01|The drug thalidomide is launched on American market under the brand name Thalidomid. It is intended to alleviate a side effect of leprosy known as erythema nodosum leprosum, a painful condition that causes bumps under the skin. Strict controls over its use will ensure that it is not given to pregnant women. During the early 1960's, thousands of pregnant women around the world were given Thalidomide as a sedative. A tragic side effect of the drug resulted in them giving birth to babies with no arms or legs or with other deformities. Celgene Corporation, the manufacturers of Thalidomid, are still testing the drug for possible applications to AIDS and Crohn's Disease.|
01|The U.N. Security Council calls on Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to punish those responsible for the massacres of several dozen ethnic Albanian villagers in Kosovo last week. British Ambassador and President of the Council Sir Jeremy Greenstock voices the alarm felt by the U.N. that fighting is continuing, despite international demands that it cease, and that thousands of civilians are still being forced to leave their homes. He says "the council demands full and immediate compliance" with a September 23 resolution that called for an immediate end to attacks on civilians by Serbian forces and negotiations for a settlement of the crisis.|
01|Stocks decline sharply across Asian markets, including those in Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand. On the Tokyo exchange, which is the first international financial market to open each day, the benchmark Nikkei 225 stock index falls to a 12-year low, triggering massive selling in London and New York City. Economists trace the decline of the Tokyo market, which is now worth 30 per cent of its 1990 value, to disarray in Japan's banking industry. Japanese banks, which invest heavily in stocks, are left with an estimated trillion U.S. dollars in bad debts. These are the result of loans made in the boom years of the 1980's and that are unlikely to ever be repaid.|
02|The postal service in Moscow and across much of Russia stops accepting mail that cannot be delivered by hand. This includes millions of monthly pension checks. The Railway Ministry refuses to transport any more public mail until it is paid about 210 million roubles in overdue bills. The 210-million-rouble debt is currently worth approximately 13 million U.S. dollars. Six weeks ago, it was worth 35 million dollars. Most air-mail deliveries have also been suspended because the post office is unable or unwilling to pay airports millions of dollars in long overdue shipping charges.|
02|In California, U.S.A., American actor, singer, song writer Gene Autry, dies of cancer at his North Hollywood home at the age of 91. Autry was famous for his roles as a yodelling, guitar-strumming cowboy in Western films from the 1930's to the early 1950's. In 1940, he was the fourth box-office draw in America, behind Mickey Rooney, Clark Gable, and Spencer Tracy. He acted in more than 100 Western films and for many years afterward continued to perform as a singer. Autry was the first major film star to have his own TV series, "The Gene Autry Show," which began in 1950. In 1948, Autry purchased a radio station in Phoenix, Arizona. An astute businessman, his financial empire at one point included a Los Angeles television station, nine radio stations, a large cattle ranch in Arizona, a hotel in Palm Beach, Florida, and the Los Angeles (now California) Angels baseball team. He was reputed to have amassed a fortune of 350 million U.S dollar fortune.|
03|The governor of the Bank of Japan, Masaru Hayami, tells U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and Federal Reserve System Chairman Alan Greenspan that Japan's biggest banks are in serious trouble. At a private meeting in Tokyo, the head of Japan's central bank reveals that the cash reserves among the country's top 19 banks have dwindled below 8 per cent of all outstanding loans, the minimum that banks are required to maintain in order to operate internationally. Hayami notes that some of banks may lack the Japanese minimum requirement of a 4-per-cent reserve.|
03|Australia's conservative government, led by Prime Minister John Howard, wins reelection, but with a diminished majority in Parliament. Pauline Hanson, leader of the One Nation party that proposes halting Asian immigration and cutting welfare programmes to Aborigines, loses her parliamentary seat.|
03|British-born actor, producer, director Roddy McDowall, 70, dies of cancer. He began a career in films at the age of eight. Most notable of his childood films were "How Green was my Valley" (1941), and "Lassie come Home" (1943) in which he starred opposite Elizabeth Taylor. In the early 1950's, he appeared in many stage productions on Broadway. He starred in many TV series in the 1960s, winning an Emmy award for his performance in "Not without Honor". Roddy McDowall will perhaps be best remembered for his roles as the intellectual simians Cornelius and Caesar in the "Planet of the Apes" series of films. He was also one of America's leading photographers of celebrities. Two days ago, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, with whom McDowall worked for many years, named its collection of negatives and still photos the "Roddy McDowall Photograph Archive of the Herrick Library".|
04|In Iran, Teheran radio announces that about 160 members of the Iranian parliament have signed a letter stressing that the fatwah against British-born author Salman Rushdie remained valid and irrevocable. Foreign ministers of Iran and Britain agreed last month to remove this last obstacle to normal diplomatic relations between the two countries.|
04|Brazil re-elects President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who is credited with ending Brazil's crippling inflation. Cardoso had warned voters before the election that belt-tightening measures would be inevitable in the face of the economic crisis that Brazil currently faces. Since late August, the Brazilian stock market has lost 40 per cent of its value, and 30 billion U.S. dollars in reserves have been drained from government coffers.|
05|In Washington D.C., the House Judiciary Committee vote 21 to 16, strictly along party lines, to recommend that the United States House of Representatives open an impeachment investigation of President Bill Clinton. The vote came after nearly 11 hours of deliberation and after David Schippers, an investigative council representing the Republican Party, outlined 15 possible impeachable offences. The 15 counts accuse the president of either obstructing justice, tampering with a witness, or giving false grand jury testimony in regard to the nature of his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, a former White House intern. Independent counsel Kenneth Starr, who spent four years investigating the business, political, and private lives of President Clinton and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, charged the president with 11 such offences when he submitted his summary report of the investigation to Congress on September 9. If the full House approve an unrestricted enquiry into the conduct of the president, it will be the first presidential impeachment proceeding since the Watergate scandal surrounding Richard Nixon in 1974.|
05|Bulgarian government officials in Sofia, the capital, confirm that mushrooms picked in southern Bulgaria have been found to be contaminated with caesium-137, a radioactive isotope. When tested by Bulgarian scientists, the mushrooms registered radioactive levels twice the limit considered acceptable and the highest recorded in Bulgaria since radioactivity from the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine drifted across eastern Europe. In September 1998, similarly tainted mushrooms were shipped to several European Union countries from Romania, where 22 people were hospitalized after eating what officials there described as "genetically altered" mushrooms.|
05|Bungy jumper A. J. Hackett, 40, sets a new world record for a leap from a man-made structure by diving off the Sky Tower, in Auckland, New Zealand. About 10,000 people watch as Hackett, tethered to the top of the building by a elastic cable, falls 190 metres before rebounding high into the night sky. Hackett, who runs a bungy-jumping centre in Queenstown, New Zealand, set the previous record with a jump of 110 metres from the Eiffel Tower, Paris.|
05| In Calcutta, leaders of India's main Communist party begin a week-long meeting which will be the launch pad of a political campaign designed to dislodge the coalition government of Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee. Communist party leaders claim that Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) which leads the coalition, is biased against India's Muslim minority groups.|
05|In Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, dismissed finance minister Anwar Ibrahim appears in court wearing a neck brace and still showing swelling and discoloration around his left eye. International concern has been expressed about Anwar's recent allegations that he was beaten while in police custody. Anwar pleads not guilty to charges of corruption and sodomy. Judge Augustine Paul says the trial is scheduled to begin on November 2.|
06|In Geneva, Switzerland, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson calls for the release of all political prisoners held in Myanmar (formerly Burma) and urges the government to hold discussions with the repressed National League for Democracy Party (NDC). She says she has received no satisfactory response from Foreign Minister Ohn Gyaw to her concerns over human rights in Myanmar, expressed to him in New York on September 23.|
06|In Beijing, leading Chinese democracy activist Xu Wenli expresses cautious optimism after China signed the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights at the United Nations yesterday. When Beijing's U.N. ambassador Qin Huasun signed the accord, which guarantees freedom of expression, a fair trial and protection against torture and arbitrary arrests, he said the universality of human rights could be better reflected if it was combined with the specific conditions of various countries. Dozens of political prisoners are held in Chinese jails.|
06|In the Philippines, Imelda Marcos, 69, widow of President Ferdinand Marcos, has her 1993 conviction for corruption, which carried a sentence of 12 years imprisonment, overturned. The decision, taken by the Supreme Court in Manila, is irreversible. However, dozens of minor charges against her are still pending.|
07|Researchers at the National Center for Health Statistics, a division of the U.S. department of Health and Human Services, announce that the number of U.S. citizens who died from AIDS in 1997 was down 47 per cent from 1996. New drug therapies are credited for the decline, which took AIDS off the list of top 10 leading causes of death in the U.S. for the first time since 1987. However, the number of new infections of HIV (the virus that causes AIDS) remained constant between 1997 and 1996, at approximately 40,000 cases.|
08|After three hours of bitter debate, the U.S. House of Representatives, votes 258 to 176 to launch a full-scale inquiry into whether President Bill Clinton should be impeached. All House Republicans and 31 Democrats vote in favour of the inquiry, which was given no definable limits. One-hundred-and-seventy-five Democrats and one independent vote against it. On October 5, an investigative council representing House Republicans accused the president of having committed 15 impeachable offences. (See October 5.)|
09|The Italian government, under the leadership of Prime Minister Romano Prodi, collapses in a parliamentary confidence vote of 313 to 312. Prodi, who presided over a coalition of centre-left factions, held office for two-and-a-half years, Italy's second-longest-lived government since World War II (1939-1945). Political scientists point to Italy's many political parties-more than 40 in 1998-as the source of its long history of political instability.|
10| In Kenya, Daniel arap Moi leads the official celebrations of his 20 years in office. The anniversary of his inauguration, known as Moi Day, is celebrated annually as a national holiday.|
10|Clark Clifford, a powerful Washington, D.C., attorney and political advisor, dies at age 91. As special council to Harry Truman, Clifford is credited with persuading Truman to recognize the newly formed state of Israel. He helped organize the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Marshall Plan and drafted the legislation creating the Defense Department and the Central Intelligence Agency. As secretary of defense during the last months of the Johnson Administration, Clifford persuaded the president to begin extricating the United States from the Vietnam War (1957-1975).|
11|Pope John Paul II canonizes Edith Stein-who was born a Jew and died in the Holocaust-as Saint Teresia Benedicta of the Cross. Scholars believe she is the first Jewish-born saint since the time of the Apostles and early Christian martyrs. Stein converted to Catholicism in 1922 and became a Carmelite nun in 1933. In 1942, Nazis storm troopers removed the nun from a convent in Echt, the Netherlands, and shipped her to Auschwitz, the concentration camp and extermination centre in Poland, where she died. Various Jewish groups and certain of Stein's relatives have taken exception to the canonization, stating that Edith Stein did not die because she was a martyr to Christianity, as the Roman Catholic Church claims, but because she was born a Jew.|
12|Japan's parliament, the Diet, passes legislation designed to save the Japanese banking industry, which may hold as much as 1 trillion U.S. dollars in bad debt. The legislation injects more than 400 billion dollars in public funds into Japan's banks and allows the government to nationalize any banks that are actually failing. Economists have cited the faltering Japanese banking system has one of the root causes of the current recession in Japan and the economic crisis in Asia and Russia.|
13|Special envoy Richard Holbrooke of the United States announces in Belgrade, capital of Yugoslavia, that he and Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milosevic have come to terms over a ceasefire in the Province of Kosovo. The agreement averts the immediate threat of a North American Treaty Organization (NATO) air strike against Milosevic's forces, which have attempted for seven months to crush an independence movement in Kosovo. Ninety per cent of Kosovo's population of 2.2 million people is ethnic Albanian. Yugoslavian army troops and police, which have been accused of massacring hundreds of Kosovo civilians, are Serbian. The agreement allows 2,000 unarmed, civilian observers entry into the province to ensure that Milosevic keeps his word to withdraw. NATO will also stage regular reconnaissance flights over the province to monitor troop movements. Milosevic has promised to hold elections and grant amnesty to members of the Kosovo Liberation Army, a band of guerrilla fighters.|
14|In the United States, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reports that last month was the hottest September on record, and the ninth consecutive month of record heat this year. The average world-wide temperature for September was 15.54 degrees Celsius, more than a degree higher than the 1880-1997 global average. Thomas Karl, director of the NOAA's National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., warns that the figures could be an indication of accelerated global warming. He also predicts that the record temperatures will not continue indefinitely because of the impacts of normal climate variability. The NOAA also reports that the heating of the Pacific Ocean in the El Nino phenomenon is now lessening.|
14| U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno and F.B.I. Director Louis Freeh announce that they have charged Eric Robert Rudolph with three 1996 bombings in Atlanta, Georgia, including the bombing at the 1996 Summer Olympics. Rudolph, who is currently a fugitive believed to be in hiding somewhere in North Carolina's Smoky Mountains, was previously charged with the 1998 bombing of an abortion clinic in Birmingham, Alabama, which resulted in the death of a police officer.|
14|At the Congress of Neurological Surgeons in Seattle, an American surgeon announces that it is now possible to have direct communication between the brain and a computer. Two mute, paralysed patients of Dr. Roy Bakay, of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, have each received an electronic implant that fuses with their brain cells. The implant comprises two minute glass cones, each containing a tiny electrode, plus growth factor substances taken from the patient's knee. These substances encourage the brain cells to grow onto the electrodes. Eventually, patients learn to trigger electrodes at will. The electrodes can transmit electrical impulses produced by the brain to move a cursor across a computer screen. By choosing the relevant icons on the screen, patients can interact with their environment in a limited way.|
15|On the 20th anniversary of his papacy, Pope John Paul II publishes his 13th encyclical, Fides et Ratio (Faith and Reason). Written over a number of years, the 36,000-word document asks people to consider the meaning and purpose of life and truth. Christian thinking, it says, must try to reconcile faith and reason, be open to spiritual insights of other cultures, and aware of intellectual developments of the 20th century. The pope, who taught philosophy before becoming pontiff, stresses his unwavering faith in God's Revelation in Jesus Christ.|
15|Prices on the New York Stock Exchange rally when Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve system, cuts interest rates by one-quarter of a percentage point. The Federal Reserve is an independent government agency that oversees the U.S. banking system. The unexpected move is the first unscheduled rate change that Greenspan has made in four and one-half years. Economists interpret the cut as an attempt to strengthen the American economy, which is declining as a result of the financial crisis that began in Asia in late 1997 and has infected Russia and South America in 1998.|
16|The Nobel Committee announces in Oslo, Norway, that John Hume and David Trimble, leaders of two of Northern Ireland's largest Roman Catholic and Protestant political parties, are awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The award is in recognition of their efforts to bring permanent peace to the British province through the creation and passage of the Belfast, or Good Friday, Agreement.|
16|In the United Kingdom, the decommissioned royal yacht Britannia opens as a tourist attraction at Leith Docks, Edinburgh. At least 200,000 visitors a year are expected. They will be able to peer through perspex walls at the royal living quarters. This is the first time that a bedroom of a living British monarch has been on public display.|
16|In London, former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, 82, is arrested at the London Bridge Hospital, following a request through Interpol by two Spanish judges who are seeking his extradition to Spain. They wish to question him about the deaths of Spanish citizens in Chile between 1973 and 1983. Pinochet will be held under guard until he can face an extradition hearing. The Spaniards have 40 days to put a case for extradition. The Chilean government protests that the arrest violates Pinochet's diplomatic immunity.|
17|Nepalese climber Kaji Sherpa, 33, climbs Mount Everest in 20 hours 24 minutes, clipping more than two hours off the previous record for his route, set by Frenchman Marc Batard in 1998. Like Batard, Kaji Sherpa travels from the base camp to the peak via the South Col route. Fierce winds prevent him from achieving his target time of 18 hours. Kaji Sherpa was born in Solu village, in the foothills of Mount Everest. His first attempt to conquer the mountain was defeated by bad weather in 1994. Since then he has assisted in four other expeditions up Everest.|
17|More than 38 centimetres of rain fall over central Texas in six hours, causing creeks and rivers to burst their banks in 60 Texas counties and closing dozens of highways and expressways. Twenty-two people die in the floods statewide, including six people in San Antonio.|
17|An explosion at an oil pipeline 290 kilometres southeast of Lagos, Nigeria, kills at least 700 people, destroys several villages, and scorches surrounding fields of crops. The explosion is blamed on thieves attempting to take oil from the line by punching several holes in it.|
18|In Egypt, a commuter train running between Alexandria and Kafr el-Sheik jumps its tracks at a station southeast of Alexandria and ploughs through a crowded platform, killing at least 30 people. The accident is blamed on the engineer attempting to change tracks at too great a speed.|
19|A Palestinian hurls two grenades at a crowd of Israeli solders in a crowded bus station in Beersheba, Israel, wounding 67 people. The attack is believed to be an attempt to disrupt Israeli-Palestinian peace talks currently underway in Maryland, U.S.A.|
19|The government of Russia releases figures confirming that the number of Russians living in poverty has risen to 44.3 million people--30 per cent of the population--from 31 million one year ago. Russian government economists define the poverty line as a monthly income equivalent to 31 U.S. dollars or less.|
19|In the United Kingdom, British actress Joan Hickson dies in hospital at the age of 92. Miss Hickson was a successful character actress on stage and screen for nearly 60 years before accepting the role of Miss Marple in the British Broadcasting Corporation's televised adaptation of Agatha Christie's novels. At the age of 78, Joan Hickson gained international acclaim as Christie's shrewd, spinster detective. The Miss Marple series ran from 1984 to 1992, and was sold to 30 countries. In 1987, Miss Hickson was awarded an OBE (Order of the British Empire).|
20|In New York, it is announced that ex-Spice Girl Geri Halliwell is appointed goodwill ambassador to the United Nations (UN). "Ginger Spice", now sporting a blonde hairstyle, is the United Kingdom ambassador for the UN population fund and will work with the Marie Stopes charity. Part of her responsibilities will be to raise public awareness of contraception and AIDS.|
20|The president of BankAmerica Corporation, David Coulter, announces his resignation in light of a 372-million-U.S.-dollar loss by the bank under his direction. The loss resulted from an unsecured loan that Coulter made in 1997 to a hedge fund, D. E. Shaw & Company. Hedge funds put investors' money into highly risky ventures in the hopes of spectacular returns. D. E. Shaw & Company is unable to repay the loan because of the enormous losses it incurred when the Russian rouble collapsed in August. BankAmerica Corporation was formed on Sept. 30, 1998, when NationsBank merged with the Bank of America.|
21|The New York Yankees baseball team complete their 1998 season of 125 victories by winning the World Series with a four-game sweep over the San Diego Padres.|
21|Massimo D'Alema, a former Communist, becomes the new prime minister of Italy. In order to form a government, D'Alema includes Communists and conservatives in a cabinet designed to please all political parties involved in the coalition. The cabinet also includes six women.|
21|In London, Queen Elizabeth II unveils a restored monument to her great-grandfather, Prince Albert, beloved consort of Queen Victoria. The gothic monument, originally paid for by public subscription, was designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott. It opened to the public in 1872. Over a four-year period, the Albert Memorial was dismantled, repaired, and re-gilded with 23.5 carat gold leaf. The unveiling is accompanied by music and a fireworks display.|
22|Medical authorities in Southern California disclose that the recent death of Florence Griffith Joyner was not associated with the use of steroids or drugs of any kind. The Olympic sprint champion, known as Flojo, died of suffocation after suffering a seizure in her sleep. The seizure resulted from a congenital abnormality of the blood vessels in her brain called cavernous angioma.|
23|A report in Science Journal reveals that the animal and human brains are far more similar than was previously realized. Studies of two adult rhesus monkeys, named Rosencrantz and MacDuff, have proved the animals are actually counting. Dr. Herbert Terrace, a professor of psychology at Columbia University in New York, and Elizabeth Brannon, a Columbia graduate student in psychology, demonstrated that animals can understand the relationship between numbers, and use numbers in their daily lives. Their research shows that both babies and monkeys are born with the ability to understand numbers.|
23|In the United States, Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sign an agreement that breathes life back into the 1993 and 1995 Oslo Accords, reopening the possibility of a permanent Palestinian state. The agreement was brokered over nine days by President Bill Clinton of the United States and King Hussein of Jordan at Wye Plantation on Maryland's Eastern Shore. It commits Israel to withdraw from 40 per cent of the West Bank over the next 12 weeks. In return, the Palestinians have pledged to take specific steps to curb terrorism and to amend their charter, which currently calls for the destruction of the Israeli state. A visibly ailing King Hussein arrived at the meetings from Rochester, Minnesota, where he has been undergoing cancer treatments at the Mayo Clinic for some months.|
24|A Buffalo, New York, obstetrician who performed abortions is shot in the head by a sniper wielding a high-powered rifle. The doctor, Barnett Slepian, is the fifth abortion doctor in western New York and Canada to be murdered by an unknown sniper since 1994.|
24|In Harare, capital of Zimbabwe, employees of the city's administration stage a second day of demonstrations in the streets, protesting that they have not received their wages They burn rubbish and overturn cars.|
25|Typhoon Babs hits Taiwan and Hong Kong with more than 50 centimetres of rain and 128 kilometre-per-hour winds. Babs smashed into the Philippines on October 22, leaving 400,000 people homeless and more than 190 people dead.|
25|About 800 children, some as young as four, perform works by Mozart, Chopin, Rachmaninov and Shostakovich at London's South Bank Centre. They are celebrating the life of Japanese music teacher and composer, Shinichi Suzuki, who died in February. Suzuki would have been 100 on the 17th of this month. Suzuki students learn to play their instruments by listening to music, before learning to read music around age five or six. More than 500,000 children have learned to play piano, stringed instruments, or flute using the Suzuki method.|
26|President Jamil Mahaud of Ecuador and Alberto Fujimori of Peru sign a peace treaty ending a boundary dispute that had triggered three wars in 50 years. The treaty, which concerns a 80-kilometre slice of upland jungle, is expected to open borders between the two countries and encourage trade and commerce.|
26|A spokesperson for Boris Yeltsin announces that the Russian president has cancelled a visit to Austria. While claiming that Yeltsin has fully recovered from a recent bout of bronchitis, the spokesperson notes that the president currently suffers from "unstable blood pressure and fatigue."|
27|Hurricane Mitch, driving across the western Caribbean, slams into Honduras and Belize with winds recorded at 290 kilometres per hour. The U.S. National Weather Service, which has categorized Mitch as a Category 5 storm, describes the hurricane as one of the most severe in the last century. A Category 5 is the strongest measurement of a hurricane's strength and potential destructive force.|
27|A report from the US Census Bureau, Focus on HIV/AIDS in the Developing World, reveals that HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, is pandemic (a disease that has spread across a continent) in the 34 countries of sub-Saharan Africa. Of the 30 million people infected with HIV worldwide, 26 million people reside in Africa, where more than 90 per cent of all AIDS deaths have also occurred. In some African countries, the epidemic has severely eroded population growth and life expectancy. Life expectancy has dropped from 66 years to 48 in Kenya, and from 62 to 40 in Botswana. In Zimbawe, where every fifth adult is infected and more than 100 people a day are dying from AIDS, life expectancy is only 31 years. The Zimbabwean National Aids Coordination Programme (NACP) estimate that of the 1.5 million Zimbabweans who are infected with HIV, 35,000 have developed AIDS. In Botswana, life expectancy has dropped from of an average of 61 to 47 years in a single five-year span. It is expected to continue to decline to an average of 41 years by 2005. Medicines to treat the disease are too expensive for most African families. The report will be published next month.|
28|Hurricane Mitch, downgraded from a Category 5 storm to Category 1, continues to batter Honduras, Guatemala, and Belize, forcing the evacuation of thousands of people to higher ground as some 50 rivers flood their banks. Most of the 75,000 residents of the capital, Belize City, have fled inland. On the island of Guanaja in the Bay Islands, at least 14 people are killed when winds of 201 kilometres per hour level nearly all buildings.|
28|In the United States, The New England Journal of Medicine publishes the results of two studies that proved that the 20-to-30-pill "cocktail" of antiviral drugs taken by people with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, fails to reduce infection to a level sufficiently low that the drug regimen can ever be stopped. Scientists had hoped that people with HIV might escape some of the adverse effects of the antiviral drugs if the "cocktail," over time, repressed HIV to a point at which the body's own immune system could keep the virus at bay. However, HIV levels quickly rebounded in most subjects placed on reduced antiviral drug dosages. Both studies were halted so that people participating in the experiments could resume normal drug regimens.|
29| A crowd estimated at a quarter of a million people, which included President Bill Clinton, watch the space shuttle Discovery lift off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, with an international crew of seven astronauts including space pioneer John Glenn, aged 77. The flight is the 121st U.S. space mission since John Glenn first orbited Earth in February 1962. Astronauts aboard the nine-day flight are scheduled to conduct low-gravity experiments on insects, fish, and human beings; take various astronomical observations; and test hardware in connection with the Hubble Space Telescope.|
30|Gale force winds and torrential rains from Mitch, a hurricane downgraded to a tropical storm, continue to sweep across Central America. Mudslides and floods triggered by the deluge trap tens of thousands of people in Honduras and Nicaragua without telephone connections, power, food or drinkable water. The death toll is believed to exceed 1,200, and expected to rise.|
31|A weather front over the Gulf of Mexico holds the remnants of Hurricane Mitch in a line along the Caribbean coasts of Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Belize, where the tropical storm is dumping as much as 61 centimetres of rain every 24 hours. Massive flooding and mudslides, particularly in western Honduras and Nicaragua, have buried entire villages, killing at least 1,200 to 1,500 people.|
31|A spokesperson for the government of Iraq announces that all cooperation with international arms inspectors is over and that all surveillance of Iraq's weapons programmes is banned. While the 100 United Nations (UN) inspectors remaining in Iraq have not been expelled officially, Iraq's representative to the UN, Nizar Hamdoon, tells reporters in New York City that the government of Saddam Hussein assumes that the inspectors will leave Baghdad soon.|
