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12 November 1990: a memo to CERN management

On 12 November 1990, Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau sent CERN managers a memorandum titled "WorldWideWeb: Proposal for a HyperText Project," attaching a more detailed project plan. Unlike Berners-Lee's March 1989 document, this one carried the project name WorldWideWeb and was jointly authored.

The proposal described a common interface through which users could follow links among reports, databases, computer documentation and online help stored on otherwise incompatible systems at CERN.

Two phases, five people

It set out two implementation phases: first, connect existing servers and provide browsers; second, allow users to add new information to the system. Three months were proposed for each phase.

The staffing request was four software engineers and one programmer. Costs were given as 50k for workstations plus 30k in development expenses — the proposal does not label the currency.

What existed six weeks later

Development proceeded immediately. By Christmas 1990, Berners-Lee had implemented HTML, HTTP and URL conventions and had a browser/editor and the first Web server operating at CERN.

That first server acquired a handwritten red warning: "This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!"

"Publishes" is imprecise for this day. The document was a CERN management memorandum and project submission, not a public release comparable to CERN's 1993 public-domain announcement.

21 September 1991: one question on the ballot

Armenia held a nationwide referendum on 21 September 1991 asking whether the Republic of Armenia should be an independent democratic state outside the USSR. Turnout reached 95.05% of an electorate of 2,163,967.

Of the 2,056,758 ballots cast, 2,042,627 favoured independence, 10,002 opposed it and 4,129 were invalid — 99.51% of the valid yes/no votes.

What the observers saw

Foreign observers visited urban and village polling places, found voting unobstructed and described the atmosphere as celebratory. Counting began at the polling stations at 11 p.m.

They reached one village after most eligible voters had already cast their ballots, the day having become a village-wide celebration. In Upper Dvin, members of the Assyrian minority told the observers they enthusiastically supported independence.

The vote was the mandate, not the proclamation

Armenia's Supreme Council had refused on 1 March 1991 to take part in the Soviet referendum on preserving a renewed union, opting instead to put full independence to its own vote in September.

The referendum supplied the legal and popular mandate the Supreme Council cited when it unanimously proclaimed the Republic of Armenia an independent state on 23 September 1991, two days later. Armenia's earlier Declaration of Independence had been adopted on 23 August 1990.

1 December 1991: one question, 27 regions

On 1 December 1991 voters across Ukraine answered a single question: whether they confirmed the Act of Declaration of Independence adopted by the Verkhovna Rada on 24 August. That August resolution had expressly scheduled this confirming referendum.

Of 31,891,742 participants, 28,804,071 voted to confirm — 90.32%, on a turnout of 84.18%. Majorities favoured independence in every one of the 27 administrative voting regions, Crimea at 54.19% and Sevastopol at 57.07%.

A president chosen the same day

Ukraine simultaneously held its first direct presidential election. Leonid Kravchuk, the parliament's chairman, won in the first round with 61.59% of the vote.

Foreign observers reported that the voting broadly met democratic standards and reflected the popular will, recording limited irregularities they did not consider significant to the result. Helsinki Commission observers met former Siberian prisoners who wept because they had lived to see an independence vote that dead relatives and friends had not.

Recognition in a day, the CIS in a week

Canada and Poland recognised Ukraine on 2 December, the first states to do so; others followed over subsequent weeks. The Central Electoral Commission collected the district protocols and released final results on 4 December.

The Helsinki Commission found that the referendum result directly impelled the Russia–Ukraine–Belarus agreement of 8 December, which declared the USSR defunct and created the CIS.

1 February 1992 at Camp David

George H. W. Bush and Boris Yeltsin met at Camp David, Maryland, on 1 February 1992 — the first meeting there between a U.S. president and the democratically elected president of an independent Russia. Yeltsin had arrived from the first summit-level meeting of the UN Security Council in New York.

They adopted the Camp David Declaration, which stated that Russia and the United States no longer regarded one another as potential adversaries and that their relationship would be characterised by friendship and partnership.

Six principles, and no treaty

The declaration set out six guiding principles. It committed both countries to remove remnants of Cold War hostility, pursue strategic-arms reductions and cooperate on nonproliferation, regional conflicts, terrorism, drug trafficking, trade and environmental problems.

It was a political statement of principles rather than an arms-control agreement. Yeltsin proposed eliminating multiple-warhead ballistic missiles and even a joint missile-defence system; the United States was not ready to accept all of those proposals.

Discussed, not agreed

The presidents also went over Russian economic reform, Western assistance and detailed nuclear proposals, including a level of roughly 2,500 strategic warheads for each side. Bush emphasised that they had reached no agreement on particular weapon categories or numbers, and assigned Secretary of State James Baker to pursue the detail in Moscow.

"Formally declared the Cold War over" is a later shorthand. Bush called the meeting a confirmation of the Cold War's end, but the signed declaration carried no such formula — only that the two countries were no longer potential adversaries.

7 February 1992, in a provincial government building

Twenty-four plenipotentiaries — principally the foreign and finance or economic-affairs ministers of the twelve European Community states — signed the Treaty on European Union on 7 February 1992, in the Council Chamber of Maastricht's Provincial Government Buildings. Two ministers signed for each state.

European Parliament President Egon Klepsch was present at the ceremony but was not one of the treaty's national signatories.

What the signed text said

The text declared that the parties had decided to establish a European Union, placing it on the basis of the existing European Communities plus cooperation in common foreign and security policy and in justice and home affairs.

The Communities did not disappear; they continued as the first pillar of the future Union. No euro notes, coins or shared monetary policy appeared that day — the treaty laid out a staged route toward economic and monetary union.

Signed, but not in force

The heads of state or government had reached political agreement at the Maastricht European Council of 9–10 December 1991 and ordered final legal editing so the text could be signed at the beginning of February. Ministers, not those leaders, put their names to it.

Portugal held the rotating Council presidency on signing day; the venue stayed in Maastricht because the agreement had been reached there under the preceding Dutch presidency.

The signatures authenticated the text but did not put it into force. Ratification by every member state was still required, and the treaty took effect 632 days later, on 1 November 1993.

9 January 1992

On 9 January 1992, Nature published Aleksander Wolszczan and Dale Frail's paper reporting that precision timing of the millisecond pulsar PSR 1257+12 showed it was orbited by two or more planet-sized bodies. A Cornell University press release publicised the result the same day.

The team inferred two companions with minimum masses of 3.4 and 2.8 Earth masses, orbital periods of 66.6 and 98.2 days, and orbital distances of 0.36 and 0.47 astronomical units.

Four thousand arrival times

The evidence was the periodic shift in when the pulsar's radio pulses reached Earth: the orbiting bodies made it move toward and away from us around the system's centre of mass. Arecibo's 305-metre dish recorded more than 4,000 pulse-arrival measurements from July 1990 to November 1991, from an object spinning about 162 times a second.

Timing residuals were dominated by 66- and 98-day cycles, and a two-planet reflex-motion model explained them after alternative pulsar, propagation and instrumental explanations were examined. The planets were inferred, not photographed.

Why “first confirmed” needs a footnote

The paper presented highly persuasive evidence, but the predicted mutual gravitational perturbations between the planets — the dynamical confirmation — had not been measured on 9 January. Within two weeks other astronomers proposed exactly that test, because the two periods lie close to a 3:2 ratio; Wolszczan's 1994 paper described the detection of those perturbations as irrefutable.

The host is a neutron-star remnant, not a main-sequence star; the first confirmed planet around a Sun-like star was 51 Pegasi b in 1995. A planet around Gamma Cephei had been reported in the late 1980s, rejected at the time, and confirmed only in 2003.

The 1992 paper securely modelled two companions and mentioned evidence for another; the system's additional inner, moon-mass planet was reported with the 1994 confirmation.

The evening of 6 April 1994

On the evening of 6 April 1994, a Falcon 50 returning from a regional meeting in Dar es Salaam was struck by surface-to-air missiles while approaching Kigali airport. Twelve people aboard were killed.

Rwandan president Juvénal Habyarimana died alongside Burundian president Cyprien Ntaryamira, who had attended the same meeting and chose to fly back on the faster aircraft rather than his own. Rwandan army chief of staff Déogratias Nsabimana, other passengers and the French crew were also killed.

Twenty minutes, then one hour

About twenty minutes after the crash, Rwandan soldiers blocked Belgian UNAMIR personnel at the airport. Within an hour, troops were surrounding the home of Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana, the senior surviving constitutional official.

Colonel Théoneste Bagosora chaired the senior-officer meeting held after the crash and rejected repeated proposals that constitutional authority pass to her.

Soldiers and militia erected roadblocks across Kigali, evacuated politicians loyal to Habyarimana and confined or began hunting opposition leaders. The first reported killing of a government official occurred around midnight.

Who fired the missiles is still unresolved

The identities and institutional affiliation of the people who fired or ordered the missiles remain unresolved and politically disputed. No reliable account establishes as settled fact that either the RPF or Hutu extremists shot down the plane.

Responsibility for the attack is a separate question from responsibility for the genocide. Extensive evidence identifies the organisers and perpetrators who exploited it, and the preparations — weapons distribution, lists, incitement — predated 6 April.

Killings of Tutsi and opposition figures began before dawn, which is why some sources date the genocide's start to 6 April; 7 April is the conventional date for the start of the massive, organised campaign.

The broadcast that never happened

Before dawn on 7 April 1994, military roadblocks across Kigali had grown so extensive that UNAMIR peacekeepers needed about three hours for a fifteen-minute journey.

Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana planned to broadcast an appeal for calm and continued adherence to the Arusha Accords. Rwandan troops attacked her residence and prevented the broadcast; soldiers found and murdered her shortly before noon, along with her husband and two other men.

Fifteen peacekeepers, ten of them killed

Soldiers captured fifteen UNAMIR peacekeepers assigned to protect her. Five Ghanaians were released; ten Belgians were beaten and shot to death at Camp Kigali after resisting for several hours.

Uwilingiyimana's five children survived and were later rescued by the Senegalese UN officer Mbaye Diagne.

Killing by list

Soldiers and police also murdered the opposition figures Félicien Ngango and Landoald Ndasingwa and the Constitutional Court president Joseph Kavaruganda, using prepared lists to locate targets. By midday, forces aligned with Hutu Power had eliminated much of the leadership capable of governing under the constitution or the Arusha transition, while soldiers, police, militia and recruited civilians hunted and killed Tutsi.

RTLM blamed the previous evening's attack on President Habyarimana's plane on the RPF and Belgian UN troops, and broadcast incitement against Tutsi. Late that afternoon RPF troops left their Kigali headquarters and engaged the Presidential Guard.

The United Nations commemorates 7 April as the start of the genocide and Human Rights Watch calls it the day massive killing began, but the boundary is not literal: the Presidential Guard had begun killing civilians on the night of 6 April.

5 July 1996: a white-faced lamb from a black-faced ewe

At the Roslin Institute in Midlothian on 5 July 1996, a Scottish Blackface surrogate ewe gave birth to a white-faced Finn Dorset lamb, first identified as 6LL and later named Dolly. Her white face immediately distinguished her from the ewe that had carried her.

She had developed from a cultured mammary-gland cell taken from a six-year-old adult Finn Dorset ewe, combined with an enucleated egg supplied by a Scottish Blackface ewe. The live birth demonstrated that genetic material from an adult mammalian cell could be reprogrammed to direct development to term.

One lamb out of 277 reconstructions

The adult mammary-cell series started from 277 reconstructed eggs. Twenty-nine of them reached the morula or blastocyst stage and were transferred to 13 recipient ewes.

One live lamb resulted. Dolly was not the first cloned mammal — earlier sheep had been cloned from embryonic cells — and her distinction was the adult-cell origin.

Seven months of silence

The achievement stayed confidential that day and for long after. Roslin kept observing her while preparing genetic evidence and a paper, and announced her publicly on 22 February 1997, days before the research paper appeared on 27 February.

In the week after the announcement, Roslin received 3,000 telephone calls. The name was a mammary-gland joke: the team chose Dolly after the singer Dolly Parton.

10 April 1998, 5:36 p.m. at Stormont

At 5:36 p.m. at Stormont in Belfast on 10 April 1998, talks chairman George Mitchell announced that the British and Irish governments and the participating Northern Ireland parties had reached agreement. It came almost 18 hours after his midnight deadline, not one hour after it.

The deadline forced decisions after two years of talks, and direct interventions by Tony Blair, Bertie Ahern and US President Bill Clinton helped resolve what remained. Ahern repeatedly left the final negotiations to arrange and attend his mother's funeral, then returned to Stormont.

Two documents, not one

Eight Northern Ireland parties or groupings joined the Multi-Party Agreement: Alliance, the Labour Coalition, the Northern Ireland Women's Coalition, Sinn Féin, the SDLP, the Progressive Unionist Party, the Ulster Democratic Party and the Ulster Unionist Party.

Blair and Mo Mowlam signed for the United Kingdom, Ahern and David Andrews for Ireland, creating the accompanying British-Irish Agreement. Four signatures appear on that government-to-government treaty.

Proposed, not switched on

The agreed package proposed a 108-seat power-sharing Assembly and an Executive, North-South and East-West institutions, the consent principle, identity and citizenship rights, and commitments concerning decommissioning, policing, security and prisoners.

The proposed Assembly, Executive and cross-border bodies were not operating that evening: implementation still required referendums and legislation, and the Agreement entered into force on 2 December 1999. The DUP, which had withdrawn from the talks, and the UKUP both opposed the settlement.

2 September 1998, in Arusha

Trial Chamber I of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, sitting in Arusha, Tanzania, unanimously convicted Jean-Paul Akayesu, former bourgmestre of Taba commune, on 9 of 15 counts on 2 September 1998.

The convictions comprised one count of genocide, one of direct and public incitement to commit genocide, and seven crimes-against-humanity counts covering extermination, murder, torture, rape and other inhumane acts. He was acquitted on six counts, including complicity in genocide and charged violations of Common Article 3 and Additional Protocol II.

The first of its kind

The judgment was the first conviction for genocide entered by an international court and the first interpretation and application of the 1948 Genocide Convention by such a court. Jean Kambanda had pleaded guilty to genocide earlier in 1998; Akayesu's distinction was the first genocide judgment after a contested international trial.

The chamber — Laïty Kama presiding, with Lennart Aspegren and Navanethem Pillay — held that rape and sexual violence could constitute acts of genocide when committed with the specific intent to destroy a protected group.

Verdict in September, sentence in October

The judgment also entered the first international conviction for rape as a crime against humanity. It did not declare every wartime rape genocidal — only that sexual violence can be genocidal when accompanied by that required intent.

Akayesu remained in ICTR custody after the verdict. His life sentence was imposed exactly one month later, on 2 October 1998.

12 December 2000, about 10 p.m.

The Supreme Court held on 12 December 2000 that the Florida recount's varying standards and procedures failed the Equal Protection Clause's requirement against arbitrary and disparate treatment of ballots. The opinion came at about 10 p.m., roughly two hours before the safe-harbor date expired, and the mandate issued immediately.

The Court reversed the Florida Supreme Court's recount order because no constitutionally compliant procedure was in place that could meet the 12 December date the majority read Florida law as intending to satisfy.

Seven and five are different numbers

Seven justices agreed that the ordered recount had constitutional problems requiring correction. The decisive 5–4 division concerned whether further recount proceedings remained possible; Souter and Breyer favoured a remand under uniform standards.

The Court counted no ballots, certified no result and cast no electoral votes. Florida had certified Bush ahead by 537 votes — 2,912,790 to 2,912,253 — back on 26 November, and the ruling left that certification and Bush's slate of electors in place.

The next six days

The physical recount had already been stopped by the Court's stay on 9 December, and argument was heard on 11 December. The decision made that halt effectively final.

Gore conceded the following day, saying he accepted the outcome's finality while disagreeing with the Court. Florida's electors cast their votes on 18 December, and the official Electoral College result was Bush 271 to Gore 266, with 270 required.