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File:1990 Events Collage.png, From left, clockwise: The 1990 FIFA World Cup is played in Italy; The Human Genome Project is launched; Voyager I takes the famous Pale Blue Dot image- speaking on the fragility of humanity on Earth, astrophysicist Carl Sagan states: "''That's here. That's home. That's us.''" ; West Germany and East Germany reunify; Police stand on-guard during the Poll tax riots in the United Kingdom; Iraq under Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait, beginning the Gulf War; The 1990 Manjil–Rudbar earthquake kills between 35,000 - 50,000 people in Iran; The Hubble Space Telescope is launched from the Space Shuttle Discovery., 300x300px, thumb
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Important events of 1990 include the Reunification of Germany and the unification of Yemen, the formal beginning of the Human Genome Project (finished in 2003), the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope, the separation of Namibia from South Africa, and the Baltic states declaring independence from the Soviet Union amidst Perestroika. Yugoslavia's communist regime collapses amidst increasing internal tensions and multiparty elections held within its constituent republics result in separatist governments being elected in most of the republics marking the beginning of the breakup of Yugoslavia. Also in this year began the crisis that would lead to the Gulf War in 1991 following the Iraq invasion and the largely internationally unrecognized annexation of Kuwait. This annexation resulted in a crisis in the Persian Gulf involving the issue of the sovereignty of Kuwait and fears by Saudi Arabia over Iraqi aggression against their oil fields near Kuwait. This led to Operation Desert Shield being enacted with an international coalition of military forces being built up on the Kuwaiti-Saudi border with demands for Iraq to peacefully withdraw from Kuwait. Also in this year, Nelson Mandela was released from prison, and Margaret Thatcher resigned as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom after more than 11 years.

1990 was an important year in the Internet's early history. In the fall of 1990, Tim Berners-Lee created the first web server and the foundation for the World Wide Web. Test operations began around December 20 and it was released outside CERN the following year. 1990 also saw the official decommissioning of the ARPANET, a forerunner of the Internet system and the introduction of the first content web search engine, Archie, on September 10.

September 14, 1990 saw the first case of successful somatic gene therapy on a patient.

Due to the early 1990s recession that began that year and uncertainty due to the collapse of the socialist governments in Eastern Europe, birth rates in many countries stopped rising or fell steeply in 1990. In most western countries the Echo Boom peaked in 1990; fertility rates declined thereafter.

Events

January

* January 1
** Poland becomes the first country in Eastern Europe to begin abolishing its state socialist economy. Poland also withdraws from the Warsaw Pact.
** Glasgow begins its year as European Capital of Culture.
** The first Internet companies catering to commercial users, PSINet and EUnet begin selling Internet access to commercial customers in the United States and Netherlands respectively.
* January 3 – United States invasion of Panama: General Manuel Noriega is deposed as leader of Panama and surrenders to the American forces.
* January 11 – Singing Revolution: In the Lithuania SSR, 300,000 demonstrate for independence.
* January 12– 19 – Most of the remaining 50,000 Armenians are driven out of Baku in the Azerbaijan SSR during the Baku pogrom.
* January 13 – Douglas Wilder becomes the first elected African American governor as he takes office in Richmond, Virginia.
* January 15
** The National Assembly of Bulgaria votes to end one party rule by the Bulgarian Communist Party.
** Thousands storm the Stasi headquarters in East Berlin in an attempt to view their government records.
** Martin Luther King Day Crash – Telephone service in Atlanta, St. Louis, and Detroit, including 9-1-1 service, goes down for nine hours, due to an AT&T software bug.
* January 20
** Cold War: Black January – Soviet troops occupy Baku, Azerbaijan SSR, under the state of emergency decree issued by General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev, and kill over 130 protesters who were demonstrating for independence. The Nakhichevan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic