VG

In the Djurab Desert in Chad, a team of French researchers discovered bones of Sahelanthropus Tchadensis, a creature that was already bipedal and almost seven million years old.

Tarek Aziz, after another dozen high-ranking Iraqi government officials, also falls into the hands of the Americans.

An epidemic of atypical pneumonia (SARS) spreads around the world from southeastern China; in the first months of the outbreak, Chinese authorities try to keep the news under wraps and then downplay it.

Paratroopers of the 101st Airborne officially open the Northern Front near Mosul and Kirkuk, joining forces with Kurdish Peshmerga fighters.

Iraq: First field use of the jet-powered Global Hawk UAV (Unmanned Automatic Vehicle)

Steven D. Howe, Gerald P. Jackson of H-Bar Technologies propose storing antihydrogen in solid 14K pellets with a diameter of 150 μm suspended in electrostatic traps; 42 mg would be equivalent to the energy of the Space Shuttle External Tank; 500 kg would be equivalent

Israel has suffered 60 terrorist attacks, resulting in 452 deaths; construction of the separation wall with the Palestinian territories begins.

At an international medical aid volunteer center in Yemen, three American doctors were killed and one wounded by machine gun fire from an Al Qaeda terrorist.

Two Islamic suicide bombers with two vehicles loaded with TNT blew themselves up, destroying the Chechen government headquarters in Grosny and causing the death of 90 people and wounding 150.

In Copenhagen, the enlargement of the European Union was decided (effective from 2004) to include 10 more countries (for a total of 25): Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Cyprus, Malta.

United Airlines, the world’s second-largest airline, goes bankrupt (two of the planes that crashed on September 11, 2001, were United).

First Launch of a Boeing Delta IV

A CIA Predator drone strikes the jeep of several Al Qaeda members in Yemen, killing them; among them is Qaed Senyan Al Harithi, known as Abu Ali, the organizer of the attack on the USS Cole.

An attack hits a French oil tanker off the coast of Yemen.

Salah Shehade, leader of Izzedine al Qassam, the military wing of Hamas, is killed in an Israeli air strike that kills at least 10 other civilians.

Michael Schumacher wins world championship with Ferrari with six races to go; equals Fangio’s record of five titles.

WorldCom goes bankrupt: the biggest bankruptcy in US history.

The Space Shuttle missions add the S0, P1, and S1 modules to the International Space Station.

Geobiologist John Parkes examines mud samples taken from great depths on the ocean floor east of Newfoundland. The living prokaryotes found divide at a rate of once a century. Each organism could be several million years old.

The Chinese-British couple Chan Hong-Mo and Tsou Sheung Tsun find a way to predict the 17 parameters of the Standard Model, which otherwise should simply be taken from experimental observation, by calculating 14 of them; the Standard Model is of the SU(3)xSU(2)xU1/Z6 type, i.e. 3quark-colors

The Red Brigades assassinate Biagi, advisor to the welfare minister.

Joint Afghan and American forces launch Operation Anaconda in the Gardez region against several thousand Al Qaeda terrorists.

Far-right politician Pim Fortuyn wins local elections in Rotterdam, goes on to have a brilliant political career, but is later assassinated by an Islamic extremist.

Konduz in Afghanistan is taken by the Mujahideen; in Mazar-I-Sharif, a revolt by non-Afghan Taliban prisoners is repressed by the intervention of American C-130s and BlackHawks: hundreds dead.

Jalalabad in Afghanistan is taken by the Mujahideen of the Northern Alliance

Kabul in Afghanistan is taken by the Mujahideen of the Northern Alliance

Airbus A300 crashes on Queens in New York

Mazar I Sharif, in Northern Afghanistan, is taken by the Mujahideen

Turkey, Italy, Germany, Japan, Australia, France, the Philippines, Canada, New Zealand, Uzbekistan, and Russia join the coalition militarily in Afghanistan.

Deep Space 1 successfully completes flyby of Comet Borrelly

The American probe Deep Space 1 passed close to the comet 19P/Borrelly at just 16 km/s, thus managing to take sharper and more detailed photos than those of Halley taken by Giotto (which passed at a good 68 km/s!)

29 dead and 1,170 injured in the explosion at a rocket fuel factory in Toulouse, an Islamic fundamentalist sympathizer dressed in the classic sacrificial garb is found dead on the spot

4:31 PM Italian time: NEADS personnel receive the rules of engagement: shoot down the hijacked jets. But it’s too late for all the attacks: the last one, American Airlines Flight 93, crashed in Pennsylvania twenty-eight minutes earlier.

4:15 PM Italian time: Fighter jets scrambled from Syracuse Air Force Base by NEADS personnel to intercept American Airlines Flight 93 are informed by the FAA that it has crashed in Pennsylvania.

4:07 PM Italian time: NEADS personnel are finally notified that a Boeing (American Airlines Flight 93) with 38 passengers and seven crew on board has been hijacked. However, they are unaware that it has already crashed in Pennsylvania.

4:03:11 PM Italian time: A Boeing 73 (American Airlines Flight 93) with 38 passengers and seven crew members on board crashes in Pennsylvania after passengers fought against the hijackers; it was possibly destined for Congress or the White House.

16:02:23. Flight UA93. From the black box: a hijacker shouts in Arabic: “Take it down! Take it down!”. Forty-eight seconds later, the plane crashes inverted, at an angle of impact of 50 degrees, into the soft grassy backfill of the former open-pit mine in Shanksville,

3:59 PM Italian time: The hijackers on board American Airlines Flight 93 begin a series of sudden maneuvers, perhaps to discourage or unbalance the rebellious passengers.

3:57 PM Italian time: Passengers aboard American Airlines Flight 93 hang up their phone calls and fight back against the hijackers; the black box recorder records noises in the cabin.

3:37 PM Italian time: A Boeing 757 (American Airlines Flight 77) with 58 passengers and six crew members on board crashes into the Pentagon at 530 mph; the Pentagon has claimed 184 lives.

3:28 PM Italian time: Terrorists kill a flight attendant aboard American Airlines Flight 93; her screams are captured on a voice recorder recovered by the FBI. From this moment on, several passengers (at least five) contact their families and friends and are updated on the

3:28 PM Italian time: Terrorists take control of American Airlines Flight 93 and reverse course, heading for Washington, DC; there are 33 passengers on board, in addition to the four terrorists.

3:03 PM Italian time: A Boeing 767 (United Airlines Flight 175) with 56 passengers and nine crew members on board crashes into the South Tower between the 78th and 84th floors. Only four employees below the 84th floor die. Fewer than twenty people from the

The single European currency is born: the Euro, but political union is far away

Attacks on the two World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon with four hijacked planes: approximately 50,000 employees in the two towers, plus visitors; 2,749 people died from 430 companies in 28 countries; 343 firefighters were killed; 157 people were aboard the two planes in

Jimmy Wales, creator of Wikipedia, and his wife become parents. Their daughter is named Ada, in honor of Ada Lovelace.

French intelligence, questioned by American intelligence agencies, responded that Zacarias Moussaoui was linked to a group of Chechen rebels. British intelligence agencies, however, responded only on September 13th, after the attacks had taken place, with the key finding that Moussaoui had been trained in Al

NATO forces enter Macedonia to collect weapons from Albanian rebels after peace deal

The book “Dynamics of Space Flight” by Davide Borghi and Marco Busato is now being printed by Levrotto & Bella, Turin.

Hague Tribunal: Radislav Krstic sentenced to 46 years in prison on genocide charges for his role in the 1995 Srebrenica massacres.

Pirelli and Benetton, in a surprise operation, acquire control of Olivetti and then, in a cascade, of Tecnost, Telecom, Tim, Seat-PagineGialle

Rodolphe Kasser, an expert Coptic translator, sees for the first time the Codex Tchacos, containing the Gospel of Judas, purchased by the Maecenas Foundation for Ancient Art

The Indonesian parliament has appointed Megawati Sukarnoputri, winner of the last elections, as president, succeeding Abdurrahman Wahid who had been in office for only 2 years.

Shuttle Atlantis STS104 carries the ISS Quest module into orbit, which now has a habitable volume equal to that of Mir.

The MAP (Microwave Anisotropy Probe) is launched towards the L2 Lagrangian point (opposite the Sun)

Slobodan Milosevic is extradited to the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague; the prosecutor is Carla Del Ponte.

Microsoft Won’t Be Split Up by Antitrust

Silvio Berlusconi Prime Minister of Italy

At Juntendo University in Tokyo, the genetic code of staphylococcus is decoded.

The two Buddhas in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, were blown up: the older one (3rd century) was 35m high, the other (4th century) was 54m.

Bones of Ardipithecus Ramidus Kadabba from 5.2-5.8 million years ago discovered

At Lake Turkania in Kenya, Mary Leakey discovers bones of Kenyanthropus Playtops (Kenyan Flat-Faced Dinosaur).

MIR: As early as 1998, the decision was made to deorbit MIR: every dollar spent on MIR was a dollar taken from the ISS. The Russians initially agreed, but reluctantly. Various proposals arose to save it, right up until the final day. On March 23,

The Taliban decide to tear down the Buddha statues in Bamiyan, and take away women’s last rights, including the right to laugh, etc.

The NEAR Shoemaker probe, after successfully landing off-programme on the surface of the asteroid Eros, sends its last data back to Earth. Then Eros’s winter arrives, and NEAR’s solar panels no longer collect enough light, and the probe shuts down. The probe is still there

Shuttle Atlantis STS98 carries the ISS Destiny module into orbit, which now has a mass of 112 tons.

NASA finds further signs of fossil life on two more Martian meteorites: Nakhla and Shergotty, 1.3 billion years old and 170 million years old respectively, and confirms signs of life on ALH84001; it also confirms the presence of underground liquid water on Europa and Callisto

NASA’s NEAR probe is landing on the Near-Earth asteroid “Eros”, the fifth extraterrestrial body touched by a functioning human probe (the others are the Moon, Venus, Mars, Jupiter – – others will be added later such as Titan in 2005 and recently several asteroids); it

The human genome is published (Celera Genomics publishes in the American journal Science while the Anglo-American public consortium Human Genome Project publishes in the English journal Nature); it turns out to be composed of only 30,000 genes (against the 90,000 expected).

Texas-based multinational energy company Enron files for bankruptcy. Investors lose $11 billion.

Humans weigh 350 times as much as all the world’s bison and elephants combined, and more than 10 times as much as all the world’s wild mammals. Combined with all domesticated animals, humans account for more than 97% of the mass of land mammals. Twenty

Evidence for a meteorite impact as the cause of the P-Tr extinction event 250 million years ago has been found; one piece of evidence is the “extraterrestrial” proportion of helium and argon in air bubbles in rocks from that era found in China, Hungary, and

Justin Khoury, Burt Ovrut, Paul Steinhardt, and Neil Turok devise the Ekpyrotic Universe, a cyclic universe that exploits string theory. It is actually two parallel three-dimensional universes (brane worlds) that periodically move apart and back together until they violently impact, exploiting one of the additional

The Hubble Space Telescope examines the composition of the atmosphere of the exoplanet HD 209458b.

The Hubble and Chandra space telescopes independently provide evidence for the presence of event horizons in some candidate black holes.

After several recounts of the votes and several Supreme Court rulings, Al Gore renounces further appeals: George W. Bush is president

Documents relating to the first computer, Colossus, built in 1943-44 and used to decrypt Nazi messages, were declassified by the American government, but not the crucial role played by Colossus in decrypting Nazi teletype messages, which was declassified only in 2000. The British government had

Two Russians and an American are the first inhabitants of the International Space Station

Russell Vreeland and colleagues at West Chester University in Pennsylvania announced the resurrection of Bacillus Permians bacteria found 600 meters underground in Carlsbad, New Mexico. They are reviving in the presence of water after 250 million years, having survived all this time and two mass

A suicide attack using a boat packed with explosives on the USS Cole, anchored in the port of Aden in Yemen, kills 17 sailors; hours of frantic work follow aboard the ship to prevent it from sinking while the dead and wounded are evacuated.