In Beslan, North Ossetia, Russian Federation, it’s the first day of school, as in all the republics of the federation and its satellites. It’s the Day of Knowledge, Den’znanja, a kind of national holiday since the days of the USSR. Beslan School Number One is filled with people: students, teachers, principals, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, aunts, cousins, grandparents. A commando of Chechen terrorists bursts like an alien force into this joyful scene and transforms it into the worst nightmare.

The Arecibo Radio Telescope, 305m in diameter, in Puerto Rico, has received a signal of possible alien intelligent origin three times: the “SHGb02+ 14a”; it is a signal in the vicinity of the famous hydrogen frequency of 1420 MHz, with a Doppler component, therefore emitted from the surface of a rotating body that cannot be (due to the period) either the Earth or an artificial satellite; the point of origin is not associated with visible stars and is located between Pisces and Aries, about 1000 light years from Earth.

Google, founded with a $10,000 loan, goes public. Within a short time, it reaches a market value higher than General Motors and Ford combined.

The American spacecraft Messenger was launched to Mercury aboard a Boeing Delta II. The probe weighed just 1,100 kg, including 600 kg of propellant in titanium tanks only 0.5 mm to 1 mm thick. Thanks to its carefully designed orbit, it achieved the unprecedented feat of entering orbit around Mercury in 2011, escaping the fatal pull of the nearby Sun. Combined with the complete success of Mariner 10, this made them the only two missions to Mercury in half a century, making Mercury the only rocky planet in the Solar System with a 100% success rate.

Three Italian and one Polish hostage were freed in a blitz by Delta Force and Polish forces.

Space-Ship-One financed by Paul Allen (Microsoft) with 62-year-old Mike Melvill on board, exceeds 70km in altitude

Amid a boom in the national economy (+8% of GDP), Sonia Gandhi of the Congress Party surprisingly wins the elections in India; Vajpayee resigns.

Photos of torture and abuse carried out by American soldiers in a prison run by the intelligence services: Abu Ghraib in Iraq are made public.

In Jordan, at the Syrian border, trucks coming from Syria carrying chemical substances were stopped; those arrested, when questioned, confessed that they wanted to carry out a chemical attack with the aim of killing 80,000 people.

Washington: 7 new countries join NATO: Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Romania, Bulgaria

NASA’s X-43A aircraft successfully exceeds Mach 7 at an altitude of 30 km; it uses revolutionary RamJet technology that uses oxygen in the air as a combustor; the X-43A is launched by a Pegasus rocket that reaches Mach 5 after being launched by a B-52 at an altitude of approximately 10 km; the experiment takes place 600 km off the coast of California

Israel kills Yassin, spiritual leader of Hamas, in a targeted missile attack.

Robert Freitas and Ralph Merkle publish the book “Kinematic Self-Replicating Machines.” The concept is based on the ideas first of John von Neumann (von Neumann probes, 1960s) and then of Freeman Dyson (1970s), and finally on the ideas of Freitas himself (1980s), who, for example, envisions a robot that reproduces itself on a moon of Jupiter, to build an interstellar ship (called REPRO) every five centuries. This seems like a long time, but if the goal is to explore the entire Galaxy, it’s not even that long. This goal would be achieved in just 10 million years.

Apple registers patent D504889. It will be granted 14 months later. It concerns a rectangular electronic tablet with rounded corners. It is the patent for what will become the iPad.

Combined observations by the American Chandra X-ray space telescope, the European XMM-Newton telescope, and the German Roentgen telescope have detected a powerful jet of X-rays from the center of the galaxy RX J1242-11, home to a black hole with a mass equal to 100 million solar masses; the magnitude of the outburst suggests that a star the size of the Sun has been swallowed by the black hole.

Al Qaeda attacks on several trains in Madrid during rush hour: 200 dead and nearly 1,500 injured

Russia. Kholod Technology: Scramjet. First test carried out on February 18, 2004, during the Strela sub-orbital flight from Baikonur to Kamchatka, at Mach 14.

Doha, Qatar. The car carrying former Chechen President Zelimhan Yandarbiev, returning from Friday prayers, explodes. His two bodyguards are killed, while his son is seriously injured. The attack was ordered by Putin, who had been denied Yandarbiev’s extradition.

Awwad Ibrahim Ali Muhammad al-Badri al-Samarrai, later known as Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, was captured by the Americans in Fallujah. He was considered a low-ranking member of the Sunni resistance. He was imprisoned in Camp Bucca, where he kept a low profile. Released in December 2004, he would become the founder of the Islamic State (ISIS) caliphate.

Suicide bombing in Moscow metro kills 39

The pro-Western Saakashvili has won the presidential elections in Georgia by a landslide; months earlier, he had taken advantage of the popular protests against President Shevarnadze, forcing him to resign and calling new elections.

NASA’s Opportunity spacecraft successfully lands on Mars (Meridiani Planum) and transmits its first images.

NASA’s Spirit probe successfully lands on Mars (Gusev Crater) and transmits first images

NASA’s Stardust mission completes a flyby of comet Wild-2, photographing its nucleus from just 230 km away and collecting samples of cometary dust; it escapes unscathed from crossing two of the five jets active at the time.

Multiple terrorist attacks in Iraq: 18 dead: 4 Bulgarian soldiers, 2 Thais, 12 Iraqis

A 6.5 earthquake in Los Angeles leaves only two victims.

Jordanian Muhammad Khatib Shafiq blew himself up in his methane-powered car next to the Modena synagogue.

Earthquake measuring 6.8 on the Richter scale in Taiwan, no casualties

Saddam Hussein is captured in Tikrit, Iraq

A truck bomb carrying suicide bombers hits the Carabinieri base in Nassyria, killing 28 people, including 19 Italians.

Edward Teller, father of the American H-bomb, dies. Born in Hungary, he was a hawk under several administrations, a staunch anti-communist and a supporter of the use of the Bomb for various applications, in addition to the military one.

Kamal Morchidi, coming from Italy, specifically from Milan, blew himself up with his car bomb against the Al Rashid Hotel in Baghdad while the American Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz was staying there, who came out unharmed.

Russia. Mikhail Borisovich Khodorkovsky is arrested for tax fraud. His company, Yukos, quickly loses much of its stock market value, until—a year after Khodorkovsky was sentenced to nine years in prison in 2005—it goes bankrupt, and its most important assets are acquired by the state-owned company Rosneft. In 2010, Khodorkovsky is convicted of embezzlement and money laundering, extending his imprisonment until 2017. Most analysts and international media consider his trial to be a political one, ordered by Vladimir Putin to get rid of one of the most powerful men in the country, who, before his imprisonment, had openly criticized Russia’s corruption. Amnesty International, denouncing the irregularities of the trials, has always considered Khodorkovsky a prisoner of conscience. Mikhail Borisovich Khodorkovsky (Russian: Михаил Борисович Ходоркгвский) was considered the richest man in Russia in 2003 (with an estimated fortune of $15 billion) and ranked 16th on the Forbes list of billionaires. Founder and leader of the anti-Putin organization “Open Russia,” recognized by the Russian government as a “foreign agent,” he later moved to London, where he declared: “I am no longer an insider of Russian power.”

China launches its first manned rocket into orbit: astronaut Yang Liwei completes 14 orbits aboard the Shenzhou 5 capsule launched by the Long March 2F (Change Zheng 2F) rocket.