01|Newspapers in Pristina, capital of the Yugoslavian province of Kosovo, report that Yugoslavian military forces and Serbian police continue to attack separatist rebels, particularly in the province's southern region. On July 27, Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milosevic assured officials of the European Union that he had suspended his military campaign against the Kosovo separatist movement. Kosovo's population is 90 percent ethnic Albanian.|
02|Indian and Pakistani forces exchange artillery fire in the disputed border area of the Indian state of Kashmir. At least 80 people, mostly civilians, died in the barrage, which both India and Pakistan claimed the other started.|
03|Hong Kong officials announce that economic growth in the former British colony shrank by 2.8 percent in the first quarter of 1998. The announcement followed a 4.8 percent drop in the Hong Kong Stock Market over the same period.|
03|Thirty-two people die in Bombay, India, when a seven-story apartment building collapses. Since 1995, eight major structures have collapsed in Bombay, where officials estimated 18,000 structurally unsafe buildings housed as many as 1.2 million people.|
04|The Dow Jones industrial average of stocks on the New York Stock Exchange falls nearly 300 points, losing 3.41 percent of its value. The NASDAQ composite index of stocks, which largely comprises financial and technology issues, dropped more than 65 points to close down 3.54 percent. Economic analysts contributed the fall to the slowing of the U.S. economy, triggered by economic recession in Asia.|
04|Canadian officials sign a treaty with West Coast Canadian Indians that guarantees the Nisga people control over specified lands in British Columbia as well as the right to establish and govern a nation on those lands. The Canadian government entered into the treaty hoping to reconcile indigenous people and Canadians of European descent, but the agreement sparked enormous controversy. More than 50 additional Indian groups claimed lands in British Columbia. If validated, the claims would essentially turn the entire province, including cities, over to indigenous peoples. A number of Canadians also argued that the treaty irrevocably changed the constitution and endangered national unity by offering indigenous people a level of self-government denied French-speaking Quebecois.|
05|Iraq announces that it is suspending cooperation with UN arms inspectors. Iraq also demanded that the UN disarmament panel free itself from U.S. influence by moving from New York City to Geneva, Switzerland, or Vienna, Austria. In February 1998, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein averted a U.S. and British military strike by pledging to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to cooperate fully with the disarmament commission and to grant the UN Special Commission and International Atomic Energy Agency unconditional access to all sites suspected of housing missiles or chemical or biological weapons.|
05|General Motors (GM) Chairman John F. Smith announces that GM plans to build a new generation of assembly plants in the United States, a move that reverses a recent trend of transferring certain assembly work out of the country. Smith noted, however, that the new plants would assemble automobile sections built by outside suppliers and would, therefore, require fewer employees than full-scale assembly plants.|
06|Monica Lewinsky, a 25-year-old, former White House intern, answers questions before a grand jury in Washington, D.C., about the exact nature of her alleged sexual relationship with President Bill Clinton. On July 28, independent council Kenneth Starr granted Lewinsky immunity from federal prosecution in exchange for her promise to testify about her relationship with the president. Starr wanted to know whether Clinton lied under oath about his relationship with Lewinski and whether the president obstructed justice by encouraging Lewinsky to lie under oath about the relationship.|
06|The U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Government Reform and Oversight votes to cite Attorney General Janet Reno with contempt of Congress for refusing to appoint a special council to investigate alleged campaign finance abuses by the Democratic Party in 1996. Reno faced a year in prison if the full House of Representatives voted to uphold the contempt citation, but few observers believed the matter would come before the full House. Responding to the charge, Reno called the Republican-dominated committee's demand that she appoint a special council "a form of political tampering that no prosecutor in America can accept."|
07|Powerful car bombs explode outside the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, the capital of Tanzania. The Nairobi explosion killed more than 275 people, including 12 Americans, and injured more than 5,000. The Dar es Salaam blast killed 9 people and injured 70. U.S. intelligence agencies said that Islamic extremists topped the list of suspected culprits. Among the possible suspects was Osama Bin Laden, a Saudi Arabian millionaire considered by the State Departmentto be a major financier of Muslim militants.|
08|Hospitals strain to treat the thousands of people injured in the car-bomb attack on the U.S. embassy in Nairobi, Kenya. Blood was in short supply despite hundreds of donors and the arrival of two U.S. cargo planes filled with medical personnel and supplies, as well as food and communications equipment.|
09|Flooding on China's Yangtze River reaches record levels and peaks for the fourth time in as many weeks. In Hubei Province, engineers ordered thousands of residents from their houses so that relief workers can dynamite levees to ease floodwaters threatening cities and farmland.|
10|Department of Health and Human Services Inspector General June Gibbs Brown discloses that health maintenance organizations (HMO's) have overcharged the U.S. federal government by more than $1 billion a year since 1995. Calling HMO profits from Medicare "excessive," Brown claimed that while Medicare clients accounted for only 8.9 percent of HMO patients in the United States, the Medicare program paid 31.7 percent of all HMO administrative expenses.|
11|The Dow Jones industrial average of stocks on the New York Exchange dropped by 258 points, pulling the market down to 8,316. Stock prices slump on exchanges around the world. In Hong Kong and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, stocks fell by 3.62 percent and 5.26 percent, respectively. On Latin America exchanges, prices declined by as much as 7 percent. In Moscow, blue-chip stocks fell 9.5 percent, which followed an identical drop on August 10. Since the beginning of1998, indexed stocks in Russia have declined by 72 percent. Market experts began to use the word "depression" to describe the current economic crisis in Asia and Russia.|
11|British Petroleum announces that it will acquire the Chicago-based Amoco oil corporation for $48.2 billion in stock. Government regulators in both the United Kingdom and the United States had to approve the takeover, which was the largest single acquisition of an American corporation by a foreign company. The new corporation, BP Amoco, was to have international headquarters in London and U.S. headquarters in Chicago. BP Amoco was the world's third largest multinational oil company.|
12|A Titan 4A rocket, carrying a spy satellite for the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office, blows up 40 seconds after launch, creating a spectacular fireball 20,000 feet (6,000 meters) over the Atlantic Ocean near Cape Canaveral, Florida. Air Force officials said they had no idea what caused the $500-million rocket to explode. The satellite, which cost another $600 million to $800 million, was intended to monitor radar and missile activity, possibly in Iraq.|
13|Antigovernment rebels, believed to be backed by the government of neighboring Rwanda, reach the outskirts of Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, after only 10 days of insurrection. The rebels seized the Inga dam, the largest hydroelectric generator in Africa, and cut off electrical power to Kinshasa, a city of 5 million people. The speed with which the rebels moved west across the vast Congo from headquarters in Goma, in the far east, suggested that government troops were offering only token resistance. Congo President Laurent Kabila himself seized power in 1997 after leading a rebellion against longtime dictator Mobutu Sese Seko.|
14|A U.S. Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, rules that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) lacks the authority to regulate tobacco. In the ruling, the judges noted that the regulation of tobacco remains a prerogative of the U.S. Congress, not the FDA, because Congress never specifically delegated such authority through legislation. The Justice Department said it would appeal the ruling. In 1996, the FDA announced that it would begin regulating nicotine as a drug and cigarettes as a drug-delivery device.|
15|A car bomb explodes in the Northern Ireland town of Omagh, 55 miles (88 kilometers) west of Belfast, the capital, killing 28 people and injuring more than 200. The bombing shattered a cease-fire in effect for more than a year. The Real Irish Republican Army, a splinter group of the Irish Republican Army, claimed responsibility for the blast. Catholic and Protestant politicians feared how the attack would affect the fragile April 1998 Irish peace agreement, which citizens in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland strongly supported in a May referendum.|
16|King Hussein of Jordan issues a decree from a hospital bed in Rochester, Minnesota, that gives his brother and heir, Crown Prince Hassan, the constitutional power to reorganize the country's government. Hussein was undergoing treatment for cancer at the Mayo Clinic. Jordanians had been highly critical of the government for its inattention to domestic problems during the king's absence.|
17|President Bill Clinton admits in a television address that he misled grand jury prosecutors and the public about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, a former White House intern. The admission came after Clinton testified at the White House for more than four hours before prosecutors under the direction of independent counsel Kenneth Starr. The president characterized the relationship as "wrong" and "not appropriate."|
17|The government of Russia attempts to avoid economic collapse by devaluing its currency and permitting banks to postpone payment on $43 billion in short-term foreign debts for 90 days. The government allowed the value of the ruble to fall as low as 9.5 to the dollar on international monetary markets--a 34 percent devaluation. Economists said that the devaluation could possibly force the country to pay much higher prices for imported grain and other food, a scenario that would raise the Russian cost of living.|
18|Heavy rains cause mud slides in two Himalayan villages approximately 200 miles (322 kilometers) east of New Delhi in India's northern Uttar Pradesh state. Of the more than 200 people buried alive, 60 were Hindu pilgrims who had camped in the villages on their return from a religious journey to Tibet.|
19|Chicago Cubs' outfielder Sammy Sosa, in the 5th inning of a home game against the St. Louis Cardinals, hits his 48th home run of the season to take the lead in an on-going race to surpass Roger Maris's 1961 record of 61 home runs in a single season. In the 8th inning of the same game, Sosa's rival--Cardinals' first baseman Mark McGwire--also collects his 48th home run of the season. In the game's 10th inning, McGwire hits a second home run, into Wrigley Field's center field bleachers, to retake the home run lead and pilot the Cardinals to an 8-6 victory.|
20|The United States launches 75 cruise missiles from ships in the Arabian and Red Seas at two targets, one in Afghanistan and the other in Sudan. Officials described the target in Afghanistan as a terrorist training camp and the Sudanese target as a facility for making certain elements of chemical weapons. U.S. President Bill Clinton characterized the operation as an "act of self-defense" and "retribution" for the August 7 bombings of American embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency said it had linked the embassy bombings and the Afghani and Sudanese sites to a Saudi Arabian millionaire, Osama bin Laden, who lived in Afghanistan and was suspected of funding terrorist activities against the United States.|
21|Chinese President Jiang Zemin announces that he will postpone state visits to Japan and Russia, scheduled for September, because of massive flooding along the Yangtze River and its tributaries in China's industrial northeast. Since the flooding began in midsummer, 13.8 million people were evacuated and 5.8 million houses were destroyed, leaving millions homeless and subject to infectious diseases.|
22|The president of Uganda, Yoweri K. Museveni, warns that he will invade the Democratic Republic of Congo if Angola and Zimbabwe do not immediately withdraw their troops from the Congo. The Angolan and Zimbabwean forces came to the aid of the Congolese army in its attempt to end a rebellion against President Laurent Kabila. The rebels were backed by Rwanda and Uganda.|
23|Russian President Boris Yeltsin replaces Sergei Kiriyenko, who has held office as prime minister for only five months, with Viktor Chernomyrdin, who was himself dismissed as prime minister on March 23 in favor Kiriyenko. The move was subject to approval by the Russian Parliament. With Russia teetering on the edge of economic collapse, observers interpret Yeltsin's move as a desperate appeal for political support among Russia's new and powerful economic elite, who have long supported Chernomyrdin as Yeltsin's heir apparent. Yeltsin gave Kiriyenko, a 36-year-old former banker without political ties, a mandate to reform Russia's increasingly ailing economy. In July, the International Monetary Fund guaranteed the Russian government loans totaling $22.6 billion with the stipulation that Yeltsin and his prime minister undertake drastic economic reforms.|
24|A federal district court in Washington, D.C., unanimously bars the use of statistical sampling in the 2000 census on the basis that it would violate federal law. The U.S. Census Bureau had planned to employ sampling methods in addition to the traditional head count to avoid both the under and over counting of certain segments of the population, particularly in poorer urban areas. Critics of the Census Bureau had claimed that the attempt to count every person created errors in the 1990 census.|
25|The ruble goes into free fall on Moscow currency exchanges, tumbling 9 percent against the dollar before the Russian Central Bank intervenes by suspending trading. Bankers attempting to transfer bank funds out of rubles and into dollars triggered the decline, which caused runs on banks and massive price instability across the nation. In the Kremlin, Viktor Chernomyrdin, the acting prime minister, unveiled another plan to stretch out the repayment of government debt and suggested the possibility of setting up a coalition government to include members of the Communist opposition in parliament.|
25|Retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr., known for his moderating influence and swing vote on the court, dies at the age of 90 at his house in Richmond, Virginia.|
26|Hurricane Bonnie, which the U.S. Weather Bureau has rated a category 3 storm, hits land at the mouth of North Carolina's Cape Fear River with winds of 115 miles (185 kilometers) per hour and heavy rains.|
26|The ruble falls 40 percent against the German Deutsche mark in a single transaction on a Moscow currency exchange after the trading of rubles for dollars was suspended for the second day in a row. The Russian Central Bank also announced that it lacks the funds to further protect the value of the currency. Flying to the Crimean resort of Simfeopol, acting Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin meets with the managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Michel Camdessus, to convince the IMF to release $4.8 billion in loan payments that might help Russia stave off economic collapse. Political and economic experts in Moscow described Russia's current situation the most serious crisis to confront the country since the fall of Communism in 1991.|
27|Stock market investors worldwide react to dire economic news from Russia and Asia by selling off securities. In New York City, Dow Jones industrial average stocks fall 357.36 points or 4.19 percent. NASDAQ shares slide 4.62 percent. In Tokyo, the Nikkei dips by 3.04 percent. Key indexes on European exchanges drop 3 to 6 percent, while the values of stocks on Latin American markets plummet 6 to 10 percent.|
27|The Central Bank of Russia announces that currency exchanges will be closed for "some time to come," which makes it impossible in Russia to legally trade rubles for dollars or any other foreign currency.|
27|Government officials in Kuala Lumpur release statistics confirming that the Malaysian economy shrank in the second quarter of 1998 by 6.8 percent and is in severe recession. In Seoul, the Bank of Korea issued a statement that the South Korean economy, which contracted by 6.6 percent in the second quarter, is also officially in recession.|
28|The Tokyo Stock Exchange drops 3.5 percent, ending the week at its lowest level since 1986. During the week of Augusts 23, the value of all stocks on the Tokyo exchange fell by a total of $241 billion, a sum that exceeded the value of the annual output of the Russian economy. Yields on long-term bonds on Tokyo markets sink to 1.07 percent, which economists calculated to be the lowest interest rates on long-term investments in recorded history.|
29|More than 6,000 Northwest Airlines pilots go on strike, grounding the airline's fleet of 400 planes. Striking pilots claimed the airline was slowly moving its fleet from large jets to smaller craft solely to lower labor costs. Pilots on large jets were paid more than those on smaller planes. Labor also demanded increases in pay and retirement benefits to make up for the 16 percent cuts they received in 1993 to save the company from bankruptcy.|
29|A Cuban Tupolev-143 jet catches fire and explodes on a third takeoff attempt from the Quito, Ecuador, airport, killing 79 of 90 people aboard.|
30|Scientists, fearing the possibility of a major eruption of Sicily's Mount Etna, step up surveillance after at least seven earthquakes rattle the volcano.|
31|Dow Jones industrial average stocks on the New York Stock Exchange fall 512.61 points, or 6.4 percent. The decline was the second largest point drop in the Dow's history. Standard & Poor's 500 index stocks sagged by more than 69 points, or nearly 7 percent. The NASDAQ composite index fell by 140 points, or 8.6 percent, the greatest point drop in the exchange's history.|
