July 14
Temperatures top 100 degrees for a second successive day as a deadly heat wave intensifies in Chicago.
July 16
Amazon.com opens for business on the Internet.
July 18
Publication date of Barack Obama’s memoir, Dreams from My Father.
July 22
A jury in Union, S.C., finds Susan Smith guilty of first-degree murder in the deliberate drowning of her two sons. She is later sentenced to life in prison.
July 25
Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić and his military commander, Ratko Mladić, are indicted for genocide by a U.N. war crimes tribunal at the Hague.
July 27
The Korean War Veterans Memorial is dedicated in Washington, D.C.
July 31
In an unexpected move, Walt Disney Company says it is acquiring Capital Cities–ABC Inc. for $19 billion. The deal includes the popular ESPN sports cable network.
August 1
In the second major television network deal in as many days, Westinghouse Electric Corporation announces that it is acquiring CBS for $5.4 billion.
August 4
Croatian forces launch “Operation Storm,” an offensive to recapture the country’s Krajina region, which Serbs had seized four years earlier. The Croat offensive drives 150,000 Croatian Serbs from their homes in another spasm of “ethnic cleansing” in the Balkans.
August 6
Bells ring and sirens wail as Hiroshima marks the moment fifty years earlier when it became the target of the world’s first atomic bombing.
August 9
Netscape Communications Corporation goes public in a frenzied stock debut that attracts wide attention to the company and the Internet.
August 10
Norma McCorvey, the pseudonymous “Jane Roe” of the Supreme Court decision in 1973 that legalized abortion, says she has joined Operation Rescue, a militant antiabortion group.
August 13
Mickey Mantle, a Hall of Fame baseball star, dies of liver cancer at a Dallas hospital. He was 63.
August 14
Shannon Faulkner becomes the first woman in the cadet corps of The Citadel in South Carolina. She leaves school four days later, citing isolation from male cadets and the stresses of a long court battle to win admission to the military school.
August 15
The federal government says it will pay $3.1 million to white separatist Randy Weaver and his family to settle claims over the killing of Weaver’s wife and teenage son at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992, during a siege by federal agents.
August 16
Microsoft introduces the first version of its Web browser, Internet Explorer.
August 17
President Clinton’s former business partners, James B. McDougal and Susan H. McDougal, are indicted by a grand jury investigating the many-tentacled Whitewater scandal. Indicted with them is Arkansas Governor Jim Guy Tucker. All three later are convicted.
August 19
Three senior U.S. officials heading to talks in Sarajevo are killed when their armored vehicle slides off a muddy mountain road, rolls over several times, and bursts into flames.
August 20
In Firozabad, India, a passenger train slams into another train that had stalled after striking a cow. About 350 people are killed and more than 400 are injured.
August 21
ABC News settles a $10 billion libel suit and publicly apologizes to Philip Morris for having reported that the tobacco company added extra nicotine to its cigarettes.
August 22
At a trial in Chicago, Democratic Congressman Mel Reynolds of Illinois is convicted of sexual misconduct involving an underage campaign worker. Reynolds later is sentenced to five years in prison.
August 23
Famous Life magazine photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt, 96, dies while vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard. His photograph of a sailor kissing a nurse in New York’s Times Square was among the most memorable images of Americans celebrating the end of World War II.
August 24
Amid hoopla in the United States and abroad, Microsoft begins selling its Windows 95 personal computer software.
August 26
Evelyn Wood, the speed-reading guru whose course was popular in the late 1950s and 1960s, dies in Arizona. She was 86.
August 28
Bosnian Serb gunners lob five mortar rounds into a market in Sarajevo, one of which kills thirty-seven people, most of them civilians. The Serb attack triggers “Operation Deliberate Force”—retaliatory NATO airstrikes intended to prevent further shelling of Sarajevo.
September 1
More than 10,000 people gather in Cleveland, Ohio, to celebrate the opening of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
September 4
The United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women opens in Beijing. More than 4,750 delegates attend, representing 189 governments. In a speech on the second day of the conference, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton declares: “It is a violation of human rights when babies are denied food, or drowned, or suffocated, or their spines broken, simply because they are born girls.”
September 5
Jurors at the O. J. Simpson double-murder trial hear portions of a tape-recording in which Mark Fuhrman, a Los Angeles police detective, uttered a racist slur. Fuhrman previously testified that he had not uttered such a slur in at least ten years.
September 6
Cal Ripken of the Baltimore Orioles breaks Lou Gehrig’s “iron man” record by playing in his 2,131st consecutive Major League baseball game.
September 7
Republican Bob Packwood of Oregon announces his resignation after twenty-seven years in the Senate, heading off a near-certain vote to expel him for sexual and official misconduct.
September 10
NBC’s prime-time hospital drama ER wins eight Emmy Awards, and ABC’s NYPD Blue wins the award for best dramatic series. NBC’s Frasier wins five awards, including best comedy series for the second straight year.
September 11
The inaugural issue of the Weekly Standard, a conservative opinion journal, goes on sale. A few days earlier, the first issue of George, a glossy lifestyle magazine founded by John F. Kennedy Jr., had been unveiled.
September 13
The Drew Carey Show premiers on ABC television. The comedy program would run until 2004.
September 14
Bosnian Serbs agree to pull heavy guns away from Sarajevo. In response, NATO announces a halt to its aerial bombing campaign of Serb positions.
September 15
The Fourth World Conference on Women adjourns in Beijing.
September 16
On her 24th birthday, Shawntel Smith of Oklahoma is crowned “Miss America” at a pageant in Atlantic City, N.J.
September 19
After considerable internal debate, the New York Times and the Washington Post agree to the Unabomber’s demands and jointly publish his 35,000-word manifesto, a rambling diatribe that appears as an eight-page insert in the Post.
September 22
Time Warner says it will acquire the 82 percent of Turner Broadcasting System stock it did not own in a $7.5 billion deal. It is the third major acquisition of a U.S. media company in two months.
September 26
The prosecution makes closing arguments in the murder trial of O. J. Simpson. The defense begins its closing arguments the following day.
September 27
The U.S. Treasury unveils a redesigned $100 bill that features a slightly off-center portrait of Benjamin Franklin.
September 28
Bob Denard, a 66-year-old French coup-master, leads a group of mercenaries in overthrowing Comoran President Mohammed Djohar in the Indian Ocean state. The French army intervenes in early October, under bilateral accords with the Comoros Islands, a former French colony, and captures the mercenaries.
October 1
Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, a blind Egyptian cl
eric, and nine defendants are convicted of plotting a terrorist campaign of bombings and assassinations. A federal jury in New York finds the defendants guilty on all but two of fifty charges.
October 2
Jurors in O. J. Simpson’s double-murder trial in Los Angeles deliberate less than four hours before reaching unanimous verdicts. The trial judge, Lance Ito, says the verdicts will be read in court the following day.
October 3
O. J. Simpson is acquitted of charges that he fatally stabbed his former wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald Goldman. Simpson afterward vows to devote his life to finding the killer or killers. “They are out there somewhere,” Simpson says in a statement read by his son, Jason.
October 4
Pope John Paul II arrives at Newark International Airport for a five-day visit to the United States. The 75-year-old pontiff is welcomed by President Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton, the governors of New York and New Jersey, and the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States.
October 5
President Clinton announces that Bosnia’s warring parties will meet for peace talks in the United States. They agree to a sixty-day ceasefire, which takes effect October 12.
October 6
Swiss astronomers Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz report the discovery of the first exoplanet, a massive object that revolves around 51 Pegasi, a star in the constellation Pegasus.
October 8
On the final day of his visit to the United States, Pope John Paul II celebrates mass in Baltimore, at Oriole Park at Camden Yards.
October 9
Saboteurs remove twenty-nine spikes from a remote stretch of railroad track in Arizona, derailing a Los Angeles–bound Amtrak train. One person was killed, and scores of others were injured.
October 11
Just hours before airtime, O. J. Simpson cancels a live interview with the NBC program Dateline. Simpson says his lawyers advised him that he “was being set up” and that the interview “was going to be tantamount to a grand jury hearing.” NBC says its interviewers had planned to pose tough questions about Simpson’s whereabouts at the time his former wife and her friend were slain in June 1994.
October 16
Hundreds of thousands of black men from across the country peaceably gather in Washington, D.C., for the “Million Man March,” called by Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam.
October 17
President Clinton tells wealthy contributors at a fund-raising dinner in Houston that he raised taxes “too much” in his first budget in 1993. His offhand remark during a rambling talk stirs criticism from Republicans and Democrats alike. “Clinton makes life hardest on those who are for him,” a Washington Post columnist observes.
October 18
The United States announces that peace talks on Bosnia would be convened at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio, about halfway around the world from the war-torn Balkans.
October 19
The Broadway revival of the classic musical Hello, Dolly opens at New York’s Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, with Carol Channing in the lead role. Channing had starred as Dolly Levi in the show’s long-running Broadway production in the 1960s.
October 20
A year after being appointed to head the alliance, NATO Secretary General Willy Claes resigns to face corruption charges in his native Belgium. The country’s highest court three years later finds Claes guilty of corruption and he receives a three-year suspended jail sentence. The Spanish foreign minister, Javier Solana, succeeds Claes in NATO’s top position.
October 22
The United Nations marks its fiftieth anniversary at a commemorative meeting in New York City. Leaders of most countries of the world attend, and their speechmaking is spread over three days. To a writer for the Washington Post, the gathering is evocative of “the funeral of Edward VII in 1910—the last great meeting of royalty before the 20th century devoured most of them.”
October 24
American archeologist and mountaineer Johan Reinhard announces the discovery of the 500-year-old body of a young Inca girl who was found frozen near the summit of Mt. Ampato in Peru.
October 25
The musical Victor/Victoria opens at the Marquis Theater in New York City in the first of 738 performances.
October 26
In the most inspired prank of the year, Montreal radio show host Pierre Brassard pretends to be the Canadian prime minister and reaches Queen Elizabeth II by telephone. They speak in English and French for seven minutes. The conversation is broadcast over Montreal’s CKOI radio station.
October 28
The Atlanta Braves defeat the Cleveland Indians, 1–0, to win the World Series in six games.
October 30
Voters in Quebec narrowly reject a pro-independence referendum, the second defeat of a separatist measure in fifteen years.
October 31
Albert Belle, a Major League baseball star with a surly attitude, drives his Ford Explorer in pursuit of teenagers who had thrown eggs at his house in suburban Cleveland. Belle, the Sporting News Major League player of the year in 1995, says in a call to police: “You better get somebody over here, because if I find one of them, I’ll kill them.” He later was fined $100 for reckless operation of a motor vehicle.
November 1
U.S.-brokered negotiations aimed at ending the war in Bosnia open at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base on the outskirts of Dayton, Ohio. U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher convenes the talks, with the presidents of Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia present.
November 4
Israel’s prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, is assassinated by a right-wing Israeli law student at a peace rally in Tel Aviv.
November 6
The owner of the Cleveland Browns, Art Modell, announces plans to move the storied professional football franchise to Baltimore.
November 8
Retired Army general Colin Powell announces he will not seek the presidency or other elected office in 1996, saying politics is “a calling that I do not yet hear.”
November 9
O. J. Simpson says in a pair of telephone interviews with an Associated Press reporter that people have mostly supported rather than shunned him since his acquittal the month before on charges of killing his former wife and her friend. He says he recognizes that the “only thing that endures is character,” and that wealth and fame are illusory. He also scoffs at reports that he has become a prisoner in his own home.
November 10
Ken Saro-Wiwa, a Nigerian writer and prominent human rights activist, is hanged with eight other dissidents in southern Nigeria. They were accused of complicity in four murders. Saro-Wiwa claimed that he and the others were framed because of their opposition to the oil industry practices in southern Nigeria.
November 13
The federal government prepares for a partial shutdown as President Clinton vetoes a stopgap budget bill in a fiscal standoff with Republicans in Congress.
November 14
A partial shutdown of the U.S. government begins, and about 800,000 federal workers are furloughed.
November 15
On the second day of the partial government shutdown, President Clinton and intern Monica Lewinsky begin their furtive sexual relationship at the White House. Their on-again, off-again affair would last until March 1997.
November 17
President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky meet for their second sexual encounter at the White House.
November 19
President Clinton and Republican leaders in Congress reach a deal to settle their budget dispute and end the partial government shutdown. Federal workers return to work the following day.
November 20
In a soul-baring, hour-long interview aired on BBC television, Princess Diana concedes to having been unfaithful to her husband, Prince Charles. But she says she does not want a divorce.
November 21
An agreement to
end nearly four years of bloodletting in the Balkans is initialed by the leaders of Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia. The agreement, brokered during three weeks of intensive negotiations at a U.S. Air Force base on the outskirts of Dayton, Ohio, calls for the deployment to Bosnia of 60,000 NATO peacekeeping troops—20,000 of them from the United States. The Dayton accords are formally signed in Paris in mid-December 1995.
November 22
Disney releases Pixar’s Toy Story, the first feature-length computer-animated motion picture. Toy Story becomes a commercial success, grossing more than $360 million.
November 27
President Clinton goes on television to press his case for deploying 20,000 U.S. troops as part of a NATO peacekeeping force in Bosnia. “If we’re not there,” he says, “NATO will not be there. The peace will collapse, the war will reignite, the slaughter of innocents will begin again.”
November 28
President Clinton signs a $6.5 billion highway bill that includes language repealing the federal speed limit of 55-miles-per-hour, which had been in place since 1974. The measure gives states the authority to set speed limits.
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