Five presidents succeed each other within a month in Argentina's economic crisis

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

Leland Hartwel, Paul Nurse and Tim Hunt win the Nobel Prize for their discoveries of key regulators of the cell cycle

For the Queen's Jubilee Mark Edwards builds an eight-oared royal shallop, Jubilant, a replica of an eighteenth-century original owned by the National Maritime Museum

All Saints is converted into a private house

Mark Edwards builds a working version of a seventeenth-century wooden submarine, by Cornelius Jacobszoon Drebbel, which is rowed underwater in the BBC programme Building the Impossible

The west end of the Barn Church in Kew is redesigned by Keith Murray to accommodate the Darby Room (named after the vicar, Nicholas Darby), a gallery and ancillary facilities for community use

Florence plays host to the first European Social Forum, an annual conference (now biennial) bringing together campaigning groups to share ideas and form collaborations

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

The death of Jonas Savimbi is soon followed by the disbanding of UNITA and the end of 27 years of Angolan civil war

In Zimbabwe's presidential election, again characterized by violence and apparent vote-rigging, Mugabe defeats Tsvangirai

Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, widow of the British king George VI, dies at the age of 102

The US-led invasion of Afghanistan sweeps the Taliban from power, ending their protection of al-Qaeda

Fifty years after her accession to the throne, the British queen Elizabeth II celebrates her Golden Jubilee

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

The African Union (AU) is established as a successor to the African Economic Community and the Organization of African Unity

New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark wins a second term with a landslide victory

Prague suffers its worst floods to date after extreme rainfall occurs in the catchment area of the source of the Vltava River

The US holds suspected al-Qaeda terrorists indefinitely, and without legal rights, in Guantanamo Bay, an American enclave in Cuba

Terrorists detonate bombs in two crowded nightclubs in the Bali resort of Kuta, killing 202 people

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

In spite of a massive military operation, the terrorist leader Osama bin Laden escapes US pursuit in Afghanistan