01|Riots cripple Bangalore, capital of India's information technology industry, for a second day. Officials attribute the civil unrest to the kidnapping of Rajkumar, one of India's most beloved movie stars. The 72-year-old actor was abducted on July 27 by Veerappan, India's most notorious bandit. Veerappan, who many Indians view as a Robin Hood-like figure, has been the object of a nationwide manhunt for more than 20 years.|
02|Delegates at the Republican Party National Convention in Philadelphia nominate Texas Governor George W. Bush for president and former Congressman Richard B. Cheney for vice president. Cheney represented Wyoming in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1979 to 1989 before serving as secretary of defense in the administration of President George H. W. Bush, father of Governor Bush.|
03|Texas Governor George W. Bush accepts the Republican nomination for president, arguing that the current "times of plenty" are the times when hard issues--"threats to our national security, threats to our health and retirement security"--should be solved.|
04|The unemployment rate in July held steady at 4 percent, reports the U.S. Department of Labor. While the total number of jobs in the United States declined by 108,000, the private sector created 138,000 new jobs during the month. Labor Department officials attribute a decline in the total number of jobs to the loss of 290,000 temporary census positions. |
04|Great Britain's Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother celebrates her 100th birthday with a carriage ride through London and an appearance on the balcony at Buckingham Palace.|
05|United Airlines, the largest passenger carrier in the United States, cancels 156 flights at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport, setting off a wave of delays that inconvenience airline passengers across the nation. While United officials cite weather conditions for the cancellations, airline traffic experts claim the disruptions are caused by the refusal of United pilots to work overtime. The Illinois-based airline has been locked in contract negotiations with its mechanics and pilots since April.|
06|Iran's supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, sides with parliamentary conservatives against reformers to quash a bill designed to restore freedom of the press. In a letter read out loud in parliament, the ayatollah said he considered freedom of the press a grave threat to the control that Muslim clerics exercise over the Iranian government. |
07|Forest fires rage in parts of 11 Western states, with a total of nearly 1 million acres (405,000 hectares) of forest ablaze. Officials with the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) in Boise, Idaho, estimate that there are more than 60 major fires, forcing hundreds of people to evacuate their houses and stretching fire fighting resources to their limit. The fires threaten several national forests and parks, including Sequoia National Park in California and Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado. According to NIFC officials, most of the fires are the result of a combination of extremely dry weather and a phenomenon known as dry lightning (lightning that originates in high clouds that do not produce rain). |
08|U.S. Vice President Al Gore, the presumptive Democratic Party nominee for president in the 2000 election, selects Senator Joseph I. Lieberman (D., Connecticut) as his running mate. |
08|A bomb explodes at the height of the evening rush hour in a pedestrian underpass in Moscow's Pushkin Square, killing 8 people and wounding 11 others. Although no one claims responsibility for the attack, the mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, blames Chechen terrorists.|
09|President Abdurrahman Wahid of Indonesia informs the legislature that he will turn over the daily management of the government to Vice President Megawati Sukarnoputri. The announcement comes less than 24 hours after members of parliament publicly criticized Wahid, who is nearly blind and has suffered strokes, for his mismanagement of the nation's affairs. Vice President Megawati, the daughter of Indonesia's founding father, Sukarno, has little political experience but is popular among Indonesia's poorer classes.|
09|Bridgestone/Firestone Inc., a Japanese-owned, U.S.-based tire manufacturer, announces that it is recalling 6.5 million tires, primarily from sport utility vehicles and light trucks. The brands slated for recall reportedly shred at high speed. Critics maintain the tires have caused hundreds of accidents and at least 46 deaths, a claim that the U.S. government is investigating. Bridgestone/Firestone responds that the tires are safe if properly maintained. Critics also claim the manufacturer has been aware of such problems since the early 1990's.|
09|The inmate population of all U.S. jails, prisons, and juvenile facilities topped 2 million at the end of 1999, reports the U.S. Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics. The U.S. prison population, the world's largest, increased by nearly 74,000 inmates in 1999.|
10|President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela meets with President Saddam Hussein of Iraq in Baghdad, the Iraqi capital. Chavez is the first head of state to pay an official visit to Iraq since the Persian Gulf War in 1991. Both Venezuela and Iraq belong to the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), which is scheduled to meet in Caracas, the Venezuelan capital, in September 2000.|
11|The Bank of Japan raises its short-term discount interest rate to 0.25 percent, abandoning its so-called "zero interest rate policy." While Japanese Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori opposed the hike, calling it premature, many economists see the move as a sign that Japan's economy is recovering after nearly a decade of recession. In 1999, Japan's official discount rate declined to zero, which most economists thought impossible.|
12|A Russian atomic submarine, with a crew of 188 officers and sailors, sinks some 450 feet (137 meters) to the floor of the Barents Sea off the northern coast of Norway. Russian Navy officials believe that the two nuclear reactors that power the Kursk, an Oscar Class II submarine, are turned off. A Norwegian scientific vessel in the area detects no trace of a radioactive leak.|
13|More than 2,000 Somalis, mostly clan elders, business and religious leaders, and intellectuals, meet in Djibouti, across Somalia's northern border, to form a national government. The meeting is sponsored by Djibouti's president, Ismael Omar Gelleh. Somalia has been without a central government since 1991 when a rebel group, the United Somali Congress, overthrew Somalia's military regime. Much of the country remains in the hands of warlords who continue to battle for control. Somali's new 225-body parliament will meet in Djibouti until a suitable location, safe from warring actions, can be found in Somalia.|
14|The Russian Orthodox Church canonizes Russia's last czar, Nicholas II, and his wife and five children. They are elevated to sainthood for their "humbleness, patience, and meekness" during the 16 months between the czar's abdication in March 1917 and their execution in July 1918 by the Bolsheviks.|
15|The governments of North and South Korea allow 100 family members from each country to cross into the other country to visit relatives they have not seen since the Korean War (1950-1953) split the peninsula into the two parts, Communist and democratic.|
16|The Democratic Party, meeting in Los Angeles, nominates Vice President Al Gore for president of the United states and U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman (D., Connecticut) for vice president. Gore and Lieberman face Republican Party nominees, Texas Governor George W. Bush and former Defense Secretary Richard Cheney, in the November election.|
16|All bakeries in Afghanistan run by widows are shut down by order of the Taliban, the fundamentalist Muslim organization that controls approximately 90 percent of the country. The Taliban, which espouses a strict brand of Islamic law, bars women from working outside the house. The United Nations (UN) World Food Program set up the widow-run bakeries to assist Afghanistan's thousands of poverty-stricken women and children. According to UN estimates, there are 28,000 widows in Kabul, the capital, alone. Most lost their husbands in the civil war that brought the Taliban to power in 1996.|
17|U.S. Vice President Al Gore accepts the Democratic Party's nomination for president, pledging to channel the nation's current economic prosperity toward working families and to champion campaign finance reform.|
18|Ice that has covered the North Pole for an estimated 50 million years is melting, report scientists with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a United Nations-sponsored organization that investigates consequences of marked changes in climate. According to a co-leader of the IPCC, oceanographer James McCarthy, a one-mile- (1.6-kilometer-) wide patch of ocean at the North Pole is ice free. In adjacent waters, ice is thin enough for sunlight to penetrate it, allowing plankton to grow.|
19|Gas escaping from a pipeline buried 15 feet (4.5 meters) below ground explodes, killing 11 people, 4 of them children, at a campground along the Pecos River near Carlsbad, New Mexico.|
20|A car bomb kills two police officers, a man and a woman, in Sallent de Gallego, in the province of Huesca in northeastern Spain. Local police blame the attack on ETA, a group of Basque separatists demanding independence. Officials in Madrid, Spain's capital, credit ETA with the deaths of 11 people and injury of the more than 20 since the organization ended a cease-fire in mid-December 1999.|
21|The admiral of the Russian Northern Fleet, Vyacheslav Popov, apologies on live television for the loss of the Russian atomic submarine Kursk with its entire crew of 118 officers and sailors. The Kursk sank in approximately 450 feet (137 meters) of water in the Barents Sea off the northern coast of Norway. While the exact cause of the accident remains a mystery, a Norwegian seismic institute and U.S. submarines in the Arctic Sea reported two underwater explosions two minutes apart in the area where the Kursk sank on August 12. After a Russian rescue team failed to gain entry to the vessel, Norwegian divers managed to pry open an escape hatch and found the entire submarine filled with water.|
22|Three people are killed when Typhoon Bilis slams into Taiwan with winds clocked at 161 miles (259 kilometers) per hour. The power of the storm drives thousands of Taiwanese into emergency shelters and knocks out electrical power to at least 80,000 households.|
23|All 143 passengers and crew members aboard a Gulf Air jet bound for Bahrain from Cairo, Egypt, are killed when the Airbus A320 crashes into the Persian Gulf after attempting to land at the Bahraini national airport, outside Manama, the capital. Gulf Air is jointly owned by the four largest members of the seven-nation United Arab Emirates--Abu Dhabi, Bahrain, Oman, and Qatar.|
24|Authorities in central China arrest 130 evangelical Christians, including two U.S. missionaries, taking part in a revival. Most of the Christians are members of the Fangcheng Church, which is one of China's largest Protestant sects, with more than 500,000 members. China labeled the group a "cult" in December 1999 and sent off two of its leaders to a "reeducation" camp.|
25|A third day of violent storms accompanied by unusually heavy downpours causes widespread flooding in southern India, killing at least 120 people and heavily damaging rice crops. A record-breaking 9.4 inches (23.9 centimeters) of rain fell in Hyderabad, capital of Andhra Pradesh, on August 24, turning roads into raging rivers. Government officials estimate that 400 people have died and 4 million to 5 million people have been displaced since India's monsoon season, the heaviest in decades, began in late June.|
26|U.S. President Bill Clinton arrives in Nigeria's capital, Abjuga, to meet with President Olusegun Obasanjo. Obasanjo, a former military dictator, was elected president 15 months ago. Foreign affairs experts suggest that Clinton's visit is an attempt to strengthen the fledgling democracy. Nigeria, with some 114 million people, is Africa's most populous nation and an important oil exporter. Before Obasanjo took office, Nigeria was ruled for 16 years by a series of military strongmen, including Sani Abacha.|
27|Fire engulfs Moscow's 1,770-foot (540-meter) Ostankino television tower, Europe's highest and the world's second highest free-standing structure. The tower is also Russia's communications hub. At least three people are killed in the blaze, two of them in an elevator that crashes 1000 feet (305 meters) into the basement. A second elevator, carrying seven firefighters, plunges several hundred feet before being stopped by emergency brakes.|
28|Burundi's Tutsi minority refuse to sign a peace accord with the Hutu majority to end seven years of civil war. The refusal publicly embarrasses former South African President Nelson Mandela, who invited U.S. President Bill Clinton and the leaders of 12 African nations to the resort town of Arusha, Tanzania, to witness the signing of the accord. The plan, which Mandela spent two years brokering, was to return political control of Burundi to the Hutu, who make up 85 percent of the population. It also guaranteed protection of the Tutsi. The civil war, which began in 1993 when Tutsi troops assassinated Burundi's first Hutu president, Melchio Ndadaye, claimed more than 200,000 lives and displaced an estimated 1 million people.|
29|The Hispanic population of the United States--31.3 million people at the end of 1999--grew by 38.8 percent between 1990 and 1999, reports the U.S. Census Bureau. During the same 10-year-period, the nation's Asian population grew 43 percent, topping 10.8 million people in 1999.|
29|Mt. Oyama volcano erupts, sending a column of ash and smoke 26,240 feet (7,998 meters) into the air over on Japan's Miyake Island. There are no casualties.|
30|Thousands of farmers in China are in revolt over high taxes, report government officials in Beijing, the capital. The announcement confirms allegations made by a Beijing-based human rights organization. As many as 20,000 peasants, armed with sticks and clubs, are staging violent protests and rioting in towns and villages across Jiangxi, a province in southern China that is closely associated with Mao Zedong's struggle to establish a Communist government in China.|
31|Clinical trails of a vaccine to combat the most wide-spread strain of AIDS in Africa begin on 18 volunteers at the Churchill Hospital in Oxford, England. The vaccine is designed to produce T-cells that will attack and kill HIV-infected cells before infection can take hold. If the Oxford trials prove successful, additional trials will be initiated in six months in Nairobi, Kenya, according to Great Britain's Medical Research Council, a government-funded organization. The International AIDS Vaccine Initiative is working with various research organizations to develop vaccines to combat four different strains of AIDS.|
