01|Each year women and children are transported into the United States by the tens of thousands and forced into bondage, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reports. According to a new CIA publication entitled "International Trafficking in Women to the United States: A Contemporary Manifestation of Slavery," as many as 100,000 people were brought to the United States in 1998 and 1999 from Latin America, Eastern Europe, and Asia and forced into slavery as servants, prostitutes, or sweatshop laborers.|
02|Families of members of the Ugandan doomsday cult, Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God, attend a memorial service for the victims of a March 17 church fire, set by the cult's leaders, that left more than 500 people dead. Since the fire, nearly 500 additional bodies have been discovered near the church, located outside the farming village of Kanungu, 200 miles (322 kilometers) west of Kampala, the capital.|
03|Microsoft, the Redmond, Washington-based software manufacturer, violated the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act, rules Thomas Penfield Jackson, a U.S. District Court judge in Washington, D.C. The judge notes that Microsoft maintained a monopoly for its PC operating system software through anticompetitive means. According to the judgment, the company attempted to monopolize the Web-browser software market and tried to quash innovation by connecting its Internet browser to its Windows operating system.|
04|Japan's acting prime minister, Mikio Aoki, announces that all members of Japan's Cabinet have resigned to allow the ruling Liberal Democratic Party to form a new government. The move was necessitated by the incapacitation of Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi, who suffered a stroke on March 2.|
05|Scientists, working under the sponsorship of Monsanto, a St. Louis, Missouri-based pharmaceutical company, have constructed a "working draft" of the genetic makeup of rice, the most complex plant decoded to date, announces the group's leader, Leroy Hood, of the University of Washington in Seattle. Hood notes that the genetic decoding will greatly accelerate the development of more nutritious and higher yielding rice, a staple for 40 percent of the world's people.|
05|Emperor Akihito of Japan presides over the swearing in of Yoshiro Mori as prime minister. Mori, who replaces the ailing Keizo Obuchi, pledges to continue Obuchi's attempts to lead the Japanese economy out of years of stagnation.|
05|More than 400 Ethiopians, most of them children, died during the month of March from drought-related food shortages in Ethiopia's Gode region, report local authorities who warn that famine threatens at least 1.3 million people in the southeastern part of the country.|
06|Former Prime Minister of Pakistan Nawaz Sharif is found guilty of hijacking a commercial airliner and is sentenced to life in prison. The hijacking incident, which took place on Oct. 12, 1999, occurred when then Prime Minister Sharif issued an order refusing to allow a Karachi-bound jet to land. He later rescinded the order. According to the pilot, the extra time in the air depleted the fuel supply, endangering the lives of the crew and passengers. The passenger list included Pervez Musharraf, a general who Sharif had dismissed from the Pakistani army. After the plane landed, Musharraf led a coup (overthrow) that toppled Sharif's government.|
07|Unemployment remains at 4.1 percent in the United States despite the fact that the U.S. economy generated 416,000 new jobs in March. The U.S. Department of Labor attributes most of the new jobs to temporary hiring by the Census Bureau and to the end of a strike at Seattle's Boeing Co., which sent several thousand people back to work. Labor Department officials estimate that the U.S. economy actually generated only about 190,000 jobs in March, compared with an average of 226,000 new jobs per month in 1999.|
08|Bolivia's president, Hugo Banzer, declares a state of emergency in response to the wave of violence and police mutinies spreading across the country. The civil unrest began on April 3 in Cochabamba, Bolivia's third largest city, after the government announced it would raise the price of drinking water. In Achacachi, a town in the foothills of the Andes, five people were killed when soldiers attempted to dismantle roadblocks set up by farmers protesting their economic troubles. On April 7 in La Paz, more than 800 police officers, demanding a 50-percent pay increase, staged a sit-down strike at police headquarters just one block from the presidential palace. In its war against the cocaine trade, the Bolivian government destroyed more than half of this year's coca-leaf production, throwing thousands of Indian farmers out of work and depressing the national economy.|
09|Incumbent Alberto Fujimori takes 49.8 percent of the vote in presidential elections in Peru, compared with opponent Alejandro Toledo's 40.3 percent. Because the country's constitution specifies that a candidate needs 50 percent plus one vote to avoid a runoff election, the results make a second round inevitable. Fujimori is running for an unprecedented third term as president. Toledo is a business school professor of Indian descent who is strongly identified with various democratic reform movements.|
10|The government of South Korea announces that President Kim Dae Jung will travel to Pyongyang, the North Korea capital, in June to participate in a summit conference with Kim Jong-Il, North Korea's leader. The meeting will be the first between the heads of state of the two countries, which technically remain at war. The Korean War (1950-1953) ended when the United Nations and North Korea signed an armistice agreement. South Korea and North Korea, however, have never signed a peace treaty.|
11|Both houses of Maine's legislature pass a bill that places price controls on medications sold in that state. The bill, which creates a board to set suggested retail drug prices, stipulates that if pharmaceutical companies doing business in Maine fail to lower their prices by Oct. 1, 2001, the board will fix drug prices no higher than they would be in Canada. Canada's nationalized health insurance system allows officials to negotiate discounts that save residents up to 60 or 70 percent on the price of some drugs.|
12|Tensions remain high in Miami after a face-to-face meeting between 6-year-old Elian Gonzalez and his father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez, was canceled by the boy's Miami relatives, who are battling to keep Elian in the United States. Juan Miguel Gonzalez, who flew to the United States from Cuba on April 6, has not seen his son since Elian and his mother left Cuba in November 1999 to escape to the United States. The boy was rescued by American fishermen off the coast of Florida on November 25 after surviving the capsizing of a refugee boat that resulted in his mother's drowning.|
13|The High Court of Zimbabwe orders the country's president, Robert Mugabe, to uphold the rule of law and evict some 50,000 squatters from more than 900 farms owned by white Zimbabweans. Mugabe claims that to take any police action against the squatters, who are armed, could trigger a civil war. Zimbabwean blacks began taking white-owned land in February after voters failed to ratify a new constitution that expanded presidential power and gave the government the right to seize without compensation any land owned by whites. White Zimbabweans, who constitute 1 percent of the population, own more than one-third of the country's productive land.|
14|The Dow Jones Industrial Average falls 617.68 points, its greatest one-day decline in history, to close off 5.6 percent for the day and more than 7 percent for the week. The Dow Jones Industrial Average is tabulated by averaging the prices of common stock of 30 prominent U.S. industrial firms traded on the New York Stock Exchange. The Nasdaq, an electronic over-the-counter service on which the stocks of many high-technology companies are exchanged, plunges 355.49 points, another historic one-day decline, to close off nearly 10 percent for the day and 25.3 percent for the week.|
14|More than 100 people are killed and 215 injured when fuel tanks and army munitions at the international airport in Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, explode in a giant chain reaction that topples whole buildings and shoots debris several miles into the city's neighborhoods.|
15|President Bill Clinton, visiting California's Sierra Nevada Mountains, signs a directive creating the Giant Sequoia National Monument. The directive bans the harvesting of commercial timber and limits the use of off-road vehicles in a 328,000-acre (133,000-hectare) area that includes 34 groves of the ancient trees.|
15|Baltimore Oriole third baseman Cal Ripken Jr., who holds a record for playing in 2,632 consecutive major league baseball games, completes the 3,000th major-league hit of his career with a single to center field at the Metrodome in Minneapolis. Ripken is the 24th player in major league history to reach the 3,000 hit milestone.|
16|Finance ministers from the member nations of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank meet in Washington, D.C., to discuss global financial stability and to set future courses for the two organizations, which are affiliated with the United Nations and provide credit to member nations. Outside the IMF headquarters, as many as 10,000 people demonstrate against IMF and World Bank policies, which protesters claim burden Third World nations with debts that crush the poor and foster sweatshops and the destruction of rain forests. Washington police arrested more than 600 demonstrators on April 15. Many described themselves as trade unionists, environmentalists, or anarchists dedicated to halting the spread of a global economy.|
17|Vladimir Putin pays his first visit to the West as president of Russia, meeting with British Prime Minister Tony Blair in London. After discussions involving economic development and investments in Russia, Putin delivers a lecture on the current war in Chechnya, which he characterizes as a fight against "international extremism and terrorism."|
18|President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, speaking during a televised interview on the 20th anniversary of the former Rhodesia's independence from Great Britain, labels Zimbabwe's white farmers "enemies of the state." He notes that whites should not have opposed a constitutional referendum that would have allowed the state to confiscate their land without compensation. Black squatters have shot and killed two white farmers since April 13, when Zimbabwe's High Court ordered Robert Mugabe to evict squatters from white-owned farms.|
19|All 131 passengers and crew members aboard Air Philippines Flight 541 are killed when the Boeing 737-200 jet crashes on Samal Island, near the Philippine city of Davao, approximately 625 miles (1,006 kilometers) southeast of Manila, the capital, where the flight began.|
20|The internal structure of the heart of a dinosaur may have been more like that of a bird or a mammal than any known reptile, announces Dale Russell, a paleontologist at the North Carolina Museum of Natural History in Raleigh. The announcement, published in Science, is based on a computerized imaging examination of a fossilized organ. The organ, which Russell and his colleagues believe is the first dinosaur heart ever found, was discovered in a dinosaur skeleton unearthed in South Dakota. The computerized images led Russell to speculate that the stony material was a heart with four chambers and a single aorta, suggesting an animal that was warm blooded. All known reptiles are cold blooded.|
21|The Duma, the lower house of the Russian parliament, follows the lead of Russian President Vladimir Putin and votes overwhelmingly to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). The treaty, which was negotiated between 1994 and 1996 at the Geneva Conference on Disarmament, bans all nuclear explosions in the hope of constraining the development and qualitative improvement of nuclear weapons. The U.S. Senate failed to ratify the same treaty in October 1999.|
22|Elian Gonzalez is reunited with his father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez, at Andrews Air Force Base in Suitland, Maryland. Federal agents seized the 6 year old during a predawn raid on the Miami, Florida, house of the boy's relatives, who have battled federal officials to keep Elian in the United States. Gonzalez last saw his son in November 1999, before Elian and his mother left Cuba in an attempt to escape to the United States.|
23|An Iranian court closes five newspapers in Tehran, the capital, after imprisoning one of the country's most active pro-reform journalists, Akbar Ganji, for writing articles deemed in violation of "Islamic values." On April 20, Iran's spiritual leader, Ayatollah Sayed Ali Khamenei, whose powers supersede those of the country's president, labeled Iran's pro-reform newspapers "bases for enemies" attempting to undermine the state. In February, Iranians elected an overwhelming majority of parliamentary representatives who support President Mohammad Khatami's efforts to reform Iran.|
24|Ukraine's minister of defense, Olexander Kuzmuk, announces that an April 20 explosion that left three people dead in an apartment building in Brovary, a city east of Ukraine's capital, Kiev, was caused by a Russian-made, surface-to-surface missile launched by Ukraine's own military. The missile was fired in northern Ukraine, approximately 80 miles (129 kilometers) from Brovary, during a routine training exercise. Hours before Minister Kuzmuk's announcement, an unarmed missile fired by a Russian naval vessel during a training exercise on the Black Sea pierced a Ukrainian passenger ship, injuring one person.|
25|Police arrest approximately 100 followers of Falun Gong in Beijing's Tiananmen Square on the first anniversary of the demonstration that spurred the Chinese government to ban the spiritual movement. Falun Gong, which adherents claim is apolitical, combines slow-motion exercise, meditation, and breathing techniques with ideas from Buddhism and Taoism. On April 25, 1999, some 10,000 adherents of Falun Gong appeared outside the compound that houses top Chinese officials and staged a silent sit-in. Observers in Beijing believe the sudden appearance of the thousands of protesters profoundly shook China's president, Jiang Zemin, who is said to be behind the government's anti-Falun Gong campaign.|
25|Black nationalists who support Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe's ruling Zanu-PF party in a parliamentary election campaign underway kill two members of an opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), according to MDC officials. The nationalists allegedly have killed at least 10 people, including MDC members and displaced white farmers, since February. The MDC agrees that land reform is necessary but argues for a peaceful land transfer based on organized agreement among black and white Zimbabweans.|
26|The governor of Vermont, Howard Dean, signs legislation into state law creating civil unions between same-sex couples. The new law empowers justices of the peace, judges, and clergyman to certify the unions, which confer many of the rights and responsibilities enjoyed by married couples. These include inheritance rights, health-insurance benefits, and the right to make medical decisions on behalf of partners. Legal experts do not expect Vermont's civil unions to be recognized by other states or to entitle domestic partners to such benefits as a deceased spouse's social security.|
27|A team of French scientists believe they have successfully treated a hereditary disorder with gene therapy, according to research reported in the journal Science. The scientists, led by Alain Fischer of the Necker children's hospital in Paris, treated three infants for severe combined immune deficiency (SCID). Patients with SCID typically must live in a sterile environment, such as inside a plastic bubble, because their defective immune systems cannot defend the body against disease-causing organisms. Researchers removed bone marrow from the infants and injected the marrow cells with a virus containing a copy of the missing gene. The scientists then returned the cells to the infants' bodies. The infants appear to have developed normal immune systems in the months since being treated by Fischer.|
28|The U.S. Department of Justice and the attorneys general of 17 states submit a formal proposal to Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, the federal judge presiding over the Microsoft Corporation antitrust case, splitting the Redmond, Washington-based software manufacturer into two companies. The federal and state officials propose establishing one company to handle Microsoft's Windows operating system and a second company to produce applications software, including the Internet Explorer Web browser. Judge Jackson ruled in April that Microsoft was an illegal monopoly that deliberately discouraged competition in the marketplace at the expense of consumers and competitors.|
29|Tens of thousands of Cuban-Americans gather in Miami's Little Havana neighborhood to denounce President Bill Clinton and Attorney General Janet Reno for removing Elian Gonzalez from his Miami relatives and reuniting him with his Cuban father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez. Federal agents seized the boy on April 22, during a predawn raid on the Miami house of the boy's relatives, who have battled federal officials to keep the 6 year old in the United States.|
30|Vietnamese veterans march in an invitation-only parade within the walls of Ho Chi Minh City's Unification Palace as part of the government's official observance of the 25th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War (1957-1975). Denied access to official observances, most residents of the city formerly known as Saigon celebrate the end of the conflict they refer to as the "American War" with family outings along the city's river. Hundreds of U.S. veterans, who traveled to Vietnam for the anniversary, tour battlefields of the war that left 3 million Vietnamese and 58,000 Americans dead.|
