01|The National Cancer Institute announces that fallout from nuclear test last conducted in 1952, 1953, 1955, and 1957 at the Nevada Test Site near as Vegas may have been the cause of thousands of cases of thyroid cancer. According to Richard D. Klausner, director of the Institute, "There were few, if any, Americans in the contiguous 48 states at the time that were not exposed to some level of fallout."|
02|Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat travels to Egypt, seeking the backing of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Arafat's stand against measures taken by Israel in response to the July 30 suicide bombings by Islamic terrorists in Jerusalem. In response to the bombings, which left 15 people dead, Israel has arrested dozens of people and demanded that Arafat arrest his own chief of police and crack down on all Palestinian militants. When peace talks with the Palestinian Authority were suspended, Arafat stated that Israel has used the bombings as an excuse "to declare war on the Palestinian people."|
03|Ash, super-heated gas, and molten rock from Montserrat's Soufriere Hills Volcano flows into Plymouth, destroying wooden houses in the historic center of the capital of the Caribbean island. The volcano, which began erupting in 1995 after being inactive for more than 400 years, had killed at least 10 people since its the most serious recent eruption on June 25, 1997.|
04|More than 185,000 truck loaders and drivers and package sorters stop work when the International Brotherhood of Teamsters calls a strike against 2,400 United Parcel Service (UPS) depots around the country. Union organizers demand that UPS hire more full-time employees. Since 1993, UPS has created 8,000 new full-time positions, compared with 38,000 part-time jobs. UPS controls 63 percent of the overall U.S. shipping market.|
05|A Korean Air Lines jumbo jet enroute to Guam from Seoul, South Korea, crashes into the jungle on the Pacific island, killing all but 29 of the 254 passengers and crew members aboard the Boeing 747-300.|
06|In an attempt to revitalize the ailing Apple Computer Inc., company cofounder Steve Jobs announces the formation of an alliance between Apple and its archrival, Microsoft Corporation. Microsoft, the software giant, agreed to buy $150 million of nonvoting Apple stock and develop programs for the Macintosh platform for at least the next five years. Jobs also announces that he and Lawrence Ellison, chairman of Oracle Corporation, have joined the Apple board of directors.|
07|A Soyuz spaceship, launched on August 5, arrives with a replacement crew of two at the damaged Russian space station Mir. Because radio transmission between the space station and the craft failed, the Soyuz craft is maneuvered into docking position manually by the three Mir astronauts. During 1997, the space station has experienced a number of system malfunctions, including an earlier docking failure that resulted in a crash that punched a hole in Mir.|
08|Carol Bellamy, executive director of UNICEF, the United Nations Children's Fund, warns that some 80,000 North Korean children are in imminent danger of dying from hunger. An additional 800,000 North Korean children are suffering from malnutrition, according to Bellamy. North Korea, with a population of 24 million people, is currently facing a number of crises, including famine and drought.|
09|More than 50 passengers are injured, some critically, when an eastbound Amtrak train carrying 325 people across northwest Arizona derails as it crosses a trestle that appears to have been undermined in a flash flood.|
10|Government forces supporting Congo Republic President Pascal Lissouba and a private militia loyal to former President Denis Sassou-Nguesso clash for the third straight day in Brazzaville, the capital. Each side blames the other for breaking the three-week-old cease fire, which was brokered by President Omar Bongo of Gabon. The current situation was initially triggered when Lissouba's troops surrounded the house of the former president in June, demanding that he disband his militia in anticipation of national elections. During the parliamentary elections of 1993, fighting between armed members of political parties resulted in the deaths of more than 2,000 people.|
11|President Bill Clinton uses the line item veto to strike down three special-interest tax measures in the balanced budget and tax cut law. Passed by Congress in 1996, the new veto allows the president to kill individual items in tax and spending bills. Many observers said that Clinton's historic first use of the veto is likely to trigger a court case challenging the constitutionality of the law, regarded by many as a major transfer of power from the legislative to the executive branch.|
12|As many as 600 people are killed and thousands more are forced from their homes in northwestern Burundi during renewed clashes between Hutu rebels and the Tutsi-dominated Burundian army. Since 1993, when the latest round of fighting between Hutu guerrillas and army soldiers began, more than 150,000 Burundians have died. The current conflict is the latest in a series of rebellions by the Hutu, a majority in Burundi, against the Tutsi, who have long dominated the nation's government and army.|
13|The Canadian province of Ontario shuts down 7 of the 19 nuclear reactors operated by Ontario Hydro, a province owned and operated utility company, in response to an internal report stating that poor management has compromised the safety of the utility's entire nuclear power system.|
14|Paleoanthropologist Lee Berger announces that he and colleagues at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, have found the earliest known fossilized footprints of an anatomically modern human being. Discovered on the edge of Langebaan Lagoon north of Cape Town, the prints are believed to have been made approximately 117,000 years ago. Older footprints, such as the 3.7 million-year-old Laetoli prints discovered by Mary Leakey, were made by hominid ancestors of the modern human.|
15|The U.S. Department of Agriculture issues a public-health alert, warning that as much as 1.2 million pounds (544,300 kilograms) of frozen hamburger patties tainted with E. coli bacteria have been sold nationwide by the Hudson Foods Company of Rogers, Arkansas. Sixteen people in Colorado become ill from eating the contaminated meat. According to an agriculture department spokesperson, much of the meat had probably been consumed, but no deaths had been traced to exposure to the dangerous bacteria.|
16|Russian astronauts Vasily Tsibliyev and Aleksandr Lazutkin, appearing before the press for the first time since returning to Earth from a six-week tour aboard the Mir space station, denounce Russian President Boris Yeltsin, the Russian space agency, and the world press for publicly blaming the astronauts for the series of problems that have plagued the space station. Earlier in the week, President Yeltsin declared all disasters aboard Mir as "human error." While aboard the space station, Tsibliyev and Lazutkin dealt with the worst collision in the station's 11-year history, several serious systems failures, a fire, and the accidental disconnection of a cable essential to the guidance of the spacecraft.|
17|NATO-led British troops surround a Banja Luka police station and intervene to prevent violence between hard-line nationalists and police backing Bosnian Serb President Biljana Plavsic. Claiming the building was being used by nationalist forces to tap President Plavsic's telephone and faxes, Plavsic's police had entered the building in violation of new guidelines for special police that were handed down by NATO earlier in August.|
18|Officials of the teamsters' union announce a tentative agreement with United Parcel Service (UPS), ending a 15-day strike against the world's largest package delivery company. The strike, which cost UPS more than $600 million in revenues, was largely over union demands that the company convert 10,000 part-time jobs, paying approximately $10 an hour, to full-time positions that average $20 an hour.|
19|National Transportation Safety Board Chairman James E. Hall announces that ultimate responsibility for the May 11, 1996, ValueJet plane crash into the Florida Everglades rests with airline executives, employees, and Federal Aviation Administration officials, all of whom failed to fulfill their responsibilities to insure safety and quality control. A fire in the cargo hold, ignited and fed by stored oxygen generators that activated in flight, caused the crash, which killed all 110 people aboard. ValueJet, with FAA clearance, farmed out all maintenance on its fleet to independent contractors.|
20|Defying the demands of Israel and the United States to suppress terrorist tactics of Islamic extremists, Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat meets openly with and physically embraces leaders of Hamas and other militant Islamic groups. He warns Israel that Palestinians are on the brink of resuming open revolt against what they believe is Israeli occupation. The last Palestinian uprising, which ended in 1994, lasted seven years.|
21|The meat-packing plant where E. coli bacteria was recently discovered in hamburger is closed by its owner, Hudson Foods of Rogers, Arkansas. Although the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) does not have the authority to close a food-processing plant, it can withdraw its food-safety inspectors, which the USDA threatened to do against the Columbus, Nebraska, plant, triggering Hudson to shut down the facility. The USDA recall of meat, which began with 1.2 million pounds (544,300 kilograms) of frozen hamburger patties on August 15, is raised to 25 million pounds (11.33 million kilograms).|
22|The United States General Accounting Office reveals that the thermoplastic skin of the B-2 Stealth bomber loses its ability to evade radar in heat, moderate humidity, and rain. The bomber regularly fails 26 percent of flight tests as a result of damage to its sensitive skin. Built to penetrate the former Soviet Union undetected, the bomber, which costs $2 billion--three times its weight in gold--is otherwise unremarkable technologically and flies no faster than a commercial jet. While the air force, which currently holds 21 of the bombers, has not requested funds for more B-2's, defenders in Congress have proposed adding an additional 9 bombers to the fleet.|
23|Iranian President Mohammed Khatami, the first moderate to hold office since the 1979 Islamic revolution, appoints a woman, Massumeh Ebtekar, to be vice president in charge of environmental protection, a cabinet position.|
24|India asks Pakistan for a cease fire after both nations' troops exchange two days of near-continuous gunfire across their borders adjacent to the Indian state of Kashmir. According to Indian sources, more than 50 Pakistani soldiers have died in the cross fire, which both sides accuse the other of starting to sabotage the third round of peace talks between the two countries, scheduled for September.|
25|More than 40 Algerian civilians, mostly women and children, are murdered in less than 24 hours in attacks attributed to Islamic militant groups waging a civil war against the government. In the current wave of violence, which has lasted for 10 days, nearly 200 civilians have been killed in a series of attacks in Algiers and surrounding villages.|
26|Former President of South Africa F. W. DeKlerk resigns as head of the National Party, the country's leading opposition party, and retires from politics. As president, DeKlerk freed current President Nelson Mandela from prison, legalized the African National Congress, and took steps to end apartheid, allowing black-majority rule for the first time. In 1993, DeKlerk shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Mandela.|
27|Negotiations to discuss export of North Korean missiles scheduled to begin today in New York City are canceled by North Korea to protest the granting of U.S. asylum to two defecting North Korean diplomats. Broader negotiations to officially end the Korean War (1950-1953), scheduled for September 15 and involving North Korea, South Korea, China, and the United States, may also be jeopardized by the defections, which were abetted by American intelligence agents.|
28|The Department of Commerce announces that the U.S. economy, as measured by the gross domestic product--the nation's total output of goods and services, grew at a robust rate of 3.6 percent during the second quarter of 1997. Earlier in the year, the Commerce Department had predicted a growth rate of only 2.2 percent for the same period. Inflation in the second quarter increased at a rate of 1.5 percent, the lowest level since 1964.|
29|The British government invites Sinn Fein, political wing of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), to participate in peace talks. The IRA is dedicated to driving the British from Northern Ireland, where the majority of people are Protestant, and joining it with the Republic of Ireland to the south, where the majority is Roman Catholic. Because of the IRA's long history of terrorist activities, it has been excluded from negotiations on the fate of Northern Ireland carried out between Great Britain, the Republic of Ireland, and various Protestant political parties. Before joining in negotiations in Belfast on September 15, Sinn Fein must publicly declare that it is committed to a peaceful settlement of a conflict that has killed 3,225 people since violence first erupted between Protestants and Roman Catholics in Northern Ireland in 1969.|
30|Two hours of rioting, during which policemen in a largely Roman Catholic neighborhood in Belfast, Northern Ireland, repond to gasoline bombs with several volleys of plastic bullets, fails to affect the British government's decision to allow Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army, to join negotiations on the fate of Northern Ireland.|
31|Diana, Princess of Wales and former wife of Prince Charles, heir to the throne of Great Britain, dies in a car crash in Paris. Authorities believe the Mercedes bearing the princess entered a riverside tunnel under the Place de l'Alma at a speed exceeding 100 miles (160 kilometers) per hour in an attempt to escape the attention of photographers pursuing on motorcycles. The Princess's companion in the car, Emad al-Fayed, Egyptian-born heir to a fortune that includes Harrod's Department Store in London and the Ritz Hotel in Paris, dies, as does the driver. A bodyguard survives. Diana was the mother of princes William and Harry, who are second and third in line for the throne after their father.|
