The Mental Floss History Of The World Part 33

Iraq I: Iraq vs. Iran, 19801988. Deaths uncertain, but estimated at as many as 500,000 on each side. Basically ended in a draw. Iraq vs. Iran, 19801988. Deaths uncertain, but estimated at as many as 500,000 on each side. Basically ended in a draw.

Iraq II: Iraq vs. United States, 1991. United States and allies lost about 200; Iraq about 24,000 military personnel and 6,000 civilians. Iraq's invasion of Kuwait was thwarted and the country severely damaged by U.S. bombing. Iraq vs. United States, 1991. United States and allies lost about 200; Iraq about 24,000 military personnel and 6,000 civilians. Iraq's invasion of Kuwait was thwarted and the country severely damaged by U.S. bombing.

Balkans: Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, and Bosnia vs. various combinations of each other 19912001. As many as 250,000 deaths, most of them civilians. Resulted in dissolution of former Yugoslavia into several independent states. Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, and Bosnia vs. various combinations of each other 19912001. As many as 250,000 deaths, most of them civilians. Resulted in dissolution of former Yugoslavia into several independent states.

Afghanistan II: United States vs. Taliban, 2001present. United States and allies lost 758 through December 2007; Taliban casualties unknown. United States succeeded in overthrowing terrorist-supporting Taliban theocracy, but through early 2008 was unable to completely secure the country. United States vs. Taliban, 2001present. United States and allies lost 758 through December 2007; Taliban casualties unknown. United States succeeded in overthrowing terrorist-supporting Taliban theocracy, but through early 2008 was unable to completely secure the country.

Iraq III: Iraq vs. United States, 2003present. Through January 2008, American casualties were at about 4,000; Iraqi civilian deaths at more than 30,000. As 2008 began, United States had yet to stabilize Iraqi government. Iraq vs. United States, 2003present. Through January 2008, American casualties were at about 4,000; Iraqi civilian deaths at more than 30,000. As 2008 began, United States had yet to stabilize Iraqi government.

WHO'S UP, WHO'S DOWN Drug Traffickers: UP UP [image]

Humans' use of drugs, at least for mystical and medicinal reasons, dates back at least fifty thousand years, according to archaeological finds in the Shanidar cave in Iraq. Use of the opium poppy dates back to 10,000 BCE. And drugs certainly played an occasional role in international relations. In the mid-nineteenth century, for instance, the French and English used military force to push China into legalizing the use of opium from British-ruled India.But drug trafficking really began to play an increasing role in geopolitics in the latter half of the twentieth century. In the 1960s and 1970s, both U.S. and Chinese spy operations alternately fought and propped up drug warlords and drug-financed regimes in Southeast Asia. Drug cartels in Colombia and Mexico grew to exert substantial influence on those countries' political and legal systems.In Afghanistan, the radical Islamic group the Taliban played both sides: When they were in charge of the country, the Taliban cited Islamic tenets against drug use and dealt harshly with Afghanistan's prolific opium poppy farming. After being overthrown by a U.S.-led military coalition in 2002, the Taliban formed a coalition with the country's opium smugglers to finance the group's comeback efforts. By the end of 2004, an estimated 75 percent of the world's opium came from Afghanistan.There were plenty of customers for it. A 2004 United Nations report estimated the world's drug-abuser population at around 185 million people. Another report estimated that the illegal drug black market had grown from $450 billion a year to $900 billion a year from 1992 to 2002, making illegal drugs the single most lucrative commodity in the world. Traffickers often invested drug profits in legitimate enterprises. In Colombia, for example, drug lords poured millions into the country's cattle business.In addition to its role as a source of governmental and legal corruption, drug trafficking also played an increasing role during the last part of the twentieth century in the spread of other illicit goods internationally, such as Ukrainian gangs trading guns to Colombian cartels for cocaine. Intravenous drug use also contributed to the spread of HIV.Like legitimate enterprises, drug dealing profited from economic globalization. The Internet, satellite phones, lowered tariffs, and relaxed currency controls all made it easier to move goods and money. At the same time, despite spending huge sums of money on interdiction, the restrictions of geographic borders and sometimes uneven levels of cooperation with police in other countries hampered law enforcement authorities. At best, the international war on illegal drugs was an ongoing stalemate as the twenty-first century began.Communists: DOWN DOWN Despite its heady success in the fifteen or so years after the end of World War II, the Communist ideology, particularly as espoused by the Soviet Union, wasn't able to make as much headway as the 1960s unfolded.One reason was the sobering effect of the Cuban missile crisis. Both sides in the cold war recognized there was a limit to how much they could push each other without risking dire consequences. Rising nationalism in third world countries in Latin America and Africa resisted influence from both sides. Some countries, such as India, played both sides against each other. And the resurgence of Islam as a driving political force in the Middle East hampered Communist efforts to expand its influence in that region.The United States also played a role. Determined to slow down revolutionary activities often financed by the USSR and other Eastern European Communist states, the United States began funneling arms and money to anticommunist forces in nations such as Angola, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Afghanistan. In the fall of 1983, U.S. troops were directly involved when they invaded the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada to topple a Communist-backed regime.Meanwhile, the natives were getting restless at home inside the European Communist Bloc. In 1968, Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia to suppress an effort by the Czech government to liberalize judicial and other policies. In 1981, the Soviets intervened in Poland to head off similar attempts at reform. Soviet troops were also sent to Afghanistan in 1979 to prop up a Communist regime there.Such intervention was costly-and the Soviets just didn't have the dough to pay for it, keep up with the West in the increasingly expensive modern arms race, and fulfill basic government jobs such as feeding its people.In Asia, China was going through its own cultural and economic upheavals and paid less attention to extending the reach of communism. Vietnam, exhausted from its long war, began seeking to normalize relations with the West, and in 1991 it withdrew from neighboring Cambodia.By the middle of the 1980s, Soviet leaders were openly encouraging other European Communist nations to stop looking to the USSR for everything and to start developing their own political and economic reforms. They did so with enthusiasm.In August 1989, Poland convened its first non-Communist government since 1948. By the end of 1990, governments in Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Albania, and Hungary had followed suit. And by the end of 1991, the Soviet Union had itself dissolved.As of 2007, only five states controlled by a single-party Communist system-the People's Republic of China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea, and Vietnam-still existed.Terrorists: ALL OVER THE PLACE ALL OVER THE PLACE Defined by the CIA as "the premeditated use or threat of extra-normal violence or brutality by sub-national groups to obtain a political, religious or ideological objective through intimidation of a large audience," terrorism has been around in one form or another at least as long as have government and organized religion.But in the latter half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, terrorist groups had changed in several ways from their predecessors. They became less tightly knit organizations and more loosely affiliated networks; less political and more religious in their motivations; more likely to be international in their members.h.i.+ps; slower to take credit for their actions; more indiscriminate in their choice of targets, and less clear in what they wanted to accomplish through a specific terrorist act.

"Today's terrorists don't want a seat at the table, they want to destroy the table and everyone sitting at it."-Member of the U.S. National Commission on Terrorism in 2000

Starting in the late 1960s, the targets of terrorism seemed to gravitate from the specific to the general. In 1978, the Red Brigade kidnapped and killed the Italian interior minister; in 1979, the Irish Republican Army a.s.sa.s.sinated Earl Mountbatten of England; in 1985, the Palestinian Liberation Front seized an Italian cruise s.h.i.+p and murdered a wheelchair-bound American tourist.In 1983, a suicide bomber killed 63 people at the U.S. Emba.s.sy in Beirut, Lebanon; this was followed by a similar attack that killed 240 U.S. Marines in a barracks in the same country. In 1988, bombs believed to have been planted by Libyan terrorists destroyed a pa.s.senger airliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 269 people. In 1995, a religious cult used nerve gas on a Tokyo subway, killing a dozen people and sickening hundreds more.And on September 11, 2001, nineteen terrorists armed with box cutters and affiliated with the radical Islamic group al-Qaeda hijacked four U.S. commercial airliners. One crashed into the Pentagon in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C.; one into a Pennsylvania field as pa.s.sengers tried to retake control; and two into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. Nearly three thousand people were killed in the worst terrorist incident in history.

America, you lost. I won.-9/11 terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui shouting after he was sentenced to life in prison for his role in the attacks, May 3, 2006

The attack on the Pentagon and World Trade Center underscored the ability of terrorists to take advantage of modern communications and transportation systems to export terror to virtually anywhere. It also demonstrated the "trans-nationalism" of modern terrorists. By 2005, according to the CIA, the group responsible for the attack, al-Qaeda, led by the charismatic fanatic Osama bin Laden, had branches or allies in sixty-eight countries.In response to the September 11 attacks, the U.S. declared a "war on terrorism" that eventually led to American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. But the effectiveness of the effort was debatable. In September 2006, a National Intelligence Estimate compiled from sixteen U.S. spy agencies concluded that the U.S. effort, particularly in Iraq, had only fueled the idea of jihad, or holy war against the U.S. in the Middle East, and encouraged the formation of more terrorist cells and groups.

THE BREAST MILK IS OKAY, THE LIP GLOSS ISN'T GOING TO FLY Most people don't get any closer to the front lines of the war on terrorism than an airport terminal-and that's plenty close for most people. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the Transportation Security Administration was formed in the United States to ferret out potentially dangerous items before they could be smuggled aboard flights.What's considered "potentially dangerous" ebbs and flows with the times. After abortive attempts to smuggle liquid explosives aboard flights from London to New York in August 2006, for example, virtually all liquids were banned. This was later amended to allow things such as small amounts of baby formula and breast milk. In 2006, TSA agents confiscated 11.6 million cigarette lighters. Then the rules were changed in August 2007 to allow most normal lighters to be carried on.Still, confiscated items, almost all of which are thrown away, do add up: Between 2002 and 2005, sixteen million "potential weapons," ranging from chain saws to plastic swords from Disneyworld, were seized by the forty-three thousand folks who make up the TSA. That's an average of fourteen thousand a day.While the vigilance has certainly played a part in preventing any new 9/11-type occurrences, the system isn't foolproof. In March 2007, an airline employee managed to smuggle a duffel bag onto a flight from Orlando, Florida, to Puerto Rico. It contained thirteen handguns, an a.s.sault rifle, and eight pounds of marijuana.

Oil Prices: UP UP It was a cla.s.sic example of economic coercion-or a textbook case of international pouting. Either way, the 1973 world oil crisis had impacts that lasted far beyond the decade of the seventies.It began in mid-October, with the announcement by oil-producing countries in the Middle East that they were cutting off oil s.h.i.+pments to countries that had either supported Israel in the Yom Kippur War, or had declined to support Egypt and Syria. Sensing an opportunity, other oil-producing nations who were members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) decided to jack up their prices.The result was a severe oil shortage in many Western countries that had since the end of World War II become increasingly dependent on imported oil to fuel industry and transportation. And the impacts of this were immediate and widespread.In the United States, the world's largest consumer of oil, the price of gasoline rose by mid-1974 to an average of 55.1 cents a gallon ($2.29 in 2007 dollars), a 43 percent increase from mid-1973. Overall inflation soared, and the world was pushed into a general economic recession.Not all countries suffered. In the Soviet Union, which actually exported oil, higher prices meant increased foreign currency, which propped up the USSR's sagging economy. In j.a.pan, the shortage spurred j.a.panese automakers to focus on more fuel-efficient cars and turned manufacturers' attention from heavy industry to electronics. Brazil began to focus on developing fuel from sugar (which it had in abundance) instead of oil (which it didn't).Industrialized nations also either began or accelerated ways to conserve energy (the United States, for example, dropped the freeway speed limit to fifty-five miles per hour), increase domestic oil production, and develop alternative energy sources.In 1979, OPEC nations took advantage of the uncertainty of oil supplies from the Middle East because of the revolution in Iran to again jack up oil prices. The action again jarred many industrialized nations.Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, increased oil production-spurred in part by some OPEC nations getting a bit greedy-resulted in something of a glut on the world market, and prices were relatively stable.As the twenty-first century moved through its first decade, however, demands for oil surged as giant countries such as China and India began developing their industries and transportation systems. At the beginning of 2008, the price of oil broke the one-hundred-dollar-a-barrel mark, and declining reserves made it increasingly unlikely that the world's supply would meet future demands.Technology: OUT OF SIGHT OUT OF SIGHT Shortly after a.s.suming the papacy in April 2005, Benedict XVI issued a "thought of the day" to the Roman Catholic faithful-via a text message on his cell phone.Yup, communications had come a long way since an April day in 1973 when a forty-four-year-old electrical engineer named Martin Cooper hefted a thirty-ounce apparatus to his ear while walking along the street in New York City and made a telephone call, to an engineer who worked for a rival company.In fact, the last half of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first saw a vast herd of technological advances that simultaneously made life simpler and easier, and more maddeningly complex:

ERROR, ERROR ERR...

The first attempt to send a message via the Internet was between scientists at UCLA and Stanford University in 1969. The system crashed when the sender got to the g g in in login. login.

-The development of the microprocessor paved the way for the manufacture and sale of "personal" computers that could be used in the home. By 2007, nearly 270 million personal computers were being sold throughout the world each year.-Originally designed to be a tool for military and scientific intelligence sharing, the Internet became the twentieth century's version of the telegraph. Only the Internet was much more. Coupled with the personal computer, the Internet allowed the development of e-mail and the World Wide Web, a vast electronic compendium of information, opinion, and ideas (oh yeah, and p.o.r.n.)-The development of incredibly powerful microscopes and other tools in the 1980s led to a new scientific field: nanotechnology, which allows scientists to manipulate individual molecules and atoms. Want a stereo system that can sit on the head of a pin? They can do that. Just don't drop it.-Of course all that technology advancing can make one hungry. So in 1967, a U.S. company began marketing a microwave oven that could fit on a countertop and was reasonably safe. By 1975 in the United States, microwave ovens were selling faster than gas ranges, and popcorn has never been the same.

Back to the cell phone. By 1970, scientists had figured out a way to hand off calls from tower to tower. By 1980, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission got around to allocating enough bandwidth to accommodate the growing demand for cell phones, despite their c.u.mbersome size and high price. By 1987, cellular phone subscribers in the United States had reached more than a million.

DOES THIS COME WITH A WAGON TO CARRY IT IN?.

A 1983 Motorola model cell phone weighed nearly two pounds, was shaped like a brick, and cost $3,500.

In Great Britain, meanwhile, engineers were developing a system that allowed cell phone users to send text messages by tapping in letters on the phone's keypad. The first system was in place by 1995; by 1999, more than a billion messages a year were being sent.By 2005, it was estimated about seven hundred million cell phones were being sold each year around the world, with the number expected to top one billion by 2009-meaning that about 40 percent of the world's population would be using the ubiquitous little b.u.g.g.e.rs.Accessorized with cameras, digital music players, and access to the World Wide Web, cell phones had revolutionized modern life, from papal text messages to warning entire populations of looming disasters.In fact, according to a 2004 survey by the Ma.s.sachusetts Inst.i.tute of Technology, the cell phone was the invention people hate the most-but can't do without. Incredibly (or not) it beat out alarm clocks and television.

Major a.s.sa.s.sinations of the Late Twentieth and Early Twenty-first Centuries a.s.sa.s.sinations have been viewed throughout human history as an expedient and emphatic-if brutal-method of making a political statement, and the last sixty years have been no different. Here are a few you should probably know something about:John F. Kennedy. The thirty-fifth U.S. president was shot and killed while traveling in a motorcade in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963. A crazy former U.S. Marine named Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested after the shooting. Two days later, Oswald was shot and killed by a Dallas nightclub owner named Jack Ruby as Oswald was being moved from the Dallas jail. The thirty-fifth U.S. president was shot and killed while traveling in a motorcade in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963. A crazy former U.S. Marine named Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested after the shooting. Two days later, Oswald was shot and killed by a Dallas nightclub owner named Jack Ruby as Oswald was being moved from the Dallas jail.

Martin Luther King, Jr. The n.o.bel Peace Prizewinning minister and U.S. civil rights leader was in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968, to support striking sanitation workers. He was shot and killed while on the balcony of a Memphis motel. An escaped convict named James Earl Ray was convicted of the murder. Ray died in prison in 1998. The n.o.bel Peace Prizewinning minister and U.S. civil rights leader was in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968, to support striking sanitation workers. He was shot and killed while on the balcony of a Memphis motel. An escaped convict named James Earl Ray was convicted of the murder. Ray died in prison in 1998.

Anwar Sadat. President of Egypt beginning in 1970, Sadat was the first Arab leader to officially visit Israel. In 1978, he and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin reached an accord that earned them a shared n.o.bel Peace Prize. It also earned Sadat an a.s.sa.s.sination, on October 6, 1981, by a squad of insurrectionists. Several hundred were implicated in the a.s.sa.s.sination, but no one did much prison time. President of Egypt beginning in 1970, Sadat was the first Arab leader to officially visit Israel. In 1978, he and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin reached an accord that earned them a shared n.o.bel Peace Prize. It also earned Sadat an a.s.sa.s.sination, on October 6, 1981, by a squad of insurrectionists. Several hundred were implicated in the a.s.sa.s.sination, but no one did much prison time.

Indira Gandhi. The prime minister of India made the country a nuclear power in 1974. But she also came down hard on dissenting groups. Two Sikhs who were part of Gandhi's bodyguard unit machine-gunned her down in a garden on October 31, 1984, to avenge an army raid she had ordered on a Sikh temple to dislodge extremists. Her murder sparked anti-Sikh riots across India that resulted in the deaths of more than a thousand people. The prime minister of India made the country a nuclear power in 1974. But she also came down hard on dissenting groups. Two Sikhs who were part of Gandhi's bodyguard unit machine-gunned her down in a garden on October 31, 1984, to avenge an army raid she had ordered on a Sikh temple to dislodge extremists. Her murder sparked anti-Sikh riots across India that resulted in the deaths of more than a thousand people.

Yitzhak Rabin. The two-time prime minister of Israel was yet another n.o.bel Peace Prize winner who ended up a.s.sa.s.sinated. Rabin was shot and killed on November 4, 1995, at a peace rally, by a right-wing Israeli law student who opposed the peace accord Rabin had reached with Palestinian leaders. The student, Yigal Amir, was sentenced to life in prison. The two-time prime minister of Israel was yet another n.o.bel Peace Prize winner who ended up a.s.sa.s.sinated. Rabin was shot and killed on November 4, 1995, at a peace rally, by a right-wing Israeli law student who opposed the peace accord Rabin had reached with Palestinian leaders. The student, Yigal Amir, was sentenced to life in prison.

Ben.a.z.ir Bhutto. The daughter of a Pakistani prime minister who was executed after a military coup, Bhutto was herself twice elected that country's prime minister. She returned from exile in 2007 to again run for prime minister. But on December 27, 2007, she was killed while leaving a campaign rally. As of early 2008, her killers had not been caught. The daughter of a Pakistani prime minister who was executed after a military coup, Bhutto was herself twice elected that country's prime minister. She returned from exile in 2007 to again run for prime minister. But on December 27, 2007, she was killed while leaving a campaign rally. As of early 2008, her killers had not been caught.

Some others:Ngo Dinh Diem (1963): first president of South VietnamMalcolm X (1965): black Muslim leaderGeorge Lincoln Rockwell (1967): founder of the American n.a.z.i PartyRobert F. Kennedy (1968): U.S. senator and presidential candidateWasfial-Tal (1971): prime minister of JordanFaisal (1975): king of Saudi ArabiaMujibur Rahman (1975): president of BangladeshHarvey Milk (1978): gay rights leader and San Francisco supervisorGeorge Moscone (1978): mayor of San FranciscoRajiv Gandhi (1991): Indian prime minister, son of Indira GandhiMohamed Boudiaf (1992): president of AlgeriaZoran Dindijc (2003): prime minister of Serbia

SO LONG, AND THANKS FOR ALL THE...

Change of Heart [image]

As early as the 1700s, scientists had experimented with the idea of replacing damaged human organs with new parts, either organic or mechanical. In 1954, surgeon Joseph Murray conducted the first successful human kidney transplant, and in 1960, Stanford University doctors Norman Shumway and Richard Lower transplanted a heart into a dog, which lived for three weeks.But the first human heart transplant was left to a fifty-five-year-old South African surgeon who had trained with Shumway's Stanford team. Christian Neethling Barnard had become interested in repairing or replacing organs early in his career, after a patient gave birth to an infant with a fatally irreparable heart. On December 3, 1967, Barnard's team took nine hours to move the heart of Denise Ann Darvall, twenty-five, who had been struck by a car, into Louis Washkansky, a fifty-five-year-old businessman who suffered from gross heart failure and was dying.

BAD NEWS/BAD NEWS.

In 1964, the U.S. Surgeon General confirmed the link between tobacco smoking and lung cancer. And the n.o.bel Prize for Chemistry went to an English scientist who determined the structure of cholesterol. Turned out it builds up from eating anything that tastes good.

While the transplant was an initial success, Washkansky died of pneumonia eighteen days after the operation. Although other surgeons rushed to emulate Barnard, so many transplant patients' bodies rejected the foreign organs that the number of heart transplants dropped from one hundred in 1968 to eighteen two years later.But in the 1970s, researchers found that a compound called cyclosporine, made from a fungus, helped calm the body's natural rejection tendencies. Survival rates greatly improved, and the survival rate today is about 84 percent at one year and 77 percent at three years after surgery.Barnard, who died in 2001, lived long enough to see the world's first successful heart-lung operation performed at Stanford University in 1981 and the first successful pediatric heart transplant in 1984.A Mother Like No Other She was a tiny bundle of positive energy who started as a novice nun and wound up being lauded as a twentieth-century saint.Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, better known to the world as Mother Teresa, was born on August 26, 1910, in Macedonia. At the age of seventeen, she became a novice nun, taking the name Sister Teresa. In 1929, Teresa was sent to Calcutta, where she taught high school. She lived a relatively comfortable life teaching middle-cla.s.s students and living in a convent.But on September 10, 1946, during a train trip on her way to a retreat, she later recalled, she received a call "to serve the poorest of the poor."

Do not wait for leaders; do it alone, person to person.-Mother Teresa.

Teresa eventually received a papal dispensation to pursue her charge. She founded her own religious order, the Congregation of the Missionaries of Charity, and opened a school for poor children. A hospice, an orphanage, and a leper colony followed the school.Teresa's efforts went largely unrecognized outside the subcontinent. In 1969, however, a BBC doc.u.mentary brought her efforts to international attention. A decade later, she was awarded the n.o.bel Peace Prize.Teresa's charitable acts, which eventually expanded to more than one hundred countries, were paralleled by her crusade for conservative religious values that included opposition to abortion, contraception, and divorce.Barely five feet tall and frail, Teresa spent most of her last decade battling injury and illness. When she died in Calcutta in 1997, India declared a national period of mourning. She was buried in a grave at one of her charity houses. The inscription, from the Gospel of St. John, reads, "Love one another as I have loved you."From White to Right It was the equivalent of a political miracle. Over a four-day period in April 1994, tens of thousands of black South Africans waited patiently in lines that stretched for as long as a mile for a chance to vote. The event capped a decades-long struggle to end apartheid, which was an Afrikaner word for "apartness" and the name of a political system that gave legal sanction to a brutally segregated society.South African apartheid began after World War II, when the country won independence from the British Empire and the National Party won control of the South African government. The new government quickly put into law what had been practice in the region since the white man arrived. Blacks and whites were required to use different transit systems, schools, hotels, restaurants, restrooms, and park benches. Interracial s.e.x was outlawed. Beginning in the 1970s, the government created tribal homelands in the crummiest areas of the country. Blacks were a.s.signed citizens.h.i.+p in them, and had to have pa.s.ses to travel through or work in any area outside these "homelands."Protests against the system were dealt with harshly, and dissenting political parties were outlawed. The repression triggered opposition that often turned violent. To justify its actions, the government argued that it was protecting itself from infiltration by Communists.But the rest of the world wasn't buying it. South Africa was banned from the Olympic Games in 1984, and in 1986 both the United States and the European Economic Community inst.i.tuted economic sanctions against it. Once one of the most thriving nations on earth, South Africa began to suffer financially.

I have just got to believe G.o.d is around. If He is not, we in South Africa have had it.-Anglican bishop Desmond Tutu, accepting the n.o.bel Peace Prize, December 10, 1984

In response, the government agreed to abolish the "pa.s.s" laws in 1986. In 1989, an attorney named F. W. de Klerk was elected president. De Klerk realized that if apartheid continued, the country was headed for civil war. In 1990, he freed a black lawyer and civil rights leader named Nelson Mandela, who had been in prison for twenty-seven years.Mandela and de Klerk negotiated an agreement in 1991 to end white rule through elections. The two men won the 1993 n.o.bel Peace Prize for their efforts; South Africans of all colors won the right to choose their government. Nearly twenty-three million turned out at the polls in 1994, seventeen million of them black. Mandela's African National Congress party won 63 percent of the vote and Mandela was elected president."The nation that once was a pariah," U.S. vice president Al Gore observed at Mandela's inauguration, "will now become a beacon of hope."No-Hands Football Up until the end of the twentieth century, the average American might have been hard pressed to name the most-watched sporting event in the world.The answer, of course, is the World Cup, a quadrennial event that pits teams from thirty-two nations in a multi-round soccer tournament to win a sleek solid-gold cup and international bragging rights.Although soccer (known outside the United States as football) has its antecedents in games played in ancient j.a.pan, China, Greece, and Rome, the modern version was pretty much born in nineteenth-century Britain.By the late 1920s, the game had spread to other countries and had attained status as an Olympic event. So the sport's international governing body, the Federation Internationale de Football a.s.sociation, decided that soccer, uh, football, should have its own tournament. The first was held in Uruguay in 1930. Except for a twelve-year stint between 1938 and 1950 because of World War II, the World Cup has been held every four years ever since.The current format involves teams facing off over a three-year period in an effort to qualify for one of 32 berths in the actual tournament, which rotates to different host countries. In 2006, 198 nations tried out; in 2010, that number is expected to reach 204.That same year, an estimated 715 million people around the world (about 11 percent of humanity) tuned in to watch the final game between Italy and France, and the total number of viewers for all televised games was an impressive 26 billion.And in the United States, viewing jumped 38 percent as the number of hours of games televised by U.S. channels more than doubled. The Yanks were catching on.Pill Popping Contraception has been around since people figured out that s.e.x sometimes resulted in babies. In ancient Egypt, for example, women used a pessary pessary composed of honey, sodium carbonate-and crocodile dung. composed of honey, sodium carbonate-and crocodile dung.But it took a root used by the Aztecs, an heiress to a farm machinery fortune, and a couple of determined scientists to come up with perhaps the most effective contraceptive in history.

FOR PREVENTION OF DISEASE ONLY.

Early feminists had opposed abortion and contraception, on the grounds that if men could have s.e.x without the responsibility of reproduction, they would exploit women. By 1900, however, feminist att.i.tudes had begun to s.h.i.+ft. If women could not protect themselves from unwanted motherhood, the argument went, they would never be able to achieve parity with men in public life and the workplace. However, at the beginning of the twentieth century, a federal law had been pa.s.sed banning contraception sales through the mail, and most states prohibited it.In 1914, a New York woman who had trained as a nurse opened a family planning and birth control clinic in Brooklyn. Margaret Sanger's clinic was open only nine days before police shut it down and she was arrested and served thirty days in jail.But in 1918, probably spurred by wartime concerns about the spread of venereal diseases, an appeals court justice in New York ruled that contraceptive devices could be legally sold, if they were prescribed by a physician, and only in packages marked "for prevention of disease only." Many such products still carry those words.

Katharine Dexter McCormick was one of the first women to graduate from the Ma.s.sachusetts Inst.i.tute of Technology and was heiress to the International Harvester fortune. In 1950, after the death of her husband, McCormick agreed to finance research by two Ma.s.sachusetts scientists. The scientists, John Rock and Gregory Pincus, combined estrogen and progestin (extracted from a wild yam, called Barbasco root, that had been used as a contraceptive by Aztec women), and came up with a contraceptive that could be taken in pill form.The pill was manufactured and marketed by the Searle company after receiving approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in May 1960. Despite concerns from time to time about side effects, the pill sold well. By 1963, thirteen major drug companies around the world were working on their own versions, and by 1967, more than twelve million women were using the contraceptive.In 1971, a version that didn't have to be taken every day was on the market most everywhere in the world except the United States (which took until 1996 to approve it.) Other contraceptive forms that were improvements on historical methods were also developed in the last part of the twentieth century. These included intrauterine devices, vasectomies, and post-s.e.x contraceptive pills. None of them used excrement from reptiles.Lyrical Liverpudlians John met Paul, who brought along George, and eventually they picked up Ringo, and that's how the Beatles were born.Or something like that. Actually it began in the hardscrabble English port town of Liverpool on October 9, 1940, when a kid named John Lennon was born.In 1957, Lennon formed a group called the Quarrymen and met a couple of other teenagers named Paul McCartney and George Harrison, who joined the band. After playing nightclubs in Germany, the group, now called the Beatles, returned to England, added a drummer named Ringo Starr and began their rise to international stardom.Fueled by songs written by Lennon, McCartney, or both, the Beatles leaped to the top of the pop musical world during the 1960s. They had forty number-one singles and alb.u.ms, sold more than one billion records, tapes, and discs, and in 2004 were named the greatest rock artists of all time by Rolling Stone Rolling Stone.

Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink...I don't know what will go first, rock 'n' roll or Christianity. We're more popular than Jesus now.-Musician John Lennon, commenting on the popularity of his group, the Beatles, March 4, 1966

The group's musical influences were enormous, ranging from lyric writing to layering instrumental tracks atop one another to create a more complex sound. They shaped hair and clothing styles, and language and advertising, and introduced the West to Eastern music and philosophy.Personal differences and business pressures broke up the Beatles in 1970, and all four went on to successful solo careers. Lennon moved to New York City, where he was shot and killed by a crazy fan in 1980. Harrison, who in his post-Beatles career was more reclusive than the others, died of lung cancer in 2001. McCartney, who was knighted in 1997, and Starr were still active musicians in 2008.AND THANKS, BUT NO THANKS, FOR...

Total Meltdown [image]

If Swedish nuclear power plant workers hadn't noticed some radioactivity on their clothes, the world might still still be waiting for news of the meltdown of the Chern.o.byl nuclear power plant, not far from the city of Kiev. be waiting for news of the meltdown of the Chern.o.byl nuclear power plant, not far from the city of Kiev.Okay, that's a gross exaggeration. But the fact is Soviet officials uttered not a peep about the accident until other countries, starting at a Swedish nuke plant, began detecting radiation in the air and deduced it was coming from the USSR.The accident, which began at 1:23 a.m. on April 26, 1986, took place during an experiment at the Chern.o.byl plant's Reactor 4, in which plant workers shut down the regulating and emergency safety systems and withdrew most of the control rods while letting the reactor continue to run.Firefighters from the nearby village of Pripyat joined with plant workers to try to stem the damage, but it was too little too late. Radiation on the scene quickly killed thirty-two people, a number that eventually rose to fifty-six direct deaths. Within a week, forty-five thousand people in the area were evacuated; the number eventually climbed to more than three hundred thousand. Millions of acres of forests and farmland were contaminated in the Ukraine, and radiation, though not at fatal levels, spread as far west as France, Italy, and Ireland.

MUSHROOMING PLANTS.

As of mid-2007, there were 437 operating nuclear power plants throughout the world, with an additional 30 under construction, 74 in the planning stage, and 182 proposed.

Soviet officials buried radioactive debris from the site in hundreds of "temporary" sites, and enclosed the reactor core in a tomb of concrete and steel. Because of a desperate need for energy, Ukrainian officials allowed three other reactors at the site to continue operating. The last of these wasn't shut down until 2000.The total impact of the Chern.o.byl disaster is still being tallied. Various studies have estimated the eventual number of deaths from radiation-caused illnesses will reach anywhere from four thousand to fifty thousand people. The current structure entombing the damaged reactor is not a permanent solution, and an effective shelter is expected to cost more than $1 billion.Tastes Like Chicken To much of the outside world, Ugandan dictator Idi Amin seemed at times to be a charming and witty leader in Africa's emergence from its colonial chains, and at times to be an amusing buffoon. His background was certainly interesting enough: a former soldier in the British Army, a heavyweight boxing champion, a convert to Islam who had five wives.But to people inside Uganda, he was a terrifying thug. During his eight-year reign, which began in 1971, Amin, through his "State Research Bureau" and "Public Safety Unit," carried out the murders of as many as two hundred thousand political enemies. Amin was deposed and fled the country in 1979. He lived in exile in Libya and Saudi Arabia until his death in 2003.The rumors about Amin's personal excesses were legion. There were reports he had personally decapitated some foes, and kept their heads in cold storage. In one case, he was said to prop up severed heads at the dinner table for a mock "farewell supper." He was also said to have had one of his wives killed and dismembered, then sewn back together and displayed to their children. And, it was rumored, he was a cannibal.Whether he really was has never been doc.u.mented. In a 1979 interview with a French magazine, Amin denied he was a cannibal, but added that he once had been forced to eat human flesh when he was captured by Mau Mau rebels while fighting with the British Army."We risked death if we refused," he said. "We ate human meat only in order to accomplish our military mission."In a 1981 interview with a.s.sociated Press, Amin again denied that he occasionally had people for dinner. "I am a simple human being, not the eater of human flesh," he said. "Do I look like a cannibal?"Well, now that you mention it...A New Plague in Town In 1981, researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta noticed something strange about reports coming out of California and New York. An abnormally large number of cases of a rare form of cancer were showing up in h.o.m.os.e.xual males.Within a year, groups that seemed especially susceptible to the disease included intravenous drug users, immigrants from Haiti, and hemophiliacs and others who had received blood transfusions. By the end of 1982, fourteen nations had reported cases. By the end of 1983, the number of reporting countries was up to thirty-three, and a French doctor had isolated the retrovirus that caused acquired immune deficiency syndrome, or AIDS.Because of the stigma attached to some of the disease's most common victims, such as gays, prost.i.tutes, and drug users, governments were slow to respond to the threat. By 1987, when U.S. president Ronald Reagan declared the disease "public health enemy No. 1," AIDS was killing twenty thousand Americans a year, and millions more around the world in every demographic group.

A POX ON POX.

In 1979, after more than a century of vaccination campaigns around the planet, the World Health Organization certified that smallpox had been eradicated. To date it is the only human infectious disease to be wiped out.

Where AIDS came from is still not entirely certain, although there is some evidence that it may have originated in Africa after World War II, possibly contracted first by people who ate infected monkeys and chimps.Whether it came from Africa or not, it hit that continent harder than anywhere on earth. A United Nations report in 2004 estimated that 70 percent of the 38 million people living with HIV were residents of sub-Saharan Africa. In some African countries, one third of the adult males were infected.In the 1990s, researchers found that a combination of drugs was effective in slowing the disease. But the drug "c.o.c.ktail," as well as tests used to detect HIV, were expensive, and thus out of reach for many people. The World Health Organization estimated that 90 percent of people who needed treatment could not afford it.Hot Times Ahead In 1896, a Swedish scientist named Svante Arrhenius published a novel idea: the burning of fossil fuels such as oil and coal might someday put enough carbon dioxide into the atmosphere so that more infrared radiation from the sun would be absorbed, and global temperatures would rise.It was an interesting theory, but most scientists at the time figured that the oceans would absorb any extra carbon dioxide and that the earth's climate was a pretty stable deal. By the 1950s, however, research had shown that the oceans couldn't hold more than a third of the CO2 being produced. being produced.Still, not everyone thought that meant the world was warming up, and if it was, so what? There was evidence that the earth had gone through some fairly drastic climactic changes in the past. And who really likes winter that much anyway?In fact, some scientists in the 1970s postulated that all the dust and smog particles humans were spewing into the atmosphere might actually block sunlight and trigger a new ice age. a.n.a.lysis of weather statistics from the Northern Hemisphere, in fact, showed that since the 1940s, the world had been cooling down.But by the end of the century, things were heating up again. In fact, the ten warmest years in recorded world history occurred after 1990. Using voluminous amounts of gathered data and improving computer models, many scientists in the 1980s and 1990s began warning that nations needed to cut back on activities that emitted greenhouse gases, most notably in manufacturing and transportation, which were dependent on fossil fuels.In 1988, the world's scientific community formed an international organization of climatologists, economists, geologists, oceanographers, and other scientists. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had more than 2,500 representatives from 113 countries, and was charged with providing political leaders with sound scientific information on global warming.In 1992, officials from 154 nations meeting in Rio de Janeiro signed a convention calling for the voluntary restriction of greenhouse gas emissions. The accord was followed in 1997 by the Kyoto Protocol, an agreement reached in that j.a.panese city that called for specific reductions in greenhouse gas emissions by 2012.While hailed as one of the most significant international environmental treaties ever, the Kyoto Protocol's success seems unlikely: the world's largest greenhouse gas producer, the United States, refused to sign it, and the second-largest, China, was exempted because it was cla.s.sified as a "developing country."It might not matter anyway. In February 2007, the IPCC reported that it was likely higher temperatures and rising sea levels "would continue for centuries" no matter how much greenhouse gas emissions were reduced. Just one more thing to look forward to!BY THE NUMBERS [image]

8.

number of weeks of unbroken bombing by U.S. forces of targets in North Vietnam, beginning in February 1965. Over the next three years, the United States dropped more bombs than were dropped over Asia and Europe during World War II.

800.

bombs, in tonnage, being dropped per day in August 1966

45.

life expectancy, in years, of a male resident of Rwanda in 1994

52

number of U.S. senators who voted in 1991, to authorize military action against Iraq