01|Chinese President Jiang Zemin, appearing before a huge crowd in Beijing, the capital, exhorts Taiwan to follow the leads of Hong Kong and Macao and reunite with China. The president had just returned from ceremonies in Hong Kong commemorating the colony's official return to China at midnight on June 30 after 156 years of British rule. The Portuguese colony of Macao is scheduled to be reintegrated into China in December 1999. Taiwan has been politically separate from China since Chiang Kai-shek and his followers, fleeing the victorious forces of Communist leader Mao Zedong, arrived on the island in 1949.|
02|A Japanese-owned tanker spills 4 million gallons (15 million liters) of oil into Tokyo Bay after running aground. The resulting oil slick is believed to be Japan's worst to date, and cleanup efforts involve more than 130 ships to battle the oil as it spreads across one of the world's busiest sea lanes. Fumes from the slick foul the air in Tokyo, the world's largest city, and its suburbs.|
03|Sixteen people die when a thunderstorm, accompanied by high winds and tornadoes, uproots trees, downs power lines, and floods highways in Detroit, its suburbs, and other cities in southeastern Michigan.|
04|The Mars Pathfinder, a United States spacecraft, lands on Mars after a seven-month, 309 million-mile (495 million-kilometer) journey from Earth. Designed to transmit data and pictures of the rocky Martian landscape, the craft opens its three exterior panels to announce on Earth its textbook-perfect arrival on Mars. Attached to the craft is a six-wheeled rover--named Sojourner--that will begin exploring the dusty surface of Mars within hours of touchdown.|
05|Sixteen-year-old Martina Hingis beats Jana Novotna 2-6, 6-3, 6-3 to win the women's singles tennis championship at Wimbledon. The victory is Hingis's second Grand Slam championship of 1997.|
06|Hun Sen, second prime minister of Cambodia, seizes absolute control of the government in Phnom Penh, the capital, after two days of street fighting between forces loyal to him and a royalist faction loyal to Prince Norodom Ranariddh, the first prime minister.|
06|Scientists with PPL Therapeutics, the British company responsible for the cloning of the sheep Dolly, announce that they have cloned a sheep with human DNA in order to produce a cheap, reliable source of blood plasma for surgery and transfusions.|
07|Results of Mexico's July 5 election reveal that the party that has held power since 1929, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (known as PRI), has lost control of the national Congress. Cuauhtemoc Cardenas Solorzano, founder of the emerging leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution, is overwhelmingly elected to the powerful post of mayor of Mexico City, regarded by some as a stepping stone to the presidency. The end of PRI's seven decade monopoly over Mexican politics is blamed on voter anger at corruption so rampant that it has reached as high as the office of president.|
07|Montgomery Ward, the Chicago-based company that invented mail-order retailing, declares bankruptcy after 125 years in business.|
08|The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) invites three former Soviet bloc countries--Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary--to join the military alliance that consists of the United States, Canada, and 14 other Western countries. NATO was formed in 1949 to discourage a Soviet attack on the non-Communist countries of Europe.|
09|Nine people die when police break up dozens of prodemocracy protests staged across Kenya. Prodemocracy forces demand the repeal of a series of repressive laws, originally passed in the colonial era, that include the Public Order Act, allowing the government to quash public demonstrations.|
10|Professor Svante Paabo announces that scientists under his direction at the University of Munich in Germany have extracted DNA from the skull of the original Neanderthal specimen, which was discovered in the Neander valley near Dusseldorf in 1856. Neanderthals were heavy-browed, thick-boned, humanlike creatures that first appeared in Europe and western Asia some 300,000 years ago and died out approximately 30,000 years ago. The DNA analysis revealed that Neanderthals did not interbreed with humans, as has long been speculated, and disclosed that they appear to have separated from the hominid line four times earlier than did humans.|
10|British troops under NATO command stage a dramatic raid on Prijedor, Bosnia, and arrest a Bosnian Serb war-crimes suspect, Milan Kovacevic. Kovacevic will be transported to The Hague, Netherlands, to face a war crimes tribunal. A second suspect, Simo Drljaca, a former chief of police and troop commander, is killed when he fires on the raiding party.|
11|At least 90 people die when an out-of-control fire, which began in the hotel kitchen, races through the 17-story Royal Jomtien Hotel in the beach resort of Pattaya, Thailand. Most victims are trapped behind locked emergency exists.|
12|An aging, Russian-made Cuban AN-24 turboprop carrying 39 passengers and 5 crew members to Havana crashes into the Caribbean off the southeast coast of Cuba minutes after take off from Santiago de Cuba. There are no survivors.|
13|Five journalists, filming street fighting in the Palestinian-held city of Hebron, are among 16 Arabs shot by Israeli soldiers battling Palestinian youths throwing rocks and gasoline bombs. While the Israeli army has closed Hebron to nearly all traffic and erected concrete barriers sealing off Shalala Street, the city's main thoroughfare, the violence that has been a daily occurrence for more than a month continues unabated. Israeli soldiers remain in Hebron to safeguard 450 Jewish settlers who live in the center of the city of approximately 12,000 people.|
14|An estimated 1 million people in Madrid march to protest the terrorist campaign of E.T.A., the Basque separatist group that claims responsibility for kidnapping and murdering Miguel Angel Blanco. The group executed Blanco when their demands that incarcerated Basque separatists be transferred to jails in the north were ignored by the government in Madrid. The E.T.A., which has killed more than 800 people since 1968, hopes to create an independent state in the Basque region of northern Spain.|
15|A senior official with the United Nations states that at least 40 Cambodians have been executed and hundreds more arrested in a "campaign of terror" in effect since Hun Sen, formerly second prime minister, seized control of the government on July 6. Hun Sen denies knowledge of executions.|
15|Fashion designer Gianni Versace is shot and killed on the front steps of his mansion in Miami Beach's art deco South Beach area. Police suspect Andrew Cunanan, believed to have previously killed four men in a three-state murder spree in May.|
16|Federal agents raid the business offices of dozens of hospitals operated in six states by Columbia/HCA Healthcare Corporation, the world's largest health-care company. Truckloads of documents are seized as potential evidence that Columbia/HCA fraudulently overcharged Medicare and other federal programs by inflating operating expenses. Commenting on a separate federal inquiry, June Gibbs Brown, inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services, disclosed that a still incomplete audit of the Medicare agency has revealed that the government overpaid health-care providers, including hospital companies such as Columbia/HCA, by $23 billion in 1996, 14 percent of all Medicare expenditures for the year.|
17|The Woolworth Corporation announces that it will close the remaining 400 F. W. Woolworth stores. The 117-year-old company, which at its height operated 8,386 five and dimes worldwide and enjoyed annual sales topping $9.9 billion, will continue to operate Foot Locker, Kinney Shoes, and a variety of other mall-based retail outlets. The closing of Woolworth's, following the slow disappearance of Kresge, Newberry, and Ben Franklin stores, brings down the curtain on the dime store, an American innovation once found on nearly every Main Street. Market analysts claim five and dimes were rendered obsolete by discount chains and the expanded merchandise carried by drug and grocery stores.|
18|Republican National Party chairman Jim Nicholson castigates Democratic Party fund raising practices before announcing that Republicans have endorsed a study-group recommendation opposing the reform of existing campaign regulations. The resolution opposes public financing of federal campaigns and supports preservation of political action committees and the raising and spending of "soft money." Political parties use soft money (donations to the party in support of issues, rather than individual candidates) to get around federal laws governing campaign finances. The resolution also calls for rescinding limits on campaign spending.|
19|The Irish Republican Army (IRA), an organization committed to ending British rule in Ireland, announces a cease-fire of terrorist activities, to become effective at noon on July 20. The organization's last cease-fire ended in February 1996 with the explosion of a bomb aboard a crowded London bus. At the time, the IRA claimed the act was made in response to the British government's insincerity during Irish/British negotiations on the subject of Northern Ireland. The peace talks--from which Sinn Fein, the political wing of the IRA, has been excluded because of terrorist activities--have been hopelessly stalled for more than a year. Since 1969, more than 3,200 people have been killed in civil unrest in Northern Ireland or at the hands of the IRA.|
20|Rivers across central Europe continue to rise after 10 days of torrential rain. The Oder River in the eastern German state of Bradenburg rises 2 feet (61 centimeters) in five hours, and officials fear that dikes shielding farmland on the eastern German plain will not hold. In Poland and the Czech Republic, floods kill nearly 100 people, and property damage is estimated at tens of millions of dollars as a result of flooding, described as the worst of the century. More than 1,000 villages and 500,000 acres (202,000 hectares) of farmland are under water in Poland alone. In Austria and Hungary, the Danube is beginning to wash over its banks.|
21|Canadian fishermen, angry because of a dispute with the United States over who gets to fish for salmon in the international waters of the Pacific Northwest, ignore a court order to break up a 200-boat blockade of the Malaspina, an Alaskan ferry, held in the port of Prince Rupert, British Columbia, since July 19. Canadian fishermen contend that Alaskan fishermen have taken three to four times more salmon during the 1997 season than is allowed by treaty and 35 million more salmon than have Canadians, since the treaty was negotiated in 1985.|
22|President Boris Yeltsin of Russia vetoes legislation banning all but "traditional faiths"--the Russian Orthodox Church, Judaism, Buddhism, and Islam. The bill, which many fear would have restored the Orthodox Church as the state religion, would have granted the state discretionary power to outlaw "nontraditional" faiths and confiscate church property. In recent years, thousands of Russians have been attracted to Evangelical Christian groups, Scientology, and such cults as Japan's Aum Shinrikyo. Yeltsin's veto can be overridden by a two-thirds majority in both houses of the Russian parliament.|
23|A three-month, nationwide manhunt ends when Andrew Cunanan, accused of killing five men in a four-state murder spree, shoots himself aboard a Miami Beach houseboat. In April, Cunanan left San Diego for Minneapolis, where he is believed to have murdered two acquaintances. In Chicago, Cunanan allegedly killed a 72-year-old real-estate developer. Cunanan next showed up in rural New Jersey, where he allegedly shot a cemetery caretaker, apparently to gain access to a getaway vehicle. On July 15, Cunanan allegedly killed celebrity fashion designer Gianni Versace, who was shot while standing on the front steps of his Ocean Boulevard mansion in Miami Beach.|
24|British Prime Minister Tony Blair's government has scheduled referenda for August 1997 that, if passed by the voters of Scotland and Wales, will result in the creation of elected, home-rule legislatures that would manage many local affairs currently controlled by Parliament in London. The proposal is the most far-reaching decentralization of authority in the history of the United Kingdom.|
25|Diplomat and cabinet minister K. R. Narayanan takes the oath of office as president of India. He is the first untouchable, or member of the lowest rung in the Hindu caste system, to attain high office in India. Narayanan concludes the ceremony by declaring that his elevation offers proof that Mohandas Gandhi's vision of a society in which "the concerns of the common man take precedence" has been fulfilled. While election to the presidency is considered a high honor, the position is largely ceremonial under India's parliamentary system.|
26|Forces of the Taliban, which had imposed a highly repressive militant form of Islamic rule over much of Afghanistan, are pushed back to the same position they were in shortly after capturing Kabul, the capital, nine months earlier. Northern alliance troops, under the command of moderate leader Ahmad Shah Massoud, have inflicted heavy casualties and, in two months time, forced the Taliban to fall back more than 250 miles (400 kilometers) to a defensive line 10 miles (16 kilometers) north of Kabul. While the Taliban continues to control three-quarters of Afghanistan, the most able of Taliban commanders are dead, and boys as young as 12 are being pressed into the army.|
27|Nate Thayer, foreign correspondent for the Hong Kong-based The Far Eastern Economic Review, reveals that he saw Pol Pot, notorious leader of Cambodia's Khmer Rouge guerrillas, on July 22. It is the first time the founder of the fanatical Maoist movement has been sighted by an outsider in almost 20 years. While visiting the last Khmer Rouge stronghold, Anlong Veng, near the Thai border, Thayer witnessed and videotaped a mass meeting during which Khmer Rouge guerrillas condemn and sentence the 69-year-old Pol Pot to life imprisonment. Pol Pot oversaw the deaths of more than 1 million people during the Khmer Rouge reign over Cambodia in the late 1970's.|
28|President Bill Clinton and Republican leaders in Congress announce that they have arrived at a budget agreement that will both balance the budget over a four-year period and provide tax cuts. The U.S. budget has not been balanced in nearly 30 years. Provisions include a $500-per-child tax credit, $24 billion for children's health care, and cuts in capital gains and inheritance taxes.|
29|Massachusetts Governor William F. Weld resigns office to fight for Senate confirmation as ambassador to Mexico. Senate Foreign Relationships Committee Chairman Jessie Helms, a conservative Republican from North Carolina, has publicly stated that he will block confirmation hearings because Weld is "soft on drugs." Weld, a moderate Republican who has supported abortion and gay rights, was nominated for the ambassadorship by Democratic President Bill Clinton.|
30|Two men detonate bombs in the ancient Mahane Yehyuda market in western Jerusalem. Fifteen people are killed, including the suicide bombers, and more than 150 people are injured, many seriously. While religious volunteers, comb the district for victims and body parts, Hamas, the militant Islamic organization, claims responsibility and demands that Israel free Palestinians imprisoned for acts of terrorism.|
31|New York City police raid a Brooklyn apartment and find evidence of what is believed to be a terrorist plot to blow up a subway station and commuter bus during rush hour. Various bomb components in the apartment suggest pipe bombs designed to be detonated in a suicide mission similar to the July 30 bombings in Jerusalem. Two of the suspects are shot when they attempt to detonate a bomb while surrounded by police. Three men holding either Jordanian or Egyptian passports are arrested. The raid was prompted by a tip from a man who described himself as a coconspirator who had a change of heart.|
