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 x 2electroweak x 1e.m. / 6quark-flavors

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, Pennsylvania.

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 New York crash. Five phone calls express the passengers’ intention to rebel.

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 area above the impact site manage to find the only intact stairway and escape; the other six hundred remain trapped and die in the collapse.

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 the WTC, 64 in the Pentagon, and 44 in Pennsylvania. The energy released by the explosions at the World Trade Center and the resulting 60-minute fire was equivalent to 1,000 tons or 200 conventionally charged Cruise ships. Nothing will ever be the same again.

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 Qaeda camps in Afghanistan. MI-6’s delay proved fatal.

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