2000 – The arrival of 2000 saw no terrorist attacks, Y2K meltdowns or mass suicides among doomsday cults, but instead saw seven continents stepping joyously and peacefully into the New Year.
2001 – Pres. Bush announced that envoy Gen. Anthony Zinni would return to the Middle East to push for steps to renew peace talks.
2002 – The Open Skies mutual surveillance treaty, initially signed in 1992, officially comes into force and currently has 34 States Parties. It establishes a program of unarmed aerial surveillance flights over the entire territory of its participants. The concept of “mutual aerial observation” was initially proposed to Soviet Premier Nikolai Bulganin at the Geneva Conference of 1955 by President Dwight D. Eisenhower; however, the Soviets promptly rejected the concept and it lay dormant for several years. The treaty was eventually signed as an initiative of US president (and former Director of Central Intelligence) George H. W. Bush in 1989. Negotiated by the then-members of NATO and the Warsaw Pact, the agreement was signed in Helsinki, Finland, on March 24, 1992.
2002 – Pakistan ordered the country’s military intelligence agency to cut off backing for Islamic militant groups fighting in Kashmir.
2003 – U.S. and British warplanes attacked an Iraqi mobile radar system after it entered the southern no-fly zone.
2003 – Joe Foss (87), former South Dakota Gov. and World War II hero who also served as president of the National Rifle Association and commissioner of the American Football League, died at an Arizona hospital.
2003 – In Bosnia the EU hoisted its dark blue banner to officially mark the transfer of peacekeeping duties from the United Nations, while NATO-led troops handed over control of Sarajevo’s airport to Bosnian authorities.
2004 – The US Navy seized a 4th drug-smuggling vessel in the Persian Gulf with about 2,800 pounds of hashish. Street value was estimated at $11 million.
2004 – North Korea confirmed that it would allow a U.S. delegation to visit its main nuclear complex next week, the first such inspection since the isolated communist country expelled UN monitors more than a year ago.
2009 – The United States handed control of the Green Zone and Saddam Hussein’s presidential palace to the Iraqi government in a ceremonial move described by the country’s prime minister as a restoration of Iraq’s sovereignty. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said he would propose 1 January be declared national “Sovereignty Day”. “This palace is the symbol of Iraqi sovereignty and by restoring it, a real message is directed to all Iraqi people that Iraqi sovereignty has returned to its natural status”, al-Maliki said.
2012 – The second of NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory spacecraft is in orbit around the moon.
http://thisdayinusmilhist.wordpress.com/2014/01/01/january-1/
