Ali Hassan Al Majid, better known as “Chemical Ali”, was captured by the Americans in Iraq; he was responsible for the Kurdish genocide with chemical weapons perpetrated in 1988.

The Kurdish Peshmerga capture Ramadan, the former Iraqi vice-president, and hand him over to the Americans; he is the 35th on the list of 55 to be captured; the daily ambushes and sabotage against the allies continue.

Tobias Colding and William Minicozzi find an even simpler, more geometric proof of the Poincaré Conjecture than the one presented only a month earlier by Grigori “Grisha” Perelman in his third paper at ‘www.arXiv.org’

Accidental blackout due to overload in the northeastern United States: 50 million people without power for 29 hours; the population’s response, however, is orderly.

Grigori “Grisha” Perelman uploads his third paper to www.arXiv.org; in it, he presents a further analytical result that allows him to use the first, less difficult half of his second paper to directly prove the Poincaré Conjecture.

Student demonstrations in Iran against the religious regime of the ayatollahs

Several high-ranking al-Qaeda figures captured in Iran

Partial solar eclipse at dawn in Italy (annular in Northern Europe and North America): the Sun rises eclipsed

Seventeen Western tourists held by an Al Qaeda-affiliated group have been freed in an Algerian army raid, nine of their captors have been killed.

Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). Two major attacks took place in residential complexes in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on May 12, 2003. Thirty-nine people were killed and over 200 injured when bombs exploded in three complexes in Riyadh: Dorrat Al Jadawel, Al Hamra Oasis Village, and Vinnell Corporation. Five car bombs were believed to have been carried out by Al Qaeda. Eight Americans were among the dead, and 17 Americans were among the 200 injured. The nine attackers were also among the dead. On November 8, a bomb exploded outside the Al-Mohaya residential complex in western Riyadh, in the neighborhood where the royal family lives, killing at least 17 people and wounding 122. It was clear from the beginning that Al Qaeda was responsible. A Saudi organization that didn’t hesitate to kill Saudis, as well as Jordanians, Egyptians, and Lebanese. Muslims. From that moment, the Saudi ruling class began a diligent process of repentance. The roots of MbS’s secular shift lie here: in the 2003 attacks, when the monarchy realized it had bred a monster within its own ranks and finally woke up to the fact that the world doesn’t just kill “infidels.”

George W. Bush announces, “We are redefining the war on our terms,” speaking of America’s operational management of the war. But in reality, the strategic objective set by politics (the creation of a democratic Iraqi state) will be unattainable by military force. Military force, however, has achieved the military objective of defeating the Iraqi army and occupying the country, implementing military techniques developed in the 1980s to counter the Soviets in north-central Germany in the event of a conflict.

In Baghdad, the Marines capture Abu Abbas, the hijacker of the Achille Lauro.

Tikrit also occupied by the Marines: end of the pitched battles in Iraq

American troops enter Mosul after the surrender of Iraqi troops

Peshmerga fighters and US special forces enter Kirkuk

Approximately 2:30 p.m.: Four American armored columns from the four cardinal points meet in the square in the center of Baghdad amidst the cheering crowd.

American forces capture several buildings in central Baghdad, including three Presidential Palaces.

The British arrive in the center of Basra

Iraq: First field use of JDAM bombs (Joint Direct Attack Munitions), or traditional bombs with a GPS and/or INS positioning system mounted via servo-driven fins to greatly improve target accuracy; their effectiveness was demonstrated live in the bombings in central Baghdad with subsequent explosions on the same building.

Beginning of the American and allied attack on Iraq

A diplomatic clash between the United States (George W. Bush, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice), the United Kingdom (Blair), Spain (Aznar), Australia, Japan, and Eastern European countries on one side, and France (Chirac), Russia (Putin), China, Germany (Schroeder), Belgium, and other countries on the other; the former want to disarm and overthrow the regime in Iraq by force, while the latter want to give UN weapons inspectors more time; the clash splits the UN and the Security Council, NATO, and the European Union, and sparks heated anti-American protests around the world.

Zoran Djindjic, the new moderate Serbian leader, is assassinated.

The MOAB (Mother Of All Bombs) is used in Afghanistan: 10 tons of explosives

Grigori “Grisha” Perelman sends the second paper to ‘www.arXiv.org’; in it he corrects the statement of two results reported in the first paper (in which he presented the proof of the Poincare Conjecture), but shows however that the corrections have no effect on the conclusions.

Wikipedia already has 100,000 articles. Created in January 2001, it has been a runaway success. It will reach 30 million by early 2014, 4.4 million of which are in English. The Encyclopedia Britannica has 80,000 entries, or 2% of Wikipedia’s English entries. It is probably the largest collaborative project of all time. As of the early second decade of the 21st century, the English Wikipedia alone has over 6 million articles of all lengths, and the combined Wikipedias for all other languages far exceed the size of the English Wikipedia, providing over 29 billion words in 55 million articles in 309 languages.

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Al Qaeda’s number 3, organizer of the September 11, 2001 attacks, is captured in Pakistan

First flights of the X47 Pegasus UAV (Automatic Unmanned Vehicle)

The Wilkinson MicroWave Anisotropy Probe creates an accurate map of the cosmic microwave background 380,000 years after the Big Bang.

Shamit Kachru, Renata Kallosh and Andrei Linde of Stanford, and Sandip Trivedi of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Bombay, India, find strong evidence that the “landscape of string theory” (the multidimensional “landscape” created by the possible values assumed by the equations of string theory) has at least one minimum (and therefore stable) where the laws of our universe are defined (which particles and forces exist, with what masses and what interactions); it will then be found that there are about 500 of these minima.

The speed of gravity is measured for the first time: it turns out to be approximately the speed of light: 300,000 km/s (+/- 20%)

Moderate Islamist party wins Turkish elections by a landslide

Brazil turns left with the election of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva