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24 March 1999: NATO launches air strikes on Serbia to end attacks against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.
News briefs and updates 1990-1998
1999: Tori Murden, a lawyer from Kentucky, becomes the first American and the first woman to row 4800km alone across the Atlantic.
1999: A jury hearing a wrongful death lawsuit filed by family of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. finds that the civil rights leader was the victim of a vast murder conspiracy, not a lone assassin.
1998: In the US, the Clinton administration made plans to kidnap Osama bin-Laden from Afghanistan, but did not proceed as they did not know where he actually was. At the time, bin-Laden was suspected as the financier of the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing and of being implicated in the 1998 attacks by Al-Qa'ida on US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 263 people including 12 Americans. (Reported 24-25 May 2003, Sydney Morning Herald)
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The terrorism problem: 1998: Afghanistan, Taliban seizes control of Kabul, declares they are a legitimate government and impose strict Islamic law.
21 May 1998: Indonesian military dictator Suharto steps down to end his 32-year rule.
1998: Wealthy Saudi Arabian Osama bin Laden plans the bombings of the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, killing more than 300 people. Afghanistan refuses to hand over bin-Laden. US in retaliation uses missiles to destroy terrorist training camps near Kabul and imposes trade sanctions.
The terrorism problem: 1998: At trial dealing with US embassy bombings of 1998, a former associate of bin-Laden and al-Qa'ida testifies that al-Qa'ida deposited US$3.2 million in a Malaysian bank account.
How fine an animal fibre 1000 years ago?: About 1000 years ago, 28 llamas and four alpacas (known genetically as camelids) were sacrificed in the Moquegua desert area of Southern Peru, under where houses were in an area known as El Yaralo. Buried with the sacrificed animals were 100 guinea pigs nestled between their legs. Amazingly, the llama wool, finer than cashmere, was "far superior" to most yarns known today - 15 microns thick. Today's animals produce fibre of 28 microns; cashmere varies from 16-20 microns. A researcher working on the find is Dr Helen Stanley of Institute of Zoology, London. Efforts to extract DNA from the camelids remains however are "disappointing". (Reported 10 January 1998)
Australian thylacine find at Riversleigh, north-west Queensland: PhD student Steve Rowe has found at Riversleigh, a treasure trove for researchers, a fossilised skull and almost-complete skeleton of an Australian wolf. Distantly related to the now-extinct Tasmanian Tiger, the wolf lived 25 million years ago. (Mr Rowe's supervisor is Mike Archer, a paleontologist with University of NSW, who waxes lyrical on the many implications of finds to be made at Riversleigh excavation sites.) Reported 3 January 1998.
1998: In front of a cheering crowd, 22 Rwandans convicted of genocide are executed by firing squad in Kigali.
1998: Leonid Meteor Shower "dazzles the world" in 1833 and 1966, returning in 2001, not so spectacular; the 1998 show was a dud. Each November the Earth enters a debris-pattern from Comet Tempel-Tuttle as it orbits the Sun. The Leonid Show occurs most intensely about every 33 years.
IF DOCUMENTARIES screened in 1998 in Australia are any guide, India's charlatan holy men are under concerted attack from sceptics and rationalists who know just a little more physics and chemistry than their opponents.
Spearheading modern attack on age-old superstition and charlatanism is a group of activists known as the Indian Rationalist Association, which began in the 1940s in India's southern states, Kerala and Tamil Nadu.
Holy men's tricks such as drawing ash out of thin air, exploding large stones by "mind power", turning water into blood, men with hooks inserted in the flesh of their back drawing motor vehicles, stakes being inserted through human cheeks into the mouth cavity, are now being shown to villagers as the fakery or deceit they have long been suspected of being.
A spokesman for the 86,000 strong Indian Rationalist Association, based in New Delhi, and which began in the 1940s, is Sanal Edamaruku.
By now, the rationalist activists have visited villages in 18 of India's 25 states, exposing fakery to astonished and often bewildered locals, attempting to deprive charlatans ("god-men") of their income.
But the rationalists' intention is not to debunk religion. Rather, they attempt to demystify trickery, to debunk myths and to prevent exploitation carried out in the name of religion.
IS THE Japanese Aum Supreme Truth doomsday sect regrouping?
Reports are that the sect's new leader is Rika Matsumoto, the 15-year-old third daughter of the cult leader, lately on trial, Shoko Asahara.
Meanwhile, the cult is now thought to have only 1000 members who are being watched by up to 1700 investigators. (Reported late 1998)
November 1998: Rome: Pope John Paul II is reportedly considering apologising on behalf of the Catholic Church, as institution, for matters associated with the Inquisition. November, 1998. Somewhat later, 1998+, the figure of The Devil is also under review by the Vatican.
Late 1990s: World Migration: About 100,000 migrants move to Australia each year, mainly from Asia. An average of 350,000 Mexicans go to USA annually. Some 200,000 people move to Canada from India and China. And in early 21st Century, 250,00 Peruvians migrate to Argentina, Chile and US. (Source: 2003, UN, International Organisation for Migration)
AT a desert in Niger, Africa, scientists have found fossils of a giant Suchomimus tenerensis. The beast, a variety of a fish-eating dinosaur, lived 100 million years ago. (Suchomimus is Greek for crocodile)
The specimen is perhaps the best yet discovered of "an odd
group" of fish-eaters, the spinosaurids. The suchomimus
had a long, narrow snout, with sharp, cone-shaped teeth for
prey-holding, a fin-like crest down its back, and sickle-shaped
thumb-claws.
(Reported 14 November 1998, and see the journal,
Science of November, 1998)
1998: November: The English midlands city of Birmingham has come under fire from Christians and Muslims after attempting to rename Christmas celebrations as "Winterval". (From The Catholic Weekly [Australia], 22 November 1998)
The terrorism problem: 1998: At trial dealing with US embassy bombings of 1998, a former associate of bin-Laden and al-Qa'ida testifies that al-Qa'ida eg., deposited US$3.2 million in a Malaysian bank account. (As noted in late 2001 in world press).
Also 1998: Retrospectives as alleged: bin-Laden's right-hand man, Muhammad Atef, said to have in 1998 assisted the bombing of two US embassies in Africa. In 1994 he went to Nairobi in Kenya to visit al-Qa'ida men running businesses there. He travelled to Somalia in late 1992 and in early 1993 to organise anti-US and anti-UN attacks, reporting back to bin-Laden then at Khartoum. In October 1993, 18 US soldiers on a relief mission in Somalia were killed.
October 1998: Archimedes meets New York: A 1000-year-old copy of mathematical works by Archimedes recently sold at auction for US$2 million at Christie's in New York.
Simon French, a London book dealer, bought the book, Method of Mechanical Theorems, for a private US collector.
The manuscript had once been re-used by Byzantine monks, who
covered over the original pages. Only computer enhancement and
ultra-violet lighting could make the manuscript useful to the modern
reader. Named in reports was Felix de Maraz Oyens, a Christie's
expert on ancient manuscripts.
Reported 31 October 1998)
Alexandria, Egypt: Retrieval of artefacts from the reign of Cleopatra, prior to establishment of an underwater museum for the city. Australian TV report, 29-10-1998. Note, in 1979, at Alexandria, Egypt, was, of related interest, Research work with psychics and scientists which comprises the book: Stephan A. Schwartz, The Alexandria Project. New York, Delacorte Press/Eleanor Friede, 1983.
October 1998: Possibly rediscovery of Sodom and Gomorrah. Two of five lost Cities of the Plains, located probably north of the ancient northern coast of the Dead Sea, Palestine, Sodom and Gomorrah, may be rediscovered. NASA satellite pictures now appear to indicate sunken buildings where they cities may have been. Mysteries of the research here involve cemeteries for up to 500,000 people, in an area now a desert, cemeteries perhaps as old as 3200BC. Perhaps, the area was devastated 5000 years ago by an earthquake which let loose pitch which caught fire? Hence the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah by fire? Later, the waters of the northern Dead Sea rose. A mini-submarine will be needed to explore a test area about 365m deep. The researchers involved in the story include: NASA satellite picture editors, Michael Sanders, biblical scholar born in Leeds, now in Irvine, California, and a scuba-diver, Rich Slater. And a late 1960s-working archaeologist, P. W. Lapp, who had excavated on the Lisan Peninsula of the Dead Sea. Archaeologists Walter Rast and Thomas Schauh worked in the same area during 1973-1979. (Reported by 19 October 1998)
William Stanbridge, a Victorian grazier and sympathiser with Aboriginals in his area, in 1857 addressed the Philosophical Institute of Melbourne on an Aboriginal zodiac which has since remained largely unknown and uncommented.
Recently, however, Stanbridge's research was noticed by lecturer at Swinburne University of Technology, John Morieson, whose material will be published by Melbourne University Press.
Stanbridge had taken great notice of the elders of the Victorian Boorong people, their language and their accounts and views of the heavenly constellations visible from south-eastern Australia.
Observing 30 stars and constellations, the Boorong were able to draw useful correlations with seasonal changes meaning changes also in plants and animal life forming their food supply, especially fish or fowl.
The area in question surrounds Lake Tyrell in north-western Victoria, associated with about 23,000 years of human occupation.
Some elements of the Boorong's Australian zodiac include, for the Milky Clouds of Magellan, a pair of brolgas (an Australian long-legged bird); between the Southern Cross and Scorpius is a giant emu. The Gemini Twins are a tortoise and a fantail cuckoo.
Morieson believes the Boorong Zodiac greatly pre-dates the European zodiac produced by the Babylonians about 2000BC.
Healthy genealogy is also an important emphasis in the "codes"
the Boorong drew from their zodiac, Morieson believes, along with
information relating to the life cycles of native animals part of the
food supply.
In Victoria, Aboriginal Cultural Officers, Doug
Nicholls and Alan Burns of Swan Hill and Horsham support Morieson's
research.
Reported 24 October 1998.
October 1998: Three cheers for two thousand years of the
non-enthusiastic study of human sexual anatomy! What an
extraordinarily long ignorance! Two Australian women anatomists have
recently found that the clitoris of the human female (re
distribution of nerve-endings) is twice as large as previously
thought!
(TV report by 22 October 1998) Is now the time to begin
a world-campaign for the abolition of the custom of "female
circumcision", otherwise known as genital mutilation, and
unfortunately most-promoted by women of the cultures afflicted by the
custom? -Ed
21 October 1998: Chinese Internet users were being blocked from accessing the main Web site of the BBC World Service, which carries Chinese-language news.
Link to Lost Worlds at your leisure, if that is your pleasure.
Spontaneous human combustion: November 1998, Broadcast on Australian ABC TV, documentary (convincing) on spontaneous human combustion as on ongoing mystery of life. Finding: the phenomenon is combustion, but it is not spontaneous.
THE LIFE of Jesus continues to fascinate, and now in Israel his tomb is being re-examined along with the town of his youth, Nazareth.
Jesus' tomb is thought to have been near Golgotha, and a place of this name still exists near Jerusalem.
Now, the presumed tomb site is surmounted by one or several edicules (little houses), inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
The Church of the Holy Sepulchre was built by Emperor Constantine's engineers in the Fourth Century AD, with the consecration of the site witnessed by the Bishop of Caesarea, Eusbesius.
For any opening of Jesus' tomb, the floor of a rotunda may have to be dug up. In 1986, efforts for such a project were made by a British scholar, Dr. Greville Freeman-Greville. The present research is being guided by Prof. Martin Biddle, Professor of Medieval Archaeology at Oxford University.
January 1999 will see the publication in English of Biddle's book, The Tomb of Christ, following its earlier publication in German.
From reports, examination of the tomb seems to be poorly funded, while squabbles between some six major Christian denominations may also delay necessary negotiations.
Any restoration project would proceed in three stages, but researchers are confident they have the right area, since they are already familiar with eight other tombs nearby the presumed tomb of Jesus.
Meanwhile, archaeologist Mr Ross Joseph Voss has been promoting an ambitious project to construct (or reconstruct) an old part of Nazareth in Galilee, Israel, as a "living village" revealing the ways of life known to Jesus in his early years.
A ground-breaking ceremony was held in November, 1998 on an 8.1 hectare site for a "theme park", prior to the mounting of a drive to find some US$60 million required.
Already, 200 volunteers including local Muslims plus people drawn from various Christian denominations have helped clear the site.
The population of Nazareth in Jesus' time is thought to have been about 300. The Nazareth "theme park" will operate from 2000.
The project director is Michael Hostetler. Assisting fund-raising
will be former US president, Jimmy Carter and US singer Pat Boone.
Voss works with Mr Stephen Pfann, a director of an institute for the
Study of Early Christianity in Jerusalem.
(Jesus' tomb, reported
26 September, 1998. Nazareth theme park, reported 2 November 1998)
17 April, 1998: Cambodia, On killer/dictator Pol Pot - his former cadres unceremoniously burn his body on a pyre of car tyres. During the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, 1.7 million people were murdered.
THAT ENTERTAINING construct in psychology, cognitive dissonance, was invented to help describe the state of mind of people disappointed to find that God has not appeared after a visit has been predicted. It's happened again.
The victim this time was Chen Hon-Ming, who helps lead a 150-strong group of American-Taiwanese believers, God's Salvation Church, a group given to apocalyptically spectacular predictions of doom.
Chen had predicted that God would appear on TV Channel 18 around the world on 25 March, 1998. Then, on 31 March, God would descend to 3513 Ridgeland Way, Garland, Texas. But God failed to appear.
Chen suggested that this was a way for God to test his believers, by exposing them to ridicule. There was also mention of a flying saucer, and Mr Chen decided to move to Michigan.
(Speaking of apocalyptic predictions, Lost Worlds has
lately been informed by certain astrologers that August 1999 is a
time to be afraid of, due to a lining-up of certain planets. Stay
tuned to Lost Worlds for more on this.)
(Reported 4 April
1998)
CUBA: The ghost of writer, Ernest Hemingway, is said to be alarming his former employees. (Radio Report, Australia, 8 April 1998)
1998: Afghanistan: The Taliban takes Kabul and declares itself the government. Mullah Mohammad Omar, spiritual leader of the Taliban, imposes strict Islamic law.
1998: Osama bin-Laden's terrorist training camps are now active. He masterminds the bombings of US embassies in Africa, followed by the suicide attack on the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000.
Knowledge of the extent of the known universe is extended
yet again. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore,
Maryland, US, have found a new and young, distant galaxy, named "RD1"
(actually, 0140+326RD1), which was apparently formed 820 million
years after the Big Bang.
(Reported by 14 March 1998)
March, 1998: A woman in Lost Worlds' home region, from Uralla, New South Wales, Sally Parkin, has won the 1998 academic, and prestigious Gwyn Alf Williams Award for a groundbreaking study of Welsh Witchcraft. The Award commemorates Professor of History, Gwyn Alf Williams, of Wales University.
New news on the development of sea-going Homo Erectus, and
early humanity, from the Indonesia island of Flores, from researcher
Dr Mike Morwood, Dept. Archaeology, University of New England,
NSW Australia. Dr Morwood also researches Kimberley Rock Art (Western
Australia).
(Australian TV report, 12 March 1998)
A British archaeologist, Mr Shimon Gibson, with the
Palestine Exploration Fund, based in London, but working in
Jerusalem, suspects that water reservoirs under the Al-Aqsa Mosque
may collapse, threatening several sites sacred to Islam and Judaism.
Parts of the affected area are known to Muslims as Haram-al-Sharif
(Noble Enclosure), and to Jews as the Temple Mount. In 1996, when
Israel opened a tourist entrance to a tunnel near the compound, riots
began in which 80 people died.
(Reported 7 March 1998)
THE HEAD of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities has
announced that American archaeologists have unearthed evidence of a
settlement in Egypt's western desert about 9,000 years ago. The
settlement is believed to be one of the oldest in the world.
(Reported 28 February 1998)
Physicist Stephen Hawking has a new theory that the
universe began as a tiny particle and will go on expanding forever.
Meantime, by March 13, was reported in Australia, "new physics"
views are arising on, not a universe, but multi-verses. We advise, do
not hold your breath till such questions are resolved.
(Hawking:
Reported 24 February 1998)
"Cannabis Unsafe", says the
World Health Organisation at Geneva. Defending itself against
accusations that it has suppressed information from a study on the
relative merits of cannabis, alcohol and tobacco, the WHO insisted,
cannabis poses health problems.
(Reported 21-2-1998)
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An Australian archaeologist, Dr Christiana Kohler, of
Macquarie University, Sydney, hopes to be able to illustrate the
cultural forces shaping the first Egyptian forms of society and
rulership after researching a burial ground Helwan, south of Cairo.
Helwan is about 25km south of Cairo, and one of three sites used for
the burial of people from Memphis, Egypt's first capital city, from
about 5000 years ago. The site in question, with about 10,000 tombs,
is about 1.5km by 800m, officially under the control of the Egyptian
Antiquities Authority, but in fact is under pressure of modern
development. The Helwan area was researched in the 1940s, but
artefacts in up to 157 boxes could not be displayed for lack of
space. They remained forgotten in a museum basement until Egypt's
antiquities were re-inventoried only a few years ago. Dr Kohler then
became aware of their existence, and, amazingly, managed to gain
permission to pursue research, ahead of a world-wide field of other
interested scholars. A question is: how did Egypt become a unified
kingdom?
(Reported 21 February 1998, The Sydney Morning Herald)
Chilling out the Kama Sutra?: British pop group The
Spice Girls coyly planned to mount a concert in October-November
1998 before a 1,000-year-old Hindu temple, much decorated with erotic
sculpture, until Indian artists and conservationists mounted an
outcry. The proposed venue is the Chandela dynasty temple in the
central Indian town of Khajuraho, one of 16 world heritage sites
listed for India. However, officers of the Archaeological Survey of
India said they had no knowledge of the proposed concert. All this
could also be merely a publicity stunt?
(Reported 21-2-1998)
Learning about sex? A new study to be published in the
journal American Demographics finds that better-educated
people (those passing through graduate school) have less active sex
lives. Apparently, the survey finds that only one person in 20 had
sex at least three times per week.
(Reported February 1998)
Death of a Goddess in media circles. Heads will roll in
Fleet Street, as tabloid newspaper circulations suffer due to the
absence of reporting on Princess Diana.
(Reported, 27
January 1998)
1998: Spain: In Madrid, members of a doomsday cult have planned to commit mass suicide, after which a spaceship would carry away their souls from the top of the Teide volcano, in the Canary Islands at Tenerife. Spanish authorities foiled the moves. The cult members, who believed that the world would end on Thursday, 8 January at 8pm GMT, were mostly Germans influenced by a female German psychologist. She in turn may have been influenced by the Solar Temple cult which believed that death voyages after ritualised suicide would lead to rebirth at "Sirius". (January 1998)
Is the human brain wired for God?: Neuroscientists from the
University of California have discovered what they've called a "god
module" in the brain. The suggestion is that faith is more an
experience arising from evolutionary necessities than a spiritual
experience. (We can also ask - which came first, God or the brain?)
The discovery arose while a study was being done on epileptics.
Patients who can suffer from seizures in the brain's frontal lobe say
they often have mystical experiences and can become obsessed with
spirituality. When they were presented with images of God, the
frontal lobe triggered electrical impulses indicating that religious
rapture is more of a "biological function".
The
researchers now feel that a tendency to religious belief might be
"hard-wired" into the brain, probably in the interests of
promoting order and stability on society. Leader of the research team
in question is Dr. Vilyanur Ramachandran.
The experimental
results in general tend in the direction of argument from
evolutionary scientists who have argued that the phenomenon of
religious belief, which of course is world-wide, is a result of
evolution, designed to promote co-operation between individuals. But
the question is not answered, whether those with no faith or belief,
or only a little, have "a different-sized God module" as
compared with strong believers.
(Item adapted from a short
article in Uri Geller Encounters magazine of January 1998, in
turn adapted from The Times of 12 November 1997)
Russia: Minority religions including Protestant Christian
denominations are being threatened by a new law brought in by
president Boris Yeltsin in September 1997. The new law provides
"religious protectionism" to the traditional church, the
Russian Orthodox Church.
(Reported 17 January 1998)
One proof of a Neanderthal Man dying of lung cancer has
been identified, via pathological changes to his leg bones,
one consequence of the disease. Researchers were Karen Fennell and
Erik Trinkaus. Original Site: La Ferrassie, in the Dordogne, in 1909,
a man's body buried head-to-head with a Neanderthal woman. The man
was aged 40-55 years.
(Item, The Weekend Australian, 3-4
January, 1998)
1997: Publishing of a new dictionary of Pitjantjatjara language in a pocket-sized edition, from editor of the larger version, linguistics lecturer at University of New England, Dr. Cliff Goddard. Earlier Dr. Goddard edited a larger-format Pitjantjatjara/Yankuntjatjara-to-English dictionary. The Pitjantjatjara people are from northern South Australia and Northern Territory, best-known as the traditional owners of Uluru (Ayers Rock). The publishers are IAD Press, PO Box 23512, Alice Springs, NT 0871.
1997: Researcher at Scotland's Roslin Institute, led by embryologist Ian Wilmut, clone a sheep - named Dolly, from the dell of an adult ewe. (Item on history of development of research on human genetics)
1997: Islamic Defenders Front. Said to be founded by 1997, a self-styled religious police, attacks bars and nightclubs using simple weapons, eg, batons. Organisation led by Habib Rizieq Syihab.
1997: Historic treaty arises to ban anti-personnel landmines signed by 121 nations in Ottawa, Canada, with the US among the nations abstaining from signing.
1997: Death in US of Pamela Harriman, "a woman of rare talent, a political power-broker, an artful seductress, a society hostess", who helped to usher in Bill Clinton to the US presidency.
TUTANKHAMUN had a wet nurse, Maya, and French archaeologists think they have found her tomb.
With any luck, further research may help identify Tutankhamun's mother? His father is widely thought to have been Pharaoh Akhenaten. It had not been thought that Tutankhamun had had a wet nurse, but information gleaned from Maya's tomb makes it apparently so.
It is unusual for an Egyptian tomb to be devoted to one woman, but Maya's tomb, which is multi-chambered, dates to 1330BC and was found at Saqqara, an old necropolis for courtiers, officials and royal staff about 20km south of Cairo, used between 1400BC and 1100BC.
A researcher mentioned in reports is: Mr Alain Zivie, research director, National Centre of Scientific Research in Paris.(Reported 10 December 1997)
17 November 1997: Massacre of 58 tourists at the Temple of Queen Hatshepsut of Egypt.
Tutankhamun's faithful servant a serial killer?: Professor Bob Brier, from Long Island University, New York, who has been researching an old x-ray of Tutankhamun's skull, now thinks that a murderer, perhaps Tutankhamun's leading adviser, Aye, a commoner who had risen to government rank, or someone else of the royal household killed the 20-year-old pharaoh. The murderer also killed Tutankhamun's wife, another royal who seemed destined to succeed Tutankhamun. Aye had conspired, Brier thinks, to marry Ankhesenamen. When Aye died, his wife was Tiy, who did become a queen of Egypt. After the death of Tutankhamun, Ankhesenamen took the unusual step of asking the King of the Hittites to send him one of his sons as a husband. The king did so, but the son and his party were ambushed and killed. Meanwhile, a ring found in Cairo in 1931 indicates that Aye and Ankhesenamen had married. She was not heard of again, according to Brier. If Aye had her killed, then he became a serial killer, Brier finds. (Reported 21 March 1997)
Palestine timeline: 1996: Israel kills Hamas leader Yihye Ayash. Hamas responds with suicide bombings. Yassar Arafat tries a crackdown on Hamas.
Clinton assassination bid: Osama bin-Laden's followers in 1996 tried to assassinate US president Bill Clinton in the Phillippines, a new claim says. The claim is made in a book by a US law professor, Ken Gormely, in a 2009 book, The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs Starr,said to be based on remarks by a former Secret Service director (Louis Merletti), though the Seceret Service declines to comment. Clinton was in Manila to attend the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-Operation forum. A bridge in the centre of Mailia that Clinton was due to cross was packed with explosives but the plot was foiled by US Secret Service agents. Bin-Laden was allegedly behind it. Philipines media comment at the time attributed the plot to local communist insurgents, not a bid by Islamic militants. The attempt was not revealed to the public, and only selected members of the US intelligence community were later made aware of it. (Sydney Morning Herald, 23-24 December 2009)
1996: Osama bin-Laden is expelled from Sudan and offered refuge by The Taliban in Afghanistan. From the mid-1980s, with Russian troops expelled from Afghanistan in 1989, al-Qa'ida is operated as "a loose federation of terrorist cells in about 60 nations".
1996: Already stripped of citizenship in his native Saudi Arabia, Osama bin-Laden is expelled from Sudan and offered refuge by The Taliban in Afghanistan. (From the mid-1980s, with Russian troops expelled from Afghanistan in 1989, al-Qa'ida is operated as "a loose federation of terrorist cells in about 60 nations".) Reportedly, by 1996, the Taliban's leader Mullah Mohammad Omar, "a one-eyed son of a landless farmer", was possessed by visions of the future. He was born in a mud hut near a village, Singesar, South Afghanistan, in 1959, and learned little but religion and war. He lost an eye in a fight with Russians in the 1980s, having joined the anti-Russian fight early, in 1979. During the 1980s, he came to believe he was called by God to purge Afghanistan of sin and violence and render it a pure Islamic state. He became the leader of the Taliban, (Islamic scholars/students, locals), who gave him a title of Mullah that he may not have had a right to, educationally, and rose to prominence in 1994. On 4 April, 1996, Omar took a cloak said to have been worn only by The Prophet, Mohammad, the founder of Islam, and before a crowd wrapped it about his shoulders. He then declared himself "The Commander of the Faithful (Amir-ul-Momineen), the leader of all Islam", a title no one has claimed for 1000 years, since the Fourth Caliphate. April was also the month that bin-Laden came to Afghanistan. It is suspected that it was bin-Laden who led Omar to consider spreading a religious revolution to the world. Omar became "the most powerful man in Afghanistan". It was also in 1996 that Omar's Taliban (or Talibs) took power in Kabul. Omar survived an assassination attempt in 1999, which killed some of his bodyguard. Omar's regime has never been recognised by The Organisation of the Islamic Conference. It is said that Omar has only twice in his life met with a non-Moslem person. Bin-Laden built Omar a house in Kandahar. In 1998, Omar took bin-Laden's eldest daughter as a wife, and some suspect that bin-Laden has taken one of Omar's daughters as a fourth wife.
1996: November: International drug trafficking organizations,
including China, Nigeria, Colombia and Mexico are said to be
"aggressively marketing heroin in the United States and Europe."
From website based on book: Opium: A History,
by Martin Booth Simon and Schuster, Ltd., 1996. e-mail
info@opioids.com
1996: Tokyo Court orders cult guru Shoko Asahana and two top assistants to pay almost US$7.5 million to victims of 1995 sarin (nerve gas) attack on city's subway system.
1996, 19 July: Tamil rebels begin an attack on a 1,200-strong army camp in northern Sri Lanka. Only 30 army soldiers survive, the worst government loss in this civil war.
1996: Researcher John Grigsby discovers that at Angkor, Cambodia, that the main monuments of Angkor follow the coils of the northern constellation of Draco, re a pattern evident in AD1150: does this have anything "astronomical" to do with the layout of the Pyramids of Giza? Angkor As built by the Khmer king, Jayavarman VII. Does computer simulation provide anything useful re date 10,500BC, a spring equinox, re any networked series of monuments around the world all resulting from similar preoccupations with astronomy? Some Khmer building dates are 1186AD for Ta Prohm, 1191AD for Prah Khan, Bayon in 1219AD. (Dates from Hancock and Faiia, p. 126).
1996: January: Khun Sa, one of Shan state's most powerful drug
warlords, "surrenders" to SLORC. The U.S. is suspicious and
fears that this agreement between the ruling junta regime and Khun Sa
includes a deal allowing "the opium king" to retain control
of his opium trade but in exchange end his 30-year-old revolutionary
war against the government.
From website based on
book: Opium: A History, by Martin Booth Simon and Schuster,
Ltd., 1996. e-mail info@opioids.com
Mid-1990s: Founding of Jemaah Islamiah, "Islamic Community",
a small and secretive group with a cell structure similar to
Al-Qa'ida. Uses tactics such as bombings, hijackings, bank robberies.
Wishes to see established a South East Asian fundamentalist
mega-state. Leader said to be Abu Bakar Bashir, who in mid.1990s is
visited by brother-in-law of bin-Laden, Muhammad Jamal Khalifa.
A
note from Sydney Morning Herald 19-10 2002, says that an
Islamic group, Majelis Mujahidin, is established in the 1930s. It
lately has members drawn from some 15,000 Indonesians who have fought
in Afghanistan.
19 April 1995: A car or van bomb in Oklahoma City, US, kills 168 people. In 2001, "Christian radical" Timothy McVeigh is executed for planting the bomb.
4 November 1995: Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin is shot dead after a peace rally in Tel Aviv.
1995: NASA scientists receive the first data from the space probe Galileo - a message is beamed home across 2.3 billion miles or 3.7 billion km.
1995: Russian troops pound Chechnya with rocket and mortar fire.
1995: A "religious sect" spreads sarin nerve gas through Tokyo's crowded subway system, killing 12 people and making about 5,500 more very sick.
1995: Peace talks on the conflict in Bosnia open in Dayton, Ohio, with leaders present of Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia.
4 November 1995: Pro-compromise Israeli PM Yitzhak Rabin is killed by a Jewish right-wing assassin.
1995, 5 September, France conducts and underground nuclear test on Muroroa Atoll (Pacific), causing world-wide condemnation.
19 April 1995: The Oklahoma City Bomber: Ex-soldier Timothy McVeigh, originally from New York, parks a rented truck filled with 2177kg of homemade explosives and blows up a nine-storey US government building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people. Destroyed was the Alfred P. Murrah building with tenant, The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and also the base of Bob Ricks, who was in charge of the 1993 raid in Waco on the Branch-Dravidian cult run by David Koresch. The date is anniversary of the Waco raid on the ill-fated cult. (See also, Lou Michel et al, An American Terrorist. Regan Books, 2001.
1995: The Golden Triangle region of Southeast Asia is now the
leader in opium production, yielding 2,500 tons annually. According
to US drug experts, there are new drug trafficking routes from Burma
through Laos, to southern China, Cambodia and Vietnam.
From
website based on book: Opium: A History, by Martin Booth Simon
and Schuster, Ltd., 1996. e-mail info@opioids.com
31 December 1994: Russian forces invade the breakaway republic of Cechnya, to storm the capital Grozny.
1994: Scientists working in Ethiopia announce they have found fossil fragments of an old hominid, close to the point where human and ape lineages split off from each other. Pre and post-afarensis? This specimen was reportedly older than "Lucy" (Australopithecus afarensis) as discovered by the Leakeys. Between 1994 and 2003 is discovered an afarensis skull-fragment about three million-years-old, which resembles yet another skull fragment about 3.9 million-years-old. (Shreeve, Neandertal).
1994: The Alliance of Small Island States - many of whom fear they will disappear beneath the waves as sea levels rise - adopt a demand for 20 per cent cuts in emissions by the year 2005. This, they say, will cap sea-level rise at 20 centimetres. (Greenhouse Timeline)
7 April 1994: Civil war re-ignites in Rwanda. Resulting is systematic massacre of up to half a million people with UN forces doing nothing useful to stop the carnage.
July 1994: Israel and Jordan sign a peace treaty ending 46 years of war.
1994: Afghanistan: The Taliban, a militia of Pashtun Islamic fundamentalist students, first appears.
Maralinga: 1994: In April 1994 it was announced that Britain would contribute $20 million for a clean-up of the atomic-bomb radiated area, Maralinga, South Australia, on the condition that Australia makes no further claims.
>1994: A space shuttle observation finally reveals that Angkor Wat, as a three-storey temple in the Cambodian jungle, was part of a huge urban complex.
1994: US: Death of former president Richard Nixon.
1994: The presidents of Rwanda and
Burundi are killed in a plane crash in Rwanda. This helps to set off
the killing of 500,0000 Rwandans, mostly from the minority Tutsis in
following months.
Update follows: A Reuters story filed from
Brussels by 8 June 2001: A Belgian civil court has delivered a
damning guilty verdict against four Rwandans, including two Catholic
nuns, for helping Hutu militia massacre thousands of Tutsi refugees
in Rwanda's 1994 genocide. They include university professor Vincent
Ntezimana and a businessman and ex-transport minister, Alphonse
Higaniro, and Benedictine sisters Gertrude and Maria Kitso (who had
aided the killing of up to 5000 Tutsi refugees sheltering in a
convent by giving petrol can to the killers, who then torched
buildings used by the refugees). Their trial lasted eight weeks and
lands them all in prison for life. The verdicts arrived under a 1993
law which gives Belgian courts universal jurisdiction over war
criminals, whatever their nationality and wherever any crimes were
committed. This is the first time a civilian jury in one country has
judged suspected war criminals from another country. The charges had
been brought partly due to action from relatives of victims. The
Rwandan genocide tragedies are now being regarded as the Twentieth
Century's third worst genocide after the Jewish Holocaust of Nazi
Germany, and the Ottoman Turk massacre of ethnic Armenians in 1915.
(Weekend Australian, 9-10 June 2001)
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1994: January: Efforts to eradicate opium at its source remains
unsuccessful. The Clinton Administration orders a shift in policy
away from the anti- drug campaigns of previous administrations.
Instead the focus includes "institution building" with the
hope that by "strengthening democratic governments abroad, [it]
will foster law-abiding behavior and promote legitimate economic
opportunity."
From website based on book:
Opium: A History, by Martin Booth Simon and Schuster, Ltd., 1996.
e-mail info@opioids.com
1994: The Taliban surfaces in Afghanistan. It is a grouping of Islamic fundamentalist student activists from the Pashtun cultural area.
1993: Year Gavin Menzies becomes filled with ideas that later surface in his book, 1421: The Year China Discovered the World.
1993: Turkey: Pro-Islamic militants set fire to a hotel housing intellectuals in Sivas, Turkey, during a cultural festival, killing 37 people.
1993: Female leaders; Turkey's first female prime minister, Tansu Ciller, forms a coalition government while in Canada, Kim Campbell becomes first female prime minister.
1993: Israel: Israeli troops kill two top commanders of militant Moslem group Hamas in sweeping raids across occupied Gaza Strip.
1993: Hundreds of opponents of Russian President Boris Yeltsin battle police in Moscow and set up burning barricades in the biggest clash of Russia's 12-day-old political crisis.
1993: Japan: In August, 1993, the Japanese finally admit to the use of deception, coercion and official involvement in the recruitment of "comfort women" during World War Two.
1993 nd, author Michael Cremo and Richard L. Thompson, write Forbidden Archaeology. (History of palaeoanthropology)
1993: South Africa glows with pride at old kingdom rediscovered: In 1933, adventurers searching for "legendary royal graves" find evidence of an old kingdom once flourishing in the Limpopo River Valley about 1000 years ago - Mapungubwe - in South Africa's northern province. (The area touches the borders of South Africa, Botswana and South Africa.) Those interested in the discovery made little progress while South Africa suffered under its apartheid regimes, but now Mapungubwe is back in the news. The people were ruled by a king who traded crocodile skins and ivory to merchants from as far away as Persia, Egypt, India and China. They also produced pottery, trade beads, ceramic figures, gold ornaments. No one knows their origins, language or why they left their area, but they produced some of the finest gold artwork found on the African continent. South Africans did not really begin to bask in the glow of Mapungubwe till 1994. Curator of the Mapungubwe African Heritage Exhibition at University of Pretoria is Sian Tiley. (Reported in world press, 9 February 2002)
1993, New York, World Trade Centre bombings kill six and injure 1000 people. Bombings said to be linked to Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, who preaches an Islamic-group war against the US, who in 1996 was convicted in US of "seditious conspiracy". It is said that Osama bin-Laden is a student of Abdel-Rahman.
1993: The Australian "Unknown Soldier" is interred at the Australian War Memorial.
1993: September. Israeli leader Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yassar Arafat meet in Washington, D.C. to sign documents that promise to end their conflict.
19 April 1993: Date of raid in Waco on the Branch-Dravidian cult run by David Koresch. (See also, Lou Michel et al, An American Terrorist. Regan Books, 2001.
1993: The Thai army with support from the U.S. Drug Enforcement
Agency (DEA) launches its operation to destroy thousands of acres of
opium poppies from the fields of the Golden Triangle region.
From
website based on book: Opium: A History, by Martin Booth Simon and
Schuster, Ltd., 1996. e-mail info@opioids.com
26 February 1993: Six people killed in terrorist bomb attack on World Trade Centre, New York.
1988-1992: Palestine timeline: Period known as "war of knives". Hamas members kill members of Palestine Liberation Organisation as well as some Israeli soldiers.
Palestine timeline: 1991-1992: Hamas kidnaps several Israeli soldiers, leading to some of their leaders going to Lebanon. Contact with Hezbollah adds to Hamas' knowledge of explosives.
1992: Falun Gong movement emerges in China with a mix of "philosophy, meditation and light exercise". It attracts up to 100 million followers. It is banned "as an evil cult" in China in 1999. Cult followers say the cult teaches truthfulness, benevolence and forebearance, and makes for better citizens.
1992: US army begins collecting blood and tissues samples from all new recruits as part of a ´genetic dog tag´. program aimed at better identification of soldiers killed in battle. (Item on history of development of research on human genetics)
9 December 1992: US marines swarm ashore in Somalia - to end up deeply humiliated. (See the movie, Black Hawk Down.)
1992: Afghanistan: Mujahidin led by Ahmed Shah Massoud seize the capital, Kabul. Other factions however fight for control of the country.
1992: Colombia's drug lords are said to be introducing a
high-grade form of heroin into the United States.
From
website based on book: Opium: A History, by Martin Booth Simon and
Schuster, Ltd., 1996. e-mail info@opioids.com
1992: Yitzhak Rabin becomes prime minister of Israel.
1992: Ahmad Shah Masood and his Jamiat-e-Islami mujaheddin faction take control of the Afghanistan capital, Kabul, while motley groups fight over other parts of the country.
1991: Mount Pinatubo erupts in the Philippines, throwing debris into the stratosphere that shields the Earth from solar energy, which helps interrupt the warming trend. Average temperatures drop for two years before rising again. Scientists point out that this event shows how sensitive global temperatures are to disruption. (Greenhouse Timeline)
1991: Allied forces liberate Kuwait.
1991: Four Belgians held captive for three years by a Palestinian group in Lebanon are released.
1991: UN weapons experts report finding 46,000 chemical weapons in Iraq, about four times the number which Baghdad had declared existed.
May 1991: Australian nun Sister Irene McCormack is executed by terrorist guerrillas (Shining Path) in Peru. See Anne Henderson, The Killing of Sister McCormack. HarperCollins, 2002, 308pp.
1991: Cloning Dinosaurs?: Dinosaurs might live again, says Berkeley's Dr George Poinar. He claims that scientists could breed dinosaurs from DNA preserved in fossils of insects that drank dinosaurs' blood 150 million years ago. (The Age, Melbourne, 27 August 1991)
1991: The Gulf War: Coalition of US-led forces restores Kuwait.
1991: Gulf War. Abu Iyad (the new Number 2 man in PLO after
Arafat) is assassinated, probably by Iraq. Negotiations open in
Madrid under US and Russian auspices. Israelis, Palestinians,
Jordanians, Syrians, and Lebanese participate. The talks have two
parts: bilateral talks between Israel and Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and
the Palestinians and multilateral talks on five functional issues:
water, refugees, environment, economic development, and security.
Rick MacArthur, Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the
Gulf War. Nd? (Macarthur is publisher of Harper's Magazine).
1991: Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev resigns as head of Communist Party in Russia, and urges the party is disbanded. In 1989, "Fall of the Berlin Wall", signifying the end for World Communism except in China, Vietnam and Cuba.
1991: First public access to majority of collection of Dead Sea Scrolls.
1991: Iraq fires at least eight missiles at Israel in a bid to drag the Jewish state into the Gulf War, the day after the US-led allies had launched operation Desert Storm.
October 1991: Otzi, "the iceman", is discovered by German tourists in the South Tyrol region of Italy, in the Otztaler Alps on the Austrian-Italian border near Switzerland, altitude 3200m above sea level. His head is seen emerging from meltwater of the Similaun Glacier. The tourists take a picture, notify the caretaker of a lodge nearby, and move on. Later, police damage Otzi's bow as they extract the body from the ice. Some of his clothes are torn, a hole is accidentally drilled in his hip. Later the body is forced into a coffin and an arm is broken. He becomes "the find of the century". He has a fascinating tool kit, a superbly-crafted bow, and near him are animal bones, grain and dried fruit. New Scientist magazine reported on him by January 1992. Otzi-mania developed. About 20,000 museum visitors now view him per year in a specially-designed chamber.
Various scenarios arise on Otzi's situation. One of the first was from Konrad Spindler, director of Institute of Alpine Studies at University of Innsbruck, who thought Otzi lost his way and died of cold in a storm or blizzard, quoted in New Scientist. Was he a shepherd who had lost his way? Other views were that he was a warrior, a hunter, a chieftain, or a shaman. Was he injured, did he have a stroke? Had he been ostracised? About 60 teams of scientists were to range over the remains and surviving artefacts. Otzi's people were farmers, raising cattle, sheep and goats. They hunted red deer, Ibex and Chamois and by 2900BC, thousands of their villages dotted Europe.
Otzi was aged about 46, about 160cm tall. If a reconstruction of him is accurate, he was quite handsome. By 11 August 2003 (in The Australian newspaper, story by Leigh Dayton), he is depicted as aged about 46, killed or dying about 3300BC after being shot from behind with an arrow, which a companion removed before he stitched the wound. The friend was also injured, and DNA tests have shown the friend's blood was on the back of Otzi's jacket. But blood from different people was on the arrowhead and a nearby knife blade. Otzi's tools bore traces of animal blood, and included a copper axe, a stone-tipped knife, bow and arrows, a drill, a multi-purpose scraper, a stone-flaker, flintstone and tinder for fire-making. Otzi was evidently born in the South Tyrol area of Italy, and his DNA resembles that of modern Europeans living in Northern Europe. His remains reside with South Tyrol Archaeology Museum, Bolzano Italy while his artefacts are kept in Mainz. He lived near Juval, a copper-age (Neolithic) site in the area. he was possibly a skilled/specialist hunter of the mountain goat (Ibex). Why did he die? One scenario is that he and his companion, on an ordinary hunting trip, became involved in a territorial fight on a high alpine pass. Both are injured, and Otzi shortly dies, lying knife-in-hand in the shelter of a rock face. Before August 2003, scientists interested in the case had not realized Otzi was with a companion, though they knew he had been shot by an arrow. A revised scenario lately arises from archaeologist Tom Loy, who is expert in prehistoric tools and is director of Institute of Molecular Bioscience in Brisbane at University of Queensland. Loy believes Otzi was expert at hunting Ibex and also Chamois, which might have led him into disputed territory. Otzi's gear when he died was in neat condition. He did not simply collapse, but was organized. Loy and his students have examined blood specimens from Otzi's antler-skinning tool, his stone-tipped knife, two of his arrows, and his axe-handle. Three sequences of DNA came from three different people. It appears, one such person had been leaning on Otzi's shoulders for support. The wounding arrowhead bothering Otzi had been discovered in 2001 by pathologist Eduart Egarter-Vigal and radiologist Paul Gostner of the Bolzano hospital.
1991, Denver, Colorado: Christian faithful in search of a sun miracle suffer retinal damage.
17 January 1991: US Operation Desert Shield becomes Operation Desert Storm. Air raids begin on Iraq. Ground attacks by 24 February, and on 27 February Kuwait City is freed. US claims victory on 28 February.
19 August 1991: Mikhail Gorbachev deposed in Soviet army coup, which falters, so that in two days, Boris Yeltsin takes charge. Gorbachev resigns on 25 December.
12 November, 1991: Indonesian army massacres in Dili, main city of East Timor.
1990: Mecca: 1,400 Haji pilgrims are trampled to death and/or suffocated due to a stampede in a pedestrian tunnel linking Mecca and the pilgrim's tent city.
1990: Publication of Michael Chrichton´s novel, ´Jurassic Park´, in which genetically-engineered dinosaurs run amok in modern times. (Item on history of development of research on human genetics)
1990: Iraq invades Kuwait; United States and allies send forces to the Gulf region; Gulf War begins.
1990: Nelson Mandela is freed in South Africa and in 1991, his country's apartheid laws are repealed.
1990: David Long publishes his book, The Anatomy of Terrorism, in which he finds that "hijackers and suicide bombers suffer from feelings of worthlessness, and that their violent, fluorescent acts are attempts to bring some inner flair to a flat mindscape."
1990: Osama bin-Laden, a Saudi citizen who had joined forces with the mujaheddin in the struggle, begins putting together a coalition of Arab fighters to set up a Muslim state. Bin-Laden wishes to see the return of The Caliphate.
1990: Annexation of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein.
The Decade of the 1990s is designated by the US Congress as Decade of the Brain as so many areas of concern - including the war against drugs - can be sheeted back to problems of the brain or the human nervous system.
2 August 1990: Iraq invades Kuwait.
1990: Starving Iraqi troops of the invading army of Saddam Hussein kill, cook and eat about three-quarters of edible species in Kuwait City Zoo.
11 February 1990: Nelson Mandela of South Africa is freed after 27 years in a South African jail.
p>January 1990: The Gulf War, known as Operation Desert Storm against Iraq, comprised of forces form 28 countries including: US, UK, Saudi Arabia, France, Italy, Egypt, Syria, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates. About 545,000 Iraqi troops and 577,000 coalition troops.
1990: A US Court indicts Khun Sa, leader of the Shan United Army
and reputed drug warlord, on heroin trafficking charges. The U.S.
Attorney General's office charges Khun Sa with importing 3,500 pounds
of heroin into New York City over the course of eighteen months, as
well as holding him responsible for the source of the heroin seized
in Bangkok.
From website based on book: Opium: A
History, by Martin Booth Simon and Schuster, Ltd., 1996. e-mail
info@opioids.com
1990, Wealthy Saudi Osama bin-Laden forms al-Qa'ida (The Base, al-Qaeda), mujaheddin to unite Arabs who have fought against the Soviets in Afghanistan to "re-establish the Muslim Caliphate/state".
Now return to the Lost Worlds Index
11-19 July 1995: More than 19,000 Bosnian Serbs, police, troops, civilians, take part in what becomes a three-day massacre of thousands of civilians (up to 8000, and mostly Muslims) at Srebrenica, as part of “the Balkans War”. If so, this would be Europe's worst atrocity since World War Two. Many of the accused still hold official positions. (As reported in Sydney Morning Herald, 6 October 2005)
January 1998: Aesop the Vulgarian? We all know him from childhood reading, Aesop the writer of fables that inform about life, behaviour and morality. Now he is exposed (again, actually) as a vulgarian, in a new Penguin edition of Aesop's Fables, January 1998. There are questions of sex, brutality, homophobia, animals with quite odd behaviour (a kinky hyena), matters of defecation and urine. Claims have now been made that the earlier-published fables by Aesop were carefully sanitised to provide moral instruction, but now we have the first full translations of Aesop's 358 tales, and 100 of them have never been seen before in English. Aesop was a rough-tongued political satirist, vulgarian and a lover of coarse peasant humour. The new translator is Robert Temple.
1866-1868: Notes on a little-known and historic exploration: The Lagree-Garnier Expedition 1866-1868 on the long Mekong River to visit Luang Prabang, the first capital of the original Lao kingdom. The topic is little-known in the English-speaking world. The intention, "classically Imperialist", was to map more than 6000km of territory and to prove that the Mekong River could carry trade goods from Yunnan in Southern China to Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) in southern Vietnam. Three of the four principal explorers died. Expedition leader was Ernest-Marc-Louis de Lagree, who died of dysentery in Yunnan. The survivors were led by Francis Garnier, who was killed by Black Flag bandits outside Hanoi in 1873. However, Louis de Carne, who died in 1871 of diseases contracted on the Mekong, did write Travels on the Mekong as the only first-hand account of the expedition in English. Naval officer Louis Delaporte produced art work still admired, and he did live to retirement. The expedition arrived at Luang Prabang in late April 1867, moving upriver from Vientanne. One of their acts was to build a tomb over the grave of the discoverer of Angkor, Henri Mohout, who died 1857 of malarial fever. (See also a book, River Road to China, by Australian Milton Osborne - Reported 21 December 2000 in world press)
Afghanistan's cultural heritage plundered: When Russians invaded Afghanistan in 1979, they did not disturb or harm the Kabul Museum, but since the Russians left in 1992, it has been plundered at will. Museum staff did not regain control of the museum till 1994, and in the interim, rival Afghan mujaheddin factions mishandled the museum's holdings. Looting did not stop till the Taliban took over. Even so, the Taliban has failed to value many artefacts as cultural heritage, since it is hostile to matters non-Islamic (Reported 30 December 2000)
Second Century BC: The ruler of Afghanistan is King Kanishka.
Kenya, Africa: Christmas 2001: Women lawyers and other activists in Kenya are counting a new victory against the custom of female circumcision as historic. Two Kenyan girls, aged 15 and 17, have taken their hotel-owner father to court to prevent his intention of having them circumcised, and won. During the fight, it is said, the girls suffered intimidation as severe as death threats. Despite, it appears, the case of a 16-year-old girl being circumcised and dying of uncontrollable bleeding only the week before the legal victory. This Kenyan legal decision is historic, but it does not become a legal precedent as it was handed down in a lower court. About two million African girls are circumcised per year. The practice has been outlawed in 15 of the 28 countries where it has been customary, not including Kenya. (Reported in world press)
19,000 years ago: Scientists have found "the most abrupt warming spike" in the history of the Southern Hemisphere. Worry now surfaces about the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which is the world's largest remaining marine ice sheet. The sheet has lately examined by American scientists from University of Colorado (Assoc Prof. James White) and Australians from Australian National University. However, it is still unclear if changes to the ice sheet are the result of natural short-term change or if they indicate an impending collapse. Whatever, about 19,000 years ago, the ice sheet was affected across a few decades by a seven degree temperature rise, which may have triggered the end of the last ice age. About then, the ice sheet was about three times its present size. The sheet rests on bedrock about 300 metres below sea levels, and if it ever melted, sea levels might rise five metres, globally. The sheet has been showing signs of change lately, but these are still being found difficult to interpret. It does seem to be retreating, but more slowly than earlier thought. (Reported 30 December 2000)
US to ban cloning: US politicians have said that they will see to outlaw human cloning after scientists have raised the spectre that the practice would produce abnormal babies. (Reported 30 March 2001)
Thomas Jefferson is hitting newspaper pages due to his children, and is again causing controversy. US president George Bush Jnr. has met a multi-racial group of "all the descendants of Thomas Jefferson" just after a panel of scholars have produced a 500-page report concluding that Jefferson probably did not have children by his slave girl Sally Hemings. It is thought however that Sally was probably the mother of her youngest, Eston Hemings, by Jefferson. At the time of Eston's birth, there were more than two dozen men surnamed Jefferson in Virginia with his father most likely being the president's younger brother, Randolph Jefferson. In 1998, Nature magazine reported that DNA tests had tied President Jefferson to Eston Hemings' origins. Parties remaining in dispute are the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, the latter of which operate out of the third president's old home, Monticello. One of the scholars debunking the idea of Jefferson as the father of Eston is University of Virginia history professor, Robert Turner, who feels it is unlikely that Jefferson became the father of Eston when aged 64. Jefferson, says Turner, was not reckless in sexual behaviour. (Reported 13 April 2001 in world press)
Bible stories too raunchy for children: Now it seems that younger people might get sanitised versions of Old Testament stories? A Roman Catholic theologian and biblical scholar, Don Bruno Maggioni, has decided that the Bible is too "full of eroticism", and was full of stories of sex and violence. He particularly finds the Song of Solomon to be too erotic. The Bible is also for adults-only because of the kind of questions it raises about humanity. (Reported 30 March 2001)
Scholars carry out a heist on history: Two US scholars have been charged with conspiracy to sell the 1814 peace treaty (Treaty of Fontainblueau) as signed by Napoleon and stolen from the French National Archives in 1988. The two made the mistake of asking Sothebys to auction the Treaty, in which Napoleon conceded defeat and accepted exile on the Island of Elba. The scholars are John William Rooney, aged 69, and Marshall Lawrence Pierce, aged 39. Both have PhDs in history. They are also accused of conspiracy with trying to steal 30 letters signed by French king, Louis XVIII. (Reported 31 March 2001)
3500BC. The Nile area of Egypt begins to turn to desert. Before now, the landscape would have been much like the African Savannah, with waterholes and rivers rising and falling according to seasonal conditions.
6000 years ago: Ancient Egypt: Circa 4000BC, and in a desert area east of the Nile, people were chiselling into rocks, at up to 30 art-rich sites, according to new discoveries. Long before the rise of the first Pharaohs, the area's art was showing cattle, boats, ostriches, giraffes, hippos, and men and women. It is now claimed that the finds open up new chapters in the history of the origins of civilisation in Egypt. The first challenge is to find the origins of Nile settlement, and how those settlers moved on to become the master builders of Egypt. It seems now that the same people who carved the art of this area, Wadi Hammamat and Wadi Barramiya, and at Wadi Umm Salam, were painting pottery in the Nile area. Egypt did not begin to turn to desert till about 3500BC. Before then, the landscape would have been much like the African Savannah, with waterholes and rivers rising and falling according to seasonal conditions. The researchers have found evidence of art work carrying Bedouin, Roman and Greek influences. But most art depicts an unknown pastoral people driving cattle from one watering place to another between the Nile Valley and the Red Sea. It is believed that as desert areas grew, these people settled closer to the Nile. One of the team leaders involved is Dr Toby Wilkinson, of Christ's College, Cambridge,and (Reported 30 December 2000)
65 million years ago: The Bird's-Eye View of History begins in Australia?: Australia is now said to be the birthplace of modern birds, not North America or Europe. Dr. Les Christidis, a molecular biologist and curator of Ornithology at Museum of Victoria, Melbourne, now says that the ancestors of 80 per cent of all living birds first appeared in Australia about 65 million years ago. At this time, Australia was still part of the ancient supercontinent, Gondwanaland. Christidis and his associates have examined genetic material from about 300 bird species from Australia and Papua New Guinea. It seems that only two major groups of birds did not originate in Australia, the Piciiformes (woodpeckers and toucans) and the Coraciiformes (hornbills and bee-eaters) and (Reported Sydney Morning Herald 6 May 1996)
Circa 1203BC: Have the sons of Pharaoh Ramesses II been discovered?: They were buried about 1203BC. And do they have anything to do with the story of Moses and The Exodus? The great object of curiosity till now has been regarded as "a dirty, unimportant, hole in the ground", a tomb designated KV5. It was perhaps found and mapped by French scientists in 1799, then later known by a few Victorian references. Then forgotten? Despite having 67 chambers and a number of hieroglyphic references to the children of Ramesses II. The site had been "comprehensively robbed", and been undisturbed for around 3000 years. However, it is in a valley which holds 62 tombs of officials and rulers, and it has an unusual design which has puzzled archaeologists. Apparently, the entrance to this particular tomb has been obscured by rubble rearranged as Howard Carter in 1922 opened the tomb of Tutankhamun. Fresh work was begun on the site in 1988, when Prof. Kent Weeks of American University in Cairo, began removing Carter's rubble. In 1995, Weeks and his team seemed to stun the world when they reported 67 newly-found chambers. Not till 1997 was the find interpreted, as possibly being the tomb of Ramses II's sons, the first-born of whom was Amon-Her-Khopeshef. And if so, did he die due to the Hebraic biblical plague which carried off the first-born of Egyptians (the Night of Passover)? Evidence about Amon-Her-Khopeshef appears on tomb walls and on canopic jars used to contain the entrails of embalmed persons. So was Ramses II the Pharaoh of the Exodus? Weeks had his team have found a wide variety of scenes showing Ramses II and various of his children. But so far, only the names of four sons have been usefully identified. (Reported Sydney Morning Herald, 20 May 1997)
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