01|A mountain cable car transporting observatory workers to the Plateau de Bure radio-telescope in the French Alps southeast of Paris falls 260 feet (80 meters) onto a rocky slope, killing all 20 passengers. French Interior Minister Jean-Claude Chevenement describes the accident as the worst such disaster in French history.|
02|The governments of Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria reject a Russian request for the use of their airspace to fly planeloads of Russian troops into Kosovo. Hungary, a new member of NATO, and Romania and Bulgaria, which hope to join the alliance, consulted with top U.S. and NATO officials before rejecting Russia's request. Russia asked to fly 3,600 troops into Pristina, Kosovo's provincial capital, on July 4. On June 11, Russian troops, stationed in Bosnia, marched into Kosovo and took control of the Pristina airport.|
02|Prime ministers Tony Blair of Great Britain and Bertie Ahern of Ireland threaten to shut down Northern Ireland's new legislature unless the province's two principle political parties, the Protestant Ulster Unionists and Roman Catholic Sinn Fein, resolve the current impasse that threatens the 1998 Northern Ireland peace settlement. The crisis centers on whether paramilitary groups, particularly the Irish Republican Army, will disarm before or after the creation of a Roman Catholic-Protestant Cabinet designed to govern Northern Ireland.|
03|Winds of 20 miles (32 kilometers) per hour drive a forest fire over more than 2,000 acres (809 hectares) outside Lewiston in northern California, forcing the evacuation of at least 500 people. Outside Reno, Nevada, strong winds drive a second wildfire across 3,000 acres (1,214 hectares).|
04|Americans sweep singles tennis at Wimbledon, England, for the first time in 15 years. Lindsay Davenport wins her first Wimbledon title by beating seven-time champion Steffi Graf 6-4, 7-5. Defending champion Pete Sampras takes a sixth Wimbledon title, a record in this century, by crushing Andre Agassi 6-3, 6-4, 7-5.|
04|A police chase through southern Illinois ends when an avowed white supremacist, Benjamin Smith, dies of a self-inflicted gunshot to the head. Police sought the 21-year-old man in connection with a three-day shooting spree that left two people dead and nine injured. The search began in Chicago on the night of July 2, after a gunman in a blue Ford shot at Orthodox Jews walking home from Sabbath services. In suburban Skokie, a gunman killed a black man, later identified as former college basketball coach Ricky Byrdsong. Similar attacks on Asians and blacks occurred on July 3 in Springfield, Decatur, and Urbana, Illinois. A man, who was also driving a blue Ford, killed a Korean student outside a church in Bloomington, Indiana, on the morning of July 4. Smith, the suspect in all of these shootings, belonged to the World Church of the Creator, a white supremacist organization.|
05|A 19-year-old Kurdish girl, flashing a "V for victory" hand signal, detonates bombs strapped to her body, killing herself and wounding 17 people on the streets of Adana, Turkey. The bombing is the third major attack on Turkish civilians by Kurdish guerrillas since a Turkish court found Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan guilty of treason on June 29 and condemned him to death.|
06|Ehud Barak takes office as Israel's 10th prime minister. Barak, one of Israel's most decorated soldiers, pledges he will make peace with Arab neighbors. Before taking office, Barak scheduled meetings in July with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, King Abdullah of Jordan, and President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt.|
06|Massive flooding in China's Yangtze River Valley forces the evacuation of more than 1.8 million people. The river, swollen to its highest level since records have been kept, has flooded 4,000 square miles (10,000 square kilometers) of farmland in central and eastern China. The Ministry of Civil Affairs estimates that the flood, which has killed 240 people, threatens the safety of 60 million Chinese.|
07|A Florida jury decides in the first class-action lawsuit brought by ailing smokers that tobacco companies defraud the public by producing "defective and unreasonably dangerous" products. The same companies are found guilty of conspiring to keep information from the public about the dangers of smoking and the addictive nature of cigarettes.|
07|British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook announces in the House of Commons that Great Britain is resuming foreign relations with Libya after 15 years. The move comes approximately three months after Libyan strongman, Moammar Gadhafi, surrendered for trial the two men accused of the terrorist bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. The United States, claiming that Moammar Gadhafi backed terrorists, broke diplomatic relations with Libya in 1981 and continues to impose travel and trade restrictions against the Gadhafi government.|
08|Intense fighting between Indian forces and Muslim militants in Kashmir continues, with heavy casualties on both sides. The combat goes on despite Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's pledge to President Bill Clinton, during a recent visit to Washington, D.C., to persuade Muslim combatants to withdraw. While control of Kashmir is divided between the two countries, both claim the territory in its entirety. The government of India maintains that Muslim militants in Kashmir are Pakistani soldiers. Officials in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, deny the assertion, claiming that the combatants are actually Kashmiri insurgents who receive only moral support from Pakistan. India has battled for two months to evict the militants from the Indian side of the cease-fire line, which serves as the border between the two countries.|
09|The highest lighthouse in the United States, the 208-foot (63-meter) Cape Hatteras Lighthouse near Buxton, North Carolina, completes a journey of more than 2,650 feet (805 meters) to a location farther away from the Atlantic Ocean, which threatened the foundation of the 100-year-old structure. The journey, costing approximately $10 million, was made on rails lubricated with soap.|
10|The United States women's soccer team beats the Chinese team on a penalty kick after a scoreless tie to win the 1999 World Cup championship. The match, staged at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California, was played before the largest stadium crowd to ever attend a woman's sporting event, 90,185 people.|
11|An official with the Pakistani government in Islamabad announces that Pakistan and India have agreed to a truce that allows Indian troops to withdraw from northern Kashmir. In New Delhi, the Indian capital, a spokesperson for Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee denies that the Indian army has agreed to a truce or cease-fire of any kind. He notes, however, that the Indian army in Kashmir sees evidence that Muslim combatants are withdrawing from the Indian side of the cease-fire line, which serves as a border between the two countries. The Indian army has attempted to evict the combatants for two months.|
11|Sixteen percent of the U.S. jail and prison population, approximately 284,000 people, are mentally ill, reports the U.S. Justice Department in a newly published departmental study. The study reveals that state prison inmates who are mentally ill are twice as likely as other inmates to have been homeless before being arrested and to have been physically or sexually abused as children.|
12|Iranian student demonstrators clash with police in Teheran, the capital, for the fifth day in a row. The protests were sparked by the passage of a new law curbing freedom of the press and by the shutdown of an independent newspaper. The paper supported President Mohammed Khatami, who is considered a liberal reformer in Iran. While Khatami was elected by popular vote, actual control of the government remains in the hands of Muslim clerics, particularly Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country's supreme religious leader.|
13|The 200 wealthiest people in the world doubled their fortunes in the four years since 1995, the United Nations (UN) reports in a survey that focuses on the costs and benefits of the emerging global economy. The UN's Human Development Report notes that the combined assets of three billionaires--Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates; the Walton family, which controls the Wal-Mart chain; and the Sultan of Brunei--exceed the total gross national products of the world's 43 poorest countries. Gross national product is the value of all goods and services produced in a country in a given year.|
13|Street battles rage through Iran's capital, Teheran, closing much of the city's commerce, including the vast bazaar. Police and national security forces, numbering in the thousands, fire tear gas into crowds that number in the tens of thousands. Bands of Revolutionary Guard vigilantes brandish shields and batons in hand-to-hand combat with demonstrators. Media coverage of the civil unrest, the most widespread and violent since the 1979 revolution, is shut down after Iran's national press reported that the demonstrations had spread to cities outside the capital. The protests began with the passage of a law suppressing freedom of the press and the closing of an influential newspaper that supported government reform.|
14|An Israeli Arab lawmaker, Hashem Mohammed, is seated on the Israeli parliament's Foreign Affairs and Security Committee. The appointment, protested by members of the conservative Likud Party, breaks a long-standing tradition of banning Arabs from parliamentary committees and panels.|
15|Texas Governor George W. Bush declares that he will not accept matching federal campaign funds in his bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000. The refusal frees Bush from conforming to the spending limits applied to candidates who receive public campaign money. With the first presidential straw poll and primary still in the future, Bush has raised a record $37 million for his campaign war chest.|
16|Vote counting in Indonesia's parliamentary election is completed more than six weeks after the June 7 polling. The opposition party led by Megawati Sukarno-putri is the clear-cut winner with 33.7 percent of the votes, giving it 154 seats in the 700-member People's Consultative Assembly. The Assembly will select Indonesia's next president in November. Megawati Sukarno-putri is the daughter of Indonesia's founding president, Sukarno, who held power from 1945 until 1967. The June 7 polling, Indonesia's first free election since Sukarno dissolved the parliament in 1960, was moderated by an international board that included former U.S. President Jimmy Carter.|
16|A small private plane piloted by John F. Kennedy Jr. disappears into the Atlantic Ocean off Martha's Vineyard near Cape Cod, triggering a massive search for the son of the late U.S. president. Kennedy was traveling with his wife, Caroline Bessette Kennedy, and sister-in-law, Lauren Bessette.|
16|The price of a share of Microsoft stock rises to $99.4375. The increase pushes the value of Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates's company holdings to $100 billion.|
17|At least 10,000 Kosovars died at the hands of Serbian soldiers and police during Serbia's three-month campaign to drive ethnic Albanians from the Yugoslav province, reports the chief investigator for the United Nations (UN) War Crimes Tribunal, J. Clint Williamson. Williamson's figure is based on estimates made by investigators for the UN, NATO, and private international relief agencies.|
18|David Cone of the New York Yankees, playing opposite the Montreal Expos in Yankee Stadium, retires 27 batters in a row to pitch the third perfect game in Yankee history and the team's second perfect game in slightly more than one year. Cone's perfect game is only the 14th since 1904. The game is attended by Don Larsen, who pitched a perfect game for the Yankees in the 1956 World Series.|
19|Senator Edward M. Kennedy (D., Massachusetts) confirms that on July 18 the U.S. Coast Guard shifted its search and rescue operation for John F. Kennedy Jr., his wife, Caroline Bessette Kennedy, and sister-in-law, Lauren Bessette, to a search and recovery operation. The senator acknowledges that the three victims are likely dead.|
20|Muslim guerrillas kill 20 Hindus in three separate incidents in remote areas of the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. Officials in New Delhi, India's capital, fear the murders indicate a renewal of the hit-and-run violence against Hindus that claimed 24,000 lives in the last 10 years. Both Pakistan, which is overwhelmingly Muslim, and India, which is predominantly Hindu, claim sovereignty over Kashmir and have twice gone to war over the territory. The Indian army has attempted for two months to evict Muslim insurgents from positions inside India's border with Pakistan in Kashmir. Pakistan denies India's claim that the Muslim guerrillas include Pakistani army regulars.|
21|The bodies of John F. Kennedy, Jr., his wife, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, and sister-in-law, Lauren Bessette, are discovered off Martha's Vineyard in the small plane that went down in the Atlantic Ocean on July 16.|
21|Canadian authorities arrest more than 100 illegal Chinese immigrants aboard a Chinese fishing vessel on the western coast of Vancouver Island, about 190 miles (305 kilometers) northwest of Victoria. The immigrants left Fuzhou, China, in mid-June aboard a boat that immigration officers described as "rusting, filthy, and obsolete." One of the immigrants claims to have paid smugglers $38,000 for the trip. All but 18 of the 21 passengers and crew members aboard the boat are women. A similar boat loaded with an unknown number of Asian immigrants sank recently near the Queen Charlotte Islands, north of Vancouver.|
22|AIDS overtakes war as the foremost killer of human beings in eastern and southern Africa, reports Stephen Lewis, the deputy executive director of the United Nations Children's Fund. In that region of Africa, where 45 percent of the world's AIDS cases are located, the disease killed 1.4 million people and orphaned 6 million children in 1998.|
22|The ashes of John F. Kennedy Jr., his wife, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, and sister-in-law, Lauren Bessette, are committed to the Atlantic Ocean off Martha's Vineyard near Cape Cod. The ceremony, attended by members of the Kennedy and Bessette families, takes place aboard the Briscoe, a U.S. Navy destroyer loaned for the occasion by President Bill Clinton.|
23|King Hassan II of Morocco, who ruled for 38 years, dies at the age of 70. Hassan's eldest son and successor, Sidi Mohammed, is expected to continue in his father's role as a mediator between Israel and the Arab nations of the Middle East.|
23|An All Nippon Airways passenger, claiming to want a "crack at the real thing," takes over the controls of a Boeing 747 with 517 people aboard after attacking and killing the pilot with a knife. Crew members, alerted to the problem by a sudden, violent plunge in altitude, overpower the hijacker, an unemployed, 28-year-old Japanese man, and return the plane safely to Tokyo's Haneda Airport.|
24|Ross Perot, who twice ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. presidency, refuses to relinquish his position as head of the Reform Party, which he founded. The Reform Party's most successful candidate to date, Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura, suggested in a speech at the party's national convention in Dearborn, Michigan, on July 23, that it was time for Perot to step aside. Perot drew 19 percent of the vote in the 1992 presidential election and 8 percent in 1996.|
25|Lance Armstrong, 27-year-old leader of the U.S. Postal Service bicycle team, wins the 86th running of the Tour de France, which has been called the world's greatest bicycle race and most grueling sporting event. Armstrong is only the second American to win the event. In 1996, he was diagnosed with testicular cancer, which had spread to his lungs and brain, but has tested free of the disease for more than two years.|
26|Chinese police arrest 1,200 government employees in the latest round of an official campaign to stamp out the Falun Gong spiritual movement. More than 5,000 people have been taken into custody since the ban went into affect on July 19. Prisoners are sent to camps for instruction in Marxist ideology and Chinese Communist doctrine. Falun Gong, which adherents claim is apolitical, combines slow-motion exercise, meditation, and breathing techniques with ideas from Buddhism and Taoism. Sect leader Li Hongzhi claims there are 100 million Falun Gong adherents in China. By comparison, the Communist Party claims 60 million members in China. Political observers in Beijing, the capital, believe the mysterious appearance in April of 10,000 silent, Falun Gong protesters outside the compound that houses top Chinese officials profoundly shook President Jiang Zemin, who is said to be behind the anti-Falun Gong campaign.|
26|The Japanese Minister of Health reports that tuberculosis is the number one infectious disease in Japan and declares a national emergency because of the rate at which the disease is being spread. In 1997, 42,715 people were treated for tuberculosis in Japan and 2,742 people died of the airborne disease, which in most cases is acquired through close, prolonged contact with an infected individual.|
27|Twenty people drown when a sudden torrential rain in the Swiss Alps triggers a flash flood in a mountain stream, trapping 45 adventurers and 8 guides "canyoning" near the resort town of Interlaken. Canyoning, or canyoneering, as the sport is called in the United States, involves swimming rapids, sliding down mountain streams without a raft, and rappelling (descending on a rope by means of short drops) down gorges and waterfalls. Affluent young people from Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and the United States flock to Switzerland for the sport, which is categorized with ice-climbing and bungee jumping as an "extreme sport."|
28|Scientists, after 15 years of laboratory research, have turned normal human cells into cancer cells, reports Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Robert A. Weinberg in the journal Nature. Weinberg, who led a team of colleagues at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, used one gene to trigger relentless cellular growth and two other genes to inactivate signals that limit cellular growth and life span. Researchers believe the discovery could lead to an early test for cancer as well as to new treatments and a possible cure.|
29|The U.S. Labor Department announces that the employment cost index, a measure of paid wages and benefits, rose 1.1 percent in the second quarter of 1999. Economists believe the jump, which is the largest in eight years, may be a sign of inflation in the economy. The employment cost index rose 0.4 percent in the first quarter of the year.|
29|A 44-year-old securities day-trader and former chemist commits suicide after shooting 9 people and wounding 13 others at 2 investment offices in the Buckhead neighborhood of Atlanta, Georgia. The gunman is believed to have also murdered his wife and two children, whose bludgeoned bodies are discovered in their suburban house south of Atlanta. In 1993, the same man's first wife and mother-in-law were murdered in an Alabama campground.|
30|A heat wave, which began in mid-July, bakes the eastern two-thirds of the United States. In drought-stricken Middle Atlantic States, temperatures shoot above 100 degrees F (38 degrees C) from northern Virginia through eastern Pennsylvania. Temperatures push above 90 degrees F (32 degrees C) for the 9th day in a row in Philadelphia and 95 degrees F (35 degrees C) for the 11th day in New York City. More than 50 deaths are attributed to the 104 degrees F (40 degrees C) heat in Chicago, where a power station fails, plunging parts of the city into a stifling darkness. In Wisconsin, a day of above 100 degrees F temperatures is capped by severe thunder storms that topple trees and down power lines. In Texas, daytime temperatures climb to 103 degrees F (39 degrees C) in Abilene and 105 degrees F (57 degrees C) in Childress.|
31|Thirty-five percent of all U.S. adults on welfare either worked full- or part-time or actively looked for work in 1998, the Clinton Administration reports in a study ranking the 50 states' performances in moving people from welfare to work. Recipients in Iowa, Oregon, Montana, Wisconsin, and Wyoming were the most successful in finding jobs, with more than 55 percent working 20 hours a week. Arkansas, Maryland, New Mexico, and North Carolina reported the lowest rates, with less than 20 percent of welfare recipients in full- or part-time jobs. In 1998, all 50 states met the basic work requirements mandated by the welfare reform law of 1996.|
