01|John Kagwe of Kenya wins the New York City Marathon. He completed the 26-mile (42-kilometer) race in 2 hours, 8 minutes, and 45 seconds, beating countryman Joseph Chebet by a margin of 3 seconds. It was the closest finish in the 29 years of the marathon. Franca Fiacconi of Italy finished in 2 hours, 25 minutes, and 17 seconds to clinch the women's title.|
02|Officials in Central America estimate that the death toll from Hurricane Mitch exceeds 10,000 people. Another 10,000 people remained missing. The storm, which stalled over Honduras and Nicaragua for nearly a week in late October, dumped as much as 24 inches (61 centimeters) of rain every 24 hours, triggering massive flooding and mudslides. The storm wiped out entire villages in Honduras and Nicaragua and damaged bridges in both countries so severely that nearly all were judged unsafe. Officials in Honduras estimated that 90 percent of all crops, the basis of the country's economy, and 70 percent of the infrastructure were destroyed. Mitch, which began as a Category 5 hurricane with winds of 180 miles (290 kilometers) per hour, disintegrated into a tropical storm, which the U.S. Weather Service labeled one of the most destructive of the 1900's.|
03|Democrats showed surprising strength in mid-term elections, picking up five seats in the House of Representatives and holding their ground in the Senate, where Republicans failed to increase their 55-to-45 vote margin. The election marked the first time since 1934 that the party of a sitting U.S. president gained seats in Congress in a midterm election. The outcome surprised most political experts, who had predicted that Republicans would gain seats as a result of the scandal surrounding President Bill Clinton's relationship with Monica Lewinsky, a former White House intern. Republicans maintained their nationwide control of governorships but lost three major posts in California, Iowa, and Minnesota.|
04|The Russian government announces that it will not pay its foreign debts in 1999 and acknowledges that it has only a two- to three-week supply of food. The government appealed to the United States and Europe for food and financial aid.|
04|A United States federal grand jury returns a 238-count indictment charging Saudi Arabian exile Osama bin Laden with conspiring to bomb two U.S. embassies in Africa in August and with acts of terrorism against Americans abroad. The U.S. government offered a $5-million reward for information leading to the arrest of bin Laden, who was believed to be living in Afghanistan under the protection of the Taliban, the Islamic fundamentalist movement that ruled the country.|
05|Scientists for the first time isolate human embryonic stem cells--unspecialized cells that are capable of developing into any of the body's specialized cells. Researchers hoped to use the cells--derived from human <i>embryos</i> (organisms at an early stage of development before birth)--to grow tissue for human transplants and introduce genes into the body to remedy inherited disease.|
05|The chairman of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, Henry J. Hyde, sends President Bill Clinton an 11-page letter asking the president to admit or deny 81 accusations made against him by independent counsel Kenneth Starr in his report on the president's relationship with Monica Lewinsky, a former White House intern.|
06|Newt Gingrich (R., Georgia), speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, announces that he will not seek reelection as speaker of the House and will leave Congress when his term expires in January 1999. Gingrich orchestrated the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994, but his Republican colleagues blamed him for the party's unexpected losses in the November 3 mid-term elections.|
06|The Israeli Cabinet suspends deliberations on a peace accord between Israel and the Palestinians after a bomb explodes outside a marketplace in Jerusalem, killing the two bombers and wounding more than 20 other people. Israel called on Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, to crack down on terrorism as he had promised in previous peace agreements.|
07|United States Senator John Glenn returns to Earth after a nine-day mission on the space shuttle Discovery. Glenn, the world's oldest astronaut at age 77, served as a subject of geriatric research on the mission. In 1962, Glenn became a national hero for being the first American to circle the planet in space.|
08|United States President Bill Clinton meets with military leaders to discuss plans for an attack on Iraq in response to Iraq's refusal to allow the United Nations to conduct weapons inspections.|
09|Representative Robert L. Livingston of Louisiana locks up the votes to become the next speaker of the House of Representatives. Republicans were not scheduled to cast their ballots for speaker until November 18, but Livingston was assured the role of speaker in the 106th Congress after his main challenger, Representative Christopher Cox of California, withdrew from the race. Livingston would replace Newt Gingrich of Georgia, who resigned the speakership less than one week earlier.|
10|In his inaugural speech, newly-elected German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder proclaimed a "Republic of the New Center" and said that Germany had to find the strength and expertise to modernize and equip itself for global economic competition. Schroder was Germany's first Social Democratic Chancellor since 1982.|
11|President Bill Clinton orders a major buildup of air and ground forces in the Persian Gulf and issues a warning to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein that the United States is prepared to attack Iraq over its continued refusal to cooperate with United Nations (UN) arms inspectors. Clinton noted that the United States would attack unless Iraq immediately allowed the UN to resume inspections of weapons facilities. The UN had withdrawn nearly all of its inspectors from Iraq in anticipation of a U.S. attack.|
11|The Israeli Cabinet approves a new Israeli-Palestinian peace accord, which calls for an Israeli troop withdrawal from 13 percent of the West Bank in exchange for a Palestinian crackdown on violent militants. The cabinet had suspended deliberations on the agreement on November 6 after a suicide bombing in Jerusalem injured 25 Israelis. Political observers expected the Israeli Parliament to approve the agreement later in November.|
12|Officials with the Clinton administration sign an international agreement calling for sharp cuts in emissions of industrial gases from burning coal, oil, wood, and natural gas. The U.S. Senate had to approve the treaty before the United States was legally bound by it, however.|
13|President Bill Clinton agrees to pay Paula Corbin Jones $850,000 to drop her lawsuit claiming that he sexually harassed her in 1991 when he was still governor of Arkansas. Clinton's lawyer called Jones's accusation baseless, but said that the president decided to settle the lawsuit to eliminate the risk that an appeals court would prolong the case, which a federal district judge dismissed in April.|
13|At least five people are killed in street riots in Jakarta, Indonesia, after soldiers fire on demonstrators. The riots broke out after Indonesia's parliament voted to hold general elections in the spring of 1999 and to institute democratic reforms. The protesters, mainly students pressing for the withdrawal of the military from its dominant role in politics, threw rocks and gasoline bombs at soldiers. Similar protests in May 1998 forced the resignation of President Suharto after 32 years in power.|
14|President Bill Clinton of the United States cancels a planned military strike on Iraq just hours before it was to begin. The cancellation is in response to President Saddam Hussein's vague promise, made in a letter to the United Nations, that Iraq would allow inspections of weapon sites. Clinton called the Iraqi letter "unacceptable," but held off on the attack after Iraq promised full cooperation with arms inspectors.|
15|President Bill Clinton announces that the Iraqi government has made an unconditional promise to cooperate completely with United Nations weapons inspectors. American and British forces would remain in the Persian Gulf poised to attack if Iraq broke its promise. Clinton also called for the overthrow of President Saddam Hussein, describing him as a threat to world peace and security.|
16|The government of Japan announces that it has approved a $190-billion economic stimulus package. Many economists have blamed the Japanese economy, which was in recession, for the Asian economic crisis that began in early 1997 and spread to Russia and South America in 1998.|
17|The Federal Reserve, an independent government agency that oversees the U.S. banking system, cuts interest rates by a quarter of a percentage point in an effort to halt an economic slowdown. The cut was the third such reduction in seven weeks.|
18|The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) issues a statement regretting that the morning's meteorite shower, which NASA had predicted would offer spectacular viewing in the United States, failed to live up to its billing. Earth's passage through the long tail of the Comet Tempel-Tuttle causes the Leonid shower, so named because the meteors appear to come from the direction of the constellation Leo. Leonid showers occur each November but are spectacular only every 33 years when the comet travels through the inner solar system and sheds swarms of particles as it nears the sun.|
19|The Judiciary Committee of the United States House of Representatives opens impeachment hearings against President Bill Clinton with testimony by independent counsel Kenneth Starr on the nature of the president's relationship with Monica Lewinsky, a former White House intern. Starr defended his four-year, $45-million investigation into the political, financial, and private lives of President Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton. He admitted, however, that he had found no evidence of impeachable offenses by either the president or first lady in relation to Whitewater, a failed Arkansas land deal; the Clinton Administration's 1996 FBI file requests; or the dismissal in 1993 of the White House travel office staff.|
20|The attorneys general of 46 states agree to settle their lawsuits against U.S. tobacco companies for $206 billion, which the states will share over a period of years. The states had sued cigarette manufacturers to recover Medicaid money spent treating diseases related to smoking.|
21|President Bill Clinton, on a visit to Seoul, South Korea, appeals to North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program in favor of strengthening its relationship with the United States and South Korea. International experts have suggested that North Korea has failed to live up to its 1994 pledge to give up its nuclear weapons program in exchange for billions of dollars in foreign aid.|
22|Foreign Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf announces that Iraq does not intend to honor its November 14 promise to cooperate with international arms inspectors and will not allow inspectors to see documents related to its weapons program.|
23|The European Union (EU) votes to lift its 32-month ban on beef from Great Britain. The EU had placed British beef exports under a worldwide ban in 1996 when some British cows were found to carry a disease linked to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a fatal, degenerative, brain disorder that affects human beings.|
23|Russian President Boris Yeltsin, suffering from pneumonia and a high fever, receives the president of China, Jiang Zemin, in his hospital suite at Moscow's Central Clinic. The Russian president's current ailment was his third serious bout of illness in six weeks. He had been hospitalized five times since undergoing bypass heart surgery two years ago.|
24|A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Justice announces that Attorney General Janet Reno has concluded that there is insufficient evidence to appoint an independent counsel to investigate Vice President Al Gore's role in fund raising during the 1996 presidential election. The attorney general's decision capped a second justice department inquiry into whether the vice president illegally solicited campaign funds while on federal property and then misled Justice Department officials investigating his role as a political fund raiser.|
25|Great Britain's highest court rules that General Augusto Pinochet's status as the former ruler of Chile does not make him immune from arrest. Pinochet had been held in Britain at the request of a Spanish court, which sought his extradition on grounds of genocide and terrorism committed against Spanish citizens during Pinochet's rule from 1973 to 1990. In a 3 to 2 ruling, the judges noted that Pinochet was not protected by sovereign immunity because torture and the taking of hostages were not legitimate acts of a head of state.|
25|The government of Prime Minister Mesut Yilmaz of Turkey falls in a parliamentary confidence vote taken after the prime minister was accused of helping gangsters buy a state-owned bank. During his 17 months in office, Yilmaz struggled to appease groups demanding an Islamic-based government and also Turkey's military, which clung rigidly to the country's secular roots established in 1923 by the founder of modern Turkey, Kemal Ataturk.|
26|British Prime Minister Tony Blair, addressing a joint session of the parliament of the Irish Republic, asks the government of Ireland to work alongside Great Britain to keep the Northern Ireland peace resolution, known as the Belfast Agreement, on track. The agreement had stalled over the refusal of the Irish Republican Army to disarm, one of the basic provisions of the accord. Blair, the first British prime minister to speak before the parliament of the Irish Republic, appealed to the Irish lawmakers for an end to the strife that has existed between Great Britain and Ireland for centuries.|
26|An express passenger train traveling enroute to Calcutta through India's Punjab collides with rail cars that had uncoupled accidentally from a mail train. The crash killed at least 200 people and injured 260 others. Physicians worked through the night amputating limbs in order to free survivors from the wreckage.|
27|A study issued by the Worldwatch Institute, an environmental research group, and Munich Re, a company that insures insurance companies, reports that disasters resulting from violent weather in the first 11 months of 1998 caused a record $89 billion in damages worldwide. The total exceeded the cost of weather-related disasters worldwide in all of the 1980's. Floods, drought, storms, and fires killed 32,000 people and displaced 300 million people in 1998, according to Worldwatch. The report listed Hurricane Mitch in Central America, the flooding of China's Yangtze River, and flooding in Bangladesh as the worst disasters of 1998.|
28|President Jacques Chirac of France announces that United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan has secured promises from eight African leaders to sign a cease-fire in Congo's current civil war. The leaders, meeting at the Louvre Museum in Paris under the auspices of the United Nations, included President Laurent Kabila of the Republic of Congo and the heads of neighboring nations that had either supported the rebellion of Congolese Tutsi against Kabila or backed his government in Kinshasa. Kabila ousted Mobutu Sese Seko and took power in the Congo in 1997. Representatives of Congo's Tutsi rebels were not invited to the meeting.|
29|Nearly 74 percent of voters in Switzerland reject an initiative that would legalize the sale of all drugs, including cocaine and heroin.|
30|A spokesperson for Deutsche Bank AG reveals that the German bank's $10.1-billion acquisition of Bankers Trust Corporation will result in the lose of 5,500 jobs in London and New York City. Deutsche Bank expected the cuts to save the newly merged company $1.7 billion a year.|
30|Volvo AB, the Swedish automobile manufacturer, announces that it will lay off 7 percent of its work force--5,300 employees--in order to increase productivity and profits. Half of the cuts would be in European plants and half in Volvo's international divisions, including U.S. plants.|
