Timeline January 2000

Events in January 2000 18

• 1914 – 2000 Hedy Lamarr (1914-2000) Died 19 January 2000, aged 85 Hedy Lamarr was an Austrian-born Hollywood star of the 1930s and 1940s, promoted as "the most beautiful woman in the world" and seen in Samson and Delilah. With the composer George Antheil she co-patented a 1942 frequency-hopping system meant to guide torpedoes, a concept later foundational to spread-spectrum wireless. Her scientific work was recognised only late in life.
• 1914 – 2000 Patrick O'Brian (1914-2000) Died 2 January 2000, aged 85 Patrick O'Brian wrote the Aubrey-Maturin novels, a twenty-book sequence set in the Royal Navy of the Napoleonic Wars and admired for its historical detail and prose. Long a cult favourite, the series found a wide readership in the 1990s. After his death it emerged that his "Irish" background was largely invented.
• 1934 – 2000 Bettino Craxi (1934-2000) Died 19 January 2000, aged 65 Bettino Craxi led the Italian Socialist Party and was prime minister from 1983 to 1987, one of the longest tenures of the postwar era. He was brought down by the Tangentopoli corruption inquiries of the early 1990s and, facing prison, fled to Tunisia in 1994. He died there in exile, still a convicted fugitive.
• 2000 Australian Open 2000 Men: Andre Agassi · Women: Lindsay Davenport
• 2000 2000: Michael Schumacher Ferrari Schumacher delivered Ferrari's first Drivers' Championship in 21 years, ending the team's longest-ever title drought and becoming an Italian national hero.
• 2000 Dot-com bubble bursts NASDAQ loses 78% of its value The dot-com bubble burst in 2000-2001 as the NASDAQ Composite fell from its peak of 5,048 in March 2000 to 1,114 by October 2002, wiping out $5 trillion in market value.
• 2000 – 2022 Later Career and Animal Advocacy Moved to a ranch in Malibu, California, and became a passionate animal rights advocate. Continued selective modelling work while raising her son Jonah.
• 2000 – 2020 Later French Novels Continued writing novels in French including Ignorance (2000) and The Festival of Insignificance (2015), while fiercely guarding his privacy.
• 2000 Opening of the Millennium Dome Britain marks the new millennium on the Greenwich peninsula The Millennium Dome opened to the public in Greenwich, London, on 1 January 2000 after a New Year's Eve gala attended by the Queen and Prime Minister Tony Blair. Its year-long exhibition drew far fewer visitors than projected and it became a byword for costly public spending. The structure reopened as the O2 Arena in 2007.
• 2000 Screen Debut in Psycho Drama Made his screen acting debut in the short film Psycho Drama.
• 2000 Tony Award for Dame Edna: The Royal Tour Won the Tony Award for his Broadway show Dame Edna: The Royal Tour, marking a high point in his conquest of American audiences.
• 2000 – 2019 Wayne Shorter Quartet Led his own acclaimed quartet featuring pianist Danilo Pérez, bassist John Patitucci and drummer Brian Blade, entering a celebrated late phase of his career.
• 2000 Year 2000 problem passes without major failure A feared computer date bug causes only scattered glitches Governments and companies had spent an estimated hundreds of billions of dollars since the mid-1990s rewriting software that stored calendar years as two digits. As clocks rolled into 1 January 2000, only minor and localised faults were reported around the world. Debate continues over whether the smooth transition vindicated the remediation effort or showed the danger had been overstated.
• 2000 AOL and Time Warner announce their merger The largest corporate merger ever announced at the time On 10 January 2000 America Online agreed to acquire Time Warner in a stock deal valued at about 165 billion dollars. Completed a year later, the combination was soon regarded as a debacle as the dot-com crash gutted AOL's value and the promised synergies never materialised. The companies formally separated in 2009.
• 2000 Becomes part-owner and president of Wizards Jordan takes a front-office role with the Washington Wizards as part-owner and president of basketball operations.
• 2000 – present Remco Evenepoel The Aero Bullet Wonderkind; World Champion in both Time Trial and Road Race.
• 2000 Baia Mare cyanide spill A gold-mine dam failure poisons the Tisza and the Danube On 30 January 2000 a tailings dam at a gold-recovery plant near Baia Mare in northern Romania burst, releasing around 100,000 cubic metres of cyanide-laden water. The plume moved down the Somes, Tisza and Danube rivers through Hungary and Serbia, killing large quantities of fish and contaminating drinking supplies. It was widely described as Europe's worst environmental disaster since Chernobyl.
• 2000 Crash of Alaska Airlines Flight 261 An MD-83 dives into the Pacific off the California coast On 31 January 2000 an Alaska Airlines MD-83 flying from Puerto Vallarta toward Seattle crashed into the Pacific near Anacapa Island, killing all 88 people aboard. Investigators found that a jackscrew controlling the horizontal stabiliser had failed through inadequate lubrication and lengthened maintenance intervals. The findings prompted changes to United States maintenance oversight.