The British Home Secretary, Jack Straw, judges Augusto Pinochet mentally incapable to stand trial and returns him to Chile

Vladimir Putin wins the presidential election in Russia on the first round

The Amber Spyglass completes Philip Pullman's trilogy, His Dark Materials

The republic of Ireland is the fastest growing economy in the EU, with a GDP growth of more than 10%

A Concorde supersonic airliner crashes after take-off from Paris, killing all 109 on board

In the election for president of Yugoslavia, the incumbent Slobodan Milosevic is defeated by Vojislav Kostunica

Mao Zedong inspires German artist Anselm Kiefer's Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom

Angry crowds drive Slobodan Milosevic from power after he denies defeat in the Serbian election

The Netherlands becomes the first country to legalize euthanasia, allowing doctors to end the life of a patient suffering 'unbearably' from a terminal condition

The Scottish Court in the Netherlands convicts a Libyan, Al-Megrahi, of responsibility for the Pan-Am Lockerbie bomb

Sylvio Berlusconi returns as Italy's prime minister with the electoral success of his right-wing House of Liberties coalition

Tony Blair leads Britain's Labour party in a second successive election victory, with a majority only marginally reduced from 179 to 167

The former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic is handed over to the war crimes tribunal in the Hague

UK terrorist Richard Reid tries to bring down a Paris-Miami flight but fails to light the exposive in his shoe

Dial House becomes the home of the Bishop of Kensington

In his novel Atonement Ian McEwan follows the disasters resulting from a child's mistaken identity of a supposed rapist , through to the child's attempt, more than sixty years later, at atonement

InAusterlitz W.G. Sebald follows the painful quest of a Czech Jew, brought to England in 1939 on a Kindertransport, to discover the history of his immediate family

The trial of Slobodan Milosevic begins at the UN war crimes tribunal in the Hague

Controversial Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn is assassinated outside a a radio station in Hilversum

Chechen terrorists take hostage the entire audience of a Moscow theatre in an atrocity resulting in the death of more than 150 people

The two remaining regions of the unravelled Yugoslavia unite as a new nation, Serbia and Montenegro

Zoran Dindić, the prime minister of Serbia, is assassinated in Belgrade

UK scientist David Kelly commits suicide, apparently for reasons linked with the Iraq War

Sweden's Minister for Foreign Affairs, Anna Lindh, is stabbed in a Stockholm department store and dies the following day

The last three Concorde airliners to carry fare-paying passengers land within a space of five minutes at Heathrow