Portal:Current events/October 2003
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- An earthquake (magnitude 4.7) hits parts of Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands.
- Accounting scandals: WorldCom has filed for bankruptcy protection, in the largest corporate insolvency ever.
- Harry Potter. The director for the third Harry Potter film has been announced as Mexican-born Alfonso Cuaron. Cuaron will start directing "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban" next year.
- Politics of the Netherlands. A new cabinet is sworn in, with Jan Peter Balkenende replacing Wim Kok as Prime Minister. He heads a coalition of three parties: Christen Democratisch Appèl, Lijst Pim Fortuyn and Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie. One of the secretaries of state of the new cabinet resigned a few hours later.
- Open source: Streaming media company RealNetworks has announced that it intends to release substantial parts of their proprietary technologies under an "open-source friendly" licence. This opens the possibility of the integration of Ogg Vorbis' technology with elements of Real's technologies.
- Intellectual property: Forgent Networks has asserted that it owns and will enforce patent rights on the widely-used JPEG image compression standard which is used widely on the World Wide Web. The announcement has created a furore remisicent of Unisys' attempts to assert its rights over the GIF image compression standard.
- Muslim missile engineer Avul Pakir Jainulabdeen Abdul Kalam is elected president of India, to be sworn into office July 25.
- John Walker Lindh, the so-called "American Taliban", pled guilty to two charges, and prosecutors dropped the rest. He will be sentenced in October.
- French president Jacques Chirac misses a would-be assassin's bullet during Bastille Day celebrations.
- Michel Brunet, a paleontologist at the University of Poitier, France, announced in the Journal Nature that a 7 million-year-old skull found in the desert of Chad is the earliest hominid fossil ever found. But he was immediately met by a firestorm of criticism from other scientists who claim that it is merely the skull of a female gorilla.
- George W. Bush gives a stern speech addressing American accountancy scandals.
- Recent celebrity deaths: Rod Steiger, American actor, aged 77.
- Organization of African Unity disbanded, African Union created.
- Recent celebrity deaths: Ted Williams, baseball player, aged 83.
- Nicotine water is ruled illegal by the Food and Drug Administration.
- Entertainment - The Yahoo! Internet Life magazine folds.
- Medicine - The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) of the United States will be headed by an infectious disease expert.
- Technology - A US federal judge decided that Microsoft is not required to reveal its lobbying contacts.
- Current events/June 2002
- Current events/May 2002
- Topics removed from current events
- Background articles for ongoing events
News pages
External links to news pages that can be used to gather new topics for the above list:
- News Search Engines: http://www.HavenWorks.com/news/search
- Google News
- http://dailynews.yahoo.com/headlines/ts/
- http://www.bbc.co.uk/news - Coverage split in to science/health etc... for UK and world news
- http://www.cnn.com.
- News Sources