What is full of holes but still holds water?

In The 1st month of this year(the year 2013), I noticed that the date 13-1-13 (13 January 2013) is special.

This date is special as:

Date * Month = Year.

Can you figure out which year of this century has a maximum number of such dates?

_ _ _ IE _ _
_ _ _ IE _
_ _ IE _ _
_ _ IE _
_ _ _ _ IE

Like you see, some letters have gone missing from these words that contain the IE pair at some or the other place. The letters that will be used to fill the blanks are given below. Use them and form meaningful words. Can you do that?

A, C, D, F, H, K, L, M, N, N, O, R, R, S, S, S, T, T, Y and Y.

I shave every day, but my beard stays the same. What am I?

You are given a cube that is made with the help of 10x10x10 smaller cubes summing up to a total of 1000 smaller cubes. You are asked to take off one layer of the cubes.
How many remain now?

There are 2 people near the river and both of them want to get on the other side. The boat can only take one of them. But they got across.
How?

Nodes are shown below and you need to connect them based on the following rule: Every node can be connected to the number of nodes inside them, i.e. the first node there is a value of 1 which indicates that the first node can connect to exactly one node only.Can you do it?

A large container is kept in open under the rain. Every passing hour, the water collected inside the container becomes double what it was.

In ten hours, the container is filled completely. Can you calculate how long would it have taken to be filled in half?

I am a three digit number.
My tens digit is five more than my ones digit.
My hundreds digit is eight less than my tens digit.
What number am I?

Which country gets ill every time?