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Last signal received from Earth, sent by Pioneer 10: the plutonium generators, after 30 years, are now exhausted.

“The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers” at the cinema

Tremendous floods in Europe cause more than 100 deaths and 20 billion euros in damages, with devastating floods also affecting India and China.

Attack on American Airlines jet from Paris to Miami foiled; attacker was affiliated with Al-Qaeda

Advanced Cell Technology announces that it has cloned the human genetic heritage for therapeutic purposes: to produce stem cells (“stem cells”)

The Mars 2001 Odyssey enters orbit around Mars

A Russian civilian plane departing from Israel explodes in flight over the Black Sea.

4:02 PM Italian time: The South Tower collapses, causing approximately 600 victims.

Earthquake measuring 7.9 on the Richter scale in northwestern India, tens of thousands dead in an area populated by 250 million people

Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger founded Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org), an encyclopedia that lives on thanks to the contributions of its readers.

First flight test of the F25-A Joint Strike Fighter with vertical takeoff

General Electric acquires Honeywell; the deal is later rejected by antitrust authorities.

Jack S. Kilby wins the Nobel Prize in Physics for the invention of the first integrated circuit. He states: “I’m sorry that Noyce (with whom he had competed for the patent for a decade) is no longer with us: “If there had been any suspicion,

The national trial of the Di Bella treatment in Italy has concluded. It involved 1,155 patients (386 experimental and 769 observational) with various tumors. Ninety-seven percent of patients died or withdrew from the study. In none of the patients was the tumor mass disappearance observed;

Pixar’s Toy Story II hits theaters

Giulio Andreotti was acquitted in both the Mafia trial and the Pecorelli murder trial.

The Second Chechen War begins. Volgodonsk. Yet another bomb attack on a residential building in Russia. Other devices are defused across the country. In the month of September alone, 293 people were killed and 651 injured.

Beginning of the Second Chechen War. Moscow, Kasirskow Avenue. Tons of TNT cause the collapse of a residential building. 118 people die.

Earthquake in Greece: 7 on the Richter scale, hundreds dead

The Red Brigades assassinate D’Antona, advisor to the Minister of Labor.

Massimo D’Alema succeeds Prodi in government after the government crisis caused by the Communist Refoundation Party.

In fiscal 1998, Apple returned to profit: $309 million. Steve Jobs was back.

Joel Barr (also Iozef Veniaminovich Berg and Joseph Berg) dies: he was part of the Soviet espionage network in the United States, along with Alfred Sarant, an electrical engineer and member of the Young Communist League. In the 1930s, they were part of the spy

The national trial of the Di Bella treatment began in Italy. It involved 1,155 patients (386 experimental and 769 observational) with various tumors. It concluded in 1999 with 97.5% of patients dying or withdrawing from the study. In none of the patients was the tumor

Cassini spacecraft launches with Titan IV rocket

NASA’s NEAR probe arrives at the asteroid Mathilde, just a few months before the Mars Pathfinder mission arrives on Mars. NEAR is part of the APL team (Applied Physics Lab, which used to work for the US Navy and is affiliated with Johns Hopkins University

Alan Greenspan uses the term “irrational exuberance” to describe stock markets. The Standard & Poor’s 500 P/E ratio (Price to Earnings—that is, the market value compared to the company’s annual profits), which normally hovers around 15 for individual companies, with peaks ranging from 5 to

The Russian Mars 96 is launched aboard a Proton rocket from Baikonur, Kazakhstan. But the fourth stage fails to ignite, and the expensive probe burns up in the atmosphere. For several years, the Russians will desist from attempting further missions to the Red Planet.

Possible signs of bacterial life have been found on the 1.9 kg Martian meteorite ALH84001. The initial enthusiasm (supported by President Clinton’s press conference) soon gave way to other scientific interpretations, which do not imply life. Although there is no convincing evidence for Martian life,

Tetra Pak launches a new filling machine: the TBA21

Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. The 1,500 Bersaglieri of the Garibaldi Brigade and units of Carabinieri and Paratroopers are the first to break the siege of the city by Serbian militias, thus enforcing the Dayton Accords.

Soho probe launched towards the L1 Lagrangian point

The CIA foils an attack on the Pope during his visit to the Philippines, carried out by Islamic extremists.

Oslo II Accords. The Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip is ratified in Washington, DC, transferring civilian control of the most populous cities in the West Bank and the entire Gaza Strip to the Palestinians.

Chris Monroe, Dawn Meekhof, Brian King, Wayne Itano, Dave Wineland, of the Boulder National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) manage to implement a CN gate with only one trapped ion

The Israeli government leaves major cities in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip under PLO rule.

Israeli Prime Minister Rabin is assassinated by a Jewish far-right fanatic.

First flights of the Predator UAV (Unmanned Automatic Vehicle).

University of Munich. Matthias Hoss and Svante Paabo publish “The Silica Extraction Method,” showing the results of the first extraction of myochondrial DNA (mDNA) from animal bones tens of thousands of years old. In this case, the bones were from Pleistocene horses dating back 25,000

The number of women assaulted in the United States is 1,600 for domestic violence and 800 for sexual assault per 100,000 women per year (1.6%/year and 0.8%/year). These rates will progressively decrease to 400 and 200, respectively (0.4%/year and 0.2%/year), starting in 2014.

Giulio Andreotti receives a notice of investigation for mafia association.

Microsoft introduces Visual Basic

With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the last European empire dissolves.

The Nunn-Lugar Program received funding from Congress to secure the Soviet arsenal. Arguably the best military investment America ever made.

Power IGBT transistors are introduced to the market

BATSE (Burst Transient Source Experiment) launched for gamma-ray observations

Ahwahnee Lodge, Yosemite National Park, California. Steven Paul Jobs, 36, and Laurene Powell, 27, are married. Steve’s father, Paul, arrives with his sister Mona Simpson, who is accompanied by her fiancé Richard Appel, who later becomes a writer and producer on “The Simpsons.”

Bombing of Iraq begins as part of Operation Desert Storm. Operation Desert Storm, the combat phase of the Gulf War, began with a vast aerial bombing campaign by coalition air forces against targets in Iraq and Iraqi-occupied Kuwait from January 17, 1991, to February 23,

The Human Genome Project officially begins in the United States, for the complete mapping of the Human Genome

The first Albanian refugees land in Otranto. Within a few years, there will be thousands.

Signal Intelligence. One of the first warnings of the impending Iraqi invasion of Kuwait came when American spy satellites detected massive Iraqi radar activity, after months of near inactivity. However, the White House interpreted this information as a bluff. The Americans were unable to access

Romanian insurgents enter the Central Committee building

Romanian Revolution begins

Funding for the Soviet Buran runs out: launches are suspended and the program is cancelled in 1993.

COBE I is launched: it measures and confirms the temperature of the background radiation: 2.736K

Margaret Geller and John Huchra discover the so-called Great Wall (also known as the Coma Wall or CfA2 Great Wall), the second largest structure in the known universe (the largest being the Sloan Great Wall). It is a wall of galaxies 500 million light-years long,

Soviet General Boris Gromov, head of forces in Afghanistan, crosses the Termez River, officially ending the war.

End of the Cold War. From the fall of the Berlin Wall to the fall of the Soviet Union, the Cold War suddenly ended, in a way very few had predicted. Some saw it as the definitive victory of the liberal capitalist model, others as

New York. Rockefeller Center is purchased by Mitsubishi Estate, a real estate company of the Mitsubishi Group.

At the beginning of the 21st century, computer scientist Martin Grotschel calculated that between 1988 and 2003, the speed of automatic solution of standard optimization problems improved by a factor of 43 million. Improvements in hardware speed contributed a factor of 1,000, but improvements in

Azerbaijan, Soviet Caucasus. Disturbances, simmering for decades or centuries, erupt between Muslim Azerbaijanis and Christian Armenians. Eventually, 300,000 Armenians leave Azerbaijan for Armenia, and 200,000 Azerbaijanis travel the other way.

The numbers derived from simulations conducted by the Japanese supercomputer K estimate that the human brain may have approximately 10^15 transistors equivalent. According to this figure, 1988 was the year in which all the electronic circuits on the planet reached the complexity of a single

Austrian Dietrich Mateschitz begins selling Red Bull, the literal translation of Krating Daeng (Red Bull), the Thai drink based on caffeine, taurine (an amino acid) and glaucoronolactone (a carbohydrate); within 15 years he will sell two billion cans a year.

In Washington, Reagan and Gorbachev signed a treaty decreeing the dismantling of tactical nuclear missiles in Europe. In his memoirs, Gorbachev attributed the beginning of the nightmare (the “gun to our heads,” referring to the Pershing 2) to the deployment of the SS-20s, a decision

Nobel Prize in Physics to J. Georg Bednorz and K. Alexander Muller for the discovery of superconductivity in certain ceramic materials

The Kamiokande, an underground facility in Japan for detecting proton decay, registers a pulse of neutrinos just as a supernova explosion is detected in the Large Magellanic Cloud. Neutrinos have been traveling through space for 170,000 years before reaching it. This is a huge stroke

Gorbachev told the Politburo, in preparation for the Reykjavik summit, “We must keep in mind that the goal is to get the Pershing 2s out of Europe: they are like guns pointed at our heads. Our broader goal is to end this arms race: it

US-Libyan clash in the Gulf of Sidra; two Libyan MIGs open fire on two F-14s sent to intercept them from the aircraft carrier; the fight lasts a few seconds: the two MIGs are outflanked and hit by the F-14s trailing behind them.

squadron of American F-111s departed from England and bombed military sites in Tripoli and Benghazi. The attack followed a terrorist attack on a Berlin nightclub frequented by American soldiers. Sixty people died, including Gaddafi’s adopted daughter. Libya was a Soviet customer for weapons, which aggravated

The Space Shuttle Challenger explodes during launch. The disaster is caused by human error; the order to launch is given given the number of political figures present, despite the temperature having dropped below the minimum limit during the night. This causes a seal ring on

Eleven new moons of Uranus are discovered by the Voyager 2 probe. Their exact positions had been predicted a year earlier by Nikolai Gorkavyi and Alexei Fridman in the article “On the Resonance Character of the Rings of Uranus, Determined by Its Undiscovered Moons.” The

Shultz suggests to President Reagan that he test Soviet goodwill with Euromissiles, or the simultaneous removal of the Pershing 2, Cruise, and SS-20 missiles. The Soviets reject the proposal.

The United States has 23,254 nuclear weapons; the USSR has 40,273; this is the most atomic bombs the Soviets (or any other nation) have ever possessed.

James Cameron’s ‘Terminator’ hits theaters

Rockwell Acquires Allen Bradley

At the Heisel Stadium in Brussels, Liverpool hooligans killed 36 Juventus fans; the match, the European Cup final, was won 1-0 by Juve.

China. In an interview with the American weekly Time, Chinese Prime Minister Deng Xiaoping declared: “There are no fundamental contradictions between socialism and the free market.”

A series of circumstances, coincidences, errors of judgment and misunderstandings, raises the tension between USA and USSR to the highest levels

NATO begins deploying Pershing 2 missiles in West Germany, as soon as the Bundestag votes for their deployment. The so-called “Euromissiles” (Pershing-2 and Cruise) are NATO’s response to the Soviet SS-20 missiles, multiple nuclear warheads deployed by the Soviets in Warsaw Pact countries starting in

The American television network airs the made-for-TV movie The Day After in prime time. Half the American population sits in front of their TVs watching it, and it leaves an impression.