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A million people storm Belgrade’s parliament: it’s the end of Milosevic’s regime.

Moderate democratic opposition wins Serbian elections against Milosevic, elections later annulled

The Codex Tchacos, containing the Gospel of Judas, after being evaluated by Yale University and its purchase rejected, is sold by Frieda Nussberg to Bruce Ferrini who freezes it thus undermining its integrity forever.

In Mexico, the right-wing opposition wins the elections after 71 years of Revolutionary Party rule.

The bridge-tunnel between Denmark and Sweden is inaugurated

The homicide rate in Western Europe is around 1 per 100,000 people per year (0.001%/year). In Italy, for example, it was 70 per 100,000 people per year (0.070%/year) in 1450. Even in the southwestern United States (where in 1860 it was 200 per 100,000 people

With 1000 British pounds you can sequence 10,000 bases of DNA; in 1968, 20 were sequenced.

The Ulysses probe makes its second flyby of a solar pole.

Giuliano Amato to govern Italy

Bill Clinton eliminated Selective Availability distortion in the GPS signal. The US government thus chose to remove the intentional deterioration in GPS accuracy for public use (Selective Availability). The “military” precision of GPS became usable by the general public, free of charge. Six years earlier,

Shanghai, China. Richard Chang, a former Texas Instruments employee, founded SMIC (Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation), raising more than $1.5 billion from international investors such as Goldman Sachs, Motorola, and Toshiba. He aims to replicate in China what TSMC has done in Taiwan.

Daimler-Chrysler buys 33.4% of Mitsubishi, gaining control of it

Telecom Italia and Seat-PagineGialle announce €100 trillion merger

Launch of the Shuttle mission STS-99, which begins an 11-day SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) mapping of 80% of the Earth’s surface. Space Shuttle Endeavour maps 80% of the Earth’s surface with synthetic aperture radar. The radar is a technological gem, the result of a NASA-JPL

The merger between the Anglo-American mobile telephone group Vodaphone (50.5%) and the historic German group Mannesmann (49.5%) has been ratified.

Exxon, Mobil merger

Merger between BP, Amoco, Arco

Boris Yeltsin resigns and leaves the presidency to Vladimir Putin, who will then be confirmed in the elections.

The largest full Moon of the century (in the last 133 years): approximate coincidence of the perigee and perihelion (January 3) with the Moon on the ecliptic

Robert Lanza of Advanced Cell Technology announces successful human cloning; experiment halted after 12 days for ethical reasons

Nuclear accident in Takemura, 100 km from Tokyo: it is the second most serious, after Chernobyl.

Russia. Putin insists on not intervening with infantry in Chechnya: “We will patiently and systematically destroy them from the air.” But just two days later, Russian troops will enter Chechnya.

Beginning of the Second Chechen War. 350 kg of TNT causes the collapse of a nine-story building in Pecatniki, on the outskirts of Moscow. Ninety-two people die.

Earthquake in Türkiye: 7.8 on the Richter scale, 17,000 dead

Referendum in East Timor sanctions independence from Indonesia

Moscow. Rush hour. In a subway underpass on Tverskaya, a central Moscow street less than 200 meters from Red Square, a homemade explosive device explodes in the crowded arcade next to a fast food restaurant: one person dies and 30 are injured. It’s just the

Chechnya. Russia intensifies its zachiski, or roundups, and purges.

Eileen Collins is the first female commander of a Space Shuttle. It’s the Space Shuttle Columbia, and it successfully orbits the Chandrasekar telescope, the most powerful X-ray telescope ever launched. On the ground, the women of the so-called Mercury 13 group witnessed the event. These

Pope John Paul II states that heaven is not a place but a condition. An identical phrase had already been written more than three centuries earlier by a man who refused religious funerals, even though he was later buried in Westminster Abbey: Isaac Newton. Piergiorgio

China, booming economically, is using its growing monetary reserves to invest in U.S. Treasury securities and will become the largest foreign holder of U.S. debt in 2008.

NASA’s Far Ultraviolet Spectrographic Explorer (FUSE) satellite is launched; it will provide ultraviolet imaging for eight years.

Bell Labs successfully transmits and receives 1.6 Tbit/s with 40 different frequencies (colors) over optical fiber (40Gbps per color)

Kosovo. When the NATO contingent arrived at the country’s only airport, it had already been in Russian hands since the previous evening. Thirty armored vehicles were deployed to defend the airport. Putin would later claim that, as Secretary of the Security Council, he had authorized

Dr. Chackos finds the Gospel of Judas in a safe deposit box in Hicksville, New York, which is authenticated by experts at Yale University (and subsequently carbon-dated to 280+/-50).

The President of the Russian Republic of Kalmykia, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, says he was abducted by aliens, taken to their star, put on a spacesuit, and held talks with them.

The Yevpatoria Messages: Yvan Dutil and Stephane Dumas, funded by the Houston-based company Encounter 2001 LLC, are using the Yevpatoria radio telescope in Ukraine to send a powerful message to four solar-type stars within 70 light-years of Earth. If anyone is listening, they won’t hear

Merger between Renault and Nissan

BMW buys Rover

Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge movement dissolves.

Chechnya, Russia. The situation for the Russians is rapidly deteriorating. The Russian representative in Chechnya, General Gennady Spigun, is kidnapped by insurgents at Grozny airport. The Russian government refuses to pay the $15 million ransom, and the general is killed. A terrorist attack follows in

The Breitling Orbiter 3, with Bertrand Piccard and Brian Jones on board, completes a round-the-world voyage from Chateau d’Oex, Switzerland, to Egypt: 42,714 km in 19 days 1 hour 49 minutes.

Sea Launch, which launches a Zenit rocket, has the advantage of GEO launches, directly from the equator, thus saving fuel and taking advantage of the Earth’s rotation speed. The floating base is a former North Sea oil platform. It is prepared in the Baltic, shipped

Deborah S. Jin and her student Brian DeMarco generate a Fermi condensate with Potassium 40 cooled to 50 millionths of a degree Kelvin.

Anton Zeilinger and colleagues in Vienna are performing the two-slits experiment with fullerene molecules (or bucky balls: C60 and C70) with a diameter of one nanometer.

Steinhardt et al. hypothesize that the current phase of accelerated expansion of the cosmos is a symptom of the beginning of a new inflationary phase of the universe, caused by a vacuum energy called quintessence.

Carlo Azeglio Ciampi President of the Italian Republic

Brazil declares financial default (bankruptcy).

A study by Abalakina-Paap et al. starts from the identification of five hypotheses capable of explaining why people believe and spread conspiracy theories: 1) the feeling of alienation 2) the feeling of having no power 3) the need to simplify a world that is too

ISS: The first module to fly was Zarya on November 20, 1998. The Americans were impressed by the temperature and vibration requirements Zarya had to survive: they weren’t for space, but for the railway from Moscow to Baikonur… The module suffered a computer problem, but

A Proton from the Baikonur Cosmodrome launches the Cargo Block: the first module of the International Space Station. It is derived from the Soviet Almaz module designed by Chelomei’s group.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin and Johns Hopkins University isolate human embryonic stem cells

Launch of the American Deep Space 1 probe toward comet 19P/Borrelly. It is part of the New Millennium Program, prepared by JPL, and uses electric ion propulsion with artificial intelligence guidance.

Wye River Memorandum. Israel commits to the immediate transfer of some territory, approximately 13% of the West Bank, to the Palestinian Authority, which commits to fighting terrorism under US supervision.

A 77-year-old man, somewhat deaf, with diabetes and arthritis, reaches space for the second time, this time aboard the Discovery: he is John Glenn.

Indonesia’s first free elections since Soeharto’s resignation. The country suffered from the Asian financial crisis, with the rupiah collapsing by nearly 85%, a 14% drop in GDP, and a $43 billion bailout from the International Monetary Fund.

Soeharto resigns as Indonesian president after deep economic crisis

Japanese and American scientists in Japan discover that neutrinos have mass; they use the Super-Kamiokande: a 50,000-ton water tank at a depth of 1,000 meters.

Eugenio Calabi and Shing-Tung Yau mathematically describe the Calabi-Yau Spaces, that is, the six extra space-time dimensions predicted by string theory; they are Kahler manifolds, that is, they have a Riemannian metric and a complex structure.

Juan Maldacena hypothesizes what will become known as the Maldacena Conjecture (or ADS/CFT conjecture), which is the most famous form of the Holographic Principle according to which the state of any string in our space can be put in 1-1 correspondence with the state of

Nicholas Cerf, C. Adami of Caltech, and Paul Kwiat of Los Alamos National Labs show how to obtain a CN (controlled NOT) gate with polarized light.

Russia defaults on its sovereign debt, declares a moratorium on foreign debt repayments, and decides to let the ruble float freely, which will lose two-thirds of its value within a month. This is a serious blow for Yeltsin.

Massacre (220 dead) at the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Al Qaeda (or Al Qaeda, or al-Qa’ida) claims responsibility. Subsequent cruise missile bombing of targets in Afghanistan and Sudan.

Merger between Daimler-Benz and Chrysler (55% German, 45% American)

The United States reopens trade and diplomatic relations with Vietnam

174 Kuiper Belt Objects Discovered

Two teams of world-class supernova hunters, led by Saul Perlmutter of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories in California and Brian Schmidt and Robert Kirschner of Australia, discover that the expansion of the universe is accelerating even now and that it began a few billion years ago. This

The first elements of the International Space Station Alpha are launched and assembled in orbit.

State Dacha, Karelia, Russia. Yeltsin summons Kirienko and delivers a decree appointing Putin as head of the FSB, the secret service. Yeltsin, ever since the August 1991 coup, had remained wary of the secret services. That same evening, Putin took up his new duties.

A 10m-high tsunami in Papua New Guinea has killed 3,000 people. The earthquake measured 7.1 on the Richter scale.

Iodized salt is banned in India. It is made by adding iodine to table salt to prevent birth defects and mental retardation, caused by iodine deficiency. In India, it is mistakenly considered an interference by Western science, which also causes tumors and “bad moods,” and

Larry Page and Sergey Brin are sitting at the Gourmet Mandarin restaurant in Palo Alto, California, preparing to meet with Paul Flaherty of Alta Vista to explain the merits of their Google search engine. They hope Alta Vista will fund them to gain access to

The international financial system trades a whopping $100 trillion. By 2007, it will reach $1 trillion. By comparison, the total value of all manufactured goods over the past 1,000 years has been approximately $100 trillion. (In fact, almost all of this value was produced in

The Hong Kong stock market crashed, followed by all other stock markets in the Far East.

Off the coast of South America, a very loud underwater sound is recorded by microphones placed on the seabed. The sound is called a Bloop and is much louder than even the heaviest whale can produce. This has sparked speculation that even larger creatures live

The genetic map of Escherichia coli is completed. It is the first living organism to be completely sequenced, with all 4.5 million bases and 4,288 genes identified. After ten years, the function of 85% of these genes and their interactions will be understood, making Escherichia

Celestis Corporation Places Cremated Bodies of Star Trek Creator Gene Roddenberry and 23 Others Into Orbit

Englishman Andy Job in the Thrust SSC breaks the sound barrier on the ground; the Thrust SSC weighs 10 tons and is powered by two Rolls Royce jet engines; it reached 763 mph (Mach 1 = 750 mph) in the Nevada Black Rock Desert.

Russia is privatizing much of its space launch capability.

Larry Page and Sergei Brin register the domain www.googol.com

The U.S. Senate approved the Byrd-Hagel resolution (95 to 0), declaring that the United States would never ratify a treaty that was both uncommitted to all and damaging to the economy; we are just months away from the drafting of the Kyoto Protocol.