01|Colombian state police end a leftist guerrilla siege of a police station in the town of Narino, 100 miles (160 kilometers) northwest of Bogota, the capital. The station, defended by 35 officers, was attacked on July 30 by members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), who killed at least 17 people, including 9 police officers and 4 children. Colombian President Andres Pastrana's government is currently negotiating with FARC leaders to bring an end to 35 years of violence in Colombia.|
02|More than 285 people die and hundreds more are injured when two trains, each traveling more than 50 miles (58 kilometers) per hour, collide head-on near the border of West Bengal and Assam in eastern India. The trains, the Awadh-Assam Express and Brahmaputra Mail, carried approximately 2,000 passengers, including many people who were riding on the roofs of overcrowded cars.|
03|More than 90 people are killed and thousands evacuated in Manila, capital of the Philippines, when torrential rains from Tropical Storm Olga trigger flash floods and the collapse of whole hillsides, burying residents in their houses. In South Korea, Olga's heavy rains swell rivers to overflowing, flooding more than 8,500 houses and killing at least 50 people. In Choonchon City, 90 miles (145 kilometers) northeast of Seoul, the capital, a tour bus is swept into a flooded river, drowning 5 passengers and injuring 30. Strong winds and heavy rains in North Korea, which already faced famine, leave thousands of acres of crops underwater.|
04|The Supreme Court of New Jersey declares that the Boy Scouts of America broke a state antidiscrimination law by expelling James Dale as an assistant scoutmaster in 1990 on the grounds that he is gay. In a 7-to-0 decision, the court dismisses the argument that the group is a private organization and likens it to such public accommodations as libraries, restaurants, schools, and theaters. The judges in the Dale case also dismiss another argument of the Boy Scouts that homosexuality is immoral, comparing the argument to discrimination against blacks and women. In 1998, the Supreme Court of California had declared that the Boy Scouts of America could expel homosexuals, agnostics, and atheists because it is a private organization not covered by civil rights laws.|
05|The U.S. Senate votes 81 to 16 to confirm Richard C. Holbrooke as chief U.S. delegate to the United Nations. Holbrooke formerly served the United States as ambassador to Germany, and he was the architect of the 1995 Dayton Accord that ended the war in Bosnia. His Senate nomination was blocked for 14 months by a group of senators that included Jessie Helms (R., North Carolina) and Majority Leader Trent Lott (R., Mississippi), who questioned the nominee's fitness on grounds of ethical lapses.|
05|The death toll from summer flooding in the Yangtze River Valley hits 725, reports China's Ministry of Civil Affairs. At least 5.5 million people have been evacuated from 23 provinces since flooding began in June.|
05|St. Louis Cardinals slugger Mark McGwire hits the 500th and 501st home runs of his major league career in a home game against the San Diego Padres at Busch Stadium. McGwire, who broke Roger Maris's single-season home-run record by hitting his 62nd home run of 1998 on September 7, finished that season with a total of 70 homers. He is the 16th baseball player in history to hit 500 home runs during a major league career.|
06|The unemployment rate in the United States in July remained steady at 4.3 percent while average hourly earnings in July increased by 0.5 percent, from $13.23 to $13.29, reports the U.S. Department of Labor. Earnings over the last 12 months increased by 3.8 percent, compared with 3.5 percent annual growth in May and 3.7 percent in June.|
07|Russian airmen in helicopter gunships fight a fierce battle in the southern republic of Dagestan with hundreds of gunmen who had crossed the border into Russia from the breakaway republic of Chechnya. The Chechen gunmen appear to belong to the Wahhabi Islamic fundamentalist movement, which authorities in Moscow blame for an attack made earlier in August in the nearby Tsumadi district of the republic. Officials in Chechnya deny any connection with the gunmen.|
08|Ethnic Albanians, using stones and their fists, attack NATO peacekeeping troops attempting to prevent a crowd from storming a Serb neighborhood in Kosovska Mitrovica, an ethnically mixed city 18 miles (30 kilometers) northwest of Pristina, Kosovo's provincial capital. The disturbance, the second in two days, allegedly began when a French soldier shoved an Ethnic Albanian woman who spat on and punched him. According to a NATO spokesperson, the crowd was organized by the Kosovo Liberation Army, an organization of ethnic Albanian separatists. In Pristina on August 7, four people were severely wounded in grenade attacks on bars catering primarily to Serbs.|
09|Russian President Boris Yeltsin replaces his prime minister for the fourth time in 17 months. Dismissing Sergei Stepashin after three months in office, Yeltsin appoints Vladimir V. Putin, a former spy who headed Russia's primary intelligence agency. Political experts in Moscow believe Yeltsin is attempting to set up Putin as his successor to the presidency.|
10|A gunman sprays 20 to 30 shots from a high-powered automatic weapon into a Jewish Community Center in suburban Los Angeles, wounding five people, including three boys attending a day camp. Later in the day, the same gunman kills a Filipino American letter carrier. The suspect, Buford O. Furrow, Jr., a self-described white supremacist, is arrested in Las Vegas, Nevada, on August 12.|
11|The last total solar eclipse of the millennium occurs. An estimated 2 billion people from Nova Scotia off the east coast of Canada to the Bay of Bengal were able to observe the phenomenon.|
11|The Kansas Board of Education votes in a 6-to-4 decision to remove almost all references to evolution from the state's science curriculum and from state standardized assessment tests. Evolution is the theory, proposed by Charles Darwin in the 1800's, that all living things evolved from simple organisms and changed through the ages to produce millions of species. While the change in the state curriculum does not prevent teachers from presenting evolution in the classroom, many educators believe the change will discourage school boards from making time for its instruction. Some educators view the vote in Kansas as a major victory for creationists, who have long attempted to block the teaching of evolution in public schools. Creationists believe in the Biblical account that describes God creating human beings and other species.|
12|Complex forms of life existed on Earth 2.7 billion years ago, 500 million to 1 billion years earlier than paleontologists once thought, reports a group of Australian scientists in the journal Science. Geoscientists at the University of Sydney led by Jochen J. Brocks discovered in northwestern Australia fatty molecules, called sterols, in shale formed 2.7 billion years ago. Sterols are found in the membranes of eukaryotes, which were the first known cells to have nuclei and specialized internal structures for processing energy. Scientists believe all higher forms of life-plants, animals, and fungi-descended from eukaryotes.|
13|Russia's new prime minister, Vladimir V. Putin, threatens to launch air strikes against the headquarters of Islamic militants in the breakaway republic of Chechnya. Putin claims that Chechnya-based militants are responsible for the current insurgency in nearby Dagestan, where Russian troops have battled Islamic separatists for seven days. International affairs experts believe that a Russian air strike against Chechnya would likely renew the 1994-1996 war that ended in a humiliating defeat for Russia and quasi-independence for Chechnya.|
14|The state of Alaska files a civil suit against Royal Caribbean Cruises, accusing the company of dumping oil, photo chemicals, and other hazardous wastes into Alaskan waters, particularly in Juneau harbor. The state's attorney general, Bruce Botelho, believes damages assessed by the court could run into millions of dollars. In July, Royal Caribbean was forced to pay $18 million in fines to the United States for dumping hazardous materials in areas ranging from the Caribbean to Alaska's Inside Passage.|
14|Texas Governor George W. Bush wins the Iowa Republican straw poll for president. The poll is a high profile, but nonbinding event designed to raise money for the Iowa Republican Party. Multimillionaire publisher Steve Forbes places second, and Elizabeth Dole, a cabinet officer in the administration of Ronald Reagan, comes in third.|
15|Marxist guerrillas in Colombia kidnap Roman Catholic Bishop Jose de Jesus Quintero Diaz. The kidnappers identify themselves as the Simon Bolivar Guerrilla Coordinator, a terrorist organization made up of members of Colombia's two leading Marxist rebel armies. The group has carried out a number of politically motivated kidnappings since the current violence in Colombia began in the mid-1960's. The operation is the first kidnapping of a high-profile Roman Catholic clergyman.|
16|Public health officials in Kazakhstan announce that there have been seven cases of bubonic plague in the former Soviet republic so far in 1999. There were no cases of plague reported in Kazakhstan in 1998.|
16|The death toll in India from flooding during the 1999 monsoon season, which began in July, hits 330. Floods in the Indian state of Bihar have disrupted the lives of nearly 5 million people and killed 221 people.|
17|More than 14,000 people are killed and thousands more injured in western Turkey in an earthquake registering 7.8 in magnitude. The quake is the most powerful ever recorded in the region. The epicenter is 50 miles (80 kilometers) east of Istanbul near the industrial city of Izmit, where huge apartment buildings collapse and Turkey's largest oil refinery catches fire. In Istanbul, Turkey's most populous city, at least 40 people die and hundreds more are injured from fallen masonry. On the southern coast of the Izmit Gulf, more than 250 sailors and naval officers are trapped under the collapsed barracks of a naval base near Golcuk.|
17|The National Ice Center, a government service organization that monitors icebergs, issues a warning that a berg approximately the size of the state of Rhode Island, 24 by 48 miles (41 by 77 kilometers), threatens shipping between South America and Antarctica. The iceberg, from which smaller bergs are breaking off, is drifting southeast at approximately 8 miles (13 kilometers) per hour. The Ice Center, which is maintained in Suitland, Maryland, by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard, cautions all vessels in the area to maintain a distance of at least 165 miles (265 kilometers) from the iceberg, which is named B-10A.|
18|Sonia Gandhi, the Italian-born widow of former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, announces she will run for Parliament in the district of Bellary in the southern Indian state of Karnataka. Sonia Gandhi is president of the Congress Party, which has held the Bellary seat through every election since 1952. The Gandhi family has produced three prime ministers, Jawaharlal Nehru, his daughter Indira Gandhi, and her son Rajiv, in the 52 years since India gained independence.|
19|An estimated 150,000 Serbs defy riot police to gather in the streets of Belgrade, Yugoslavia, demanding the resignation of President Slobodan Milosevic. Milosevic led the country into a series of ruinous wars that have left the economy near collapse.|
20|Three major Japanese banks announce their plan to merge, creating the world's largest financial institution with assets of $1.1 trillion. Economists suggest the merger is a response by the Japanese financial community to the country's deep and stubborn recession and combats the intense global competition of U.S. and European banks.|
20|The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) suspends the national security clearance of former director John D. Deutch on the grounds that he improperly moved national secrets from a secure computer server onto his own personal computer. Deutch, who led the agency for 18 months in 1995 and 1996, is the first director in the agency's 52-year history to be barred from access to top secret security information.|
21|NATO troops order Serbs in southern Kosovo to turn in all guns or face arrest. The Serbs claim they need the weapons to protect themselves from attack by the ethnic Albanian majority. NATO officials believe Serb civilians received the guns from Serb police fleeing Kosovo for Serbia. The NATO crackdown takes place shortly before the area comes under the authority of Russian troops, who ethnic Albanians assert favor the Serb population. Russia, Serbia's historic ally, condemned the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, which began in March and ended in June.|
22|A Taiwan jetliner, attempting to land at Hong Kong in the fierce winds of a tropical storm, crash lands, flips onto its back, and bursts into flames. Two of the 315 passengers and crew members are killed and 206 injured. The crash of the McDonnell Douglas MD-11 is the first serious accident at Hong Kong's new $20 billion airport, which opened in 1998 on an island west of the city.|
23|German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder moves the chancellery from Bonn to Berlin, establishing Germany's first Berlin-based government since the collapse of Adolf Hitler's regime at the end of World War II (1939-1945).|
24|The Federal Reserve, the central bank of the United States, raises interest rates on overnight loans among banks to 5.25 percent from 5 percent. A Federal Reserve spokesperson reports that the board believes the raise, the second in less than two months, is necessary to combat the risk of inflation in the U.S. economy.|
24|Ethnic Albanians in the Kosovo town of Orahovac use cars, trucks, and tractors to barricade miles of surrounding roads to keep Russian peacekeeping troops from entering the area. The ethnic Albanians claim Russia sided with Serbia during the recent NATO bombing campaign and favor Kosovo's Serb minority. The ethnic Albanians also assert that Russian mercenaries fought with the Serbs to drive the ethnic Albanians from Kosovo.|
25|Russian troops route Islamic militants from villages in Dagestan's Botlikh district in the Caucasus Mountains. The militants crossed into Dagestan from the breakaway republic of Chechnya in early August and seized the Botlikh villages in an attempt to wrench control of the area from Russia. Speaking in Moscow, Defense Minister Igor D. Sergeyev is reluctant to claim that the rebellion is over. Russian military experts believe the rebels have retreated into the mountains in Chechnya, which successfully fought Russia for independence between 1994 and 1996, and may resort to terrorism to achieve their goal of establishing an independent Islamic state.|
26|The first discovery of liquid water in an object from space is announced by Michael E. Zolensky, a scientist at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. NASA scientists found the water trapped in salt crystals on a meteorite that fell to Earth in 1998.|
26|Israel's United Torah Judaism, a political party representing Orthodox Jews, threatens to withdraw from Prime Minister Ehud Barak's coalition government if Barak grants a permit to move a turbine engine weighing 50 tons (45 metric tons) through the streets of Jerusalem on the Jewish Sabbath. Members of the party claim that moving the engine on the Sabbath would constitute a "desecration." The Israeli Supreme Court has ruled that authorities must grant the transfer because all applications for permits are in order. Jerusalem police have warned that moving the turbine on a weekday would snarl city traffic.|
27|Two Russians and a French astronaut, the last full crew aboard Mir, leave the 13-year-old Russian space station in preparation for its abandonment. After Mir's systems, including the central computer, are switched off from Mission Control on Earth, the station is scheduled to fall from outer space in 2000 and burn up in the atmosphere. Scientists hailed Mir as revolutionary when it was launched in 1986 for what was expected to be three to five years in space.|
28|A car bomb explodes outside a supermarket frequented by diplomats in the Yemen capital of Sana, killing two Yemeni guards and damaging the Turkish and French embassies. An earlier blast in the southern port city of Aden rocked a government-owned bank. International affairs experts speculate that the bombings are the work of the Islamic Army, a radical Islamic group that has been responsible for a series of violent acts since the end of Yemen's civil war in 1994.|
29|A 39-year-old mother and her 8-year-old daughter are killed when the roller coaster car in which they are riding at an Ocean City, New Jersey, amusement park reverses course and crashes into another car. The accident is the fourth fatal mishap at a U.S. amusement park in one week.|
30|The people of East Timor, a former Portuguese colony occupied by Indonesia since 1976, go to the polls by the thousands to vote on whether to become an autonomous part of Indonesia or a sovereign nation. The referendum, brokered by the United Nations (UN) and Portugal and monitored by UN officials, including Secretary General Kofi Annan, is carried out under the threat of violence by the Indonesian army. Human rights groups estimate that Indonesian forces have killed at least 200,000 people in the 23 years that the East Timorese have struggled for independence.|
31|Mireya Moscoso becomes the first female president of Panama in an inaugural ceremony in Panama City. Moscoso, the widow of former president Arnulfo Arias, is the second freely elected president since the United States deposed General Manuel Noriega in 1989.|
31|A bomb explodes in a video arcade, injuring at least 40 people in a Western-style shopping mall in Moscow. A group calling itself the Revolutionary Writers claims responsibility for the attack, which they describe as a protest against consumerism in Russia.|
