2000

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• New millennium begins amid celebrations – and fears of a worldwide computer crash that fails to materialise.

• On 18 March, in Kanungu in Uganda, 330 people (including 78 children), members of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God (a doomsday cult), die when the church in which they are singing and chanting is set alight. It appears later that they were murdered.

• On 3 April, after four months of unsuccessful talks between Microsoft and the US government, US District Judge T P Jackson rules that the company has violated US antitrust laws by using its monopoly power in personal computer operating systems to stifle competition.

• In June, Britain restores the Northern Ireland parliament, after the Irish Republican Army (IRA) agrees to disarm.

• On 25 July, a Concorde airplane crash near Paris kills 113 people.

• On 23 September, Aung San Suu Kyi, leader of Burma's National League for

• On 5 October, following a nationwide uprising, Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milosevic is voted out of office. Vojislav Kostunica becomes the new president. Milosevic is later arrested and, in June 2001, extradited to The Hague to stand trail on war crimes charges.

• On 8 November, in the US presidential election between George W Bush – son of former president George Bush – and Vice President Al Gore, there is no clear winner of the electoral college. Following an attempt at a recount in Florida (whose governor is Bush's brother Jeb) and many court hearings, Gore finally concedes defeat on 13 December.

• In Sierra Leone, a peace agreement signed in July 1999 collapses in May after the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) take more than 500 UN peacekeepers hostage. The RUF steps up attacks on Guinea in December 2000, despite a cease-fire that it signed with the Freetown government a month earlier. At the end of the year, up to 13,000 UN peacekeepers are protecting the capital and key towns in the south. A UK force of 750 is helping to reinforce security and train the Sierra Leone army.

• On 26 June, after years of research, the human genome (or genetic code for the whole body) is deciphered. This feat is expected to revolutionise medicine.

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