01|Northern Ireland First Minister David Trimble resigns after the Northern Ireland independent disarmament commission confirmed that the Irish Republican Army (IRA) had failed to relinquish its weapons. Trimble's resignation fulfills the threat he made in May 2000 to leave his post if the IRA continued to ignore its pledge to disarm. Under the Good Friday agreement of April 1998, the IRA promised to surrender its weapons and to allow the inspection of arms dumps by third parties.|
01|Background checks conducted by state and local authorities blocked the sale of some 153,000 firearms in the United States in 2000, announce U.S. Justice Department officials with the Bureau of Justice Statistics. A total of 7.7 million Americans purchased guns in 2000, down 11 percent from the 8.6 million people who bought firearms in 1999.|
02|The world's first self-contained artificial heart is implanted in the chest of a man suffering from heart failure. Surgeons from the University of Louisville perform the operation at Jewish Hospital in Louisville, Kentucky. The artificial heart--the AbioCor, constructed at Abiomed Inc. of Danvers, Massachusetts--is powered by an external battery pack, which is worn on a belt. Power is transmitted through the skin to a coil implanted in the chest and on to an electronic controller that is also implanted. The controller adjusts the AbioCor's pumping speed based on the body's needs.|
03|The United Nations International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, enters a "not guilty" plea for Slobodan Milosevic when the former Yugoslav president refused to answer the charges against him. Milosevic was charged with crimes against humanity stemming from the Yugoslav campaign against ethnic Albanian separatists in Kosovo in 1999. The crimes include murder, deportation, and prosecution of people on political, racial, and ethnic grounds. Insisting that the indictments against him were illegal, Milosevic appeared before the tribunal without being represented by legal counsel. He also insisted that his transfer from Yugoslavia to The Hague on June 28, 2001, was illegal and, therefore, constituted kidnapping.|
03|The European Union's chief antitrust regulator, EU Commissioner Mario Monti, blocks General Electric's $42-billion takeover of Honeywell International. The decision marks the first time a European official has stopped a merger of U.S. companies already approved by antitrust regulators in the United States. The merger was subject to European review because both companies have extensive holdings in EU countries.|
03|A Russian airliner crashes near the Siberian city of Irkutsk, killing all 145 passengers and crew members aboard the Tupolev-154. The jet was en route from Yekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains to Vladivostok, a port on the Sea of Japan.|
04|U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill publicly criticizes the European Union's chief antitrust regulator, Commissioner Mario Monti, for blocking the merger of General Electric and Honeywell International. The secretary calls the decision "off the wall." He also notes that European Union (EU) member nations have failed to live up to their roles as "locomotives" of worldwide economic growth. He suggests that EU nations help spur an economic rebound by following the lead of the United States in cutting interest rates and taxes.|
05|Macedonian officials announce that ethnic Albanian insurgents have agreed to a cease-fire in their four-month rebellion against the government. Officials representing the European Union, the United States, and NATO brokered the agreement.|
06|U.S. employers cut 114,000 jobs in June, primarily in the manufacturing sector, announce officials at the U.S. Department of Labor. The rate of unemployment rose from 4.4 percent in May to 4.5 percent in June. During the second quarter of 2001, the number of service sector jobs in the United States declined for the first time since 1958.|
07|At least 39 police officers are killed when Maoist rebels in Nepal launch nocturnal attacks on security posts across the country on the eve of the 55th birthday of Nepal's new king, Gyanendra.|
08|At least 120 British police officers are injured in a massive race riot in Bradford, a depressed industrial city in northern England. The riot, which lasted for nearly 10 hours, began when white youths armed with baseball bats and bricks attacked an Asian-owned Indian restaurant. During the riot, most of the violence became directed from the city's Asian population to the police. Approximately 15 percent of Bradford's 500,000 people are of Asian descent, primarily Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Indian, or Sri Lankan. Government officials in London, the capital, suggest that outside agitation, particularly by members of the National Front, a white-supremacist organization, sparked the riot and similar recent incidents of racial violence in other economically depressed cities in northern England.|
08|Venus Williams of the United States defeats Justine Henin of Belgium 6-1, 3-6, 6-0 to win her second consecutive women's tennis championship at Wimbledon.|
09|Goran Ivanisevic of Croatia beats Patrick Rafter of Australia 6-3, 3-6, 6-3, 2-6, 9-7 to win the men's championship at Wimbledon. Ivanisevic, who entered the tournament ranked number 125 in the world, is the first wild-card entrant to ever win a Grand Slam title in professional tennis.|
10|A fierce gun battle breaks out between Israeli troops and Palestinian activists as Israeli army bulldozers level a series of houses and shops in a Palestinian refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. According to Israeli government officials, the structures were built without permits to serve as covers for Palestinian gunmen during attacks on Israeli troops. According to Palestinian officials, the destruction of the houses leaves scores of Palestinians homeless.|
10|Justices of the Philippines' top anticorruption court formally charge former President Joseph Estrada with accepting millions of dollars in bribes and kickbacks during his 31 months in office. Estrada, on the advice of his lawyers, refuses to respond to the charges. The former president, who was impeached by the Philippines House of Representatives in late 2000, was forced from office in January 2001 after military and police officials announced that they would not serve under him.|
11|A Bush administration budget director estimates that the U.S. surplus for fiscal year 2001 is likely to drop to $160 billion, 20 percent less than previously estimated.|
11|Comets orbiting a star 3,000 trillion miles (4,800 trillion kilometers) from Earth contain water, report astronomers with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The star, CW Leonis in the constellation Leo, is dying. As it burns itself out, explains Gary Melnick, who headed the team of astronomers, the highly luminous and swollen star is engulfing and melting nearby objects, including comets. The water detected by the astronomers is being released as the comets evaporate. Water, a key ingredient to life, has never before been detected in a celestial object circling a star other than our own sun.|
12|Fossilized fragments of bones and teeth of a chimpanzee-sized hominid, who lived in African forests between 5.8 million and 5.2 million years ago, were discovered in the Middle Awash River Valley of Ethiopia, announce paleontologists at the University of California (UC) at Berkeley. Hominids make up the scientific family that consists of human beings and early humanlike ancestors. The primitive, apelike bones are more than 1 million years older than any other fossils definitely identified as hominid. Paleontologists at UC Berkeley speculated that the bones may be from an ancestor of both humans and chimpanzees. The bones are the correct age to place them in the time period when the lineage leading to humans and such primates as chimpanzees split. According to paleontologists, the location where the fossils were discovered indicates that early human ancestors evolved in a wet woodland, rather than a dry savanna, as had previously been thought. Many paleontologists had believed that human ancestors began walking on two legs when a climate change turned forests into savannas.|
12|Congressional efforts to reform how election campaigns are financed collapses in the U.S. House of Representatives in a battle between the Republican leaders of the House and a coalition of Democrats and Republicans who favor reform. After the coalition voted down a Republican-sponsored rules bill that mandated separate votes on every section of the legislation, Speaker of the House J. Dennis Hastert (R., Illinois) announced that he has no future plans to allow any campaign finance act to be brought to the floor for a vote. The bill would have banned "soft money" contributions --large, unregulated contributions to national political parties--and would have regulated the private funding of political advertising.|
12|The Bulgarian Parliament votes to approve Simeon Saxe-Coburg-Gotha as prime minister of Bulgaria. Saxe-Coburg-Gotha is Bulgaria's exiled king, Simeon II, who was forced from the throne in 1946, when he was nine years old. In June 2001, Simeon led his own political party, the National Movement for Simeon II, to a huge victory in national legislative elections in which his party's candidates took half of the 240 seats in the Bulgarian parliament.|
13|The president of the International Olympic Committee, Juan Antonio Samaranch, announces in Moscow that the games of the 29th Olympiad, which are scheduled for 2008, will take place in China's capital, Beijing.|
14|Political leaders from the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Northern Ireland end four days of talks in a deadlock over how to resolve the current political crisis in Northern Ireland. The crisis was precipitated by the resignation on July 1 of First Minister David Trimble. Trimble and his Protestant Ulster Unionist Party demand that the Irish Republican Army surrender its arsenal of weapons. Irish Republican Army leaders want to tie disarmament to police reform and the gradual withdrawal of British military troops from Northern Ireland.|
15|More than 12 inches (30 centimeters) of rain falls on South Korea's capital, Seoul, in less than 24 hours, leaving at least 45 people dead and thousands of people homeless.|
16|President Jiang Zemin of China and President Vladimir Putin of Russia sign a treaty of "friendship and cooperation" at a ceremony in the Kremlin in Moscow. Under the terms of the treaty, the two countries formally join in opposition to a plan by the United States to develop a missile defense shield. The treaty also includes a clause in which Russia recognizes China's claim of sovereignty over the island of Taiwan. Various experts on international affairs describe the accord as an act of defiance against the United States and suggest that the pact is an indication of Chinese and Russian concerns over the economic and military dominance of the United States and its European Union allies.|
16|Israeli tanks shell Palestinian police positions near the cities of Jenin and Tulkarm on the West Bank in response to a Palestinian bomb attack in Binyamina in northern Israel. A Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself apart at a bus stop outside the town's train station, killing two Israeli soldiers and wounding several other people. The Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for the bombing, which the Palestinian Authority condemned. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon described the attack as further indication that the Palestinian Authority "does not act against terrorism."|
16|A summit meeting between President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan and Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee of India collapses when the two leaders are unable to agree on the wording of a joint resolution on ways to reduce the risks of nuclear war. The meeting, held in the Indian city of Agra, primarily involved negotiations over Kashmir, the Himalayan land claimed by both nations and over which Pakistan and India have fought three wars since gaining their independence from Great Britain in 1947.|
17|Chinese President Jiang Zemin and Russian President Vladimir Putin, meeting for a third day at the Kremlin in Moscow, sign an agreement to build a 1,500-mile (2,400-kilometer) oil pipeline from Siberia to China. Engineers expect the pipeline, which is to be completed in 2005 at a cost of $1.7 billion, to annually carry 147 million barrels of Russian oil to China.|
18|Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve (the Fed), the nation's central bank, reports to Congress that the U.S. economy may be approaching the bottom of the current business cycle and could be on its way to recovery. Economic deterioration appears to have slowed and housing starts and consumer spending continue to hold steady. The Fed chairman notes, however, that the economy is "not yet out of the woods." It remains weak and susceptible to shocks from overseas, a situation that could force the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates for a seventh time in 2001.|
19|Labor confederations in Argentina stage a crippling, nationwide strike to protest the government's latest austerity plan. The strike shuts down most commerce in cities, including Buenos Aires, the capital, and closes most schools, universities, and government offices. The national government is cutting public wages and pensions by up to 13 percent in an attempt to avoid defaulting on foreign debt payments, and the government of Buenos Aires Province, the nation's largest, is paying public workers in bonds, rather than cash, to avoid bankruptcy.|
19|The government of Macedonia rejects a NATO-sponsored plan to provide the country's ethnic Albanian minority with the same constitutionally guaranteed civil rights enjoyed by the Slav majority. NATO officials fear that the government's refusal to grant equality to the ethnic Albanians will trigger the collapse of the current cease-fire in the current insurgency.|
20|One person is killed and hundreds of people are injured as thousands of protesters and anarchists battle more than 15,000 armed police in the streets of Genoa, Italy, the host of the current Group of 8 (G8) summit meeting. Leaders from Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States are in Genoa to discuss the world economy, the ongoing fight against AIDS, and other global issues. The protestors include a variety of groups loosely connected under the name Genoa Social Forum. They demonstrated against a number of grievances, ranging from the spread of a global economy to animal rights and the inability of the poor to purchase drugs to combat AIDS.|
21|Firemen in Baltimore, Maryland, reach the center of a railroad tunnel that is blocked by four burning freight cars, the remains of a 62-car CSX train that derailed on July 18. Smoke from the cars, burning 60 feet (18 kilometers) below ground, billowed through the city's downtown for three days, as firemen climbed down manholes, attempting to reach the source of the fire with water hoses. Workers dragged all but six of the freight cars--many loaded with highly flammable plywood, paper, and hydrochloric acid--from the tunnel before the firemen could get close enough to actually battle the fire directly. City officials believe that heat from the fire ruptured a water main, pouring millions of gallons of water into the ground around the tunnel. Engineers fear the flooding destabilize the tunnel's ceiling and walls and the streets above it.|
22|President George W. Bush of the United States and President Vladimir Putin of Russia announce that future discussions of U.S. plans to create a missile defense system will be tied with discussions about reducing the number of nuclear weapons in both country's arsenals. The announcement is made at the conclusion of the Group of 8 (G8) summit meeting in Genoa, Italy.|
22|An explosion in an illegally operated coal mine near the city of Xuzhou in China's Jiangsu province kills at least 38 miners. Officials had closed the mine in mid-June because of safety concerns.|
23|Vice President Megawati Sukarnoputri becomes president of Indonesia after the legislative assembly votes overwhelmingly to dismiss Abdurrahman Wahid from office. In the capital, Jakarta, the streets remain calm despite the fact that Wahid calls on his supporters to rise up against Megawati and the legislature. Denouncing the vote against him as unconstitutional, Wahid barricaded himself in the presidential palace. Megawati is the daughter of Indonesia's founder, Sukarno, and the leader of the Indonesian Democratic party, which holds the largest number of seats in the legislature.|
23|Representatives of 178 countries, meeting in Bonn, Germany, agree to a revision of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. The revised accord requires participating industrialized countries to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, by 2012. The agreement does not require reductions from developing countries. However, the European Union pledged $410 million a year to assist developing countries in reducing emissions. The revision to the accord creates legally binding consequences for noncompliance and allows nations to receive credits for protecting forests that absorb carbon dioxide. International affairs experts expect most European Union nations to ratify the Kyoto treaty by 2002. Officials attending the Bonn conference from the United States, which will not participate in the protocol, described the accord as flawed and not in the best interests of the U.S. economy.|
23|The cease-fire in Macedonia collapses amid heavy fighting between government security forces and ethnic Albanian rebels in Tetovo in northwestern Macedonia. Army officers report that the guerillas have killed at least 7 civilians and kidnapped 22 people from villages surrounding Tetovo, which is the country's second largest city. Macedonia's defense minister, speaking in Skopje, the capital, issues a warning, demanding that the rebels withdraw from the area or face a major army assault. The ethnic Albanian rebels blame the government for violating the cease-fire, which went into effect on July 6.|
23|At least 100 people drown when torrential rains in Pakistan trigger flash floods that destroy dozens of houses and other structures. In Islamabad, the capital, 24 inches (610 millimeters) of rain falls in less than 24 hours, the city's heaviest downpour in 100 years of record keeping.|
24|Separatist rebels from the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, armed with rifles, grenade launchers, and antitank weapons, carry out a suicide mission at Sri Lanka's international airport outside Colombo, the capital. The attack leaves 20 people dead, including 7 soldiers and 13 rebels. Three of the Sri Lankan national airline's fleet of 12 planes are destroyed. Before the attack, government security officers considered the Bandaranaike International Airport the most protected site in the country. Since the ethnic conflict between Sri Lanka's Sinhalese ethnic majority and the Tamil minority began in the early 1980's, at least 60,000 people have been killed.|
24|Government officials announce that at least 75 people drowned and 500,000 people were left homeless in July in India's eastern state of Orissa in massive flooding caused by monsoon rains.|
25|Ethnic Albanian rebels begin withdrawing from areas they hold in north-western Macedonia, including Tetovo, the nation's second largest city. According to officials at the Macedonian ministry of defense, the rebels are pulling down roadblocks into Tetovo, and residents who had fled the region are being allowed to return. NATO officials describe the withdrawal as a crucial step toward reinstating the cease-fire brokered earlier in July.|
26|Mayon, one of the most active volcanoes on the Philippines, erupts for the second time in two months, shooting a fountain of lava 200 feet (60 meters) into the air. Villagers living near the volcano, which is located on the Bicol Peninsula, about 200 miles (320 kilometers) south of Manila, the capital, are forced to evacuate.|
27|The annual, inflation-adjusted rate of growth of the U.S. economy fell to 0.7 percent in the second quarter of 2001, its lowest since the first quarter of 1993 when the growth rate fell to 0.1 percent, announce officials at the U.S. Department of Commerce.|
27|A river of molten lava from Mount Etna, located near the eastern coast of the Italian island of Sicily, destroys a ski lift and damages several nearby villages. Mount Etna, which is Europe's most active volcano, erupted on July 18.|
28|Skirmishes between Protestants and Catholics break out across Northern Ireland. In Belfast, the capital, gunfire rings through the neighborhood of Ardoyne, a Catholic stronghold, as some 300 rioters take to the streets, pelting police with bottles, stones, and firebombs. The disturbances begin just hours after Tony Blair, prime minister of the United Kingdom, and Bertie Ahern, prime minister of the Republic of Ireland, arrived at a new compromise designed to salvage the 1998 peace proposal known as the Good Friday agreement.|
29|Clouds of ash from an erupting volcano on the Caribbean island of Montserrat force airlines to cancel all flights in and out of Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, which are located more than 200 miles (320 kilometers) to the northwest. About half of the land mass of Montserrat has been lost since the Soufriere Hills Volcano began erupting in 1995.|
30|Ten freezer trucks containing the remains of as many as 1,000 people have been discovered in Serbia, according to police in Belgrade, the capital. Trucks were found submerged in the Danube River and in a reservoir 90 miles (145 kilometers) southwest of Belgrade. Authorities believe the bodies were those of ethnic Albanian victims of Serb security forces fighting in Kosovo in 1999. The police speculate that dozens of truckloads of bodies were shipped from Kosovo into Serbia, where they were submerged or dumped into mass graves.|
31|The Israeli Army launches a missile attack on the West Bank offices of the Islamic militant group Hamas. The missiles, fired from Army helicopters into third-floor windows of a seven-story office building in Nablus, kill eight Palestinians, including three senior Hamas officials and two boys waiting on the street for their mother. The attack is the deadliest single incident in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since a cease-fire went into effect in early June.|
