October

This was the month in which simmering enmity between Israeli and Palestinian boiled over into days of violence as the communities' respective leaders struggled to come to terms with what leadership means – Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat told Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak to go to hell. In the Yemen port of Aden, a suicide boat bomb killed 17 sailors on the United States destroyer Cole.

It was a bad time for Greek vessels. A third in four days ran into problems, this one with 38 passengers and crew running aground off Naxos, leaving one tourist dead. The death toll from flooding passed 1000 in Bangladesh and eastern India with 16 million people left marooned by the monsoon season's devastation. And in Europe torrential rain brought deadly mudslides and flooding to Switzerland and Italy.

A third fatal crash in three years focused critical attention on Britain's privatised rail network. In Georgia, a Russian military aircraft crashed into a mountain, killing 82 people.

In Serbia, Slobodan Milosevic succumbed to people power as the weight of street demonstrations saw control pass to election winner Vojislav Kostunica. Another car bomb hit Spain, killing a Supreme Court judge, his driver and his bodyguard in Madrid, bringing to six the number of separatist-blamed bombing deaths in the month.

New Zealand-born scientist Alan McDiarmid shared the Nobel Prize for chemistry for the discovery in the 1970s that plastics can conduct electricity.

At home, on the business front, the dollar continued its downward fall, dropping below 40USc, reaching 39.4c, while Tranz Rail decided it no longer wanted to move passengers. And the Fletcher Challenge group's restructuring plans came up against the Commerce Commission, the oversight body ruling against a $4.6 billion Shell Oil bid to buy the company's energy division. However, the meat industry was upbeat over a World Trade Organisation ruling that the United States was out of order with its 1999 restriction on lamb imports from Australia and New Zealand.

The Government set about getting business onside, although a Beehive-initiated talkfest lost credibility when some of its most trenchant critics from the corporate world were left off the invitation list. Disability Issues Minister Ruth Dyson also lost some credibility. Her bad-role-model jibe at Norm Hewitt for playing on with a broken arm in the NPC final (which, incidentally, Wellington won) boomeranged with a late-night drive home after drinking on the job. She regained some credibility with an immediate resignation of her ministerial responsibilities.

Life with no parole for 18 years plus – finally – preventive detention for rape were the sentences passed on Taffy Hotene, the killer of Kylie Jones.

One weekend provided some understanding of why New Zealanders had what might be considered excessively high expectations of their sportspeople at the Olympics – in so many sports, New Zealanders perform with distinction at the highest level. Within a few hours, the silver fern was carried to success in the highest-prized international one-day cricket tournament, the Wimbledon of squash, the British Open, and world junior cycling's road race championship. In Melbourne, it wasn't that Sunline won her second successive Cox Plate, it was that a wide-angle lens was necessary at the finish to pick up the New Zealand mare's nearest rivals.

The Paralympic team ended their Sydney Games with six gold medals, eight silver and four bronze, finishing 25th on the medal table.

And One Tree Hill lost its title landmark.