2002 Archives - PopHistory.org

Journalist Daniel Pearl is murdered

On February 1, 2002, 38-year-old American journalist Daniel Pearl, the Southeast Asia bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal, is murdered by a terror group in Pakistan. Weeks later, a videotape of Pearl’s beheading was released, shocking millions and underscoring the threat of terrorism less than a year after the 9/11 attacks on the United States.

On January 23, 2002, Pearl, who was Jewish, was on his way to what he thought was an interview with a Pakistani religious leader in Karachi as part of his research into Islamist militants. But he was kidnapped near a hotel by terrorists, who claimed he was a spy. The group—which called itself the National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty—demanded the United States free all Pakistani terror detainees.

The terrorists released photos of a handcuffed Pearl with a gun at his head and holding up a newspaper. The group did not respond to public pleas for his release from his family or others.

U.S. intelligence failed to track down the kidnappers of Pearl, whose remains were discovered weeks later in Pakistan. The journalist’s kidnapping and death received widespread media coverage.

In 2002, British national Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh was convicted of Pearl’s murder. (The Pakistani Supreme Court ordered his release in 2021.) In 2007, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed of the al-Qaeda global terror network claimed responsibility for Pearl’s murder. Others have been connected to the journalist’s death, including an Egyptian with ties to al-Qaeda.

Pearl’s widow, also a journalist, wrote a book about her husband’s life titled A Mighty Heart. In 2007, the movie version of the book was co-produced by Brad Pitt and starred Angelina Jolie.

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IOC finds fraud, awards second gold in Winter Olympics skating event

On February 15, 2002, the International Olympic Committee announces it has sufficient evidence of fraud by a French judge and awards a second gold medal in pairs figure skating at the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah. The decision comes after days of rumors and behind-the-scenes investigations.

READ MORE: Winter Olympics History

As part of a vote-trading scheme, a French judge allegedly succumbed to pressure from her federation to award a gold medal score to Russian pair Yelena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze, leaving Canadians Jamie Sale and David Pelletier with the silver.

Four days earlier, the Canadians skated a nearly flawless routine that received loud cheers from the crowd at the Salt Lake Center. In the Russians’ final skate, Sikharulidze bungled the landing on a jump. But the pair was awarded the gold in a 5-4 vote that was booed loudly.

“We took a position that was one of justice and fairness for the athletes,” said IOC president Jacques Rogge about the awarding of a second gold.

Joked Pelletier at a news conference the following day: “We do hope we get the bronze, too, so we can get the entire collection.”

The International Skating Federation suspended the French judge, Marie-Reine Le Gougne. Valentin Piseyev, the president of the Federation of Russian Figure Skating, said the awarding of a second gold was dictated by pressure from North American media.

The scandal led to a revised judging system aimed to better represent performances and to safeguard against the manipulation of scores.

In 2012, Le Gougne insisted she was a scapegoat. “My life was devastated,” she told Reuters.

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George W. Bush describes Iraq, Iran and North Korea as “axis of evil”

On January 29, 2002, in his first State of the Union address since the September 11 attacks, President George W. Bush describes Iraq, Iran and North Korea as an “axis of evil.”

Just over a year into his presidency and several months into a war which would eventually become the longest in American history, Bush identified the three countries as the major nodes of a wide-ranging and highly dangerous network of terrorists and other bad actors threatening the United States. The speech outlined the logic behind Bush’s “War on Terror,” a series of military engagements which would define U.S. foreign policy for the next two decades.

Bush speechwriter David Frum is credited with coining the term “axis of evil,” which was meant to evoke the Axis powers against which the United States and its allies fought in World War II. The Bush administration wanted to emphasize the outstanding threat posed by these three “terror states,” arguing that each was in the process of building weapons of mass destruction and supporting terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda. Bush’s father, former president George H.W. Bush, had invaded Iraq in 1990 after repelling the Iraqi invasion of neighboring Kuwait, but left Saddam Hussein in power.

After 9/11, George W. Bush’s administration waited less than a month before invading Afghanistan and deposing the Taliban regime there. It was not long before Bush turned his attention to “regime change” in Iraq. Although there were no direct links between Iraq, Iran and North Korea—Iraq and Iran, in fact, were commonly understood to be geopolitical enemies—the concept of an “axis of evil” united in its desire to harm Americans proved useful to those making the case for a second invasion of Iraq.

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President George W. Bush signs No Child Left Behind Act into law

Updated:: Sep 5, 2019
Original:: Sep 5, 2019

Year: 2002

Month Day: January 08

On January 8, 2002, President George W. Bush signs the No Child Left Behind Act into law. The sweeping update to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 created new standards and goals for the nation’s public schools and implemented tough corrective measures for schools that failed to meet them. Today, it is largely regarded as a failed experiment.

NCLB passed both houses of Congress easily and with bipartisan support. Future Speaker of the House John Boehner, a Republican, and longtime Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy were among its sponsors. The bill aimed to address what both parties agreed was an unacceptable drop in standards in America’s public schools. The new law mandated that states create measures of Adequate Yearly Progress based on standardized tests. Schools that did not meet AYP requirements were subject to increasingly harsher actions by the state, such as giving students the options to transfer after 2 years of missing AYP goals or even the wholesale restructuring of a school after 5 years.

While some schools did see improvements in test scores, the results were uneven and often negative. Teachers complained that standardized testing cut into class time and forced them to “teach to the test” rather than to their students’ needs. Many felt that requiring all schools statewide to achieve the same goals unfairly punished both schools that were already performing well and schools in underserved areas. Others argued in principle against threatening underperforming schools with corrective measures, while some accused Republicans of using the law to turn private schools over to charter school companies or private businesses.

In 2015, NCLB was replaced with the Every Student Succeeds Act, which retained parts of the old law but attempted to make it less punitive to underperforming schools. Today, NCLB is often cited as an overly harsh approach to education reform, while many Americans simply remember it as the reason they had to take so many standardized tests.

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Michael Skakel convicted of 1975 murder in Greenwich

Year: 2002

Month Day: June 07

On June 7, 2002, 41-year-old Michael Skakel is convicted in the 1975 murder of his former Greenwich, Connecticut, neighbor, 15-year-old neighbor Martha Moxley. Skakel, a nephew of Ethel Kennedy, the wife of the late U.S. Senator Robert Kennedy, was later sentenced to 20 years to life in prison.

On October 30, 1975, Moxley was bludgeoned to death with a golf club outside her family’s home in Greenwich, one of America’s most affluent communities. The golf club was later determined to have come from a set belonging to the Skakel family, who lived across the street from the Moxleys. Investigators initially focused on one of Michael Skakel’s older brothers, the last person Moxley reportedly was seen alive with, as well as the Skakels’ live-in tutor as possible suspects, but no arrests were made due to lack of evidence, and the case stalled.

In the early 1990s, Connecticut authorities relaunched the investigation, and public interest in the case also was reignited by several new books, including Dominick Dunne’s “A Season in Purgatory” (1993), a fictionalized account of the crime, and former Los Angeles police detective Mark Fuhrman’s “A Murder in Greenwich” (1998), in which he claimed that Michael Skakel killed Moxley in a jealous rage because she was romantically interested in his older brother. In 2000, based in part on statements made by former classmates of Skakel’s who claimed he admitted to them in the 1970s to killing Moxley, he was charged with her murder.

Skakel, who came from a family of seven children, had a wealthy, privileged upbringing; however, his mother died from cancer in 1973 and he had a troubled relationship with his father. In the late 1970s, Skakel, who began drinking heavily as a teen, was sent to the Elan School, a private boarding school in Poland, Maine, for troubled youth. At Skakel’s 2002 trial, the prosecution presented testimony from several of his former Elan classmates who stated that in the 1970s Skakel had confessed to killing Moxley. One ex-classmate, a drug addict who died shortly before the 2002 trial started, claimed at a previous court hearing that Skakel told him, “I am going to get away with murder because I am a Kennedy.”

At trial, prosecutors, who had no eyewitnesses and no physical evidence directly linking Skakel to the murder, played a 1997 taped conversation between Skakel and the ghostwriter of an autobiography Skakel hoped to sell. Skakel said on tape that on the night of the murder he climbed into a tree in the Moxleys’ yard, while drunk and high on marijuana, and masturbated as he tried to look into Martha Moxley’s bedroom window. He said that when Moxley’s mother came to his house the next morning looking for her daughter, he felt panicked and wondered if someone had seen him the night before. Although Skakel never admitted on the tape to killing Moxley, prosecutors said his words put him at the scene of the crime and were an attempt to cover up the slaying.

After three days of deliberations, jurors found Skakel guilty of murder, and in August 2002, he was sentenced to 20 years to life behind bars. Skakel’s cousin, Robert Kennedy Jr., an attorney, later worked to get Skakel a new trial; however, in 2010, the request was denied by the Connecticut Supreme Court.

In October 2013, in yet another twist to the case, a Connecticut judge ordered a new trial for Skakel, ruling that his first trial lawyer didn’t represent him effectively. The following month, Skakel was released from prison on a $1.2 million bond.

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“Spider-Man” becomes first movie to top $100 million in opening weekend

Year: 2002

Month Day: May 05

Directed by Sam Raimi and starring Tobey Maguire in the title role, the eagerly awaited comic book adaptation Spider-Man was released on Friday, May 3, 2002, and quickly became the fastest movie ever to earn more than $100 million at the box office, raking in a staggering $114.8 million by Sunday, May 5.

After a genetically altered spider bites the teenager Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) during his class field trip to a university laboratory, he discovers that the bite has given him supernatural powers. Though his principal goal is pursuing his longtime crush, Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst), Parker soon transforms himself into Spider-Man in order to combat evil, in the form of the Green Goblin, the villainous result of an experiment that the scientist Norman Osborn (Willem Dafoe) has performed on himself.

By the time the film was released, four decades had passed since Stan Lee and Steve Ditko created Spider-Man for Marvel in 1962. The comic’s enduring popularity, as well as a massive marketing campaign by Columbia Pictures and Marvel, seemed to predict commercial success for Spider-Man, which opened in more than 3,600 theaters nationwide. In addition, super-hero movies traditionally faired well at the box office, as evidenced by the hit Superman and Batman films. Reviewers also praised Raimi’s film for its smart script and generally good acting, as well as its high-tech special effects. The combination of all these factors helped explain Spider-Man’s record opening-day haul of $39.4 million. The previous mark was $32.3 million, set by Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone in 2001. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone had taken five days to pass the $100 million mark, as had 1999’s Stars Wars: Episode 1 – The Phantom Menace. Spider-Man would go on to earn some $403.7 million domestically, more than any other comic book movie to that date.

Both Spider-Man sequels, in 2004 and 2007, would break their predecessor’s opening day record, earning $40.4 million and $59 million, respectively. Spider-Man 3, shown on more than 10,000 screens at 4,252 locations, boasted an opening weekend haul of $151.1 million. That record would stand until July 2008, when The Dark Knight, the fifth film in the Batman franchise, grossed $155 million in its first weekend. Only 19 days after its release, The Dark Knight had taken in $405.7 million in the United States alone, passing the first Spider-Man.

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Divers recover U.S.S. Monitor turret

Year: 2002

Month Day: August 05

On August 5, 2002, the rusty iron gun turret of the U.S.S. Monitor broke from the water and into the daylight for the first time in 140 years. The ironclad warship was raised from the floor of the Atlantic, where it had rested since it went down in a storm off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, during the Civil War. Divers had been working for six weeks to bring it to the surface.

Nine months before sinking into its watery grave, the Monitor had been part of a revolution in naval warfare. On March 9, 1862, it dueled to a standstill with the C.S.S. Virginia (originally the C.S.S. Merrimack) in one of the most famous moments in naval history—the first time two ironclads faced each other in a naval engagement. During the battle, the two ships circled one another, jockeying for position as they fired their guns. The cannon balls simply deflected off the iron ships. In the early afternoon, the Virginia pulled back to Norfolk. Neither ship was seriously damaged, but the Monitor effectively ended the short reign of terror that the Confederate ironclad had brought to the Union navy.

Designed by Swedish engineer John Ericsson, the Monitor had an unusually low profile, rising from the water only 18 inches. The flat iron deck had a 20-foot cylindrical turret rising from the middle of the ship; the turret housed two 11-inch Dahlgren guns. The ship had a draft of less than 11 feet so it could operate in the shallow harbors and rivers of the South. It was commissioned on February 25, 1862, and arrived at Chesapeake Bay just in time to engage the Virginia.

After the famous duel, the Monitor provided gun support on the James River for George B. McClellan’s Peninsular Campaign. By December 1862, it was clear the ship was no longer needed in Virginia, so she was sent to Beaufort, North Carolina, to join a fleet being assembled for an attack on Charleston. The Monitor served well in the sheltered waters of Chesapeake Bay, but the heavy, low-slung ship was a poor craft for the open sea. The U.S.S. Rhode Island towed the ironclad around the rough waters of Cape Hatteras. As the Monitor pitched and swayed in the rough seas, the caulking around the gun turret loosened and water began to leak into the hull. More leaks developed as the journey continued. High seas tossed the craft, causing the ship’s flat armor bottom to slap the water. Each roll opened more seams, and by nightfall on December 30, the Monitor was in dire straits.

That evening, the Monitor’s commander, J.P. Bankhead, signaled the Rhode Island that he wished to abandon ship. The wooden side-wheeler pulled as close as safety allowed to the stricken ironclad, and two lifeboats were lowered to retrieve the crew. Many of the sailors were rescued, but some men were terrified to venture onto the deck in such rough seas. The ironclad’s pumps stopped working, and the ship sank before 16 of its crew members could be rescued. The remains of two of these sailors were discovered by divers during the Monitor’s 2002 reemergence.

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Terrorists kill 202 in Bali

Year: 2002

Month Day: October 12

On October 12, 2002, three bombings shatter the peace in the town of Kuta on the Indonesian island of Bali. The blasts, the work of militant Islamist terrorists, left 202 people dead and more than 200 others injured, many with severe burns. The attacks shocked residents and those familiar with the mostly Hindu island, long known as a tranquil and friendly island paradise.

The most deadly of the three blasts occurred when a large bomb, estimated to be about 1,200 kilograms, was detonated in a van outside the town s Sari Club nightclub. The explosion left a large crater in the ground and was said to have blown the windows out of buildings throughout the town. Many of those killed and injured in the blast were young visitors vacationing on the island, most from Australia. Thirty-eight Indonesians, mainly Balinese, were killed.

Two other bombs were also detonated that day: one, packed in a backpack, was detonated in a bar and another was exploded in the street in front of the American consulate. All three were thought to be the work of the regional militant Islamist group Jemaah Islamiah, which is believed to have links to al-Qaida. Jemaah Islamiah is also alleged to be responsible for the bombing of a Marriott hotel in Jakarta in 2003 and the Australian embassy to Indonesia in 2004, as well as the suicide bombing of three restaurants in Bali on October 1, 2005. The second attack on Bali killed 22 people, including the bombers, and injured more than 100 others.

Indonesia is the world’s most populous Muslim nation.

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Former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic goes on trial for war crimes

Year: 2002

Month Day: February 12

On February 12, 2002, former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic goes on trial at The Hague, Netherlands, on charges of genocide and war crimes in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo. Milosevic served as his own attorney for much of the prolonged trial, which ended without a verdict when the so-called “Butcher of the Balkans” was found dead at age 64 from an apparent heart attack in his prison cell on March 11, 2006.

Yugoslavia, consisting of Croatia, Montenegro, Slovenia, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Macedonia, became a federal republic, headed by Communist leader Marshal Tito, on January 31, 1946. Tito died in May 1980 and Yugoslavia, along with communism, crumbled over the next decade.

Milosevic, born August 20, 1941, joined the Communist Party at age 18; he became president of Serbia in 1989. On June 25, 1991, Croatia and Slovenia declared their independence from Yugoslavia and Milosevic sent tanks to the Slovenian border, sparking a brief war that ended in Slovenia’s secession. In Croatia, fighting broke out between Croats and ethnic Serbs and Serbia sent weapons and medical supplies to the Serbian rebels in Croatia. Croatian forces clashed with the Serb-led Yugoslav army troops and their Serb supporters. An estimated 10,000 people were killed and hundreds of Croatian towns were destroyed before a U.N. cease-fire was established in January 1992. In March, Bosnia-Herzegovina declared its independence, and Milosevic funded the subsequent Bosnian Serb rebellion, starting a war that killed an estimated 200,000 people, before a U.S.-brokered peace agreement was reached at Dayton, Ohio, in 1995.

In Kosovo, a formerly autonomous province of Serbia, liberation forces clashed with Serbs and the Yugoslav army was sent in. Amidst reports that Milosevic had launched an ethnic cleansing campaign against Kosovo’s ethnic Albanians, NATO forces launched air strikes against Yugoslavia in 1999.

Ineligible to run for a third term as Serbian president, Milosevic had made himself president of Yugoslavia in 1997. After losing the presidential election in September 2000, he refused to accept defeat until mass protests forced him to resign the following month. He was charged with corruption and abuse of power and finally surrendered to Serbian authorities on April 1, 2001, after a 26-hour standoff. That June, he was extradited to the Netherlands and indicted by a United Nations war crimes tribunal. Milosevic died in his cell of a heart attack before his trial could be completed.

In February 2003, Serbia and Montenegro became a commonwealth and officially dropped the name Yugoslavia. In June 2006, the two countries declared their independence from each other.

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Jimmy Carter wins Nobel Peace Prize

Year: 2002

Month Day: October 11

On October 11, 2002, former President Jimmy Carter wins the Nobel Peace Prize “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.”

Carter, a peanut farmer from Georgia, served one term as U.S. president between 1977 and 1981. One of his key achievements as president was mediating the peace talks between Israel and Egypt in 1978. The Nobel Committee had wanted to give Carter (1924- ) the prize that year for his efforts, along with Anwar Sadat and Menachim Begin, but was prevented from doing so by a technicality—he had not been nominated by the official deadline.

After he left office, Carter and his wife Rosalynn created the Atlanta-based Carter Center in 1982 to advance human rights and alleviate human suffering. Since 1984, they have worked with Habitat for Humanity to build homes and raise awareness of homelessness. Among his many accomplishments, Carter has helped to fight disease and improve economic growth in developing nations and has served as an observer at numerous political elections around the world.

The first Nobel Prizes—awards established by Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel (1833-1896) in his will—were handed out in Sweden in 1901 in the fields of physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and peace. The Nobel Prize in economics was first awarded in 1969. Carter was the third U.S. president to receive the award, worth $1 million, following Theodore Roosevelt (1906) and Woodrow Wilson (1919). Former president Barack Obama won in 2009.

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