Part 31 (2/2)

Apr. 6, 1965 The world's first global telecommunications satellite, EARLY BIRD, is launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

June 20, 1969 U.S. astronaut Neil Armstrong sets foot on the Earth's moon.

Jan. 15, 1973 The United States suspends all military action against North Vietnam to concentrate on peace talks.

Aug. 9, 1974 After the Watergate scandal Richard M. Nixon becomes the first U.S. president to resign from office.

Jul. 25, 1978 A healthy 5-pound, 12-ounce baby girl is born in London from an egg that is fertilized outside her mother's body-history's first ”test-tube baby.”

Oct. 16, 1978 Cardinal Karol Jozef Wojtyla of Poland becomes Pope John Paul II, the first non-Italian pontiff since 1522.

May 3, 1979 Margaret Thatcher becomes Britain's first female prime minister.

Dec. 26, 1979 Soviet troops invade Afghanistan.

Sept. 17, 1980 Iraq declares war on neighboring Iran.

Dec. 3, 1985 Poisonous gas leaks from a pesticide plant near Bhopal, India, killing 2,500.

Nov. 9, 1989 Guards throw open the gates at the Berlin Wall.

Aug. 6, 1991 A young British scientist named Tim Brenners-Lee posits an idea for using the Internet to share information called the ”World Wide Web Project.”

Dec. 26, 1991 The Supreme Soviet, which had ruled over the USSR since 1917, dissolves itself, completing the breakup of the Soviet Union.

Apr. 25, 1994 The all-white parliament of South Africa also dissolves itself, ending 342 years of white rule.

Jul. 1996 A United Nations report reveals that 385 people control about half of the world's personal wealth.

Aug. 1999 The population of India reaches 1 billion. Overall, the world's population reaches 6 billion.

Mar. 29, 2004 NATO formally admits seven new countries that were once part of the Soviet Union or Soviet-dominated.

Aug. 24, 2006 Pluto is recla.s.sified as a dwarf planet, shrinking the solar system's full planet roster to eight.

SPINNING THE GLOBE.

Africa:

Free(ish) at Last

By the 1960s, most African countries had achieved independence, or were on their way to doing so. But once the colonial powers departed, Africans were left to hastily put together their own governments, something they were often ill prepared to do.

The result in many cases was either a military coup or civil war, sometimes accompanied by genocide. In Libya, Colonel Moammar al-Gaddafi seized power in 1969, followed by General Idi Amin in Uganda in 1971. Civil wars erupted in the Sudan (1956 and 1983), Nigeria (1967), and Liberia (1990).

In 1974, a Soviet-backed Marxist coup toppled the venerable leader Haile Sela.s.sie in Ethiopia, and a decade later the region of Eritrea broke off from Ethiopia. A nine-year civil war ended with Eritrean independence in 1993.

In famine-ridden Somalia, troops from the United States and other countries tried both humanitarian and military aid to stop a civil war in the early 1990s. In 1995, however, they gave up the military efforts and the war continued into the 2000s.

In April 1994, ethnic violence broke out in Rwanda between members of the Hutu and Tutsi tribes. Within three months, an estimated one million Tutsi and moderate Hutus had been shot, clubbed, or hacked to death by Hutu gangs and members of the Rwandan military. When the genocide finally ended, more than two million Hutu, fearing reprisals, had fled the country to refugee camps in neighboring nations.

In Sudan, the largest country in Africa, a civil war raged between ”Arab” Sudanese in the north and ”African” Sudanese in the south. From 1956 to 1972, and then from 1983 to 2005, the fighting killed more than 2.0 million and displaced another 4.5 million. Even as an uneasy peace was worked out between north and south, the Arab-dominated government was using militia groups and mercenaries to wage war on residents of Darfur in western Sudan. More than 2,000 villages were destroyed and more than 400,000 people killed.

YOU CAN CALL ME AL(-GADDAFI).

Although he has been ruler of the country since 1969, Libya's Muammar al-Gaddafiholds no official public office and lacks a formal government t.i.tle. Heck, he's not even a general, he's a colonel.

Not all the fighting was African on African, and not all Europeans bowed out gracefully as the post-colonial era dawned. In Rhodesia, a minority white government led by a politician named Ian Smith broke away from British rule and established its own whites-in-charge government. Eventually bowing to international pressure, the white government held elections in 1980, which resulted in the election of a black-majority government led by a Marxist politician named Robert Mugabe. Mugabe rapidly became dictator of what was renamed Zimbabwe.

In South Africa, whites' control of the government began to slip in the 1980s. Widespread riots broke out in 1985, followed a year later by an economic boycott of the country by the United States and the European Economic Community. By 1994, black civil rights leader Nelson Mandela, who had spent more than twenty-seven years behind bars, was elected the country's president.

Even the relatively stable and democratic East African country of Kenya had its share of political unrest, including an attempted 1982 military coup and ethnic violence following a controversial 2007 election.

In addition to a high degree of political unrest throughout much of the continent, Africa also suffered from a severe case of empty wallet. Both the West and the Communist bloc had shown interest in currying the emerging nations' favor through economic aid. But the collapse of the Soviet Union made Africa less interesting to Western leaders. Direct economic aid from Western governments gave way to loans from organizations such as the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund, and the result was that many African nations rolled up heavy debts, with little economic growth to show for it.

While the economies stagnated, however, population growth did not. With the highest birthrate of any continent, Africa's turn-of-the century population of about 750 million was expected to nearly triple by 2050. The continent also led the world in another most unwelcome category: with 13 percent of the earth's population, Africa was home to nearly 70 percent of the earth's HIV/AIDS victims.

Soviet Union:

Refragmented

While the breakup of the Soviet Union seemed to happen overnight, it actually began to show signs of cracking decades before it occurred.

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