The Space Transportation System, aka Space Shuttle, with the Discovery shuttle, returns to space and carries into orbit an Italian module, the Raffaello, for the space station

Texan Lance Armstrong wins his seventh Tour de France

A suicide bomber detonated himself in Baghdad next to a Humvee where American soldiers were distributing candy to dozens of children: 32 children died, 1 American soldier was killed, and dozens were injured.

Chess champion Bobby Fischer has been released from a Japanese detention center where he has been held at the request of the U.S. government since 2004. He will then travel to Iceland, where he has been granted full citizenship.

8:51 a.m. Italian time: The first of four explosions rocks London, the massacre being carried out by Al Qaeda, causing approximately 70 deaths and 700 injuries on the subway and a bus. England had won the 2012 Olympic Games the day before, Bob Geldolf’s Live Aid concert had taken place a few days earlier, and the G8 summit was underway in Scotland. The nation reacted with pride and composure.

The 372-kg copper projectile released by the American Deep Impact probe crashes at 10 km/s into comet Tempel 1 to test its consistency and chemical composition through spectrographic analysis of the ejecta. The impact lifts off 5 million kg of water ice and 25 million kg of dust.

Hans Bethe dies

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approves the use of Brain Pacemakers as a treatment for depression.

Mark Felt, former deputy head of the FBI, at the age of 91, finally reveals that he was the “Deep Throat” of the Watergate scandal, the one who passed the information to Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein: 30 years of theories about conspiracy and cross-party vendettas have fallen, everything simply started from a citizen who acted on his own initiative, tired of the submission to the power of Edgar J. Hoover’s FBI.

6:30 pm: Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger is elected Pope, taking the name Benedict XVI.

The funeral of Pope John Paul II is taking place in the Vatican in Rome, with around 4 million people coming to Rome from all over the world for the occasion, 200 heads of state and religious leaders of all faiths, and exceptional security measures.

Kurdish Jalal Talabani is elected president of Iraq; Jafari will instead head the government.

After massive street demonstrations in the capital Bishkek, the pro-American and pro-Western opposition seizes power in Kyrgyzstan and overthrows President Akayev, who takes refuge in Kazakhstan and then in Moscow.

The euro-dollar exchange rate is at an all-time high: 1.35, meaning the dollar is worth 1,430 lire.

The restoration of the Gospel of Judas is being completed in Switzerland: 1000 parchment fragments written in Coptic which constitute 85% of the original text.

Steve Fosset completes the round-the-world flight in 67 hours and 2 minutes, nonstop and without in-flight refueling; the aircraft’s design team is the same as that of SpaceShipOne.

Soudan, Minnesota (formerly a US Steel mine). The MINOS (Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search) experiment records two or three events per week. Its goal is to elucidate the oscillation of solar neutrinos between electron neutrinos (as emitted by the nucleus) and muon and tau neutrinos.

After days of unprecedented demonstrations in Beirut’s streets against the Syrian occupation, pro-Syrian Prime Minister Omar Karami resigns; a partial withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon will follow.

Psychologist Paul Bloom, writing in The Atlantic, presents a provocative thesis according to which our innate ability to recognize and separate physical and intentional causality everywhere explains the universality of religious beliefs.

Gillette, founded in 1901 and owner of the Gillette, Braun, Oral-B, and Duracell brands, is acquired by Procter & Gamble for $57 billion.

The rate of pedestrian deaths in traffic accidents in the United States is 2 deaths per 100,000 people per year (0.002%/year). It was 12 in 1937 (0.012%/year).

FIAT and General Motors finalize their divorce, with GM paying 1.5 billion euros.

The Second Intifada, which had begun five years earlier, on September 28, 2000, ended. It was sparked by Likud party leader Ariel Sharon’s twenty-minute walk through the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The outbreak of violence was immediate and led immediately to armed clashes. This second intifada followed the first intifada of 1987-1993. During the Second Intifada, 3,839 Palestinians and 1,011 Israelis died, in addition to another 205 Palestinians killed by other Palestinians in what is known as the Intrafada, a campaign to track down and kill collaborators. Sixty-four percent of the Israelis killed were civilians, and 110 were children. The Second Intifada ended with the Sharm el-Sheikh summit in 2005, when Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon took definitive measures to ease hostilities.

Elections in Iraq: Despite al-Zarqawi’s death threats to anyone who goes to the polls, voter turnout is over 70%, reaching 95% in some regions; however, 51 people have died in a single day in various terrorist attacks across the country.

An article in Nature demonstrates that liquid water loses memory of its structural correlations in less than 50 femtoseconds (or 0.00000000000005 seconds): a truly short memory… In 1988, also in Nature, an article by French scientist Jacques Benveniste was published in which he believed that homeopathy elicited a reaction in certain blood cells. However, the study’s results were unsuccessful in repeating in other laboratories. James Randi, a famous illusionist and fraud debunker, then visited his Paris laboratory. Randi quickly discovered the trick: his assistant wrote down the experiment’s results in a notebook, which he then took home and artfully altered. Randi brought to light one of the most sensational and mocking scientific frauds in the history of the 20th century: Benveniste was cheating. To uncover Randi’s trick, he videotaped the experiments. The handwritten codes on the test tubes were then replaced with randomly coded labels to make them anonymous (a blind procedure). The code key was written on a piece of paper, sandwiched between two sheets of aluminum foil, then sealed in an envelope with adhesive, revealing fingerprints. Finally, the envelope was glued to the ceiling. Before leaving the laboratory, James Randi, unbeknownst to everyone else, also marked the position of the ladder used to attach the envelope to the ceiling on the floor. The next day, upon his return, the ladder had been moved, and the envelope had been tampered with to open, failing. However, before the end of the year, further negative results accumulated in attempts to duplicate the experiment (J. Seagrave, S. Bonini, E. Adriani, F. Balsamo, among others). Jacques Benveniste would win two Ig Nobel Prizes, the first in 1991 in chemistry for demonstrating that water possesses intelligence, and the second in 1998 in chemistry for demonstrating that this information from water can be transmitted via telephone or the Internet. The Ig Nobel Prizes are a caricature of the Nobel Prizes, intended as a parody.

16:19 UTC (17:21 Italy): The first data from the Huygens probe (transmitted 67 minutes earlier by the Cassini probe which in turn acts as a radio relay for Huygens) arrive on Earth: it will transmit the data collected for 2h 27′ 50″ during the descent and for a full 1h 10′ from the surface (it was designed to survive for 3 minutes!)

12:34 UTC (1:34 PM Italy): The Huygens module, after taking hundreds of photographs from various altitudes and collecting valuable scientific data, lands intact and fully functional on Titan. The surface is muddy, at a temperature of -179°C (-290°F). The air, at 1.5 bar, is composed of 95% nitrogen and 5% methane. It is located in an area called Adiri.

violent earthquake measuring 9.0 on the Richter scale off the western coast of Sumatra triggers tsunamis traveling at 800 km/h; upon reaching the coast, the wave slows down and rises for a good 10 meters, causing a catastrophe in the entire area: Indonesia (200,000 deaths), Sri Lanka (42,000), India (12,000), Thailand (6,000), Bangladesh, Myanmar, Maldives and even dozens of deaths in Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania; the deaths from the earthquake, the tsunami and the epidemics will be hundreds of thousands; the earthquake was caused by the subduction of the Indian plate under the Burma Plate for a good 30 meters; enormous and unprecedented international solidarity from private and state sources.

NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft, 94 astronomical units from the Sun (93-95 from Earth), passes through the termination shock, or the boundary where solar wind particles pass at subsonic speeds.

A group of terrorists attacked the US consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, Saudi special forces intervened and freed the hostages, 9 Saudis and Asian guards were killed, 3 terrorists were killed and 2 were wounded and captured

Awwad Ibrahim Ali Muhammad al-Badri al-Samarrai, later known as Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is freed by the Americans at Camp Bucca in southern Iraq. He will become the founder of the Islamic State (ISIS) caliphate.

Victor Yushchencko, the opposition candidate in Ukraine, who was admitted to a hospital in Vienna due to serious health problems he had in recent months, has confirmation that he was poisoned with heavy doses of dioxin, probably at a dinner with a representative of the secret services in September.

Pitcairn Islands, a British territory in the South Pacific. A third of the island’s adult male population, including the mayor, have been convicted of child sexual abuse. The total population is several dozen.

Ukrainian elections: In the runoff, pro-Russian candidate Yanukovych narrowly defeats pro-Western candidate Yushchenko, backed by the Americans. Street protests erupt with accusations of fraud. The European Union rejects the election’s fairness. The protests continue for days, and parliament annuls the elections.

Stephen Hawking denies his own theory about information falling into black holes: the information they emit in the form of radiation contains traces of the information that fell into them. In fact, the particle-antiparticle pair that forms in the event horizon separates, and one falls in while the other forms Hawking radiation. As the first particle falls, it interacts with the matter already in it, making a “measurement” that is “teleported” to the other particle outside (a phenomenon called entanglement), which then carries information from the matter inside outward, reprocessing it (somehow).

US Elections: George W. Bush is confirmed for a second term in the White House; record voter turnout allows him to break Ronald Reagan’s voter turnout record of 54 million.

Theo van Gogh is assassinated by an Islamic terrorist

SpaceShipOne wins the $10 million Ansari Prize for being able to go into space (suborbital flight) twice in one week with the same spacecraft and a crew of humans; the pilot of the first flight was Mike Melvill, the pilot of the second is Brian Binnie; the designer is Burt Rutan.

With a violent offensive that causes over 100 deaths, Americans and Iraqis regain control of Samarra, north of Baghdad, within the Sunni triangle.

Al Zarqawi in Fallujah beheads the two American contractors captured a few days earlier, the videos of the beheadings are spread on the internet and partially shown on television networks

In Beslan, North Ossetia, Russian Federation, just a few kilometers from the border with Chechnya-Ingush, a terrorist commando took 1,127 adults and children and 59 teachers hostage during the school year-opening ceremony. The weapons and explosives had been brought in earlier during renovation work. After days of stalemate in negotiations, events escalated: perhaps an explosive device placed by the terrorists with duct tape on the wall of the gymnasium, crammed with hostages, broke free and exploded. Dozens of children ran for safety through the breach. The terrorists opened fire on the fleeing children. Russian special forces intervened, more explosives exploded, and the entire gymnasium collapsed. After 10 hours of fighting, the toll is terrible: 334 dead (about half of which were caused by the collapse of the gymnasium), including 186 children, 783 wounded, 31 terrorists killed, including 10 Arabs, 1 captured alive, at least 10 special forces men killed.