01|Three days of riots between Muslims and Christians in the city of Aba in southeast Nigeria leave at least 400 people dead. The violence follows a similar outbreak during the week of February 19 in Kaduna, a city in the north, where hundreds of people were killed. In both cities, the clashes were triggered by Christians demonstrating against Muslim demands for an Islamic penal code.|
02|Great Britain drops extradition proceedings against General Augusto Pinochet, who is allowed to return to Chile because of his failing health. The former Chilean dictator was under house arrest in England for 16 months on the possibility that he would be tried on charges of gross human rights violations. Spanish officials accused Pinochet of abducting, torturing, and executing thousands of political enemies during his 17 years in power.|
03|An international tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, sentences Croatian General Tihomir Blaskic to 45 years in prison for war crimes committed during the conflict in Bosnia between 1992 and 1994. Blaskic is the highest-ranking military commander yet brought to trial for crimes against humanity and breaches of the Geneva Convention. The United Nations created the international tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in 1993.|
04|A U.S. Army spokesperson announces that no National Guard and Reserve unit will be stationed overseas for peacekeeping or military operations for longer than a period of six months. U.S. Army reservists currently serve in Bosnia, Kosovo, and in the Middle East.|
05|The Israeli cabinet votes unanimously to withdraw its troops from Lebanon. Israel established a 9-mile (14.5-kilometer) wide security zone in southern Lebanon in 1985 to protect settlements in northern Israel from guerrilla attack. Israel's presence in Lebanon has been a major obstacle to an Israeli-Syrian peace accord. Syria has used the issue to justify its support of Hezbollah (Party of God), a pro-Iranian, militant Islamic group that has waged guerrilla warfare against Israeli troops in the security zone.|
06|President Vaclav Havel of the Czech Republic, speaking on Czech television, suggests to U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright that she succeed him as the republic's president. The secretary of state, who was born in Czechoslovakia and speaks the language fluently, is visiting the Czech Republic to honor Tomas Masaryk, a scholar-statesman who was president of Czechoslovakia from 1918 to 1935. The Czech presidency, which Vaclav will hold until 2003, is an appointive, rather than an elective, office.|
07|Vice President Al Gore sweeps the presidential primaries in all 16 states in which the Democratic Party held elections on Super Tuesday, against challenger Bill Bradley, a former senator from New Jersey. Gore is victorious in the delegate-rich states of California and New York as well as in Maine, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Georgia, Maryland, Ohio, and Bradley's home state of Missouri. In California, the vice president garners 81 percent of the vote, compared with Bradley's 18 percent. In the Republican presidential primaries, Texas Governor George W. Bush wracks up victories in 9 of the 13 elections, beating his chief challenger Arizona Senator John McCain in California, Georgia, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, New York, Ohio, and Washington. Senator McCain captures primaries in Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Massachusetts, where the Arizona senator took 65 percent of the vote, compared with George W. Bush's 32 percent.|
08|The Chinese government executes a former provincial vice governor for taking bribes. The condemned man is the highest official ever put to death by China's Communist government, which came to power in 1949. China's premier, Zhu Rongji, has vowed to stamp out official corruption, which many experts believe extends into the highest ranks of the Communist Party.|
09|Arizona Senator John McCain announces that he is withdrawing as an active candidate for president. McCain won primaries against Texas Governor George W. Bush in six states during his campaign but lost primary elections on Super Tuesday, March 7, including votes in New York and California. Former New Jersey Senator Bill Bradley, running against Vice President Al Gore for the Democratic nomination for president, also announces that he is dropping out of the race. Bradley failed to wrest a single primary election from the vice president, who is now unchallenged for the Democratic nomination.|
10|Much of the United States experienced the warmest winter season--from December 1999 through February 2000--in the 105 years that records have been kept by the federal government, reports a spokesperson for the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, North Carolina. Temperature in the lower 48 states during the 1999-2000 season averaged 38.4 degrees F (3.6 degrees C). The previous record for the warmest winter was set during the 1998-1999 winter season, with an average temperature of 37.8 degrees F (3.3 degrees C). The third warmest winter on record occurred in 1997-1998, when the temperature averaged 37.5 degrees F (3.1 degrees C).|
10|Melting snow and heavy rains rupture a dam at the Baia Borsa mine in northwestern Romania, dumping 20,000 short tons (18,140 metric tons) of lead, zinc, and other metals into surrounding streams, including the Vaser River. On January 31, highly polluted water overflowed a dam at the Baia Mare mine, also in northwest Romania, pouring cyanide into neighboring streams, which carried the cyanide west into the Tisa and Danube rivers in Hungary and into Serbia.|
11|At least 80 Ukrainian miners are killed when methane gas explodes in a coal mine at Krasnodon, approximately 530 miles (853 kilometers) east of Kiev, Ukraine's capital. The explosion occurs more than 2,100 feet (640 meters) below ground.|
12|Pope John Paul II, attending a Mass inside Saint Peter's Basilica in Rome on the first Sunday of Lent, repents for errors committed by the "sisters and brothers" of the Roman Catholic Church over the last 2,000 years. The pope is joined by seven cardinals and bishops who cite the church's religious intolerance in the past toward Jews, the humiliation and marginalization of women, and violation of the rights of various immigrant groups and native peoples. The pope's public act of repentance, which officials characterize as a purification of memory, is unprecedented in the history of the Roman Catholic Church.|
13|The Japanese economy lapsed back into recession by shrinking in the fourth quarter of 1999, announces an official of the Japanese Economic Planning Agency. The gross domestic product, the value of all goods and services produced in a country in a given year, fell 1.4 percent in the October through December period. By comparison, the U.S. economy grew at a rate of 7.3 percent in the last quarter of 1999, according to the latest U.S. Commerce Department statistics. While the Japanese economy, which is the world's second largest, began recovering earlier in 1999 from the Asian financial crisis of 1997 and 1998, consumer spending remained weak, which economists attribute to the Japanese public's continuing fears for the future of their economy and jobs.|
14|Vice President Al Gore and Texas Governor George W. Bush sweep the Democratic and Republican presidential primaries in Florida, Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Mississippi, providing each candidate with enough votes to claim his party's presidential nomination in August at the party's convention.|
14|Scientists in Scotland have produced the first clones of an adult pig, according to an announcement made by PPL Therapeutics, a private corporation in Edinburgh, Scotland, that is an offshoot of the Roslin Institute of Edinburgh. Under the direction of Ian Wilmut, researchers at the Roslin Institute produced the sheep Dolly--the first clone of an adult mammal--in 1996. The first cloned pigs were born on March 5, 2000, at a PPL laboratory in Blacksburg, Virginia. Scientists believe that genetically altered pigs, made genetically identical through cloning, may eventually provide medical science with organs suitable for transplantation into human beings.|
15|The fossilized bones of an animal that scientists describe as "the earliest known relative in the primate line" have been discovered by a team of U.S. and Chinese paleontologists, announces the head of the team, Daniel L. Gebo of Northern Illinois University in DeKalb. The primate lived 45 million years ago in the upper canopies of a rain forest in China. Its body was approximately the size of a human thumb and weighed less than half an ounce. According to Gebo, the tiny animal may represent a critical link between higher-and lower-order primates and provide important information about the development of anthropoids, a group that includes monkeys, apes, and human beings.|
16|Investors push Dow Jones Industrial Average stocks up 499 points. The point gain is the greatest in a single day of trading in the history of the New York Stock Exchange. The Dow Jones Industrial Average is tabulated by averaging the prices of common stock of 30 prominent U.S. industrial firms.|
17|More than 500 members of an Ugandan doomsday cult, the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God, die in a church set on fire by the cult's leaders, who dosed the newly constructed building with gasoline. The church was near the farming village of Kanungu in southwest Uganda, 200 miles (322 kilometers) west of Kampala, the capital.|
18|Taiwanese voters elect as president Chen Shui-bian, a former political dissident and a member of the Democratic Progressive Party, ousting the Nationalist Party government after more than 50 years of rule. The Democratic Progressive Party stressed independence for Taiwan during the campaign, though Chen distanced himself from that position. Attempting to influence the election, the government of China in Beijing warned in February that China would use military force against Taiwan, which China considers a disloyal province, if Taiwanese leaders continued to delay negotiations on reunification with the mainland. Taiwan considers itself a separate, independent country from China.|
19|Thousands of members of Taiwan's Nationalist Party battle with police in Taipei, Taiwan's capital, during protests over the party's humiliating loss in the March 18 presidential election. The Nationalists ran a candidate who came in third after Chen Shui-bian, of the Democratic Progressive Party, and James Soong, a former Nationalist who ran as an independent. Taiwan's current president, Lee Teng-hui, is barricaded inside the Nationalist Party headquarters.|
20|Pope John Paul II begins a pilgrimage to the Holy Land with prayers on Jordan's Mount Nebo. According to Biblical traditions, Mount Nebo is the place where Moses first viewed the Promised Land.|
21|The U.S. Supreme Court rules 5 to 4 that the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938 does not give the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) the authority to regulate tobacco. The decision rejects a 1996 FDA proposal to restrict the marketing of tobacco products to children and teen-agers. Legal experts suggest that the Supreme Court ruling is important because it declares that only Congress through the passage of legislation has the authority to regulate the tobacco industry and its products.|
21|The Federal Reserve (the FED), an independent government agency that oversees the U.S. banking system, raises its Federal funds target rate on overnight loans among banks one-quarter of a percentage point, to 6 percent. The FED also raises the discount rate on Federal Reserve loans to banks by one-quarter point, to 5.5 percent. The latest increases marked the fifth time since June 1999 that the FED has hiked interest rates to control inflation in a steadily growing economy.|
22|The government of the United States ends a 23-year-old lawsuit by offering $508-million settlement to 1,100 women who claimed to have been discriminated against by the United States Information Agency, a federal bureau that distributes news and information about the United States. In 1977, the women, all reporters, editors, or radio announcers or producers, charged that because of their sex, they were denied jobs and promotions, particularly at the agency's Voice of America, a U.S. radio service that offers news and entertainment to listeners outside the United States. The settlement is the largest ever recorded in a federal sex-discrimination case.|
24|An enormous piece of ice breaks free from Antarctica's Ross Ice Shelf, forming an iceberg that scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) describe as one of the largest ever seen. The iceberg, which was spotted by the agency's NOAA-12 polar-orbiting satellite and has been named B15, is approximately 185 miles (298 kilometers) long and 25 miles (40 kilometers) wide, roughly the size of the state of Delaware. Scientists estimate that B15 contains an amount of fresh water equivalent to the average annual rainfall on the entire land surface of Earth.|
25|President Bill Clinton, visiting Pakistan's new military leader, General Pervez Musharraf, in Islamabad, warns Pakistan to tread lightly in its dispute with India over Kashmir and to end the use of terrorism in the territory. Reminding Musharraf that Pakistan's strategic alliance with the United States ended with the Cold War, the president notes that Pakistan will need to fend for itself in any future confrontation with India. Both India and Pakistan claim sovereignty over Kashmir, a dispute that has triggered two wars since the nations gained independence from Great Britain in 1947. President Clinton also encourages General Musharraf, who overthrew a legitimately elected government in October 1999, to restore democracy to Pakistan.|
26|Acting President Vladimir Putin is elected president of Russia in his own right, receiving a clear majority of 52.6 percent of the vote in national elections. Putin's greatest rival, Communist Gennady Zyuganov, comes in second place with 29.3 percent of the vote. The new president-elect, whose government has been strongly identified with the war in Chechnya that began in October 1999, pledges to fashion a realistic program to tame the economic chaos that has plagued Russia since the collapse of Communism in 1991. Putin was Russia's prime minister before becoming acting president on Dec. 31, 1999, upon the resignation of former President Boris Yeltsin.|
27|The Supreme Court of the United States refuses to hear arguments that the 1996 Welfare Reform Act illegally cuts off benefits, such as food stamps, to legal aliens. The court's refusal lets stand a lower court ruling that the federal government is not required to provide noncitizens with the same benefits it provides citizens. The city of Chicago filed the suit in a federal court in 1997, claiming that the 1996 Welfare Reform Act transferred the burden of providing for legal noncitizens from the federal government to state and city governments.|
28|Glass from shattered skyscraper windows rains into the streets of Fort Worth, Texas, when two tornadoes rip through the downtown. Three people are killed and more than 100 are injured in the storms, which cut through neighborhoods in both Fort Worth and Arlington, Texas, wrecking at least 50 houses.|
28|The Chicago Cubs and the New York Mets open the 2000 baseball season in Tokyo, Japan. The season opener, which the Cubs win 5-3, is the first to be played outside North America in major league history.|
29|The discovery of two planets orbiting separate stars approximately 100 light years from Earth is announced by a team of American astronomers at a news conference at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in Washington, D.C. A light-year is the distance light travels in one year, approximately 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion kilometers). According to team leaders Geoffrey W. March, of the University of California at Berkeley, and R. Paul Butler, of the Carnegie Institution in Washington, the two planets are smaller in mass than Saturn and orbit Sun-like stars. All of the approximately 30 extrasolar planets that scientist have previously detected are as large or larger than Jupiter, our solar system's largest planet. The existence of smaller planets, according to the astronomers, suggests that Earth-sized worlds exist in planetary systems other than our own and may soon be detected.|
29|The price of oil drops on world markets after Iran reluctantly agrees to join other members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC)--an association of 11 oil-producing nations--in increasing oil production by 1.45 million barrels a day. In London, Brent crude falls by 49 cents to $25.34 a barrel, and in New York City, oil drop 69 cents, to $26.40 a barrel. Government leaders in the United States asked OPEC to increase oil production by 2 million barrels a day in the hope of forcing down retail gasoline prices, which climbed 51 cents a gallon between February 1999 and February 2000. Economists estimate it will take at least six to eight weeks before increased oil production affects retail prices at the pump.|
30|Three straight years of economic growth in excess of 4 percent has significantly imporved the financial condition of both Medicare and Social Security, reports Donna Shalala, secretary of the United States Department of Health and Human Services. Government economists estimate that the Medicare hospital trust fund will remain solvent until 2023. In 1992, they predicted that it would be depleted by 1999. The economists calculate that the Social Security trust fund will not run out until 2037, three years later than the estimates they made in 1999.|
31|Mount Usu, a volcano in northern Japan, erupts for the first time in 22 years, throwing a blue-gray plume of molten rock and ash 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) into the atmosphere above the crater. Ash from the eruption rains down on the volcano's snow-covered slopes, which are dotted with villages from which more than 11,000 people have evacuated. About 51,000 people live in the area of the volcano, which is near the ski resort of Sapporo, 475 miles (764 kilometers) north of Tokyo, the capital.|
