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Five days in January 1992

Deng Xiaoping arrived by train in Shenzhen on 19 January 1992 and stayed through the 23rd. There was no single “Shenzhen speech”: his remarks came during several inspections and conversations across the five days.

Touring the city, he argued that special economic zones should be judged by whether they increased productive capacity and living standards, rather than being labelled automatically capitalist or socialist. He inspected sites including the Guomao Building and the Xianke Laser Company and pressed Shenzhen to experiment boldly. Shenzhen's party secretary Li Hao and Guangdong's party secretary Xie Fei were among the officials receiving and accompanying him.

3:10 p.m. on 22 January

The most substantial recorded session began at 3:10 p.m. on 22 January, when Deng addressed provincial and municipal officials and stressed that reform and opening required the courage to experiment and take risks.

He held no top party, state or military office, but retained decisive personal authority, and used the visibly successful southern zones to challenge the conservative economic caution that followed 1989.

Published two months later

The national media did not announce the visit at the time. The Shenzhen Special Zone Daily journalist Chen Xitian was the designated local text reporter, and his account — more than 11,000 Chinese characters — appeared on 26 March, after Deng had left.

The official compilation known as the Southern Talks combines remarks made in Wuchang, Shenzhen, Zhuhai and Shanghai between 18 January and 21 February, so not every famous sentence in it can be assigned securely to Shenzhen.

Deng left for Zhuhai on 23 January. The Fourteenth Party Congress later that year, not the visit itself, formally adopted the goal of a socialist market economy.

17 July 1994: the last bastion

On 17 July 1994, Rwandan Patriotic Front forces captured Gisenyi, the last major bastion of the former government forces in northwestern Rwanda. The RPF had taken Kigali on 4 July, Butare on 5 July and Ruhengeri on 14 July as the government army's fighting capacity collapsed.

Virtually all remaining Rwandese government forces retreated across the nearby border into Zaire and ceased to function as an organised fighting force.

A million people had already crossed

By the fall of Gisenyi, more than a million Rwandan refugees had crossed into Zaire amid the RPF advance, inflammatory broadcasts and pressure from retreating soldiers.

About 1.5 million Rwandans entered Zaire during roughly two weeks in July. Some 850,000 gathered around Goma and about 500,000 in the South Kivu camps.

Ceasefire on the 18th, a government on the 19th

On 18 July the RPF reached the Zairian frontier and declared a unilateral ceasefire. It then controlled Rwanda except for the French-led Operation Turquoise humanitarian zone in the southwest.

A broad-based Government of National Unity was installed on 19 July, with Pasteur Bizimungu as president and Paul Kagame as vice-president and defence minister. The interim government's members had escaped by multiple routes, some through the French-controlled zone rather than directly from Gisenyi.

Midnight, 1 July 1997

The joint British-Chinese handover ceremony began at 11:30 p.m. on 30 June 1997 in the Grand Foyer of the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre Extension. About 4,000 invited guests attended and roughly 6,500 local and overseas media representatives covered the events.

Immediately before midnight the British and colonial Hong Kong flags were lowered; at midnight the flags of the People's Republic of China and the new Special Administrative Region were raised. Under the Sino-British Joint Declaration, China resumed the exercise of sovereignty and the United Kingdom restored Hong Kong to the People's Republic of China with effect from 1 July 1997.

Sworn in at half past one in the morning

At approximately 1:30 a.m., President Jiang Zemin formally declared the HKSAR established. Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa, senior officials, councillors and judges were then sworn in.

The Provisional Legislative Council held its first HKSAR session immediately afterwards and enacted the Reunification Ordinance. Chris Patten, the last governor of British Hong Kong, had left Government House on 30 June.

The garrison moved at dawn

Defence responsibility changed at midnight too, with flag ceremonies at the barracks. An advance element of 509 PLA soldiers had entered at 9 p.m. on 30 June, and the main body of the People's Liberation Army Hong Kong Garrison came in at 6 a.m. to occupy 14 barracks.

By morning the colonial government and governorship no longer existed and the Basic Law was in force. The HKSAR sat directly under China's central government, with foreign affairs and defence reserved to Beijing.

2 July 1997: the basket is abandoned

On 2 July 1997 the Bank of Thailand abandoned the fixed exchange-rate system based on a basket of trading-partner currencies and announced a managed float for the baht. The last recorded rate under the basket system, on 30 June, was 25.79 baht to the US dollar.

The baht depreciated by approximately 15–20% on the day it was floated. What replaced the peg was a managed float, not an unrestricted one.

The defence had depleted the reserves

The change followed months of speculative pressure and failed interventions. The central bank had spent US$24 billion — about two-thirds of total reserves — defending the currency.

Usable reserves reportedly remaining before the float came to US$2.85 billion. Sustained selling of baht and baht-denominated assets had left the authorities without enough to hold the old rate.

What the peg had been hiding

The regime Thailand abandoned was formally a basket peg dominated by the dollar rather than a simple statutory dollar peg. Its stability had concealed the exchange-rate risk carried by Thai banks and firms with foreign-currency debts, and that risk became visible immediately.

The devaluation is the conventional starting point of the Asian financial crisis, though Thailand's banking, debt and property-market problems had begun earlier. The baht's low of roughly 56 per dollar came in January 1998, not on 2 July.

2 August 1998, on Goma's state radio

On 2 August 1998, Congolese army units in Goma mutinied against President Laurent-Désiré Kabila, and General Sylvain Buki announced the rebellion over the local state radio station. Goma fell to the mutineers with little fighting.

Banyamulenge-led rebellions erupted simultaneously from Goma and Bukavu in eastern Congo, while fighting also broke out among soldiers in Kinshasa. Rwanda and Uganda intervened alongside the mutineers, turning Kabila's rupture with his former sponsors into a new war.

Six days after the expulsion order

The uprising followed Kabila's 27 July order ending the Rwandan military presence in Congo and sending the troops home. He had also dismissed the Rwandan commander James Kabarebe, previously chief of staff of the Congolese army.

Within two days, Rwandan and some Ugandan troops under Kabarebe were flown from Goma to Kitona in western Congo, opening a second front aimed toward Kinshasa. That airlift is what the 4 August date actually describes.

What the 5.4 million figure counts

The International Rescue Committee estimated 5.4 million excess deaths between August 1998 and April 2007, about 2.1 million of them after the formal 2002 peace agreement. Only 0.4% of deaths in its survey were attributed directly to violence.

The number is an excess-mortality estimate covering disease, malnutrition and disrupted services, and its methodology and baseline mortality assumptions have been challenged by other researchers.

1 January 1999: Stage Three begins

Stage Three of Economic and Monetary Union began on 1 January 1999. Exchange rates for the currencies of the 11 initial participants became irrevocably fixed, and responsibility for their single monetary policy passed to the Eurosystem — the European Central Bank together with the 11 national central banks.

The euro replaced the official ECU at one euro per ECU. The participating national currency units became denominations of the euro rather than separate currencies with adjustable exchange rates.

A launch with no banknotes

The launch was initially non-cash. Euro-denominated accounts, payments and financial instruments could operate while national banknotes and coins remained in circulation; euro cash reached the public only in 2002.

Over the changeover weekend, financial institutions converted electronic records and adjusted payment and securities systems. The first regular financial-market trading in euros began on 4 January, and ECB employees were themselves paid in euros from launch day.

What the date does and does not mark

The Council of the European Union adopted the irrevocable conversion rates on 31 December 1998, and they took legal effect with Stage Three the following day. The ECB itself had been established earlier, on 1 June 1998, under president Willem F. Duisenberg.

What changed hands was euro-area monetary-policy competence, not every present-day ECB function — and it passed to the Eurosystem rather than to the ECB acting without the national central banks.

Noon, 31 December 1999

Boris Yeltsin's televised address announcing his resignation as president of the Russian Federation aired at noon Moscow time on 31 December 1999 — not at midnight, during the usual New Year countdown. His decree ended his presidential powers at 12:00.

Under Article 92 of the Constitution, the duties passed automatically to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin as acting president. About six months of Yeltsin's second term remained.

Asking forgiveness

Yeltsin said Russia should enter the new era with new political leaders, and asked citizens' forgiveness because many shared hopes had not been realised.

Putin addressed the country that night as acting head of state and stressed that there would be no vacuum of power. His first official act granted legal and material guarantees to Yeltsin and his family, including protection from prosecution.

An election within three months

Putin took the office by constitutional succession; Yeltsin had no legal power to appoint a permanent successor. Early termination required a new election no later than three months afterwards, and it was held on 26 March 2000.

Yeltsin's public explanation is documented. Analysts have also read the timing as a strategy to advantage Putin and protect Yeltsin's circle — an inferred motive, not an established fact.

04:05 UTC, 2 May 2000

A few minutes after midnight EDT on 2 May 2000, commands took effect across the GPS constellation setting Selective Availability — the intentional degradation of the public signal — to zero worldwide. Monitoring stations recorded the intentional error disappearing at approximately 04:05 UTC, over an interval of one or two minutes.

Existing civilian receivers picked up the more accurate signal without replacement, user fees or additional government expenditure. More than four million users worldwide had receivers when the change was announced.

How much better

The White House estimated the result would be up to ten times more accurate, with basic civilian accuracy of approximately 20 metres or better. At one Kentucky reference station, the 95% radius went from 45.0 metres with SA to 6.3 metres without it.

The change removed intentional degradation but left the ordinary error sources: atmospheric delay, satellite geometry, orbit error and multipath. Post-change accuracy is therefore not one universal number.

Set to zero, not removed

A coordinated security review had concluded that the military could deny GPS regionally in threat areas, making continuous worldwide degradation unnecessary and of minimal security benefit. Bill Clinton approved the recommendation and announced on 1 May that degradation would end at midnight.

Selective Availability was set to zero rather than physically removed from the satellites; a 2007 procurement decision later excluded the feature from GPS III. Civilians gained nothing from the encrypted military service — what stopped was the deliberate degradation of the open civilian signal.

27 November 2001: sodium, not hydrogen

NASA announced on 27 November 2001 that David Charbonneau, Timothy Brown, Robert Noyes and Ronald Gilliland had used the Hubble Space Telescope to make the first direct detection and chemical measurement of an atmosphere around an extrasolar planet. The element detected was neutral sodium.

Hydrogen belongs to a later result. An extended, escaping hydrogen atmosphere around the same planet was reported by Alfred Vidal-Madjar's team in Nature on 13 March 2003.

684 spectra, four transits

Hubble's Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph measured starlight filtered through the atmosphere of HD 209458 b during four transits; the planet circles its star in about 3.5 Earth days. The team collected 684 spectra.

They found extra absorption around sodium's 589.3-nanometre resonance doublet: the sodium-band transit ran deeper than adjacent bands by (2.32 ± 0.57) × 10⁻⁴. Nothing was photographed — the chemical fingerprint was read from starlight passing through the planet's limb.

Less sodium than the model predicted

The measured absorption fell short of what the team's cloudless, solar-abundance model predicted. The explanations they offered included high clouds, sodium chemistry, photoionisation and a lower sodium abundance.

The accepted paper was posted as a preprint on 28 November and appeared in the Astrophysical Journal on 20 March 2002.

11 February 2003: first-year data, and a new name

NASA released the first year of data and the first full-sky cosmic-microwave-background maps from the Microwave Anisotropy Probe on 11 February 2003. The same announcement renamed the mission the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, in honour of David T. Wilkinson, the Princeton cosmologist and founding science-team member who had died in 2002.

Thirteen companion papers were released alongside the data, covering the maps, foregrounds, the angular power spectrum, polarization, cosmological parameters and inflation.

Three million pixels, millionths of a degree

The basic-results paper presented full-sky microwave maps in five bands spanning 23 to 94 GHz, with calibration errors below 0.5 percent and a best angular resolution of 13 arcminutes. The maps used 3,145,728 pixels to portray temperature variations of millionths of a degree.

The parameter analysis found that a flat, cosmological-constant-dominated model fit the data, and gave a best-fit age of 13.7 ± 0.2 billion years.

Four percent atoms

NASA's public summary gave the present universe's composition as approximately 4 percent atoms, 23 percent cold dark matter and 73 percent dark energy. It also highlighted unexpectedly early star formation — first light about 200 million years after the Big Bang.

The data products reached researchers that day, but 11 February was the release and preprint-posting date. The principal peer-reviewed first-year papers appeared in the Astrophysical Journal Supplement in September 2003.

About 5:30 a.m. Baghdad time, 20 March 2003

On 20 March 2003, two U.S. F-117 stealth aircraft and cruise missiles attacked the Dora Farms compound in southern Baghdad at about 5:30 a.m. local time, acting on intelligence — later shown to be wrong — that Saddam Hussein and senior leaders were there. Each F-117 dropped two 2,000-pound bombs, and Human Rights Watch's reconstruction counts up to 40 Tomahawks.

The strike did not kill Saddam and did not hit any actual underground command bunker. Reported civilian casualties at Dora Farms were one person killed and 14 wounded, including nine women and a child.

Not yet the air campaign

This was a limited, opportunistic leadership strike rather than the broad aerial offensive popularly called "shock and awe." The Iraq Inquiry records the main strategic air campaign as scheduled for 21 March.

President George W. Bush announced at 10:16 p.m. Eastern time on 19 March that U.S. and coalition forces had begun military operations; dawn had already come to Baghdad on 20 March. The two dates are a time-zone difference, not two separate beginnings.

Across the border that night

Iraqi forces fired missiles toward coalition positions in Kuwait. Patriot missiles intercepted incoming weapons, and the Defense Department reported no casualties from those attacks.

Coalition ground forces moved across the Kuwait–Iraq border during the evening and night of 20–21 March, with Regimental Combat Team 5 crossing at 20:42 local time. Bush said more than 35 countries were providing forms of coalition support — bases, intelligence, logistics and overflight rights among them, not invasion troops from each.

9 April 2003: two divisions meet at the Tigris

Iraqi military resistance continued to disintegrate on 9 April 2003 as the U.S. 1st Marine Division crossed the Diyala River into eastern Baghdad and linked up with the 3rd Infantry Division near the Tigris. Armored "Thunder Runs" on 5 and 7 April had already shown that U.S. forces could penetrate central Baghdad and remain there.

Marines of 3rd Battalion, 4th Marines advanced into the city centre to secure the Palestine and Sheraton hotels, embassies and other key buildings. The principal urban battle had run seven days.

Firdos Square

At Firdos Square, Iraqi civilians asked the Marines to help pull down a roughly 20-foot statue of Saddam Hussein, and the Marines used an M88 armored recovery vehicle to topple it. Foreign correspondents poured out of the Palestine Hotel, putting the scene onto live television.

A Marine briefly placed a U.S. flag over the statue's head. After Iraqis objected it was replaced with an Iraqi flag before the statue came down.

Collapse is not control

While the statue fell, a separate firefight at the Abu Hanifa mosque ran from about 4 a.m. until noon; a combatant account cited by Human Rights Watch reported ten civilian deaths there.

By the end of the day, Saddam's government no longer exercised effective control over the capital and its leader was in hiding. Fighting, looting and the disappearance of Iraqi police exposed an immediate security vacuum, and Tikrit and other locations remained to be taken.