1999

1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000

political events

Europe takes a step closer toward unification January 1 with the fixing of exchange rates among members of the European Union and adoption of a new European Central Bank and a new common currency, the euro (see European Union, 1993).

Turkey's Democratic Left Party (DSP) leader Bulent Ecevit, 73, gains the support of rival parties January 7 to form a minority government (see 1997). Ecevit failed in a previous effort, but President Suleyman Demirel asked him to try again, and this time former premier Tansu Ciller of the center-right True Path Party has agreed to back the new coalition (see 2002).

The Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization March 12, bringing its membership to 19 and creating anxiety at Moscow that Russia has little more than her nuclear arsenal to defend against encroachment by her NATO neighbors.

Diplomats try to settle Balkan problems during weeks of negotiation at Rambouillet, France. Albanian Kosovars agree in mid-March to a plan finalized at Rombouillet, but Yugoslavia's president Slobodan Milosevic refuses to accept it, he sends more troops into Kosovo, President Clinton and others warn of a human catastrophe as the Serb soldiers burn, rape, and pillage their way through the country, and NATO launches missile attacks and bomber raids on Serbian positions beginning March 24 in the first war ever undertaken for purely humanitarian reasons (see 1998). NATO commander Gen. Wesley K. Clark, 54, of the United States directs the campaign, but Milosevic steps up efforts to "cleanse" Kosovo of non-Serbians, hundreds of thousands flee to neighboring Albania, Bosnia, Macedonia, and Montenegro, Milosevic holds noonday rock concerts at Belgrade, and critics of the NATO bombing say it is actually making Milosevic more popular at home and further destabilizing the region (but see 2000).

NATO observes its 50th anniversary in late April at Washington, D.C., and agrees to step up the pace of its bombing attacks on the Serbs. B-2 Stealth bombers are used for the first time, many of them flown from Missouri's Whiteman Air Force Base by pilots who return home in time for lunch.

The House of Representatives comes close to ending U.S. support of NATO air strikes against the Serbs April 28. Rep. Dennis Hastert, 57, (R. Ill.) has succeeded Newt Gingrich as speaker January 6 and assured Democrats that they can expect easy passage of a symbolic, bipartisan resolution supporting the NATO effort; he himself votes for it, but Majority Whip Tom DeLay rallies votes against the measure, the final roll call ends in a tied vote of 213 to 213 (187 Republicans and 26 Democrats have voted nay), embarrassing Speaker Hastert and delighting right-wing extremist DeLay, a former Houston pest exterminator who makes no secret of his visceral animosity toward President Clinton.

President Clinton's impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate ends in acquittal February 12 (see 1998). Needing 67 votes to convict, the Republicans find no Democratic Party support and can muster only 45 senators to vote guilty on the charge of perjury, 50 on the charge of obstruction of justice, but although the senators do not vote on a proposed resolution of censure they are virtually unanimous in condemning the president's actions in his private life. Independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr tells a Senate committee April 13 that the law under which he has acted should be allowed to expire at the end of June, and it does; efforts to oust Clinton will continue, but Starr's successor will conclude in September of next year that the so-called Whitewater investigation that cost taxpayers close to $60 million yielded insufficient evidence of any wrongdoing to warrant prosecution. The late president Kennedy's onetime mistress Judith Campbell (Exner) dies of lung cancer at a Los Angeles suburb September 25 at age 65.

The New York Times reports March 6 that Chinese agents have obtained nuclear secrets from a U.S. Government laboratory and reports March 7 that a "Chinese-American" computer scientist at Los Alamos, N.M., is the chief suspect. A walk-in source gave the CIA a document 4 years ago claiming that People's Republic weapons designers had obtained specific details of the highly classified W-88 warhead, doubts exist in the scientific community about the authenticity of the document, but Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson dismisses Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee, 58, March 8. The Cox Report released by Congress May 25 alleges illegal transmission of nuclear technology from weapons laboratories to the Chinese for more than 20 years, Lee protests his innocence August 1 in a 60 Minutes television interview, but FBI agents arrest him at his home December 10 and he will be held in solitary confinement for 9 months (see 2000).

The U.S. Senate votes against ratifying a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty October 13. Right-wing Republicans repudiate the treaty, the vote is 51 to 48 (67 votes are needed to ratify), critics compare the defeat to the Senate's repudiation of the League of Nations 80 years ago and warn that America has lost its moral leadership and the ability to discourage underground nuclear testing by other nations, but President Clinton assails what he calls neo-isolationists and vows to continue efforts to have the treaty ratified.

Former Nixon White House aide John Ehrlichman dies of diabetes at his Atlanta home February 15 at age 73; U.S. atom spy (and biology researcher) Ted Hall of cancer at Cambridge, England, November 1 at age 74, having suffered from Parkinson's disease; former attorney general Elliot Richardson dies of a cerebral hemorrhage at Boston December 31 at age 79.

A U.S. bomb hits the Chinese embassy at Belgrade by error May 7, three Chinese journalists are killed, more than 20 other people are injured, and anti-American demonstrations erupt at Beijing and other Chinese cities. Former Russian prime minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin, Finland's president (and European Union envoy) Martii Ahtisaari, and London investment banker Peter Castenfelt persuade Yugoslavia's President Milosevic to accept peace terms June 3, 200 Russian troops enter Kosovo June 11 and take over the Pristina airport, NATO troops begin entering Kosovo June 12 as Serb forces withdraw, ending a conflict that has not cost a single Allied life but has left at least 20,000 Serbians dead. All but about 90,000 of Kosovo's 900,000-odd emigrés return by the end of July, and demonstrations throughout Serbia demand Milosevic's resignation. Croatia's president Franjo Tudgman dies of cancer in a Zagreb suburb December 10 at age 77, having gained independence for his country while engaging in "ethnic cleansing" that has cost thousands of lives and sent more than 150,000 Serbs across the borders into Serbia and Bosnia (see 2000).

Russia's president Boris Yeltsin dismisses Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov May 12 after 8 months in which the nation's economy has not improved (see 1998); he appoints Interior Minister Sergei V. Stepashin, 47, to succeed Primakov, and some observers note that Stepashin is a Yeltsin loyalist who controls the nation's security forces, who may be required to protect the unpopular Yeltsin from prosecution before or after his term ends next year. Stepashin is replaced in late August by Vladimir V. Putin, 45, another former KGB man, who takes a tough stand against secessionists in Chechnya and wins a majority of the Russian people to support that position (see 1996). Chechen separatists deny responsibility for explosions that destroy Russian apartment houses, causing heavy loss of life (cynics suggest that the government staged the blasts to arouse nationalist support), and Russian troops invade Chechnya September 21, redoubling efforts to bring the region under control in a move that wins popularity for Prime Minister Putin but creates tensions with the United States and other countries. With the economy in deep trouble and charges of high-level corruption swirling about the Kremlin, President Yeltsin resigns December 31, to clear the way for "smart, strong, and energetic people," turning over his duties to Prime Minister Putin, who issues a decree granting Yeltsin immunity from any future prosecution (see 2000).

Gunmen invade the Armenian Parliament at Yerevan October 27, killing Prime Minister Vazgen Sarkisian plus other top government officials and wounding as many as 50 in an attempted coup d'état.

Former Greek dictator George Papadopoulos dies of a heart attack at Athens June 27 at age 80. He was convicted of treason in 1975 and has been imprisoned ever since.

German chancellor Gerhard Schröder moves from Bonn to Berlin August 23 and the new Reichstag (renovated by British architect Norman Foster) opens soon thereafter as the capital of the unified country relocates from Bonn and the old Prussian capitol resumes its place as the center of government for the first time since World War II.

A Rome jury acquits former Italian prime minister Giulio Andreotti September 24 of complicity with Mafia figures in the 1979 murder of muckraking journalist Carmine Pecorelli. Five co-defendants are also acquitted (see 1995). Now 80, Andreotti is revered by many right-wing politicians as the man who transformed Italy from a backward agricultural country into a major industrial power, but critics blame him for not having prevented the murder of former prime minister Aldo Moro in 1978. Five-time prime minister Amintore Fanfani dies at Rome November 20 at age 91.

Britain's Labour government ends hereditary peers in Parliament's House of Lords, 666 of them sit for the last time in early November (92 are allowed to stay after that on a temporary basis), and the upper house is left with some 500 life peers, some of them newly appointed (critics call them "Tony's cronies," a reference to Prime Minister Tony Blair).

Britain ends direct rule of Northern Ireland December 2 as Catholics and Protestants begin sharing power as Parliament votes to give Ulster the right to rule itself (see Good Friday accord, 1998). Queen Elizabeth has given ceremonial royal consent December 1 to the bill transferring powers to Belfast, Ireland's president Mary McAleese has lunch at Buckingham Palace December 2, and authority over local affairs is moved that day from London to Belfast, where Protestant Ulster Union president David Trimble heads the new Northern Ireland Assembly, which unites factions that have battled in a conflict that has persisted for centuries. Hard-line Democratic Unionist Party leaders denounce the new political arrangements (but see 2000).

Canada opens a new 760,000-square-mile territory called Nunavut April 1 to provide a homeland for the Inuit, who represent 80 percent of the territory's 27,200 people. The area has been carved out of what formerly was the Northwest Territories and extends far to the north of the Arctic Circle, embracing Baffin Island, part of Victoria Island, Grise Fjord, and Ellesmere Island. One-third of the population is on welfare, its suicide, substance abuse, and violence rates are among the highest in the country, and Nunavut will depend on the government for 90 percent of its $392.8 million ($600 million Canadian) annual budget.

Venezuela's president Hugo Chávez takes office in February, saying that he needs a new constitution to carry out a peaceful social revolution and end rampant corruption (see 1998). He issues a decree calling for three referenda aimed at deciding the logistics of rewriting and ratifying the constitution. The opposition-controlled Congress pledges in late August to establish a constitutional assembly (see 2002).

Panama elects her first woman president in May as Mireya Moscoso, 53, defeats President Ernesto Pérez Balladares; the widow of former Panamanian president Arnulfo Arias Madrid, she takes office September 1 amidst allegations that high-ranking officials have sold Panamanian visas to Chinese immigrants using the country as a way to sneak into the United States.

Some Cuban refugees drown while en route to Florida in late November but 5-year-old Elián González is rescued after the death of his mother. Premier Castro demands that the boy be returned to his father in Cuba, thousands of people stage demonstrations in the streets of Havana, the boy turns 6, his relatives at Miami insist that he remain in America, and the situation creates new strains in U.S.-Cuban relations (see 2000).

Argentine voters elect Radical Party stalwart Fernando de la Rua, 62, president October 24. The first mayor of Buenos Aires to be elected by the city's own citizens rather than being named by the president, he has drawn up plans for refinancing a collective provincial debt of $17 billion and wins 48 percent of the popular vote.

Jordan's Hussein ibn Talal dies of cancer at Amman February 7 at age 63 after a 45-year reign in which he has worked to keep peace in the Middle East; he is succeeded by his son Abdullah, 36.

Turkish commando forces arrest fugitive Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan, 49, at Nairobi, Kenya, February 15 and return him to Turkey, where he is indicted for treason as Ankara tries to end a 14-year conflict between Ocalan's Kurdistant Workers' Party (PKK) and security forces in southeastern Turkey. Ocalan has used terrorist tactics in an effort to gain autonomy or even a separate state for Turkey's 15 million Kurds; more than 30,000 Turks have been killed and hundreds of thousands left homeless in the struggle, which has involved atrocities by both sides and has had a dire impact on the Turkish economy. An estimated 3,000 Turkish troops cross into Iraq to attack Kurdish guerrilla sanctuaries, demonstrations erupt worldwide, Kurds seize Greek missions throughout Europe, taking diplomats and their families hostage, and Israeli guards at Berlin open fire when more than 50 Kurds try to enter their consulate February 17, killing three protesters and wounding 16. Ocalan is sentenced to death June 29 but will be confined instead to an island in the Sea of Marmara and pro-Kurdish protests continue to delay his hanging.

Israeli voters oust Prime Minister Netanyahu May 17 after 3 years in which he has failed to advance the peace process (see 1998); they elect Labor Party leader Ehud Barak, 57, a protégé of the late Yitzhak Rabin and the nation's most highly decorated war hero. But although Barak wins more than 56 percent of the vote in what is clearly a call for reviving peace efforts with Palestinians, and although Netanyahu gives up his leadership of the Likud Party, the Ultra-Orthodox parties gain more seats in the parliament (Knesset). Barak and Yasir Arafat of the PLO sign a new agreement September 4 that implements last year's Wye River accord but with the release of fewer PLO prisoners; Israeli troops forcibly remove Jewish settlers from West Bank locations in November (see 2000).

Iranian students riot at Teheran and other cities in July to protest a new law curbing freedom of the press and the closing of a popular leftist newspaper (see 1998). Others join the demonstrations against strict control by the nation's fundamentalist Islamic government, police use tear gas to dispel the armed mobs, and although President Mohammad Khatami has for the past 2 years been urging tolerance and the rule of law, he meets with religious leaders July 13 and shifts his remarks to condemn the demonstrations. Half the Iranian population is too young to remember the revolution of 1979 (nearly two-thirds are under age 30) and there is growing impatience with the lack of progress by President Khatami to relieve what many people consider oppressive Shiite restrictions, which some Iranians vow not ever to abandon, calling their opponents "traitors," assembling teams of baton-wielding vigilantes to beat the students gathered in Teheran's Engelhab Square, and mounting a huge counter-demonstration (see 2000).

U.S. Customs officers at Port Angeles, Wash., find the trunk of a car loaded with 130 pounds of bomb-making material December 14 and arrest a 32-year-old Algerian-born terrorist arriving from British Columbia at a remote ferry terminal on the Olympic Peninsula. Ahmed Rassam will turn out to be an operative trained last year in an Afghanistan camp operated by the Saudi-born religious fanatic Osama bin Laden, whose al Qaeda network has developed underground cells in many countries; he will help the FBI find other members of the network (but see 2001).

Sierra Leone rebels launch a new offensive January 3 in an effort to regain control (see 1998). The United Nations pulls most of its staff out of Freetown as the rebels approach, the United States evacuates her diplomats, the rebels fight their way into the capital January 6 and take the State House, patrolling the streets with assault rifles; rebel leaders announce January 16 that they will not observe a scheduled truce unless former junta head Foday Sankoh is released from prison. A peace accord signed July 7 at the Togo capital, Lomé, brings a temporary halt to the 8-year-old civil war, and rebel leader Foday Sankoh is made a government minister as part of the deal, but about 10 percent of the country's 4.5 million people have fled the country, and the war has left tens of thousands of amputees whose extremities were hacked off by enemy axes and machetes (see 2000).

Ethiopia and Eritrea resume hostilities in February, confronting each other in trenches along their 600-mile border with Ethiopia having an estimated 250,000 men, Eritrea perhaps 200,000, all well armed (see 1998). Ethiopian forces break through at Badame February 26, concentrating aircraft, armor, and artillery on a rocky, 120-square-mile triangle of disputed territory, but Eritreans take a heavy toll at Tsorona in March.

Nigeria returns to civilian governance, electing its first president in 16 years February 28. Former military ruler Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo, now 61, has triumphed over former finance minister Olu Falae, who has said that Obasanjo would merely continue military rule. Obasanjo has presented himself as the only man with enough control of the army to prevent another military takeover; he surprises cynics by cracking down on graft.

South African voters give overwhelming approval to Thabo Mbeki, 56, as successor to President Nelson Mandela, now 80, whose 5-year term has seen the construction of more than 500,000 new houses and provision of water, electricity, and telephone lines to millions of homes. An English-educated economist who has had charge of day-to-day administration in the Mandela administration, Mbeki faces severe problems of crime, joblessness, poor schools, and a rising rate of AIDS infection.

Congo's president Laurent Kabila and leaders of two rebellions in that country agree July 7 to the framework of a cease-fire after a year of hostilities, but tribal conflicts continue to kill thousands, mostly with arrows and machetes.

Morocco's Hassan II dies of a heart attack at Rabat July 23 at age 70 after an autocratic and repressive 38-year reign in which he has acted as intermediary in mid-East disputes and survived half a dozen assassination attempts and uprisings; he is succeeded by his eldest son, Sidi Mohammed, 35, who will reign as Mohammed VI. The new king will address what he calls "the thorny issue" of the past but Islamic terrorists will use violence to challenge his enlightened efforts to make the country more open and democratic.

Zimbabwe's vice president Joshua Nkomo dies of prostate cancer at Harare July 1 at age 82; Tanzania's founding father Julius K. Nyerere of leukemia following a stroke at London October 14 at age 77 (approximate).

East Timorese give overwhelming approval to independence from Indonesia August 30 in a referendum held under UN auspices (see human rights, 1991). Indonesia's president B. J. Habibie urges peaceful compliance with the result, but military-backed militiamen commit acts of violence, threatening to plunge the former Portuguese colony into civil war. Indonesian troops are unable (or unwilling) to control the militia. They burn villages and kill more than 1,000 Timorese, President Clinton announces that he will no longer support the Indonesian occupation force, Habibie yields to international pressure in September, he allows a United Nations peacekeeping force to help restore order, and Australian-led force begins arriving September 19. Criminal charges against former president Suharto are dropped in October, and an electoral assembly at Jakarta votes 373 to 313 October 20 to make Muslim leader Aburrahman Wahid, 59, president in the nation's first democratic transfer of power. Weakened by a stroke, nearly blind, but renowned for his intelligence and inclusiveness, Wahid defeats opposition leader Megawati Sukarnoputri, a daughter of former president Sukarno who is elected vice president October 21 (see 2001).

India's Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party vows not to pursue policies that have angered Muslims and gains a resounding victory over the Congress Party in election results announced October 7.

Pakistan's prime minister Nawaz Sharif dismisses army chief Gen. Pervez Musharraf, 56, and is ousted in a military coup October 12 (see 1997). Gen. Musharraf and Sharif have clashed over incursions into the Indian part of Kashmir; the general takes power and makes a nationally televised speech in which he announces that he will soon lay out plans that may include martial law, new elections, or the installation of a civilian government controlled by the military. Most Pakistanis welcome the ouster of the corrupt, albeit democratically elected, Sharif government. Grenade-carrying Pakistani hijackers commandeer an Indian Airlines Airbus en route from Katmandu to New Delhi December 24, land at Amritsar, force the pilot to take off for Kandahar, Afghanistan, and refuse to allow the plane's 184 passengers to deplane until their demands are met. The hostages are finally released December 31 after Indian authorities release a few Pakistani political prisoners; New Delhi accuses Karachi of being involved in the incident, further straining relations between the two nuclear powers.

Portugal hands over the island of Macao to China December 19 after 442 years of colonial occupation.

human rights, social justice

NATO forces in Kosovo find evidence in June of atrocities committed by Serb soldiers and civilians against ethnic Albanians. Mass graves, torture chambers, and other such evidence support the claims of refugees; returning Albanians commit atrocities against remaining Serbs.

The U.S. Supreme Court rules 5 to 4 May 24 in Aurelia Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education that any school receiving federal funding can face a sex-discrimination suit for failing to intervene energetically enough when a student complains of sexual harassment by another student. The case involved two Georgia elementary school children, aged 11 and 10.

Former U.S. Court of Appeals judge John Minor Wisdom dies at his native New Orleans May 15 at age 93; Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) cofounder James Farmer at Fredericksburg, Va., July 9 at age 79, having lost his eyesight and legs to diabetes; civil rights leader Daisy Bates dies at Little Rock November 4 at age 84.

philanthropy

Philanthropist Paul Mellon dies of cancer at his Upperville, Va., home February 1 at age 91.

exploration, colonization

Astronaut Pete Conrad dies of internal injuries after a motorcycle accident at Ojai, Calif., July 8 at age 69.

commerce

Eleven countries of the European Union (but not Britain, Denmark, Greece, Norway, Sweden, or Switzerland) adopt the euro for non-cash transactions January 1, although euro notes and coins are not scheduled for circulation until January 1, 2002 (French francs, German marks, and some other currencies are to remain in circulation until July 1, 2002).

Brazil devalues the real January 13 and its value against the dollar soon falls by 43 percent, having fallen only 7 percent in 1998. Critics say the $40 billion credit line extended by the International Monetary Fund last year served only to let Brazil cling to an exchange rate that was overvalued by as much as 30 percent.

The U.S. Treasury Dept. moves August 4 to use part of its budget surplus to reduce the nation's $3.6 trillion debt, buying back government bonds and thereby saving interest.

Wall Street's Dow Jones Industrial Average closes at 10006.84 March 29, having broken through the 10000 mark earlier on an interday basis. It closes at 11014 May 3, breaking through 11000 for the first time.

Japan's economy begins to recover but her banks still have billions of dollars in non-performing loans on their books.

China's Premier Zhu Rongji pledges March 14 to make whatever concessions it can to join the World Trade Organization (WTO) and visits the United States. He and President Clinton sign a statement April 14 committing them to complete a WTO deal by year's end, NATO's bombing of the Chinese Embassy at Belgrade May 7 ends talks, Clinton and President Jiang Zemin agree at an economic summit in New Zealand September 11 to resume talks, Clinton sends his chief trade negotiator Charlene Zharshefsky, 59, to Beijing November 8, and an agreement signed November 15 pledges China to open her markets to U.S. exports of agricultural products, manufactured goods, and economic services, paving the way for Chinese entry into the WTO. Global trade talks open at Seattle November 29, but WTO opponents stage violent protests in downtown streets, a curfew is imposed, the National Guard is called in to restore order, and the talks break down amidst considerable rancor as environmentalists join with human rights advocates, labor groups who insist that "free trade" is not fair trade, anarchists who oppose government altogether, and nationalists fearful of losing sovereignty to bureaucrats at Geneva; European delegates refuse to scale back agricultural subsidies, and many tariff barriers remain in place, but globalization of commerce proceeds nonetheless (see Washington, D.C., demonstrations, 2000).

China has more than 120,000 labor disputes, up from 8,150 in 1992, as workers are laid off in unprecedented numbers. Many are paid late or not at all and feel cheated when they see corrupt officials selling state property for a song to colleagues, friends, and relatives.

Levi Strauss closes half its North American plants, lays off 5,900 of the 19,900 workers in its U.S. and Canadian plants, and announces plans to shift more of its production to overseas plants where labor costs are lower.

U.S. federal judge Thomas Penfield Jackson denounces Microsoft November 5 in a 207-page findings of fact that say the software giant has used its "prodigious market power and immense profits" to stifle innovation and reduce competition to the detriment of consumers (see 1998; 2000).

Nobel economist Wassily Leontief dies at New York February 5 at age 93; former AFL-CIO president Lane Kirkland of lung cancer at Washington, D.C., August 14 at age 77.

The Financial Services Modernization Act signed into law by President Clinton November 12 repeals parts of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, allowing mergers of banks, securities firms, and insurance companies.

Wall Street's NASDAQ average closes at 3028.51 November 3, breaking through the 3000 mark as investors continue their demand for technology stocks. The Dow closes at 11497.12 December 31, up 25.22 percent from 9181.43 at the end of 1998, the NASDAQ at 4069.31, up 85.59. The Toronto Stock Exchange gains nearly 37 percent for the year, the Mexican 80 percent, the French Bourse 51 percent, the Frankfurt Exchange 39 percent, the London Exchange nearly 18 percent, Tokyo's Nikkei Average nearly 37 percent.

retail, trade

eBay addresses fraud problems in January with a program that includes free Lloyds of London insurance for purchases of up to $200 (less a $25 deductible) (see 1997). It has 3.8 million registered users by the end of March, with 2.2 million items listed for sale, and acquires the 134-year-old San Francisco auction house Butterfield & Butterfield April 26 for $260 million in eBay stock.

energy

An accident in a Japanese nuclear plant at Tokaimura September 30 critically injures three workers who are handling uranium and exposes 52 others to radiation (see 1997). One worker dies, and officials of the Sumitomo Metal Mining Co. subsidiary JCO Co. come under attack for allegedly having employees omit vital safety steps in order to increase production of uranium fuel for the controversial Joyo experimental fast-breeder nuclear reactor (most other advanced industrial nations have abandoned such reactors for reasons of cost and safety).

transportation

A fire March 24 in the seven-mile tunnel under Mont Blanc linking France and Italy traps dozens of cars and trucks, killing at least 40 people as toxic fumes and high temperatures thwart rescue workers. A Belgian-registered truck carrying flour and margarine has caught fire, other trucks have collided with it, the blaze has spread swiftly, temperatures reach 1,800° F. (1,000° C.), the 34-year-old facility has an antiquated ventilation system, there is no service lane for emergency vehicles or for evacuation, and it takes French, Italian, and Swiss firefighters 50 hours to bring the flames under control (see 2001).

A British intercity express barrels through a red light and plows into a three-car commuter train at London October 5 in the nation's worst train crash in more than 40 years. The initial death toll is estimated at 70 but scores of passengers remain missing. Formerly state owned, the system was sold to private companies in May 1996 and union officials charge that the new owners have skimped on safety equipment in their zeal to boost profits.

An EgyptAir Boeing 767 takes off for Cairo from New York's JFK Airport October 31, reaches an altitude of 33,000 feet, suddenly drops 16,000 feet, climbs 8,000, and falls into the cold Atlantic off Nantucket Island. All 199 passengers and 18 crew members aboard Flight 990 are killed as the plane sinks in 270 feet of water.

U.S. sales of sport utility vehicles (SUVs) exceed 3 million, up from 909,925 in 1991.

Budget Rent-a-Car cofounder Jules W. Lederer dies of a heart attack at his home outside London January 21 at age 81; Carnival Cruise Lines founder Ted Arison of a heart attack at his Tel Aviv home October 1 at age 75, having recently purchased the money-losing Cunard Line (with its flagship QE2) and leaving a fortune of more than $5 billion.

technology

Vinyl inventor Waldo Semon dies at Hudson, Ohio, May 26 at age 100; silicone and optical fiber pioneer J. Franklin Hyde at his Marco Island, Fla., home October 11 at age 96.

science

MIT biophysicist Alexander Rich describes in the June 11 issue of Science how the three-dimensional structure of the Z-DNA that his team discovered in 1979 binds to a protein involved in editing genetic messages important in a number of brain receptors (see 1995). Now 74, Rich received the Medal of Science from President Clinton 4 years ago for his various achievements.

Nuclear physicist Henry Way Kendall dies outside Tallahassee, Fla., February 15 at age 72 while helping a National Geographic magazine team take underwater photographs at Wakulla Springs State Park; nuclear physicist (and plutonium pioneer) Glenn T. Seaborg dies at his Lafayette, Calif., home February 25 at age 86 (he has been virtually paralyzed since August from injuries sustained after a stroke at Boston); biochemist Heinz L. Fraenkel-Conrat dies at Oakland, Calif., April 10 at age 88; Nobel physicist (and laser pioneer) Arthur L. Schawlow of congestive heart failure at Palo Alto, Calif., April 28 at age 77; Nobel microbiologist Daniel Nathans at his Baltimore home November 16 at age 71.

medicine

The painkiller and arthritis drug Celebrex introduced in January is unlike nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs such as aspirin and ibuprofen; a cox-2 inhibitor, it attacks the enzyme cyclo-oxygenase 2 that promotes inflammation (see 1971). Cox-2 inhibitors are far costlier than older anti-inflammatory anodynes (Celebrex costs about 15 times as much as aspirin) but have far fewer side effects such as internal bleeding and ulcers, which kill thousands of people each year; demand for them is enormous (40 million Americans have arthritis) (but see 2004).

Retired Michigan pathologist Jack Kevorkian, 70, is convicted of murder and sentenced April 13 to a prison term of 10 to 25 years. He has participated in assisted suicides of more than 130 terminally ill people since the 1980s, flouting the law, and allowed himself to be shown in one such suicide on the CBS show 60 Minutes last November.

Silicone breast implants cause no major diseases, concludes an independent panel of 13 scientists convened by the Institute of Medicine at the request of Congress. Issued June 22, the panel's report states in more than 400 pages that when implants rupture or deflate (which they do with "relatively high frequency") they can cause infections, or hardening or scarring of breast tissue which can be painful, disfiguring, and require further surgery, but the report discounts alleged links to lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, or other systemic disease of the kind that have cost manufacturers some $7 billion in jury awards.

Federal investigators report in late July that data linking cancer to electric power lines were falsified. Papers by cell biologist Robert P. Liburdy of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory at Berkeley, Calif., were published in 1992 purporting to show a relationship between electromagnetic fields and the calcium signaling fundamental to many important cellular functions. The Office of Research Integrity of the Department of Health and Human Services reports that Liburdy simply eliminated data that did not support his conclusions.

A United Nations report issued November 23 claims that sub-Saharan Africa has 22.3 million adults infected with the AIDS virus and that 12.2 million of them (55 percent) are women. HIV in Africa is spread mostly through heterosexual intercourse and is transmitted more easily from men to women than from women to men, but while its incidence is alarming it causes far fewer deaths and disabilities than malaria. In North and South America, Europe, Central Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East, only 20 percent of those infected with HIV are women, in East Asia and the Pacific only 15 percent, and in Australia and New Zealand only 10 percent, but in the Caribbean the figure is 35 percent.

Nobel pharmaceutical researcher Gertrude B. Elion dies at Chapel Hill, N.C., February 21 at age 81, having worked with the late George Hitchings to develop treatments for herpes (acyclovir, or Zovirax), gout (allopurinal, or Zyoloprim), and malaria (pyrimethane, or Daraprim), as well as drugs to help prevent rejection of transplant organs and treat severe rheumatoid arthritis (azathioprine, or Imuran); open-heart surgery pioneer C. Walton Lillehei dies of cancer at his St. Paul, Minn., home July 5 at age 80; cancer researcher Ernst L. Wynder of thyroid cancer at New York July 14 at age 77; cortisone synthesizer Lewis Hastings Sarrett at Viola, Idaho, November 29 at age 81.

religion

Some 10,000 members of the 7-year-old Chinese Buddhist Law (Falun Gong, or Falun Dafa) group stage a vigil at Beijing April 25, alarming Chinese authorities. Founder Li Hongzhi, 46, moved with his wife in May of last year to New York; leased an apartment in Flushing, Queens; paid $293,500 in June for a residence in a quiet Queens neighborhood; and in May of this year acquires a 4,600-square foot house at Princeton, N.J. Li's followers deny that the Falun Gong is a religion or cult, insisting that they merely subscribe to a traditional technique of exercise and meditation, and they claim to have tens of millions of adherents. Communist Party officials note that they make repeated references to obscure Buddhist deities, refer to a "third eye" that can see into the future, discourage orthodox medical care (but also discourage drinking and smoking), and move an imaginary "law wheel" with purported cosmic healing powers around their bodies. Beijing deplores what it calls "superstition," alleges that some of Li's followers have died because they refused medical treatment, and takes quiet measures to suppress the Falun Gong; the government outlaws the cult July 22, it issues a warrant for Li's arrest and asks Interpol to help have him returned to China, the legislature passes a law October 30 banning groups such as Falun Gong, but retirees, middle-aged women, students, and even some officials continue to gather regularly in public parks to practice mystical exercises.

education

Radcliffe College and Harvard University officials announce April 20 that Radcliffe has agreed to be absorbed into Harvard after more than a century of semi-independence and will be renamed the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Students at Mexico City's National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) strike April 22 to protest a tuition increase from the equivalent of 2¢ per semester to $75. They also demand reinstatement of open admission for all students from a number of public high schools (canceled 4 years ago) and a convening of a general congress of faculty, students, and workers to reorganize the university, whose student body of 275,000 makes it the largest in Latin America. The strike expands and will continue into next year; more than 228,000 students register for classes in the fall, but professors are obliged to hold classes in rented quarters, on athletic fields, even in their cars, and thousands of students transfer to other colleges.

The Kansas state board of education votes 6 to 4 August 11 to delete virtually every mention of evolution from the state's science curriculum but does not prevent teaching evolution (see Scopes trial, 1925). So-called "creationists" have succeeded in requiring at least some teaching of alternatives to Darwinian evolution in Alabama, Nebraska, and New Mexico (see Supreme Court decision, 1987), but New Hampshire, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, Washington, and other states have rejected pressure from the religious right to impose its arguments that it took an "intelligent designer" to create the Earth and that the Bible shows that life on Earth could not have existed more than 10,000 years ago. Alabama students are advised, "No one was present when life first appeared on earth. Therefore, any statement about life's origins should be considered as theory, not fact." A Gallup poll taken in August finds that 68 percent of those surveyed favor teaching creationism along with evolution in the public schools, and 40 percent favor dropping evolution completely. No such attitude is found in any other Western nation, and some biologists warn that the decision in Kansas will make its high school graduates unprepared for college admission tests and college science courses. One board of education member says that "the effort to emphasize the rock of ages rather than the age of rocks" could make Kansas students "the laughing stock of the world" (three members of the Kansas board will be replaced next year by people pledged to restore a full set of science standards, including evolution). New Mexico's Board of Education votes 14 to 1 October 8 to bar teaching of creationism from the state's curriculum.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announces September 16 that it will give at least $1 billion in the next 20 years to fund full scholarships for minority students in the fields of education, engineering, mathematics, and science. Administered by Gates's father, William Gates II, the foundation has nearly $17 billion and will become the world's richest foundation early next year when an additional $5 billion donation swells its coffers to $21.8 billion, surpassing the assets of Britain's $21.4 billion Wellcome Trust and putting it far ahead of the $13.1 billion Ford Foundation (a philanthropic fund must give away at least 5 percent of its endowment each year in order to keep its tax-exempt status).

communications, media

A 20/20 Special on ABC TV March 3 features a 2-hour interview by Barbara Walters of Monica S. Lewinsky, who is on Prozac and is careful to say almost nothing about how she was treated by independent prosecutor Kenneth Starr and his staff. An estimated 70 million viewers watch the show, which receives a 33.4 Nielsen rating (33.2 million homes).

Congress changes federal regulations to give U.S. television viewers relief from high monthly cable charges; earlier regulations have forbidden satellite providers from carrying local broadcast channels to viewers who could receive those channels either over the air or via cable, but consumers have demanded the right to use their dishes for local broadcast reception and Congress has responded. Cable reception in many areas remains superior to satellite reception but costs more and has fewer channels.

Sony Corp. cofounder Akio Morita dies of pneumonia at Tokyo October 3 at age 78 (disabled by a stroke since 1993, he is hailed as having changed the world's perception of "Made in Japan" to mean quality); former American Broadcasting Co. chairman Leonard H. Goldenson dies at his Sarasota, Fla., home December 27 at age 94.

Some 100 million people use the Internet worldwide, up from 5 million in 1995, and thousands of new users log on each week; more than 90 percent of e-mail messages are in English.

Anticommunist editor Jerzy Turowicz dies of a heart attack at Kraków January 27 at age 86; cartoonist John L. Goldwater of "Archie" fame of a heart attack at his New York home February 26 at age 83; Washington Post editorial-page editor Meg Greenfield of lung cancer at her Washington, D.C., home May 13 at age 68; George magazine founder John F. Kennedy Jr. in the crash of his Piper Saratoga plane en route to Martha's Vineyard July 17 at age 38 (also killed are his wife, Carolyn [née Bessette], 33, and her sister Lauren, 34. The story of their deaths receives more press coverage than did the assassination of Kennedy's father in 1963); former La Opinión publisher Jacobo Timmerman dies of a heart attack at his Buenos Aires home November 11 at age 76.

The Blackberry wireless platform introduced by the Waterloo, Ontario, firm Research in Motion, Ltd. (RIM) will become the industry standard for handheld e-mail communication devices. Istanbul-born Canadian computer whiz Mike Lazardis, now 39, dropped out of college to start RIM, developed an electronic sign system to monitor operations for a General Motors plant, and hired James Balsillie, also now 39, in 1992. Their wallet-size Blackberry has a flip-open screen and a full keyboard; although not compatible with other e-mail devices it will be in the hands of 2.4 million users by early 2005, and more than 100 million e-mails per day will be moving through RIM's data center.

literature

The World Encyclopedia (Sekai Dai-Hyakka Jiten) published by Heibonsha since 1931 goes online in May through a joint undertaking of Heibonsha and Hitachi (see 1955). It runs on Japanese Windows 95/98 but the digital version will soon be available only to subscribers who have bought a CD-ROM version of the work.

Nonfiction: The Lexus and the Olive Tree by Tom Friedman; The Ultimate Terrorists by New York-born Boston-raised Harvard lecturer Jessica (Eve) Stern, 41; Sleeping with Extra-Terrestrials: The Rise of Irrationalism and Perils of Piety by Wendy Kaminer; Against All Enemies: Gulf War Syndrome; The War between America's Ailing Veterans and Their Government by Seymour M. Hersh; Hitler, 1889-1936: "Hubris" by English historian Ian Kershaw, 56, of the University of Sheffield; Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II by John W. Dower; The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy by Nicholas Lemann is about SAT tests; Building Wealth: New Rules for Individuals, Companies, and Nations in a Knowledge-Based Economy by Lester Thurow; The Ostrich Factor: Our Population Myopia by Garrett Hardin, now 84; Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan by Kenya-born New York author Edmund Morris, now 59, who 14 years ago was named official "in-house historian" at the White House but whose book is so laced with fiction that critics pan it mercilessly; Our Kind of People: Inside America's Black Upper Class by New York lawyer Lawrence Otis Graham, 37, who exposed racial prejudice at a suburban country club 7 years ago by working there as a waiter and writing about it in New York magazine; Galileo's Daughters: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love by Dava Sobel.

Author William H. Whyte dies at New York January 12 at age 81; linguist James D. McCawley of an apparent heart attack at Chicago April 10 at age 61; essayist-editor-anthologist Clifton Fadiman on Sanibel Island, Fla., June 20 at age 95; biographer W. Jackson Bate of cardiac arrest at Boston July 26 at age 81; Willie Morris of heart failure at Jackson, Miss., August 2 at age 64; Peter Wildeblood at Vancouver, B.C, November 13 at age 76, having been left paralyzed by a stroke 5 years ago; Quentin Crisp dies at Manchester, England, November 21 at age 90, having said, "Life was a funny thing that happened to me on the way to the grave"; anthropologist-author Ashley Montagu dies at his Princeton, N.J., home November 26 at age 94; historian C. Vann Woodward at his Hamden, Conn., home December 17 at age 91.

Fiction: No Great Mischief by Alistair MacLeod; Waiting by Chinese-born Emory University poetry professor-novelist Ha Jin, 53, who learned English only at a relatively late age; The Ground Beneath Her Feet by Salmon Rushdie; Interpreter of Maladies (stories) by London-born New York writer Jhumpa Lahiri, 32; Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee; Crazy by Munich novelist Benjamin Lebert, 17, whose teenage protagonist, like the author, is partially paralyzed as a result of an accident at birth; Undue Influence by Anita Brookner; Juneteenth by the late Ralph Ellison; Timeline by Michael Crichton; Evensong by Gail Godwin; Another World and Ghosts by Pat Barker; The Basic Eight by San Francisco-born New York novelist Daniel Handler, 29; Walkin' the Dog by Walter Mosley; Personal Injuries by Scott Turow; Digital Fortress by former Philips Academy Exeter English teacher Dan Brown.

Novelist Brian Moore dies of pulmonary fibrosis at Malibu, Calif., January 10 at age 77; Naomi Mitchison at her home on the Mull of Kintyre, Scotland, January 13 at age 101, having written 80 novels plus travel works and a three-volume autobiography; Iris Murdoch of Alzheimer's disease at Oxford February 8 at age 79; Gary Jennings of heart failure at his Pompton Lakes, N.J., home February 13 at age 70; Andre Dubus at Haverhill, Mass., February 24 at age 62; J. F. Powers at Collegeville, Minn., June 12 at age 81; Mario Puzo of heart failure at his Bay Shore, N.Y., home July 2 at age 78; Morris West at Sydney, Australia, October 9 at age 83; Penelope Mortimer at London October 19 at age 81; novelist and historian Richard Marius of pancreatic cancer at Belmont, Mass., November 5 at age 66; George V. Higgins is found dead of natural causes at Milton, Mass., November 6 at age 53; novelist-composer-poet Paul Bowles dies of a heart attack at Tangier November 18 at age 88; Joseph Heller of a heart attack at his East Hampton, N.Y., home December 13 at age 76.

Poetry: On the Bus with Rosa Parks by Rita Dove; The River Sound by W. S. Merwin, now 72; Eating the Honey of Words by Robert Bly, now 72.

Poet-film maker James Broughton dies of a heart attack at Port Townsend, Wa., May 17 at age 85; Bangladeshi poet and political activist Sufia Kamal at Dakka November 20 at age 88 (she is buried with full state honors, becoming the first woman in the country to be so honored); Felicia Lamport dies at Cambridge, Mass., December 23 at age 83.

Juvenile: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J. K. Rowling; The Bad Beginning and The Reptile Room by San Francisco-born New York author Lemony Snicket (Daniel Handler), 29, illustrations by Bret Helquist; David Goes to School by David Shannon; Me and My Dad by Stuart Hample; The Absolutely Awful Alphabet by Mordichai Gerstein.

Teacher-author William Howard Armstrong dies at Kent, Conn., April 11 at age 84; writer-cartoonist Shel Silverstein is found dead at his Key West, Fla., home May 10 at age 67; illustrator-author Leo Lionni dies at his Italian home near Radda in the Chianti district October 11 at age 89.

art

The $37 million Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MOCA) opens May 30 on a 13-acre site at North Adams in the Berkshires, using 19th-century factory buildings that were occupied until 1984 by Sprague Electric Co. Its 19 galleries are supplemented by a 10,000-square-foot black-box theater, an outdoor cinema, two courtyards for performance art, 5,000 square feet of rehearsal and production space, and 60,000 square feet of office and retail space.

New York's mayor Rudolph Giuliani threatens September 2 to cut off all city funding of the Brooklyn Museum unless it cancels its Sensation art exhibition scheduled to open October 2 (see 1997). Art critics praise the work (the mayor has only seen the catalogue but calls the works "sick stuff"), and Giuliani comes under fire for trying to censor legitimate expressions of talent.

Artist-cartoonist Saul Steinberg dies at his New York home May 12 at age 84; abstract painter Olivier Debré at his native Paris June 1 at age 79; art dealer Leo Castelli at his New York home August 21 at age 91; painter Bernard Buffet by his own hand at his home in the south of France October 4 at age 71 (he had Parkinson's disease and was unable to work).

Sculpture: Switch (elliptical steel plates in the shape of a huge maze) by Richard Serra.

photography

Photographer Horst B. Horst dies at his Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., home November 18 at age 93.

theater, film

Theater: Wit by California elementary-school teacher Margaret Edson, 23, 1/9 at New York's off-Broadway Union Square Theater, with Kathleen Chalfant; Not about Nightingales by the late Tennessee Williams 2/25 at New York's Circle in the Square Theater, with Corin Redgrave, Finbar Lynch, James Black, Sherri Parker Lee; Goodnight Children Everywhere by Richard Nelson 5/26 at New York's off-Broadway Wilder Theater with Robin Weighert, Kali Rocha, Heather Goldenhersh, Jon DeVries, Chris Stafford; Fuddy Meers by playwright David Lindsay-Abaire 11/2 at New York's Manhattan Theater Club, with J. Smith-Cameron, Robert Stanton; Waiting in the Wings by the late Noël Coward (as revised by Jeremy Sams) 12/16 at New York's Walter Kerr Theater (to Eugene O'Neill Theater 2/17/2000), with Lauren Bacall, Rosemary Harris, Barnard Hughes, Dana Ivey, Rosemary Murphy, Elizabeth Wilson, 186 perfs.

Actress Susan Strasberg dies of cancer at her New York home January 21 at age 60; playwright Sarah Kane hangs herself at London February 20 at age 28; actor Richard Kiley dies of a blood disorder at Middletown, N.Y., March 5 at age 76; playwright-director Garson Kanin at his New York home March 13 at age 86; actor Donal McCann of cancer at Dublin July 17 at age 56; Kabuki theater expert Faubion Bowers at his New York home November 16 at age 82.

Television: The Sopranos 1/10 on HBO with James Gandolfini as an upwardly mobile Mafia capo from northern New Jersey, Nancy Marchand, Steve VanZandt, Tony Sirico, Lorraine Bracco, Edie Falco; Trenton, N.J.-born comedian Jon Stewart (originally Jonathan Stewart Leibowitz), 36, takes over the Daily Show on Comedy Central 1/11, succeeding Craig Kilborn (who has left to replace Tom Snyder on CBS's Late Late Show); It's Like, You Know . . . 3/24 on ABC with A. J. Langer, Chris Eigeman, Evan Handler, Steve Eckholdt, Jennifer Grey (to 1/5/2000); Passions (daytime soap opera) 7/15 on NBC with Taylor Anne Mountz, Josh Ryan Evans, Chea Courtney; Judging Amy 9/19 on CBS with Amy Brenneman, Tyne Daly, Dan Futterman; Once and Again 9/21 on ABC with Sela Ward, Bill Campbell (to 4/15/2002); The West Wing 9/22 on NBC with Martin Sheen as U.S. President Josiah Bartlet, John Spencer as White House chief of staff Leo McGary, Richard Schiff as Toby, Allison Janney as press secretary C. J. Cregg, Rob Lowe as Sam Seaborn, Bradford Whitford as Josh Lyman, Janel Moloney as his secretary, Dulé Hill as presidential aide Charlie in a series created and written by playwright Aaron Sorkin; Who Wants to Be a Millionaire 9/23 on ABC with host Regis Philbin in a game show that revives that genre (see Van Doren, 1958; Twenty-One, 2000), ABC has purchased rights to adapt a British TV show, and its high ratings revive the network's fortunes; Third Watch 9/23 on NBC with Michael Beach, Coby Bell, Bobby Cannavale, Eddie Cibrian, Jimmy Doherty, Molly Price, Kim Raver, Anthony Ruivivar, Skip Sudduth, Jason Wiles as paramedics and police officers in and about a fictional New York 55th Precinct station house (to 5/6/2005).

Candid Camera creator-host Allen Funt dies at his 1,100-acre Pebble Beach, Calif., ranch near Big Sur September 5 at age 84, having suffered a stroke in 1993; radio raconteur Jean Shepherd dies at Sanibel Island, Fla., October 16 at age 78.

Films: Pedro Almodóvar's All about My Mother with Cecilia Roth; Sam Mendes's American Beauty with Kevin Spacey, Annette Bening as a dysfunctional suburban couple; Kimberly Peirce's Boys Don't Cry with Hilary Swank, 25 (as a sexually confused Nebraska woman who is raped and murdered for posing as a man), Chlöé Sevgigny; Wim Wenders's documentary Buena Vista Social Club with Ry Cooder, Ibrahim Ferrer, Rubén González, Compahy Segundo; Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia with Julianne Moore, Tom Cruise, Jason Robards Jr. Also: Chris Smith's documentary American Movie with Mark Borchardt and friends; Wayne Wang's Anywhere But Here with Susan Sarandon, Natalie Portman; Mark Pellington's Arlington Road with Jeff Bridges, Tim Robbins; Erich Rohmer's Autumn Tale with Béatrice Romand, Marie Rivière; Spike Jonze's Being John Malkovich with John Cusack, Cameron Diaz, Catherine Keener, John Malkovich; Bernardo Bertolucci's Besieged with David Thewlis, Thandie Newton; Lasse Hallstrom's The Cider House Rules with Tobey Maguire, Michael Caine; Tibetan lama Khyntse Norbu's The Cup; Kevin Smith's Dogma with Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Linda Fiorentino; Erick Zonka's The Dream Life of Angels (La Vie Revee des Anges) with Elodie Bouchez, Natacha Régnier, Grégoire Colin; Alexander Payne's Election with Matthew Broderick; Atom Egoyan's Felicia's Journey with Elaine Cassidy, Bob Hoskins; Neil Jordan's The End of the Affair with Ralph Fiennes, Julianne Moore; Michael Mann's The Insider with Russell Crowe as tobacco industry whistle blower Jeffrey Wigand, Al Pacino as CBS 60 Minutes producer Lowell Bergman, Christopher Plummer as Mike Wallace; Steven Soderbergh's The Limey with Terence Stamp, Peter Fonda; Patricia Rozema's Mansfield Park with Embeth Davidtz, Jonny Lee Miller, Alessandro Nivola; Hugh Hudson's My Life So Far with Colin Firth, Rosemary Harris, Irene Jacob, Mary Elizabeth Mastroianni; Kunihiko Yuyama's Pokémon: The First Movie (animated) with the voices of Veronica Taylor, Philip Bartlett; Hayao Miyazaki's Princess Mononoke (animated) with the voices of Billy Crudup, Clair Danes, Billy Bob Thornton, Minnie Driver; François Girard's The Red Violin with Samuel L. Jackson, Carlo Cecchi, Jean-Luc Bideau, Jason Flemyng, Greta Scacchi, Sylvia Chang; Ang Lee's Ride with the Devil with Skeet Ulrich, Tobey Maguire; Tom Tykwer's Run Lola Run with Franka Potente, Moritz Bleibtreu; M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense with Bruce Willis, Haley Joel Osment, Toni Collette; David Lynch's The Straight Story with Richard Farnsworth, Wiley Harker; Anthony Minghella's The Talented Mr. Ripley with Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law; David O. Russell's Three Kings with George Clooney; Julie Taylor's Titus with Anthony Hopkins, Alan Cumming, Jessica Lange; John Lasseter's animated Toy Story 2 with the voices of Tom Hanks and Tim Allen; Gavin O'Connor's Tumbleweeds with Janet McTeer, Kimberly J. Brown.

Chicago Tribune film critic Gene Siskel dies following brain surgery at Chicago February 19 at age 53; director Stanley Kubrick dies of a heart attack in his sleep at his Hertfordshire home outside London March 7 at age 70; actor Charles "Buddy" Rogers at his Rancho Mirage, Calif., home April 21 at age 94; Dirk Bogarde of a heart attack at his London home May 8 at age 78; Francis Lederer at his Palm Springs, Calif. home May 25 at age 100; Sylvia Sidney at New York July 1 at age 88; multiplex cinema pioneer Stanley H. Durwood of esophageal cancer at his native Kansas City July 14 at age 78; actor Victor Mature of cancer in San Diego County, Calif., August 4 at age 83 (or 84); actress Ruth Roman at her Laguna Beach, Calif., home September 9 at age 75; director Charles Crichton at London September 14 at age 89; actor George C. Scott of a ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm at his Westlake Village, Calif., office September 22 at age 71; Madeline Kahn of ovarian cancer at New York December 3 age 57; director Robert Bresson at his Droué-sur-Droutte home December 18 at age 98.

music

Film musicals: Kevin Lima and Chris Buck's Tarzan with Walt Disney animation by Glen Keane, music by Mark Mancina, lyrics (and drumming) by Phil Collins, and the voices of Tony Goldwyn as Tarzan, Minnie Driver as Jane, Glenn Close as Kala; Mike Leigh's Topsy-Turvy with London-born actor Jim Broadbent, 50, as William S. Gilbert, Allan Corduner as Arthur Sullivan.

A performing arts festival to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the People's Republic of China opens at Beijing August 1 and continues to October 15, but ideological concerns stifle innovation.

Violinist-conductor Sir Yehudi Menuhin at Berlin March 12 at age 82; soprano Bidu Sayão at Rockport, Me., March 12 at age 94; choreographer Birgit Cullberg at Stockholm September 8 at age 91; lyric tenor Alfredo Kraus of pancreatic cancer at his Madrid home September 10 at age 71.

London's Royal Opera House at Covent Garden reopens December 1 after a 30-month, $360 million renovation and begins its new season December 6.

Broadway musicals: Marie Christine 12/2 at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, with Audra McDonald, 29, Anthony Crivello, music, book, and lyrics by John La Chiusa, songs that include "I Don't Hear the Ocean," 42 perfs.

Composer-lyricist Lionel Bart dies at his native London April 3 at age 68; stage and film showman Anthony Newley of cancer at his Jensen Beach, Fla., home April 14 at age 67; Broadway songwriter George Forrest at his Miami home October 10 at age 84, having collaborated with Robert Wright on 16 stage musicals, 18 stage revues, and more than 2,000 musical compositions.

Napster Inc. is founded in May by college dropout Shawn Fanning, 19, and his friend Sean Parker, 20, who have adapted peer-to-peer file sharing in a way that turns the Internet into a huge free music exchange. Users log on to Napster, enter the name of a song they want, and are directed to a digital version in a format known as MP3. One click lets the user copy the requested song at no charge from another user's personal computer onto his or her hard drive. The sound quality is mediocre, and most people who use the service later buy CDs of the songs that they want, but recording companies regard Napster's operation as piracy; without a business model or any immediate prospect of revenues, the new company will have more than 20 million users availing themselves of its service within a year, a figure that American Online (AOL) did not reach for 10 years, and then only after mailing out millions of disks and other promotional material (see 2000).

Popular songs: Christina Aguilera (CD) by Staten Island, N.Y.-born Pennsylvania-raised singer-songwriter Aguilera, 18, achieves phenomenal sales, as do her singles "Genie in a Bottle" and "What a Girl Wants;" Vacancy (CD) by Joseph Arthur, whose seven-song EP gains critical acclaim; Voice of an Angel (CD) by Welsh soprano Charlotte Church, 13, whose medieval-sounding songs include some from the 1937 secular oratorio Carmina Burana by the late German composer-music educator Carl Orff; Last Kiss (CD) by Pearl Jam; Up Up Up Up Up Up (CD) by Ani DiFranco, now 28; The Slim Shady LP (CD) by Eminem.

Songwriter-actor Bobby Troup dies at Los Angeles February 1 at age 80 (he is survived by his wife, singer-actress Julie London); pop singer Dusty Springfield dies of breast cancer at her Henley-on-Thomas home near London March 3 at age 59; jazz singer Joe Williams of a respiratory ailment at Las Vegas March 29 at age 80; vibraphonist-bandleader Red Norvo at a Santa Monica convalescent home April 6 at age 91; communist anthem writer Cao Huoxing at Tianjin (Tientsin) April 16 at age 75; jazz trumpeter Al Hirt of liver ailments at his native New Orleans April 27 at age 76; singer Mel Torme of complications from a stroke at Los Angeles June 5 at age 73; singer Helen Forrest of congestive heart failure at Los Angeles July 11 at age 82; country singer Anita Carter at her Goodlettsville, Tenn., home July 29 at age 66; former belly dancer Tahia Carioca (Abla Mohammed Karim) of a heart attack at Cairo September 20 at age 79; vibraphonist Milt Jackson of liver cancer at New York October 9 at age 76; tenor Josef Locke in County Kildare south of Dublin October 15 at age 82; jazz guitarist Charlie Byrd of cancer at his Annapolis, Md., home December 1 at age 74; jazz saxophonist Grover Washington Jr. of an apparent heart attack at New York December 17 at age 56; country singer Hank Snow at his Madison, Tenn., home December 20 at age 85; soul singer-songwriter Curtis Mayfield at Roswell, Ga., December 26 at age 57.

sports

Chicago Bulls guard Michael Jordan, now 35, announces his retirement January 13 after a dazzling 14 years in which he has led the Bulls to six championships, scoring 29,277 points (third highest in NBA history). Wilt Chamberlain dies of an apparent heart attack at his Los Angeles home October 12 at age 63; a knee injury at Philadelphia December 8 ends the career of Houston Rockets forward Charles Barkley at age 36 ("Just what America needs," he quips, "another unemployed black man").

The Denver Broncos win Super Bowl XXXIII at Miami January 31, beating the Atlanta Falcons 39 to 14.

The Breitling Orbiter 3 completes the first nonstop round-the-world balloon flight March 20 as Swiss psychiatrist Bertrand Piccard, 41, and British ballooning instructor Brian Jones, 51, pass the finish line at 9 degrees 27 minutes west longitude over Mauretania in North Africa at an altitude of 36,000 feet. The 20-day flight from Château-d'Oex in the Swiss Alps has taken the pair across Europe, Africa, Asia, the Pacific Ocean, Central America, and the North Atlantic.

Hockey legend Wayne Gretzky retires at New York April 18 at age 38 after a 21-year professional career in which he has scored 894 goals and racked up a record 2,857 points. Hockey legend Maurice "Rocket" Richard dies of stomach cancer and Parkinson's disease at Montreal May 27 at age 78.

Golfer Gene Sarazen dies at Naples, Fla., May 13 at age 97; Iditarod dog-sled race cofounder Joe Redington of throat cancer at his Knik homestead outside Anchorage, Alaska, June 24 at age 82; Nascar speedway owner H. Clay Earles at his Martinsville, Va., trailer home November 16 at age 86.

Tennis doubles champion Bill Talbert dies at his New York home February 28 at age 80 (mugged at a La Guardia Airport taxi stand in 1992, he sustained a broken shoulder and pelvis and has been in poor health ever since).

Pete Sampras wins in men's singles at Wimbledon, Lindsay Davenport in women's; Andre Agassi, now 29, in U.S. Open men's singles, Serena Williams, 17, in women's.

Moroccan runner Hicham el-Guerrouj, 24, covers a mile in 3 minutes 43.13 seconds at Rome July 7, setting a new world record; runner Michael Johnson, now 31, runs the 400 meter in 43.18 seconds at Seville August 26, breaking the record of 43.29 that has stood since 1988.

The U.S. team wins the Women's World Cup in football (soccer), defeating China July 10 before a crowd of more than 90,000 at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, Calif. Goalkeeper Briana Scurry blocks a Chinese penalty kick in the crucial play that seals the U.S. victory, which is widely attributed to passage in 1972 of a federal aid to education act whose Title IX has encouraged women's sports and produced a generation of "soccer moms."

Dallas-born cyclist Lance (Edward) Armstrong, 27, wins France's Tour de France July 25. Only the second American to win the race (Greg Le Mond won it three times), he has also won a 33-month battle against testicular cancer which spread to his lungs and brain before being stopped by chemotherapy.

Baseball legend Joe DiMaggio dies of lung cancer and pneumonia at Hollywood, Fla., March 8 at age 84; veteran catcher-manager-scout George "Birdie" Tebbetts at Bradenton, Fla., March 24 at age 86; veteran Baltimore Orioles coach Cal Ripken, Sr., of lung cancer at the Johns Hopkins Oncology Center March 25 at age 63; cricket legend Godfrey Evans at Northampton, Northamptonshire, May 3 at age 79; onetime Negro league all-star center fielder Henry Kimbro at his Nashville, Tenn., home July 11 at age 87; pitcher Jim "Catfish" Hunter of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's disease) at his Hertford, N.C., home September 9 at age 53; former Minnesota Twins (and Washington Senators) owner Calvin Griffith at Melbourne, Fla., October 20 at age 87.

Seattle's $517 million Safeco Field ballpark opens July 15 with Kentucky bluegrass and rye grass turf and a retractable steel-rail canopy to replace the nearby Kingdome that cost $67 million.

The New York Yankees win their 25th World Series (no other team has won more than 9), defeating the Atlanta Braves 4 games to 0.

Former Chicago Bears running back Walter Payton dies of sclerosing cholangitis (acute bile-duct inflammation) at Chicago November 1 at age 45.

Veteran horse racing writer Whitney Tower dies at his Saratoga Springs, N.Y., home February 11 at age 75, having suffered a stroke last year; horse trainer Charlie Whittingham dies of leukemia at Pasadena, Calif., April 20 at age 86; horse racing patron Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt at his Mill Neck, N.Y., home November 12 at age 87.

Panamian-born jockey Laffit Pincay, Jr. breaks his rival Bill Shoemaker's record of 8,333 victories December 10. Now nearly 53, he will win 198 more before he retires in 2003.

everyday life

A California Legoland theme park opens March 20 about 30 miles north of San Diego at Carlsbad with 128 acres of rides and other attractions (see 1996). Included is a "Miniland" made of some 30 million plastic Lego blocks featuring a replica of the U.S. Capitol at Washington, D.C. The park has cost $130 million to build.

Universal Studios opens its Islands of Adventure theme park on a 110-acre site near Orlando, Fla., with rides and attractions that include Seuss Landing (based on Dr. Seuss characters), the Incredible Hulk steel roller coaster, the Lost Continent, Jurassic Park, and Toon Lagoon.

The Mandalay Bay hotel-casino opens at Las Vegas in March with a separate Four Seasons hotel on its 35th through 39th floors. Decorated with a tropical theme, the Mandalay Bay has a 12,000-seat concert, entertainment, and sports complex, and is followed May 3 by the Venetian hotel casino (with the Piazza de San Marco, the Camanile, the Bridge of Sighs, and the Ca' d'Oro reproduced indoors complete with gondoliers). The Venetian has 15 restaurants, but only three of them open in May; it has 2,718 rooms (average rate: $167 per night) and 318 suites, 130-square-foot baths paved with Italian marble, 27-inch TV sets, and although its 700-square-foot rooms are the biggest in town a malfunctioning fire-control system prevents their immediate occupancy. The Paris hotel casino opens in June while construction continues on the Venetian.

Steve Wynn's $650 million Beau Rivage hotel-casino opens at Biloxi, Miss., with 1,780 rooms, 66 suites, 4,500 employees, 24 live oaks lining its entrance drive, 13 magnolia trees inside, a 20,000-square-foot health spa, 50,000 square feet of convention space, and countless blackjack tables, slot machines, roulette wheels, and the like.

The venerable British betting-parlor chain and racetrack operator Ladbroke Group changes its name as of May 14 to Hilton Group, with one division called Hilton International and the other Ladbroke Betting and Gaming.

Sony introduces PlayStation 2 in Japan in March to maintain its leadership in the video-game market. The console will be launched in the United States in the fall of next year, competing with the Nintendo 64 (each retails for about $130), but the ability to turn personal computers into Sony PlayStations soon creates a flood of cheap or even free (albeit illegal) games that are pirated onto CD-ROMs and offered via the Internet; the Dreamcast video console introduced by Sega Enterprises in September lists for $199 and helps Sega increase its share of the U.S. video-game market from 0.5 percent to about 15 percent, but the company lags far behind Nintendo, which trails the market leader Sony (see 2000); Yu-Gi-Oh (Game King) cards challenge Nintendo's Pokémon cards in Japan. Introduced by the 26-year-old Konami Corp. video-game maker of Osaka and based on a 3-year-old comic-book series, the card game is based on a shy boy (Yu-Gi) who fights virtual monsters whose powers are derived from an ancient "millennium puzzle" that his grandfather helps keep alive. Konami will develop the card game into animated computer software and launch a Yu-Gi-Oh craze in America beginning in the spring of 2002.

Nike Inc. cofounder William J. "Bill" Bowerman dies at his Fossil, Ore., home the night of December 24 at age 88.

tobacco

All remaining U.S. cigarette billboards come down by midnight April 21 as part of the $206 billion agreement reached last year between tobacco companies and 40 states. Anti-smoking billboards take their place in many states, some of them suggesting that smoking saps a man's sexual powers, but since the states collect sales taxes on tobacco products they will use only about 5 percent of the revenues received directly from the companies for anti-smoking efforts. Philip Morris raises wholesale cigarette prices by 18 percent per pack (8 percent) August 27, increasing the retail price to between $2.72 and $3.47 per pack; competitors quickly follow suit, anticipating a tax increase and more expenses from settlements with the states over healthcare costs.

The U.S. Department of Justice ends a criminal investigation of the tobacco industry September 22 and files a civil lawsuit accusing the major companies of having conspired since the 1950s to defraud and mislead the public about the health hazards of smoking. "The tobacco companies should answer to the taxpayers for their actions," says President Clinton, and Attorney General Janet Reno says at a news conference, "For the past 45 years the companies that manufacture and sell tobacco have waged an intentional coordinated campaign of fraud and deceit . . . designed to preserve their enormous profits whatever the cost in human lives, human suffering, and medical resources. The consequences have been staggering." Philip Morris concedes October 12 that there is an "overwhelming medical and scientific consensus that cigarette smoking" is addictive "as that term is most commonly used today" and causes diseases that include lung cancer, emphysema, and heart disease, but while California and Florida mount effective anti-smoking campaigns most of the states that are receiving billions of dollars from the tobacco companies in accordance with the settlements made last year adopt plans to use the money for almost everything except reducing smoking.

crime

The 4-year trial of Raul Salinas de Gortari ends at Mexico City January 21 with the conviction of Salinas for murder in connection with the September 1994 assassination of political rival José Francisco Ruiz Massieu. Brother of former president Carlos Salinas de Gortari, the prominent politician is sentenced to 50 years. Former anti-drug boss Mario Ruiz Massieu, 48, is found dead in New Jersey September 15, an apparent suicide (a civil jury at Houston confiscated most of his money 2 years ago after U.S. prosecutors presented evidence showing that he had accepted huge bribes from Mexican drug traffickers to protect their operations).

The U.S. Supreme Court rules 6 to 3 April 5 in Wyoming v. Houghton that police officers who have probable cause to search an automobile for illegal drugs may search the personal belongings of the passengers even though they are under no suspicion of illegal activity.

Two alienated Columbine High School students at Littleton, Colo., place at least 30 bombs April 20 and shoot 13 fellow students, aged 14 to 18, and a 47-year-old male teacher dead and wounding several others before killing themselves at the suburban Denver school; dressed in black trenchcoats, Eric Harris, 18, and Dylan Klebold, 17, have deliberately chosen Adolf Hitler's 110th birthday for their murder spree. The massacre inspires copy-cat threats in other schools nationwide.

The U.S. Supreme Court rules 6 to 3 June 10 in Chicago v. Morales that a city ordinance against loitering adopted in 1992 was unconstitutional. Struck down by a state appellate court in 1995, it was once considered a model for reclaiming streets in gang-infested neighborhoods and was used by police to arrest more than 42,000 people in the 3 years of its existence, but the Court says it gave the police too much discretion to single out what sometimes turned out to be innocent people.

Tulia, Texas, makes headlines following a July 23 drug sting in the town (population: 5,000) by undercover agent Tom Coleman, who has been employed by the Amarillo-based Texas Panhandle Regional Narcotics Trafficking Task Force; 39 of the 46 people arrested by Coleman are black, they accuse him of using racial epithets, he finds no drugs, weapons, or large sums of cash in his mass arrest, he makes no tape recording of his alleged drug purchases, and he will claim that he jotted down information on his leg, but 22 of those arrested will be sentenced to long prison terms (see 2003).

Atlanta stock trader Mark O. Barton, 44, loses $500,000 in day trading, bludgeons his estranged wife and two children to death the night of July 28, types a confession on his computer, warns in the note that he plans to kill "the people that greedily sought my destruction," drives his van to an office park the next morning, walks into two offices carrying a .9 mm Glock semiautomatic handgun and a .45 Colt semiautomatic pistol, kills nine day traders and trading house employees aged 30 to 60, wounds 13 other people, nine of them seriously, and then shoots himself as police close in.

Texas drifter Larry Gene Ashbrook, 47, walks into Fort Worth's Wedgwood Baptist Church during a contemporary Christian music concert September 16, lights a cigarette, shoots a janitor who approaches him, kills six other people, including four teenagers, and then kills himself, having fired at least 30 shots from a .9 millimeter Ruger handgun and a 380-caliber AMT. Gun-control advocates have failed for 31 years to obtain the enactment of any but small measures to regulate the manufacture and sale of firearms, but public pressure against the gun lobby has mounted. New York State attorney general Eliot Spitzer has threatened to make New York the first state to join the municipal legal assault on guns; Colt Manufacturing Co. owner Donald Zilkha approaches Spitzer on an Upper East Side New York street, introduces himself, suggests that they talk, and in October cuts production of less-expensive civilian handguns, the very weapons that Spitzer and others want curtailed.

architecture, real estate

Hyatt Hotel chain founder Jay Pritzker dies of heart disease at Chicago January 23 at age 76.

Copenhagen's First Hotel opens at 23-29 Vesterbrogade May 17 with 400 double rooms.

Shanghai's 88-story Jin Mao Tower opens March 18 with a 34-story, 555-room Grand Hyatt Shanghai beginning on the 54th floor. Designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the office building (third tallest structure in the world) has been financed by the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation, which undertook its construction when the country's economy was in sounder condition (vacancy rates in the city now approach 60 percent and rents are two-thirds below 1995 levels). The building's underground garage can accommodate 1,000 automobiles (and 2,000 bicycles).

Malaysia's prime minister Mahathir Mohammad moves with 800 civil servants in June into a colossal new green-domed government building at the new capital city of Putrajaya; adjoining it is a grandiose, green-domed ministerial residence with a man-made lake. Kuala Lumpur remains the official capital, but it is congested and all government offices are to move 25 miles south to Putrajaya by 2012 (the total cost is projected to be $5.2 billion, of which $1.3 billion has already been spent).

environment

The worst tornadoes in the United States since 1985 strike Oklahoma and Kansas May 3 with winds of 300 miles per hour and higher, killing 46, injuring hundreds, and leaving close to $1 billion in property damage in their wake.

An earthquake rocks parts of Colombia January 25 with tremors that register 6.3 on the Richter scale. The death toll is 1,185, more than 700 are missing and presumed dead, upwards of 4,750 injured, about 250,000 left homeless; Turkey has a predawn earthquake August 17 that is the worst in western Turkey's history. Centered at Izmit on the North Anatolian Fault east of Istanbul, it measures 7.4 on the Richter scale, kills 17,118, injures at least 50,000, leaves more than 200,000 homeless, and causes damage estimated at between $3 billion and $6 billion. The centralized government is slow to react, rescue efforts lag as people die in the ruins, and critics charge that builders were allowed to erect low-cost housing without meeting safety codes and that regulation was lax. Another quake in the same area November 13 kills nearly 500 people and injures 3,000; Taiwan has the worst earthquake in her history September 20. Epicentered at Taichung and Nantu, it measures 7.6 on the Richter scale, levels parts of Taipei and other cities, kills 2,297, injures more than 8,700, leaves 600,000 homeless, and causes bridges and highways to buckle, causing damage estimated at $14 billion. Shoddy housing is blamed for many of the collapsed buildings.

Hurricane Floyd knocks down houses in the Bahamas in mid-September and bears down on the U.S. East Coast with 115-mile-per-hour winds, authorities evacuate coastal Florida and Georgia in the biggest such operation ever, about 65 percent of Charleston, S.C., is moved inland, but the winds abate, and the worst damage occurs in North Carolina, where heavy rains flood streets, roads, and farmland.

Cyclones hit the coast of India's Orissa state in October (see 1996). Winds of up to 200 miles per hour send waves as high as 25 feet rushing as much as 100 miles inland, sweeping at least 10,000 people (and perhaps as many as 50,000) to their deaths, destroying 1.2 million homes, displacing 10 million people, leaving salt on fields that will not be arable for another 4 years, and devastating the economy.

Venezuela has a fortnight of torrential rains that lead to floods and landslides in mid-December, killing 30,000 and causing $15 billion worth of damage in what many call the nation's worst natural disaster ever.

Gale-force winds of up to 120 miles per hour barrel across northern France December 26 and move into parts of Germany and Switzerland, killing at least 62 people, smashing windows, halting air and rail traffic, and knocking down trees (some 10,000 are uprooted at Versailles alone).

agriculture

U.S. farmers save $465 million by using genetically-altered grains and oilseeds that reduce or eliminate the need for fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides (see 1997); such seeds account for 44 percent of the nation's soybean crop and 36 percent of the corn (maize) crop. Geneticist James Watson and agronomist Norman Borlaug are among the scientists who sign a letter assuring the public that genetically-altered foodstuffs are as safe as anything that people have consumed for thousands of years, and molecular biologists continue development of grains with the potential not only to withstand cold, drought, and extreme heat but also with built-in vitamins that can protect millions of people against blindness and other results of malnutrition.

consumer protection

Drinking water containing a vicious strain of E. coli bacteria (0157:H7) infects about 1,000 visitors to the annual Washington County Fair at Easton, N.Y., August 28, killing an elderly man and a young girl, leaving dozens of others hospitalized. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention at Atlanta issues a report September 16 estimating that the nation has 76 million cases of food poisoning per year, about 3,000 of them fatal—much higher than earlier estimates. Food industry sources insist that virtually no other country has such a safe food supply, but Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna E. Shalala says the findings should persuade Congress to enact food-safety measures proposed by President Clinton, and the Center for Science in the Public Interest warns, "The odds are one in four that you'll get sick this year from contaminated food. In today's food safety lottery, odds are one in 840 that you'll be hospitalized and one in 55,000 that you'll die. Those are not good odds for the American public."

Denmark bans use of antibiotics in hog and poultry feed. Human health problems related to antibiotic-resistant bacteria have been rare in Denmark, the ban will lead to a 54 percent decrease in the country's use of antibiotics in feed, some hogs will die of infection, pork-production costs will rise by just over 1 percent, the ban will not affect poultry production, and the World Health Organization will suggest in August 2003 that other countries may be able to cut back on their use of drugs in animal feed.

food and drink

The French retail food chain Carrefour merges with the supermarket chain Promodès and becomes Europe's largest retailer (see 1976). Elderly French housewives may still buy food several times per week; younger ones now shop just once, enjoy more choice, but spend more for food. Partly by franchise agreements, Carrefour (French for crossroads) has grown since its founding in 1963 to have 681 hypermarkets, 2,259 supermarkets, 3,124 discount stores, and 1,921 convenience stores. It also acquires 85 Brazilian supermarkets and is now second worldwide only to Wal-Mart, with operations on four continents, nearly 9,500 stores—hypermarkets, supermarkets, cash-and-carry stores, convenience stores, and discount stores—under more than 24 different names in 30 countries. It has 240,000 employees and $46 billion in annual sales, although more than half of its sales will be in France, but the country's 43,000 small bakers (down from 54,000 in 1960) still enjoy 77 percent of the bread and pastry market.

Onetime popcorn king James V. Blevins dies at his Nashville, Tenn., home April 12 at age 87; candy maker Victor A. Bonomo at his Bal Harbour, Fla., home June 26 at age 100; Forrest E. Mars Sr., at his Miami, Fla., home July 1 at age 95; Reddi-Wip creator Aaron S. Lapin at Los Angeles July 10 at age 85; cyclamate inventor Michael Sveda of Parkinson's disease at his Stamford, Conn., home August 10 at age 87; Suntory Ltd. chairman Keizo Saji of pneumonia at Osaka November 3 at age 80, having amassed a fortune of about $4.7 billion.

population

Former Supreme Court justice Harry A. Blackmun dies at Washington, D.C., March 4 at age 90 and is remembered as the author of the 7-to-2 1973 Roe v. Wade decision upholding the legality of abortion. Mourned by pro-choice advocates, he remains a villain in the eyes of right-to-lifers, but most Republican politicians soft-pedal the divisive abortion issue in hopes of reclaiming the presidency.

Japan's Ministry of Health and Welfare decides in early June to make oral contraceptives available after more than 35 years of delay in which feminists have lobbied to have The Pill approved. The ministry has approved Pfizer's 1-year-old anti-impotence drug Viagra in a record 6 months, creating an uproar among women, and there are charges that the condom industry and abortionists have blocked approval of The Pill, but some critics raise fears that Japan's fertility rate is already so low that labor shortages will ensue as the population declines by more than 1 percent each year in the next century.

India's population officially passes the billion mark August 15, up from 345 million in 1947, with 320 million living in abject poverty (life expectancy has risen to 63 years, up from 39). China's population has reached 1.267 billion, the United States 276 million, Indonesia 209, Brazil 168. The population of the world officially reaches 6 billion October 12, according to the United Nations, but fertility rates in many countries are below the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman (Bulgarian, Latvian, and Spanish women give birth on average to 1.1 children, Japanese women 1.4, U.S. women 2.0).

The Clinton administration agrees in mid-November to new statutory language restricting international family planning assistance in return for congressional approval of a plan to pay most of the United Nations dues that America owes. Foreign family planning organizations that spend their own money to provide abortions or lobby for more lenient abortion laws become legally ineligible for U.S. assistance. Anti-abortion crusaders in the House of Representatives have blocked funding of the UN until at least some of their demands were met.

1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000

Anthropology

Scientists discover a 24,500-year-old skeleton in Portugal that many believe to be a hybrid between a Neandertal and Homo sapiens. See also 1997 Anthropology.

Berhane Asfaw and coworkers announce the discovery of fossils of a new hominid species in Ethiopia, which they name Australopithecus garhi ("surprising australopithecine"); it dates from 2,500,000 years bp. Evidence of animal butchering with stone tools is found in the same stratum, although no absolute connection can be made between the australopithecine and the butchering.

Zahi Hawass [b. Damietta, Egypt, May 28, 1947] and other Egyptian archaeologists discover at Bahariya Oasis, some 140 km (230 mi) from Cairo, a previously unknown cemetery that contains an estimated 10,000 mummies. They name the site the Valley of the Golden Mummies, since the first mummies found have gold face masks and gold-covered vests. See also 1984 Archaeology.

Geoffrey W. Marcy of San Francisco State University and Robert Noyes of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics discover that there are at least three planets orbiting the star Upsilon Andromedae, a star about 44 light-years from Earth. Two planets are much larger than Jupiter, while the third, about 3/4 the size of Jupiter, is orbiting the star so closely that its period is only 4.6 Earth days; thus, this first nonsolar system of planets to be discovered is not much like our familiar solar system. See also 1995 Astronomy. (See biography.)

Gregory W. Henry becomes the first astronomer to observe the periodic dimming of light from star HD 209458; this is caused by an extrasolar planet orbiting the star. See also 1995 Astronomy.

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey begins. It uses the largest electronic camera ever built to map millions of galaxies and other objects visible from our galaxy.

Philip Lucas and Patrick Roche discover 13 free-floating extrasolar "planets" in the Orion Nebula. Since these small bodies are not in orbit about a star, however, they will later be termed "planetars" or "sub-brown dwarfs." They are not brown dwarfs because they have masses below 13 times that of Jupiter. At a mass of 13 Jupiters, bodies produce limited nuclear reactions, making brown dwarfs low-level cousins of stars. See also 1987 Astronomy.

On January 23 the Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment (ROTSE) near Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico observes the first optical image associated with a gamma-ray burst. The light from GRB 990123 is captured just 22 seconds after the explosion is recognized by gamma-ray detecting satellites. GRB 990123 is also the most powerful gamma-ray burst observed to this date. Current theory holds that the gamma-ray bursts occur when a giant star collapses into a black hole, sending out jets that produce the bursts as they strike nearby gas or dust. See also 2002 Astronomy.

On February 7 the United States launches the space probe Stardust. Its mission is the capture and return to Earth of dust from comet Wild 2, which it is scheduled to reach in January 2004. Stardust is expected to parachute the samples back to Earth in 2006.

In March Mars Global Surveyor enters its orbit about the planet Mars, beginning a study that will last for at least one Mars year of 687 days. Among its first discoveries is that fossil magnetism, which can be detected from space, indicates that 4,000,000,000 years ago Mars had active tectonic plates, similar to those known on Earth. It also finds additional evidence that water once flowed over the Martian surface. See also 1996 Astronomy.

On June 24 the United States in conjunction with Canada and France launches FUSE (Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer), a space-based telescope that will explore the universe at wavelengths slightly longer than X rays. FUSE fills a gap in astronomers' coverage of the electromagnetic spectrum.

On July 23 the United States launches the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, a space-based telescope that will become among the most successful of NASA's observatories. See also 1995 Astronomy.

On December 10 the European Space Agency launches the X-Ray Multi-Mirror Telescope, generally known as XXM-Newton. This is the most powerful X-ray detector ever put into space. XXM-Newton has three X-ray telescopes, two X-ray spectroscopes, and an optical telescope. Its orbit about Earth takes it a third of the way to the Moon, giving it long periods of time for observation of stars, pulsars, active galaxies, and black holes. See also 1996 Astronomy.

The Hobby-Eberly telescope, dedicated primarily to spectroscopy, begins operation in October at the McDonald Observatory in the Davis Mountains of Texas. It has the world's largest primary mirror at 11 m (433 in.), but is considered the world's third largest telescope at this time (Keck 1 and 2 are first and second) because only 9.2 m (362 in.) of the surface is available for use at any one time. See also 1993 Astronomy.

The Gemini North telescope begins operations on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. Its 8-m (319-in.) mirror is to have an exact twin in the Southern Hemisphere. See also 2000 Astronomy.

The Subaru telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, with an 8.3-m (338-in.) reflector, begins operation. It is the largest telescope mirror to this time cast from a single piece of glass.

On December 1 the sequencing of the first human chromosome, chromosome 22, is completed. Both the United States and United Kingdom announce that the human genome will not be patentable. See also 1998 Biology; 2000 Biology.

A joint project of the Sanger Centre, near Cambridge, England, and Washington University in St. Louis announces that they have decoded the genome of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, making it the first animal whose genome is completely known (and previously the first animal for which the development path of each cell had been determined). C. elegans is found to have 19,099 genes spread out among some 97,000,000 base pairs of nucleotides in its DNA. See also 1996 Biology; 2000 Biology.

Studies in mice show that a process of cell division called telomere shortening produces the effects of cell aging. Telomeres are structures at the end of chromosomes that protect DNA against breakage or other instabilities during cell division. Scientists also discover that telomeres of mammalian chromosomes form loops that look like tiny lassos. See also 1985 Biology.

Joe Z. Tsien of Princeton University and coworkers show that enhancing a component of a mouse brain with genetic engineering can produce a mouse that is more intelligent than one that has not had its brain cells altered. The enhanced part of the brain cell is a molecule called the NMDA receptor. See also 1996 Biology.

Heidi Schulz discovers in ooze off the coast of Namibia the largest bacterium known. Thiomargarita manibiensis is about the size of the period at the end of this sentence.

German-American Günter Blobel [b. Waltersdorf, Germany, May 21, 1936] is awarded the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for determining that proteins carry signals that direct their transport to specific places within a cell.

Scientists at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna create element 114 by smashing calcium atoms into a plutonium target.

Scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California claim to have extended the periodic table with elements 116 and 118, but will later withdraw the claim after the experiment cannot be replicated and evidence of fraud by one member of the team is found.

Using a combination of X-ray and neutron-diffraction techniques, scientists are able to image for the first time the specific shape of electron orbitals in an atom. See also 1955 Tools.

Egyptian-American Ahmed H. Zewail [b. Damanhur, Egypt, February 26, 1946] is awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for developing a technique that uses a laser to observe the movements of atoms within molecules while a chemical reaction takes place.

Sole responsibility for registration and maintenance of domain names (such as site names ending in .com, .edu, and .net) is removed from Network Solutions, Inc., which has had a monopoly since 1992. Control is assigned to the nonprofit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), formed in 1998. It in turn accredits registrars who assign the actual domain names. See also 1992 Communication.

Ji Qiang of the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences locates a nearly complete fossil of a rat-sized creature called a triconodont, thought to be the earliest known ancestor of the mammals, dating from 120,000,000 years bp. The triconodont was equipped with forelegs like those of a mammal and hindlegs like those of a reptile.

Two fossils of tiny cartilaginous fish from 530,000,000 years bp found in Chengjiang in southern China are identified as the first known vertebrates.

On February 23 Denmark puts Earth satellite Ørsted into orbit, from which it will make a high-precision map of Earth's magnetic field.

Scientists studying the Greenland ice sheet determine that it has shrunk substantially since 1994, an effect thought to be caused by global warming. See also 1997 Ecology & the environment; 2001 Ecology & the environment.

Researchers find that active colonies of bacteria live in the ice at the bottom of glaciers.

Herpetologists discover that extra legs, missing limbs, and other deformities often found in frogs are caused by parasitic flatworms called trematodes that infect tadpoles.

The American peregrine falcon (Falco peregrinus anatum) is removed from the United States Endangered Species List. The falcon population had declined rapidly after the introduction of DDT, starting during World War II, which caused reproductive failure through eggshell thinning, but began recovery after DDT was banned in the early 1970s. Much of the recovery has been due to captive breeding and re-introduction. See also 1994 Ecology & the environment; 2001 Ecology & the environment.

Restoration of the Florida Everglades begins. The primary goal of the $7.8 billion, 35-year project is to restore the natural flow of water through much of the basin, which had been in decline since 1948, when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began draining wetlands, building dams and levees, and otherwise depleting the Everglades.

Scientists studying carbon nanotubes discover that the giant molecules conduct electricity with almost no resistance, although nanotubes are not conventional superconductors. Nanotubes also are shown to emit light when an electric current is passed through them. Furthermore, nanotubes sometimes behave as semiconductors and sometimes behave as metals, depending on how the atomic structure of the tube is aligned. Each of these properties is viewed as potentially of great usefulness, although no applications are immediately forthcoming. See also 1991 Materials; 2001 Electronics.

Thomas Hales proves the "honeycomb conjecture": Tiling a plane in regions of equal area in such a way that there is a minimum length for the edges of the regions requires that the regions be regular hexagons. Bees' combs have long been thought to use hexagonal cells because this minimizes the amount of wax in the walls. Research with bees indicates, however, that the hexagonal shapes are a fortuitous artifact of the method of construction. See also 1998 Mathematics.

A team led by Yasumasa Kanada calculates the value of π to 206,158,430,000 decimal places. See also 1987 Mathematics.

On April 22 the United States announces that it will not destroy remaining stocks of the smallpox virus as previously planned. All known legal smallpox viruses are in two laboratories in the United States and Russia, but there is some fear that illegal stocks exist and that they might be used for biological warfare or terrorism. See also 1992 Biology.

Surgeons at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center perform the first successful brain surgery on an unborn fetus. See also 1984 Medicine & health; 2001 Medicine & health.

The first New World cases of human West Nile virus infection appear in New York State, where 62 persons become ill and 2 die. Birds throughout the area also become infected and many die from the disease, which is spread to humans by mosquitoes. See also 1937 Medicine & health.

The U.S. Surgeon General issues the office's first-ever report on mental health, which notes that almost half of all Americans with severe mental illness fail to seek treatment.

Deborah Jin and Brian DeMarco create a Fermi gas of atoms by cooling potassium-40 in a magnetic trap to a temperature of 150 micro Kelvin -- 0.0015°C (0.0027°F) above absolute zero. See also 1995 Physics.

Lene Vestergaard Hau and coworkers at the Rowland Institute for Science in Cambridge, Massachusetts, use a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) to slow the speed of light to 61 km (38 mi) per hour. See also 2001 Physics. (See biography.)

Gerardus 't Hooft [b. Den Helder, Netherlands, 1946] and Martinus J.G. Veltman [b. Waalwijk, Netherlands, June 27, 1931] are awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for contributions to the standard theory of subatomic-particle physics that show how to make precise calculations of properties.

Scientists at the U.S. National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST) use a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) to create the first directional atom laser. See also 1995 Physics.

Drama and Theater

• A. R. Gurney Jr: Ancestral Voices. Returning to the concept of a play to be read rather than fully staged, which he had employed in Love Letters (1988), Gurney's autobiographical drama considers the decline of his grandparents and his native Buffalo, New York.
• Terrence McNally: Corpus Christi. This controversial play, a retelling of the Christ story from a gay perspective and featuring a gay Jesus, is attacked as anti-Christian. Critics, however, find no mockery in the drama and instead are impressed with the way the playwright integrates his characters' moral and sexual natures.
• Alfred Uhry: Parade. Despite its downbeat subject matter for a musical, Uhry wins a Tony Award for best book, based on the true story of the trial of Leo Frank, a Jewish factory manager in Atlanta, charged with the rape and murder of a thirteen-year-old employee in 1913.
• Paula Vogel: And Baby Makes Seven. Vogel takes gay and lesbian literature to a new level of comedy and melancholy in this play about a lesbian couple and a gay male who parent one actual child and indulge in the fantasy of raising three more. The real and fantasy children are emblematic of the characters' reactions to reality and their desire to dream of a world less prejudiced and more open to possibility than the one they inhabit.

Fiction

• Louis Auchincloss: The Anniversary and Other Stories. Auchincloss continues his well-established and highly praised series of portraits of upper-class easterners. His characters include the head of a mammoth media corporation, a rich American married to a European aristocrat, and the hypocritical headmaster of a boarding school. Critics are especially impressed with his handling of period details from the Civil War through the late 1970s.
• Toni Cade Bambara: Those Bones Are Not My Child. This posthumously published novel by one of the masters of the American short story is edited by Toni Morrison, who had lost and then found the author's manuscript. It is an ambitious work of fiction based on the child murders in Atlanta in the 1970s. Critics observe that the novel explores a cycle of fear, accusation, and acrimony with considerable sensitivity in an epic of contemporary culture.
• Melissa Bank (b. 1960): The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing. This series of stories relates the escapades of Jane Rosenal, an independent young editor who takes readers on a tour of her lovers--young, old, and in between. Critics praise the high comedy of the novel and Bank's creation of a distinctive narrator who is interested in the variations of romantic love, not marriage.
• Thomas Berger: The Return of Little Big Man. In a sequel to Berger's classic revisionist western, Little Big Man (1964), the 111-year-old Jack Crabb continues his memoirs with offbeat profiles of western legends such as Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, Annie Oakley, and Buffalo Bill, and the "real story" behind the shoot-out at the O.K. Corral.
• Bliss Broyard (b. 1966): My Father, Dancing. This first collection of stories by the young author explores relationships between fathers and daughters. Broyard's eight stories, some of them already anthologized, are clearly autobiographical, such as the title piece, about a daughter reflecting on life with her father (critic Anatole Broyard), who is dying of prostate cancer. "Mr. Sweetly Indecent" explores a daughter's awareness of her father's adultery. Other stories also explore sexuality and the way it impinges on father-daughter relationships.
• Philip Caputo: The Voyage. Caputo's richly imagined novel connects a perilous voyage undertaken by three teenage boys in 1901, from Maine to the Florida Keys, with a family secret that explains the reason for the journey.
• Bret Easton Ellis: Glamorama. Praised and sometimes attacked for his flashy style, Ellis finds the world of high fashion a fit for his mordant, comic sensibility. Critics praise his cast of characters, including a nightclub organizer, a supermodel, a supermodel-terrorist, a spy, and a rich playboy. Ellis once again explores trendy New York and exposes the materialism of a new generation of the rich ensconced in the fashion industry.
• Ralph Ellison: Juneteenth. Ellison's long-awaited second novel becomes a controversial literary event. Ellison had published parts of the novel over the years, and the mystique about its scope and subject matter grew, especially after it became known that a fire had destroyed the principal draft and Ellison had to begin anew, almost from scratch. The novel features Hickman, a black minister, who brings up a boy who looks white. Later the boy runs away and becomes a racist U.S. senator. The events that prompt this denouement are gradually revealed in the conversation between the minister and the senator.
• Janet Fitch (b. 1955): White Oleander. Fitch's first novel is about a strong-willed poet mother who murders her boyfriend, and her daughter's struggle to sort out her past and forge an identity while living in a string of dysfunctional foster homes. The work earns both critical acclaim and popular success.
• David Gates (b. 1947): The Wonders of the Invisible World: Stories. Gates's stories concentrate on characters in and around New York City, struggling with aging and debilitating illnesses. Gates has been well received as the chronicler of the baby-boom generation now facing or just getting past midlife crises.
• David Guterson: East of the Mountains. This novel concerns a seventy-three-year-old heart surgeon afflicted with terminal colon cancer. Although he intends to commit suicide, his plans are delayed by a series of adventures with a remarkable cast of characters. Although the novel broods on death, critics find it a bracing affirmation of life.
• Kent Haruf: Plainsong. Haruf's novel animates multiple stories of inhabitants of a Colorado community, including a pregnant high school student, a lonely teacher, brothers abandoned by their mother, and a pair of bachelor farmers. It is praised by reviewer Jon Hassler as "A work as flawlessly unified as a short story by Poe or Chekhov".
• Oscar Hijuelos: Empress of the Splendid Season. Hijuelos's fifth novel treats the life of Lydia España who is forced by her family to leave Cuba for New York City, where the former "queen of the conga line" finds herself a cleaning lady. She meets life's challenges with dignity and fortitude.
• Gish Jen: Who's Irish? Jen's first story collection offers a series of compressed, comic depictions of Asian American life, treating immigrants and their children.
• Ha Jin: Waiting. After publishing a first novel, In the Pond (1998), about a Chinese artist, Ha Jin wins the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award for his comic portrait of Chinese life under Communism. Based on the regime's law that a couple without mutual consent must be separated for eighteen years before they can be divorced, the novel examines a Chinese army doctor trapped in an arranged marriage who decides to wait out the time before marrying and consummating his relationship with the woman he loves.
• Gayl Jones: Mosquito. Jones's novel about a female truck driver's involvement with illegal Mexican immigrants is an exercise in mining the rich poetry of the black vernacular, resembling, in her narrator's words, "a true jazz story, where the peoples that listen can just enter the story and start telling it theyselves while they's reading."
• Thom Jones: Sonny Liston Was a Friend of Mine: Stories. This third collection ranges from Vietnam to Illinois and Michigan and includes characters such as Kid Dynamite, a young boxer; Anson, a hunchback obsessed with mice; and his lover Molly Bloom, who has been recently released from a mental institution. Jones shifts from the grim to the comic to the eccentric with aplomb, providing a broad canvas of contemporary American culture.
• Jhumpa Lahiri (b. 1967): Interpreter of Maladies. Lahiri wins the Pulitzer Prize for her debut story collection, which deals with the experiences of Indian immigrants in the United States. Included is "A Temporary Matter," chosen for inclusion in both The O. Henry Prize Stories and The Best American Short Stories for 1999.
• Chang-Rae Lee: A Gesture of Life. Lee's second novel is set in Japan, Burma, and a fictional small town outside New York City, where a Korean American vividly recalls the atrocities he witnessed in the Far East and deals with his domestically troubled life in America.
• Jonathan Lethem: Motherless Brooklyn. Lethem offers a postmodern detective novel, with a detective who suffers from Tourette's syndrome. Critics treat the novel as a mainstream literary work, not a formula story, precisely because Lethem handles the genre with self-conscious verbal virtuosity.
• Peter Matthiessen: Bone by Bone. The third volume of the novelist's trilogy, set in the Florida Everglades and concerning the criminal E. J. Watson, a historical figure who is the subject of much speculation and mythmaking in the earlier two novels. Here Matthiessen has Watson himself narrate his story, using his own words to strip his story of legend and reveal a man warped by his drunken, cowardly father and trying to find the meaning of life even as he commits murder and is himself murdered in the Everglades in 1910.
• Larry McMurtry: Duane's Depressed. This novel completes the trilogy begun with The Last Picture Show (1966) and continued in Texasville (1989). Once again the protagonist is Duane, the considerably older mayor of Thalia, Texas, who startles his constituents by abandoning his pickup truck and walking everywhere. This signals his shake-up of community conventions, which he also challenges by consulting a young woman psychiatrist. Duane's story, critics note, shows McMurtry's fine grasp of a changing contemporary Western culture.
• Joyce Carol Oates: Broke Heart Blues. This novel, in the form of a religious allegory, is about a Christ figure who appears in a small upstate New York town. The effect of the allegory, critics suggest, is to emphasize the bleakness of American culture and the need to redeem it.
• David Plante: The Age of Terror. The novel is about Joe, a twenty-three-year-old who becomes obsessed with a photo of a Russian partisan hanged by Nazi troops. Set in the Soviet Union, the novel explores Joe's journey through contemporary Russia, with flashbacks to its past and scenes that hold the promise of a better world. Critics view the novel as one of Plante's most ambitious, both in its vivid setting and its probing of Russian history.
• E. Annie Proulx: Close Range: Wyoming Stories. This collection depicts an extraordinary range of characters--a young Brahma bull rider, a gay rodeo rider, and a variety of cowpunchers, ranchers, and cattle dealers. Proulx describes Wyoming and its history in lyrical but sometimes gruesome terms. Critics admire her precise, seemingly effortless prose and her accurate ear for regional dialects. This collection includes "Brokeback Mountain," winner of an O. Henry Award.
• Leslie Marmon Silko: Gardens in the Dunes. Set during the American financial panic of 1893, the novel is about two sisters who belong to a fictional tribe wiped out in the early twentieth century. The girls escape the massacre, are befriended by whites, and are educated at prestigious white institutions. Critics admire Silko's ability to integrate a powerful nostalgia for the Native American past with a recognition that Native Americans must adapt while never forsaking their bond with the land and their heritage.
• David Foster Wallace: Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. This story collection is highly praised for its unified, novel-like structure. Wallace invents interviews with men who vent their feelings about women in a style that veers from the Proustian to the crude. Although Wallace's work offends certain readers, critics agree that his range of styles puts him in the same league as Thomas Pynchon and Donald Barthelme.
• Colson Whitehead (b. 1969): The Intuitionist. Although not clearly specified, the city in this novel is New York in the 1950s. It features Lila Mae Watson, the first black woman to become an elevator inspector; James Fulton, the founder of Intuitionism; Ben Urich, an investigative journalist; and other characters in an exploration of racism, urban decay, and epistemology. Critics admire Whitehead's creation of a fantastic yet fully realized world as a way of probing the limitations of the materialist view of reality. The New York City writer worked for several years as the television critic for the Village Voice.
• Helen Yglesias: The Girls. The novel depicts four aging Jewish American sisters in contemporary Miami Beach who are contending with their declining health and loss of independence. The book is praised by writer Ursula K. Le Guin as "the truest report from the real war zone I have ever read."

Literary Criticism and Scholarship

• Ellen Handler Spitz: Inside Picture Books. In a groundbreaking examination of the text and images of classic children's picture books of the twentieth century, Spitz takes a psychological approach. Her study says much about the culture in which children read and begin to appreciate books and how their notions of race, morality, gender, and class are formed through reading and viewing.
• James Wood (b. 1965): The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief. Considered one of the most erudite and provocative of contemporary literary critics, Wood collects essays examining figures such as Gustave Flaubert, Herman Melville, Philip Roth, John Updike, and Don De Lillo. He adds to conventional literary criticism an eloquent account of his own upbringing as an evangelical Christian, merging his own history with his responses to what fiction has to say about religious faith.

Nonfiction

• Edwin G. Burrows (b. 1943) and Mike Wallace (b. 1942): Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. The authors draw high praise and win the Pulitzer Prize for this social history of New York City from the ice age to 1898, when the five boroughs were incorporated.
• Annie Dillard: For the Time Being. Dillard meditates on the nature of religion and science and how they impinge on the individual. Dillard reports facts about nature (with especially apt descriptions of insects) while suffusing her first-person narrative with vivid metaphors and images.
• John W. Dower: Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II. Dower wins the National Book Award, the Bancroft Prize, and the Pulitzer Prize for his magisterial chronicle of the rebuilding and transformation of Japanese society during the six years of American occupation following the end of World War II.
• William Least Heat-Moon: River-Horse: A Voyage Across America. This book gives an account of the writer's five-thousand-mile transcontinental journey along America's rivers, lakes, and canals in a small outboard-powered boat.
• John Irving: My Movie Business: A Memoir. The writer critiques the differences between novels and screenplays, between writing and filmmaking, in this account of bringing The Cider House Rules (1985) to the screen.
• David M. Kennedy: Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945. Kennedy's Pulitzer Prize-winning social history is praised by reviewer Barry Gewen as the "best one-volume account of the Roosevelt era available."
• Wendy Lesser: The Amateur: An Independent Life of Letters. In this series of autobiographical pieces, Lesser writes about the formation of her artistic sensibility. Her clarity of thought and desire to relate literature to life have been compared with George Orwell's work.
• Frank McCourt: 'Tis: A Memoir. The sequel to McCourt's acclaimed autobiography, Angela's Ashes, this book takes up the story in 1949, when McCourt arrives in New York from Ireland. The awkward nineteen-year-old has trouble adjusting and spends much time in the library, reading. The author describes his struggle to get an education, his teaching, and his painful memories of his father--all told in a lyrical style, with Irish cadences that critics find mesmerizing.
• James H. Merrell (b. 1953): Into the American Woods. Merrell, a professor of history at Vassar College and one of the foremost authorities on the interactions between Europeans and Native Americans in early America, wins the Bancroft Prize for this account of the role played by negotiators on the Pennsylvania frontier in mediating conflicts between settlers and Native Americans.
• Edmund Morris: Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan. Although many critics attack this biography, its experimental nature makes it a publishing phenomenon. Morris challenges the conventions of biography, not only inserting himself as a character but also changing his age and inventing facts about himself--all to the purpose of writing a more insightful, vivid biography of a president who, Morris believes, eludes more conventional treatment.
• Edward W. Said: Out of Place: A Memoir. The brilliant and controversial literary critic and political commentator explores his first twenty-seven years, beginning with his birth in Jerusalem to middle-class Palestinian-Lebanese Christian parents, through his childhood during the political upheavals in the Middle East, to 1962, when he is near to completing his doctorate at Harvard. Critics take issue with many of Said's views and for fictionalizing his own life but also praise his Proust-like memories of childhood, youth, and early manhood.
• Jean Strouse: Morgan: American Financier. Considered one of the finest contemporary biographers, Strouse supplies a definitive portrait of this towering figure of finance in the Gilded Age, drawing on new material made available in the Morgan archive during the 1990s. Her work's sense of balance and nuanced use of detail are much admired by critics.

Poetry

• Ai (b. 1947): Vice: New and Selected Poems. Born Florence Anthony in Texas, the feminist poet wins the National Book Award for her sixth collection.
• John Ashbery: Girls on the Run. Ashbery's collection is inspired by the art of Henry Darger, a mentally ill recluse whose fantastic sketches and paintings of little girls were discovered after his death. According to reviewer Donna Seamon, Ashbery "has captured the peculiar energy of Darger's disturbing creation" in "a virtuoso interpretive performance."
• Rita Dove: On the Bus with Rosa Parks. Dove's seventh collection contains the sequence "Cameos," a narrative portrait of a working-class family. The title work celebrates Rosa Parks's heroism in the Jim Crow South, in which "Doing nothing was the doing."
• David Ferry (b. 1924): Of No Country I Know: New and Selected Poems and Translations. The acclaimed translator of Gilagamesh (1992), the Odes of Horace (1997), and Virgil's Eclogues (1999) wins the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry for this collection of his own works and translations.
• Nikki Giovanni: Blues: For All the Changes. The poet uses the blues idiom to attack racism in American life and celebrate food, friends, lovers, and family.
• John Hollander: Figurehead & Other Poems. Hollander animates a number of speakers in this collection, including Sappho, Arachne, Minerva, and Robert Browning's duchess in "My Last Duchess," who reveals that she was not murdered at all but is living peacefully in a convent.
• Denise Levertov: The Great Unknowing: Last Poems. Levertov's final collection, completed while she battled with terminal lymphoma, ranges, in the words of one reviewer, from "the specifically personal to the searchingly mystical."
• Philip Levine: The Mercy. Levine's collection combines a nostalgia for his blue-collar Detroit past with sharpness of imagery and polish of diction that critics call luminous. Levine's immigrant mother had come to the United States in steerage aboard The Mercy, and Levine's work honors his origins.
• N. Scott Momaday: In the Bear's House. This mixed-media collection combines paintings, a dialogue, poems, and prose pieces on the subject of the bear, an animal of cosmic significance to the Kiowas. The author also publishes Circle of Wonder: A Native American Christmas Story, a recollection of his reservation childhood.
• Sharon Olds: Blood, Tin, Straw. Olds's sixth collection returns to her familiar themes: sexual experience, motherhood, and her estrangement from her father. "The Promise," "The Gift," and "Animal Music" express the range of her intensely physical but also spiritual quest for the stimulation of the senses and the resolution of her internal conflicts.
• Adrienne Rich: Midnight Salvage: Poems, 1995-1998. Rich's collection explores the conflict between beauty and brutal contemporary reality and the challenge of using language to evoke both. The poems are commended by Richard Howard, who declares, "I know of no poetry by an American so charged with passion and solicitude for human life as it yields itself to her attention, her judgment."
• C. K. Williams: Repair. Williams wins the Pulitzer Prize for this collection, which continues his observations of the natural world and meditations on love, death, violence, and intimacy. He employs his trademark discursive, long-line style, which sometimes straddles the boundary between poetry and prose.

Publications and Events

• C. K. WilliamsThe Best American Short Stories of the Century. Editor John Updike selects the fifty-five best stories that have appeared in The Best American Short Story annual publication since 1915. His selections amply demonstrate that the short story is a quintessential American literary genre.