01|An explosion of unknown origin rocks the Ford Motor Company's River Rouge complex in Dearborn, Michigan, killing 6 employees and injuring at least 30 others. A subsequent fire shuts down the power plant, which normally produces sufficient energy to satisfy the electrical needs of a city the size of Boston. The Rouge--an enormous complex in which raw materials, such as iron ore and rubber, are transformed into completed automobiles--has been a symbol of mass production and industrial strength, since Henry Ford completed it in 1918.|
01|Navies and merchant fleets worldwide abandon use of the Morse code and the SOS distress call, adopted three months after the <I>Titanic</I> sank in 1912. SOS, which had no meaning, was adopted for the ease with which its Morse code signal, dot dot dot dash dash dash dot dot dot, could be recognized. The International Maritime Organization replaced SOS with the Global Maritime Distress and Safety System, a satellite network that pinpoints the locations of ships from their signals.|
02|A federal jury in Portland, Oregon, orders the creators of an antiabortion Website to pay more than $107 million in damages to Planned Parenthood and to a group of physicians whose names, as well as the names of their spouses and children, were listed on the Website under the heading "Butchers." Three physicians were murdered after being listed on the site.|
03|The Colorado Division of Wildlife releases a 3-year-old, female lynx, weighing 18 pounds (85 kilograms), into the Weminuche Wilderness area of the San Juan Mountains. The animal is the first of 50 lynxes the state agency plans to release in 1999. In the last 100 years, lynxes, which were once common in the area, have been sighted in Colorado only 22 times. The last lynx was sited in 1973.|
04|Deutsche Bank A.G., Germany's largest financial institution, releases documents that reveal that the bank helped finance the construction of the Auschwitz concentration camp, where sime 1.25 million Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals were murdered by German Nazis between 1941 and 1945. Deutsche Bank continues to face class action suits involving survivors' claims that the institution seized property and other wealth from German Jews during World War II (1939-1945).|
05|The British patent office declares that Diana, Princess of Wales, was a historic person, not a "commercial brand" and rejects a request from her estate and memorial fund to register her face as a trademark. Estate trustees had hoped to reserve all rights to the reproduction of her face on commercial products and prevent others from exploiting her image for profit.|
06|French President Jacques Chirac opens the Kosovo peace conference in Paris by strongly advising the 13-member delegation of the Serbian-dominated government of Yugoslavia and the 16 ethnic Albanian negotiators from Kosovo to put aside their differences for the sake of peace. At least 2,000 people have died in Kosovo, a province of Serbia, since February 1998, when Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milosevic began a crack down on the independence movement among the province's nearly 2 million ethnic-Albanians. The opening of the peace conference was delayed because Serbian authorities refused to provide travel permits to some members of the ethnic Albanian delegation on the grounds that they were members of the Kosovo Liberation Army, a separatist military organization.|
07|King Hussein of Jordan, who was widely admired for his role as a peacemaker in the Middle East, dies as age 63. He had ruled since 1952. Abdullah, the new king, who is 37 and the eldest of Hussein's sons, was an army major general until chosen as heir to the throne by his father on Jan. 26, 1999. Abdullah replaced the king's brother, Hassan, as crown prince.|
08|King Hussein of Jordan is buried in the capital, Amman, with Jordan's new king, Abdullah, and the heads of state of many of the world nations in attendance. Monarchs attending the funeral included the kings of Belgium, Norway, Spain, and Sweden, and Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands. Other dignitaries included President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, President Jacques Chirac of France, Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder of Germany, Prince Charles and Prime Minister Tony Blair of Great Britain, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, Crown Prince Naruhito of Japan, President Boris Yeltsin of Russia, and U.S. President Bill Clinton and former presidents Ford, Carter, and Bush.|
09|U.S. Department of Justice officials disclose plans to investigate Special Counsel Kenneth Starr, who led a four-year, $40-million investigation of President Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton. The officials suggest that there is evidence that Starr misled Attorney General Janet Reno about a possible relationship between himself and lawyers involved in the Paula Jones sexual harassment suit against the president. Starr claimed that the president's reluctance to reveal his relationship with a White House intern during testimony in the Jones civil suit constituted perjury and obstruction of justice. The House impeached the president on those grounds in December 1998. Officials with the Justice Department also intend to investigate the possibility that Starr overstepped his authority in his handling of witnesses and in his disclosures of secret grand jury information to the news media.|
10|Avalanches, triggered by unusually heavy snowfall, continue to roar down Alpine mountainsides near the ski resort of Chamonix, in the Mount Blanc region of France. Ten people were killed on February 9 when the first of the avalanches buried two villages in the area, which is a popular tourist destination. Search teams, using dogs and electronic sensors, rescue 20 people trapped in the snow and continue looking for survivors. More than 5 feet (150 centimeters) of new snow has fallen in the Alps since February 4, stranding thousands of tourists in French and Swiss mountain resorts.|
11|More than 2,400 of American Airlines' 9,200 pilots defy a federal court order and continue their protest against management by calling in sick. The "sickout," which began six days ago, upset the travel plans of tens of thousands of people worldwide and forced the airline to cancel as many of half of all its flights, domestic and foreign. The pilots demand that management pay the pilots at Reno Air, a small airline that American bought in December 1998, at the same scale as American pilots. The pilots fear that the acquisition of Reno was a ploy to lower pay rates at American. Management prefers to delay the integration of Reno Air and American and keep Reno pilots at their current, lower pay scale.|
12|The United States Senate acquits President Bill Clinton on both charges for which the House of Representatives impeached him in December 1998. Senators reject the charge of perjury 55 to 45, with 10 Republicans breaking ranks to vote against conviction. The vote on whether the president willfully obstructed justice by attempting to conceal his relationship with a former White House intern ties 50 to 50. No Democrats break with the president in either vote. The U.S. Constitution specifies that a two-third majority of the Senate--67 members--must vote to remove the president from office. The voting ends a five-week trial, which was only the second such presidential impeachment in the 210-year history of the republic.|
13|President Bill Clinton announces on his weekly radio address that he will send nearly 4,000 U.S. troops to Kosovo as part of a NATO peacekeeping force if ethnic Albanians in Kosovo and the government in Belgrade, the capital of Yugoslavia, are able to come to terms in a peace agreement. The two groups, negotiating in Paris, have made little progress toward resolving their conflict. Yugoslavia launched the initial crackdown on the province in February 1998 with attacks on the Kosovo Liberation Army, which demands independence for the area's nearly 2 million ethnic Albanians. Kosovo is a province of Serbia, which dominates Yugoslavia.|
14|American Indians are more than twice as likely as other ethnic groups in the United States to be victims of violent crime, according to the first comprehensive study of Indians and crime conducted by the U.S. Department of Justice. Justice Department officials report that unlike whites and blacks in the United States, Indians are more likely to be the victims of violent crimes committed by members of a race other than their own. Only 29 percent of those people who commit violent crimes against Indians are other Indians. Whites commit 60 percent of all violent crimes against Indians. Blacks commit 10 percent of such crimes. Survey results reveal that alcohol is involved in more than 50 percent of all incidents of violence against Indians.|
15|The influenza that killed between 20 million and 50 million people worldwide in 1918 was caused by an ordinary flu virus similar to current influenza viruses, according to a report by Jeffrey K. Taubenberger in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Taubenberger notes that he and his associates at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, working with virus samples taken from lung tissue preserved since 1918, have been unable to discover why the flu was so deadly.|
16|Kurds, an ethnic group from Southwest Asia, stage demonstrations in 15 countries in response to the arrest of Abdullah Ocalan, leader of an independence movement for 20 million Kurds in Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Armenia. Ocalan was seized by Turkish agents on February 15 as he left the Greek embassy in Nairobi, Kenya. Kurds respond with attacks on Greek and Kenyan embassies and consulates in 28 European, Canadian, and Australian cities. Ocalan has been wanted by Turkish authorities since he came to the fore in the guerrilla war that has resulted in the death of some 30,000 Turks and Kurds since 1984. The United States lists Abdullah Ocalan's Kurdistan Workers Party on its list of international terrorist organizations.|
17|Israeli security guards open fire on dozens of Kurd demonstrators, armed with clubs and hammers, as they storm the Israeli embassy in Berlin. Three Kurds die, and 16 are wounded. In a second day of mass demonstrations in the wake of the capture of Kurd rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan, protesters seize hostages at embassies in Zurich and Stockholm and attack Turkish institutions, including a mosque, in Hamburg, Germany. The chancellor of Germany, Gerhard Schroeder, threatens to expel all Kurds from Germany, more than 500,000 people, if the violence continues.|
18|Danish physicist Lene Vestergaard Hau announces in the journal <I>Nature</I> that she and a research team at the Rowland Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, have succeeded in slowing light to the lowest speed ever observed. By beaming lasers through an extremely dense cloud of sodium atoms chilled to within a fraction of a degree of absolute zero, Hau slowed light to 38 miles (61 kilometers) per hour--20 million times slower than light's highest speed of 186,282 miles (299,792 kilometers) per second. Atoms cooled to near <I>absolute zero</I> (theoretically, the lowest possible temperature) form into state of matter in which they act as a single atom. Physicists predict that precise control over the speed of light has a number of potential applications, including uses in communication systems, optical computers, and high-speed switches.|
18|Robert C. Smith, the senior senator from New Hampshire, announces his candidacy for the Republican nomination for president of the United States. A staunch conservative, Smith advocates implementation of the national antimissile defense--or "Star Wars"--system first advocated by President Ronald Reagan. He supports a full accounting of U.S. servicemen missing in action in the Vietnam War, is firmly antiabortion, and calls for an across-the-board 10 percent tax cut.|
19|The U.S. Commerce Department announces that sales of U.S. exports declined in 1998 for the first time in 10 years, pushing the trade deficit, or unfavorable balance of trade, to a record $168.2 billion in 1998. Economists blame the current economic recession in Asia for driving down the demand for U.S. goods in Asia and lowering the price of Asian goods on American markets.|
20|Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee of India crosses the border into Pakistan where he is embraced by the Pakistani prime minister, Nawaz Sharif. The visit is only the third paid by an Indian leader to neighboring Pakistan since both gained independence from Great Britain in 1947.|
21|The government of Saddam Hussein blames the February 19 murder of Ayatollah Mohammed Sadeq al-Sadr and his sons on major Western powers "conspiring against Iraq." Mohammed al-Sadr was the leading Shiite cleric in Iraq, where the Shiite majority is persecuted by the Sunni-dominated government. News of the murder sparked violent conflicts between Shiites and the police in a Baghdad mosque on February 20. The leader of Iran, Shiite cleric Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, publicaly stated that Saddam Hussein's government was responsible for the murder. Sadr, the fourth important Shiite cleric to be murdered in Iraq in recent months, defied a government ban on assemblies by ordering Shiite males to attend public prayers on Fridays.|
22|U.S. and British warplanes bomb weapons depots, missile sites, and communication centers in northern Iraq. According a Clinton Administration spokesperson, the attacks are made in response to Iraqi antiaircraft fire on U.S. jets and the intrusion of Iraqi MIG warplanes in no-flight zones.|
23|At least 35 people die in an avalanche in the Austrian ski resort of Galtuer, and up to 80,000 tourists are snowbound in Alpine ski resorts by a blizzard of more than 16 inches (41 centimeters) of snow and winds of 175 miles (282 kilometers) per hour. The storm is the latest in a series of massive snowfalls, characterized as the fiercest in half a century, that have set off huge avalanches that have killed dozens of people in Austria, France, Italy, and Switzerland.|
24|Senior U.S. Army officials announce that no new remains will be placed in the Tomb of the Unknowns in Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. Scientists have concluded that genetic tests have made all remains identifiable. The remains of a serviceman from the Vietnam War (1937-1975) were removed from the tomb in May 1998 after an investigation concluded that they could probably be identified. DNA testing confirmed that the remains were those of First Lieutenant Michael Blassie, an Air Force pilot shot down over South Vietnam in 1972.|
25|Bacteria resistant to the most powerful antibiotics, including vancomycin, have been found in commercial chicken feed produced in the United States, according to a research group led by J. Glenn Morris, Jr., at the University of Maryland at Baltimore. Morris notes in the British medical journal Lancet that while the discovery is the first to be reported in the United States, detection of such organisms on the threshold of the human food chain is an ominous sign of greater contamination.|
26|Pacific Lumber Company, a subsidiary of Texas-based Maxxam Inc., rejects California's $480-million offer for 10,000 acres of redwoods, of which 5,000 acres consist of old-growth forest with trees some 1,500 years old. A $250-million federal appropriation for the so-called Headwaters forest, located 250 miles (400 kilometers) north of San Francisco, expires on March 1 unless Pacific Lumber and California can reach an agreement.|
27|The United Nations (UN) Security Council, called into emergency session, passes a resolution demanding that Ethiopia and Eritrea halt hostilities and resolve the border dispute that ignited a war in May 1998. During the week of February 21, Ethiopian forces smashed through Eritrean defenses along the disputed border, which is approximately 600 miles (965 kilometers) in length.|
28|Former general Olusegun Obasanjo is declared president of Nigeria after receiving 62 percent of the vote. The February 27 balloting was Nigeria's first free election after 15 years of military dictatorship, which left Africa's most populous and potentially wealthy nation in ruins. Obasanjo, a former military ruler, relinquished power 20 years ago. He was Nigeria's only post-colonial leader to leave office voluntarily until the current military ruler, General Abdulsalem Abubaker, instituted a plan aimed at restoring the government to civilian rule following the June 1998 death of General Sani Abacha.|
