01|Senator John McCain of Arizona takes 49 percent of the vote in the New Hampshire Republican presidential primary, defeating Texas Governor George W. Bush who received 30 percent of the vote. Most political experts considered Bush, who accumulated far more campaign money than McCain as well as the endorsement of a majority of Republican leaders, the front-runner. In the Democratic primary, Vice President Al Gore collects 50 percent of the vote against former New Jersey Senator Bill Bradley, who receives 46 percent.|
01|The leader of Austria's conservative People's Party, Wolfgang Schussel, announces that he is forming a coalition government with the Freedom Party, an extreme anti-immigrant organization that many political experts have compared to Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party. European leaders warn Schussel that a government that includes the Freedom Party is unacceptable to Austria's partners in the European Union.|
02|The Federal Reserve (the FED), an independent government agency that oversees the U.S. banking system, raises its Federal funds target rate on overnight loans among banks one quarter of a percentage point, to 5.75 percent. The FED also raises the discount rate on Federal Reserve loans to banks by one quarter point, to 5.25 percent. The latest increases marked the fourth time since June 1999 that the FED has hiked interest rates to control inflation in a steadily growing economy.|
03|Ford Motor Company of Dearborn, Michigan, announces that all 350,000 Ford employees--from executives in Michigan to factory workers in India--will be offered a high-speed desktop computer with Internet access and an e-mail account for $5 a month. Officials at Ford describe the move as a way to promote computer literacy and maintain good employer-employee relations.|
04|The rate of unemployment in the United States fell to 4.0 percent, a 30-year low, in January, reports the U.S. Department of Labor. According to Labor Department statistics, 387,000 new jobs were generated in January, and average hourly earnings increased 6 cents, to $13.50.|
05|At least 50 people are injured in clashes between demonstrators and police in the Austrian capital of Vienna. The demonstrations were staged in response to a February 4 ceremony in which members of the right-wing Freedom Party were sworn in as ministers of a coalition government. Critics have likened the anti-immigrant Freedom Party to Germany's Nazi Party of the 1930's and 1940's.|
06|Vladimir Putin, the acting president of Russia, announces that Russian troops have captured Grozny, the capital of the breakaway republic of Chechnya. While Chechen militants suffered heavy loses fleeing the city, which is in ruins, hundreds escaped into the highlands to the south, which is held by an estimated 7,000 rebels. Russia troops entered Chechnya on Oct. 1, 1999, in an effort to halt a rebellion of Islamic militants intent on establishing an Islamic state in the Caucasus region of southern Russia.|
06|Hillary Rodham Clinton announces that she is a Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate from the state of New York, where the First Lady established residency in January. Mrs. Clinton is the first wife of a sitting U.S. president to run for public office.|
07|A hijacked Afghan jet with approximately 150 passengers and crew members on board lands at a suburban London airport in Stansted, England. An unknown number of gunmen seized control of the state-owned Ariana Airlines Boeing 727 on February 6, during a short flight between Kabul, Afghanistan's capital, and Mazar-I-Sarif, a city north of Kabul. The hijackers forced the pilot to change course for Uzbekistan, where 10 passengers were allowed off, and fly on to Kazakhstan. Before landing in England, the plane stopped in Moscow for refueling. Officials with the Taliban, the fundamentalist Islamic organization that controls much of Afghanistan, characterize the hijackers as terrorists with whom the Taliban refuses to negotiate.|
08|Israel bombs targets in Lebanon for the second day in a row. On February 7, Israeli bombers destroyed power plants near the capital, Beirut, plunging much of Lebanon into darkness. A spokesperson for the Israeli Army describes the raids as a message to Hezbollah (Party of God), a pro-Iranian, militant Islamic group in Lebanon, "to stop the escalation and to live in a coexistence as neighbors." Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak claims that Hezbollah combatants, firing on Israeli troops from Lebanese villages, are responsible for the deaths of six Israeli soldiers in the last nine days.|
09|U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno pledges to track down the computer hackers who vandalized a number of the biggest sites on the Internet in the last three days. The first attack, on February 7, hit Yahoo, closing down the portal site for five hours. Hackers later blocked access to a major online brokerage house, to various media sites, including CNN, and to such retail and auction sites as Amazon.com and eBay.|
09|Steve Forbes, a conservative who advocates a flat income tax, drops out of the race for the Republican nomination for president of the United States. The millionaire publisher spent $32 million of his own money on the race without winning a primary.|
10|Nearly half of the approximately 150 passengers and crew members remaining aboard a hijacked Afghan airliner that landed in Great Britain on February 7 request asylum after their captors surrender to British police. While the police arrest 21 of the people aboard the plane, officers remain unsure who is a victim and who is a hijacker. The reason for the hijacking also remains unclear.|
11|Great Britain suspends Northern Ireland's power-sharing government of Roman Catholics and Protestants 10 weeks after it was instituted because the Irish Republican Army (IRA), a military organization that seeks to unite the independent country of Ireland with Northern Ireland, refuses to discuss a timetable for disarming its members. The 1998 agreement known as the Good Friday peace accord had targeted May 22, 2000, for the disarmament.|
11|Jesse Ventura, who was elected governor of Minnesota on the Reform Party ticket in 1998 and is the Reform Party's highest-elected official, announces that he is leaving the party, which the governor describes as "hopelessly dysfunctional."|
12|Approximately 55 percent of voters in Zimbabwe reject a constitution designed to increase the power of the president. The draft constitution, proposed by President Robert Mugabe, would have given Zimbabwe's president the right to dissolve parliament without cause and seize white-owned farms without compensation. In urban areas, Zimbabwe voters reject the proposal by a margin of 4 to 1. While Mugabe retains strength in the countryside, much of Zimbabwe's urban population blames him for the country's current economic plight, which includes soaring inflation, high unemployment, and acute fuel shortages.|
13|A Serb environmental minister announces that Serbia will sue Romania in an international court for damages to the environment caused by a cyanide spill at a gold mine. Highly polluted water overflowed a dam at the Baia Mare mine in northwest Romania on January 31, pouring cyanide, which is used to separate gold from ore, into neighboring streams. The streams carried the cyanide west into the Tisa and Danube rivers in Hungary. Both rivers flow into Serbia.|
14|At least four tornadoes with winds of up to 210 miles (355 kilometers) per hour cut a 10-mile- (16-kilometer-) wide swath across southern Georgia, destroying more than 250 houses and killing 18 people. The tornadoes are the deadliest in Georgia since 1936, when 203 people were killed in Gainesville, a town northeast of Atlanta.|
15|The prison population in the United States reaches 2 million men and women, according to the Justice Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based research organization. At least 145,000 men and women are currently housed in federal penitentiaries, 1.21 million in state prisons, and 645,000 in county jails.|
16|The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and Russia agree to resume relations and expand cooperation in an effort to become the "cornerstones of European security." In March 1999, Russia froze all contact with NATO to protest the NATO-led bombing of Serbia, a long-time Russian ally. In late 1999, NATO leaders and various NATO countries condemned Russia for the conduct of its war in the breakaway republic of Chechnya.|
17|Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve System (the FED), an independent government agency that oversees the U.S. banking system, warns the U.S. House of Representatives banking committee that the U.S. stock market is overheated. Greenspan tells the committee that he expects the Federal Reserve will respond to the current boom economy with an increase in interest rates to control inflation. The FED has raised interest rates four times in the last eight months.|
18|Iranians, voting in record numbers, overwhelmingly elect reform-minded representatives to the Majlis, the Iranian parliament. Reform candidates who support Iran's moderate president, Mohammad Khatami, win 170 seats, a clear majority, of the 290 seats in the legislature. The Majlis has been dominated by ultraconservative Islamic clergy since the 1979 revolution.|
19|Texas Governor George W. Bush wins 53 percent of the vote in the South Carolina Republican presidential primary, defeating Arizona Senator John McCain, who takes 42 percent, and Alan Keyes, who receives 5 percent. The Democratic Party did not hold a presidential primary in South Carolina on February 19.|
20|A Serb mob stones U.S. and German peacekeepers in the Kosovo city of Mitrovica. The peacekeepers were conducting a house-to-house search for weapons in an attempt to end the current spate of violence between the city's Serb and ethnic Albanian residents. Since a February 2 rocket attack on a United Nations bus, nine people have died and dozens have been injured in Mitrovica, a mining community of 90,000 people that is divided into predominantly Serb and ethnic Albanian sides.|
21|The Chinese government in Beijing issues a policy statement in which China threatens to attack Taiwan if Taiwanese leaders continue to delay discussions on the future reunification of Taiwan and China. The island of Taiwan, located in the South China Sea, about 90 miles (140 kilometers) off the Chinese coast, was an integral part of China until the Chinese Nationalist government fled to the island when the Chinese Communists conquered mainland China in 1949.|
21|Hundreds of people are killed in Kaduna, a city in northern Nigeria, in clashes between Christians and Muslims, who insist that strict Islamic law be instituted in Kaduna state. Muslims constitute a majority of the population in the region. Islamic law, called sharia, went into effect in January in the neighboring state of Zamfaria, which is overwhelmingly Muslim. Christians make up approximately 40 percent of the population of Kaduna state.|
22|Arizona Senator John McCain wins the Republican presidential primary in Michigan, taking 50 percent of the vote. His opponents, Texas Governor George W. Bush and Alan Keyes, receive 43 percent and 5 percent respectively. In the Arizona Republican primary, McCain receives 60 percent of the vote against Bush's 36 percent and Keyes's 4 percent. In both states, McCain attracted large numbers of Democrats and independents who crossed over to vote in the Republican primary, which was open to all voters. The Democratic Party did not hold a presidential primary in either state on February 22.|
23|The senior commander of NATO, General Wesley Clark, asks the 16-member military alliance to supply an additional 1,800 troops to counter the current violence between ethnic factions in Kosovo. The general also reveals that NATO intelligence forces have detected Yugoslav troops massing on the Kosovo border. According to Clark, Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic is attempting to stage a coup (takeover) in Montenegro, Serbia's partner in the Yugoslav Federation.|
23|Tens of thousands of people mob banks in Hong Kong attempting to buy shares in the initial public offering of Tom.Com Ltd., a Chinese-language Internet service that currently operates a single Web site. According to the company's prospectus, Tom.Com Ltd., which lost $10.3 million in 1999 on sales of $6.7 million, aims to become "the leading multilingual, China-related new media megaportal."|
24|Pope John Paul II is greeted by President Hosni Mubarak upon the pontiff's arrival in Egypt to retrace the steps of Moses and other important Biblical figures. John Paul is the first pope in history to visit Egypt.|
25|The Dow Jones average of prices of common stock of 30 U.S. industrial firms falls 230.51 points, or 2.28 percent, on the New York Stock Exchange to close below the 10,000 mark for the first time in 10 months. The Dow declined by 3.5 percent during the week of February 20 and 14.22 percent since the beginning of 2000.|
25|More than 40 people are killed when bombs explode on two buses being transported on a ferry bound for the Philippine city of Ozamis. Philippine officials suggest that Islamic separatists are responsible for the bombings as well as for the burning, earlier in the day, of another bus.|
26|As many as 5,000 to 10,000 flood victims in Mozambique are stranded in trees and on rooftops, according to United Nations estimates. Weeks of torrential rain and a cyclone that killed approximately 60 people along the southeast coast of Africa on February 22 has caused widespread flooding in Mozambique as well as in South Africa, Botswana, and Zimbabwe.|
27|Cyclone Steve rips through Cairns, Australia, a resort town near the Great Barrier Reef, with winds of 106 miles (171 kilometers) per hour, flattening buildings, uprooting trees, and downing electrical lines. Massive rainfall dropped by the cyclone leaves two thirds of the Australian state of Queensland under water.|
28|The average retail price for unleaded gasoline in the United States hits $1.421 a gallon, after jumping 1.5 cents in less than one week, according to statistics released by the U.S. Department of Energy. The Energy Department also reports that the average retail price of gasoline, which has risen 51 cents a gallon since late February 1999, now stands at its highest level since the department began the weekly tracking of gasoline prices in 1990.|
29|The Russian general staff in Chechnya announces that the Russian Army has established control over the Argun gorge after taking Shatoi, the main mountain stronghold of the Chechen separatists. While the Russian army officers claim the victory essentially ends the five-month-old war in Chechnya, international observers note that at least 2,000 Chechen rebels managed to escape the Russian siege.|
29|Governor George W. Bush of Texas wins Republican presidential primaries in Virginia and Washington and the Republican caucus in North Dakota. Vice President Al Gore wins the Democratic primary in Washington. The Democratic Party did not hold a primary election in Virginia or a caucus in North Dakota. In Virginia, Bush receives 53 percent of the vote. His opponents, Arizona Senator John McCain and Alan Keyes, take 44 percent and 3 percent respectively. In the North Dakota caucus, Bush wins 76 percent of the vote while McCain polls 19 percent and Keyes 5 percent. In Washington, Bush collects 58 percent of votes against McCain's 38 percent and Keyes's 3 percent. Washington voters award Vice President Al Gore 68 percent of the vote and former New Jersey Senator Bill Bradley 32 percent.|
