Portal:Current events/September 1998

September 1998 was the ninth month of that common year. The month, which began on a Tuesday, ended on a Wednesday after 30 days.

Portal:Current events[edit]

September 1, 1998 (Tuesday)

Second Congo War:
- The Democratic Republic of the Congo says that the rebels are surrounded by forces loyal to President Laurent Kabila in the west. (BBC)
- The rebels gain control over Goma, Kabila's home area. (BBC)

September 2, 1998 (Wednesday)

A McDonnell Douglas MD-11 airliner (Swissair Flight 111) crashes near Peggys Cove, Nova Scotia, after taking off from New York City en route to Geneva; all 229 people on board are killed.
A United Nations court finds Jean-Paul Akayesu, the former mayor of a small town in Rwanda, guilty of 9 counts of genocide, marking the first time that the 1948 law banning genocide is enforced.

September 4, 1998 (Friday)

Google, Inc. is founded in Menlo Park, California, by Stanford University PhD candidates Larry Page and Sergey Brin.^[1]
The last former Soviet Union radar station, Skrunda-1, is closed down in Latvia.

September 5, 1998 (Saturday)

The Government of North Korea adopts a military dictatorship on its 50th anniversary.

September 10, 1998 (Thursday)

At midnight, a shooting occurs aboard an Akula-class nuclear-powered attack submarine of the Russian Navy docked in the northern Russian port-city of Severomorsk. The shooter, Alexander Kuzminykh, a 19-year-old seaman from St. Petersburg, opened fire after murdering a soldier (who was supervising his detention on punishment charges in the personnel quarters of the submarine) with a chisel, and taking his AK-74U carbine. After killing five people and wounding one with the dead soldier's weapon, he proceeded to take 2 fellow soldiers hostage, and barricaded himself in the submarine's torpedo room, where he would later murder them. For 23 hours, doctors, relatives, and a priest attempt to persuade him to surrender, but to no avail. After threatening numerous times to set the torpedo room on fire (an event the authorities feared would cause a quote "second Chernobyl"), the crisis came to an end on the morning of 12 September, when a special anti-terrorist commando unit of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) launched a raid on the torpedo room during which, Kuzminkykh allegedly committed suicide, contrary to prior reports that he'd been killed by the unit.

September 12, 1998 (Saturday)

Bosnian general election, 1998: Votes in Bosnia and Herzegovina go to the polls for a general election.
The Cuban Five intelligence agents are arrested in Miami, and convicted of espionage. The agents claim they were not spying against the United States Government but against the Cuban exile community in Miami.

September 24, 1998 (Thursday)

Iranian President Mohammad Khatami retracts a fatwa against Satanic Verses author Salman Rushdie that was in force since 1989 stating that the Iranian government will "neither support nor hinder assassination operations on Rushdie".

^ "The History Of Google – Searching The World" (notes), Matt Jacks, 10 January 2005, webpage: WAH-HGoogle Archived 2007-04-02 at the Wayback Machine.