.
• September 19 – The Washington Post and The New York Times publish the Unabomber's manifesto.
• September 22 – American millionaire Steve Forbes announces his candidacy for the 1996 Republican presidential nomination.
• September 23 – Argentine national Guillermo "Bill" Gaede is arrested in Phoenix, Arizona on charges of industrial espionage. His sales to Cuba, China, North Korea and Iran are believed to have involved Intel and AMD trade secrets worth USD$10–20 million.
• September 26 – The trial against former Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, who is accused of Mafia connections, begins.
• September 27–28 – Bob Denard's mercenaries capture President Said Mohammed Djohor of the Comoros; the local army does not resist.

October

• October 1 – Ten people are convicted of bombing the World Trade Center in 1993.
• October 3 – O.J. Simpson is found not guilty of double murder for the deaths of former wife Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman.
• October 4 – France launches a counter-coup in the Comoros with 600 soldiers. They arrest Bob Denard and his mercenaries and take Denard to France; Caabi el-Yachroutu becomes the interim president.
• October 4 – Hurricane Opal makes landfall at Pensacola Beach, FL as a Category 3 hurricane with 115 mph winds.
• October 6 – Michael Mayor and Didier Queloz announce the discovery of 51 Pegasi b, the first confirmed Extrasolar planet.
• October 9 – 1995 Palo Verde derailment: An Amtrak Sunset Limited train is derailed by saboteurs near Palo Verde, Arizona.
• October 15 – The Carolina Panthers win their first-ever regular season game by defeating the New York Jets at Clemson Memorial Stadium in South Carolina.
• October 16 – The Million Man March is held in Washington, D.C.. The event was conceived by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.
• October 17- French woman Jeanne Calment reaches the confirmed age of 120 years and 238 days, making her the oldest person ever recorded.
• October 23 – In Houston, Texas, Yolanda Saldivar is convicted of first degree murder in the shooting death of Selena Quintanilla Perez and 3 days later is sentenced to life in prison.
• October 24 – A total solar eclipse is visible from Iran, India, Thailand, and Southeast Asia.^[1]
• October 25 – A Metra commuter train slams into a school bus in Fox River Grove, Illinois, killing 7 students.
• October 26 – An avalanche hits the village Flateyri in Iceland, killing 20 people.
• October 28 – Fire breaks out on a crowded metro train in Baku, Azerbaijan, killing more than 300 passengers (the world's worst metro disaster).
• October 30 – Quebec independantists narrowly lose a referendum for a mandate to negotiate independence from Canada.

November

• November ? – NASA loses contact with the Pioneer 11 probe.
• November 1 – Participants in the Yugoslav War begin negotiations at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio.
• November 1 – The U.S. House of Representatives votes to ban partial birth abortions by a vote of 288-139.
• November 2 – The Supreme Court of Argentina orders the extradition of Erich Priebke, ex-S.S. captain.
• November 3 – At Arlington National Cemetery, U.S. President Bill Clinton dedicates a memorial to the victims of the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing.
• November 4 – Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin is assassinated at a peace rally in Tel Aviv.
• November 10 – Iraq disarmament crisis: With help from Israel and Jordan, UNSCOM inspector Scott Ritter intercepts 240 Russian gyroscopes and accelerometers on their way to Iraq from Russia.
• November 10 – In Nigeria, playwright and environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, along with 8 others from the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, are hanged by government forces.
• November 12 – The Millbrook Commonwealth Action Programme, a programme to implement the Harare Declaration, is announced by the Commonwealth Heads of Government.
• November 14 – A budget standoff between Democrats and Republicans in the Congress of the United States, forces the federal government to temporarily close national parks and museums, and run most government offices with skeleton staff.
• November 16 – A United Nations tribunal charges Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladic with genocide during the Bosnian War.
• November 21 – The Dow Jones Industrial Average gains 40.46 to close at 5,023.55, its first close above 5,000. This makes 1995 the first year where the Dow surpasses 2 millennium marks in a single year.
• November 21 – The Dayton Agreement to end the Bosnian War is reached at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio (signed December 14).
• November 22 – Rosemary West is sentenced to life for killing 10 women and girls, including her daughter and stepdaughter, after the jury returns a guilty verdict at Winchester Crown Court. The trial judge recommends that she should never be released from prison, making her only the second woman in British legal history to be subjected to a whole life tariff (the other is Myra Hindley).
• November 22 – Six-year-old Elisa Izquierdo's child abuse-related death at the hands of her mother makes headlines, and instigates major reform in New York City's child welfare system.
• November 22 – Egypt, Eilat, Israel, and much of the North African Mediterranean is struck by the strongest earthquake (7.2 M_w) along the Dead Sea Transform in a century; 8 are killed.
• November 22 – The first ever full length computer animated feature film "Toy Story" was released by Pixar Animation Studios and Walt Disney Pictures.
• November 28 – The Barcelona Treaty is signed by 27 attending nations.
• November 28 – U.S. President Bill Clinton signs the National Highway Designation Act, which ends the federal 55 mph speed limit.
• November 30 – Javier Solana becomes the new NATO General Secretary; Operation Desert Storm officially ends.

December

• Strikes paralyze France's public sector.
• December 7 – NASA's Galileo probe reenters over Jupiter.
• December 8

Editor-in-chief of Elle magazineJean-Dominique Bauby, suffers a massive strokeand lapses into a coma.

• December 14 – The Dayton Peace Agreement is signed in Paris.
• December 15 – The European Court of Justice rules that all EU football players have the right to a free transfer among member states at the end of their contracts.
• December 15 – Because of the "quadruple-witching" option expiration, volume on the New York Stock Exchange hits 638 million shares, the highest single-day volume since October 20, 1987, when the Dow staged a stunning recovery a day after Black Monday.
• December 16 – Iraq disarmament crisis: Iraqi scuba divers, under the direction of UNSCOM, dredge the Tigris River near Baghdad. The divers find over 200 prohibited Russian made missile instruments and components.
• December 20 – American Airlines Flight 965 (Boeing 757) crashes into a mountain near Buga, Colombia after veering off its course en route to Cali, Colombia. Of the 164 people on board, 4 passengers and a dog are the only survivors.
• December 30 – The lowest ever United Kingdom temperature of -27.2°C is recorded at Altnaharra in the Scottish Highlands. This equals the record set at Braemar, Aberdeenshire in 1895 and 1982.
• The Republic of Texas group claims to have formed a provisional government in Texas.
• December 31 – The final original "Calvin and Hobbes" comic strip is published.

Ongoing

• Console wars, Computer Age.

Fictional

• Events in Metal Gear happen
• The Belkan War, in Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War begins and ends, with massive destruction
• In Command & Conquer, the fictional alien substance Tiberium first appears on Earth in Italy.

World population

World population
	1995	1990		2000
World	5,674,380,000	5,263,593,000	410,787,000	6,070,581,000	396,201,000
Africa	707,462,000	622,443,000	85,019,000	795,671,000	88,209,000
Asia	3,430,052,000	3,167,807,000	262,245,000	3,679,737,000	249,685,000
Europe	727,405,000	721,582,000	5,823,000	727,986,000	581,000
Latin-America/ Islands	481,099,000	441,525,000	39,574,000	520,229,000	39,130,000
Northern America	299,438,000	283,549,000	15,889,000	315,915,000	16,477,000
Oceania	28,924,000	26,687,000	2,237,000	31,043,000	2,119,000

1995 in other calendars

Gregorian calendar	1995 MCMXCV
Ab urbe condita	2748
Armenian calendar	1444 ԹՎ ՌՆԽԴ
Bahá'í calendar	151 – 152
Berber calendar	2945
Buddhist calendar	2539
Burmese calendar	1357
Byzantine calendar	7503 – 7504
Chinese calendar	甲戌年十二月初一日 (4631/4691-12-1) — to — 乙亥年十一月初十日 (4632/4692-11-10)
Coptic calendar	1711 – 1712
Ethiopian calendar	1987 – 1988
Hebrew calendar	5755 – 5756
Hindu calendars
- Vikram Samvat	2050 – 2051
- Shaka Samvat	1917 – 1918
- Kali Yuga	5096 – 5097
Holocene calendar	11995
Iranian calendar	1373 – 1374
Islamic calendar	1415 – 1416
Japanese calendar	Heisei 7 (平成7年)
Korean calendar	4328
Thai solar calendar	2538
Unix time	788918400 – 820454399
v • d • e

Births

• January 4 – María Isabel, Spanish singer
• January 5 – Jordan Orr, American actor
• January 12 – Laurel McGoff, American singer and actress
• January 13 – Qaasim Middleton, American actor
• January 21 – Jennifer Rae Daykin, English actress
• February 8 – Jordan Todosey, Canadian actress
• March 27 – Taylor Atelian, American actress
• March 29 – Marc Musso, American actor
• April 6 – Ryutaro Morimoto, Japanese singer
• May 2 – Kelsey Lewis, American actress
• May 12 – Luke Benward, American actor and singer
• May 12 – Sullivan and Sawyer Sweeten, American actors
• May 15 – Ksenia Sitnik, Belarusian singer
• May 24 – Prince Joseph Wenzel of Liechtenstein
• May 30 – Rohan Mishra
• May 31 – Alissa Musto, American singer and pianist
• July 3 – Alex Steele, Canadian actress
• July 7 – Chloe Greenfield, American actress
• July 9 – Georgie Henley, English actress
• August 8 – Malin Reitan, Norwegian singer
• August 18 – Parker McKenna Posey, American child actress
• August 23 – Eliza Pineda, Filipina actress
• September 20 – Sammi Hanratty, American actress
• September 22 – Juliette Goglia, American actress
• October 17 – Alexandria, McKenzie and Megan Calabrese, American actresses
• November 16 – Noah Gray-Cabey, American actor
• December 6 – Joy Gruttmann, German singer
• December 24 – Soleil Borda, Iranian actress

Deaths

Eugene Wigner

Siad Barre

Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy

Rick Aviles

Selena Quintanilla Perez

Hannes Alfvén

Arturo Frondizi

Christian B. Anfinsen

Elizabeth Montgomery

Harold Wilson

J. Howard Marshall

Yitzhak Rabin

• January 1 – Fred West, English serial killer (b. 1941)
• January 1 – Eugene Wigner, Hungarian physicist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1902)
• January 2 – Siad Barre, President of Somalia (b. 1919)
• January 4 – Sol Tax, American anthropologist (b. 1907)
• January 7 – Murray Rothbard, American economist (b. 1926)
• January 7 – Larry Grayson, British comedian and game show host (b. 1923)
• January 9 – Peter Cook, English comedian and writer (b. 1937)
• January 18 – Adolf Butenandt, German chemist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1903)
• January 18 – Ron Luciano, American baseball umpire (b. 1937)
• January 22 – Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, American philanthropist (b. 1890)
• January 30 – Gerald Durrell, British naturalist, zookeeper, author, and television presenter (b. 1925)
• January 31 – George Abbott, American writer, director, and producer (b. 1887)
• February 2 – Fred Perry, English tennis player (b. 1909)
• February 2 – Donald Pleasence, English actor (b. 1919)
• February 4 – Patricia Highsmith, American author (b. 1921)
• February 12 – Robert Bolt, English writer (b. 1924)
• February 12 – Philip Taylor Kramer, American musician (b. 1952)
• February 14 – U Nu, Burmese politician (b. 1907)
• February 23 – Melvin Franklin, American singer (b. 1942)
• February 23 – James Herriot, English veterinarian and author (b. 1916)
• February 24 – Hideko Maehata, Japanese swimmer (b. 1914)
• February 24 – Tatsumi Kumashiro, Japanese film director (b. 1927)
• March 1 – Vladislav Nikolayevich Listyev, Russian journalist (b. 1956).
• March 3 – Howard W. Hunter, American Mormon leader (b. 1907)
• March 5 – Vivian Stanshall, English comedian, writer, artist, broadcaster, and musician (b. 1943)
• March 7 – Georges J. F. Köhler, German biologist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (b. 1946)
• March 8 – Ingo Schwichtenberg, German drummer (b. 1965)
• March 12 – Juanin Clay, American actress (b. 1949)
• March 13 – Leon Day, American baseball player (b. 1916)
• March 13 – Odette Sansom, French World War II heroine (b. 1912)
• March 14 – William Alfred Fowler, American physicist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1911)
• March 17 – Ronald Kray, British organised crime leader (b. 1933)
• March 17 – Rick Aviles, American actor (b. 1952)
• March 18 – Robin Jacques, English illustrator (b. 1920)
• March 19 – Yasuo Yamada, Japanese voice actor (b. 1932)
• March 20 – John William Minton American Wrestler (Big John Studd) (b. 1948)
• March 22 – Peter Woods, British journalist, reporter and newsreader (b. 1930)
• March 23 – Davie Cooper, Scottish footballer (b. 1956)
• March 26 – Eazy-E, American rapper and record producer (b. 1963)
• March 27 – Maurizio Gucci, Italian businessman (b. 1948)
• March 28 – Hugh O'Connor, American actor the son of Carroll O'Connor (b. 1962)
• March 29 – Tony Lock, English cricketer (b. 1929)
• March 31 – Selena Quintanilla Perez, Mexican American singer (b. 1971)
• April 2 – Harvey Penick, American golfer (b. 1904)
• April 2 – Hannes Alfvén, Swedish chemist, Nobel-prize (b.1908)
• April 4 – Kenny Everett, British comedian (b. 1944)
• April 10 – Morarji Desai, Indian politician (b. 1896)
• April 14 – Burl Ives, American singer (b. 1909)
• April 15 – Harry Shoulberg, American painter and serigrapher (b. 1903)
• April 18 – Arturo Frondizi, President of Argentina (b. 1908)
• April 20 – Milovan Đilas, Yugoslavian Marxist (b. 1911)
• April 23 – Howard Cosell, American sportscaster (b. 1918)
• April 24 – Art Fleming, American actor and game show host (b. 1924)
• April 25 – Ginger Rogers, American actress and dancer (b. 1911)
• April 25 – Andrea Fortunato, Italian football player (b. 1971)
• May 5 – Mikhail Botvinnik, Russian chess player (b. 1911)
• May 5 – Al Sanders, American news anchorman (b. 1941)
• May 6 – Noel Brotherston, Irish footballer (b. 1956)
• May 8 – Teresa Teng, Taiwanese singer (b. 1953)
• May 14 – Christian B. Anfinsen, American chemist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1916)
• May 15 – Eric Porter, English actor (b. 1928)
• May 15 – Ben Bubar, American activist (b. 1917)
• May 18 – Elisha Cook Jr., American actor (b. 1903)
• May 18 – Alexander Godunov, Russian-born ballet dancer and actor (b. 1949)
• May 18 – Elizabeth Montgomery, American actress (b. 1933)
• May 24 – Harold Wilson, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (b. 1916)
• May 26 – Friz Freleng, American animator (b. 1905)
• May 28 – Irfan Ljubijankic, Bosnian diplomat (b. 1952)
• May 30 – Ted Drake, English footballer (b. 1912)
• June 7 – Hsuan Hua, Chinese Buddhist master (b. 1918)
• June 12 – Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, Italian pianist (b. 1920)
• June 20 – Emil Cioran, Romanian philosopher and essayist (b. 1911)
• June 23 – Jonas Salk, American medical researcher (b. 1914)
• June 26 – Ernest Walton, Irish physicist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1903)
• June 29 – Lana Turner, American actress (b. 1921)
• June 30 – Georgi Beregovoi, Russian cosmonaut (b. 1921)
• July 1 – Wolfman Jack, American disc jockey (b. 1938)
• July 4 – Eva Gabor, Hungarian actress (b. 1919)
• July 4 – Bob Ross, American television painter (b. 1942)
• July 5 – Takeo Fukuda, Japanese politician (b. 1905)
• July 17 – Juan Manuel Fangio, Argentine race car driver (b. 1911)
• July 18 – Fabio Casartelli, Italian cyclist (b. 1970)
• July 24 – Marjorie Cameron, American writer, painter, actress, and occultist (b. 1922)
• July 24 – George Rodger, British photojournalist (b. 1908)
• July 27 – Miklós Rózsa, Hungarian composer (b. 1907)
• August 3 – Ida Lupino, British actress (b. 1914)
• August 3 – Edward Whittemore, American author and Central Intelligence agent (b. 1933)
• August 4 – J. Howard Marshall, American billionaire (b. 1905)
• August 7 – Brigid Brophy, English author (b. 1929)
• August 9 – Jerry Garcia, American guitarist (Grateful Dead) (b. 1942)
• August 11 – Phil Harris, American actor (b. 1904)
• August 13 – Mickey Mantle, baseball player (b. 1931)
• August 15 – John Cameron Swayze, American journalist (b. 1906)
• August 19 – Pierre Schaeffer, French composer (b. 1910)
• August 21 – Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, Indian-born astrophysicist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1910)
• August 29 – Michael Ende, German author (b. 1929)
• August 30 – Fischer Black, American economist (b. 1938)
• August 30 – Sterling Morrison, American guitarist (The Velvet Underground) (b. 1942)
• September 12 – Jeremy Brett, English actor (b. 1933)
• September 15 – Harry Calder, South African cricketer (b. 1901)
• September 15 – Dietrich Hrabak, German World War II flying ace (b. 1914)
• September 15 – Gunnar Nordahl, Swedish footballer (b. 1921)
• September 19 – Orville Redenbacher, American entrepreneur and businessman
• September 20 – Eileen Chang, Chinese writer (b. 1920)
• September 25 – Bessie Delany, American physician and author (b. 1891)
• September 25 – Pedro Nolasco, Dominican republican boxer (b. 1963)
• October 5 – Linda Gary, American voice actress (b. 1944)
• October 9 – Alec Douglas-Home, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (b. 1903)
• October 12 – Johnny Gammage, African American motorist
• October 21 – Maxene Andrews, American singer (b. 1916)
• October 21 – Jesús Blasco, Spanish comic book author (b. 1919)
• October 21 – Shannon Hoon, American singer (Blind Melon) (b. 1967)
• October 22 – Mary Wickes, American actor (b. 1915)
• October 26 – Gorni Kramer, Italian bandleader and songwriter (b. 1913)
• October 26 – Wilhelm Freddie, Danish painter (b. 1909)
• October – Margaret Gorman, first Miss America (b. 1905)
• November 4 – Yitzhak Rabin, Prime Minister of Israel, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize (b. 1922)
• November 4 – Gilles Deleuze, French philosopher (b. 1925)
• November 4 – Paul Eddington, English actor (b. 1927)
• November 21 – Noel Jones, British diplomat (b. 1940)
• November 22 – Elisa Izquierdo, American murder victim (b. 1989)
• November 30 – Stretch, American rapper and record producer (b. 1972)
• December 2 – Roxie Roker, American actress (b. 1929)
• December 2 – Robertson Davies, Canadian novelist (b. 1913)
• December 3 – Jimmy Jewel, English actor (b. 1909)
• December 10 – Darren "Buffy, the Human Beatbox" Robinson, American rapper and actor (The Fat Boys) (b. 1967)
• December 16 – Johnny Moss, American poker player (b. 1907)
• December 18 – Konrad Zuse, German engineer (b. 1910)
• December 22 – James Meade, English economist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1907)
• December 23 – Patric Knowles, English actor (b. 1911)
• December 25 – Nicolas Slonimsky, Russian/American musicologist (b. 1894)
• December 25 – Dean Martin, American actor (b. 1917)
• December 30 – Doris Grau, American actress (b. 1924)
• December 30 – Heiner Müller, German poet and playwright (b. 1929)

Nobel Prizes

• Physics – Martin L. Perl, Frederick Reines
• Chemistry – Paul J. Crutzen, Mario J. Molina, F. Sherwood Rowland
• Medicine – Edward B. Lewis, Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, Eric F. Wieschaus
• Literature – Seamus Heaney
• Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel – Robert Lucas, Jr.
• Peace – Joseph Rotblat and the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs

Templeton Prize

• Paul Davies

Notes

1. ^ NASA – Solar Eclipses: 1991 – 2000

External links

• 1995 Coin Pictures

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: 1995

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