2006 in review

Key international events of the year gone by

Brought to you by in part by iafrica.com (http://iafrica.com/news/features/519415.htm ) on Tue, 12 Dec 2006. This was a fabulous synopsis pf the years events with some of my own commentary. The highlights are to help guide you, and the articles are to explain the top stories that are dying for more explanation. Enjoy your history lesson with the events that made headlines throughout 2006.

JANUARY

• Russia sends shivers through Europe by reducing supplies of natural gas to Ukraine. 
•  At least 78 people die when roofs covered in heavy snow collapse in buildings in Germany and Poland. 
• Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon falls into a coma after a massive stroke; he fails to regain consciousness and is replaced by his deputy Ehud Olmert. 
• The hardline party Hamas enjoys a landslide election victory in the Palestinian territories. Western countries and Israel respond by cutting off aid to Hamas-led government.  http://www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/features/jan-june06/hamas_3-01.html 
•  Bird flu... need I elaborate?
• Crowd crush kills 360 plus in Hajj celebration in Saudi Arabia.
• Iran resumes nuclear research. Western countries believe is aimed at building a bomb. 
• Protests break out after a Pakistani air strike against a religious college near the Afghanistan border. The dealy strike was US-led. www.commondreams.org/headlines06/1031-02.htm
• The tone is set for the Year of Women: Michelle Bachelet, a socialist, becomes the first woman elected to the presidency of Chile. In Liberia, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf is sworn in as the first women president anywhere in Africa.
• The collapse of Livedoor, an internet firm, rocks the Tokyo stock market.
•  Washington says goodbye to Alan Greenspan, long-time head of the US Reserve Bank. Ben Bernanke is confirmed as his replacement.
• The music world marks the 250th anniversary of the birth of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
• New Orleans Mayor Ray Nugin urges residents to rebuild a "Chocolate New Orleans."

FEBRUARY

• Denmark faces a rising storm of criticism in the Islamic world for newspaper cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed. Danish interests are attacked in several countries.
• Some 1000 passengers of a ferry, most of them Egyptians, die when the vessel sinks in the Red Sea.
• The widow of the US human rights leader Martin Luther King, Coretta Scott King, dies in the United States.
• The 20th Winter Olympic Games take place in and around the northern Italian city of Turin.
• US millionaire Steve Fossett sets a record by flying a plane all the way round the world without landing.
• The British government is embarrassed by video images showing troops in Iraq torturing local teenagers, while new images of violence against Iraqis in the Abu Ghraib prison also emerge. The United Nations calls for Abu Ghraib to be closed.
• Vice President Dick Cheney shoots a 78-year-old friend during a hunting expedition.
• Over 1000 people die when a landslide buries their village in the Philippines.
• At Samarra in Iraq, a bomb attack destroys the dome of one of the holiest Shiite Muslim shrines. The blast brings a huge increase in violence, which increasingly resembles a civil war.
• France is in shock after a young Jewish man is found to have been sequestered and tortured to death over several weeks by an exortion gang.
• Fifty-six people die when the snow-laden roof of a food market collapses in Moscow.
• In England, an armed gang steals a record 53 million pounds (78 million euros) from a security depot.
• The US city of New Orleans holds the first of its traditional Mardi Gras parades since a hurricane spread devastation in August 2005.

MARCH

• President George W. Bush signs a deal to sell nuclear technology India, then goes on to Pakistan, where his visit coincides with a flare up of violence by Taliban forces.
• The United States says it plans to develop a new generation of nuclear weapons.
• 'Crash', a low-budget racial drama, wins the Oscar for the best picture at the US Academy awards.
• The US state of South Dakota introduces a near-total ban on abortions.
• The European Union lifts a nearly 10-year-old ban on British beef.
• Citing fears of terrorism, the US Congress refuses to allow a company based in the United Arab Emirates to take over a firm that controls many American ports.
• France is shaken by mass youth demonstrations against a new short-term labour contract. It is later withdrawn.
• Former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic, on trial for war crimes, dies in his jail cell before a verdict can be given.
• Alexander Lukashenko, the president of Belarus, is re-elected with over 81 percent of the vote. A protest movement against him fizzles out after police move in.
• A former rebel leader from the Democratic Republic of Congo becomes the first person to appear before the new International Criminal Court on war crimes charges.
• The Basque separatist group ETA announces a permanent ceasefire in its armed struggle against the Spanish state.
• Nigeria hands over the former Liberian president and warlord Charles Taylor to a special tribunal in Sierra Leone, where he is to go on trial for war crimes.

APRIL

• A centre-left coalition in Italy ousts the government of Silvio Berlusconi in parliamentary elections.
• Chinese President Hu Jintao makes his first official visit to the United States, and follows up with a tour of Africa.
• Queen Elizabeth II of Britain turns 80.
• Jawad al-Maliki becomes Iraq's new prime minister.
• John Kenneth Galbraith, one of the most influential economists of the 20th century, dies aged 97.

MAY

• Bolivian President Evo Morales issues a decree nationalizing his country's abundant oil and natural gas resources.
• Around a million people, mainly Spanish-speakers, rally around the United States to demand better rights for immigrants.
• A US federal court decides that Zacarias Moussaoui, linked to the planning of the September 11, 2001 attacks, will not be executed but instead face life in jail. 
• Violence increases sharply in Somalia, where an Islamic movement is battling US-backed militia groups. 
• President George W. Bush faces heat when it emerges that the government has been secretly archiving the telephone records of tens of millions of citizens.
• Over 170 people die in coordinated attacks by gangs in the Brazilian city of Sao Paolo.
• The United States restores diplomatic relations with Libya, and takes the oil-rich country off its list of states supporting terrorism.
• Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born member of the Dutch parliament and critic of Islam, decides to move to the United States after conflict over her immigration status.
• China completes its massive Three Gorges hydroelectric dam.
• The small Balkan republic of Montenegro votes to cut its remaining links with Serbia and become fully independent.
• Australia and Portugal agree to send forces to quell violence between government troops and rebel soldiers in East Timor.
• A massive earthquake kills some 5800 people on Indonesia's main island of Java.
• Pope Benedict XVI, visits the former Nazi death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland.
• British director Ken Loach takes the main prize at the Cannes Film Festival for a movie on the Irish independence struggle.
• Alvaro Uribe wins a second term as president of Colombia.

JUNE

• In one of a series of attacks on coastal oil installations in Nigeria, militants seeking a larger share of income for their region abduct and then release eight foreign workers.
• Italy says it will pull its troops out of Iraq by the year's end.
• US and Iraqi officials say their forces have killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, head of the feared al-Qaeda in Iraq group.
• Anti-NATO protesters in Ukraine prevent US soldiers from starting joint military exercises in the country. 
• President George W. Bush pays a brief unannounced visit to Iraq, where violence is killing hundreds of civilians every week. A few days later the US military death toll in the war goes over 2,500.
• Royals from around the world attend lavish 60th birthday celebrations for King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand.
• The prosecutor of the International Criminal Court says his office has documented major massacres and rapes during the conflict in Sudan's Darfur region.
• Scientists say polar bears are threatened with extinction because global warming is causing the Arctic ice cap to melt.
• Violence increases in Sri Lanka, with bombings and both land and sea battles.
• Russia says it has killed the hardline Chechen independence leader Abdul-Khalim Saidullayev.
• Countries in favour of hunting whales win a key vote at the International Whaling Commission.
• A painting by Gustav Klimt fetches a record $135-million at auction.
• Former Liberian president Charles Taylor is taken to The Hague where he is to face trial on war crimes charges.
• Japan pulls its small troop contingent out of Iraq.
• Palestinian militants kill two Israeli soldiers and abduct a third in an attack on a border post. Israel hits back with a massive incursion during which it knocks out the territory's only power station and abducts leading members of the ruling Hamas movement.
• Kuwait holds parliamentary elections in which women are allowed to vote for the first time.
• The US Supreme Court says President Bush overstepped his powers by creating special military courts for terrorism suspects.

JULY

• Conservative candidate Felipe Calderon is declared the winner of a presidential election in Mexico. His leftist opponent Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador says the vote was fraudulent, and unsuccessfully demands a recount.
• A US veteran of the Iraq war is charged with raping a young Iraqi girl and killing her and her family.
• Forty-one people die when a metro train derails in the Spanish city of Valencia.
• North Korea test-fires several missiles, including one which could potentially reach US soil.
• Italy wins the World Cup, beating France in the final match. French star Zinedine Zidane is sent off for head-butting an Italian player.
• Russia says its forces have killed Shamil Basayev, the Chechen rebel leader who took responsibility for the 2004 Beslan school hostage massacre.
• Bomb blasts on commuter trains kill 140 people in India's financial capital of Mumbai.
• Isreal-Lebanon Conflict. Guerrillas of the Lebanese militia movement Hezbollah capture two Israeli soldiers in a raid over the border. The incident sparks a 34-day war that kills at least 1300 people dead in Lebanon and 158 in Israel, and causes massive destruction in Lebanon.
• G-8 Summit held in the Russian city of Saint Petersburg. The event is dominated by the war in Lebanon.
• Cambodia prepares to try surviving former leaders of the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime, but one of the most important ones dies before proceedings can begin.
• World Trade Organisation talks in Geneva collapse in acrimony.
• A tropical storm in China kills over 600 people. 
• Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice says the war in Lebanon can help create a new Middle East. 
• Israel bombs an oil-fired power station on the Lebanese coast, causing an environmental disaster in the Mediterranean.
• The people of the Democratic Republic of the Congo vote in a presidential election. The two-round process ends in November, with a victory for the incumbent.
• Fidel Castro, Cuba's leader of 47 years, hands over power to his brother Raul to undergo intestinal surgery.

AUGUST

• US film star Mel Gibson apologizes for making anti-Semitic remarks while being arrested for drunken driving.
• The United States sends troop reinforcements into Baghdad in a vain attempt to stem massive violence in the city.
• Flash floods kill hundreds of people in Ethiopia.
• Oil prices jump when the British oil company BP shuts down a key pipeline in Alaska for long-term repairs.
• Britain announces that it has prevented "mass murder" by thwarting terror attacks on planes headed for the United States. More travel restrictions ensue.
• On August 14, Israel complies with a UN Security Council resolution to end the war in Lebanon. In the final days of the conflict, it drops large quantities of cluster bombs on the country, which continue to maim and kill through the rest of the year. Hezbollah claims a "divine victory".
• John Michael Carr is arrested in Thailand, claiming to be the killer of a child beauty queen murdered in Colorado in 1996. The story turns out to be untrue.
• UN plans to "beef-up" forces in south Lebanon. Italy and Fance commit support.
• An international AIDS conference in Canada ends in recriminations.
• 170 people die when a Russian airliner crashes in Ukraine.
• A special Iraqi tribunal begins a new case against former leader Saddam Hussein, on charges of genocide against the country's Kurdish population.
• Scientists overturn decades of school astronomy lessons by decreeing that distant Pluto is not in fact a planet.
• A teenage Austrian girl found wandering in her town near Vienna turns out to have been held captive in a basement for eight years. Her captor commits suicide.
• In one of many deadly incidents involving illegal immigrants seeking to cross by sea from Africa to Europe, dozens of people are feared dead after 14 bodies wash ashore in Mauritania.
• Amid continuing carnage caused by Israeli raids on the Gaza Strip, two western journalists are held hostage by militants there for two weeks. Palestinians continue to fire home-made rockets into Israeli.
• The Ugandan government reaches a truce agreement with the rebels of the Lord's Resistance Army. 
• New Orleans marks the first anniversary of the hurricane that has left most of it in ruins.
• At least 10 people die and hundreds fall ill when toxic waste from a cargo ship is dumped in various areas around the Ivory Coast city of Abidjan, in Ivory Coast. 
• California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger announces an agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the state.
• Norwegian art officials say they have recovered Edvard Munch's painting 'The Scream', stolen in 2004.

SEPTEMBER

• NATO says it has launched a major new military offensive against Taliban forces in southern Afghanistan, where Canadian and British soldiers take significant losses.
• Meanwhile Afghanistan's opium production has jumped by 50 percent.
• Japan's Princess Kiko gives birth to the royal family's first boy in more than 40 years, bringing sighs of relief from traditionalists. He is named Hisahito, or "serene one".
• The United States marks the fifth anniversary of the attacks of September 11, 2001.
• Representatives from more than 100 developing nations hold a summit of the Non-Aligned Movement in the Cuban capital Havana.
• Muslims around the world express anger after Catholic leader Pope Benedict XVI quotes a medieval text linking Islam with violence. The head of the Roman Catholic Church says he regrets causing offence, but does not apologise.
• The US shuttle Atlantis makes a successful visit to the International Space Station, while an Iranian-American becomes the first woman space tourist, aboard a Russian craft.
• A centre-right government is formed after elections in Sweden, but two of its ministers soon have to resign over financial scandals.
• Shinzo Abe is appointed prime minister of Japan, replacing Junichiro Koizumi.
• Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra of Thailand is overthrown in a bloodless coup.
• At the UN General Assembly in New York, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez calls US president George W. Bush "the devil".
• Protesters in Hungary demand the resignation of Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany, who has admitted lying about the economy. (Pres. Bush admitted to lying about more than just money... hmm)
• President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan says the United States threatened to bomb his country "back to the Stone Age" if it failed to support the "war on terror" after the September 11, 2001 attacks.
• Hezbollah chief Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah makes his first public appearance since the war with Israel, holding a huge "victory" rally in Beirut.
• The start of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan brings even more violence in Iraq, where it has become routine to find dozens of dead and tortured bodies every day.
• The British Labour Party holds its annual conference. Prime Minister Tony Blair promises to hand the party over to a successor, expected to be Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, within a year.
• In China, Shanghai's top Communist Party leader is sacked over a major corruption scandal. 

OCTOBER

• Tension rises between Russia and its much smaller neighbour Georgia, after Georgia arrests four Russians whom it accuses of spying.
• Israel completes its military withdrawal from southern Lebanon, but continues overflights.
• South Korean Foreign Minister Ban Ki-Moon is elected to be the next secretary general of the United Nations, to take over on January 1.
• Five girls are killed in Pennsylvania Amish school shooting in the US.
• A sex scandal involving top congressman Mark Foley causes embarrassment for the US Republican Party, weeks ahead of mid-term elections.
• The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation takes formal control of all the western forces fighting the resurgent Taliban movement in Afghanistan.
• Anna Politkovskaya, a Russian journalist known for her coverage of atrocities in Chechnya, is found murdered in Moscow.
• An Islamist movement which has fought its way to power in most of Somalia accuses neighbouring Ethiopia of mounting an invasion.
• North Korea carries out a test explosion of what it says is a nuclear weapon, bringing outraged reactions from around the world.
• The search engine company Google spends a $1.65-billion to buy the YouTube video-sharing website.
• A respected British medical journal publishes a study which concludes that some 655,000 Iraqi civilians have died due to the US-led invasion of March 2003.
• The Nobel Peace Prize ia awarded to Muhammad Yunus, a promoter of small loans in poor countries. Most of the science-based Nobels go to US researchers.
• The head of the British army says his country's presence in Iraq is causing more problems than it is resolving.
• US President George W. Bush signs into law an act legalising secret prisons, relaxing limits on torture and removing the protections of the Geneva Conventions from certain detainees.
• The Dow Jones Industrial Average index reaches a record high of over 12 000 points.
• Voters in Panama approve a proposal to widen the canal which crosses their country, linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
• A United Nations envoy is expelled from Sudan for published remarks critical of its policy in the war-torn region of Darfur. Fighting increases in Chad, the country which borders Darfur to the west.
• Kazakhstan reacts first with irritation then with resigned humour to a filmed spoof by the British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen. The jokes in the film, 'Borat', turn out to be mostly at the expense of Americans, who nevertheless lap it up at the box-office.
• President George W. Bush signs a law calling for the building of "The Great Wall of Mexico", an anti-immigrant fence along the US-Mexico border.
• The Israeli government takes a sharp turn to the right by bringing on board an ultra-nationalist Russian politician Arkady Gaydamak, owner of the Jerusalem's Beitar soccer club. Gaydamak has a "shady" reputation. http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_id=8058481
• Political and social unrest worsens in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. www.theepochtimes.com/news/6-8-25/45299.html
• The apartheid-era leader of white South Africa, PW Botha, dies at age 90.

NOVEMBER

• California Congresswoman Nancy Polosi is selected to serve as the next US Speaker of the House making her three steps from the Presidency. She will be the first woman in history to hold the position.
• Trade unions from around the world set up a world federation to represent their interests.
• A report says Britain is becoming a "surveillance society", due to the omnipresence of closed-circuit TV cameras in public places.
• Venezuela fails in its bid to win a seat on the UN Security Council, in defiance of the United States. The seat goes to Panama.
• Hoping for trade and energy supplies, China for the first time hosts a major gathering of African leaders.
• Scientists say overfishing could make seafood a thing of the past for most of the world's people by the middle of the century.
• A tribunal in US-occupied Iraq sentenced the country's former leader, Saddam Hussein, to death. US officials deny that the verdict has been deliberately timed to fall two days before mid-term elections in the United States.
• Former revolutionary leader Daniel Ortega wins a presidential election in Nicaragua.
• Vietnam becomes the latest country to join the World Trade Organisation.
• In the US mid-term elections the Democratic Party regains control of both houses of Congress, dealing a major setback to the Republicans.
• President George W. Bush fires his defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, seen as the main architect of the war in Iraq.
• A top judge in China set strict limits on use of the death penalty, applied in thousands of cases each year.
• Margaret Chan of China is elected head of the UN World Health Organisation.
• President George W. Bush is among Asia-Pacific leaders to attend a summit in Vietnam.
• Joseph Kabila, the outgoing president of the Democratic Republic of Congo, emerges as the winner of the vast country's first free presidential elections.
• A mass kidnapping of officials from a government ministry in Baghdad highlights the fast-declining influence of Iraq's US-backed government.
• Segolene Royal becomes the first woman with a chance of winning the French presidency, as she is selected as the Socialist Party's candidate.
• The Dutch government says it plans to ban the wearing of veils, such as those worn by many Muslim women, in public places.
• Chinese president Hu Jintao visits India, and later goes on to its arch-rival Pakistan.
• Plans to publish a book by OJ Simpson, in which he writes about how he might have murdered his wife if he had actually done so, collapse amid anger from his late spouse's relatives.
• Iran, Syria and Iraq announce plans to work together on ending the mayhem in Iraq.
• UN Secretary General Kofi Annan says the United States is trapped in the country, and the world body says over 3700 Iraqi civilians died in the month of October.
• A former Russian spy dies after being poisoned with a radioactive substance in London.
• Rwanda severs diplomatic ties with France amid a legal spat over events leading up to the Rwandan genocide in 1994.
• Rafael Correa, an anti-US leftist, wins a presidential election in Ecuador.
• Iraqi President Jalal Talabani visits Tehran, and his Iranian opposite number calls for US troops to leave Iraq.
• Pope Benedict XVI, head of the Roman Catholic Church, makes a visit to predominantly Muslim Turkey.
• South Africa becomes the first African country to legalise gay marriage.

DECEMBER

• The world marks international AIDS day, with almost 40 million people infected with the virus that causes it.
• The US dollar falls sharply amid fears for the US economy.
• Almost 500 people are dead or missing in a landslide in the Philippines.
• The last Italian troops pull out of Iraq.
• Former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet dies.