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Portal:Current events/October 2003

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Patrick (talk | contribs) at 12:07, 5 January 2003 (Reports that they had already resumed there daily occupations like fishing are misleading: they were "fishing" for their possesions that were blown out to sea.). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Every day, news articles appear that mention new, unfamiliar, but (now) important people, places, things, and concepts. Wikipedia can and should become a resource for background information on the topics behind these current events.

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Ongoing events and developing stories

These are entries which cover current events, that is, events that are ongoing and may have historical significance. These entries should be edited with an eye to historicity, while including timely information in a way not possible with paper encyclopedias.

Current events

January 4, 2003

January 3, 2003

  • The Immigration and Naturalization Service of the United States proposes rules which will require all Americans traveling abroad to disclose detailed personal information both before leaving the country and before being permitted to re-enter the country. [1]
  • In Bourake, Cote d'Ivoire, French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin met with political leaders of the Patriotic Movement of the Ivory Coast, who agreed to to participate in negotiations to be held in Paris, France, the week of January 15, 2003. However, two independent rebel groups in the west of the country, assisted by fighters from Liberia, have seized villages and the cocoa crops inside those villages, forcing residents to flee to the port of San Pedro with no possessions. One-fifth of the world's cocoa crop passes through San Pedro. A French unit is guarding the port.
  • U.S. plan to invade Iraq: United Nations arms inspectors from UMOVIC have established a base of operations in Mosul, Iraq, 375 kilometers or 200 miles north of Baghdad, to speed the inspection process.
  • College football: At the Fiesta Bowl in Tempe, Arizona, the Ohio State University Buckeyes defeated the University of Miami (Florida) Hurricanes, 34-27, to win the national championship.
  • Journalist Geoff Mackley [2] reports after a helicopter mission that the Cyclone Zoe has led to no casualties on the island of Tikopia, even though devastation was enormous. The 1,000 inhabitants of the island survived in caves. Reports that they had already resumed there daily occupations like fishing are misleading: they were "fishing" for their possesions that were blown out to sea. The situation on the island of Anuta with 600 inhabitants is not known yet.

January 2, 2003

  • The first 49 of a promised 1,264 West African peacekeepers arrives at Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire, to help supervise the cease-fire between the government of President Laurent Gbagbo and the main rebel group, the Patriotic Movement of the Ivory Coast. Rebellion against the Gbagbo government began September 19, 2002. The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) agreed to send peacekeepers on September 29. The EECOWAS peacekeepers will join 2,500 French forces. Rebel groups occupy the nothern half of Cote d'Ivoire.
  • French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin arrives in Cote d'Ivoire to help mediate the conflict.
  • Oil leakage from the sunken tanker Prestige threatens the southwestern coast of France. The prefect of Aquitaine reported a slick from the tanker is 50 kilometers (30 standard miles) from the coast. French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin promised 50 million euros for the cleanup. The Prestige, which carried 77,000 tonnes of crude oil, sunk in late November, 2002, off the coast of the Galician region of Spain.
  • The Chinese Foreign Ministry reacted to a report in the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz which stated that Israel has complied with a U.S. request to suspend all contracts on the exports of arms and security equipment from China to Israel. Israeli Defence Ministry Director-General Amos Yaron stated that Israel intends to "track down" all security ties with China. An unnamed senior Israeli official stated that the Americans were using the pretext of protecting Taiwan to cover a proposed shift of American policy to allow direct arms sales to China.
  • United States Army division commanders are beginning a war game at V Corps headquarters at Heidelberg, Germany, called VICTORY SCRIMMAGE. The exercise is under the command of Lieutenant General William Wallace, who is expected to command American ground forces in a planned U.S. war against Iraq.
  • Clonaid Chief Executive Brigitte Boisselier told the French television station France 2 that the American parents of the supposed clone that Clonaid has created are balking at provicing DNA evidence to prove that their new-born baby "Eve" is really a clone. The claim is that the parents are afraid that Florida will try to take the baby away from them.

January 1, 2003

  • Users of the Gregorian calendar around the world celebrate the New Year. Happy New Year!
  • Luíz Inácio Lula da Silva ("Lula") becomes the 37th president of the Federative Republic of Brazil for the period (2003-2007). Da Silva was elected representing the Worker's Party with 61% percent of the vote. His inaugural speech includes vows to wipe out poverty, hunger, and corruption, but da Silva promised during the campaign to abide by an agreement with the International Monetary Fund to maintain a budget surplus of 3.75% and has filled key economic posts with men considered friendly to foreign investment. Among guests at the inauguration were Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, Cuban President Fidel Castro, and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick.
  • The Turkish-registered tanker Vicky, with 70,000 tonnes of diesel cargo, struck the wreck of the sunken auto carrier Tricolor off the coast of Dunkirk, France. The double-hulled tanker freed itself from the wreck with the rising tide and sailed a mile off to check for leakage. The Vicky is the second ship to strike the wreck of the Tricolor since the carrier sank on December 14, 2002.
  • A Royal Australian Air Force C-130 Hercules overflew the islands of Tikopia and Anuta in the Solomon Islands to inspect damage by Cyclone Zoe. The overflight carried officials of the Australian government agency AusAid. Reports show that there has been damage to crops and traditional homes, but there may be no casualties among the islands' 1,600 inhabitants.

December 31, 2002

  • United States troops get into a brief gun battle with paramilitary forces of the Warzirstan Scouts of Pakistan, in a remote tribal area along the undefined Afghan/Pakistani border, in Paktia Province, Afghanistan. One US soldier is wounded by gunfire, and several Pakistani soldiers are killed when US air support arrives. The border in this region is poorly demarcated. [3]. Three missiles from US helicopter gunships strike a madrassa owned by former Taliban official Maulana Muhammad Hassan, according to the ANI news agency.
  • The first trial of a member of the Russian military for human rights violations in Chechnya concludes controversially, with Col. Yuri Budanov found not guilty by reason of insanity and committed to a psychiatric hospital for further evaluation and treatment. Budanov was charged with murder and abduction after being accused of raping and strangling Heda Kungayeva, an 18 year old Chechen girl whom Budanov contends was a rebel sniper. [4]

December 30, 2002

  • The Israeli Supreme Court rules that reservists may not refuse to serve in the West Bank or Gaza because of their objection to Israeli government policies. The Court ruled "the recognition of selective conscientious objection might loosen the links that hold us together as a people."
  • Four Americans (the director, a doctor, the administrator and the pharmacist) at the Baptist hospital in Jibla, Yemen, were killed by Abed Abdul-Razzak Kamal. Kamal was captured and claims he was linked to the extremist Islamic Reform Party. Another member of his alleged cell, Ali al-Jarallah, was arrested for shooting a Yemeni left-wing politician on Sunday.
  • The United Nations Security Council voted 13-0, with two abstentions, to revise the list of goods Iraq is allowed to purchase under the "food-for-oil" program. The list includes flight simulators, communications equipment, high-speed motorboats, and rocket cases, which the United States noted are dual-use technologies. The Security Council also agreed to ask the UN for standards to evaluate the quantities of medicine and antibiotics Iraq is allowed to import under this program.
  • A tanker, the Amazonian Explorer, arrived in Puerto La Cruz, Venezuela, 200 kilometers east of Caracas, the capital. President Hugo Chavez traveled to the port to supervise the unloading of 525,000 barrels of gasoline. Gasoline is restricted due to a strike at Petroleos de Venezuela, SA (PdVSA), the state-owned oil company, which is aimed at forcing President Chavez to call early elections.
  • Crude oil futures on the New York market rose to $33 a barrel because of the Venezuelan oil strike and fears of war with Iraq.

December 29, 2002

  • The Kenyan electoral commission confirms that the opposition National Rainbow Coalition (NARC) has won landslide victories over the ruling KANU party in Friday's elections, ending 40 years of single party rule and 24 years of rule by Daniel arap Moi. The NARC's presidential candidate, Mwai Kibaki, led by more than 30 percentage points over the KANU's official candidate. [5]
  • Brighton's West Pier collapsed. It had served from the Victorian era until it was closed in 1975. [6][7]

December 27, 2002

  • Chechen rebels detonate two car bombs at the Grozny headquarters of Chechnya's Russian-backed government in an apparent suicide attack, killing more than 80 people. [8]
  • North Korea expels UN weapons inspectors, and announces plans to reactivate a dormant nuclear fuel processing laboratory. [9]
  • Clonaid, the medical arm of a cult called Raelism, who believe that aliens introduced human life on Earth, claims to have successfully cloned a human being. They claim that aliens taught them how to perform cloning, even though the company has no record of having successfully cloned any previous animal. A spokesperson said an independent agency would prove that the baby, named Eve, is in fact an exact copy of her mother. [10]
  • Presidential elections in Kenya between Uhuru Kenyatta, candidate for ruling party KANU, and Mwai Kibaki, candidate for opposition party NARC. Early reports say the latter wins a landslide victory.

December 26, 2002

  • North Korea is reactivating a plutonium producing nuclear power plant north of Pyongyang after removing United Nations seals on the reactor and degrading the capability of surveillance cameras. This same reactor is thought by U.S. officials as the source for plutonium for two previously produced atomic bombs. North Korea has been named by the George W. Bush Administration as part of the so-called "axis of evil."[11]
  • War on Terrorism: A Washington Post article quotes numerous anonymous CIA agents who confirm that the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States uses so-called "stress and duress" interrogation techniques, which are claimed by human rights activists to be acts of torture. The actions include beatings as a prelude to interrogation in order to break their will, followed by sleep deprivation, denial of pain medication, and enclosure in cramped rooms. The CIA frequently turns suspects over to Middle Eastern intelligence services for what is undisputablely torture and intensive interrogation. The anonymous agents defend the practice as necessary in light of the September 11th terrorist attacks; publicly, US government officials deny the charges, while declining to address specifics. Privately, however, one official justified human rights violations as being a necessary part of the job. [12]
  • Israeli-Palestinian conflict: Israel announces it will begin with temporarily providing social services such as education, healthcare, and licenses in the West Bank and Gaza. The Israeli government claims the move is necessary to provide badly needed services to the Palestinian people in light of the Palestinian Authority's inability to do so. Palestinian officials claim the move is an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of the Palestinian Authority and tantamount to the reinstatement of the Israeli occupation that existed before the 1993 Oslo Accords.
  • A 55-year-old contractor from West Virginia named Andrew "Jack" Whittaker Jr won the $314.9 million Christmas Day Powerball jackpot which is the biggest undivided lottery prize in American history. [13]

December 25, 2002

December 24, 2002

  • A number of US Muslim groups have initiated a class action lawsuit against the US Attorney General, John Ashcroft and the US immigration services over the arrest and detention of large numbers (believed to be in the hundreds) of Muslim men.
  • A bomb believed planted by a Muslim separatist organisation killed 13 people, including a town mayor, and wounded 12 in a Christmas Eve attack in the southern Philippines town of Datu Piang.
  • Iran's state radio reported quoted a statement by airport officials, saying that pilot "carelessness" caused a plane carrying Ukrainian and Russian aerospace scientists to crash in central Iran, killing all 46 people on board.
  • Sun Microsystems won a major antitrust victory against Microsoft when a federal judge ordered Microsoft to distribute Sun's Java programming language in its Microsoft Windows operating system.

December 23, 2002

  • Bill Frist was voted to succeed Trent Lott as United States Senate Majority Leader.
  • Scientists at California company VaxGen Inc., have finished the first human trial of an AIDS vaccine, a mammoth $200 million, 5,400-patient effort more than a decade in the making. The Food and Drug Administration has granted the vaccine "fast-track" status that would speed it through the approval process, if it proves effective, for public availability. The test results are expected to be made public within approximately three months.
  • The British musician Joe Strummer has died of a heart attack, aged 50. His death made the top news story in a number of British news sources.
  • Victor Emmanuel (IV), the heir of the last King of Italy, visited the country for the first time since the Italian Royal Family was banned. A constitutional amendment passed in November allowed the royal family to return as ordinary citizens.

December 22, 2002

  • Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat announced that he has called off presidential and legislative elections scheduled for next month, as he feels that continued Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory will make a free election impossible.
  • North Korea announced that it is physically removing monitoring devices placed on the Yongbyon nuclear reactor. The devices were placed by the United Nations following the 1994 nuclear agreement to shut down Yongbyon, which is capable of making weapons-grade material, in exchange for deliveries of oil. In November 2002, Korea admitted that it is working on a weapons of mass destruction program in response to "imperialist threats." The United States states it does not trust the North Koreans.
  • Demonstrators estimated in the tens of thousands supported proposed national security laws for Hong Kong, following last week's demonstrations with similar numbers against these proposed laws. The Government Consultation Exercise for the proposed laws received 18,000 comments. Article 23 of the Basic Law of Hong Kong, negotiated by Britain and China before the 1997 handover to China, stated that Hong Kong must enact national security legislation by itself banning treason, turning over state secrets, and urging separation from China.
  • A senior member of ETA, Ibon Femandez de Iradi, escaped from French custody yesterday. He and a woman companion was arrested Wednesday after their car was found to have false number plates. Ibon Femandez de Iradi was the logistics chief for ETA, a Basque separatist group which has been implicated in terrorist activities.
  • Time Magazine announced that its "Persons of the Year" are three female whistle blowers -- Coleen Rowley, FBI agent who wrote a memorandum to FBI Director Robert Mueller claiming that the Minneapolis, Minnesota office had been remiss in its investigation of suspected terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui; Cynthia Cooper, former WorldCom auditor, who alerted the company's Board of Directors of accounting irregularities; and Sherron Watkins, former Enron Vice President, who reported to the company's former Chairman Kenneth Lay in 2001 that the company was about to collapse as a result of false accounting.
  • The city of Baltimore, Maryland passed an ordinance making the giving of a BB gun to a minor a misdemeanor punished by a $500 fine and two months in jail.
  • Singer Kristyn Osbourne of the country music group SHeDAISY filed a $3.5 million lawsuit against karaoke companies for failure to pay songwriters.

December 21, 2002

  • In the Cote d'Ivoire, units of the French Foreign Legion, based at the city of Duekoue on Sassandra River have come into contact with rebels advancing southward from the city of Man. Colonel Emmanuel Maurin, commander of the French force, states "Between what we have here and the river, they shall not pass."
  • South Korean President-elect Roh Mooh-hyun states that he will visit Washington after receiving an invitation from President George W. Bush. During his campaign, Roh stated he would not visit simply for a White House "photo op."

December 20, 2002

December 19, 2002

  • U.S. plan to invade Iraq: After reviewing a 12,000 page Iraqi weapons declaration document, U.S. officials state that Iraq has failed to account for all its chemical and biological agents and that Iraq is in material breach of an United Nations Security Council resolution.
  • Hundreds of Middle Eastern immigrants in Southern California who came to INS officials to register, as per new regulations, are arrested and imprisoned for various INS violations, many of them due to official delays in processing necessary forms. Critics compare the action to the Japanese internment in the same region during World War II. Others claim that the people are in violation of United States immigration law, and the arrests are valid.
  • Ruling party candidate Roh Moo-hyun won South Korea's presidential election, a result that could complicate ties with the United States as the allies grapple with North Korea's nuclear programme.
  • Pope John Paul II will approve the miracle needed to beatify Mother Teresa, whose dedication to the destitute earned her a special place in the pontiff's heart. A second miracle then will be needed to declare Mother Teresa a saint.
  • AOL Time Warner announced that they had been issued a patent for instant messaging. AOL said that they have no plans to enforce the patent, but it could cause major problems for the purveyors of other instant messaging systems, in partcular Microsoft and Yahoo.
  • Rebels in the Cote d'Ivoire seized the key western city of Man from government forces.

December 18, 2002

December 17, 2002

  • Congo's government, rebels and opposition parties signed a peace accord to end four years of civil war and set up a transitional government to lead Africa's third-largest nation to its first democratic elections since independence in 1960.
  • The Bush administration announced it will begin begin deploying a limited system to defend the United States against ballistic missiles by 2004.
  • ElcomSoft is found not guilty on 4 counts of DMCA violations, in the first important test case involving the controversial law.

December 16, 2002

  • Former Bosnian Serb President Biljana Plavsic pled guilty to one count of crimes against humanity at the Hague tribunal for her part in persecuting Bosnian Muslims and Croats during the 1992-95 conflict, which left 200,000 dead or missing.
  • Protesters blockaded highways in and around Caracas as the opposition, angered by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's resolve to hang on to power, called for an escalation in its campaign to remove him.
  • Former US Vice President and 2000 Presidential candidate Al Gore announces on the CBS program 60 Minutes that he will not seek election to the Presidency in 2004.

December 13, 2002

December 11, 2002

December 10, 2002

  • The government of Indonesia and rebel leaders from the province of Aceh (in the north of Sumatra) have signed a peace accord which negotiators hope will bring an end to fighting in the province.
  • Venezuela's Supreme Court announced it was suspending its services, citing political harassment and condemning deadly violence during a general strike by opponents of President Hugo Chavez.

December 9, 2002

December 7, 2002

December 6, 2002

  • The Chechen separatist Akhmed Zakayev has returned to London, where he is expected to seek asylum. He was arrested but released soon afterwards on bail paid by Vanessa Redgrave.
  • Israeli-Palestinian conflict: Israeli troops backed by tanks and helicopter gunships swept into the Bureij refugee camp in the Gaza Strip on Friday, provoking a gunbattle and killing 10 people, Palestinian witnesses and medics said.
  • Venezuela's oil exports ground to a halt, negotiations stalled and protesters faced off on the streets as prospects dimmed for a peaceful resolution to a strike designed to unseat President Hugo Chavez.
  • In continuing legal action against Exxon over the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989, punitive damages against the company have been reduced from $5000 to $4000 million. The company is expected to appeal.
  • Archeologists digging near the Gulf Coast of Mexico have discovered an inscribed seal and fragments of a plaque which contain writing, pushing back the date for the first appearance of writing in Mesoamerica to about 650 BC. It also suggests that the Olmec culture developed writing, not the Zapotecs.
  • Pi has been calculated to 1.24 trillion digits. Professor Yasumasa Kanada and nine other researchers at the Information Technology Center at Tokyo University have set the new world record.

December 5, 2002

December 3, 2002

December 1, 2002


Past events:

News pages

External links to news pages that can be used to gather new topics for the above list:


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