The United States Supreme Court upheld the University of Michigan law school’s use of affirmative action in its admissions process and overturned a Texassodomy law, saying that “the state cannot demean [homosexuals'] existence or control their destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime.”New York Times“This opens the door to bigamy, adult incest, polygamy, and prostitution,” said the head of the FamilyResearch Council.New York TimesThe court also ruled that a California law that retroactively abolished the statute of limitations on sex crimes is unconstitutional; California’s attorney general said that the ruling will lead to the release of about 800 …

The United States, the United Nations, Russia, and the European Union, acting collectively as “the Quartet,” presented Israel and Palestine with the famous “road map” to peace that President Bush promised to reveal once the Palestinians acquired a prime minister independent of Yasir Arafat. A suicide bomber, who turned out to be a British citizen, responded to the confirmation of Mahmoud Abbas as prime minister by blowing up a nightclub in Tel Aviv, leaving body parts scattered along the shore. A day later Israeli tanks invaded a crowded neighborhood in Gaza and killed 12 Palestinians, mostly civilians, including a two-year-old …

Two hundred couples were selected by an Italian embryologist to take part in a human cloning project; the human clones will be made using a technique similar to that which produced Dolly the sheep. The United States House of Representatives voted to ban human cloning for both reproduction and medical research; the measure also prohibits the sale of treatments derived from such procedures. Some British and Indianscientists claimed that they had positively identified alien bacteria entering Earth’s upper atmosphere from space, which would tend, they said, to confirm the Panspermia theory of life’s origin. Hundreds of pounds of such bacteria, …

A fifteen-year-old boy smiled as he murdered two classmates and wounded over a dozen others in Santee, California. A fourteen-year-old girl, who was said to be a victim of teasing, shot up her school in Pennsylvania, hitting one girl, a cheerleader and possibly one of her tormentors, in the shoulder. A seventeen-year-old boy beat his father to death with a baseball bat because he didn’t want to turn off two radios and a television that he was listening to simultaneously; the boy told police that he then went bowling, tried to slash his wrists, and deliberately crashed his dead father’s …

Peru’s dictator Alberto Fujimori stopped in Japan on his way to an economic summit, decided he liked it there, and quit his job, via fax; Peruvians were generally pleased with the development, and within days Fujimori was named in a corruption investigation.Slobodan Milosevic was reelected president of the Socialist Party of Serbia.Madeleine Albright asked to meet with Serbia’s new president, Vojislav Kostunica, at a meeting in Vienna; she was snubbed.Jean-Bertrand Aristide (promising “Peace in the Head. Peace in the Belly.”) was reelected president of Haiti in an election boycotted by major opposition parties, who said it was rigged.The United Stateselection …

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak called “timeout” and decided to make peace with Ariel Sharon, the right-wing opposition leader, instead of with the Palestinians.Gun sales in Israel were on the rise.The United States Congress increased military aid to Israel by $60 million, bringing the total up to $1.9 billion; Israel put a rush on its order for a new German submarine; according to some reports, the submarine will be equipped with nuclear weapons.Islamic students demonstrated in front of the U.S. embassy in Jakarta, Indonesia, chanting “Kill All Jews.” Music by Richard Wagner was performed in concert in Israel for the …

Safeway, the supermarket chain, recalled its house brand of corn taco shells after food critics discovered that the shells contained StarLink, a type of genetically modified corn that was not approved for human consumption. Taco Bell previously recalled its shells.The National Grain and Feed Association demanded the names of some 2,000 farmers who have planted StarLink crops; the manufacturer, Aventis Crop Science, refused to provide the names.Advanced Cell Technology, a company in Worcester, Massachusetts, announced that it had cloned an Asian guar; the embryo was gestating in an Iowan cow. The company plans to clone the extinct bucardo mountain goat …

Data from the Galileo spacecraft yielded evidence that Europa, Jupiter’s second moon, may have salty liquid oceans beneath its icy shell, increasing the likelihood of finding life there. Austrian scientists discovered bacteria living among the clouds. The National Institutes of Health issued rules allowing researchers who receive federal funds to use human embryonic stem cells in their studies. Richard Hatch won the Survivor game show. Three men beat a Gypsy woman, a mother of eight, to death in Slovakia. Experts urged the United Nations to improve its peacekeeping department by adding an intelligence unit. Against the advice of senior Justice …

A Concorde airplane crashed in Paris; two amateur Hungarian photographers snapped a picture of the doomed plane with flames shooting from its engines, which were manufactured by Rolls Royce, just before it destroyed a small hotel near the airport. Investigators soon narrowed their suspicions to a fuel leak, saying that previously detected cracks in another Concorde were unrelated. Atmospheric scientists discovered that some 4,000 tons of a new synthetic greenhouse gas have been released into the atmosphere; the gas, which takes 1,000 years to degrade, may be a by-product of weapons production. A Russian spacecraft docked with the International Space …