Welcome to Gaia! :: View User's Journal | Gaia Journals

Jan 1 Austria, Finland and Sweden enter the European Union.

Jan 9 Valeriy Polyakov, Russian cosmonaut (male) completes 366 days in space, breaking a duration record.

Jan 17 A magnitude 7.3 earthquake near Kobe, Japan, kills 6,434 people.

Jan 31 President Clinton invokes emergency powers to extend a $20 billion loan to help Mexico avert financial collapse.

Feb 13 A UN tribunal on human rights violations in the Balkans charges twenty-one Bosnian Serb commanders with genocide and crimes against humanity.

Mar 1 In Moscow, a popular anti-corruption journalist and TV anchor, Vladislav Listyev, is assassinated, his assailant to forever remain a mystery.

Mar 1 In Santa Clara, California, Yahoo is founded.

Mar 3 The UN peacekeeping mission ends in Somalia.

Mar 20 In Tokyo, religious terrorists release sarin gas on five railway trains, killing 12 and injuring 5,510.

Apr 5 The U.S. House of Representatives votes 246-188 to cut taxes for individuals and corporations. Speaker Gingrich says that the bill "helps to create jobs. It strengthens families. it does what we ought to be doing. And it's the last step in the Contract."

Apr 19 U.S Army veteran Timothy McVeigh is upset concerning the federal government's action against David Koresh and his Branch Davidians in Waco Texas. In Oklahoma City he and an accomplice, Terry Nichols, set off a bomb that destroys the Murrah Federal Building, killing 168 people, including 8 federal marshals and 19 children.

May 11 More than 170 countries agree to extend the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty indefinitely and without conditions.

Jul 11 Dutch UN peacekeepers are pushed out of the way in the area around Srebrenica, in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Bosnian Serbs round up and kill an estimated 8,000 Muslim men and boys, the largest mass murder in Europe since World War II.

Jul 21-22 China tests four missiles aimed at targets 85 miles north of Taiwan.

Aug 3 At peace talks in Switzerland, Croatia appeals to Serbs within Croatia to reintegrate. The Serbs refuse, while Serbia's president, Slobodan Milosevic, is giving the Serbs in Croatia no support in response to their refusal to make peace.

Aug 4 Croatia claims its right to liberate its own territory. Croatia's military advances toward Serbs in the separatist Krajina area in Croatia. Before the force arrives, a 40-mile stream of some 300,000 Serb civilians and armed men flee. Three Croatian generals will be tried in 2008 by a UN war crimes tribunal for ethnic cleansing.

Aug 4 The Clinton Administration discloses intelligence information and opposes lifting economic sanctions against Iraq. President Clinton complains that the Hussein regime still kills opponents abroad and has developed vast stocks of germ warfare agents. At the United Nations, US representative Madalaine Albright lists the UN resolutions that Iraq is supposed to comply with in order for sanctions to be lifted but which she describes him as flouting.

Aug 9 Jerry Garcia, guitarist for The Grateful Dead, dies from an overdose of heroin.

Aug 28 A Bosnian Serb mortar shell kills 37 people and wounds 90 in a market place in Sarajevo.

Aug 30 The Serb mortar attack has moved people in Europe to support President Clinton's call for an air attack against Serb forces. NATO air strikes against the Bosnian Serbs around Sarajevo begin. Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell, is opposed. He is for all out war or no war and has advised that air strikes will probably fail to deter Bosnian Serb aggression. Only troops on the ground, he claims, could do that.

Sep 20 NATO strikes have involved 400 aircraft from 15 nations. The air campaign has ended with Bonsian Serbs agreeing to a settlement.

Sep 23 President Clinton speaks to the nation via radio about the inability of the U.S. to force peace of warring parties in Bosnia. "Only they themselves can make it [peace]," he says. "That's why I have refused to let American ground troops become combatants in Bosnia."

Oct 3 A jury finds O.J. Simpson not guilty of the murder of his former wife and her friend.

Oct 30 Quebec separatists narrowly lose a referendum for a mandate to negotiate independence from Canada.

Nov 1 Russia, the U.S. and others have applied pressure to bring together the Serbs, Croats and Bosnians to end the war in Bosnia. Negotiations begin in Dayton, Ohio.

Nov 4 In Tel Aviv, Yigal Amir, 25, a religious rightist opposed to peace efforts with the Palestinians assassinates Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

Nov 10 Iraq disarmament crisis: With help from Israel and Jordan, UN inspector Ritter intercepts 240 Russian gyroscopes and accelerometers on their way to Iraq from Russia.

Nov 10 In Nigeria, playwright and environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, along with eight others from the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, are hanged by government forces.

Nov 16 A United Nations tribunal charges Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic with genocide during the Bosnian War.

Nov 21 A peace agreement for Bosnia is reached.

Nov 28 U.S. President Bill Clinton signs the National Highway Designation Act, which ends the federal 55 mph speed limit.

Dec 4 First NATO peacekeeping troops arrive in Sarajevo, including 700 U.S. troops. an international force to number around 60,000.

Dec 14 The Dayton Agreement is signed in Paris, ending three and a half years of war in Bosnia.