On this day
Revisit the music, news, notable people, and historical moments connected to this date.
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Pfizer Inc reportedly nears completion of $87 billion deal to acquire Warner-Lambert and create largest US drugmaker; will reportedly exchange 2.75 shares of company stock for every Warner-Lambert share; American Home Products, which agreed to merge with Warner-Lambert, will drop bid in exchange for $1.8 billion in breakup fees (M)
Chris Woodruff of United States loses to Byron Black of Zimbabwe in Davis Cup play, Harare, Zimbabwe, with John McEnroe's first day on sideline as captain of US Davis Cup team everything he feared; photos of Black and Woodruff (M)
Ten million Russians, including one million in St Petersburg, still live in Soviet-era communal flats, makeshift cubicles crammed with people and utterly devoid of privacy; residents share bathrooms, hallways and common kitchen; they are mired in communal milieu by inertia, lack of choice and outright poverty; photos; diagram (M)
Amateur historians in New Jersey are busy spending their time and money pinning down memories, trying to keep the past alive; Robert MacAvoy and his friend Chuck Eckhardt spend their weekends traipsing through cemeteries of New Jersey, trying to document graves of Civil War veterans before elements destroy headstones; other dedicated amateurs are studying things like defunct dairies and departed railroads; in Monmouth County, volunteers with metal detectors have devoted thousands of hours to excavating famous battlefield; other examples of amateur historians at work cited; photos; map (L)
Federal District Judge Leonard B Sand, nearly eight years after Social Security Adm agreed to review cases of thousands of New Yorkers who claimed they were wrongfully denied disability benefits during Reagan Adm, criticizes agency for moving too slowly, saying people are dying before their claims can be processed; orders Social Security Adm to give prompt attention to backlog, and to report back if it cannot process at least 30,000 cases a year until work is complete (M)
Music on My Birthday
The Top 50 albums for the chart week of February 2, 2000, covering February 5, 2000.
Santana
Celine Dion
Dr. Dre
Christina Aguilera
DMX
2000Claude Autant-Lara, French director and screenwriter (born 1901)[†]
Claude Autant-Lara was a French film director, screenwriter, set designer and costume designer who worked in films for over 50 years. He made films characterised by bourgeois realism, anti-clericalism and sexual frankness, often from literary sources. His career was frequently marked by controversy. Even though he was considered left-wing during most of his life, in his late 80s he was elected to the European Parliament as a member for the far-right National Front: he stepped down two months later after making antisemitic statements.
2000Russian forces massacre at least 60 civilians in the Novye Aldi suburb of Grozny, Chechnya.[†]
The Novye Aldi massacre was the mass murder of Chechen civilians on February 5, 2000, in which Russian forces went on a cleansing operation (zachistka), summarily executing dozens. The village had been cluster-bombed a day prior to the massacre, and local residents urged to come out for inspection the next day. Upon entering the village, Russian forces shot their victims with automatic fire at close range. The killings were accompanied by looting, rape, arson and robbery. As a result of the deadly rampage by Russian forces, up to 82 civilians were killed in the spree. Houses of civilians were burnt in an attempt to destroy evidence of summary executions and other crimes. Looting took place on a large scale and organised manner.
In 2000, the world population was approximately 6,171,702,993 people[†]