01|Israel releases Sheik Ahmed Yassin, founder of the Islamic movement Hamas, in exchange for the release of two Israeli intelligence agents who had been held in Jordan for attempting to assassinate Khaled Meshal, a political leader of Hamas. Yassin had been imprisoned in Israel for eight years for his role in terrorist activities. The two Israeli agents allegedly attempted to kill Meshal by injecting a poison into his ear. After capturing the agents, Jordan demanded and received from Israel an antidote to the poison. Jordan also extracted a promise that Israel release an additional 70 Palestinians currently in prison.|
02|United States Attorney General Janet Reno expands the Justice Department's inquiry into Vice President Al Gore's telephone fund raising. Reno's actions are the next phase in the process of determining whether the Justice Department will seek an independent prosecutor to investigate the fund-raising practices of the Clinton Administration during the 1996 presidential election. Republicans have threatened to impeach Reno if she fails to appoint an independent prosecutor to examine the list of fund-raising practices by Democrats in the Clinton-Gore reelection campaign.|
03|Attorney General Janet Reno announces that she has found no evidence that President Bill Clinton misused his office to raise money, improperly allowed contributors to stay overnight at the White House, or sought contributions in exchange for political favors.|
04|Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History pays $8.36 million at Sotheby's auction house in New York City for Sue, the most complete <i>Tyrannosaurus rex</i> fossil yet discovered.|
05|The Clinton Administration releases a videotape showing President Bill Clinton greeting potential campaign donors at a series of coffees in the West Wing of the White House before the 1996 presidential election. The tape is released two days after Attorney General Janet Reno cleared Clinton of allegations of campaign finance abuse. Disclosure of the tape marks the first Clinton Administration acknowledgment that fund-raising events had been held in federal offices, where U.S. law limits such activity.|
06|The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine is awarded to Stanley B. Prusiner, a neurologist at the University of California at San Francisco, for his discovery of prions, a new genre of disease-causing agents. Prions are proteins that have been linked to mad cow disease and other deadly brain-wasting conditions.|
07|Astronomers announce the discovery of a star in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius that is 25,000 light-years from Earth. Although the discovering astronomers claim the star is the brightest yet observed in the Milky Way, it has been hidden from human view by vast interstellar clouds. The star, situated near the center of the Galaxy, was discovered in the process of analyzing an infrared image from the Hubble Space Telescope.|
08|The Mars Global Surveyor satellite yields the strongest evidence to date that Mars, like Earth, has a crust, a mantle, and an iron core. The finding lends support to the theory that the planet might once have been hospitable to life.|
08|Kim Jong Il, who North Koreans call the "Dear Leader," assumes the nation's top leadership post, which had been vacant since the 1994 death of Kim's father, Kim Il Sung.|
09|A hurricane unleashes flash floods and landslides along the Pacific coast of Mexico, killing at least 120 people. The storm dumps 16 inches (40.6 centimeters) of rain on the resort city of Acapulco, turning streets into rivers of mud. At least 17 people die when flood waters collapse an apartment building and a church.|
09|Dario Fo, an Italian playwright and performer known for mixing social farce with political satire, is awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Fo is renowned for <i>Mistero Buffo</i> (Comic Mystery), a play written in 1969 that blasts religion and politics.|
10|The Nobel Peace Prize is awarded to the International Campaign to Ban Land Mines and to its American coordinator, Jody Williams. Hours after the award is announced, Russian President Boris Yeltsin declares that Russia has decided to sign an international treaty banning land mines. The United States and China have refused to sign the treaty.|
10|The major tobacco companies settle the first class-action lawsuit over the effects of smoking on nonsmokers by agreeing to spend $300 million for the study of tobacco-related diseases. The tobacco industry settled the lawsuit with an estimated 60,000 former and current flight attendants and their survivors, acknowledging that secondhand smoke is harmful.|
11|An Argentine airline crashes in Uruguay, killing all 75 people aboard. According to authorities, the DC-9 was flying in a fierce rainstorm. A crater 25-feet (8-meters) deep and 30-feet (9-meters) wide marked the spot where the plane slammed into the earth about 140 miles (225 kilometers) north of Buenos Aires, the Argentine capital.|
12|John Denver, singer/songwriter of "Take Me Home County Roads," "Sunshine on My Shoulders," and "Rocky Mountain High," dies when his experimental plane crashes into California's Monterey Bay. Denver was 53 years old.|
13|British Prime Minister Tony Blair meets Gerry Adams, leader of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army. According to observers, the meeting, which is the first between a British prime minister and a Sinn Fein leader, signifies a new era in mending the stormy relations between Great Britain and the Roman Catholic citizens of Northern Ireland.|
13|A British jet car becomes the first vehicle to officially exceed the speed of sound on land. The Thrust SSC automobile makes three high speed runs in the Black Rock Desert near Gerlach, Nevada. In two of the runs, the car exceeds the speed of sound, known as Mach 1 in aviation and racing fields. The car's average speed was 763.035 miles (1,227.986 kilometers) per hour.|
14|Two scholars who devised a formula for accurately pricing financial market options win the Nobel Memorial Prize for Economic Science. Robert C. Merton, of the Harvard Business School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Myron S. Scholes, a Canadian-born professor emeritus at the Stanford Business School in Palo Alto, California, are credited with spawning the explosive growth in options trading, which began in the 1970's.|
15|NASA's Cassini spacecraft rockets flawlessly toward Saturn on a mission that activists attempted to stop for fear that the flights would cause Earth to be accidentally showered with radioactive plutonium. The 2.2 million-mile (3.54 million-kilometer) journey to the ringed planet will take seven years. Cassini will spend four years exploring Saturn, its rings, and icy moons, particularly, Titan, the largest moon.|
16|Researchers at a private Atlanta, Georgia, clinic announce that they have frozen human eggs, thawed them, fertilized them, and produced a successful twin pregnancy. Physiologists suggest that the procedure could allow women to remain fertile longer by freezing and storing healthy eggs for later use.|
17|The remains of Ernesto "Che" Guevara, an Argentine-born physician and Marxist guerrilla fighter who inspired a generation of revolutionaries, are laid to rest in Cuba 30 years after he died in Bolivia. Guevara's body had been found early in 1997 in a mass grave in the Bolivian jungle, where he was executed in 1967.|
18|McNeil Consumer Products Company, the makers of Tylenol, the most popular pain reliever in the United States, announces that future advertising and bottle labels will inform consumers that too much of the drug can harm children. Overdoses of acetaminophen--Tylenol's active ingredient--have been blamed for liver damage and the death of U.S. children.|
19|The attorney general of Israel agrees that a 17-year-old American fugitive could be extradited for trial in the killing and dismemberment of a 19-year-old man. Israel's initial refusal to extradite the teen-ager, Samuel Sheinbein, had strained relations between the United States and Israel. In response, Congress had withheld a $75 million Israeli aid installment. Sheinbein, an American citizen whose father was born in Israel, fled to Israel after being charged with first degree murder.|
20|The U.S. Justice Department charges Microsoft--the Redmond, Washington, based software giant--with violating a 1995 antitrust pact. Microsoft is being fined $1 million a day until it stops demanding that U.S. personal computer makers package only Microsoft software for browsing the Internet with new computers.|
20|Stock prices and currency values fall sharply in Asia markets amid fears that east Asia's economic crisis is spreading to other regions. Stocks plunged in Hong Kong, Malaysia, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand. The currencies of South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand hit record lows against the dollar.|
21|The Clinton Administration announces it will support legislation to overhaul the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) by creating a board of outside directors that would have some authority over the agency, but would function under the supervision of the Secretary of the Treasury. The legislation would strengthen rights of taxpayers in their relations with the tax-collection agency. The IRS currently considers any taxpayer under investigation by the agency to be guilty until proven innocent.|
22|Pol Pot, former leader of the Communist Khmer Rouge that controlled Cambodia between 1975 and 1979, discloses during his first interview in 18 years that he had never intended to kill anyone and that his "conscience is clear." Pol Pot has been held responsible for the deaths of at least 1 million Cambodians during the four years he wielded power.|
22|Stocks on the Hong Kong exchange plummet when Hong Kong bankers raise interest rates to avoid devaluation of the Hong Kong dollar, which is pegged to the U.S. dollar. The Hong Kong dollar is the only Southeast Asian currency that has not been devalued during the current economic crisis.|
23|As stocks in Hong Kong continue to drop, loosing 10.4 percent of value, investors worldwide respond with massive sell-offs in the financial markets in Japan, Europe, and the United States.|
24|A freak snowstorm blankets eastern Colorado, piling as much as 48 inches (122 centimeters) of snow in some areas. The blizzard moves into Nebraska, where it dumps up to 23 inches (58 centimeters) of snow in some sections of the state. Heavy snow also falls in Utah, Texas, and Iowa.|
25|Approximately 300,000 women, according to police estimates, converge in Philadelphia for the Million Woman March, a rally celebrating family unity and what it means to be a woman of African descent in America.|
26|President Jiang Zemin of China lands in Honolulu, Hawaii, to begin a state visit to the United States, the first by a Chinese leader in 12 years. Both Chinese and American officials have described the visit as Jiang's attempt to the repair Sino-American relationships.|
26|The Florida Marlins win baseball's World Series, defeating the Cleveland Indians 3-2, in the 11th inning of the seventh and final game. The Marlins were the first baseball team to win the series without finishing the regular season first in its league.|
26|President Bill Clinton announces that the federal budget deficit has fallen to $22.6 billion, the lowest since the early 1970's. Economists believe that the current strong economic growth resulted in a surge in tax revenue.|
27|A worldwide plunge in stock prices forces the New York Stock Exchange to halt trading during regular trading hours for the first time since President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. The Dow average ends the day down 554 points--7.2 percent--the worst loss since October 1987 and the 12th worst day in the history of the exchange. Economists blame the steep drop on the continued decline of the Hong Kong stock market, which dragged down share prices and bond markets around the world. In Hong Kong, share prices fall 5.8 percent, their fourth major decline in five days, amid speculation that Hong Kong would be forced to devalue its currency as other Asian nations have done.|
27|British Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordan Brown announces that Great Britain will not take part in European single currency during the next four or five years, but will join when membership will help Britain economically. The statement marks the clearest endorsement a senior British politician has yet made regarding the single-currency project.|
28|The panic that had gripped the world financial community eases as stock shares of the biggest and strongest U.S. companies rally sharply, reversing the losses of October 27 in the first 45 minutes of trading. The Dow Jones industrial average sores 337.17 points or 4.7 percent by days end--its greatest single-day point gain in history and the biggest percentage gain in more than a decade.|
29|President Bill Clinton and President Jiang Zemin of China, meeting for a first round of summit talks in Washington, D.C., agree to several trade pacts but clash on human rights issues. China agrees to buy $3 billion of U.S. civilian airplanes. Jiang also agrees to abandon China's nuclear cooperation program with Iran, which clears the way for American companies to bid on nuclear power contracts in China.|
29|The Iraqi government orders American members of the United Nations arms inspection team to leave Iraq within a week and demands that the United States halt flights used to search for prohibited Iraqi military programs.|
30|The World Wide Fund for Nature reports that villagers in Indonesia are killing orangutans fleeing fires in the rain forests. The endangered apes are among the world's most advanced primates. The females are being slaughtered and their young captured and sold illegally. The Indonesian forest fires were set by corporations to clear land for agriculture.|
31|The United States announces that is it committing approximately $3 billion in aid to Indonesia--the first direct American financial contribution to restore financial stability in Southeast Asia. The International Monetary Fund, an organization that works to maintain orderly payments between countries and promote world economic growth, pledges $15 billion for Indonesia, the world's fourth most populous country.|
