I am giving an overview of history since 1945 in this series, with an eye towards uncovering the patterns that give insight into the world we live in today, and in this part will be focusing on events that took place between 1993 and 1995.
So far, patterns uncovered since 1945 show events and people being manipulated for particular outcomes, and deceiving us about what was really going on to gain our consent…
…seeing hereditary rulers being taken down and replaced with new governments, with examples of like communist, socialist and autocratic-theocratic, leading to genocide and repression of millions of people…
…since the 1980s, multiple events seeding our collective Human consciousness with the notion we could meet a violent and horrible death, anywhere and anytime…
…and at the same experienced the rise of the personal computer, internet, and world-wide web.
Starting in the 1990s, at the same time we saw the fall of the centralized communist systems of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, we saw the rise of war and violence between different ethnic groups in the former republics of the countries, resulting in the genocide of the people…
…and the destruction of infrastructure in this civil and political warfare…
…the First Gulf War in Kuwait…
…violent weather…
…violent earthquakes…
…and airplane, and other transportation disasters as they have been occurring quite frequently from what I have been finding in the historical record in both the 1990s so far, and also in the decade of the 1980s that I looked at in the last part of the series.
I will now pick up the 1990s in 1993, where I left off.
The European Economic Community eliminated trade barriers and created a European Single Market on January 1st of 1993.
It was comprised of the 27 member states of the European Union, and the four non-member states of Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, and Switzerland.
It referred to the European Union as one territory without any internal borders or regulatory obstacles to the free movement of goods and services, with the stated goal of guaranteeing the free movement of goods, services, capital and people, also known as the “four freedoms.”
EuroNews was launched in Lyons, France, on the same day, a multilingual television news network aimed to cover news from a Pan-European perspective.
This neon-green cube has been the new EuroNews Headquarters since 2015.
I don’t know, what do you think?
It was constructed at the confluence of Lyons’ Rhone and Saone Rivers…
…which is described as being transformed into a dynamic business and commercial hub from what was a run-down and neglected area.
It almost looks as if the old masonry building is being imprisoned in the new architecture!
I can think of another city at the confluence of two rivers that was once a busy commercial hub back in the day.
This city is Cairo, the southernmost point in Illinois, which is situated at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers.
Cairo is largely-abandoned today, and is considered a ghost town.
In its heyday, Cairo was an important city along the steamboat routes and railway lines.
Fort Defiance, described as a Civil War-era fort, was located right at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers.
On January 3rd, Russian President Boris Yeltsin and U. S. President George H. W. Bush signed the second Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, also known as START II, banning the use of Multiple Independently Targetable Re-entry Vehicles (MIRVs) on Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs).
Funny thing is, the treaty never really went into effect.
While it was ratified by the U. S. Senate in 1996, the Russians ratified it in 2000, and instead withdrew from the treaty in 2002.
The Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT) came into effect instead in June of 2003 through February of 2011.
It reduced the number of strategic warheads count for each country to 1,700 from 2,200.
The fifth-largest robbery in U. S. History took place on January 5th, which was the theft of $7.4 million stolen from the Brink’s Armored Car depot, in Rochester, New York.
I looked at two big robberies in the last part of this series, the still-unsolved, largest art theft in U. S. history on March 18th of 1990, at which time twelve paintings and a Chinese Shang Dynasty vase, all together worth $100 to $300 million, were stolen from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Art Museum…
…and the City Bonds Robbery in the City of London, which took place on May 2nd of 1990, the largest robbery in world history where a courier was robbed of 301 bearer-bonds, worth 292-million pounds, and 299 of the bonds were ultimately recovered.
The City Bonds Robbery was believed to be a sophisticated global operation which involved the New York Mafia, the Provisional Irish Republican Army, and Colombian drug barons.
In the Brinks Robbery, an Irish Priest in New York and an ex-guerilla fighter from Northern Ireland were eventually convicted of the robbery, for the stated reason of helping the Provisional Irish Republican Army.
On the same day as the Brinks’ Robbery, on January 5th, the MV Braer, a Liberian-registered oil tanker, ran aground at Garths Ness in northern Scotland’s Shetland Islands when it was enroute from Bergen, Norway to Quebec, Canada, loaded with 85,000-metric tonnes, or 94,000-tons of crude oil, causing oil to leak into the sea.
The reason given for the oil tanker’s grounding was that it had lost power after seawater contaminated the ship’s heavy fuel two-days earlier, when a pipeline on deck broke loose.
While there was an immediate environmental response, and work was being done to contain and clean-up the spill, it spread northward up the west side of the Shetland Islands.
So there was lots going on here related to the January 5th spill…
…when along came what became known as the Braer Storm, named after the MV Braer, on January 8th, which was the most intense extra-tropical cyclone ever recorded over the North Atlantic, the lowest low ever…
…and was the fastest-deepening, mid-latitude depression in history, with central pressure dropping 78 mbs in a 24-hour period, which resulted in what is called “Explosive Cyclogenesis,” or the explosive genesis of a cyclone, and took place just west of the Shetland Islands.
It caused severe blizzards across most of Scotland, and the final break-up of the MV Braer oil tanker.
Was it just a coincidence that the major environmental disaster of the MV Braer spilling its oil into the sea and the most intense extra-tropical cyclone ever recorded formed within days of each other in the vicinity of the Shetland Islands? Or not.
Something to think about.
The Polish Ferry Jan Heweliusz sank, as a result of hurricane-force winds, off the coast of Rugen in the Baltic Sea on January 14th, the most deadly peace-time maritime disaster involving a Polish ship, killing at least 54 of the passengers and crew.
Bill Clinton was sworn in as the 42nd-president on January 20th.
The first World Trade Center Bombing took place on February 26th.
A truck bomb was blown-up below the North Tower of the complex, in the parking garage.
The truck contained a 1,336-lb (606 kg) urea nitrate-hydrogen, gas-enhanced device, which was said to have been intended to send the North Tower crashing into the South Tower.
This is what the U. S. State Department website says about it:
“On February 26th, a bomb exploded in the parking garage of the World Trade Center in New York City. This event was the first indication for the Diplomatic Security Service (DSS) that terrorism was evolving from a regional phenomenon outside of the United States to a transnational phenomenon.“
From what the State Department had it say about it, it sounds like the first World Trade Center bombing in February of 1993 marked the beginning of acts of terrorism in the United States, and took place just a little after a month after Bill Clinton took office.
The investigation into the bombing led to ties with Al-Qaeda, and in March of 1994, four men were convicted of carrying out the bombing, which killed six people and injured over 1,000.
Two days after that, on February 28th, the Waco Siege began in Texas.
The Waco Siege involved the law enforcement siege of the Mount Carmel Center compound of the Branch Davidians, located 13-miles, or 21-kilometers, northeast of Waco.
The information that is found in the historical record is that due to suspected stockpiling of illegal weapons, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) had obtained a search warrant for the compound, and arrest warrants for the group’s leader, David Koresh, and several others in the group.
When the ATF attempted to serve the warrants, a gunfight ensued, and four officers were killed along with six Branch Davidians.
With the failure of the ATF to implement the search warrant, the FBI initiated a siege of the compound.
After 51-days, the FBI resorted to a tear gas attack to force the Branch Davidians out.
What came next was a fire that engulfed the Mount Carmel Center, that was ultimately officially blamed on the Branch Davidians themselves …
…that resulted in the deaths of 81 Branch Davidians, including women and children.
On March 5th, Macedonian Palair Flight 301 on a flight to Zurich crashed shortly after take-off from Skopje, killing 83 of 97 on-board.
At the time, it was the deadliest plane crash in the history of the country.
The cause of the crash was attributed to atmospheric icing and pilot error.
On March 11th, Janet Reno was confirmed by the Senate and sworn in as first female U. S. Attorney General the next day.
The Bombay bombings occurred on March 12th, killing 257 and injuring an estimated 1,400 more.
The Bombay bombings were a series of at least 12 bombings that took place in one day.
The bomb attacks started at 1:30 pm that day, when a powerful car bomb exploded in the basement of the Bombay Stock Exchange building.
The car bomb severely damaged the 28-story stock exchange building and other nearby buildings.
Following the bombing of the stock exchange, car and scooter bombs exploded throughout the city, and suitcase bombs were exploded at three hotels, like the Hotel Sea Rock.
The estimated number of deaths and injuries from the Bombay bombing spree were at least 257 fatalities, and 1,400 injuries.
The Great Blizzard of 1993 took place between March 13th and March 15th, bringing record snowfall all the way from Cuba to Quebec.
Also dubbed “The Storm of the Century,” it formed over the Gulf of Mexico on March 12th, and was notable for its massive size, intensity, and wide-reaching effects.
Heavy snow was reported in places like Alabama, the Florida Panhandle, and Georgia, and the storm also brought hurricane force wind-gusts and record-low barometric pressures.
The 32-year-old actor Brandon Lee’s death took place on March 31st, the son of martial artist and actor, Bruce Lee.
Brandon’s cause-of-death is cited as being shot in the abdomen by a gun with defective blank ammunition at the Wilmington movie studios on the set of “The Crow” in March of 1993.
Brandon Lee landed what was to be his breakthrough acting role in “The Crow” as the lead character, Eric Draven, a murdered musician who was resurrected by a crow, and went on to avenge the deaths of himself and his fiancee.
Brandon Lee had finished most of his scenes before his death, so the film was finished through script re-writes, a stunt-double, and digital effects, and the film was dedicated to Brandon Lee…and his fiance, Eliza Hutton.
Sounds incredibly similar to the death of the Australian actor Heath Ledger in 2008, who was said to have received inspiration for the make-up for his role as the Joker in “The Dark Knight” from Brandon Lee in “The Crow…”
…and who, at the age of 28, also died before the filming of the movie was complete, in his case from “acute-combined drug-intoxication” after he had finished filming his role a few months prior…
…and while he was in the middle of filming his last role in “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.”
Back to 1993.
In April & May of 1993, the Four-Corners area of the American Southwest was hit with an outbreak with the newly-recognized pulmonary Hantavirus syndrome.
This region is largely-occupied by the tribal lands including the Hopi, Navajo, Ute, and Zuni.
This was the first-known outbreak of Hantavirus in the United States, and said to be carried by deer-mice, and was said to have been spread through contact with “aerosolized” deer-mice droppings…
… in enclosed spaces in and around those who contracted the Hantavirus.
The Great Flood of 1993 occurred in the United States between April and October, when the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers flooded large parts of the American Midwest.
One of the most costly and devastating floods ever to occur in the United States, the cost in damages was said to be $15-billion, and the flooded area totalled around 30,000-square-miles, or 78,000-kilometers-squared.
Repetitive and persistent storms bombarded the Upper Midwest with considerable rainfall, with many areas across the north-central plains having rainfall 400 to 750% above-normal.
The Srebrenica Massacre took place in Bosnia on April 12th, at which time the Bosnian Serb Army launched an artillery attack on Srebrenica, and Bosnian Muslim enclave that believed it was under UN protection, and had numerous Bosnian muslim refugees from surrounding settlements coming there.
The artillery attack left 56 dead and 73 seriously wounded, including 14 children who were killed when an artillery shell hit a school playgorund.
Even though the UN declared Srebrenica, and several other Bosnian cities, as Safe Areas on April 16th, it was considered to be one of the most controversial decisions of the UN, and the resolutions were unclear about how these areas were to be protected in a war zone.
It led to a diplomatic crisis, and another massacre took place in Srebrenica in July of 1995, one of the worst atrocities in Europe since World War II, when more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were killed by the Bosnian Serb Army.
On April 24th of 1993, the IRA detonated a powerful truck-bomb, loaded with fertilizer, on Bishopsgate, a major thoroughfare in the City of London, London’s financial district.
This is a view of the nearby Wormwood Street after the bomb detonated, for which there was a telephoned warning about an hour beforehand.
It took place on a Saturday, resulting in one-death, 44 injuries, and severely damaged St. Ethelburga’s, the smallest and one of the oldest churches in London…
…which has since been restored…
…and wrecked the Liverpool Street Station…
…and the NatWest Tower.
As a result of the bombing, combined with the bombing of the Baltic Exchange in the City of London the year prior, a “ring of steel” was implemented to protect the city.
Most of the Zambian National Football team died in a plane-crash in Gabon on April 27th, enroute to Dakar, Senegal, for the FIFA World Cup Qualifier against Senegal.
They were in a transport carrier of the Zambian Air Force, and the official investigation concluded that the pilot had shut down the wrong engine after an engine fire, causing the plane to lose all power when leaving the airport in Libreville, Gabon, and the plane crashed in the ocean.
On May 4th, The United Nations Operation in Somalia (UNISOM) II assumed Somalian duties after the dissolution of the US-led United Task Force (UNITAF).
UNISOM II was tasked with establishing a secure enough environment to carry out humanitarian operations by any means necessary.
The Nambjiya Mine disaster in Zamora, Ecuador took place on May 9th.
It involved a landslide that took place in a remote mining settlement in southeastern Ecuador, near Peru.
The Nambjiya Mining settlement, known as the “World’s Most Dangerous Gold Town,” is situated in a valley 2,600-meters, or 8,530-feet, above sea-level, with most of the houses built right on the tunnel entrances to the mines.
On this day, a large part of the mountain, above the mines and part of the town, collapsed, with estimates of the death toll ranging between 85 and 400, and is considered to be one of the worst mining disasters ever, even though mining was said to have continued in the settlement in the unaffected areas after the landslide.
The location of the landslide itself is an official graveyard.
The next day, on May 10th, a fire at the Kader Toy Factory fire took place in Bangkok, Thailand, killing 188 people and injuring 469. It is considered the worst industrial fire in history, with most of the victims being young women from rural Thailand. The toys, stuffed toys and plastic toys intended for export, were manufactured primarily for Disney and Mattel.
The fire exits drawn in the building plans were in fact not constructed, and the existing external doors were locked.
The fire started in the part of the building where fabrics, materials, and plastics were stored, providing fuel for the fire.
It is interesting to note that when I was investigating fire disasters back in the 1980s, locked doors were a common occurrence, with examples like the Cinema Statuto Fire in February of 1983, in Turin, Italy, that killed 64 people, and was the largest disaster in Turin since World War II, with the fire was said to have started from flames spread by an old curtain, and that the burning of the theater seats created hydrogen cyanide fumes, of which inhalation was the primary cause of death of the victims.
All but one of the theater’s emergency exits was said to have been closed and locked…
…and the Alcala 20 Nightclub in Madrid, Spain, in December of 1983, in which 82 people were killed and 27 injured, where an exit on the upper floor was locked, and a main exit to an adjoined building was closed with an iron-grille during the fire.
On May 17th, the new Pentium Processor was unveiled, the newest and fastest microprocessor created by the Intel Corporation.
There was a plane crash in Colombia, on May 19th, that killed all 132 people on-board after the aircraft collided with a mountain on approach to Medellin.
The crash was attributed to bad weather and pilot error.
Typhoon Koryn caused massive damage to the Philippines, China, and Macau between June 26th and June 28th.
It was the first typhoon, and it was a super typhoon, of the 1993 Pacific Typhoon season, which had no official bounds.
In a normal year, tropical cyclones, which can turn into typhoons, form between May and November.
In 1993, the season started in February and the last storm dissipated on January 1st of 1994.
Forty tropical cyclones formed in 1993, with 30 becoming tropical storms, 15 becoming typhoons, and 3 becoming, like Koryn, becoming super typhoon.
A typhoon, which is a tropical cyclone that forms in the northwestern Pacific Ocean, is classified as a super typhoon when it has wind-speeds of at least 120-mph, or 190-km/h.
President Bill Clinton authorized a cruise missile attack on Iraqi intelligence HQ in Baghdad on June 27th after an attempted assassination of George H. W. Bush in Kuwait in April.
On the night of April 13th that same year, when George H. W. Bush was scheduled to visit Kuwait City the next day to commemorate the International Coalition Victory against Iraq, Kuwaiti officials arrested 17 people in connection with a plot to kill Bush using plastic explosives hidden in a vehicle.
The authorized attacked was comprised of the launch of 23 cruise missiles by two U. S. Navy warships into downtown Baghdad, was claimed by the U. S. to hit the Iraqi intelligence Headquarters, and the Iraqis claimed that nine civilians were killed in the attack and 3 civilian houses destroyed.
Hurricane Calvin landed in Mexico on July 7th, which was 2nd hurricane on record to make landfall in Mexico. It was said to kill an estimated 30 to 40 people.
Throughout its journey along the Pacific coast of Mexico, it dropped heavy rainfall, and causing property damage, mudslides and flooding.
A magnitude 7.7 EQ hit southwest of Hokkaido on July 12th, and generated a tsunami.
The hardest hit location by these events in northern Japan was Hokkaido’s island of Okushiri, where 165 people were killed as a result of the earthquake, with the tsunami, and large landslide.
On July 26th, Asiana Airlines Flight 733 crashed into Mt. Ungeo in Haenam, South Korea, killing 68, with two survivors.
The cause was attributed to pilot error after two previously failed landing attempts because of bad weather.
The Royal Plaza Hotel at Nakha Ratchasima in Thailand collapsed on August 13th, killing 137 and injuring 227.
The collapse of the building took less than 10-seconds, which was attributed to gradual deformation from creep that weakened all the ground floor support columns.
The only part of the building left standing was the front elevator hall, which was said to have been separately built from the rest of the structure.
It was one of the most fatal and disastrous man-made accidents in Thai history, which took place only three-months after the world’s worst accidental loss-of-life fire in an industrial Building at the Kader Toy Factory in Bangkok, Thailand.
Hurricane Gert started out as large tropical cyclone that formed from a tropical wave in the Caribbean Sea, and became the 7th-named storm, and third hurricane, of the Atlantic Hurricane season.
It caused extensive flooding and mudslides throughout Central America and Mexico between September 15th and September 21st.
Hurricane Gert left behind disrupted road networks for extended periods of time, which hampered rescue missions and relief efforts in badly-flooded regions.
Damage costs amounted to $170-million, leaving private property, infrastructure, and farmland in ruins.
On September 22nd, the Big Bayou Canot Rail Disaster took place, near Mobile, Alabama, killing 47 people and injuring 103.
It involved the derailing of an Amtrak train on the CSX Transportation Big Bayou Canot Bridge after a towboat pulling heavy barges collided with the rail bridge eight-minutes earlier, causing a displacement of the span of the bridge and deformation of the rails.
It was the deadliest rail accident in Amtrak’s history, and the worst rail accident in the United States since the 1958 Newark Bay Rail accident, where 48 people were killed.
The pilot of the tugboat pulling the barges was said to have made a wrong turn in foggy conditions on the Mobile River, and entered the Big Bayou Canot; was not properly trained on how to read radar; and mistook the bridge on the radar for another tugboat.
After the accident, the pilot was not found to be criminally-liable for it.
On September 24th, the Cambodian monarchy was restored with Norodom Sihanouk as its king.
It is interesting to note that during his lifetime, Cambodia was variously called: the French Protectorate of Cambodia, until 1953; the Kingdom of Cambodia, from 1953 to 1970; the Khmer Republic from 1970 to 1975; the People’s Republic of Kampuchea from 1979 to 1989; the State of Cambodia from 1989 to 1993; and again the Kingdom of Cambodia, from 1993 to the present.
King Sihanouk abdicated in 2004, and the Royal Council of the Throne chose his oldest son, Norodom Sihamoni, as his successor, who is still the King of Cambodia.
King Sihamoni lived outside of Cambodia most of his life, having been educated in Czechoslovakia.
He is not married, and has no children.
Back to 1993.
A 6.2-magnitude, relatively shallow earthquake, known as the Latur Earthquake, shook Maharashtra, India, on September 30th.
As a result of the earthquake, approximately 10,000 people died; over 30,000 were injured; and around 50 villages were destroyed.
The Battle of Mogadishu, part of the broader Somali Civil War, took place between October 3rd and 4th in what was known as “Operation Gothic Serpent.”
It was also known as the “Black Hawk Down” incident.
The battle was a disaster for coalition troops and resulted in a major strategic victory for Somali National Alliance forces under the leadership of Mohamed Farrah Aidid.
The Battle of Mogadishu remains one of the most heavily devastating battles American troops ever experienced in close combat.
On October 10th, less than 3-months after the July 26th crash of Asiana Airlines Flight 733 into Mt. Ungeo in Haenam, South Korea, the South Korean Ferry Soehae capsized in the Yellow Sea, off Wido, South Korea, killing 292 of the 362 on-board, with 70 rescues.
Factors attributed to the capsizing of the ferry included: overcrowding, with 141 more passengers than safely allowed; harsh weather conditions; and a thick rope that was found wrapped around both propellor shafts, which was said to have been left behind by fishing operations.
On October 21st, a coup in Burundi resulted in the assassination of the new-elected President Melchior Ndadaye, who won the country’s presidency in a landmark, multi-party election in July of this same year.
His assassination sparked the Burundian Civil War, which we are told was the result of longstanding divisions, like in Rwanda, between the Hutus and Tutsis.
An estimated 300,000 died as a result of the Burundian Civil War, with children being used on both sides.
The German, then Belgian, colonial rulers of the region of Ruanda-Urundi, found it convenient to rule through the existing power structure, in which the Tutsis were the aristocrats & rulers.
The colonial powers fostered ethnic differences between the minority artistocratic Tutsis and majority Hutus, and Ruanda-Urundi became two countries upon independence in 1962.
Believed to be Nilotic origin, meaning indigenous to the Nile River Valley, the Tutsi people are historically a very tall people.
The Burundian Civil war lasted from October 21st of 1993 until May 15th of 2005, and the Rwandan Civil War started on October 1st of 1990, and ended on July 18th of 1994, with the end of the Rwandan genocide. More on Rwandan Genocide coming up in a close look at 1994.
The Maastricht Treaty took effect on November 1st, formally establishing the European Union.
The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) passed the legislative houses of United States, Canada, and Mexico between November 17th and November 22nd.
NAFTA created a trilateral trade bloc in North America, with the elimination or reduction of barriers to trade and investment between the three countries.
On November 20th, an international passenger flight travelling from Geneva, Switzerland to Skopje, Macedonia, crashed into Mount Trojani near Ohrid Macedonia, killing all 116 on-board, and was the deadliest plane crash in Macedonian history, taking place only a little-over eight-months since the prior deadliest place crash in Macedonian history on March 5th, 1993, as mentioned previously.
The cause of the accident was attributed to pilot error.
President Clinton signed NAFTA into law on December 8th.
On December 10th, id Software’s Doom was released, becoming a landmark title in first-person shooter video games for MS-DOS.
Players assumed the role of a space marine, named Doomguy, fighting his way through hordes of invading demons from hell.
Hmmmm.
Makes me wonder what they were trying to tell us here. Boy, if we knew then what we know now, as I really think hordes of demons is what we have all been dealing with here, without knowing it!
The next day, one-block, of three-blocks, of the Highland Towers near Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, collapsed on December 11th.
The collapse buried the building’s occupants under tons of debris, with a total of 48 bodies found and two survivors.
The cause of the collapse was attributed to a major landslide caused by heavy rains that burst diversion pipes.
So far in 1993, as in the last parts of this series focusing on the 1980s and 1990s, we are seeing the same pattern of violent weather around the world…
…weather anomalies like the Great Blizzard on the East Coast and Great Flood of 1993 in the Midwest…
…earthquakes in different parts of the world…
…worst disasters ever of their kind happening one day after the other in different parts of the world…
…plane and train crashes…
…sinking ships…
…buildings just collapsing…
…civil wars…
…terrorism, and much more along these lines going on 1993.
So, what happened in 1994?
The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was established, on January 1st, exactly one-year to the day after the European Economic Community eliminated trade barriers and created a European Single Market as previously mentioned.
On January 14th, President Bill Clinton and President Boris Yeltsin signed the Kremlin Accords, which ended the pre-programmed aiming of nuclear missiles towards each country’s targets, and provided for the taking apart of the nuclear arsenal in the Ukraine.
The 6.7 magnitude Northridge Earthquake took place on the Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday in Los Angeles on Monday, January 17th, leaving 57 dead, and 8,700 injured.
It was the highest-ever, instrumentality recorded earthquake in an urban area in North America.
The 1994 North American cold wave took place during January of 1994, with extreme cold events taking place between January 18th and 19th, and again between January 21st and 22nd, and 67 cold temperature records set on January 19th, with Indiana and Kentucky setting state records on that same day.
The cold wave caused an estimated 100 deaths.
On February 6th, the Markale Massacres took place in a marketplace in Sarajevo.
On this day, a 120-milimeter mortar shell hit the middle of a crowded marketplace during the Bosnian War, which was part of the break-up of the former Yugoslavia, between Bosnian Serbs and forces of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
As a result of this incident there were 68 dead and 144 injured, and it was never conclusively determined which side had fired the shell. The UN ultimately concluded that it was impossible to determine which side had fired the shell.
Baruch Goldstein, a physician who followed the far-right, ultranationalist Meir Kahane, opened fire inside the Cave of the Patriarchs, also known as the Ibrihami Mosque, in Hebron in the West Bank on February 25th, and killed 29 muslims, and injured 125 before he was beaten to death.
As a direct result of the massacre, Jewish Israelis were barred from going into major Arab communities in Hebron…and the Israel government also expelled Arabs from certain streets near Jewish settlements in Hebron, where many had homes and businesses.
On March 14th, Apple released Power Macintosh, ten-years after the release of the first Macintosh computer.
It was the first Macintosh to use the new PowerPC Microprocessors, a Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC) Instruction Set Architecture (ISA), created by the 1991 Apple – IBM – Motorola Alliance.
On the same day of March 14th, the Linux Kernel version 1.0.0 was released after two-years of development by Finnish software engineer Linus Torvalds.
A kernel is a computer program that has complete control over everything in the system, and is in the core of the operating system.
The Linux Kernel software is a Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) that anyone is freely-licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way.
It is deployed on a wide-variety of computing systems, such as embedded devices, mobile devices, personal computers, servers, mainframes, and supercomputers.
Hmmm. Does this mean that something or someone has control over my computer devices at all times?
Is this what updates my computer and cell phone whether I asked for it or not?
US troops were withdrawn from Somalia on March 15th.
As part of Operation Restore Hope, they had arrived in Somalia on December 9th of 1992, and greeted by the glare of television lights, which I remember watching on TV when it happened with my husband, and we were both thinking how crazy it was that a military landing was being televised.
By the time U. S. troops were withdrawn in March of 1994, they left behind a country plagued by bandits and looters, with many Somalis needing to scavenge for survival.
The Green Ramp Disaster occurred on March 23rd, when two military aircraft collided in mid-air over Pope Air Force Base in North Carolina.
The Green Ramp was a grassy area at the end of the one of the east-west runway at the Air Force Base that was used by the Army to stage joint-operations with the Air Force.
A little after 2 pm on that fateful day, a fighter-jet conducting a simulated “flame-out,” which is the run-down of a jet engine due to the extinction of the flame in the combustion chamber, collided with a C-130 transport plane.
At an altitude of 300-feet, or 90-meters, above-ground, the nose of the fighter jet severed the right elevator of the C-130, which is what controls the aircraft’s pitch, or angle, of the wing.
The C-130 managed to land safely, but pilots of the fighter jet ended-up having to eject, and the fighter jet ended up hurtling towards the Green Ramp.
Long-story short, the burning wreckage of the fighter jet ended up directly in the area where the mass of Army paratroopers were situated.
It killed 24-members of the U. S. Army’s 82nd-Airborne Division and injured around 100.
The causes of the fatal accident were attributed to both Air Traffic Control and pilot error.
The Palm Sunday tornado outbreak occurred on March 27th, the biggest of 1994, in the southeastern United States.
It was the third notable tornado outbreak to occur on a Palm Sunday, with the first two occurring in 1920 and in 1965.
The weather system caused 29 tornadoes, killing 40 people, injuring 491, and causing $140-million in damages.
The deadliest storm of the outbreak produced an F4 tornado that devastated Piedmont, Alabama, striking three churches in mid-Palm Sunday service.
There were 20 people killed at one of the churches, Goshen United Methodist Church in Cherokee County, including the 4-year-old daughter of the pastor.
The supercell that formed this tornado tracked for 200-miles, or 322-kilometers, across north Georgia, to South Carolina.
Is it just me, or does the path of the 1994 Palm Sunday Tornado Outbreak mirror the goldbelt in the Southeastern United States?
The first Gold Rush in U. S. history was in North Carolina starting in 1799, and the second in north Georgia, starting in 1828.
Weird coincidence, or is something else being reflected here, like perhaps weather manipulation on a sacred day for Christianity, through the lands of the original people of North America.
On April 6th, both Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana and Burundian President Cyprien Ntaryamira died after surface-to-air missiles shot down the jet they both were on, after a regional summit that was held in Tanzania, as it was getting ready to land on a clear day near Kigali, Rwanda.
This event was taken as the pretext to begin the Rwandan Genocide, one of the bloodiest events of the late-20th-century, which began on April 7th.
The immediate backstory to this was the signing of the Arusha Accords in August of 1993, which was a set of accords and power-sharing agreement signed under in Arusha, Tanzania, to end the, by that time, three-year-old Rwandan Civil War, by the government of Rwanda, and the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF).
The Rwandan Civil War itself had radicalized internal opposition, and the Coalition for the Defense of the Republic (CDR) embraced the Hutu Power ideology of Hutu advancement and the ethnic-cleansing of Tutsis, which led to the Rwandan Genocide.
The predominately-Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front was portrayed as an alien force that was intent on reinstating the Tutsi monarchy which was in existence until it was abolished after the Rwandan Revolution between 1959 and 1961, and replaced by the form of government of the Republic of Rwanda, which was predominantly Hutu.
It is important to note that the minority Tutsis and majority Hutus spoke the same language, had the same traditions, and inhabited the same places.
The large-scale killings of Tutsis by ethnicities began within a few hours of the death of the Rwandan President.
The Crisis Committee headed by Theoneste Bagosora, Chief of Staff of the Ministry of Defense, considered the primary organizer of the genocide, took power in the country, and according to the historical narrative, he immediately began issuing orders to kill Tutsi to Hutu paramilitary groups like the Interahamwe and Impuzamugambi.
The Hutu population was said to have been armed with weapons like machetes, clubs, blunt objects, etc, and prepared during the preceding months, and were said to have carried out the orders of their leaders without question as the result of a Rwandan tradition of obedience to authority.
The military pictured in this photo were French, who were sent in to rescue French citizens, and were accused of not doing enough to stop the genocide.
Also, checkpoints were set up around the Rwandan capital city of Kigali by the paramilitary groups, where anyone with Tutsi ethnicity on their national identity cards were immediately killed, as well as house-by-house searches for Tutsis living in Kigali.
During the 100-day period between April 7th and July 15th, members of the Tutsi minority group, as well as some moderate Hutus and Twa, an indigenous pygmy tribe, were massacred by what were described as soldiers, police, militia, and gangs, with death total estimates for this period of time ranging between 800,000 and 1.1 million.
We’ll see how the Rwandan Genocide ended when we get to July of this year.
Well, let’s see: the Presidents of two neighboring countries with Hutu and Tutsi populations assassinated by surface-to-air missiles as their airplane was getting ready to land at the airport of the Rwanda’s capital city, Kigali; Rwandan Hutu citizens armed with deadly weapons for months in advance; and the genocide primarily of Rwanda’s Tutsis beginning within a few hours of the President’s death.
Hmmm.
Did the beginning of these divisions start, say when the region became part of the German East Africa between 1885 and 1918, and then the divisions continued after it was handed over to Belgian Colonial Administration starting in 1916 when the region of Ruanda-Urundi was occupied by the Belgians during World War I, until so-called independence in 1961, after the Rwandan Revolution and the mysterious death of the Tutsi King Mwami Mutara III Rudahigwa of Rwanda, who he died unexpectedly in 1959 after visiting a Belgian doctor in Burundi, where he had gone for a meeting with Catholic missionaries, which sparked the beginning of the Rwandan Revolution.
China Airlines Flight 140 crashed on April 26th while landing at Nagoya, Japan, killing 264 people.
It was the deadliest accident in China Airlines’ history, which is the national carrier of Taiwan, also known as the Republic of China
Just before the routine landing of the flight, the takeoff/goaround setting on the autothrottle was somehow triggered, and the pilots’ lost control of the aircraft, which ultimately stalled and crashed. Of the 271 people on-board the plane, 264 were killed.
On April 27th, South Africa held its first multi-party elections, and the first election in which all races were allowed to vote.
The election marked the completion of a four-year process that ended Apartheid, which was the the system of institutional racism that existing in South and Southwest Africa that started in 1948.
Nelson Mandela won the election, and was sworn-in the following month, on May 10th.
On June 30th, an Airbus 330 crashed in a test flight in Toulouse, France, killing 7 people.
We are told the test was meant to test the performance of the aircraft in simulated engine failures after take-off.
The Airbus management did not expect the test to be hazardous, and were seeking to promote the plane to potential customers, and so had invited four passengers for the test flight – two Airbus executives and two Alitalia pilots.
As a result of the crash, all seven people on board were killed, and the investigation commission found that the crash was related to a long list of factors that none of which would have caused the crash in isolation.
Also on June 30th, Tropical Storm Alberto formed, and ended up producing extensive flooding over portions of Alabama, Georgia, and Florida, causing 32 deaths and over a billion-dollars in damage.
It was the first tropical cyclone and named storm of the annual hurricane season.
Now back to Rwanda.
Rwandan Patriotic Front troops captured Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, on July 4th, which was considered a major breakthrough in the Rwandan Civil War as it led to the Rwandan Patriotic Front taking control of the rest of the country by July 18th.
Rwanda has been ruled by the Rwandan Patriotic Front since then as a Unitary President System with a two-house Parliament since then.
Paul Kagame, the Tutsi leader of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, was first elected President in 2000, and has been Rwanda’s President ever since.
Jeff Bezos founded Amazon on July 5th, which started out as an on-line bookstore, when he was on a cross-country road trip from New York City to Seattle.
Bezos was named the wealthiest man in modern history when his net-worth increased to $150-billion in 2018,and he was the world’s first centribillionaire on the “Forbes Wealth Index,” in which he has a net-worth of 1-billion units in any given currency.
On July 18th, a suicide bombing targeting the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association (AMIA )in Buenos Aires, Argentina, killing 85 and injuring 100s.
The bombing was Argentina’s largest terrorist attack to date.
The bomber drove a Renault van full of 275 kilograms, or 606 pounds, of ammonium nitrate fertilizer and fuel oil explosive mixture in the Jewish Community Center building in the commercial area of Buenos Aires.
No suspects have been convicted of the bombing, and while Iran has been suspected as having a role, no definitive action has never been taken.
The release of the IBM Simon Smartphone took place on August 16th, and was the first commercially available smartphone and distributed by BellSouth Cellular Corporation.
It was a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA), or hand-held PC that functioned as a personal information manager, and had a battery that lasted only an hour.
On August 31st, the Provisional Irish Republican Army announced a conditional cessation of military operations after 25-years of violence and terror, which held for 18-months, with the exception of a few politically-motivated killings here and there, until February of 1996.
USAir Flight 427 crashed in Hopewell Township on approach to Pittsburgh International Airport on September 8th, killing all 132 on-board, and was the deadliest air disaster in Pennsylvania history.
As a result of the severity of the crash impact, the bodies of the passengers and crew were severely fragmented, leading investigators to declare the site a biohazard.
After the longest investigation in FAA history, lasting four-and-a-half-years, it was determined that a rudder malfunction caused the plane to crash.
The U. S. staged what has been termed “bloodless” invasion of Haiti to restore Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power on September 19th, code-named “Operation Uphold Democracy.”
It was designed to remove the military regime installed after the “coup d’etat” in 1991 that overthrew Jean-Bertrand Aristide after having been elected at the end of 1991, and in-office for only a few months.
A diplomatic American delegation comprised of Former President Jimmy Carter; Sen. Sam Nunn; and retired General Colin Powell met with General Raoul Cedras, the military leader in charge of the government.
He apparently agreed to step-down with the threat of a U. S. military forced-entry invasion, after he was shown a video-feed of U. S. Special Forces, like the 82nd Airborne being readied to go, unless he complied immediately.
Jean-Bertrand Aristide was returned to Haiti in October of 1994 after 3-years of exile, and while there was a change of authority ceremony between President Bill Clinton and President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in March of 1995, a U. S. troops under the UN remained in Haiti until 1996, and some kind of UN-Peacekeeping force remained in place until 2000.
On September 28th, the MS Estonia ferry sank in the Baltic Sea, killing almost 900 people, with 139 rescues.
It was one of the worst maritime disasters of the 20th-century.
According to the official report of the disaster, the bow-door had separated from the vessel, pulling the ramp ajar, rapidly flooding the vessel that was already listing from poor cargo distribution.
The power failed; search and rescue was inhibited; and a full-scale emergency wasn’t declared for an hour-and-a-half.
In what sounds like Keystone-Cops-level incompetence, the official report criticized the passive-attitude of the crew, failing to notice that water was entering the vehicle deck, delaying the alarm, and providing minimal guidance from the bridge.
World Wide Web Consortium founded and led by Tim Berners Lee became the main international standards organization for the WWW on October 1st.
It was founded at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Lab, with funding from the European Commission and DARPA.
The consortium is comprised of member organizations that maintain full-time staff to work together in the development of World Wide Web standards.
A rainfall event between November 4th and 6th caused flooding in the Piedmont region of Italy that killed an estimated 77 people…
…after one-third of the rain that falls in one year fell in a 72-hour period, and caused $14.5 billion in damages.
The Brazuole Bridge bombing took place on November 7th.
It involved the explosion of a bomb around 7 am underneath this bridge in Lithuania on the Vilnuius-Kaunas Railway shortly before two passenger trains were scheduled to cross the bridge.
We are told a rail disaster was avoided because one of the trains was warned by a local resident, and slowed down in time to cross the bridge on the side that was relatively undamaged, and alerted the other train in time for it to stop before it got to the bridge.
No one has ever been charged in connection with the bombing, though it was alleged that members of the Lithuanian National Defence Volunteer Forces was behind the bombing, after a stand-off occurred between some of its members and the Lithuanian government in 1993.
Also on November 7th, the WXYC student radio station at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill provided the world’s first internet radio broadcast.
Hurricane Gordon hit Central America, Jamaica, Cuba, the Bahamas, Haiti, and Southeastern US on November 8th, causing 1,152 fatalities and $594 million in damages.
It was a long-lived, as it finally dissipated on November 21st, and was the last hurricane of the season in 1994.
Notice the curvy, looping track of the Hurricane Gordon.
Damage was the heaviest in Haiti, where the storm dropped 14-inches, or 360-mm, of rain in 24-hours, resulting in extensive landslides and flooding that destroyed 3,500 houses and damaged another 11,000 or so more, and killed over 1,000 people.
Interesting that this extreme weather devastation in Haiti took place the month following the return of Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
Boris Yeltsin ordered troops into Chechyna on December 11th, thereby starting the first Chechen War, which lasted until August 31st of 1996.
Russian federal forces attempted to seize the mountainous country of Chechyna, but were ultimately set-back by Chechen guerilla warfare, leading to the cease-fire in 1996 and Yeltsin signing a Peace Treaty with the Chechens the following year.
The Battle of Grozny in the First Chechen War in which Russian forces captured Grozny after two-months of heavy fighting, however, caused enormous destruction and casualties amongst the civilian population, and was the heaviest bombing campaign in Europe since World War II.
Why was all of this happening to this small republic?
The reason we are given is that the Chechens wanted their independence from Russian Federation, the name given to the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic after the Soviet Union dissolved.
The initial release of the Netscape Navigator 1.0 web-browser by Netscape Communications Corportion was on December 15th.
It was the world’s first commercially-developed web browser.
So like in 1993, we are seeing the same patterns of major hurricanes and tornado outbreaks…
…weather anomalies like the North American Cold Wave and the excessive rainfall causing the destructive flooding in Italy’s Piedmont Region and in Haiti…
…earthquakes like the Los Angeles Northridge Earthquake, the highest-ever, instrumentality recorded earthquake in an urban area in North America…
…more plane crashes, like USAir Flight 427 in Pennsylvania; China Airlines Flight 140 in Japan, and the Green Ramp Disaster in North Carolina and Airbus 330 crash in France, both of which had emergency situation flight training going on at the time of the deadly incidents…
…near train crashes, like the narrowly-averted train disaster in Lithuania with the Brazuole bridge bombing minutes before the trains’ scheduled arrival, unlike the Amtrak train crash at Big Bayou Canot in 1993, where the incident causing the bridge collapsed also happened minutes before the train wreck…
…and again in 1994, like 1993, we see sinking ships, like the MS Estonia Ferry, one of the worst maritime disasters of the 20th-century…
…massacres in different places…
…out-and-out genocide for one-hundred days in Rwanda…
…along with civil wars and other wars…
…and major bombings like the AMIA bombing in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
More of the same kinds of thing that we saw in 1993…
…in addition to the progress that we saw being made in 1994 in relationship to the development of the PC, Internet, and mobile phone…
…and on-line business models and services.
So, now let’s take a look and see what happened in 1995.
Headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, the World Trade Organization (WTO) was established on January 1st, to replace the General Agreements on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which had been established in 1948.
Negotiated and signed trade Agreements by the bulk of the world’s trading nations that serve as the legal ground-rules for international commerce are at the heart of the WTO.
On January 17th, the 6.9-magnitude Kobe, also known as the Great Hanshin, Earthquake struck southern Japan. Aftershocks of the earthquake lasted for days, with 74 of them being strong enough to feel.
Close to 6,500 people lost their lives as a result of the earthquake, with approximately 4,600 from the major city of Kobe, with the epicenter of the earthquake being 12-miles, or 20-kilometers, from the center of the city center.
Irreparable damage from the earthquake included nearly 400,000 buildings; numerous elevated road and rail bridges; the majority of the quays in the port Kobe at 120, the total of which had numbered 150; caused 300 fires; and disrupted water, electricity, and gas service.
The fires in Kobe incinerated the equivalent of 70 U. S. city-blocks.
Here are some examples of what the historical architecture looked like in Kobe.
On February 13th, twenty-one Bosnian Serb commanders were charged with Crimes against Humanity in the United Nations.
The Serkadji Prison Mutiny took place, in what was formerly known as the Barberousse Prison, in Algeria between February 21st and 23rd.
Apparently the immediate cause of the mutiny was a recently-appointed guard who supplied prisoners with four guns and three hand-grenades, after a prior escape attempt failed.
After killing four prison guards, the mutineer prisoners started opening cell doors, and after security forces stormed the prison, somewhere between 96 and 110 prisoners were killed, with eight later being executed for their part in the mutiny.
On February 26th, the United Kingdom’s oldest investment bank, Barings, collapsed on February 26th.
Barings was founded in 1762 by Francis and John Baring in order to provide service to the huge expansion of world trade that was coming into being in the latter-half of the 18th-century.
The first offices of the bank were located in Cheapside in the City of London, the historic and modern financial center of London.
The cause of the crash of the United Kingdom’s oldest investment bank was apparently a rogue securities broker in Singapore by the name of Nick Leeson, who allegedly lost somewhere around $1.4 billion in unauthorized trades in futures contracts on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, and he was arrested for his crimes days later, on March 2nd.
Leeson was in Changji prison in Singapore until 1999, when he was released from his sentence early.
While in prison, he published an autobiography detailing his crimes in 1996, called “Rogue Trader.”
Among other achievements since his release from prison in 1999, Nick Leeson held a senior management role as Chief Executive Officer for Galway United, an Irish association football club in the League of Ireland, a position which he resigned in 2011 when the club suffered financial difficulties…
…and has been a regular guest on the after-dinner and keynote speaking circuit.
Nick Leeson is listed as having a net worth of $3 million.
Not bad for a guy that confessed to, was convicted of, and served prison time, for securities fraud of a magnitude that took out Barings Bank!
The Tokyo Subway Sarin Gas Attack took place on March 20th.
In five coordinated attacks carried out by the Aum Shinrikyo personality cult movement led by Shoko Asahara, the perpetrators of the attacks released sarin gas, a chemical warfare agent classified as a nerve agent, on three lines of the Tokyo Metro during rush hour, killing 14 people and injuring in some fashion approximately 6,500 people.
The subway lines that were attacked served the part of Tokyo that houses the Japanese Parliament.
Police arrested senior members and leaders of Aum Shinrikyo after the attacks in a raid in May of 1995, several of whom were sentenced to death and later executed in 2018, including the cult founder Shoko Asahara.
On March 31st, TAROM, the flag-carrier airline of Romania, Flight 371 from Bucharest to Brussels crashed in after entering a nose-down dive after take-off in Bucharest, killing all sixty people on-board.
The cause of the crash was attributed to the captain losing consciousness, and unable to communicate with his co-pilots, and auto-throttle failure.
The Samashki Massacre took place on April 7th during the First Chechen War, in which Russian troops were reported by 128 eyewitnesses as engaging in a “cleansing operation” in which there are estimates as high as 300 of civilians killed in the village of Samashki.
They were said to have arbitrarily shot civilians and burned down houses with flame-throwers, among other things.
On April 19th, the bombing of the Alfred P. Murragh Federal building in Oklahoma City took place.
Called the deadliest act of domestic terrorism in U. S. history, we are told it was carried out by anti-government extremist Timothy McVeigh, who was helped by his friend Terry Nichols, in retaliation for the federal siege of Ruby Ridge in 1992, and the federal Waco Siege, which ended in the deadly fire of the Branch Davidian compound on April 19th in 1993.
As the official story goes, McVeigh planned for the bombing to take place on the second anniversary of the fire that ended the siege in Waco, and selected the Murragh Federal Building in Oklahoma City because it met his criteria of housing at least two federal law enforcement agencies.
McVeigh and Nichols stockpiled the materials they needed to manufacture the fertilizer bomb, including forty-one 50-pound, or 23-kilogram, bags of ammonium nitrate fertilizer; seven crates of tovex explosives; shock tubing; 500 electric blasting caps; and ANFO, which is ammonium nitrate fuel oil.
Several days before the bombing, McVeigh rented a Ryder truck under an assumed name, and he and Nichols drove to Oklahoma City, where they parked McVeigh’s getaway car a few blocks from the Federal building, a 1977 Mercury Marquis which is now an exhibit at the Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum.
What we are told is that McVeigh and Nichols drove to pick up the bomb materials from storage Kansas and drove to a state park in Kansas to build the truck bomb, filling 13 barrels each with 500 lbs, or 230 kilograms, of mixed chemicals, using plastic buckets and a bathroom scale, and added the explosive devices needed to the truck in order to detonate the bomb.
The next day, McVeigh drove the Ryder Truck to Oklahoma City at dawn, and parked it at the building’s drop-off zone for the daycare center after having lit timed fuses, and headed towards his getaway vehicle after getting rid of the keys to the truck.
The Ryder rental truck that contained 4,800-pounds, or 2,200-kilograms, of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, nitromethane and diesel fuel mixture, detonated in front of the north side of the building at 9:02 am, creating a 30-foot, or 9.1-meter, and 8-foot-deep, or 2.4-meter crater on NW 5th Street next to the building, and the blast destroyed or damaged 324 buildings in a 4-block radius, and shattered glass in 258 nearby buildings, resulting in 168 deaths, including children in the daycare center, and injuring hundreds more.
McVeigh was arrested within an hour-and-a-half of the explosion, as he was pulled over for driving a car without a license plate, and arrested for having a concealed weapon.
The subsequent investigation into his connection to the Oklahoma City bombing ultimately led to McVeigh’s conviction and death sentence, and Terry Nichols’ conviction and life sentence.
McVeigh was executed by lethal injection in June of 2001.
There was a gas explosion at a subway construction site on April 28th in Daegu, South Korea.
At least 101 people were killed, including 42 middle school students, with estimates of around 200 people injured.
The gas explosion was said to have result from construction workers accidently drilleing 31 holes through a grout curtain into a gas pipeline, resulting in gas leakages into the construction site that went through a sewer, and the explosion was caused by an unknown fire at the site, creating a 164-foot, or 50-meter, high pillar of fire.
The private parking lot on the construction site collapsed, and 60 buildings and 152 cars were damaged as a result of the explosion.
Established in 1985, the funding for the National Science Foundation Network, or NSFNET, was stopped by the U. S. Government on April 30th, making the internet totally privatized.
The NSFNET backbone service was no longer central, but still remained central to the infrastructure of the expanding internet.
On May 10th, a runaway locomotive fell into an elevator shaft in the Vaal Reefs, a gold mine near the town Orkney in the northwest South Africa.
History’s worst elevator disaster ever, the locomotive landed on the elevator cage carrying miners, causing it to plunge 1,500-feet, or 460-meters, to the bottom of the shaft, and resulted in the deaths of 104 miners.
The 7.0 Neftegorsk Earthquake struck northern Sakhalin island on May 28th.
The most catastrophic earthquake in the known history of Russia, the earthquake resulted in the deaths of almost 2,000 people in the oil town of Neftegorsk, over half of the population, and almost all of the deaths were from the collapse of residential buildings.
On June 29th, the Sampoong Department store collapsed in Seoul.
It was the deadliest peacetime disaster in South Korean history, killing 502 people and injuring 937, and the deadliest modern building collapse until the 9/11 Collapse of the World Trade Center buildings.
The cause of the collapse was attributed to structural overload and punching shear, which is defined as a phenomenon where a concentrated force on a slab causes a “shear failure cone” that punches through…
…and ultimately primarily blamed on the ignorance, negligence and greed of Lee Joon, the chairman of the Sampoong Group’s constuction division and store owner, and his son Lee Han-Sang, the CEO of the department store , both of whom served prison time for criminal negligence in their alleged roles in the collapse of the building.
The second Srebrenica massacre took place in Bosnia on July 11th, in which upwards of 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys native to Bosnia were killed by units of the Bosnian Serb Army under the command of Ratko Mladic.
The last major battle of the War for Croation Independence was Operation Storm, major operations of which took place between August 4th and 7th, and follow-up operations between August 8th through 14th.
NATO and the United States were also involved in Operation Storm, the largest land-battle in Europe since World War II, and was called a decisive victory for the Croatian Army and a strategic victory for the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina against the forces of the Republic of Serbian Krajina (RSK) by the time it was over.
We are told that 150,000 to 200,000 Serbs of the area formerly held by the RSK had fled, and that a variety of crimes were committed against the Serbs who remained there by Croatian forces.
Later, three Croatian generals were tried by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia for war crimes in what was called a joint criminal enterprise to force the Serb population out of Croatia.
On August 7th, the Chilean government declared a State of Emergency with respect to what became known as the “White Earthquake” in southern Chile.
The “White Earthquake” was a weather event involving intense winds, cold, snowfall and rain that primarily caused widespread agricultural and structural damage and great disruption to the lives of the people living there, with only a few human deaths reported, though the lives of hundreds thousands of sheep were lost or left in critical condition, with the most heavily impacted area shown in red on this map of Chile.
On September 3rd, eBay, the multinational e-commerce corporation, was founded as AuctionWeb in California by French-born, Iranian-American computer programmer Pierre Omidyar, and it soon became the first online auction site allowing person-to-person transactions…
…and on September 9th, SONY entered the video game market with the release of Playstation.
Interestingly, Sony, the name of a multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Tokyo, Japan…
…was also the acronym for Standard Oil of New York, founded by John D. Rockefeller in 1870.
A commuter train slammed into a school bus in Fox River Grove, Illinois, on October 25th, killing seven students.
The school bus, driven by a substitute driver, was stopped at a traffic light, with the rear portion of the bus hanging over railroad tracks when it was struck by a commuter train heading to Chicago.
It was one of the worst grade-crossing accidents in U. S. History.
The cause was attributed to bus driver misjudgment and traffic signal timing issues with the railroad, which were supposed to be coordinated with the highway traffic signal.
On the very next day, October 26th, there were two disasters in the world.
One was an avalanche that struck the village of Flateyri, Iceland, destroying 17 houses, and in the process killing twenty people. Twenty-one people managed to escape these houses after the avalanche and four were rescued alive.
The same day as the avalanche in Iceland, there was a fire in the Baku Metro, the capital of Azerbaijan.
It resulted in what has been called the world’s worst deadliest subway disaster, killing 289 people, including 28 children.
It was said to have been caused by an electrical malfunction, though the possibility of deliberate sabotage was not excluded.
On November 1st, all participants in the Bosnian Civil Wars began the peace negotiation process, with the Presidents of Serbia, Bosnia, and Croatia meeting with US, British, French, German, and Russian officials at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio.
Typhoon Angela, also known as Rosing, which dissipated on November 7th, had left parts of the Philippines devastated on a track that started out as a tropical disturbance in the Marshall Islands pn October 25th, and moved west, turning into a super-tycoon by November 1st before it hit the Philippines.
Typhoon Angela wreaked havoc over the regions of metropolitan Manila, Calabarzon, and Bicol, and when all was said and done with the Typhoon, it had caused over 10-billion Philippine Pesos in damages, destroying over 96,000 houses, as well as bridges and roads.
Angela was one of the most intense typhoons ever recorded.
On November 16th, a UN tribunal charged Bosnian-Serb President Radovan Karadzic and Bosnian Serb Commander Ratko Mladic with genocide and Crimes against Humanity during the Bosnian War.
The Dayton Agreement ending the Bosnian War was reached on November 21st, and signed on November 24th.
It created a single sovereign state known as Bosnia Herzegovina, composed of the largely Serb-populated Republika Srpska, or Serb Republic, and the Croat-Bosniak populated Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina.
On November 22nd, there was an earthquake, with the epicenter in the middle of the Gulf of Aqaba, the narrow body of water that separates Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula from the western border of Saudi Arabia.
At least eight deaths and thirty injuries were reported as a result of the earthquake, and damage to buildings occurred in places like coastal cities of Eilat, Israel; Aqaba, Jordan; and Nuweiba, Egypt.
American Airlines Flight 965 crashed into a mountain in Buga, Colombia on December 20th, with the cause of the crash was attributed to pilot error.
Killing 151 of 155 passengers and all eight crew members on-board, it was the deadliest aviation accident in Colombia’s history, and the deadliest air disaster involving a U. S. airline since the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988.
So, once again in 1995, as seen in this video in the previous two years of 1993 and 1994, we have seen recurring patterns of major earthquakes in different parts of the world, in this case Japan, Russia, and the Sinai region in the Middle East…
…a super typhoon wreaking havoc in the Philippines and the same in Chile with weather-event called a “White Earthquake…”
…more plane crashes…
…more massacres and genocide…
…more terrorist attacks…
…many other disasters…
…and more internet, on-line business model, and video game development milestones.
One more thing to mention before I end this post, bringing “Seeing World History with New Eyes” up to the year of 1995, is a curious pattern that has emerged in my research of the 1990s thus far.
Starting with the Baltic Exchange Bombing in the City of London in 1992, I am consistently finding the use of truck-fertilizer bombs in terrorist attacks that are incredibly destructive when detonated.
The Baltic Exchange Bombing in April of 1992 was the biggest on mainland Britain since World War II, and caused extensive damage to the Baltic Exchange building and its surroundings.
Same thing happened again in the City of London the following year as mentioned earlier in this video, a truck fertilizer bomb detonated this time in Bishopsgate, exactly a year and two-weeks after the Baltic Exchange bombing.
This bombing led to the implementation of the “Ring of Steel” around the City of London.
Earlier in 1993, the first World Trade Center bombing in February involved the detonation of a truck fertilizer bomb parked below the North Tower.
The bombing of the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association (AMIA) Building in Buenos Aires in July of 1994 involved a suicide bomber driving a van full of 275 kilograms, or 606 pounds, of ammonium nitrate fertilizer and fuel oil explosive mixture in the Jewish Community Center building in the commercial area of Buenos Aires, for which there suspects but no convictions…
…and the Oklahoma City bombing in April of 1995 involving a truck fertilizer bomb in which the primary accused was arrested within an hour-and-a-half of the bombing, and who was executed several years later.
Why did truck fertilizer bombs become a thing in these terrorist attacks?
How did the terrorists have access to the quantities of materials and know-how needed to construct a bomb that creates this kind of devastation?
This graphic shows the occurrence of ammonium nitrate disasters since 1900…
…including the storage-silo explosion involving ammonium nitrate fertilizer in Oppau, Germany in 1921…
…the ship carrying the ammonium nitrate chemical that exploded in Texas City in Galveston Bay in 1947, the deadliest industrial accident in U. S. History…
…the 2004 explosion of a train carrying ammonium nitrate in Neyshabur, Iran…
…the 2015 explosion in Tianjin, China, of a storage warehouse…
…and the 2020 explosion in Beirut, Lebanon.
Is there something else going on with these apparently randomly occurring ammonium nitrate explosions in different places around the world over the years, and if there is, is there a connection to the truck fertilizer bombings that I have identified so far, starting in the 1990s?
Revealing What Has Been Hidden in Front of Our Eyes 