Hittokiri's Hara-Kiri Forum

Events of 1997  2/12
February

* indicates my note
~ indicates a handbook note

2; Algerian rebels kill more than 30 people in a town south of Algiers, the capital. The Victims were associated with a dissident member of a fundamentalist Muslim faction, one of a number of groups battling the government and each other in Algeria's five-year-old civil war.

3; Sergeant Major of the Army Gene McKinney, 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 female colleague.

5; Former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party concedes that the Pakistan Muslim League, headed by Nawaz Sharif, has taken 124 of the National Assembly's 217 seats in the February 3 elections. The People's Party wins only 19 seats.

6; The German government announces that the number of Germans without jobs rose in January to 3.66 million, 12.2 percent of the workforce and the nation's highest unemployment rate since 1933, the year Adolf Hitler became chancellor.

7; Ron Robertson, head of the District of Columbia police union, describes the streets of the nation's capital as a war zone and call 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.

10; A civil court jury in Santa Monica, California, orders O.J. Simpson to pay $25 million in punitive damages to the families of Simpsons's ex 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 suit brought by the Brown and Goldman families, ordered Simpson to pay $8.5 million in compensatory damages.

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 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 1000-point jump in Wall Street history.

14; Forty-nine dolphins and three whales are found dead in the Gulf of California near Culiacan, Mexico. Biologists suspect that the cause is a chemical 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 telecommunications markets to foreign competition, a move that could push down the cost of international telephone calls, which averages $1 a minute, by 80 percent.

17; The Department of Health and Human Services announces that the U.S. government will pay teaching hospitals not to train physicians. University of Pennsylvania professor Alan Hillman called the program, which is designed to reduce the surplus of doctors, "an amazing treatment of health care as a commodity."

19; Deng Xiaoping, leader of one fifth of all humans beings on Earth, dies at the age of 92. "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.

21; Kenneth Starr announces he has changed his mind and will not resign as the Justice Department's independent counsel until the investigation into the failed Arkansas real estate venture known as Whitewater is completed. Starr had announced his resignation on February 17, sparking widespread speculation that he had failed to collect sufficient evidence to prosecute President Clinton and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton for their possible roles in the Whitewater project.

22; Embryologist Ian Wilmut announces that he and his research group at the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh, Scotland, have cloned an adult animal. Using a mammary cell from an adult ewe, Wilmut and his team prepared other ewe. After removing DNA from the donor 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 Empire State Building. One person is fatally shot and seven are wounded before the gunman turns the gun on himself.

26; Chairman of the Federal Reserve System Alan Greenspan publicly warns that stock prices may be "unsustainable high"

27; Officials of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention annouce that deaths from AIDS throughout the United States have dropped "substantially." The AIDS death rate was 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 the late 1990's to fight HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.