01|The federal Department of Health and Human Services announces that the number of people on welfare has declined by 18 percent, since the record high of 1994. The decline, which is attributed to current economic expansion and state programs to get welfare recipients into the job market, offers states a financial windfall and a head start in carrying out the 1996 welfare reform law.|
02|Algerian rebels kill more than 30 people in a town south of Algiers, the capital. The victims, according to a government official, were associated with a fundamentalist Muslim rebel faction, the Armed Islamic Group, one of a number of groups battling the government and each other in Algeria's five-year-old civil war. Since January 10, the beginning of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, more than 225 people have been killed in a series of violent incidents, including a January 19 car bombing that killed 42 people in Algiers.|
03|Sergeant Major Gene C. McKinley, the U.S. Army's top-ranking enlisted man and a member of the committee that reviews army sexual harassment policies, is accused of sexually assaulting a colleague, Sergeant Major Brenda L. Hoster, in her hotel room when the two were in Hawaii on army business.|
04|President Bill Clinton, pronouncing the state of the union "strong," calls Congress "to action" to balance the budget without enacting an amendment to the constitution and announces that the top priority of his second term is the education of the nation's young.|
04|In Santa Monica, California, O. J. Simpson loses the wrongful death suit brought against him by the families of Simpson's former wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald L. Goldman, who were murdered in June 1994. In contrast to the findings of the primarily white, suburban jury in the civil case, a largely African-American jury acquitted Simpson of the murders in 1995.|
04|Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, unable after 77 days to halt street protests in Belgrade, the capital, and abandoned by many of his key supporters, announces that he will recognize victories of political opponents in local elections. Milosevic's nullification of the Nov. 17, 1996, elections triggered the protests.|
05|Former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party concedes that the Pakistan Muslim League, headed by Nawaz Sharif, has taken 134 of the National Assembly's 217 seats in the February 3 elections. The People's Party wins only 19 seats, its poorest showing since 1969. Fourteen Assembly seats remain undecided. Farooq Leghari, the president of Pakistan, dismissed the Bhutto government on Nov. 5, 1996, for misrule and corruption.|
06|The German government announces that the number of Germans without jobs rose in January to 4.66 million, 12.2 percent of the work force and the nation's highest unemployment rate since 1933. Economists view unemployment in such key European countries as Germany, France, and Italy as a threat to European Union plans for monetary union in 1999.|
07|Ron Robertson, head of the District of Columbia police union, describes the streets of the nation's capital as a war zone and calls on the federal government to take control of the police force. Forty-five people have been murdered since January 1 on the streets of Washington, D.C. On February 5, a uniformed police officer, waiting in his squad car for a traffic light to change, was shot for no apparent reason by the driver in the next lane, who was wielding a semiautomatic weapon.|
08|Albanian police, blocking an antigovernment protest in the capital, Tirana, beat scores of demonstrators with clubs. The protests, which began more than two weeks ago and have brought traffic in the city to a standstill, were triggered by Albanians who lost an estimated $1 billion in collapsed pyramid schemes that appeared to be backed by the government.|
09|Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat meet at a checkpoint between Israel and the Palestinian-controlled Gaza Strip and agree to carry out various aspects of the 1995 peace agreements known as the Oslo Accords, including beginning discussions on the final status of Jerusalem, which both the Israelis and Palestinians claim as their capital.|
10|A civil court jury in Santa Monica, California, orders O. J. Simpson to pay $25 million in punitive damages to the families of Simpson's former wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald L. Goldman, who were murdered in 1994. On February 4, the same jury, ruling against Simpson in the wrongful death suite brought by the Brown and Goldman families, ordered Simpson to pay $8.5 million in compensatory damages. Simpson was acquitted of the murders of his exwife and her friend in a 1995 criminal court case.|
11|Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, testifying before a Congressional committee, announces that family planning is a major component of the Clinton Administration foreign policy and urges Congress to release $385 million, allocated in 1996 for international family-planning programs. The money has been held up by abortion opponents in Congress who claim that overpopulation is a myth and family planning a smoke screen for "the Clinton Administration's overseas abortion crusade."|
12|The Ecuadorean congress elects Fabian Alarcon interim president. Locally known as El Bailarin--the dancer--for his adroit deal making, Alarcon replaces Roalia Arteaga, the former vice president who on February 9 was appointed interim president. Political unrest in Ecuador began on February 6 when Abdala Bucaram, who had been elected president in July 1996, was removed from office on grounds of mental incapacity.|
13|The Dow Jones Industrial Average, a composite of the stock prices of 30 major companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange, climbs 60.81 points to close at 7,022.44. The push beyond 7,000, coming only 82 trading days after the Dow cleared the 6,000-point level, is the fastest 1,000-point jump in Wall Street history.|
14|Forty-nine dolphins and three whales are found dead in the Gulf of California near Culiacan, Mexico. Fishermen report that schools of sardines have also been killed. Marine biologists suspect that the cause is a phosphorescent chemical--NK-19--used by drug traffickers to mark sites where drugs are dropped in the ocean.|
15|More than 60 countries, meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, agree to open their telecommunication markets to foreign competition. At present, state-controlled monopolies, including state-owned telephone companies, control more than half of communications business worldwide. The U.S. Federal Communications Commission estimates that the agreement will eventually pull down the cost of international telephone calls, which average $1 a minute, by 80 percent.|
16|South Korea is placed on a military alert, and hundreds of soldiers comb the country for two North Korean agents suspected of the February 15 assassination attempt on a North Korean defector living in a suburb of Seoul. The defector, who had family connections to North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, was shot in the head and remains in critically wounded. The shooting, in combination with the February 12 defection in Beijing of a high North Korean official, has intensified tensions between Communist North Korea and democratic South Korea.|
17|The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announces that the federal government will pay teaching hospitals not to train physicians. The project will function like federal agricultural programs that paid farmers not to plant crops and will pay 41 hospitals in New York State a total of $400 million not to train new physicians. University of Pennsylvania professor Alan Hillman called the program, which is designed to reduce the Northeast's surplus of doctors, "an amazing treatment of health care as a commodity."|
18|Kenneth Starr tells reporters in Little Rock, Arkansas, that his resignation as independent counsel in the Whitewater investigation--announced the previous day--is unrelated to whether criminal charges would be brought against President Bill Clinton or First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. The February 17 resignation spawned widespread speculation that Starr, who became head of the investigation in August 1994, lacks sufficient evidence to prosecute the president or first lady for criminal behavior in relation to the failed Whitewater real estate venture and other areas of inquiry.|
19|Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping dies at age 93. "Paramount leader" of China for 18 years, Deng was the last of the generation of Communist revolutionaries who transformed China from a chaotic, feudal state to a world power, and he was the architect of an economic modernization program that radically improved the standard of living for 1.2 billion people.|
20|The National Transportation Safety Board announces that the Boeing 737 is less safe than other airliners. A single valve controlling the rudder can jam and reverse. The rudder then moves in the direction opposite of that intended by the pilot. The failure, however, is rare, and the board did not ground the planes or declare them "unsafe."|
21|Kenneth Starr announces that he has changed his mind and will not resign as the Justice Department independent counsel until investigation into the failed Arkansas real estate venture known as Whitewater is completed. Starr's February 17 resignation sparked widespread speculation that he had failed to collect sufficient evidence to prosecute President Clinton or First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton for their roles in the Whitewater project.|
22|Embryologist Ian Wilmut announces that he and his research group at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, Scotland, have cloned a sheep, the first mammal in history to be cloned. Wilmut and his team prepared the DNA from a mammary cell of a adult ewe to be accepted by an egg from another ewe. After removing the DNA from the egg, they replaced it with the DNA from the donor ewe. The egg was then implanted in a third ewe, which gave birth in July 1996 to a healthy lamb with DNA that perfectly matches that of the donor ewe.|
23|Wielding a semiautomatic weapon, a 69-year-old Palestinian immigrant opens fire on a crowd of 90 to 100 people on the 86th floor, open-air observation deck atop New York City's famed Empire State Building. Panic among sightseers leads to a mass stampede during which several children are trampled. One person is fatally shot and seven are wounded before the gunman turns the gun on himself.|
24|Officials of an internal U.S. Army investigation announce that the Central Intelligence Agency warned the army in November 1991 of "the risk of chemical contamination" of American troops who participated in the demolition of an Iraqi ammunition depot in March 1991. While the army in 1996 did acknowledge that the demolition took place and that more than 20,000 American soldiers had been exposed to nerve gas and other chemical weapons, it continued to deny any link between the exposure and the multiple health problems experienced by Gulf War veterans.|
25|The Servicemembers Legal Defense Network--an organization that provides legal services to members of the U.S. armed services accused of homosexuality--announces that 850 men and women were discharged from the military for homosexuality in 1996. The total is an 18 percent increase over the number of discharges in 1995 and a 42 percent increase over 1994, the year the Clinton Administration instituted the "don't ask, don't tell" policy toward homosexuals in the armed services.|
26|Chairman of the Federal Reserve System Alan Greenspan, speaking before the Senate Banking Committee in Washington, D.C., publicly warns that stock prices may be "unsustainably high."|
27|Officials of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announce that deaths from AIDS throughout the United States have dropped "substantially"--13 percent lower in the first six months of 1996 compared with the same period in 1995. The decline is attributed to the benefits of drug therapies introduced in recent years to fight HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.|
28|The Dallas Morning News claims on its Internet web page that Timothy J. McVeigh, the man accused of the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, confessed to his lawyers that he drove the truck containing the bomb and chose a daytime attack to achieve a higher "body count." The bombing killed 168 people and injured more than 500. The Dallas Morning News claims its information came from summaries of 1995 meetings between McVeigh and his lawyers. McVeigh's lawyers claim the report is a fraud.|
