2010
Disaster hits Haiti
On January 12 a devastating magnitude-7.0 earthquake struck Haiti, the worst in the region in more than 200 years. The Haitian government estimated more than 316,000 people died and over 1-million were displaced.
WikiLeaks shakes the world — again
In April WikiLeaks published video footage from a 2007 US Apache helicopter attack in Baghdad that killed at least nine men. A voice on the transmission urges the pilots to “light ’em all up” and individuals on the street are fired at from the helicopter.
In November more than 250,000 classified cables between the US state department and its embassies around the world went online, revealing: that the US had conducted secret drone strikes in Yemen; details of US efforts to get information on UN representatives; a push by Saudi Arabia’s royal family to have the US strike Iran; and a description of Russia under Vladimir Putin as a “virtual mafia state”.
2011
Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster
On March 11 a large region of Japan’s northeastern coast was shaken for three minutes by a magnitude-9.0 earthquake. The movement was so severe that the country moved a few metres east, the local coastline dropped, and it triggered a 15m tsunami. More than 19,000 people were killed. Whole villages disappeared and a million buildings were destroyed or partly collapsed.
The natural disaster also triggered a man-made catastrophe, the meltdown of three reactors at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi power plant, the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl in 1986. Tens of thousands were evacuated from a 20km area around the nuclear site.
Arab Spring
On the morning of December 17 2010, 26-year-old Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi set himself alight in the dusty provincial town of Sidi Bouzid in protest at the seizing of his vegetable stand by police for failing to have a permit. He had refused to pay a bribe and had been slapped by a policewoman. The outraged reaction at his desperate suicide sparked a popular revolt.
Tunisia’s dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was forced to flee to Saudi Arabia and this triggered the Arab Spring, a surge of pro-democracy uprisings in Muslim countries across North Africa and the Middle East. Social media became an effective tool for activists to mobilise demonstrators.
In Egypt, Cairo’s Tahrir Square was the site of 18 days of protests that forced president Hosni Mubarak out of office.
The Arab Spring brought down governments, but ushered in an era of political chaos and instability in Egypt. Libya and Syria descended into civil war.
Death of Osama bin Laden
On May 2 2011, US special forces raided an al-Qaeda compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, and killed the world’s most wanted terrorist. The September 11 mastermind had managed to evade US retribution for a decade. The entire operation lasted only 40 minutes and the US buried bin Laden’s body at sea within 24 hours to comply with Islamic law.
Norway attacks
On July 22 a right-wing extremist carried out two terrorist attacks, killing 77 people. Lone-wolf assailant Anders Behring Breivik killed eight people by detonating a fertiliser bomb in the centre of Oslo near the prime minister’s offices. Then he shot 69 youngsters at summer camp on the island of Utøya attended by 650 teenagers. Some of the victims drowned while trying to swim to safety.
His manifesto blamed feminism for a European “cultural suicide” and called for all Muslims to be deported from the continent.
Death of Muammar Gaddafi
In Libya, the Arab Spring led to a violent civil war and the execution of Muammar Gaddafi in October. Brother Leader had ruled Libya with an iron fist for 42 years, the longest-serving leader in both Africa and the Arab world.
Video footage recorded Gaddafi’s humiliating and gruesome end. Africa’s self-styled “king of kings” was dragged through the streets bloody and pleading for his life. His desecrated corpse was dumped in an ambulance, then stored on the floor of a restaurant freezer.
2012
Hell comes to Syria
President Bashar al-Assad retaliated against peaceful Arab Spring protests with brutal force. By 2012 the conflict had escalated into a full-scale civil war that so far has left more than 350,000 people dead and 11-million displaced. The Syrian regime has been accused of the repeated use of chemical weapons against civilians.
Islamic State extremists capitalised on the mayhem to push for a caliphate across Iraq, Syria and beyond, carrying out public executions, crucifixions and the rape of women they regarded as “nonhuman”.
Black Lives Matter
Seventeen-year-old black US teen Trayvon Martin was on his way to buy snacks when he was shot and killed in Florida in the US by a white neighbourhood watch volunteer. George Zimmerman, a 28-year-old former altar boy, claimed he shot Martin in self-defence during a confrontation.
Florida police did not arrest Zimmerman for six weeks after the shooting, provoking mass rallies in Florida and throughout the US. The Black Lives Matter movement took off the following year after Zimmerman was acquitted.
Malala Yousafzai is shot
On October 9, 15-year-old Malala Yousafzai was shot in the head by a Taliban gunman while riding on a school bus in Swat Valley, Pakistan. She had spoken up for the right of girls to be educated.
She was left deaf in one ear and the left side of her face was badly damaged. Yousafzai became a global ambassador for female education, and in 2014 the youngest Nobel laureate when she was named joint winner of the peace prize at the age of 17.
2014
Ebola surges
On December 26 2013 a two-year-old boy in the remote Guinean village of Meliandou fell ill with a mysterious illness characterised by fever, black stools and vomiting. He died two days later.
Following the young boy’s death, the disease spread undetected, causing several chains of deadly transmission. Later the two-year-old was identified as West Africa’s first case of Ebola. As the disease spread, terrifying images of health workers covered from head to toe in protective clothing caring for pitiful victims shook the world. More than 11,000 people would die of the virus worldwide, the deadliest outbreak since its discovery in 1976.
Israel–Gaza conflict
Israel killed more Palestinian civilians in 2014 than in any other year since the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip began in 1967.
Tensions heightened after the abduction and murder of Mohammed Abu Khdeir, which led to daily riots and protests in East Jerusalem. Khdeir, a 16-year-old Palestinian, was kidnapped and killed in July, after the abduction and murder of three Israeli teenagers the previous month.
Israel launched a military operation. More than 2,200 Palestinians were killed in the 50-day conflict, 1,400 of them civilians. Israel lost 67 soldiers and six civilians. Israel carried out more than 6,000 airstrikes and 511 Palestinian children were among the dead.
The rise of Islamic State
On June 29, Islamic State (IS) leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi announced the formation of a caliphate under sharia law stretching from Aleppo in Syria to Diyala in Iraq. By mid-2014 IS was at the height of its powers, the most powerful and wealthy jihadi force ever seen.
The extremist group controlled oilfields and refineries, vast grain stores, lucrative smuggling routes and stockpiles of arms and ammunition, as well as entire parks of powerful modern military hardware. Its economic capital was Mosul, Iraq.
The jihadists committed heinous acts of violence, including public executions, rapes, beheadings, and crucifixions, posting videos of them online.
Boko Haram atrocities
In April Boko Haram, a militant Islamic group in northern Nigeria, kidnapped 276 girls from a Chibok boarding school. Some of the girls escaped and spoke about their ordeal. Said one: “They told us whosoever cries or begs for them not to be slaughtered will be slaughtered along with them.”
One schoolgirl was locked in a cage for four months, and forced to “marry” a soldier.
Boko Haram means “Western education is forbidden” in the local Hausa dialect.
The kidnapping of the Chibok schoolgirls sparked global outrage and a #BringBackOurGirls campaign on social media.
Ferguson riots
Two years after the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin, yet another white US police officer was absolved of killing an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, in August in Ferguson, Missouri.
The shooting sparked protests that went on for weeks. After three months of deliberation a grand jury decided not to indict Darren Wilson.
Demonstrators poured onto the streets of dozens of US cities in protest. In New York, rush-hour traffic was brought to a standstill and hundreds of people gathered outside CNN’s headquarters in Atlanta.
2015
Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris
On January 7 two masked gunmen forced their way into the Paris offices of the French satirical weekly magazine Charlie Hebdo, killing 12 people.
The attackers wanted to avenge what they believed was the magazine’s mocking of the Prophet Muhammad. Among the victims were the editor-in-chief, prominent cartoonists and police officers. The attack was among the deadliest in postwar France.
A second series of attacks, carried out by a third assailant who had pledged allegiance to IS, were later found to be related. Thousands took to the streets of Paris, holding signs proclaiming Je suis Charlie (I am Charlie) to express solidarity.
European refugee crisis
A heartbreaking photograph of a drowned Syrian toddler helped bring Europe’s refugee crisis into the global spotlight. Nearly 1-million refugees and migrants arrived on Europe’s shores in 2015 at the peak of the crisis.
Those who made it faced further misery, chaos at border crossings and train stations, and squalid conditions in makeshift refugee camps
The world’s biggest refugee crisis since World War 2 was sparked by those fleeing conflict and persecution in Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq. Thousands did not make it. In April the number of deaths at sea rose to record levels when five boats carrying almost 2,000 migrants sank in the Mediterranean, with a death toll of more than 1,200 people.
The flood of migrants caused political rifts within the EU, with some states inside the border-free Schengen area putting up fences and reimposing frontier controls.
2016
Brexit
In a referendum held in June 2016, 51.9% of UK voters opted to leave the EU. After three years of political wrangling, Britain this week gave Prime Minister Boris Johnson an overwhelming mandate to move forward with the divorce from Europe with the slogan “Get Brexit done”. Johnson — fired from his first job as a journalist for making up quotes — has said he will get the country out of the EU by the end of January.
Election of Donald Trump
Bucking predictions, reality-TV star and real-estate tycoon Donald Trump was elected president of the US with promises to build a wall along the Mexican border and crack down on illegal immigrants.
In the wake of his television fame, licensed Trump products have included board games, steaks, cologne, vodka, furniture and menswear.
2017
Rohingya refugee crisis
Facing persecution, statelessness and violence in Rakhine state, Myanmar, the Rohingya have for years been forced to flee to neighbouring Bangladesh and other countries.
In 2017, the crisis exploded. As at March 2019, over 909,000 stateless Rohingya refugees live in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, where they have been denied official refugee status.
More than 630,000 Rohingya — an ethnic minority considered the most persecuted in the world — live in Kutupalong, the world’s largest refugee camp.
End of Mugabe
Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s ruler since independence in 1980, resigned as president shortly after lawmakers began impeachment proceedings against him.
Mugabe’s ruinous rule had trashed the economy, and his deeply unpopular wife, Grace, was plotting to position herself as her husband’s successor.
The first lady had been nicknamed the First Shopper and the Mugabe sons kept boasting about bottles of champagne that cost more than the salary of the average worker. Mugabe himself had once proclaimed that “only God will remove me”.
Lawmakers erupted into cheers, and jubilant residents poured into the streets of Harare after the announcement that he would step down.
Harvey Weinstein and the #MeToo movement
When countless women came forward with tales of sexual assault at the hands of Hollywood movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, his outrageous behaviour and sense of entitlement gave impetus to the #MeToo movement.
As more and more allegations — ranging from harassment to rape and spanning decades — came forth from more than 80 women, many women around the world shared their stories of abuse on social media and the #MeToo hashtag went viral.
2018
Murder of Jamal Khashoggi
On October 2, journalist Jamal Khashoggi visited the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, seeking to complete the paperwork he needed to marry his fiancée. He never left the building and it later emerged that Khashoggi, a prominent critic of the Saudi government, had been murdered and dismembered.
The murder plot was carried out by 15 agents of the Saudi Arabian government. His gruesome death and the brazen way in which it had been executed led to an outcry around the globe. A UN investigation found there was “sufficient” and “credible” evidence linking Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to the murder.
Climate crisis
In October the UN released a report stating that the world may have as little as 12 years to prevent irreversible damage from climate change. This, coupled with the fiery activism of 15-year-old Greta Thunberg, a Swedish teenager who began a school strike for climate action in August 2018 outside the Swedish parliament, prompted massive climate strikes around the world.
As the planet warms and the climate changes, the past few years have seen major wildfires around the world, from the Amazon rainforest and Siberia to Knysna, the Canary Islands, Greece, Bolivia, Greenland, Alaska, California and Western Canada.
This week Thunberg was named Time magazine’s Person of the Year for 2019, prompting her No 1 critic, US President Donald Trump, to tweet: “So ridiculous. Greta must work on her Anger Management problem, then go to a good old-fashioned movie with a friend! Chill Greta, Chill!”
Thunberg’s response was to change her Twitter bio, which now reads: “A teenager working on her anger management problem. Currently chilling and watching a good old-fashioned movie with a friend.”
2019
Hong Kong protests
In June massive protests began in Hong Kong against a proposal to allow extradition to mainland China. After Hong Kong authorities backed down and the controversial bill was withdrawn in September, protesters demanded democracy and an inquiry into police actions.
Clashes between police and activists have become increasingly violent, with police firing live bullets and protesters attacking officers and throwing petrol bombs. A journalist observed: “The young demonstrators … are risking everything for a tomorrow that almost certainly won’t come: a Hong Kong that cleaves greater freedom from the Chinese Communist Party.”
SOURCES: The New York Times, The Guardian, msn.com, usatoday.com
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