Word: years
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...year 2000 was not the best of times for tyranny. True, Saddam Hussein began to shake off the shackles of world sanctions, all the while restocking his arsenal with the nastiest of weapons, unfettered and unwatched. Against all expectations, however, Yugoslavia's strongman, Slobodan Milosevic, vanished--poof!--from power after calling an election he felt sure he'd win, and then failing to steal the result from a populace that rose up to guard its rejection of his troublemaking. Another autarch actually took a turn toward benevolence all on his own: North Korea's quirky Kim Jong Il reached...
...compared to what Slobodan Milosevic tried in Yugoslavia when, to his astonishment, an election went against him. On Sept. 24 Vojislav Kostunica, head of the center-right Democratic Party of Serbia, who had the support of a coalition of 15 opposition parties, seemed to have ended Milosevic's 13-year autocratic rule. But when the votes were counted, the state-run Federal Election Commission reported 48.22% for Kostunica, 40.23% for Milosevic. At Milosevic's strong urging, a runoff was called. The opposition cried fraud, saying Kostunica had won nearly 55% of the vote. On Sept. 25 Kostunica (inset) declared victory...
...great year for cracking codes, man's and nature's alike. The scientific high point of the year--if not of all intellectual history--was the decoding of human DNA, announced with much fanfare at the White House in late June by two scientists, J. Craig Venter and Francis Collins, whose agreement to share the credit and a podium was all the more remarkable because they can hardly stand to breathe the same air. Passions were no less intense on the Internet, where the music industry fought a rear-guard action against the forces--and free music--unleashed...
...rivers, chopped down the forests and depleted the soils. Burning up fossil fuels that had been created over eons, we pumped billions of tons of greenhouse gases into the air, altering atmospheric chemistry and appreciably warming the planet in just a few decades. And as our population began the year 2000 above the 6 billion mark, still spreading across the continents, dozens of animal and plant species were going extinct every day, including the first primate to disappear in more than 100 years, Miss Waldron's red colobus...
...there were also, in the year 2000, signs of greater awareness. Linked by the Internet, hundreds of millions of people rallied for the cause of conservation on the 30th anniversary of Earth Day. Governments from Washington to Lima took steps to protect large wilderness areas from development. Progress was made toward using more renewable energy from the wind and the sun, and new hybrid cars that used both gasoline and electricity sported impressive fuel-economy statistics...