Attachment #5: Key Dates in World History: The 21st C, 2000 to present

• 2000: The global population reaches 6.1 billion, but is not divided equally by hemisphere.  Although the Earth’s hemispheres are equal in geographic size, the Earth’s population is not divided similarly. Roughly 90% of Earth’s human population lives in the Northern Hemisphere, which also accounts for most of the planet’s landmass. The Northern Hemisphere is made up of 39% land(the rest is ocean)and also contains many of the world’s most-populated cities, while the Southern Hemisphere is only 19% land. Also over half of the world’s population lives on a single continent. It’s estimated that 60% of Earth’s population (4.7 billion people) lives in Asia. Made up of 48 countries, Asia is also home to the two most populous nations in the world, China and India. China is estimated to currently have 1.44 billion people living in the country (and dropping rapidly), while India is not far behind with an estimated 1.40 billion residents. Together, the two countries account for over half of Asia’s total population (See “1700”, “1800”, “1900”, “1975” and “2022, Nov”)

• 2000, March: Putin is elected President of Russia in what his biographer Steven Myers said “would be the last election in Russia that could still arguably be called democratic.”

• 2000, March: The dot.com bubble burst. Between 1995 and its peak in March 2000 investments in the NASDAQ composite stock market index rose 800%, but gave up all its gains during the bubble. The period reflected massive growth in internet adoption, a proliferation of available venture capital, and the rapid growth of valuations in new dot.com startups. Between 1990 and 1997 the percent of households in the US owning computers increased from 15% to 35%, all using web browsers, and they need access to the World Wide Web

• 2000, June: The Clarity Act is passed by the Canadian Parliamentthat established the conditions under which the Government of Canada would enter into negotiations that might lead to secession following such a vote by one of the provinces. (It was known as Bill C-20 before it became law.) The motivation behind the act was largely based on the near separation vote of the 1995 Quebec referendum, in which the people of Quebec voted against the sovereignty option by a small margin (50.58% to 49.42%). Controversy surrounded the ambiguity and wording of the ballot question. Former Prime Minister Chrétien has often stated that the act was among his proudest achievements in federal politics (See “1995, Oct” and “1998, Aug”) 

• 2000, June: Canada enacted the Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act, becoming the first country in the world to adopt comprehensive legislation implementing the Rome Statute. The Act officially criminalizes genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes based on customary and conventional international law, including the Rome Statute. Defining these crimes in Canadian law allows Canada to take advantage of the complementarity provisions under the Rome Statute (See “2002, July”)

• 2000, July: The 2000 Camp David Summit, between the US, Israel and the Palestine Authority, ended without an agreement, largely due to irreconcilable differences between Israelis and Palestinians on the status of Jerusalem. (The three leaders were US president Bill Clinton, Israel PM Ehud Barak, and chairman of the Palestine Authority, Yassar Arafat.) Its failure is considered one of the main triggers of a major uprising by Palestinians against the Israeli occupation, characterized by a period of heightened violence in the Palestinian territories and Israel between 2000 and 2005 (called the Second Intifada) (See “2023, Oct 6”)

• 2000, Oct: Al-Qaeda rammed a small boat filled with explosives into the destroyer USS Cole as it was refuelling in the port of Aden, Yeman, killing 17 US Navy personnel (See “1998, Aug” and “Sept 11, 2001”)

• 2000, Nov: Ralph Nader’s candidacy helped make Republican George W. Bush president. Nader was trying to do damage to the Democratic Party and he succeeded. Plus Bush lost the popular vote but won. Nader-voters who spurned Democrat Al Gore to vote for Nader ended up swinging both Florida and New Hampshire to Bush. Bush, who lost the popular vote (Gore won the popular vote by about half a million votes), won in the Electoral College. Nader, running as the Green Party nominee, cost Al Gore both states, either of which would have given the vice president (Gore) a victory. In Florida, which George W. Bush carried by 537 votes, Nader received nearly 100,000 votes (nearly 200 times the size of Bush’s Florida ‘win’). In New Hampshire, which Bush won by 7,211 votes, Nader pulled in more than 22,000 (three times the size of Bush’s ‘win’ in that state).” If either of those two states had gone instead to Gore, we would never have had a US President George W. Bush (like Perot did for Clinton in 1992.)  (Robert F, Kennedy Jr. running as an independent in 2024 is more complicated; we’ll watch which presidential candidate suffers the most as the race unfolds. Independent – once Green Party –  presidential hopeful Cornel West will likely have a minimal impact.) (See “2024, March”)

• 2001, Jan: The creation of Wikipedia, paved the way for collective web content generation. This free-content online encyclopedia is written and maintained by a community of volunteers. It began as a side-project of Nupedia, to allow collaboration on articles prior to entering the peer-review process. The name was suggested as a portmanteau of the words wiki (Hawaiian for “quick”) and encyclopedia. Wikipedia’s Main Page is viewed about 4.7 million times daily (Source: Wikipedia)

• 2001, April: The Netherlands became the first country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage. (Canada became the first non-European country to legally recognize same-sex marriage at the national level. (See “2005, July”)

• 2001, May: The African Union (AU), a continental union consisting of 55 member states located on the continent of Africa, was founded. The African Union has more than 1.3 billion people and an area of around 30 million km² (12 million sq mi) and includes world landmarks, such as the Sahara and the Nile. The primary working languages are Arabic, English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swahili. Barack Obama was the first-ever sitting US president to speak in front of the African Union in 2015. With his speech, he encouraged the world to increase economic ties via investments and trade with the continent but he criticized a lack of democracy and leaders who refuse to step down, discrimination against minorities (including LGBT people, religious groups and ethnicities) and corruption. He suggested an intensified democratization and free trade, to significantly increase living quality for Africans. In Sept, 2023 the African Union was admitted as a member to the G20 (See “2023, Sept”)

• 2001, May: The Chisholm wildfire was the most intense fire ever measured anywhere on the earth. It took place in a sparsely inhabited place in central Alberta, about 200 miles south of Fort McMurray, where the air was warm and the soil very dry. At its peak the fire incinerated 200 square miles of forest in seven hours. Experts attempted to find a way to measure the impact and concluded that the energy released during the fire’s peak was calculated to be that of 17 one-megaton hydrogen bombs, or about four Hiroshima bombs per minute. The fire has set a precedent for the obliterating energy existing out there in the forest (See “2003, Jan” and “2016, May”)

• 2001, Sept 11: The terrorist attacks of 11 September (and the emergence of international terrorism). 19 militants associated with the Islamic extremist group al-Qaeda hijacked four airplanes and carried out suicide attacks against targets in the US. Two of the planes were flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, a third plane hit the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C., and the fourth plane crashed in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Almost 3,000 people were killed during the 9/11 terrorist attacks. After the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration undertook the task of remaking the world in America’s image, at gunpoint. The War on Terror was the New Cold War, the New New Deal. To express skepticism about this national mission – not even opposition, but merely skepticism – was to side with the terrorists.
• (Personal aside: Shortly after I arrived in New York City to work for Exxon in 1973 I was able to arrange a visit to the recently constructed World Trade Centre, before it was open to businesses moving in. I was provided a tour to the 80th floor in the South Tower, and took photographs of the open space, before office spaces were blocked out. My photos are spooky, upon reflection, considering the fact that the tower, and those surrounding it, no longer exists.)
• Bin Laden never anticipated that the US would go to war in response. He predicted that the American people would take to the streets, replicating the protests against the Vietnam war and calling upon their government to withdraw from Muslim-majority countries. Instead, Americans rallied behind President George W. Bush and his “war on terror”. When a US-led coalition invaded Afghanistan (October 2001) to hunt down al-Qaeda and dislodge the Taliban regime, which had hosted the terrorist group since 1996, bin Laden had no plan to secure his organization’s survival. The 9/11 attack turned out to be a Pyrrhic victory for al-Qaeda. The group shattered in the immediate aftermath of the Taliban regime’s collapse. The rest saught refuge in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan, an autonomous area bordering Afghanistan. Hiding became a way of life for them. For the rest of bin Laden’s life, the al-Qaeda organization never recovered the ability to launch attacks abroad (See “1998, Aug”, “2011, May” and “2014, March”)

• 2001, Oct: The US (plus the UK and Canada) invaded Afghanistan and toppled the Taliban government, but withdrew 20 years later. (In 2001, Afghanistan had been at war for over 20 years.) The invasion’s aims were to dismantle al-Qaeda, which had executed the September 11 attacks, and to deny it a safe base of operations in Afghanistan by removing the Taliban government from power. The US and its allies rapidly drove the Taliban from power by December 2001, and built military bases near major cities across the country. Canada took part in this US-led multinational campaign to invade Afghanistan, capture members of al-Qaeda, dismantle their training camps and overthrow the Taliban government. Most al-Qaeda and Taliban members were not captured, but escaped to neighbouring Pakistan. Everything the US built in Afghanistan was a sandcastle, leading to their withdrawal in 2021  (See “1979, Dec”, “1996, Sept-2001, Oct”, “2014, March” and “2021, Aug”)

• 2001, Dec: Enron Corporation bankruptcy shakes Wall Street. The implosion devastated a major US city, Houston, both economically and psychologically, plus it reached all the way to the president and vice president of the US. Enron’s founder, Ken Lay, was a longtime family friend of George W. Bush and major Republican donor. Bush and VP Dick Chaney ran in the same business and social circles as the Enron executives. The company became a symbol of modern corporate crime. Enron was one of the first big-name accounting scandals. It hid its mountains of debt and toxic assets from investors and creditors; its shares went from $90.75 at its peak to $0.26. Enron’s accounting firm, Arthur Andersen, was deeply disgraced by the scandal and dwindled into a holding company. Enron’s collapse led to new regulations and legislation including the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (2002, July) or the Public Company Accounting Reform and Investor Protection Act

• 2001, Dec: China joins the World Trade Organization (WTO); this has not led to what was hoped – a more democratic state. This was controversial and full of debate and negotiation as a result of the mismatch between the WTO framework and China’s economic model. For decades, the neoliberal project’s highest ambition was to take root in China. The People’s Republic had a potentially massive customer base, millions of low-paid workers, non-existing human rights and labour standards; its integration into the global economic system became seen as an unmissable financial opportunity. Their successful entry was, at the time, deeply symbolic of the country’s integration into a global order based on the rule of law. The fact that countries such as China and Russia (who joined the WTO in August 2012) were experiencing both economic growth and shrinking political freedom pointed to an ominous fact: economic growth, rather than being a force for democratic change in tyrannical states, can sometimes be used to strengthen oppressive regimes. Even though economic growth often led to increases in popular demand for political power, oppressive governments are growing more sophisticated in their ability to thwart these demands

• 2002, Feb-April: The entire Larsen B Ice Shelf in the Antarctic Peninsula splintered and collapsed. Scientists had never witnessed such a large area – 3,250 square kilometres, or 1,250 square miles – disintegrate so rapidly. The collapse of the Larsen appeared to have been due to a series of warm summers on the Antarctic Peninsula, which culminated with an exceptionally warm summer in 2002. Significant surface melting due to warm air temperatures created melt ponds that acted like wedges; they deepened the crevasses and eventually caused the shelf to splinter. Also warm ocean temperatures in the Weddell Sea that occurred during the same period might have caused thinning and melting on the underside of the ice shelf. As the surface melt ponds began to fracture the shelf, strong winds or waves might have flexed the shelf, helping to trigger a runaway break up. (Personal aside: on a trip to the Antarctic in January 2003, the sea and ice conditions were such that allowed our ship to approach the famous Elephant Island, where Shackleton famously left and 4 1/2 months later returned to rescue his men.) (See “1915, Nov”, “1916, Aug” and “2023, Dec”)

• 2002, April to present: Venezuela has seen one of the most dramatic economic contractions in human historymore so considering that this has been a man-made disaster, outside of a war zone (even if the statistics resemble a war zone). A failed coup d’état saw the president of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, ousted from office for 47 hours in 2002 before being restored to power (See “2022, Jan” and “2024, July”)

• 2002, May: East Timor achieved independence from Indonesia. The region had been a Portuguese colony up until 1975 when they were invaded by Indonesia under the pretext of anti-colonialism and anti-communism

• 2002, July: The International Criminal Court (ICC) was established and the Rome Statute entered into force. The Rome Statute established four core international crimes: (I) Genocide, (II) Crimes against humanity, (III) War crimes, and (IV) Crime of aggression. The establishment of an international rule of law and of an international criminal court was first recognized by the need to deal with atrocities of the kind prosecuted after World War II. However the Cold War made the establishment of an international criminal court politically unrealistic. Then two ad hoc tribunals were established in the early 1990s in response to the atrocities committed during the Yugoslav Wars and the Rwandan genocide. Fast forward to 1998 when the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court was adopted in the UN General Assembly by a vote of 120 to seven, with 21 countries abstaining. (The seven countries that voted against the treaty were China, Iraq, Israel, Libya, Qatar, the US, and Yeman.) Following 60 ratifications, the Rome Statute entered into force on July 1, 2002 and the ICC was formally established (See “2000, June”)

• 2002, Oct: A 3-day siege of a Moscow theatre ended by an opiate pumped into theatre. 130 died. The siege was originally blamed on Chechen terrorists. Strong subsequent evidence suggest the siege had been orchestrated by the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB) to vilify the Chechen rebels and burnish Putin’s strongman image

• 2002, Nov: The Department of Homeland Security in the US was created as a result of the 9/11 attacks. It is a cabinet responsible for preventing terror attacks, border security, immigration and customs, and disaster relief and prevention

• 2003, Jan: A tornado generated by a wildfire (a pyro-tornadogenesis) occurred just outside Canberra, Australia. It was rated an EF3 on the Enhanced Fujita Scale, with horizontal winds of 160 miles per hour, roughly equivalent to a Category 5 hurricane. It was the first documented example of its kind. But the Chisholm Fire, two years earlier in Alberta, Canada, had offered a preview (See “2001, May” and “2016, May”)

• 2003, Feb: The US Space Shuttle Columbia (STS-107) disintegrated as it reentered the atmosphere killing all seven astronauts on board. It was the second Space Shuttle mission to end in disaster, after the loss of Challenger and crew in 1986. Construction of the International Space Station (ISS) was paused until flights resumed in July 2005. Except for one mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope, subsequent Space Shuttle missions were flown only to the ISS to allow the crew to use it as a haven if damage to the orbiter prevented safe reentry; the remaining orbiters were retired after the ISS was finished (See “1986, Jan” and “1998, Nov”)

• 2003, Feb-2020, Aug: The Darfur genocide – the first genocide of the 21st century – in Sudan. The ethnic conflict in Sudan’s western Darfur region has been persistent, with racism at its roots. Darfur is split into two: those who claim Black “African” descent and primarily practice sedentary agriculture, and those who claim “Arab” descent and are mostly semi-nomadic livestock herders. The use of rape as a tool of genocide has been noted. This crime has been carried out by Sudanese government forces and the Janjaweed (“evil men on horseback”) paramilitary groups. (Janjaweed comprise Sudanese Arab tribes, the core of whom are from the camel herder background with significant recruitment from the cattle herder people. This is the same group – The Rapid Support Forces – that are now active in the April 2023 problems in Sudan.)  By 2015, it was estimated that the death toll stood between 100,000 and 400,000 (See “2011, July” and “2023, July”)

• 2003, March-April: The invasion of Iraq and the deposing of Saddam Hussein (the Second Persian Gulf War or the Iraq War). A combined force of troops from the US (led by president George W. Bush), the UK, Australia and Poland invaded Iraq and deposed the Ba’athist government of Saddam Hussein. He himself was captured in December, put-on trial for crimes against humanity, and hanged in 2006. The mission was to end Hussein’s support for terrorism, to free the Iraqi people and disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction (WMD)- none of which were found. It was followed by a longer second phase in which a US-led occupation of Iraq was opposed by an insurgency. After violence began to decline in 2007, the US gradually reduced its military presence in Iraq, formally completing its withdrawal in December 2011. One important criticism suggests that one needn’t invade a country whose actions were peripheral to the real threat, al-Qaeda. The reality is that Operation Iraqi Freedom instead produced a legacy of death and destruction that destabilized the region (See “1990, Aug-Dec”)

• 2003, March: Canada made a historic decision not to join the Iraq invasion. Canada’s PM, Jean Chretien, made a historic decision not to join the “coalition of the willing”. It became something more akin to a coalition of the duped, including the main-stream media that had bought the Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) hype (as it turned out the evidence was distorted, if not fabricated). Staying out of the Iraq decision has come to have defining-moment status in Canada’s foreign policy history. It is seen as a landmark statement of sovereignty for a country so long subordinate to one great power. The Chretien decision was opposed also by Britain (under Tony Blair as PM), the opposition leader Stephen Harper, as well as the business community. The current US president Biden supported the invasion; Germany under Chancellor Gerhard Schroder, did not 

• 2003, March: Hu Jintao was elected president of China by the National People’s Congress. He consolidated his power in September 2004 when he was named chair of the Central Military Commission (CMC) following President Jiang Zemin’s resignation. In November 2012 Hu stepped down as general secretary, and the party congress elected Xi Jinping to the office. Under Hu, China assumed an aggressive posture in world affairs and tightened grips on its domestic society and economy plus turned to the politics of containment. He began the bullying style of foreign policy that Xi subsequently followed (See “2012, Nov”)

• 2003, April: The Human Genome Project (HGP) was completed producing the first ever nearly complete sequence of an individual’s DNA. This was an international scientific research project with the goal of determining the base pairs that make up human DNA, and of identifying, mapping and sequencing all of the genes of the human genome from both a physical and a functional standpoint. It started in 1990 and was completed in 2003, and was one of the greatest scientific feats in history. They then recognized that having one map of a single human genome cannot adequately represent all of humanity. In 2022 a more complete version of an individual human genome was released. (The human genome consists of some 3.2 billion base pairs or genetic letters strung out along approximating two metres of DNA packed into nearly every human cell. While all people share approximately 99.9% of that DNA, it is the remaining .1% – the average genetic difference between individuals – that has the potential to reveal why health risks vary so widely across the human population.)

• 2003, June: The first court decision in the world to call for full and immediate marriage equality took place in Canada. The Court of Appeal for Ontario ruled that marriage rights must be extended to same-sex couples. The Court (in Halpern v Canada) found that the common law definition of marriage, which defined marriage as between one man and one woman, violated section 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In June 2005, the Civil Marriage Act,a federal statute legalizing same-sex marriage across Canada was passed. (It wasn’t until June 2015, did the US catch up.) (See “2001, April“ and “2005, July”) 

• 2003, Aug: Skype is created, and Voice over IP (VoIP) technology begins. The broader terms specifically refer to the provisioning of voice and other communications services (fax, SMS, voice messaging) over the Internet, rather than via the plain old telephone service (POTS). In May 2011, Microsoft bought Skype from eBay for $8.5 billion and used it to replace their Windows Live Messenger  

• 2003, Sept: North America’s first legal supervised consumption site opened in Vancouver. It is called Insite and is located in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. The facility operates under a Health Canada exemption from prosecution under federal drug laws. Insite operates on a harm-reduction model, which means it strives to decrease the adverse health, social and economic consequences of drug use without requiring abstinence from drug use. In 2020 the province was the first in Canada to prescribe opioids in a bid to steer users away from tainted street drugs. Despite these initiatives, the problems have grown. At the current rate, six British Colombians die each day from overdose, typically because of opioids laced with fentanyl

• 2003, Oct: Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a Russian businessman, oligarch, and opposition activist, was arrested by Russian authorities and charged with fraud. He was believed to be the wealthiest man in Russia, with a fortune estimated to be worth $15 billion. He dared confront then president Vladimir Putin, criticizing state corruption. He was convicted in two Kafka-esque trials, and imprisoned. Putin pardoned him, releasing him in 2013; he now lives in London. The once powerful oligarch is now an invisible hero for the growing opposition to Putin’s tyranny. In a 2010 op-ed for the New York Times, Khodorkovsky argued that “Russia must make a historic choice. Either we turn back from the dead end toward which we have been heading in recent years – and we do it soon – or else we continue in this direction and Russia in its current form simply ceases to exist.” In 2022 he published his account of what is happening in Russia today, How to Slay a Dragon. In it he declares regarding Russia, “A genuine change of regime is now possible only in the event of a military defeat.” (See “2022, June”)

• 2003, Nov: The first known cases of SARS occurred in the Guangdong province of China. Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) was traced to bats in Yunnan, produces flu-like symptoms, and has a case fatality rate of 11%. China was slow to report this to the World Health Organization. Canada’s electronic warning system picked up reports of the outbreak. No further cases have been documented since 2004

• 2003, Nov: The so-called Rose Revolution took place in Georgia, a country at the intersection of Eastern Europe and Western Asia.The Revolution triggered new presidential and parliamentary elections, which brought the National Movement-Democrats coalition to power. This started the wave of “colour revolutions” that swept the former Soviet states

• 2003, Dec: The federal Conservative Party of Canada (the Tories) was formed by the merger of the two main right-leaning parties, the Progressive Conservative Party and the Canadian Alliance, the latter being the successor of the Western Canadian–based Reform Party of Canada

• 2004: China began establishing centres for Chinese language instruction around the world. China’s Ministry of Education has supervised and funded The Confucius Institute (CI) program. Since its widely embraced start, the number of CIs on say US campuses has been dropping as complaints about bias and censorship in teaching have emerged. For example the CI’s either avoids or advocates Beijing’s controversial positions on issues like Taiwan’s independence, the Tiananmen Square massacre, and Tibetan sovereignty. In 2014, the  Toronto District School Board voted to cancel their CI contract saying it was clear that “this partnership is not aligned with TDSB and community values, and its continuation is not appropriate.”

• 2004, Jan: Podcasting is invented byAdam Curry and Dave Winer. The next month in a Guardian article, Ben Hammersley suggested the term “podcasting” as a name for the nascent technology 

• 2004, Feb:Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes, all of whom were students at Harvard University. Facebook became the largest social network in the world, with nearly three billion users as of 2021, and about half that number using Facebook every day

• 2004, March: NATO accepted into its ranks three Baltic states – Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – which were once part of the Soviet Union. The accession of the Baltics signalled that NATO enlargement would not halt at the former border of the Soviet Union. The EU followed suit in May (See “2004, May”)

• 2004, April: Gmail, a product from Google, was introduced by Google’s co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. It initially offered a gigabyte of space apiece, enough to store about 13,500 e-mails before running out of space, compared with just 30 to 60 e-mails in the then-leading webmail services run by Yahoo and Microsoft. Now each active account offers 15 gigabytes of free storage bundled with Google Photos and Google Drive. The digital hoarding of e-mail, photos and other content is why Google (and Apple and others) make money from selling additional storage capacity in their data centres. Gmail now has an estimated 1.8 billion active accounts

• 2004, May: The EU extended its border eastward to include a number of former Soviet republics and allies, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia (and including the Baltic states accepted in March). Since Putin, a leader of an empire denying its own decline, still considered Soviet borders significant, he viewed such moves as a massive affront

• 2004, Aug: Opponents of the Iraq War gathered to disrupt the Republican National Convention and the nomination of President George W. Bush in New York City. Over 1800 individuals were arrested by the authorities, a record for a political convention in the US. But Bush and VP Dick Cheney went on to defeat the Democratic Party’s ticket of John Kerry and John Edwards in the 2004 presidential election (unlike the protests that occurred at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968 and where Nixon went on to become president.) (See “1968, Aug”)

• 2004, Sept: The Beslan, Russia school siege was the deadliest school shooting in history. This Islamic terrorist attack killed 334 after a group of Chechen separatists corralled 1,100 people into a gym. They demanded that Russia withdraw from and recognize the independence of Chechnya. The siege lasted three days at which point an explosion ripped through the gym, prompting Russian special forces to enter the building, guns drawn. The follow up investigation and trials was confusing and misleading, with Putin being evasive and contradictory. Allegations of incompetence or worse fly everywhere

• 2004, Nov: The Second Battle of Fallujah was an American-led offensive of the Iraq War that lasted roughly six weeks. It was a joint military effort carried out by the US, the Iraqi Interim Government and the UK. It was the bloodiest battle of the entire conflict for American troops, and is notable for being the first major engagement of the Iraq War that was fought solely against insurgents as opposed to the government military forces of the former Ba’athist Iraq. The stated purpose of the military operation in Fallujah was to weaken the insurgency in preparation for the planned Iraqi elections in January 2005. Also in March, four American private military contractors from Blackwater were ambushed and killed in the city. Images of their mutilated bodies were broadcast around the world. A leak later revealed that the main factor behind a larger assault wasn’t the killings themselves, but the circulation of images of the event which served as a symbol of opposition to American forces in Iraq

• 2004, Nov to 2005, Jan: The Orange Revolution toppled the pro-Kremlin regime in Ukraine. Ukrainians took to the streets to demand a genuine election, rather than the stage-managed farce that Putin’s regime had perfected. Viktor Yushchenko, the pro-Western politician (who had survived a poisoning attempt many believed was masterminded by the Kremlin) beat Viktor Yanukovych. This made the Ukrainian aspirations to join the EU clear. For Putin, the Orange Revolution was a double defeat. Not only did his candidate lose, but the democratic protests in Ukraine deepened anti-Russian sentiment in the two other states that had “colour revolutions,” Georgia and Kyrgyzstan

• 2004, Dec: The world’s most powerful earthquake in more than 40 years struck deep under the Indian Ocean off the west coast of Sumatra. The resulting tsunami reached speeds of up to 500 mph and heights of almost 100 feet. Waves from the massive 9.1 magnitude quake slammed into 11 Indian Ocean countries, killing an estimated 220,000 people and displacing millions. It was also the third largest earthquake ever recorded

• 2004, Dec: The Taipei 101 tower was classified as the world’s tallest from its opening in Taipei, Taiwan until the 2010opening of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, UAE. Upon completion, it became the world’s first skyscraper to exceed a height of half a kilometre. (It was formerly the Taipei World Financial Center.) (See “1999, Aug” and  “2010, Jan”)

• 2005, July: Canada became the first non-European country to legally recognize same-sex marriage at the national level. The Civil Marriage Act,a federal statute legalizing same-sex marriage across Canada, was passed. It took actions at the provincial and territorial level  (BC, Quebec, Yukon, Manitoba, Nova Scotia and Saskatchewan had all followed Ontario’s June 2003 legislation) before the feds took this action (See “2001, Apr” and “2003, June”)

• 2005, July: The Iran nuclear deal (or the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action – JCPOA) was signed. It is an agreement on the Iranian nuclear program reached in Vienna between Iran and the P5+1 (the five permanent members of the UN Security Council – China, France, Russia, UK, US – plus Germany together with the European Union. After the Trump administration twice certified Iran’s compliance in 2017, in May 2018 the US withdrew from JCPOA as Trump pledged he would negotiate a better deal. Trump left office without fulfilling that pledge and analysts determined Iran had moved closer to developing a nuclear weapon since the American withdrawal (See “2024, May” and “2024, July”)

• 2005, Aug: Hurricane Katrina was the costliest hurricane to ever hit the US, surpassing the record previously held by Hurricane Andrew in 1992. Katrina was a Category 5 Atlantic hurricane that resulted in 1,392 fatalities and caused damage estimated between $97 billion to $146 billion, particularly in the city of New Orleans and its surrounding areas

• 2005, Nov: The Kelowna Accord was announced – but not proceeded with. It was the result of an 18-month consultative process that involved the federal government, provincial and territorial governments, and five national Indigenous organizations. In order to “close the gap” between the Indigenous and non-Indigenous standard of living in Canada, the Accord was a 10-year plan, including a $5 billion commitment over five years, aimed at significantly improving health, education, housing and infrastructure, economic opportunities, accountability, and relationships between Indigenous communities and the federal government. The Harper government did not proceed with the accord and a number of academic studies recognize that the accord itself is not legally binding 

• 2006, Jan: Evo Morales became president of Bolivia (and the first to come from its indigenous population) but the country is now running out of money. He was a trade unionorganizer, and former coco leaf grower activist and has led the Movement for Socialism party since 1998. The full cost of economic populism is now becoming clear, as are three lessons for the many other Latin American countries tempted by it. First, don’t count on commodity booms (the cash gusher is now running dry). Secondly, beware of currency pegs (in 2008 a fixed exchange rate was introduced. For a while this kept inflation low but over time the peg has proved exorbitantly costly). And thirdly, hostility towards private capital eventually comes back to bite you (Bolivia went on a nationalization spree that included the gas fields and electricity grid. Its government has treated business with contempt. Unsurprisingly, investment has shrivelled up.)

• 2006: Four small APEC economies – Brunei, Chile, New Zealand, and Singapore – concluded the Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership (also known as P4) to create a model for a high-quality, regionwide free trade agreement (FTA). From the beginning P4 members saw their agreement not as an end in itself but as the seed of a broad, Trans-Pacific effort

• 2006, July: Germany began providing Israel at least six nuclear submarines giving it a sea-based, second strike capability.  The first two submarines cost, overall, around €1.3 billion, and up to one-third was subsidized by Germany. In 2011, Israel ordered a sixth Dolphin-class submarine, for which it was reported that there was an agreement was reached to subsidize €135 million of the US$500–700 million cost. In 2016, the purchase of three additional ThyssenKrupp built submarines apparently was concluded. The Dolphin-class submarines are believed to be nuclear armed, offering Israel a sea-based, second strike capability. Submarines are key to Israel’s regional security. Sophisticated modern U-Boats, supplied by German dockyards, in large part paid for by the German tax payer, hiding in the depths of the Mediterranean, or off the Persian Gulf provide Israel with what its military planners most crave, “strategic depth”. And what everyone knows but will not say out loud is that each of Israel’s vessels is equipped with a complement of nuclear-tipped cruise missiles whose warheads have a destructive force of perhaps 14 times that of the Hiroshima bomb. Germany-supplied submarines complete Israel’s nuclear triad – the other two poles being air-dropped bombs and Jericho missiles. The submarine-based warheads are likely smaller, the cruise missiles have more limited range and accuracy, but they provide Israel with the gold standard in nuclear deterrence, a credible second-strike capability i.e. a country’s assured ability to respond to a nuclear attack with powerful nuclear retaliation against the attacker. So if Iran imagined that it might be able to knock out Israel’s arsenal of land-based and air-based nuclear warheads in a preemptive strike, it would have to face an onslaught of atomic hellfire launched from Israel’s submarines

• 2006, Nov: Assassination of Alexander Litvinenko, a former officer of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) and the KGB. He was the first confirmed victim of lethal polonium-210-induced acute radiation syndrome. On his deathbed he accused the Russian FSB of misdeeds and Putin being behind his poisoning. Russia, and Putin, were found responsible in a British court (See “1999, Sept”)

• 2006: Apple introduced the concept of Siri, enabling users to interact with machines using voice. Following this, Google introduced a voice-enabled search in 2007. Tech-giants like Microsoft, Apple, and Google then launched voice assistants for mobile. In 2014, Amazon introduced Amazon Echo, a smart speaker that integrates with virtual assistants (Alexa, Siri, etc.). A Voice User Interface (VUI) enables users to interact with a device or application using spoken voice commands. These speakers can be integrated with mobile apps through Alexa Skills. Similarly, competitors introduced Google Home, Apple HomePod to improve the user experience when they are in office, home, or even at the shopping mall. VUIs give users complete control of technology hands free. Well known VUIs include Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, Google Assistant, Samsung Bixby, Yandex Alisa, and Microsoft Cortana

• 2007, Jan: Apple launches the iPhone. It was retroactively referred to as the iPhone 2G, iPhone 1 or original iPhone. It was released in the US in June. At the start Apple outsourced much of its components but eventually designed the main processors (made in Taiwan). The iPhone quickly became Apple’s most successful product, with later generations propelling it to become the world’s most profitable company. The introduction of the App Store allowed established companies and startup developers to build careers and earn billions of dollars, via the platform, while providing consumers with new ways to access information and connect with other people. The iPhone largely appealed to the general public, as opposed to the business community

• 2007, Feb: Putin makes a famous speech, where he refused to accept the post-1989 settlement in Europe after the fall of the Berlin wall. Putin’s speech, delivered to the Munich Security Conference,accused the west of forgetting and breaking assurances, leaving international law in ruin (See ”2022, Feb”)

• 2007-2008: The Global Financial Crisis was the most serious worldwide financial crisis since the Great Depression of 1929. Predatory lending targeting low-income homebuyers, excessive risk-taking by global financial institutions, and the bursting of the US housing bubble culminated in a “perfect storm”. Mortgage-backed securities (MBS) tied to American real estate, as well as a vast web of derivatives linked to those MBS, collapsed in value. Financial institutions worldwide suffered severe damage, reaching a climax with the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in September 2008. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which included a substantial payroll tax credit, saw economic indicators reverse and stabilize less than a month after its February enactment (See “2008, Sept”, “2010, Jan”, “2010, July” and “2011, Sept”)

• 2007, June: The canoe was picked in a competition run by the CBC as the top choice for the “Seven Wonders of Canada”. The other six were: the igloo, Niagara Falls, Old Quebec City, Pier 21 Halifax, Prairie Skies, and the Rockies. As CBC anchor Peter Mansbridge said, “it’s hard to imagine Canada being Canada without the canoe. Explorers, missionaries, fur traders, and First Nations – they’re all linked by this subtle and simple craft. To many, the quintessential Canadian experience begins by picking up a paddle.” There were over 25,000 nominations and one million votes cast. After receiving the votes a panel of judges (Ra McGuire, Roy MacGregor, and Roberta Jamieson) picked the winners based on geographic and poetic criteria (See “1972, May”) 

• 2007, Sept: The largest class action settlement in Canadian history to date, the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement (IRSSA), came into effect. It is an agreement between the government of Canada and approximately 86,000 Indigenous peoples in Canada who at some point were enrolled as children in the Canadian Indian residential school system, a system which was in place between 1879 and 1997. Funded by the Canadian government’s Indian Affairs and Northern Development, and administered by Christian churches, predominantly the Roman Catholic Church in Canada (60%), but also the Anglican Church of Canada (30%), and the United Church of Canada, including its pre-1925 constituent church predecessors (10%). The policy was to remove children from the influence of their families and culture and assimilate them into the dominant Canadian culture. Over the course of the system’s existence, approximately 30% of native children, roughly some 150,000, were placed in residential schools nationally. It recognized the damage inflicted on Indigenous peoples by residential schools in Canada and established a multi-billion-dollar fund to help former students in their recovery. In June 2008, Prime Minister Harper “apologized on behalf of the Government of Canada, and all Canadians, for the forcible removal of Aboriginal children from their homes and communities to attend Indian residential schools.” In this historic apology, the Prime Minister recognized that there is no room in Canada for the attitudes that created the residential school system to prevail. The IRSSA has five main components: the Common Experience Payment, Independent Assessment Process, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Commemoration, and Health and Healing Services (See “2015, Dec” and “2022, July”) 

• 2007, Dec: Robert Picton, a prolific serial killer and semi-literate pig farmer, was convicted on six counts of second-degree murder. He was sentenced to life in prison; murder charges involving 20 other women were stayed, but he acknowledged he’d killed 49 women and buried their bodies at his farm in Coquitlam, BC. The case has spotlighted the failure of the police departments to apprehend him and the lack of communication between the Mounties and the Vancouver city police. It also reflects problems, prejudices and stereotypes permeating police forces across the country

• 2007, Dec: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) received the Nobel Peace Prize “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change”. It shared the award with former US Vice-president Al Gore for his work on climate change and the documentary An Inconvenient Truth 

• 2008, Feb: Kosovo declared its independence from Serbia. It has since gained diplomatic recognition as a sovereign state by 101 member states of the UN. The tiny Balkan country’s 1998-99 war to break free from Serbia – after centuries as part of the Ottoman Empire and then Yugoslavia – ended in an uneasy and unresolved stalemate. It is bordered by Serbia to the north and east, North Macedonia to the southeast, Albania to the southwest, and Montenegro to the west. Serbia does not officially recognize Kosovo as a sovereign state. In December 2022, Kosovo, a country of 1.8 million people (mostly ethnic Albanian and Muslim) filed a formal application to become a member of the European Union

• 2008, May: The Arctic Five (A5) established at the Arctic Ocean Conference held in Ilulissat (Greenland).Theyare the five littoral states bordering the Arctic Ocean: Canada, Denmark, Norway, Russia, and the US. The key issues they focus on include environmental regulation, maritime security, mineral exploration, polar oil oversight, and transportation (See “1996, Sept”)

• 2008, Aug: China hosted the 2008 Olympic Games. This marked China’s emergence as a major global player and the legacy of a transformed Beijing, plus an important political test for Xi Jinping, at the time China’s leader-in-waiting. The hugely elaborate opening showcased the nation’s “four great inventions” – the compass (see “200 BC”), gunpowder (see “1040 AD”), paper (see “200-101 BC, 2cd century”), and the printing press (see “868 AD” plus “1450 AD”). China wanted to present a friendly face, but it also wanted respect. Their athletes were under great pressure from the government to trounce the competition. China dominated the rankings for the first time with 51 gold medals (China was later stripped of 3 golds for doping violations) (See “776 BC”)

• 2008, Aug: Russia invasion of Abkhazia and South Odessa in Georgia. It is regarded as the first European war of the 21st century. It was the first time Russia had invaded a sovereign state since the fall of the USSR. Georgia had declared its independence in early 1991 as the Soviet Union began to fall apart. The country remains independent today. Russia has not returned any of the occupied territories. The Russo-Georgian war was viewed at the time as a mere bump in the road to a “reset” in US-Russian relations under a new Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev. Relations briefly improved, making possible the signing of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or New Start, under President Obama in 2010 (See “2010, April”)

• 2008, Sept: The bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers was the climax of the subprime mortgage crisis.After the financial services firm was notified of a pending credit downgrade due to its heavy position in subprime mortgages, the Federal Reserve summoned several banks to negotiate financing for its reorganization. These discussions failed, and Lehman filed a Chapter 11 petition that remains the largest bankruptcy filing in US history, involving more than US$600 billion in assets. The Obama administration had to quickly deal with a collapsing financial system and an economy plunged into the worst recession since the depression. Lehman, plus the bailout of AIG, and the Bank of America taking over Merrill Lynch, were some of the challenges (See “2007-2008”, “2010, July” and “2024, Jan”)

• 2008, Oct: Iceland’s systemic banking collapse was the largest experienced by any country in economic history. The default of all three of the country’s major privately owned commercial banks occurred following their difficulties in refinancing their short-term debt and a run on deposits in the Netherlands and the UK (See “2010, July”)

• 2008, Nov: India’s “9/11” occurred when 10 members of the Pakistan’s militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba unleashed coordinated shooting and bombing assaults on the Indian city of Mumbai (formerly Bombay). The attack lasted over four days and left 161 civilians dead and was carried out with the backing of both al Qaeda and Pakistan’s security establishment. They were intending to destabilize the relationship between India and Pakistan which had recently begun to improve. Despite fears that the crisis would escalate into an all-out war between the two nuclear powers, India chose instead to put its foot on the brakes and did not mobilize the Indian army or strike at terrorist camps in Pakistan. They chose restraint over revenge and responded through diplomatic and political channels which brought India international support, prevented a potentially catastrophic war, minimized civilian casualties, and arguably prevented more terrorism. Nine of the 10 terrorists were killed, and one, Amir Kasab a Pakistani, was found guilty and sentenced to death and executed. 
• (Personal aside: Three of their targets I have either visited or stayed in; the first being the Oberoi Hotel, where I stayed, the second being the iconic and elegant Taj Mahal Palace and Tower Hotel, and the third was the grand old Victoria (now named Chhatrapati Shivaji) train station.)

• 2009, Jan: Barack Obama became the first African American to be elected president of the United States. He gained 53% of the popular vote and 365 electoral votes (of 478). His vice-presidential running mate was Senator Joe Biden. They defeated Republican Senator John McCain and his running mate Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska. Obama served two terms through to January 2017

• 2009, March: Bernie Madoff, an American financier and fraudster, admitted to turning his wealth management business into the largest Ponzi scheme in history, worth about $64.8 billion. He pleaded guilty to 11 federal felonies and was sentenced to 150 years in prison, the maximum sentence allowed, with restitution of $170 billion. He died in prison in 2021

• 2009: NASA scientist, James Hansen, publishes Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity. The book was a prominent early milestone. Hansen describes how the burning of fossil fuels is changing our climate and argues that this is putting Earth into imminent peril. He suggests that millions of species, and humanity itself, are threatened. Hansen is often called the father of global warming. He was the creator, more than 30 years ago, of one of the first climate models

• 2009, April: A H1N1 swine flu pandemic occurred, starting in the US and spread around the world. Over 12,000 died in the US with over 15,000 worldwide and 80% occurring in people younger than five years. Some studies estimated that the real number of cases including asymptomatic and mild cases could be 700 million to 1.4 billion people – or 11 to 21 percent of the global population of 6.8 billion at the time! The virus appeared to be a new strain of H1N1 that resulted from a previous triple reassortment of bird, swine, and human flu viruses which further combined with a Eurasian pig flu virus, leading to the term “swine flu” 

• 2009, June: The BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) block of large emerging market economies gathered in Yekaterinburg, Russia. They announced the need for a new global reserve currency, which would have to be “diverse, stable and predictable”. South Africa officially became a member nation December 2010. The group was renamed BRICS. Numerous other countries have expressed interest in joining the bloc, including Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Algeria, Mexico, Argentina, Nigeria, Indonesia, Bahrain, Iran and the United Arab Emirates. The original aim of BRICS was the establishment of an equitable, democratic and multi-polar world order, but later BRICS became a political organization, especially after South Africa joined. BRICS is seen as a potential vehicle  for breaking the dominance of the US dollar, a long standing Chinese goal. 

• Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov postured, at a recent BRICS conference, that Moscow had, like other members, also overcome imperialism and European colonization. The truth is that the Soviet Union was not anti-colonial but the opposite: The Russian Federation is the last remaining European empire. In fact, Putin’s war against Ukraine is aimed at preventing the independence of its most important former colony (See “2023, Aug”)

• 2009, Nov: Death of Ukrainian-born Russian tax attorney Sergei Magnitsky, responsible for exposing corruption and misconduct by Russian government officials while representing client Hermitage Capital Management and hedge-funder Bill Browder. He died in a Russian prison on trumped up charges after being refused medical care

• 2010, Jan: The US Supreme Court tilted political influence towards wealthy donors and corporations with its landmark decision Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission regarding campaign finance laws. The court held that the freedom of speech clause of the First Amendment prohibits the government from restricting independent expenditures for political campaigns by corporations, nonprofit organizations, labour unions, and other associations. The controversial decision, it has been argued, has given special interests and their lobbyists even more power in Washington to spend without limits. Large expenditures, usually through “Super PACS”, could now come from a small group of billionaires, passed solely on ideology (See “2011, Sept”)

• 2010, Jan: A catastrophic magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck Haiti approximately 16 miles west of Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital. Death toll estimates range from 220,000 to 316,000. The most-watched telethon in history aired called “Hope for Haiti Now“, raised US$58 million by the next day (See “2024, March”)

• 2010, Jan: The Burj Khalifa Tower opened; it became the world’s tallest building. It is located in Dubai, the most populous city in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and the capital of the Emirate of Dubai. It has a total height of 2,722 ft, or just over half a mile. It supplanted Taipei 101, the previous holder of the world’s tallest building. It’s also the tallest freestanding structure: 2,722 ft (previously CN Tower at 1,815); the tallest skyscraper at 2,717 ft (previously Taipei at 1671); the building with most floors – 163 (previously World Trade Centre – 110) (See “1999, Aug” and “2004, Dec”)

• 2010, Feb: Viktor Yanukovych was elected president of Ukraine; the election was judged free and fair by international observers (See “2013, Nov”)

• 2010, Feb: The Vancouver Winter Olympics took place, where Canada won 14 gold medals. In sudden-death overtime Canada’s Sidney Crosby scored the winning goal beating the Americans 3-2 in hockey 

• 2010, March: The world’s largest and highest-energy particle collider became operational. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was built (starting in 2002) by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists and hundreds of universities and laboratories, as well as more than 100 countries. It lies in a tunnel 27 kilometres in circumference and as deep as 175 metres beneath near Geneva. The LHC’s goal is to allow physicists to test the predictions of different theories of particle physics, including measuring the properties of the Higgs boson, searching for the large family of new particles predicted by supersymmetric theories, and other unresolved questions in particle physics. The LHC is one of the most expensive scientific instruments ever built (See “2012, July”)

• 2010, April: A series of volcanic events at Eyjafjallajökull, Iceland caused enormous disruption to air travel. Expanding gases from the rapid vaporization of the glacier ice on the summit of the Mýrdals Glacier started a series of explosions (which result from the contact of water and magma) that sent a plume of steam and ash almost 7 miles into the atmosphere. For three months across Europe ash fallout disrupted air travel

• 2010, April: The BP Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig exploded and sank causing the largest marine oil spill in history. Leased to and operated by BP, it was drilling in 4100 feet of water 250 miles southeast of Houston in the Gulf of Mexico, off the coast of Louisiana. A blowout caused an explosion on the rig that killed 11 crewmen and ignited a fireball visible from 40 miles away. The fire was inextinguishable and, two days later on April 22 the Horizon sank, leaving the well gushing at the seabed. This continued until July when it was closed by a cap. Relief wells were used to permanently seal the well, which was declared “effectively dead” in September. The disaster cost BP more than $65 billion in clean-up cost and penalties. It also led to a flat-lining of oil production in the Gulf (See “1989, March”)

• 2010, April: New Strategic Arms Reduction Agreement (START treaty) signed (and in force February 2011). President Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev signed a new strategic arms reduction agreement in Prague, replacing the first START treaty, which expired in 2009. The so-called New START treaty commits Washington and Moscow to another round of cuts to their strategic offensive arsenals. The package sets a 30% reduction on deployed warheads and lower caps on deployed and non-deployed intercontinental ballistic missile launchers, submarine-launched ballistic missile launchers, and heavy bombers equipped for nuclear weapons (See “1963, Aug”, “1991, July”, “2008, Aug”, and “2021, Feb”)

• 2010, May: Viktor Orbán retook the role of PM of Hungary but his government model is not a democracy at all. A complicated man and background, he has been open about his determination to overthrow the concept of western democracy and replace it with what he calls “illiberal democracy” or “Christian democracy”. He wants to replace the multiculturalism at the heart of democracy with Christian culture, stop the immigration that he believes undermines Hungarian culture, and reject “adaptable family models” in favour of “the Christian family model.” He is moving Hungary away from the stabilizing international systems supported by NATO. On July 1/24 Orbán took over the rotating presidency of the European Union – for six months. He will be dangerous and leaning far-right

• 2010, July: The Dodd-Frank Act, one of the most significant US regulatory reforms since the Great Depression, was signed by then-president Barack Obama. Intended to make the US financial system safer for consumers and taxpayers, it came about as a result of the 2007-2008 financial crisis. It created new government agencies – including the Securities and Exchange Commission Office of Credit Ratings and watchdog Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) – to oversee the financial system to prevent mortgage companies and lenders from exploiting consumers. Trump rolled back portions of it in 2018; after Biden in 2020, the CFPB focused on rescinding rules from the Trump era that conflicted with its charter (See “2007-2008” and “2008, Sept”)

• 2010, July: The Kalamazoo River oil spill resulted in the most expensive inland petroleum spill in history. It occurred when a pipeline operated by Enbridge (Line 6B) burst and flowed into a tributary of the Kalamazoo River near Marshall, Michigan. A 6-foot break in the pipeline resulted in a million gallon spill (of diluted bitumen or “dilbit”, a heavy crude oil from Canada’s Athabasca oil sands). It took five years and more than a billion dollars to mitigate, making it the most expensive inland petroleum spill in history

• 2010: Speech recognition by computer had some critical breakthroughs. Speech recognition – the recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers – has a long history with several waves of major innovations. In this period, the field benefited from advances in deep learning and big data. Also called voice recognition, it was clearly differentiated from speaker recognition, and speaker independence was considered a major breakthrough. Until then, systems required a “training” period

• 2010: Thousands of classified US military documents were released by WikiLeaks about the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. WikiLeaksis a non-profit media organization and publisher of leaked documents founded in 2006 by Julian Assange an Australian editor, publisher, and activist. It has published classified documents and other media provided by anonymous sources. In November 2010, Sweden issued an arrest warrant for Assange for allegations of sexual assault. After losing his appeal, he breached bail and took refuge in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London and spent seven years at the embassy before being arrested in 2019. He faced an 18-count indictment in the US and up to 175 years in prison. There are many who feel he should not be punished for publication of disclosed documents as this activity mirrors conduct that investigative journalists undertake regularly in their professional capacity. In late June 2024 he pleaded guilty to conspiring to obtain and disclose US national defence information, ending over a decade of fighting extradition. Assange’s plea deal includes a 62-month sentence, crediting the five years already served at a London prison, allowing him to avoid US imprisonment

• 2010, Oct: The Instagram app started, and it continues to increase in popularity. It marries social media and photo-editing. Just shy of two years of operation, it was sold to Facebook for $1 billion. Kevin Systrom, one of its two founders, remained on as CEO until 2018, while the other founder, Michel Krieger, who was head of engineering, had left earlier. Instagram has played a central role in this century’s popular culture, with popular users dubbed ‘influencers’. Influencers have become a key demographic for Instagram, and the app has opened up its platform with shopping and other marketing tools to make these popular users more successful. Now owned by Meta, Facebook’s parent company, it has over two billion monthly active users, making it the fourth most popular social app worldwide. Instagram was responsible for 44% of Meta’s revenue in 2023 and is expected to surpass Facebook as Meta’s main revenue source by 2025. Over 70% of Instagram users are under 35 years old

• 2010, Dec: The “Arab Spring” commences. This was a series of anti-government protests, uprisings, and armed rebellions that spread across much of the Arab world. The protests were triggered by the self-immolation of a Tunisian street vendor. It was a protest against the endemic and long-standing corruption, repression and inequality in the country. The Tunisian protests triggered uprisings in Libya, Egypt, Yeman, Bahrain and Syria. The early hopes that these popular movements would end corruption, increase political participation, and bring about greater economic equity collapsed in the wake of counter-revolutionary moves

• 2011, Jan: In Egypt about a million protesters gathered in Tahrir Square, thrilling the world with their calls for reforms and freedom. President Hosni Mubarak was toppled, but democracy did not replace his autocratic rule; the Muslim Brotherhood did. Egyptians elected Islamist Mohamed Morsi to the presidency in June 2012. His government encountered fierce opposition after his attempt to pass an Islamic-leaning constitution. Morsi also issued a temporary presidential decree that raised his decisions over judicial review to enable the passing of the constitution. It sparked general outrage from secularists and members of the military, and mass protests broke out against his rule in June 2013. Morsi was deposed by a coup d’état in July led by the minister of defence, General Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, as millions of Egyptians took to the streets in support of early elections. El-Sisi went on to become Egypt’s president after an election in 2014 which was boycotted by opposition parties

• 2011, Feb: An uprising in Libya against the four-decade rule of Muammar al-Qaddafi led to civil war, international military intervention and Qaddafi’s death. The government’s sudden escalation of violence against protesters and other civilians (essentially the First Libyan Civil War or the 17 February revolution) drew international condemnation from foreign leaders and human rights organizations. A multi-state NATO-led coalition began a military intervention to implement a UN resolution. The effort was initially largely led by France and the UK, with command shared with the US. NATO then took control of the arms embargo. Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi was found after his convoys were attacked by NATO aircraft. He was captured in October by National Transitional Council (NTC) forces and killed shortly afterwards

• 2011, March: A nuclear disaster occurred in Ōkuma, Fukushima, Japan after an earthquake and 15-metre tsunami (the Great East Japan Earthquake). It was the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan, and the fourth most powerful earthquake recorded in the world since modern seismography began in 1900. It swamped the 3 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactors, disabling the power and cooling system, with all 3 reactors melting in 3 days. The tsunami brought destruction along the Pacific coastline of Japan’s northern islands. Thousands of lives were lost and entire towns were devastated. The tsunami propagated throughout the Pacific Ocean region reaching the entire Pacific coast of North and South America. The reported toll: 19,759 deaths, 6,242 injured, and 2,553 people missing. Nuclear regulators elevated the severity level of the nuclear emergency to 7 – the highest level on the scale created by the International Atomic Energy Agency – placing it in the same category as the Chernobyl accident in the Soviet Union in 1986 (See “1986, Apr”) 

• 2011, May: Conservative Party’s Stephen Harper, pulled off a majority win in Canada’s federal election. It was a big defeat for Michael Ignatieff’s opposition Liberals. The New Democrats became the main opposition party for the first time in Canadian history. The leader of the Green party, Elizabeth May, was also elected, marking the first time a member of the environmental party has won a federal election in North America. (Since then, the Conservatives have lost three straight elections to Justin Trudeau’s Liberals.)

• 2011, May: Osama bin Laden was killed in his compound in Pakistan by US Navy Seals. He was tracked down in the city of Abbottabad, where he spent his final years hiding. He was the founder and first leader of the Islamist militant group al-Qaeda and wanted for masterminding the September 11, 2001 World Trade Centre attacks on the US (See “1998, Aug”, “2000, Oct”, “2001, Sept 11”)

• 2011, July: South Sudan declared independence. It is the newest internationally recognized country in the world. It then became also the newest member of the United Nations. South Sudan was originally the southern part of Sudan, which itself had become independent in 1956 after being ruled by Egypt and Great Britain. The population of Sudan is quite diverse, with the north dominated by adherents of Islam, most of whom speak Arabic and identify as Arab, while the people of the south tend to be of African ethnic groups, adherents of Christianity or traditional African religions, and speakers of various indigenous African languages. The country has been tormented by civil war for most of its time since independence. Two lengthy civil wars took place in 1955–72 and 1983–2005. Hardly anyone has been held to account for mass slaughter during the country’s various wars, nor for mass rape, nor the widespread enslavement of black Africans by the country’s Arabic-speaking elite. The internationally supported 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement, crafted to end the long-running conflict between the north and the south, granted southern Sudan semiautonomous status that led to the 2011 independence (See “2003, Feb”, “2011, July”, “2020, Aug” and  “2023, July”)

• 2011, Sept: The Pussy Riot, a collective of around a dozen performers, was formed in Moscow to publicize the injustices of Putin’s Russia, including escalating autocracy, anti-LGBTQ+ policies, crackdowns on free speech, abuse of prisoners, the annexation of Crimea, and the war in Ukraine. In 2012 three members of the group were arrested and sentenced to two years in a penal colony under horrific conditions. The cause: Pussy Riot members had entered Moscow’s Russian Orthodox Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, hopped the barrier guarding the altar, shed their coats and put on balaclavas. “Virgin Mary, mother of God, banish Putin!” they scream-sang in Russian, part of a song that implored the Virgin Mary: “Be a feminist!” They were performing in a part of the church where women are not allowed. “The mother of God could not, for example, approach the altar if she were in the cathedral”, it was pointed out. (Note: the patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox church had supported Putin’s 2012 re-election, calling him a “miracle from God” who had “rectified the crooked path of history”!) Their current (March 2024) multi media show, Velvet Terrorism, has been installed in a number of North American cities. When you enter the show you encounter a video, the famous one of a balaclava’d Pussy Riot member drinking a bottle of water, then hiking up her dress and urinating on a portrait of Putin

• 2011, Sept: The “Occupy Wall Street” movement begins. It was a left-wing populist movement against economic equality, corporate greed, big finance, and the influence of money in politics. The motivation for the Occupy movement largely resulted from public distrust in the private sector during the aftermath of the Great Recession. The Occupy protesters’ slogan “We are the 99%” referred to the income disparity in the US and economic inequality in general (See “2007-2008”)

• 2012, March: Vladimir Putin retakes control from Dmitry Medvedev as president of Russia in an election tainted by allegations of voter fraud. He served two terms in the Kremlin before term limits forced him to step down in 2008. But he served as prime minister (office of prime minister is nominally the subservient position) under his successor, Dmitry Medvedev (See “2024, March”)

• 2012: Semaglutide, the drug that’s contained in Ozempic and Rybelsus (for diabetes) and Wegovy (for weight loss), was first developed. Five years later it was first approved for use as a treatment for type 2 diabetes. It is now used as an anti-obesity medication for long-term weight management. Approved in 2017 as a type 2 diabetes treatment in the US. Note: the World Obesity Federation predicts that over half of the world’s population will be overweight or obese by 2035 (See “ 1997”, “1998” and “2023”)

• 2012: Tesla introduced the Model S sedan. Before that car, very few electric vehicles were sold in the US. There are over 100 electric models available in the US in 2024 and prices have fallen as the supply and variety of models have increased. Tesla’s lineup is aging – its best selling vehicle, the Model Y, went on sale in 2020 making it dated by industry standards, and many consumers have said that it can be hard to get their cars repaired at the company’s relatively small network of service centres. (Tesla sells on line.)

• 2012, July: The Battle of Aleppo was a major military confrontation in Aleppo, the largest city in Syria, between the Syrian opposition (including the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and other largely-Sunni groups, such as the Levant Front and the al-Qaeda-affiliated al-Nusra Front) against the Syrian government, supported by Hezbollah, Shia militias and Russia, and against the Kurdish-majority People’s Protection Units (YPG). The battle began in July 2012 and was part of the ongoing Syrian Civil War. A stalemate that had been in place for four years finally ended in July 2016, when Syrian government troops closed the rebels’ last supply line into Aleppo with the support of Russian airstrikes. In response, rebel forces launched unsuccessful counteroffensives in September and October that failed to break the siege; in November, government forces embarked on a decisive campaign that resulted in the recapture of all of Aleppo by December 2016. The Syrian government victory was widely seen as a turning point in Syria’s civil war

• 2012, July: The ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN announced that they had independently observed a new particle consistent with the Higgs boson. In October 2013, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded jointly to theorists François Englert and Peter Higgs “for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider”. The particle was first theorized to exist by Higgs, an English physicist, in the 1960s. Englert had independently proposed the same particle. The discovery of the Higgs boson has opened up new windows in the search for new physics phenomena. Many theories also predict that the Higgs boson plays a critical role in the production of new phenomena such as dark matter at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (See “13.8 billion”, “1964” and “2010, March”)

• 2012, Oct: Dr. Shinya Yamanaka received the Nobel Prize for the discovery that mature cells could be reprogrammed. He figured out how to reprogram adult cells and return them to an embryonic-like state. The discovery revolutionized cell biology and the search for ways to treat human diseases. Now researchers are using the technique to reverse aging and eradicate the illnesses that come with it

• 2012, Nov: Xi Jinping became General Secretary of China and has adopted a new bullying style of foreign policy. Prior to the eighteenth National Congress of the Communist Party of China, Chinese politics was trending towards collective leadership, where the paramount leader had to share power with his circle of senior leaders in the Politburo Standing Committee, particularly the Premier. Under Xi, China began the bullying style of foreign policy which includes economic coercion against countries that criticized Chinese domestic policies; belligerent ”wolf warrior” rhetoric; operations to cultivate political influence with politicians and organizations in other countries; cyber hacking of foreign firms; military intimidation against Taiwan and Japan; coast guard and fishing boat deployments in the coastal zones of Southeast Asian neighbours, in violation of international law; thought reform camps for Muslims in Xinjiang; the destruction of Hong Kong’s freedoms under the Hong Kong Security Act; coverup of information about COVID-19; and Xi’s refusal to condemn Russia’s brutal unprovoked invasion of Ukraine

• 2012: The role and scope of the United Front Work Department (UFWD) was expanded and intensified under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) general secretary Xi Jinping. The role of the United Front is to target non-Communist people and entities internationally to ensure influential individuals and groups support CCP interests. It’s own documents show that it works closely with the Ministry of State Security, China’s secret police. It has been a main agency of the CCP since 1979, when Deng Xiaoping tasked it to collect information from sources around the world and advance global support for the party. United Front activities are more subtle than the heavy-handed approach of American intelligence agencies. It is primarily focussed on influencing civilians and civil society organizations around the world to try and shape these individuals’ and groups’ attitudes toward Beijing. With the absorption of the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office in 2018, the United Front gained full control of the country’s second largest state-run media apparatus, the China News Service. In 2019, the it partnered with the Cyberspace Administration of China to promote united front work with social media influencers.  A 2020 Australian report suggests that the United Front’s expansion overseas is  “an exportation of the CCP’s political system”…giving “the CCP undue influence over political representation and expression in foreign political systems.”

• 2012, Dec: HSBC, the British banking giant, was fined $1.9 billion in a money-laundering case. US federal and state authorities accused the bank, Europe’s largest by market value, of violating the Bank Secrecy Act and the Trading With the Enemy Act. The case focused on the transfer of billions of dollars on behalf of nations like Iran, which are under international sanctions, and the transfer of money through the US financial system from Mexican drug cartels. HSBC will pay $1.25 billion in forfeiture and $655 million in civil penalties. The $1.25 billion figure is the largest forfeiture ever in a case involving a bank

• 2012, Dec: The start of an ongoing civil war in the Central African Republic (CAR) involving the government, rebels from the (Muslim) Séléka coalition, and (Christian) Anti-balaka militias. Its northern tip is severed by the 10th parallel, the line of longitude described by one journalist as “the fault line between Christianity and Islam.” Other contributing tensions include the struggle for control of diamonds and other resources. CAR is a desperate country with a complicated brutal past and present. Recently more than 1.1 million people have fled their homes in a country of about 5 million people. Despite its significant mineral deposits and other resources, as well as significant quantities of arable land, CAR is among the ten poorest countries in the world, with the lowest GDP per capita at purchasing power parity in the world as of 2017. As of 2021, the country had the fourth-lowest level of human development, ranking 188 out of 191 countries. The Central African Republic is also estimated to be the unhealthiest countryas well as the worst country in which to be young

• 2012, Dec: Mass killing of 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut – with 20 of them 6 or 7 years old. This was the deadliest mass shooting at an Elementary School in US history but only one of a continued litany, while the US public debate gun control. (A side tragedy connected with this incident is that American far-right, alt-right radio show host and prominent conspiracy theorist Alex Jones alleged that the US government falsified the Sandy Hook shooting. Juries awarded a total of $1.487 billion in damages from Jones to a first responder and families of victims.) (See “2017, Oct”, “2022, May” and “2023, Oct”)

• 2013, Feb: An asteroid (19 metres in diameter) exploded 30 kms above the Russian city of Chelyabinsk, with the energy of about 500 kilotons of TNT. The airburst injured more that 1,000 people, most of them hurt by shattered glass after they rushed to windows to observe the bright flash in the sky

• 2013: The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a global infrastructure development strategy, is adopted by China. Also called the “New Silk Road”, the plan isto invest in more than 150 countries and international organizations. It is considered a centrepiece of Xi Jinping’s foreign policy. As of January 2023, 151 countries were listed as having signed up to the BRI. The participating countries include almost 75% of the world’s population and account for more than half of the world’s GDP. Supporters praise the BRI for its potential to boost the global GDP, particularly in developing countries. However, there has also been criticism over human rights violations and environmental impact, as well as concerns of debt-trap diplomacy resulting in a relationship of dependence, subservience, or financial obligation towards China.  It certainly is designed to build a new world order replacing the US-led international system. These differing perspectives are the subject of active debate

• 2013, June: The American Medical Association recognized obesity as a disease (and also the American College of Cardiology, the American College of Surgeons, and the American Heart Association). The Canadian Medical Association followed suit in 2015. There were many who believed that classifying it as a disease could shift the responsibility to the medical community, which could take an authoritative, scientific approach to what are considered healthier sizes; it also could temper anti-fat sentiment and give doctors and researchers more leverage to develop a safe and effective treatment. The problem is there are plenty of people who are obese who live long, healthy lives without developing high blood pressure or heart disease (See “1997”, “1998” and “2012”)

• 2013, July: An Egyptian coup d’etat took place by the military. Army chief General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi led a coalition to remove the democratically elected President of Egypt Mohamed Morsi from power and suspended the Egyptian constitution of 2012. The move came after the military’s ultimatum for the government to “resolve its differences” with protesters during widespread national interests. The military arrested Morsi and Muslim Brotherhood and declared Chief Justice of the Supreme Constitutional Court Adly Mansour as the interim president of Egypt 

• 2013, Aug: President Obama’s reluctance to punish the Russian-backed president of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, for using sarin gas-filled rockets in Damascus diminished America’s credibility. His warned that “a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons being moved around or utilised. That would change my calculus.” This red line over Syria is remembered as a defining moment of his presidency. Rather than strike immediately, he first decided to ask for a vote in Congress and then agreed not to act at all if Russia stepped in to oversee Syria’s chemical disarmament. Critics argue that Obama’s reluctance to punish Assad diminished America’s credibility and that the consequences are still being felt even now. This one incidence of perceived US weakness in Syria may well have encouraged America’s adversaries, including Russia, to test the US further (See “2015, Sept”)                                                                                                                                                                                             

• 2013, Nov: The Euromaidan protests in Ukraine. Ukrainians went to Independence Square in Kyiv to protest the Russian-leaning government. The next February the Revolution of Dignity (Maidan Revolution) resulted in the ousting of President Viktor Yanukovych and the overthrow of the Ukrainian government. (This was a reaction to the refusal by Yanukovych, who was chummy with Russia, to sign an association agreement – an extensive free-trade deal – with the European Union. Thousands of Ukrainians took to the streets and Yanukovych fled to Russia. Ukraine’s new government signed the agreement, infuriating Putin. His subsequent response to the Maidan marked Russia’s first military incursions into independent Ukraine.) (See ”2010, Feb” and “2014, May”)

• 2014, Feb: The illegal annexation of Crimea by Russia; the February 2022 act of aggression by Russia is the latest in a war that really started back here. Masked men wearing unmarked green flak jackets took the Crimean parliament. This stemmed from the overthrowing of Russian-allied president Viktor Yanukovych (who had been installed with the help of American political operative Paul Manafort). With its assault on and subsequent annexation of Crimea, Russia violates its previous pledges to respect Ukraine’s territorial integrity, raising concerns about its commitments to arms control. Moscow also begins arming and abetting pro-Russia separatists in southeastern Ukraine. The aggression is widely condemned by Western powers, which impose economic sanctions. This is the biggest success President Putin can lay claim to, that of establishing a land bridge from Russia’s border to Crimea so it is no longer reliant on its bridge over the Kerch Strait. The Sea of Azov, inside the Kerch Strait, “has become Russia’s internal sea”, Putin has stated, pointing out that even Russian Tsar Peter the Great did not manage that (See “2022, Feb”)

• 2014, March: Putin gave a speech to the national legislature of the Russian Federation in connection with supporting the entry of Crimea in Russia. Noted in the West’s reaction was the speech’s “aggrieved evocation of Russia’s history and its religious, Russian Orthodox overtones” and that “by annexing Crimea, Putin is almost certainly fueling the fire of the most extreme nationalist elements in Kiev’. The speech was compared to Hitler’s speech on Sudetenland from 1939 as using “the same arguments and vision of history”.  Putin claimed that the Russian minority in Ukraine was in danger. “Crimea is historically Russian land and Sevastopol is a Russian city.” It’s a horrifying speech and should be read 

• 2014, March: Russia suspended from the G8 due to its annexation of Crimea. In a nod to political and economic reforms, the US, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and Italy had added Russia to their group in 1998 – transforming it from the G7 to the G8 

• 2014, March: The last Canadian troops left Afghanistan. The war in Afghanistan (2001–14) was Canada’s longest war and its first significant combat engagement since the Korean War (1950–53). After the 2001 terror attacks on the US, Canada joined an international coalition to destroy the al-Qaeda terrorist network and the Taliban regime that sheltered it in Afghanistan. Although the Taliban were removed from power and the al-Qaeda network was disrupted, Canada and its allies failed to destroy either group, or to secure and stabilize Afghanistan. More than 40,000 Canadian Armed Forces members served in the 12-year campaign. The war killed 165 Canadians – 158 soldiers and 7 civilians (See “2001, Oct”)

• 2014, March: Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 disappears while flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with a loss of life being 239. Parts of the plane washed ashore in the Western Indian Ocean but the plane has never been found

• 2014, April: Province of Ontario stopped burning coal to produce power. Coal-fired electricity was successfully eliminated from all Ontario Power Generation stations – 19 generating units in total. More than 90 per cent of the power generated in Ontario now comes from clean energy sources such as water, nuclear and renewables

• 2014, April: The War in Donbas was a phase of the Russo-Ukrainian War in the Donbas region of Ukraine. It began when a fifty-man commando unit headed by Russian citizen Igor Girkin seized Sloviansk in the Donetsk Oblast (or region). The Ukrainian military launched an operation against them. It continued until it was subsumed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. There was an attempt to stop the fighting; the Minsk Protocol (Minsk I) was signed in September 2014 but this agreement failed to stop the fighting and was thus followed with a revised and updated agreement, Minsk II (See “2015, Feb”)

• 2014, May: Petro Poroshenko elected president of Ukraine on a platform of decommunization, inclusive capitalism, nationalism and Ukranian language. The events leading to his election were perceived by Moscow as a coup (See “2013, Nov” and “2019, April”)

• 2014, July: A Malaysian passenger jet, a Boeing 777, was shot down over Donetsk, a separatist-controlled region of Ukraine and occupied by Russia killing all 298 people on board. In November 2022 a Dutch court convicted three men of murder (who all remain at large). It was proved they used a Russian surface-to-air missile, plus the court directed the blame at the government of Russian President Vladimir Putin. The plane should never have been in that airspace as around that time pro-Russian rebels were acquiring shouldered missiles and that several Ukranian military aircraft had been shot down

• 2014: Intel launched a 14-nanometer (nm) processor, boasting of having the world’s smallest and most advanced transistors. (They are now looking at a 7nm chip!)

• 2014, Sept: Scotland voted “no” by 55% to 45%, for independence from the UK. Support for independence today remains roughly where it was a decade ago; it looks a distant prospect. After the referendum, the Scottish National Party, already running the devolved government in Edinburgh, surged to spectacular victories in elections to both Holyrood (the official residence of the monarch in Scotland) and Westminster, but it has had leaner times since

• 2014, Sept: India sent an operational mission to Mars. Its Mangalyaan satellite was confirmed to be in orbit around the planet after a ten month journey

• 2014, Oct: The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy. In what has become known as nanoscopy, scientists visualize the pathways of individual molecules inside living cells. They can see how molecules create synapses between nerve cells in the brain; they can track proteins involved in Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s diseases as they aggregate; they follow individual proteins in fertilized eggs as these divide into embryos. Before this, there was a presumed limitation: that it would never obtain a better resolution than half the wavelength of light. This limitation was ingeniously circumvented and has brought optical microscopy into the nanodimension

• 2015, Jan: A terrorist attack on the the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo, a satiric magazine, killed 17 people. Two Algerian French brothers, along with a third terrorist who killed 4 others in a parallel incident, were responsible and later all were killed in police shootouts. Charlie Hebdo had earned a reputation for satirizing everyone. In February 2006 Charlie Hebdo reprinted cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that had originally appeared in the Danish Jyllands-Posten. Such visual depictions of the Prophet were prohibited by Islam, which adheres to the principle of aniconism, the opposition to the use of icons or images to portray living creatures. Thousands of people took to the streets in Paris and other cities to express sympathy for the victims, using the slogan “Je suis Charlie” (“I am Charlie”). The message of solidarity spread around the world on social media

• 2015, Feb: The Minsk II agreement was signed but never fully implemented. Brokered by France and Germany, it was signed by representatives of Russia, Ukraine, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and the leaders of separatist-held regions Donetsk and Luhansk. It sought to halt the conflict that began when Russia-backed separatists seized swaths of territory following Russia’s 2014 annexation of the Crimean Peninsula. A major blockage has been Russia’s insistence that it is not a party to the conflict and therefore is not bound by its terms. And Ukraine saw the 2015 agreement as an instrument to re-establish control over the rebel territories. (It came on the back of Minsk I, an earlier failed attempt at a ceasefire agreement.)

• 2015, April: The US and world powers reached a nuclear deal with Iran calledthe Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), or the “Iran nuclear deal”. It was between Iran and the P5+1 (the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany), together with the European Union. It was successful as  Iran drastically curtailed its program in exchange for the lifting of international sanctions and the unfreezing of assets. However, president Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew from the deal during his presidency. New evidence as of May 2023 suggests that Iran could produce enough fissile material for a nuclear device immediately (See “1906, Aug”, “2018, May” and “2023, May”) 

• 2015, July: Health Canada approved the use of the medical abortion drug Mifepristone (sold under the name Mifegymiso). Medical abortion uses medication rather than an internal procedure to end a pregnancy. Note: medication abortion now accounts for more than half of all abortions in the US, however there is some pushback (in Texas for example where a conservative Christian legal advocacy group has received a legal ruling reversing the US Food and Drug Administration’s approval ofMifepristone  (See “1988, Jan” and “2024, Sept 3”)

• 2015, Sept: Russian Army officially entered the war in Syria to fight alongside the troops of dictator Bashar al-Assad, ostensibly to neutralize the expansion of the Islamic State (IS) in the Syrian Civil War. The intervention was kick-started by extensive air strikes across Syria, focused on attacking opposition strongholds of Free Syrian militias of Revolutionary Command Council and Sunni militias under Army of Conquest coalition. Russian Special Operations Forces, military advisors and private military contractors like the Wagner Group were also sent to Syria to support the Assad regime, which was on the verge of collapse. In practice, troops and fighter jets sent by Moscow, on its first foreign mission since the collapse of the Soviet Union, undertook a devastating bombing campaign over areas controlled by rebel factions. On Ukrainian territory, they hit medical centres, schools or markets without shame. In December 2017, the Russian government announced that its troops would be deployed to Syria permanently. By the end of April 2018, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) documented that Russian bombings directly killed more than 7,700 civilians, about a quarter of them children, apart from 4,749 opposition fighters and 4,893 IS fighters. The Russian campaign has been criticized by numerous international bodies for indiscriminate aerial bombing across Syria that target schools and civilian infrastructures and carpet bombing of cities like Aleppo. During the Georgian war in 2008, Putin found out that he had inherited an incompetent army, with outdated weapons and lousy communication systems. The military campaign in Syria served as a preparation for the Russian armed forces (See “2013, Aug”)

• 2015, Sept: The UN adopted 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Theyare a collection of interlinked objectives titled “Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development”. The SDGs are: no poverty; zero hunger; good health and well-being; quality education; gender equality; clean water and sanitation; affordable and clean energy; decent work and economic growth; industry, innovation and infrastructure; reduced inequalities; sustainable cities and communities; responsible consumption and production; climate action; life below water; life on land; peace, justice, and strong institutions; and partnerships for the goals

• 2015, Sept: The National Newsmedia Council was created in Canada as a form of media self-regulation to enhance media accountability and promote responsible journalism. It replaced longstanding press councils in Ontario, British Columbia and the Atlantic provinces that were floundering for some time. The council is supported by daily and community news organizations across Canada, including the Star, Torstar’s Metroland Media, the Globe and Mail, Postmedia and its newly acquired Sun Media properties. It is a place foe the public to file complaints they believe were not satisfactorily addressed 

• 2015, Oct: The US sent a destroyer through an archipelago in the South China Sea upon which China has staked a claim. The Spratlys, with about 45 islands, has been occupied by militaries from China, Taiwan, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Malaysia. China however is asserting bold territorial claims in the South China Sea (they claim about 90% of it) and has been reclaiming land from the sea to build airstrips, setting up military bases and deploying missiles. The US Navy response was to conduct a freedom of navigation operation (FONOP). In 2016, an international arbitral tribunal delivered a sweeping rebuke of China’s historical claims in the South China Sea. China refused to take part in the arbitration and said the verdict was null and void

• 2015, Dec: The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s (TRC) report provided 94 “calls to action”, which were divided into two parts: legacy and reconciliation. The TRC was created in 2008 to acknowledge and attend to the deep harm done to Indigenous people through the Indian Residential School system. Note: Canada’s indigenous population (or “First Peoples”) in 2021 totals 1.8 million or 5% of the total (made up of 1,048,000 First Nations People, 624,000 Métis, and 71,000 Inuit – the three Indigenous groups recognized in the Constitution Act, 1982) (See “2007, Sept” and “2022, July”)

• 2015, Dec: The Paris Agreement (or the Paris Climate Accords), was adopted. It is an international treaty on climate change. 195 members of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) are parties to the agreement. The Paris Agreement’s long-term temperature goal is to keep the rise in mean global temperature to well below 2 °C (3.6 °F) above pre-industrial levels, and preferably limit the increase to 1.5 °C (2.7 °F), recognizing that this would substantially reduce the effects of climate change. Emissions should be reduced as soon as possible and reach net zero by the middle of the 21st century. To stay below 1.5 °C of global warming, emissions need to be cut by roughly 50% by 2030. This is an aggregate of each country’s nationally determined contributions (See “(See “1992, June”, “1994, March” and “2023, Dec”)

• 2016, Jan: China Creates a World Bank of Its own – the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) –  and the US balks. The AIIB is the first Asian-based international bank to be independent from the Western-dominated Bretton Woods institutions, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. This new multinational, multibillion-dollar bank will  finance roads, rails and power grids across Asia. Under Chinese stewardship, the bank would tackle the slow development in poor countries that was holding the region back from becoming the wealth centre of the world. However the Obama administration began a rear-guard battle to minimize the bank’s influence. The US worries that China will use the bank to set the global economic agenda on its own terms, forgoing the environmental protections, human rights, anticorruption measures and other governance standards long promoted by its Western counterparts. American officials point to China’s existing record of loans to unstable governments, construction deals for unnecessary infrastructure, and villagers abruptly uprooted with little compensation. Most of the US closest allies signed up for the bank, including Britain, Germany, Australia and South Korea; Canada has not. Altogether there are106 countries approved members, leaving the US and Japan on the outside 

• 2016, April: The Chinese shipping company COSCO became the majority stakeholder in the port of Piraeus, Greece, i.e. a foreign power controls Greece’s main port. Subsequently the ownership has increased. The decrepit facility has since been turned into one of Europe’s most productive ports. It may not be surprising but since then, Greece stopped the EU from issuing a unified statement against Beijing’s aggression in the South China Sea (2016), as well they vetoed a high-profile EU criticism of human rights abuses in China (2017) 

• 2016, April: A Panamanian law firm got hacked. The released Panama Papers contain personal financial information about wealthy individuals and public officials that had previously been kept private. In one of the biggest leaks of confidential papers in history, around 11.5 million leaked documents (or 2.6 terabytes of data) detail financial and attorney-client information for more than 214,488 offshore entities. The leak showed how the firm had assisted companies and individuals from more than 200 countries in secreting their money in offshore accounts, tax havens, and shell companies. The documents, some dating back to the 1970s, were created by, and taken from, former Panamanian offshore now-defunct law firm Mossack Fonseca. In 2017, the “Paradise Papers” unearthed thousands of unknown offshore corporations owned by prominent corporations and individuals such as Prince Charles, Queen Elizabeth II, and former US Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross. These, along with the “Pandora Papers” generate headlines, but then get forgotten, and the wholesale redistribution of the world’s wealth into the hands of a few unethical entities generally continues (See “2021, Oct”)

• 2016, May: Fort McMurray, Alberta suffered the largest, most rapid displacement of people in modern times, because of fire. Upwards of 88,000 people were forced from their homes. The wildfire destroyed approximately 2,400 homes and buildings. With an estimated damage cost of C$9.9 billion, it was the costliest natural disaster in Canadian history. It was the largest, most rapid displacement of people due to fire in North American history.  2,300 square mlles of forest were burned. It would not be declared fully extinguished until August of the following year. It has been described as “hundredth-percentile fire weather conditions during the hottest, driest May in recorded history, following a two-year drought in a sudden city filled with 25,000 petroleum-infused boxes and surrounded by millions of desiccated trees.” (See “1666, Sept”, “1871, Oct”, “1950, June-Oct” and “2001, May”)

• 2016, June: “Medical assistance in dying” (MAID) became legal in Canada. Canada’s Criminal Code exempts doctors and nurse practitioners who provide, or help to provide, MAID. It includes: the use of medication by a physician or nurse practitioner to directly cause a person’s death at their request. In Canada 3.3% of all deaths in 2021 were from MAiD. That has it approaching the European average where about 4% of all deaths are assisted deaths. An update as of January 2024: Canada will notexpand eligibility for MAID to people with mental health as their sole medical condition. The government agrees with a joint parliamentary committee report released late January that reached the same conclusion, and that assisted death should only be offered to such patients when it can be “safely and adequately provided.” The report concluded that fundamental issues around the expansion have not yet been resolved and that health-care system actors are not ready

• 2016, June: Brexit referendum: the United Kingdom voted to withdraw from the European Union, to which it had belonged since 1973, a move dubbed “Brexit.” (Brexit means: Britain and exit). That decision reflected, in part, the economic doldrums in the country after the 2008 financial crash, and the emphasis of politicians on anti-immigrant sentiment and promises to return England to a past greatness by cutting it off from the bureaucrats of Europe. Following the UK-wide referendum, in which 51.89% voted in favour of leaving the EU and 48.11% voted to remain a member, PM David Cameron resigned. In March 2017, the new British government led by Theresa May formally notified the EU of the country’s intention to withdraw, beginning the process of Brexit negotiations. It took four years and was very costly (See “2020, Jan”)

• 2016, July: Turkey’s President Recep Erdogan survived a coup attempt, and changed political course. First as prime minister from 2003 and then as directly elected president since 2014, he has flexed Turkey’s muscles as a regional power. He has presided over a period of steady economic growth and winning praise internationally as a reformer. However he has repeatedly supported criminalizing adultery. And as a father of four, he has said “no Muslim family” should consider birth control or family planning. “We will multiply our descendants.” His government excluded the teaching of evolution from school curriculums. In July 2020, he oversaw the conversion of Istanbul’s historic Hagia Sophia into a mosque, angering many Christians. Built 1,500 years ago as a cathedral, it was made into a mosque by the Ottoman Turks, but Mustafa Ataturk (the founding father of Turkey) had turned it into a museum – a symbol of the new secular state (See “1923, Oct”)

• 2016, July: A 97-page report covering significant state-sponsored doping in Russia was published by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA). The report concluded that it was shown “beyond a reasonable doubt” that Russia’s Ministry of Sport, the Centre of Sports Preparation of the National Teams of Russia, the Federal Security Service (FSB), and the WADA-accredited laboratory in Moscow had “operated for the protection of doped Russian competitors” within a “state-directed failsafe system” using “the disappearing positive [test] methodology” (DPM) after the country’s poor medal count during the 2010 Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver (See “2019, Dec”) 

• 2016, July: A plane – the Solar Impulse 2 – travelled 25,000 miles around the world without a drop of liquid fuel, the sun suppling the only power after 14 months of travel and 550 hours in the air, over four continents, two oceans and three seas. It was the brainchild of Bertrand Piccard, a psychiatrist and explorer who came up with the idea after his 1999 nonstop spin around the world in a hot air ballon. (Piccard will try and fly a hydrogen-powered aircraft, with zero emissions, around the world in 2028.) 

• 2016, Sept: TikTok, an online video sharing social networking service was released and now has more than one billion users. It was created by ByteDance, a Chinese internet technology company headquartered in Beijing. TikTok lets people create short videos that can range from 3 seconds to 10 minutes; the videos can be about any topic. TikTok’s editing features make it easy for kids to create professional-looking videos. TikTok also allows for editing using special filters, and videos can be slowed down or sped up for comedic or dramatic effect. These short videos have earned the app a place among popular social media platforms. TikTok has also gained widespread usage among young teenagers and so-called “Zoomers.” Some children aren’t just interested in making videos with their friends on TikTok – they want to get a lot of likes and followers. Nearly half of all people on TikTok are aged between 16 and 24, and some are even younger. TikTok is popular all around the world. It was the most downloaded app in the US in October 2018.  As of 2022, TikTok had over 3 billion downloads. Today the social network now has more than 150 million monthly users, double that of Snapchat and Twitter combined. TikTok has faced criticism based on ByteDance’s Chinese origins. Like Facebook and Instagram, TikTok’s money is made through advertising, which combined with its recommendations algorithm, requires hefty data collection. In 2020, TikTok was banned by the Indian government (See “2024, March”) 

• 2016, Nov: Peace Agreements (revised a few times) were signed between the Colombian Government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC–EP) to bring an end to the Colombian conflict. (Over the years Colombia is the country in which more people have been kidnapped than anywhere else in the world.) The Colombian armed conflict is the oldest ongoing armed conflict in the Americas, beginning – by some measures – in 1964 with the creation of FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia), the largest of left-wing guerrilla groups which have operated in the country. FARC was reformed as a political party, in accordance with the peace deal terms. There still remains a dissident faction who reject the peace deal. (Personal aside: when I was working in South America, and first arrived in Bogotå  in 1984 I was given strict instructions not to venture anywhere without an escort. While a representative democratic republic, Colombia was having big problems. The Medellin drug cartel and the Cali cartel had surged to power in the 1980s, run by Pablo Escobar and FARC was very active. The year before my first visit a local guerrilla group had kidnapped one of our Exxon staff, a US citizen. They demanded money for his return – it was rumoured the ransom was 10 million dollars. Exxon didn’t want a repeat performance. When I arrived at the airport I didn’t even get processed through customs – I was taken straight to a limousine and, with an escort car in front and one in the rear, they took me to my hotel.)

• 2016, Nov: Republican, Donald Trump wins vote for president of the US with Mike Pence as Vice President, defeating former secretary of state and First Lady of the US Hillary Clinton. He won but lost the popular vote by about 3 million. Trump took office as the 45th US president January 2017

• 2017: The Canadian CANDU small modular nuclear reactor is now a huge global (and Canada-wide) opportunity. Natural Resources Canada established a “SMR Roadmap” targeting the development of small modular reactors. In response, SNC-Lavalin has developed a 300 MW SMR version of the CANDU, the CANDU SMR. Candu remains the the only nuclear power technology on the market that is both Canadian-made and Canadian-owned. Nuclear energy can play a pivotal role in decarbonizing energy grids across the globe, as Canada and its international partners drive toward net-zero emissions. Not all nuclear technologies are the same. A single Candu reactor can potentially support up to 60,000 jobs across Canada (vs competing designs). Also, only Candu reactors use natural uranium mined in Canada. In contrast alternatives developed outside of Canada use highly regulated and controlled enriched uranium. The use of natural uranium is a major advantage, considering the fact that Russia is the largest enriched uranium supplier on the global market. Russian state-owned businesses provided no less than 35% of global enrichment in 2021 and are projected to provide 30% of global supply in 2035. 

• 2017, July: The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), or the Nuclear Weapon Ban Treaty, adopted by the UN General Assembly. It is the first legally binding international agreement to comprehensively prohibit nuclear weapons with the ultimate goal being their total elimination (See “1968, July”)

• 2017, Aug: A multilateral body called the Lima Group was formed in order to coordinate responses to the mushrooming crisis in Venezuela. It now includes 16 countries, and Canada is one of them. Among other issues, the group demands the release of political prisoners, the end of human rights violations, calls for free elections, offers humanitarian aid and criticizes the breakdown of democratic order in Venezuela under Nicolás Maduro. With the help of the US, Canada and other wealthy countries almost seven million Venezuelans have entered Colombia and about half have been granted permanent residency, free education and health care. (It is even more critical as of December 2023, when Maduro issued a proclamation that the Essequibo region of the country of Guyana is a Venezuelan state. This is one country seeking to conquer the territory of a neighbouring state.) (See “2002, April”, “2022, Jan” and “2024, July”)

• 2017, Oct: The deadliest mass shooting committed by an individual in US history occurred on the Las Vegas Strip in Nevada. From his 32nd-floor suites in the Mandalay Bay hotel, the killer fired more than 1,000 bullets, killing 60 peopleand wounding at least 413. The ensuing panic brought the total number of injured to approximately 867. The killer used bump stocks to fire shots in rapid succession, at a rate similar to that of automatic firearms. Subsequently bump stocks were banned by the US Justice Department, but the constitutionality of the ban remained under review until 2022, when the US Supreme Court declined to hear the case

• 2017, Nov: The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (QSD) – the QUAD – established. This isa strategic security dialogue between Australia, India, Japan and the US organized (originally in 2007) as a response to China’s rising power. They describe in a joint statement “a shared vision for a Free and Open Indo-Pacific,” and a “rules-based maritime order in the East and South China seas,” which the Quad members state are needed to counter Chinese maritime claims (See “2021, Sept”)

• 2017, Nov: Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe was removed as president and party leader of ZANU-PF and was replaced by Emmerson Mnangagwa (See “1965”, “2013, Aug” and “2023, Aug”)

• 2018, Feb: India refused to let PM Justin Trudeau’s plane land unless he agreed to meet with a government official to air grievances about Sikh separatists in Canada. They agreed and during the meeting in Amritsar India’s minister for the Punjab, Captain Amarinder Singh, handed Trudeau and then-defence minister Harjit Sajjan, a dossier containing the names of about 10 Sikh activists whose activities the Indian government wanted curtailed. Under India’s PM Narendra Modi, they want Canada to take legal action against Sikh separatists, whom India view as terrorists. (They are known for promoting the creation of a Sikh homeland carved out of the Punjab, home to the majority of Sikhs, and an area Sikhs would call Khalistan. These frictions have boiled over in the aftermath of the slaying in June 2024 of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, who was gunned down at a Surrey, BC temple. Subsequently Trudeau suggested Indian agents may have been involved in his death which has caused Modi great consternation.)

• 2018, March: Putin’s “state of the nation” address in which he announced that Russia had developed a new arsenal of nuclear missiles capable of penetrating US air defences. “The attempt at curbing Russia has failed.” Putin said Russia had tested new nuclear weapons, including a nuclear-powered cruise missile and a nuclear-capable underwater drone that, Putin claimed, would be impossible to intercept

• 2018, March: Xi Jinping abolished term limits allowing him to rule China indefinitely and unrestrained. The National People’s Congress (the country’s rubber-stamp legislature) approved two other constitutional amendments, “the addition of a political philosophy called Xi Jinping Thought to the constitution”, and the creation of politically driven “supervisory commissions” tasked with investigating party members and civil servants. Some consider him the de facto Emperor of China. He proceeds with his efforts to turn his country into an expansionist and fiercely totalitarian state (see “2022, Oct”)

• 2018, May: The US unilaterally withdrew from the “Iran nuclear deal” (the JCPOA), sparking years of tension since. President Donald Trump signed a Presidential Memorandum ordering the reinstatement of harsher sanctions. In a speech President Trump called the Iran deal “horrible” (See “2015, April” and “2023, May”)

• 2018, May: The Canadian federal government bought the Trans Mountain Pipeline (TMPL) from Houston-based Kinder Morgan for C$4.5 billion in order to keep the project alive but get more pipeline capacity to export crude. By expanding the pipeline (from 300,000 b/d to 890,000 barrels), and replacing more expensive and dangerous transport by rail, Ottawa wanted to boost exports and narrow the gap between the price paid for Alberta oil and crude produced in the US. Also it seems possible that an indigenous-led group will ultimately purchase Trans-Mountain. The pipeline has incurred massive cost overruns; the expansion project’s final price tag will almost certainly be more than $35 billion – once the final construction bill, and debt servicing costs, estimated to be in the range of $2 billion a year, are taken into account. The total amount of government-backed loans provided to Trans Mountain by a group of Canadian banks is now (January 2024) up to $18 billion. The line is needed to move Canadian crude to tidewater. No matter how fast TMX fills up, it’s likely to be Canada’s last major export pipeline ever built, due to regulatory hurdles, environmental opposition and uncertainty about future oil demand. Note: the first barrels of crude oil were loaded into the system April 2024 (See “2021, Jan” and “2024, May”)

• 2018, June: Volcán de Fuego erupted in Guatemala. One of the most active volcanoes in the world, it is located 44 kilometres from Guatemala City. It caused the death of officially nearly 200 people

• 2018, June: US President Donald Trump met North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un, an achievement Kim’s father or grandfather never experienced. He became the first sitting American commander in chief to set foot in North Korea. Never before had American and North Korean leaders gotten together at the military demarcation line, where heavily armed forces have faced off across a tense divide for 66 years since the end of fighting in the Korean War 

• 2018, Oct: Canada became the second country in the world to legalize cannabis. It remains “controlled”: sold only at government licensed retailers and grown only by government licensed producers

• 2018, Nov: The first birth from human gene editing: twin girls in China had undergone CCRS genome editing as embryos for HIV resistance – the world’s first CRISPR babies. Man has for the first time developed the capacity to add to his own genetic makeup. The lead scientist, He Jiankui, shocked the world with many in the scientific community criticizing his work as unethical

• 2018, Dec: Huawei’s board deputy chair, Meng Wanzhou, was arrested in Vancouver by the RCMP on a US extradition request for fraud and conspiracy to commit fraud in order to circumvent US sanctions against Iran. (Huawei Technologies is China’s largest nominally private company and the world’s largest supplier of network equipment for telecommunications firms.) Shortly after, Canadian nationals Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig were taken into custody in China and indicted under the state secrets law. In September 2021, the US Department of Justice announced it had reached a deal with Meng to resolve the case through a deferred prosecution agreement. Ming was then released from house arrest in Canada. Shortly after, Kovrig and Spavor were released after 1,019 days in prison

• 2018, Dec: The Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) came into force. It was originally called the Trans-Pacific Partnership and was meant to include America, only for Donald Trump to pull out as soon as he took office. The eleven signatories (Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam) have combined economies representing 13.4 percent of global GDP, at approximately US$13.5 trillion, making the CPTPP one of the world’s largest free-trade areas by GDP. Starting 2024, Canada will assume the rotating chair position. Both Taiwan and China are seeking to join the agreement, with China having policies and practices that are not compatible with many of the CPTPP provisions, while Taiwan has a strong case for membership having spent the past eight years preparing (See “2024, Jan”)

• 2019, March: The Boeing 737 MAX passenger airline was grounded worldwide until December 2020 after 346 people died in two crashes (Indonesia October 2018 and Ethiopia March 2019). Scrutiny of Boeing has been renewed in January 2024 after an unused door blew off an Alaska Airlines plane mid-flight which forced an emergency landing but resulted in no serious injuries

• 2019, April: Election of Volodymyr Zelenskyy as President of Ukraine after a runoff vote withthe top two vote-getters – the incumbent president, Petro Poroshenko and Zelensky. In the run-off vote, Zelensky took more than 73% with Poroshenko trailing far behind at 24%. Zelensky was best known for starring in a satirical television series Servant of the People, in which his character accidentally becomes Ukrainian president! (See “2014, May”)

• 2019, June: Final report of Canada’s National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG), “Reclaiming Power and Place”. It had 231 “calls for justice” to end violence against indigenous women, girls and 2SLGBTQQIA people in Canada. (The acronym 2SLGBTQQIA+ represents those who are two-spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex, asexual, and all other sexual orientations and genders.)

• 2019, June: The UN-Forum Partnership was signed which calls for a global partnership for sustainable development. The partnership identified six areas of focus – financing the 2030 Agenda, climate change, health, digital cooperation, gender equality and empowerment of women, education and skills – to strengthen and broaden their combined impact by building on existing and new collaborations

• 2019, July: The UN’s Human Rights Council urged China to end its mass arbitrary detentions and related violations against Muslims in the Xinjiang region. In a joint statement the UN’s top human rights body expressed concern about reports of large-scale arbitrary detention, widespread surveillance, and other violations against Uyghurs and other Muslims in Xinjiang. They urged China “to allow meaningful access to Xinjiang” for UN and independent international observers, and asked the high commissioner to keep the Human Rights Council regularly informed on the situation

• 2019, Aug: India revoked the special status, or autonomy, granted under the Indian Constitution to Jammu and Kashmir – a region administered by India as a state which consists of the larger part of Kashmir which has been the subject of dispute among India, Pakistan, and China since 1947. Under India’s PM Narendra Modi and his Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government, a laissez-faire approach toward violent incidents targeting Muslims, Christians, Dalits and other minorities has grown. Human Rights Watch has called upon world leaders to confront Modi regarding violence against Muslims, Christian and other religious minorities (See “1947, Oct”)

• 2019, Nov: TheBlue Dot Network (BDN) created. It is a joint project of the US, Japan, and Australia that supports investment in high-quality infrastructure projects around the world. In 2021, the success of the program influenced the adoption of the Build Back Better World (B3W) initiative by the Group of Seven (G7) nations

• 2019, Dec: Russia received a four-year ban from all major sporting events by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA); this includes the Tokyo 2020 Olympics and Paralympics and football’s 2022 World Cup in Qatar. (In 2020 the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) reduced the ban period to two years following an appeal by Russia.) Athletes who can prove they are untainted by the doping scandal will be able to compete under a neutral flag (See “2016, July”)

• 2019, Dec: US president Donald Trump was impeached by the House of Representatives of the US Congress. Trump’s impeachment came after a formal House inquiry found that he had solicited foreign interference in the 2020 US presidential election to help his re-election bid, and then obstructed the inquiry itself by telling his administration officials to ignore subpoenas for documents and testimony. The inquiry reported that Trump withheld military aid, and an invitation to the White House to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy in order to influence Ukraine to announce an investigation into Trump’s political opponent Joe Biden, and to promote a discredited conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, was behind interference in the 2016 presidential election. Republican Mitt Romney, the only senator to break party lines, became the first US senator to vote to convict a president of his own party in an impeachment trial, voting to convict on Article 1: abuse of power, but voted to acquit on Article II. The Senate acquitted Trump twice: on February 2020, and again February 2021

• 2019: The world’s economy is estimated to be worth around $94 trillion, and nearly all its energy (84%) was derived from fossil fuels. (Source: energy historian, Daniel Yergin.) Crude oil  is the world’s most widely traded commodity. On any given day the human race consumes about 100 million barrels of crude oil, while another 40 million barrels are in transit around the globe via tanker, pipeline, truck, and train. More than a third of global shipping is devoted to transporting petroleum products

• 2019, Dec-2020, Feb: The Black Summer fire season in southeastern Australia contributed to an intense ‘super outbreak’ of fire-induced and smoke-infused thunderstorms, known as pyrocumulonimbus (pyroCb). As the planet warms, large-scale fires are becoming more frequent, and wildfire seasons are getting longer. Australia, which in 2020 experienced its driest spring and hottest year, has experienced increasingly dangerous wildfires. Scientists say the fire storms there may increase as well, creating a dangerous positive feedback loop that scorches already-dry land. The same conditions that can lead to devastating wildfires – hot, dry air and intense wind – are also the most likely to produce fire-borne storms. Once formed, pyroCbs can look similar to intense thunderstorms, but they have key differences. They tend to produce lightning with positive, rather than negative charges, which lasts longer and allows the strikes of lightning more time to set the ground aflame. Fire storms also tend to stagnate, staying parked over the fires that create them. And perhaps most notably, fire storms rarely produce the precipitation desperately needed to squelch massive fires (See “2021, June-mid July”)

• 2020, Jan: COVID-19 coronavirus descends upon the planet.China cut off the city of Wuhan, population 11 million, the outbreak’s epicentre, from the rest of China and the world, marking the start of a 76-day lockdown, but it was too late to stop the coronavirus from becoming a global pandemic. By January2023 the virus had officially killed 6.8 million people worldwide (although the true toll is likely three times that or about 21.5 million dead). The world hasn’t seen infectious disease death on this scale since the Great Influenza of 1918-19, when the Spanish flu killed from 17 to 50 million. In Canada our COVID-19 death deaths as of mid January 2023 amounted to 50,000 on a population of 38 million; the same number of deaths occurred in 1918-19 on a population of eight million (See “1918-19”)

• 2020, Jan: Britain formally leaves the European Union; the UK Brexit is accomplished through the European Union (Withdrawal) Agreement Act. It took four years since British voters stunned the world by narrowly voting to leave the EU. Then-prime minister Boris Johnson, who led the Brexit campaign in 2016, showed uncharacteristic restraint in marking the occasion. A July 2023 survey found 63% of Britons regard Brexit as a failure and 55% said they would vote to keep the UK in the EU if the referendum were held again. The UK had been a member state of the EU or its predecessor the European Communities (EC) since January 1973. Then the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement was signed December 2020. The agreement governs the relationship between the EU and the UK after Brexit. It provides for free trade in goods and limited mutual market access in services, as well as for cooperation mechanisms in a range of policy areas (See “2016, June”)

• 2020, April: The deadliest shooting rampage in Canadian history took place in Nova Scotia when Gabriel Wortman killed 22 people and set fires at 16 locations. For most of his thirteen-hour crime spree, Wortman drove a replica RCMP cruiser and wore an RCMP uniform. He was finally shot and killed by the RCMP. Wortman was described as paranoid, manipulative, and controlling and struggled with alcohol use. No motive has been established for the attacks. Shortly after PM Trudeau announced an immediate ban on some 1,500 makes and models of “military-grade assault-style” weapons, including two of the five guns used in the attacks. The ban included the Ruger Mini-14, which Wortman obtained illegally within Canada (See “1989, Dec”)

• 2020, May: Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3), that uses deep learning to produce human-like text, introduced. It is capable of writing original prose with fluency equivalent to that of a human. The quality of the text generated by GPT-3 is so high that it can be difficult to determine whether or not it was written by a human (subject to some debate), which has both benefits and risks. It was created by OpenAI, a San Francisco-based artificial intelligence research laboratory (See “2022, Dec”)

• 2020, June: The Hong Kong national security law was passed. The law bans all activities Beijing deems a danger to its national security. It applies not just to the actions of everyone in Hong Kong, but to the actions of anyone outside the region as well. The law established four particular crimes of secession, subversion, terrorism, and collusion with foreign organizations; any open speech, verbal promotion or intention of Hong Kong’s secession from China is considered a crime as well. The United Kingdom called it a breach of the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration, which provided autonomy for Hong Kong to be retained for 50 years. The law reflects the reality that China has always found it difficult to accept the kind of freedom and restraint to power that Hong Kong has under a separate system

• 2020, July: The United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) entered into force. (It was signed November 2018.) The USMCA, sometimes characterized as “NAFTA 2.0” as it replaced the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which was implemented in 1994. It is a mutually beneficial win for North American workers, farmers, ranchers, and businesses. It created the largest free trade region in the world. It also obliged signatories to notify each other if they entered into trade talks with a “non-market” economy (effectively giving the US a veto over the other countries’ deals). USMCA created one of the world’s largest free trade zones, with a population of more than 510 million people and an economy of $30.997 trillion in GDP nominal terms, or nearly 30 percent of the global economy (See “1987, Oct” and “1994, Jan”)

• 2020, Aug: Russian opposition figure and anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny was poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent and was hospitalized in serious condition. According to the EU, the poisoning became possible “only with the consent of the Presidential Executive Office” and with the participation of the FSB. He returned to Russia the next year and was given a 2 1/2 year prison sentence, which was later extended to 9 years. He then faced new criminal accusations that extended his prison term to 19 years. He was moved in December to a Russian Arctic prison so remote that his aides have had very limited contact with him. He died in prison on Feb 16, 2024 (See “2024, Feb”)

• 2020, Nov: The world’s biggest trade agreement, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), was signed. This free trade agreement among the Asia-Pacific nations includes Australia, Brunei, Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. The 15 member countries account for about 30% of the world’s population (2.2 billion people).It is the world’s largest plurilateral trade agreement (with $29.7 trillion or 30% of global GDP). It would have been bigger still had India not withdrawn a year ago (they were worried their domestic industry would be swamped by Chinese imports). It eliminates, by one estimate, about 90% of tariffs, but only over a period of 20 years after coming into effect. Some see RCEP as so unambitious as to be largely symbolic. Others see it as an important building block in a new world order, in which China calls the shots all over Asia; it will accentuate a regional tilt in China’s trade. It is a joining together in one overarching compact the various free-trade agreements (FTAs) between the ten-member Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) and several other countries in the Asia-Pacific: Australia, China, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea. RCEP’s membership overlaps with that of another big regional trade pact, the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) (See “2018, Dec”)

• 2021, Jan: A mob of then-US President Donald Trump supporters attacked the US Capital Building in Washington, DC following his defeat in the 2020 presidential election. The mob was seeking to keep Trump in power by preventing a joint session of Congress from counting the electoral college votes to formalize the victory of President-elect Joe Biden. A week after the riot, the House of Representatives impeached Trump for incitement of insurrection, making him the only US president to have been impeached twice. After Trump had left office, the Senate voted 57–43 in favour of conviction; because this fell short of a two-thirds majority he was acquitted for a second time. The House approved a select committee with seven Democrats and two Republicans to investigate; they held nine televised public hearings in 2022 

• 2021, Jan: Donald Trump was banned from Twitter, but reinstated in November 2022 by its new owner, Elon Musk, after Musk bought Twitter (now rebranded as “X”)

• 2021, Jan: US President Biden revoked the permit that was granted to TC Energy Corporation for the Keystone XL Pipeline. TransCanada Keystone Pipeline GP Ltd (Keystone), operated three  phases of an oil pipeline system that runs from the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin in Alberta to refineries in Illinois and Texas. The proposed fourth pipeline, called Keystone XL, would have connected the Phase I-pipeline terminals in Hardisty, Alberta, and Steele City, Nebraska, by a shorter route and a larger-diameter pipe. It would have run through Baker, Montana, where American-produced light crude oil from Montana and North Dakota would have been added to the Keystone’s throughput of synthetic crude oil and diluted bitumen from the oil sands of Canada. It was designed to ship up to 830,000 barrels of crude a day, one of a series of projects seen as crucial to Canada’s energy industry, but it became a symbol for the North American climate movement. Alberta crude has been selling at a deep discount vs. the world price because of limited pipeline capacity to move its crude to tidewater.  Rail is filling in the gap – with increased risk and carbon emissions, and significantly higher costs. When the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion (TMX) is finally complete second quarter 2024 it will treble existing capacity to the Pacific coast, shipping an extra 590,000 barrels a day. The potential for brand new pipelines being built is pretty close to zero (See “2018, May” and “2024, May”)

• 2021, Feb: Military coup in Myanmar (Burma); the armed forces removed the civilian government. It was the end of a brief stretch of democratic rule, the former British colony’s first since a coup led by General Ne Win in 1962. (In November 2020 elections were held in which Ms. Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy won overwhelmingly and the military contested the outcome as fraudulent.) Many citizens have joined a massive countrywide protest that has collapsed Myanmar’s public institutions and strained its economy to the breaking point. Many have also joined the shadow National Unity Government (NUG); thousands more have joined civilian militias and other ethnic armed groups. The junta, led by ethnic-majority Burmans, has responded brutally against the citizen population. The army is deeply enmeshed in heroin and jade smuggling, as are some ethnic militias. The country has not had a conflict-free year since independence in 1948. (Personal aside: a fortunate visit in 2017, part of which included travelling down their Irrawaddy River that’s like a highway and sensing early tensions that would erupt, will likely not be replicated.) (See “1885, Nov”) 

• 2021, Feb: The US and Russia agree to extend New START treaty for another five years, keeping verifiable limits on their arsenals of long-range nuclear weapons. The agreement is one of Joe Biden’s first major foreign policy acts as US president. The Trump administration had tried and failed in its final months to secure a shorter extension to the treaty that would have addressed China’s nuclear weapons.(Note: Russian President Vladimir Putin’s move in February 2023 to suspend Russia’s involvement came as a disturbing surprise) (See “1991, July” and “2010, Apr”)

• 2021, March: Argentina’s Foreign Ministry launched the International Campaign for the Right to Identity, which is aimed at promoting the search for granddaughters and grandsons who were abducted during the last civil-military dictatorship and who may be living abroad.The initiative was developed with the National Commission for the Right to Identity (CoNaDi) and Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, which participated both in the preparation of the outreach material and in the training of the consular staff.

• 2021, June-mid July: The 2021 Western North America heat wave affected much of Western North America and killed many. Extreme event attribution found this was a 1000-year weather event, made 150 times more likely by climate change. A study in NatureClimate Change estimated that its occurrence, while previously thought virtually impossible, is projected to increase rapidly with further global warming. The heat wave sparked numerous extensive wildfires, some reaching hundreds of square kilometres in area, which led to widespread disruption on the roads. One of them destroyed the village of Lytton, BC, the day after it had set a record high temperature for Canada, 49°C. The death toll exceeded 1,400 people, with a death toll of at least 808 estimated in western Canada (See “2019, Dec-2020, Feb”)

• 2021, July: The first child in Canada to receive a fully artificial heart – a bridge to receiving a heart transplant, which this 11 year old girl did two months later

• 2021, July: The president of Haiti, Jovenel Moïse, was assassinated. No one knows who ordered the hit, but many suspect a link to the drug trade. The country has been in chaos since. Gangs that once dominated only slums now control much of the capital, Port-au-Prince. Haiti’s prime minister, Ariel Henry, begged for a foreign military intervention to help the police restore order. Many locals would welcome it. However, Haitian opposition groups fear that such an intervention would serve only to prop up Henry, who seized power after Moïse’s death and is widely regarded as illegitimate. (He finally resigned April 2024; subsequently Haiti’s newly installed transitional council chose former sports minister Fritz Bélizaire as the country’s prime minister.) (See “2024, Feb”)

• 2021, Aug: US humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan after two decades of a “forever war”. President Biden honoured Donald Trump’s withdrawal deal with the Taliban. Trump described the exit he himself had negotiated as “the greatest foreign policy humiliation” in American history. The US evacuated more than 124,000. What subsequently occurred was the reimposition of a cruel and authoritarian system that will deprive Afghans, women in particular, of their fundamental human rights. (Today it is the only country in the world where girls over 12 years of age cannot pursue education.)  A comprehensive report from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) shows that the operation was a failure almost from the beginning. It was an attempt to impose America’s will on a nation whose economic, cultural, and political dynamics American leadership never respected or understood (See “2001, Oct”) 

• Regarding the world’s 35 million refugees, four conflicts account for the majority: there are now about 8.2 million Afghans who’ve been forced to flee their country due to its decades of war; the majority of them are thought be in Pakistan, which vies with Turkey as the world’s most refugee-filled country; about 6 million Ukrainians cannot return to their invaded country, with most living in Central and Western Europe; 6.5 million Syrians have been forced by dictator Bashir al-Assad’s crushing of their democratic uprising to flee mostly to Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon; and 1.4 million Sudanese have escaped violence mainly for other parts of Africa

• 2021, Sept: AUKUS, a trilateral security pact between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States for the Indo-Pacific region, was struck to counter China’s rising military might. (China condemned AUKUS as a threat to peace in the Indo-Pacific. They also are displeased with the QUAD. See “2017, Nov”). Under the pact, the US and the UK will assist Australia in acquiring nuclear-powered submarines. Canada is seeking to join the non-nuclear component (information sharing on cutting edge technologies, e.g. undersea defence, AI, quantum technology, hypersonic warfare). (It will happen.) Canada already shares intelligence with its Five Eyes allies (See “1946, March”) 

• 2021, Sept: Squid Game, a South Korean television series, became Netflix’s most-watched series and the most-watched program in 94 countries, attracting more than 142 million member households and 1.65 billion viewing hours in its first four weeks 

• 2021, Oct: The Pandora Papers exposed the secret offshore accounts of 35 world leaders as well as more than 100 billionaires, celebrities, and business leaders. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) published 11.9 million leaked documents with 2.9 terabytes of data. The list the leak exposed included current and former presidents, prime ministers, and heads of state. The news organizations of the ICIJ described the document leak as their most expansive exposé of financial secrecy yet, containing documents, images, emails and spreadsheets from 14 financial service companies, in nations including Panama, Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates. The ICIJ estimates that the total global amount of money held offshore (outside the country where the money was made) is between US$5.6 trillion and US$32 trillion (See “2016, April”)

• 2021, Oct: NATO expelled eight Russians from its Brussels, Belgium headquarters amid concerns that they were undeclared intelligence agents. Russia responded by suspending relations with NATO

• 2022, Jan: James Webb Space telescope turned on; it is able to register light from one galaxy as far back as 13.1 billion years – touching the beginning of a universe that is roughly 13.8 billion years old (See “13.6-13.8 billion”)

• 2022, Jan: Venezuela is engulfed in a political and economic crisis which has led to more than eight million people leaving the country since 2015. Since 1999, Venezuela has been run by two men from the same party. Hugo Chávez was president from 1999 to his death in 2013 and was succeeded by his right-hand man, Nicolás Maduro. He had formed the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV). This socialist PSUV party has over the past two decades gained control of key institutions, including much of the judiciary, the electoral council and the supreme court. As a result, the role of the president has become much more powerful and the system of checks and balances has been severely weakened. Waves of anti-government protests in 2014 and 2017 fizzled out after a police crackdown. In April 2019 opposition leader Juan Guaido tried to overthrow dictator Maduro but bullets dispersed the revolution. A crisis due to corruption, repression and incompetence continues to plunge a once-prosperous country to the brink of starvation and destitution. The regime overseeing this disaster remains in place through military force and political repression (See “2002, April” and “2024, July”)

• 2022, Jan: A truck convoy blocked the highway at the busy Canada/US border in Coutts, Alberta. Subsequently two Canadians were charged with conspiracy to murder police officers. A cache of firearms, ammunition and body amour was seized in trailers near the protests. The demonstration, during which hundreds of vehicles clogged the border in defiance of COVID-19 restrictions, ended abruptly when the alleged plot became known. The two men went to trial in July 2024 (See “2022, Feb”)

• 2022, Feb: The Canadian federal government invoked the Emergencies Act to end the protests that had blocked downtown Ottawa’s streets for nearly a month. The protesters were angry with the government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, including vaccine requirements (like the decision to require that commercial truck drivers be vaccinated in order to enter Canada). They parked large vehicles on key arteries and honked their horns incessantly for days. By invoking the act, the federal government gave law enforcement extraordinary powers to remove or arrest protesters – and gave itself the power to freeze the finances of those connected to the protests. The temporary power also gave authorities the ability to commandeer tow trucks to remove protesters’ vehicles from the streets. The leaders of the so-called “Freedom Convoy” face criminal charges. (Follow-up: the temporary measures adopted to deal with the protests were determined to infringe on provisions of the Canadian Charter of Rights. (See “2024, Jan”)

• 2022, Feb: Brittney Griner, an American professional basketball player, was arrested on smuggling charges by Russian customs officials after cartridges containing less than a gram of medically prescribed hash oil, illegal in Russia, were found in her luggage. She is a two-time Olympic gold medalist with the US women’s national basketball team and a six-time WNBA All-Star. She had been playing basketball with the Russian Premier League during the WNBA off-season. She pleaded guilty to the charges, and in August was sentenced to nine years in prison. In November 2022, Griner was transferred to a Russian penal colony. US officials stated that she was “wrongfully detained”. On December 8, Griner was released in a prisoner exchange for Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout

• 2022, Feb: The 2022 Winter Olympics took place in Beijing, China, a city that rarely has snow. Having previously hosted the 2008 Summer Olympics, Beijing became the first city to have hosted both the Summer and Winter Olympics. Like the Summer Olympics held six months earlier in Tokyo, the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in the implementation of health and safety protocols, and, for the second Games in a row, the Games being closed to the public

• 2022, Feb: Russia invades Ukraine. Russian presidentVladimir Putin described the biggest European invasion since the end of WWII as a “special military operation”. His declared goal on 24 February 2022 was to “demilitarise and denazify” Ukraine and not occupy it by force, days after backing independence for eastern Ukrainian territories occupied by Russian proxy forces since 2014. He vowed to protect people from eight years of Ukrainian bullying and genocide – a Russian propaganda claim with no foundation in reality. He spoke of preventing NATO from gaining a foothold in Ukraine, then added another objective of ensuring Ukraine’s neutral status. For years, Putin has denied Ukraine its own statehood, writing in a lengthy 2021 essay that “Russians and Ukrainians were one people” dating back to the late 9th Century (See “2007, Feb”)

• 2022, March: Russia’s parliament passed a law imposing a jail term of up to 15 years for spreading intentionally “fake” news about the military, stepping up the information war over the conflict in Ukraine. Lawmakers passed amendments to the criminal code making the spread of “fake” information an offence punishable with fines or jail terms. They also imposed fines for public calls for sanctions against Russia. Russia’s communications watchdog, known as Roskomnadzor, also cut access to several foreign news organizations’ websites, including the BBC and Deutsche Welle, for spreading what it alleged was false information about its war in Ukraine

• 2022, March: The Republic of Moldova applied for European Union membership. In June, the European Commission formally recommended that the European Council grant the Republic of Moldova the perspective to become a member of the EU and candidate status for accession, with a number of conditions for the opening of accession negotiations

• 2022, April: The Prime Minister of Pakistan, Imran Khan, lost a military-backed no-confidence motion in the National Assembly. In 2022 President Biden called Pakistan “one of the most dangerous countries in the world,” presumably  because of its potentially lethal cocktail of nuclear weapons and unstable politics. Shehbaz Sharif was then elected unopposed by the National Assembly to replace Khan as prime minister, as Khan’s PTI party boycotted the vote. Of the three parts into which Britain’s former Indian empire was eventually divided, Pakistan is now indisputably the poorest. (GDP per capita is only $1,500 US in Pakistan, compared to $2,250 for India and almost $2,500 for Bangladesh. The gap will grow even wider, because Pakistan’s population is growing twice as fast as the other two.) To some extent Pakistan’s poor performance is due to its perpetual arms race with far bigger India because of the territorial dispute over Kashmir, but it cannot be denied that a large part of the fault lies with the country’s corrupt and chaotic politics. It is too bad as it a vast country of 231.4 million people, one of only nine countries in the world with nuclear weapons, a long coastline in a generally peaceful region of the ocean and has plenty of talented people (See “1947, June”, “1954, May” and “1965, Aug”)

• 2022, May: Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity (IPEF) is an initiative by the US to promote four pillars: boosting trade, especially of the digital kind; making supply chains more resilient; tackling climate change through clean energy; and fighting corruption in business. For America, IPEF is a way of signalling that it hears Asian worries, and is trying its best to respond to them. The framework was launched with a total of fourteen participating founding member nations with an open invitation for other countries to join at any time. Participating nations include: Australia, Brunei, Fiji, India, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, US, Vietnam

• 2022, May: Afghanistan’s supreme leader ordered the country’s women to cover their faces in public, again. “They should wear a chadori (head-to-toe burqa) as it is traditional and respectful,” said a decree issued by Taliban chief Haibatullah Akhunzada. A spokesman for the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice  (yes, you read that correctly) read the decree. A woman’s father or closest male relative would be visited and eventually imprisoned or fired from government jobs if she did not cover her face outside the home. The women are again disappearing; the Taliban have ordered women out of schools, workplaces, parks, airplanes, buses – even hospitals. These restrictions are reminiscent of the Taliban’s last rule in the 1990s

• 2022, May: A mass shooting occurred at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, where an 18-year-old former student at the school fatally shot 19 students and two teachers, while 17 others were injured but survived. Police officers waited more than 1 hour and 14 minutes on-site before breaching the classroom to engage the shooter. The shooting is the third-deadliest school shooting in the US, after the Virginia Tech shooting in 2007 and the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012, as well as the 9th-deadliest mass shooting in modern US history. Since the Uvalde murders the US has experienced 650 mass shootings and well over 40,000 deaths from gun violence. Guns are the top killers of children in the US (See “2012, Dec”, “2017, Oct” and “2023, Oct”) 

• 2022, June: The US Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, the landmark ruling that granted the right to abortionfor nearly five decades in the US. The country’s top court ruled in a Mississippi case that “the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion”. The justices voted 6-3, powered by the court’s conservative supermajority. The justices held that the 1973 Roe v Wade decision that legalized abortions performed before a fetus would be viable outside the womb – between 24 and 28 weeks of pregnancy – was wrongly decided because the US Constitution makes no specific mention of abortion rights. More than two dozen US states have begun to ban abortion now that the 1973 legal precedent has been overturned (See “1973, Jan”)

• 2022, June: Creation of the Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity (APEP), a forum positioned to improve the economies of countries in the Western Hemisphere with the idea that stronger economies will be able to address economic inequality, bolster supply chains, and restore faith in democracy. APEC is also designed to strengthen the Los Angeles Declaration for Migration and Protection that established a responsibility-sharing approach to addressing this era’s historic migration flows

• 2022, June: The Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (PGII) is a collaborative effort by the Group of Seven to fund infrastructure projects in developing nations based on the trust principles of the Blue Dot Network . It is considered to be the bloc’s counter to China’s Belt and Road initiative (taking a page out of Xi’s book) and a key component of the “Biden Doctrine”. Plans are to raise $600 million to build projects in developing countries over five years

• 2022, June:  Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a Russian businessman, oligarch, and opposition activist, published his account of what is happening in Russia today. In 2003 he was arrested by Russian authorities and charged with fraud; he was released from prison in 2013. In his book How to Slay a Dragon, he declares regarding Russia, “A genuine change of regime is now possible only in the event of a military defeat.” He says that Putin “goes to war with one, and only one, objective – to squeeze at least some benefit for himself from the protests against his irremovability, ultra-centralization and corruption. Any lull in the fighting will lead to an increase in the protests, which will only force him once again to undertake even bigger military adventures, spreading the virus of aggression to new territories. Compromises with Putin simply serve to reinforce his belief that aversion is an all-purpose way of removing any conflicts, be they external or internal.” (See “2003, Oct”)

• 2022, July: Health Canada introduced new nutrition labelling regulations for packaged foods requiring a symbol on the front of packages indicating that a food is high in saturated fat, sugars and/or sodium. A front-of-package nutrition symbol will be required on foods that are high in one or more of those nutrients. The food industry has been given until January 1, 2026 to make this change. The push to cut sugar intake – fructose, specifically – can be likened to earlier public-health policy successes such as smoking, seat belts and drunk driving

• 2022, July: US killed Ayman al-Zawahiri, the long-time boss of al Qaeda, in downtown Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, using an unmanned drone-fired air-to-surface missile (Hellfire)

• 2022, July: Pope Francis offered a sweeping apology directly to Indigenous people on their land in Canada, fulfilling a critical demand of many of the survivors of church-run residential schools that became gruesome centres of abuse, forced assimilation, cultural devastation and death for over a century. In Maskwacis, Alberta he said “I am sorry…I ask forgiveness, in particular, for the ways in which many members of the church and of religious communities cooperated, not least through their indifference, in projects of cultural destruction and forced assimilation promoted by the governments of that time, which culminated in the system of residential schools.” (See” 2007, Sept” and “2015, Dec”)

• 2022, Aug: The US passes the CHIPS and Science Act to impede China’s access to chips, economic growth, and technological progress. The CHIPS Act works in two ways: It allocates $280 billion to boost chip production, train workers, and conduct research and development in the U.S. But it also blocks the export of strategically important chips and manufacturing equipment to China. Chinese companies are banned from dealing with firms that rely on, or provide, US technology, and Americans are prohibited from providing expertise to China (sort of geo-economic warfare). Beijing reacted fiercely to this and has placed pressure on South Korea and others to sell it advanced chips, but to no avail. It also officially lodged a trade dispute against the CHIPs Act with the World Trade Organization because it is protectionist. And China continues to openly threaten Japan and Taiwan through a combination of naval sabre-rattling and rhetoric

• 2022, Aug: The Inflation Reduction Act was passed in the US. It’s a federal law which aims to curb inflation by reducing the deficit, lowering prescription drug prices, and investing into domestic energy production while promoting clean energy. It is the largest piece of federal legislation ever to address climate change. It has also launched a huge subsidy war

• 2022, Sept: Queen Elizabeth II dies. She was Queen of the United Kingdom and other Commonwealth realms from February 1952 until her death. She was queen regnant of 32 sovereign states during her lifetime, and was head of state of 15 realms

• 2022, Sept: Charles III became King of the United Kingdom and the 14 other Commonwealth realms all of which are members of the Commonwealth, an intergovernmental organization of 56 independent member states, 52 of which were formerly part of the British Empire. All Commonwealth members are independent sovereign states, regardless of whether they are Commonwealth realms. Charles succeeded his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, as monarch (See “2023, May”)

• 2022, Sept: Hurricane Fiona was the most expensive extreme weather event in the history of Atlantic Canada; it presages a future of increased storms. Fiona made landfall in Nova Scotia with the force of a Category 2 hurricane. More than three dozen tropical or subtropical storms have affected the shores of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and PEI in the past century – though most storms typically lost power as they approached, saving the region from full blown destruction as seen in New Orleans, Houston, Florida and New York. The primary deterrent safeguarding Canada’s shores is that hurricanes draw their power from heat in the seas beneath them. Cold water in the North Atlantic saps energy from storms, diminishing their strength and duration. However the ocean is warming quickly increasing the devastation potential. In addition it is predicted that hurricanes will penetrate further inland. Also because the atmosphere holds around 8% more water for every 3.6 C of warming, storms carry vastly more precipitation. By 2030, half of the world’s population will live near the ocean, exposing billions to storms

• 2022, Sept: Reverses on the battlefield have Putin annexing four Ukrainian provinces, without having full control of any of them: neither Luhansk or Donetsk in the east, nor Kherson or Zaporizhzhia to the south. He has also announced Russia’s first mobilization since World War Two, although it was partial and limited to some 300,000 reservists

• 2022, Oct: Xi Jinping secured a third term as the Chinese Communist Party (CPP) General Secretary, the second leader of the CPP to do so (the other being Mao) after he engineered the removal of term limits for the presidency in 2018. Xi’s political ideas and principles, known as Xi Jinping Thought, have been incorporated into the party and national constitutions. The incorporation made Xi the third Chinese leader (after Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaping) to have their names incorporated into the list of fundamental doctrines of the CCP.  The phrase “Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era” was used in his speech delivered on the opening day of the 19th Party Congress in 2017 (See “2018, March”)

• 2022, Nov: TheFIFA World Cup of soccer took place in Qatar; some controversy existed on its choice as a venue. 32 teams competed, with Argentina beating France in the final. It was the first World Cup to be held in the Arab world and Muslim world, and the second held entirely in Asia after the 2002 tournament in South Korea and Japan. The choice of Qatar was a controversial one: it’s a city-state, with its capital, Doha, surrounded by a desert sitting on vast fields of natural gas and oil. 95% of its population of 2.8 million are not actually Qatari; rather they are international workers and there is great controversy regarding how many of them have been exploited

• 2022, Nov: Crash of crypto exchanges FTX and FTX, US which led to collapse in the value of most crypto currencies such as Ethereum and Bitcoin

• 2022, Nov: A peace deal in Ethiopia was brokered between the government and the rebellious Tigray region. This was the bloodiest war in the world in 2022 with deaths at 600,000 between 2020 and 2022. (No estimate for Ukraine is as high.) The war began in November 2020, primarily as a conflict between the Ethiopian government and Eritrea on one side, and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front on the other. The war has been characterized by  war crimes, massacres of civilians, accusations of genocide, and a devastating humanitarian crisis. There is also an entirely separate conflict, which is still blazing. While government troops were distracted by the war in Tigray, members of Ethiopia’s largest ethnic group, the Oromo, revived an old insurgency, and are trying to drive other ethnic groups out of their home region. Ethiopia has more than 90 ethnic groups, many of whose leaders are tempted to stir up hatred to win control of one of the country’s 11 ethnically based regions. Plus it hosts hundreds of thousands of refugees from four turbulent neighbours (Eritrea, Somalia, South Sudan and Sudan)

• 2022, Nov: The global population reaches eight billion. It took 12 years to get there from 7 billion (the same length of time 1998-2010) for the global population to grow from 6 billion. Two-thirds of the human population now lives in a society with below-replacement-rate fertility. On current trends – UN projections – the global population will reach 9 billion in 2037 and peak at 10.4 billion some time between 2080 and 2100. (Note: the UN once projected the population would exceed 11 billion by 2100). Other analysts see the population peaking at less than nine billion by mid-century. In all scenarios, peak population is followed by population decline. The total fertility rate has plunged from 3.3 children per female to 2.3 now (just slightly over the “replacement rate” at which the population stays constant – of 2.1). Just nine countries are predicted to make up more than 50% of population growth by 2050. According to the UN, these countries are India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Indonesia, Egypt, and the United States  (See “1700”, “1800”, “1900” and “1975”)

• 2022, Dec: The Taliban government in Afghanistan banned female students from receiving a university education. This strict interpretation of Islamic law, or Sharia, occurred despite initially promising a more moderate rule respecting rights for women and minorities

• 2022, Dec: The United Nations removed Iran from the Commission on the Status of Women. The massive protests that happened in Iran in 2022 and 2023, after the killing of Mahsa Amini while in the custody of the so-called morality police, exposed the laws used to police women’s bodies and the mechanisms of state violence to the world. Her death rightly outraged the world and sparked a movement which allowed activists to effectively remove Iran from its seat on the UN Commission on the Status of Women. This action was led in part by Canada’s ambassador Bob Rae. As he said “Iran has shown the world the face that only can be described as a face of cruelty and of terror.” This was the first time in the commission’s 78-year history that a member state was removed

• 2022, Dec: ChatGPT, the artificial-intelligence application, was launched. It is a natural language processing tool that allows you to have human-like conversations and much more with a chatbot. It is not technically a search engine – it doesn’t cite any sources, for one. The language model can answer questions, and assist you with tasks such as composing emails, essays, and code. It trains on data and generates human-like responses based on what it learns, and it can with its creative streak serve up data that’s false or inaccurate. It has been noted, particularly in the education sector, that generative AI is a new source of concern. Even the CEO of Open AI, the company that created the app, issued a caveat that the app is “incredibly limited but good enough at some things to create a misleading impression of greatness.” There are other challenges: generative AI is a mimic of human action, parroting back our words and images – and often quite badly. AI depends upon computing capacity: the more AI we deploy, the more computing capacity we need. This takes capacity away from other, potentially more useful activities, but it also requires an enormous amount of energy. Further, billions will be needed to make it commercially viable as an everyday technology – dollars that could go somewhere else more useful. It certainly will suck up venture capital. The real problem is that generative AI is not really designed to address actual social problems. We need to turn to the expertise of social scientists to understand the challenges we want AI to address, then work out whether AI can contribute to finding viable solutions (and then get AI companies to focus on producing those solutions) (See “2020, May”)

• 2022: The vast arid area below the Sahara desert (the Sahel) suffered droughts in 2022 and the most severe food crisis in 20 years. Five countries – Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Niger and (northern) Nigeria – are in this area. Nearly 6 million people were also hit by floods. Some 24 million in these five countries are “food insecure” (meaning they struggle to feed themselves). Jihadist groups have stepped in, accelerating the collapse of state authority. Their ideas spread rapidly online and in radical madrassas (See “1975, May” and “2023, Aug”)

• 2022: Somalia’s ongoing record drought may have killed as many as 43,000 people during the year, and half of them were children under the age of five. Five consecutive failed rainy seasons in Somalia have left five million people with acute food shortages and nearly two million children at risk of malnutrition. The combination of no rain and significant temperature increases has been deadly

• 2023, Jan: America’s Partnership for Economic Prosperity (APEP) is launched. Led by the US, APEP is a new framework for cooperation across the Americas aiming to deliver economic growth in the region, generate good middle-class jobs and reduce economic inequality. The 12 APEP member countries committed to working together to advance mutual interests and enhance regional prosperity. The initial members of APEP are Barbados, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Mexico, Panama, Peru, the United States and Uruguay

• 2023, Feb: The Chinese balloon incident in the US and Canada. The US Air Force shot down a Chinese-owned high-altitude balloon off the coast of South Carolina. It had been spotted in North American airspace, including Alaska, Western Canada, and the contiguous US. The US said that the balloon was capable of geolocating electronic communications and carried intelligence surveillance equipment inconsistent with that of a weather balloon. The incident increased US-China and Canada-China tensions

• 2023, Feb: A magnitude 7.8 earthquake killed nearly 46,000 people in Turkey and Syria. Two weeks later further quakes and aftershocks rocked the region

• 2023, March: The 2023 world’s richest person is France’s Bernard Arnault, the chief executive of LVMH and the first time a citizen of France leads the Forbes 2023 World’s Billionaires ranking. With 75 brands, the luxury conglomerate owns Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior, and Tiffany. Net worth of Arnault and family: $211 Billion. Elon Musk lost his title of world’s richest person after his pricey purchase of Twitter, which he funded in part by the sale of Tesla shares, helping to spook investors. Musk, with net worth of $180 billion ($39 billion less than a year ago), is now No. 2. Americans dominate the top of the billionaires ranks, taking 17 of the 25 spots, followed by France and India, with two apiece. The top 25 mostly made their money in technology (eight list members) and fashion & retail (seven) 

• 2023, March: The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant against Vladimir Putin for war crimes during the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The ICC isalleging responsibility for the war crime of unlawful deportation and transfer of children during the Russo-Ukrainian War. The warrant against Putin is the first against the leader of a permanent member of the UN Security Council (See “1948. Dec”)

• 2023, March: Canadian Dr. Pieter Cullis received the 2023 Killam Prize for Health Sciences. He is recognized for fundamental research advances in the development of nanomedicines employing lipid nanoparticle (LNP) technology. Notably, this work has contributed to several approved drugs, and enabled the success of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines

• 2023, March: China announced a three-way trade deal with Saudi Arabia and Iran, aimed at securing energy supplies should Russia fall apart. The Saudis have expressed interest in joining the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and a good deal of their oil goes to China.”This accomplishment vaults China into a new league diplomatically

• 2023, March: Donald Trump is the first former US president in history to be charged with a criminal offence. (All told he has six charges, four of them criminal; this is charge #1: “hush money”) . A 34-count felony indictment was revealed in the Manhattan Criminal Court. It charges that Trump conspired to illegally influence the 2016 election through a series of hush money payments designed to silence claims (covering up a sex scandal) that he feared would be harmful to his candidacy. Felony charges were filed against Trump, alleging that he falsified business records as part of a scheme to pay hush money to women who said they had had sexual relationships with him. But that’s not what the trial is about, and it’s not what’s at stake. Trump tried to keep relevant information from voters on the eve of the 2016 election. This trial is about the integrity of the US elections system. The trial is criminal because it is claimed that Trump interfered in an election; that he violated campaign finance laws; that he deprived voters of information that might have affected their votes, and that he then sought to cover it up with false entries in business records (See “2019, Dec”, “2021, Jan”, “2023, June”, “2023, Aug” and “2024, May”)

• 2023, March: Evan Gershkovich, an American journalist and reporter, was detained by Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) on charges of espionage. He worked for the Wall Street Journal covering Russia. This marked the first time a journalist working for an American outlet had been arrested on charges of spying in Russia since the Cold War. Accusing Gershkovich of espionage may well have been motivated at least in part by fury that someone with a Russian background would dare report the truth about Russia. It must be especially galling for Russians of conscience to hear Putin using the antifascist language of World War II – the one feat of Soviet history that all its people are proud of – in the effort to destroy Ukraine. Experts have speculated that the motivation behind the order for Gershkovich’s arrest was an anticipated prisoner exchange for one or more high-profile Russians imprisoned in other countries. As of April he is in the fifth extension of his detention. His trial took place late June in Yekaterinburg, Russia. He received 16 years in a penal colony, but was released in August 2024 in a multi country prisoner exchange with the West (See “2024, Aug”)

• 2023, April: Paul Kagame, the president of Rwanda, is backing a rebel group (the M23 Movement) that is rapidly gobbling up land in the neighbouring Democratic Republic of the Congo (and whose members are mostly ethnic Tutsis, like Kagame). He has been playing the defend Rwanda defence card but he wants access to the natural resources of a vast region in the Congo that has been only fitfully governed since President Mobutu Sese Seko fled into exile in 1997 (See “1994, April”)

• 2023, April: Finland joined the NATO military alliance. This Nordic country’s membership doubles Russia’s border with the world’s biggest security alliance. Finland had adopted neutrality after its defeat by the Soviets in WWII, but its leaders signalled they wanted to join NATO after Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. This brought the number of member states to 31. Note: in November Finland closed four crossing points, then finally all crossings, with Russia to stop the flow of Middle Eastern and African migrants that it accuses Moscow of ushering to the border in recent months (See “1949, April”, “2023, Oct” and “2024, March”)

• 2023, April: Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Russian and British political activist, journalist, author, filmmaker, was sentenced by a Russian court to 25 years in prison, charged with treason. Ironic as two of his great-grandfathers were executed as spies and “enemies of the people” during Stalin’s great purges. He is a Russian opposition activist and Washington Post contributor. He survived what he characterized several years ago as two government attempts to poison him. Amnesty International and others called the charges politically motivated for his anti-war views. He urged American lawmakers to expand economic sanctions against the Russian government under a landmark law known as the Magnitsky Act that was enacted by Congress in 2012 and expanded in 2016 (See “2024, Aug”)

• 2023, April: There was a three-quarter-billion-dollar settlement in favour of Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News Network. Fox aired false claims and questioned true ones as it sought to placate Donald Trump’s supporters. The Dominion suit revealed how Fox actively sought to promote Trump’s effort to stay in office after losing the 2020 presidential election. Fox regurgitated nightly his election-fraud claims, lies that plenty of people at Fox, up to and including News Corp Executive Chairman Rupert Murdoch, disbelieved. It was the largest publicly disclosed monetary settlement ever in an American defamation action. Fox then abruptly cut ties with its biggest prime-time star, Tucker Carlson, and as The Monthly said on April  26 “one of the most mendacious and poisonous figures in the history of American television”

• 2023, April: Pope Francis embarked on a secret “peace mission” to try and end the Ukraine war. One month later he personally announced the mission was over because there was no apparent end in sight. The consultations were doomed from the start because they were between the Pope’s envoy and one of Putin’s closest foreign policy advisors, as well as Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill. This is the same man who has issued a directive to Russian soldiers that “your task is to wipe the Ukrainian nation off the face of the earth”

• 2023, May: The coronation of Charles III as king of the United Kingdom and the 14 other Commonwealth realms took place at Westminster Abbey. Charles acceded to the throne on 8 September 2022, upon the death of his mother, Queen Elizabeth II.On the same date, May 6, Camilla Parker Bowles, Charles III’s former mistress and second wife, was crowned Queen. He is the oldest person to accede to the British throne, after having been the longest-serving heir apparent and Prince of Wales in British history. This was the 40th coronation to be held at Westminster Abbey since the coronation of William the Conqueror in 1066 (See “1066, Oct” and “2022, Sept”)

• 2023, May: Recent satellite pictures appear to confirm that Iran is building a nuclear facility in the Zagros mountains, near the existing Natanz enrichment site. It seems to be so deep under the ground that it will be invulnerable even to America’s most powerful bunker-busting bomb. The Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), a think-tank in Washington founded by David Albright, a former weapons inspector, reckons that the deepest part of the chamber could be used as a hall for a small number of advanced centrifuges that could rapidly produce enough weapons-grade uranium (WGU) to make Iran capable of an unstoppable nuclear breakout (See “2118, May”)

• 2023, May: The Group of Seven (G7) met in Hiroshima, Japan sending a strong message that the 77-year record of non-use of nuclear weapons since the atomic bombing of Japan must not be ignored. Fumio Kishida, Prime Minister of Japan, set a defining agenda that emphasized respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity and stated that Russia’s aggression against Ukraine is a global issue, not just European. He also emphasized the G7 commitment to a “Free and Open Indo-China”. He decided to host the summit in Hiroshima because, as he said, “There is no better place to express commitment to peace. I would like to send a strong message that the 77-year record of non-use of nuclear weapons since the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki must not be ignored.“ (Note: With the G20 major economies growing in stature since the 2008 Washington summit, world leaders from the group announced in 2009 that the group would replace the G8 as the main economic council of wealthy nations. Nevertheless, the G7 retains its relevance as a “steering group for the West with special significance appointed to Japan”.) (See “1973, March”)

• 2023, May: Uganda approves a harsh anti-LGBTQ law. The death penalty has been authorized for the vaguely defined act of “aggravated homosexuality.” The law authorizes a 20-year prison sentence for anyone who “promotes” or “normalizes” homosexuality, including in print or media. Christian evangelical leaders, including US religious groups with Ugandan followers, have strongly supported the new law. Ugandans can be jailed up to five years if they fail to tell the police about any “reasonable suspicion” that someone “intends to commit the offence of homosexuality.”

• 2023, May: Danielle Smith won the Alberta provincial election. She had taken over as Alberta’s United Conservative party Leader and Premier (from Premier Jason Kenney) in 2022. Smith has become the strident proponent of provincial autonomy measures – or Alberta First policies, as she has called them – to occupy the office of premier. She introduced “sovereignty” legislation to enable Alberta MLAs to vote on motions against federal rules they believe intrude into the provincial sphere. And she has had little qualm in launching advertising campaigns cheerleading for Alberta to consider leaving the Canada Pension Plan and create its own fund

• 2023, June: Apple Inc became the first publicly traded company to close a trading day with a US$3-trillion market value. Apple shares closed June 3 at US193.97. The 47-year-old company was founded by Silicone Valley legend, Steve Jobs. (Other biggies: Microsoft ($2.5-billion); oil giant Saudi Aramco ($2.08); Alphabet Inc, the parent of Google ($1.7); Amazon ($1.5); Nvidia ($1.1) 

• 2023, June: Google stated it would remove Canadian news links from its services throughout the country due to Canadian government legislation (Bill C-11) that would require Google and other online platforms such as Facebook to pay for news articles being shown on their platforms

• 2023, June: A submersible called Titan imploded during an expedition to view the wreck of the Titanic in the North Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Newfoundland. It was operated by the American tourism and expeditions company OceanGate. Five men died, including the CEO of OceanGate and a French deep-sea explorer and Titanic expert. The vessel was not certified as seaworthy by any regulatory agency or third-party organization (See “1912, April”)

• 2023, June: Trump was indicted by a federal grand jury in Miami for taking classified national defence documents from the White House after he left office. (This is Trump charge #2: “classified documents”) and resisting the government’s attempts to retrieve the materials. The special counsel of the US Justice Department charged Trump with with 37 felonies in connection with his removal of documents from the White House when he left office. The charges include willful retention of national-security information, obstruction of justice, withholding of documents, and false statements. Trump took boxes of documents to properties where they were stored haphazardly (in his Mar-a-Lago home), but the indictment centres on his refusal to give them back to the government despite repeated requests. Three new accounts, including one additional count of willful retention of national defence information have been added. These are stupid crimes, but they are nevertheless very serious. Protecting the nation’s secrets is one of the greatest responsibilities of any public official with classified clearance, and not only did Trump put these documents at risk, but he also (allegedly) refused to comply with a subpoena, tried to hide the documents, and lied to the government through his attorneys. Status: charges filed June 2023. But there is a Trump-appointed judge handling the case, Aileen Cannon, and on July 15 she threw out the case. While higher courts will probably look askance at the ruling, it does mean that these tactics have pushed the trial date – if it ever begins at all – past the November presidential election (See “2019, Dec”, “2021, Jan” and “2023, Aug”)

• 2023, July (etc.): In the past three years, four countries from the 15-member Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) have experienced a military coup and an unlawful change of leadership: Niger (July 2023), Mali (August 2020 and May 2021), Guinea (September 2021) and Burkina Faso (January and September 2022). The group’s leading democracies – Ghana and Nigeria, which both experienced decades of military rule – may steer other nations to improved democratic outcomes, but it will be a struggle. The US and France need to find a way to add muscle to ECOWAS’s determination to dampen coup tendencies in the Sahel and West Africa, to assist restoring stability and the possibility of democracy throughout the region (See “1975, May”)

• 2023, July: The chaos in Sudan has escalated dangerously as a result of a power struggle within the country’s military junta. The Sudanese military is battling the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary force of over 100,000 members (led by General Dagalo, nicknamed Hemedti or “Little Mohamed”) and ironically long-time ally of the military (led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan). The two forces had united to seize power in 2019 to topple the country’s long-ruling dictator Omar al-Bashir and again to launch another coup in 2021. The army, after using this as an attack force for many years, has realized that it might have created a monster. Now the problem is that neither side is more legitimate than the other nor offers a prospect for peace, stability and democracy. An April 2024 truce offered some faint hope for a resolution, but things have since deteriorated. UN officials have said the violence has recently taken on an ethnic dimension, with the RSF and Arab militias reportedly targeting non-Arab tribes in Darfur, a sprawling region of five provinces in Western Sudan. Close to the West Darfur capital in early November a massacre took place of the Gaslit people, an African ethnic group that has often been targeted by the RSF. Sudan is now the largest displacement crisis in the world. Nearly 2 million people have left the country altogether, adding refugee pressure to the neighbouring states of Chad and South Sudan. In November, Sudan’s military regime has demanded the immediate termination of the UN political mission, silencing one of the last remaining international voices in this horrific conflict. As both generals are currently engaged in mutual destruction, it is generally agreed that Sudan has no long-term future under either man; this is not a civil war; it is a war on civilians. Recent data suggest 25.6 million people – more than half the country’s population – are facing acute food insecurity, and 755,000 people are on the brink of starvation (See “1885, Jan”, “2003, Feb”, “2011, July” and “2020, Aug”) 

• 2023, July: There are now more Millennials than Baby Boomers in Canada, ending the 65-year reign of the post-second World War generation as the largest cohort in the population. The baby boomer generation became the largest in Canada in 1958 – seven years before the last boomer was even born; they accounted for 40% of the population from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s. Many countries are grappling with the reality of an aging population as baby boomer retire. These changing demographics are expected to affect health care needs and governments’ tax bases. Statistics Canada estimates Generation Z could overtake millennials in numbers some time between 2038 and 2053. 
• As a reminder, here are the generation cohorts: 1883-1900: Lost Generation; 1901-1927: Great Generation (or “Greatest Generation”, the Elders; pillars were family, church, hard work); 1928-1945: Silent Generation, with the Baby Bust wedged in during late 30s-early 40s (a fortunate cohort: too young to fight in Korea; too old for Vietnam; they entered job market as economy expanding and less job competition); 1946-1965: Baby Boomers or just boomers (internet, social media era; had it easy early; TV, consumption, rock n roll, fun; Canadians different from US too because of Vietnam; really 1946-57 was the height of postwar boom; the 1957-1964 period had the Late Baby Boomers; 1966-1980: Generation X: era of steep tuition hikes; the The Fourth Turning authors called them the “13ers”, describing them as the thirteenth generation since the US became a nation and asserts that 13ers’ location in history as under-protected children during the Consciousness Revolution explains their pragmatic attitude; 1981-1996 (or even 1994): Generation Y (or Millennials because born around turn of the millennium; also called Generation Me or Echo Boomers; 1997-2012: Zoomers or Generation Z; or Generation 9/11; 2010-2020s: Generation Alpha or Gen A; the COVID Generation

• 2023, Aug: Donald Trump was arraigned  in a Washington courthouse for trying to overthrow his 2020 election loss. (This is Trump charge #3: “election interference”) – his third set of criminal charges in the past four months. Special counsel Jack Smith alleged that Trump knew his claims of election fraud were lies but pushed them in a bid to illegally stay in office, culminating in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the US Capital. He now faces a total of 78 criminal indictments in three cases. Sadly he was the runaway favourite to win the Republican nomination (which he did), supported by conspiracy-hungry loyal right-wing voters who believe he is a victim of a “deep state” that can’t stand to see their man in power. Status as of March 2024: investigation began February 2021; charges filed August 2023; trial was on hold while the Supreme Court hears a case about whether the former president should be immune to prosecution. A three-judge panel roundly rejected that claim on February 6, but Trump appealed. Case now being heard April 2024 (See “2019, Dec”, “2021, Jan”, “2023, June”, “2023, Aug”, “2024, April” and “2024, July”)

• 2023, Aug: Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa won an election tainted by widespread voter intimidation and the arrest of independent observers. Mnangagwa, known as the Crocodile, became president in 2017 after a military coup toppled his long-ruling predecessor, Robert Mugabe, who had led the country to independence (See “1965”, “2013, Aug”, and “2017, Nov”)

• 2023, Aug: The BRICS group of countries have agreed to add six more. To the original group of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa will be added Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Ethiopia, Argentina, and the United Arab Emirates as of January 2024. With this addition the 11-nation “BRICS Plus” group will account for 47% of the world’s population and 37% of its GDP in purchasing-power parity (PPP) terms, compared to 9.8% of the world’s population and 29.8% of the global GDP for the G7. It is becoming a “support organization for China’s geopolitical agenda” and a “venue for anti-US political activism” according to some observers (See “2009, June”)

• 2023, Aug: The Wagner mercenary group leader, Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, died after the private jet he was on went down northwest of Moscow, likely on Putin’s orders. Russia confirmed later his identity through genetic testing. 10 people were on board including Wagner’s top commander. Two months before Prigozhin had staged a short-lived mutiny against Russia’s military leadership. US intelligence has concluded that an internal explosion caused the plane to go down leading to suspicions that he was likely targeted by Putin. Russia’s special services quickly divided Prigozhin’s sprawling military-criminal enterprise among themselves. The FSB would keep domestic businesses and the SVR the media arms, such as the troll farms which interfered in America’s presidential election in 2016. The GRU (Russia’s military intelligence agency) got the foreign military bits, split into a Volunteer Corps for Ukraine and an Expeditionary Corps, managed by General Averyanov (deputy head of the GRU), for the rest of the world

• 2023, Aug: Italy appears poised to withdraw from the China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a reflection of frustrations with the initiative’s unmet promises and the country’s strategic reassessment of China. The five-year memorandum of understanding is up for renewal in March 2024. They were the first Group of Seven (G7) country to join the BRI in 2019. As China looked to increase its influence in Europe, drive a wedge in the EU, and sow divisions between Washington and Brussels, Italy appeared as a weak point it could press. Recently the President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen argued that “the Chinese Communist Party’s clear goal is a systemic change of the international order with China at its center,” pointing to the BRI as evidence. Also Beijing’s support for Russia in its war against Ukraine has led many European governments, including Italy’s, to shed their illusions about China

• 2023, Aug: A “coup contagion” is afflicting former French colonies. A military coup d’état took place in Gabon, a former French colony, just one month after another coup in Niger and six others. It is judged to be the past focus of France offering only military intervention, in partnership with local strong men. The British colonies fared better because its decolonization template was to build strong democratic and judicial institutions, also with strong media. Coup leaders in Mali, the Central African Republic, and Burkina Faso have all rejected French involvement from now on. This has spread also to the Ivory Coast and Senegal, as well as to North Africa where France’s relations with its former colonies – Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, and Algeria – have become extremely hostile. It is a complicated picture involving China, which has its official Belt and Road program having 52 African countries signing on. Africa is a key part of China’s economic empire. The other predatory player is Russia, whose Wagner Group has provided political, propaganda, and military advice. The future there is uncertain following the assassination of its leadership team

• 2023, Aug: An Atlanta-based grand jury indicted Trump and 18 others on state charges stemming from their alleged efforts to overturn the former president’s 2020 electoral defeat. (This is Trump charge #4: “Fulton County, Georgia – election case”). The indictment is the fourth criminal case that Trump is facing. More than any other case, this one attempts to reckon with the full breadth of the assault on democracy following the 2020 election. The charges, brought in a sweeping investigation led by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, cover some of the most overt efforts by Trump and his allies to meddle in the 2020 presidential election. Willis has some strong evidence – such as a call in which Trump asked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” some 11,000 votes. Three major plea deals from co-defendants may also ease Willis’s path, but getting a jury to convict Trump will still be a challenge. Unlike the election subversion charges brought by special counsel Jack Smith, Willis’ case will be insulated if Trump is reelected in 2024; he will not be able to pardon himself or his allies of any state law convictions, nor will he be able to dismiss the Fulton County prosecutors bringing the charges. It should be noted that nearly nine in 10 Republicans believe the legal cases against Trump are designed to prevent his return to the White House (according to a CBS poll conducted after his third indictment.) (See “2019, Dec”, “2021, Jan”, “2023, June”, “2023, Aug” and “2024, July”)

• 2023, Sept: Canada is made a strategic partner within the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). It has been negotiating a free-trade agreement with the ASEAN trading bloc since 2021. Apparently it’s unusual to see Canada granted this trading opportunity because other strategic partners such as the US and the EU have been lobbying for their own trade negotiations with the bloc (See “1967, Aug”)

• 2023, Sept: The Group of 20 (G20) reflects a comparatively weaker influence of the West, which has now been diluted by the addition of the African Union as a permanent member representing an additional 55 countries (of which many members have close ties to Russia and China). The G20 is now effectively the Group of 21. The G20 still carries a great deal of heft and responsibility; there is no other grouping of countries representing two-thirds of the world’s population and almost 80% of global GDP.  At this recent summit, Indian PM Narendra Modi, who chaired the summit, ensured that a statement (watered down from the 2022 Bali G20 summit) condemned the Russia invasion of Ukraine. The G20 also announced plans for a new rail and shipping corridor that will connect India and Europe through the Middle East. This ambitious plan is part of Biden’s larger vision of creating high-quality infrastructure projects and the development of economic corridors that together should promote sustainable growth in low- and middle-income countries. There also seems to be a front of mind regarding a growing challenge from BRICS for some G20 attendees (See ”1999, Sept”, “2001, May”, ”2009, June” and “2023, Aug”)

• 2023, Sept: When Twitter (now known as “X”) got rid of its safety standards, Russian disinformation on the site took off, according to a report by the European Commission (the body that governs the European Union). Lies about Russia’s war against Ukraine spread to at least 165 million people in the EU and allied counties like the US, and garnered at least 16 billion views. The study found that Instagram, Telegram, and Facebook, all owned by Meta, also spread pro-Kremlin propaganda that uses hate speech and boosts extremists. The report concludes that “the Kremlin’s ongoing disinformation campaign not only forms an integral part of Russia’s military agenda, but also causes risks to public security, fundamental rights and electoral processes” in the EU

• 2023, Sept: Google begins to defend itself in the biggest American antitrust trial in a generation. The US Department of Justice (DOJ) and the attorneys-general of 38 states are accusing the tech giant of using unfair business practices to hold onto its monopoly on search traffic. Google says its dominance is just because it has the best product on the market. It could lead to Google tearing up the multibillion-dollar agreements it has with phone makers such as Apple, or even to the breakup of the company’s lucrative search business. (Google handles ~90% of US search volume.) 

• 2023, Sept: A former Ukrainian man who served in a Nazi unit in WWII was invited to, and recognized by the speaker of, the Canadian House of Commons during an official visit by the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. He was introduced as a hero for fighting for Ukrainian independence against the Russians in WWII. Subsequently the speaker. Anthony Rota, resigned

• 2023, Sept: A ceasefire finally took hold in Nagorno-Karabakh (an ethnic-Armenian enclave inside the borders of Azerbaijan). Karabakh has been home to some 100,000 ethnic Armenians. Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, Armenia had relied upon a security partnership with Russia, while Azerbaijan grew closer to Turkey. However Armenia has been moving closer to America, and have recently hosted military exercises with a small number of  American troops. They have also moved to join the International Criminal Court (which has issued an arrest warrant for Putin). The bad blood between Azerbaijan and Armenia and the trauma of past wars will be difficult to overcome. Most of the 120,000 people fled the enclave to Armenia, leaving the area empty. Azerbaijan itself is a hereditary dictatorship ruled by the same family for the past three decades, with conditions described as one of “the worst of the worst” – among the most repressive regimes worldwide

• 2023, Oct: A new vaccine for malaria, R21/Matrix-M, has been developed, and it is cheap to produce. It has now been recommended by the World Health Organization for broad international rollout. It has the potential of saving about 450,000 lives a year! (In 1921, malaria caused 619,000 deaths, 76% of which were children under five, and 96% in Africa.)

• 2023, Oct 6: Hamas gunmen launched an attack on Israel from the Gaza Strip, killing more than 1,400 people and taking more than 220 hostages. It was the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. (Oct 6 will be Israel’s “9/11”.) Hamas is a terrorist organization that has its genocidal intentions in its founding charter. Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu has suspended all legislation not connected with the war effort and formed a coalition in which the centrist opposition party, National Unity, headed by former Israel Defence Force commander-in-chief Benny Gantz, has joined (See “1948, May”, ”1967, June”, “1979, March”, “2002, July” and “2024, Jan”)

• 2023, Oct: Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan submitted to the Turkish parliament a bill approving Sweden’s bid to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a step he has been delaying to pressure Sweden into clamping down on members of the Kurdistan Workers Party in Sweden, a party that aims to create an autonomous Kurdish region that would include parts of Turkey (See “1949, April”, “1981, Oct”, “2023, April” and “2024, March”)

• 2023, Oct: The Russian parliament passed a bill to revoke its ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), while retaining its cooperation with the treaty’s verification system and implementing organization. A Russian spokesperson said “The aim is to be on equal footing with the US who signed the Treaty, but didn’t ratify it. Revocation doesn’t mean the intention to resume nuclear tests.” Note: The US signed the CTBT in 1996 but the Senate did not ratify the treaty. Successive US administrations however have observed a moratorium on testing nuclear weapons. (Apart from the US, it has yet to be ratified by China, India, Pakistan, North Korea, Israel, Iran and Egypt.) Putin suggested Moscow might resuming testing for the first time in 33 years, signalling another downward turn in relations between the world’s two biggest nuclear powers

• 2023, Oct: Poland voters changed government, reversing the slide towards the kind of electoral authoritarianism practiced by Viktor Urban in Hungary. The opposition, consisting of the Civic Coalition (under the leadership Donald Tusk), Third Way, and The Left achieved a combined vote total of 54% and are widely expected to form a coalition government. It was assessed that voters got fed up with the corrupt, obscurantist rule of the ruling Law and Justice Party (PiS) under its resentful leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski plus the risk that Poland would be moved further to the right and join forces with Orban of Hungary, the Slovak populist Robert Fico, and Giorgia Meloni of Italy. Poland’s populist nightmare may soon be over (See “1989, June”)

• 2023, Oct: 18 people were shot dead in Lewiston, Maine and 13 people injured at two different locations continues to reflect the US blind spot to the obvious – too many guns, poorly controlled. A 40-year-old Army reservist and firearms instructor using an AR 15-style rifle with a laser optic was the perpetrator. A deep culture of gun ownership and a powerful gun-rights lobby has blurred partisan lines on the issue in the US. Lewiston joins the roll call of sites of American mass shootings: Uvalde, 2022 (21 dead); El Paso, 2019 (23 dead); Pittsburgh synagogue, 2018 (11 dead); Las Vegas, 2017 (60 dead – the deadliest attack of the 565 mass shootings, i.e.greater than four or more, in the US this year); Orlando, 2016 (49 dead); Sandy Hook Elementary School, 2012 (26 dead); Virginia Tech, 2007 (32 dead). This is It is estimated that there were 390 million guns in circulation in the US in 2018. The US ratio of 120.5 firearms per 100 residents, up from 88 per 100 in 2011, far surpasses that of other countries around the world (See “2012, Dec”, “2017, Oct” and “2022, May”)

• 2023, Nov: The US Republican Party has chosen Christian extremist Mike Johnson to lead the House of Representatives as speaker, after the removal House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA). Johnson displays a flag outside his office associated with the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) network that wants to place the US government under the control of right-wing Christians. Johnson is also associated with a right-wing movement to call a convention of states to rewrite the constitution

• 2023, Nov: Geert Wilders, leader of the far-right party PVV, or Party for Freedom won the most votes in a general election, in The Hague, Netherlands. This seismic shift reverberated through Europe. Wilders’ anti-Islam, anti-immigration party won 37 seats in the 150-seat Second Chamber of Parliament putting him in pole position to succeed Prime Minister Mark Rutte. But at least two potential coalition partners are balking at some of his policy pledges that they consider unconstitutional (his campaign pledges were for “No Islamic schools, Qurans and mosques”.) He’s also against internationalism, the European Union, military support of Ukraine, and measures to deal with climate change

• 2023, Dec: A new deal has been reached at COP28 which could signal the world’s desire to move away from fossil fuels over the next few decades in an effort to address climate change. Representatives from nearly 200 countries gathered in a public meeting in Dubai to support the new deal. The agreement contains much stronger language on fossil fuels compared to a previous proposal. For the first time, the text calls for a “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner, accelerating action in this critical decade, so as to achieve net zero by 2050 in keeping with the science.” The  agreement would mark the first time that nations agree at a UN climate summit to explicitly address fossil fuels and the need to move away from oil, natural and coal in order to limit global warming. The hard reality is, however, the world will not be able to keep warming below the goal of the 2015 Paris Agreement of 1.5 °C. Note: UN climate conferences are government-level large-scale annual gatherings focused on climate action. They are also referred to as COPs – Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).This one is the 28th held. (See “1972, June”, “1988”, “1992, June”, “1994, March”, “2007, Dec” and “2015, Dec”)

• 2023, Dec: Yeman’s Houthi rebels have been attacking ships in the Red Sea threatening international shipping in retaliation for Israeli’s campaign in Gaza. The Houthis have been fighting a civil war in Yeman since 2014. The Houthis, a Shia group, are backed by Iran and have reportedly received funding, equipment and training from the Quds Force. (This is the overseas arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, responsible for funding and training militant groups in Iraq, Yeman, Lebanon, and the Palestinian Territories. The Quds Force form part of Iran’s so-called Axis of Resistance, a coalition of regional militias that also includes Hamas, Hezbollah and several smaller groups linked to attacks against US forces in Iraq.) In response to the ship attacks and the threat to free navigation, the US has assembled a coalition of more than 20 countries under Operation Prosperity Guardian, to ensure the safety of shipping. This threat to international shipping cannot be ignored. An Iranian proxy group has essentially blockaded a vital international waterway with few consequences. (The Suez Canal handles about 12% of worldwide trade.) This represents another event in the very complicated West vs Palestinians puzzle; as well the to and fro involved with the Yeman civil war is so complicated and full of crazy, mostly religious, tensions, that it would fill a book to outline. When evaluating the role a rebel group like the Houthis plays, one must consider their official slogan: “God is the Greatest, Death to America, Death to Israel, A Curse upon the Jews, Victory to Islam.” 

• 2023, Dec: The International Olympic Committee announced that some Russians would be eligible to compete as neutral athletes at the upcoming Paris Olympics, removing a complete ban that came after the country’s invasion of Ukraine. The IOC decision confirmed moves it started one year ago to reintegrate Russia and its military ally Belarus into global sports, and nine months after it urged sports governing bodies to look at ways to let individual athletes compete. Russia sent 335 athletes to the Tokyo Olympics held in 2021 – winning 20 golds among 71 total medals – but only dozens are likely to compete in Paris as individuals. Russia remains banned from team sports. Those who are given neutral status must compete without their national identity of flag, anthem or colours. Ukraine have said any Olympic medal wins for Russians will be used as propaganda by the state. Russian medal winners are often linked to military sports clubs such as the CSKA which is tied to the army. Paris is the fifth straight Olympics where Russia and its athletes have faced calls to be banned since the steroid-tainted 2014 Sochi Winter Games. In Paris, Russian athletes will compete as Individual Neutral Athletes – using the French acronym AIN – at the fourth straight games where the simple team name “Russia” was not allowed

• 2023, Dec: The Vatican will now formally allow priests to bless same-sex couples, although not in the context of marriage. This ruling of Pope Francis reaffirms the church’s position that marriage is an indissoluble union between and man and a woman. The ruling includes several caveats to ensure blessings of same-sex couples do not occur in the context of anything resembling marriage. (This is all in context; a recent book, The Changing Face of the Priesthood states that 58% of Roman Catholic priests are gay and many aren’t celibate.)

• 2023, Dec: Last year, there were an estimated nine million measles cases worldwide, and 136,000 deaths – with both figures representing huge jumps from the previous year. At the end of 2023, 49 countries were experiencing “large and disruptive” outbreaks, according to the World Health Organization. Measles is just the canary in the coal mine. It seems inevitable we will see a resurgence other conditions like whooping cough, chicken pox, mumps and other old-world diseases we have controlled effectively with vaccination. But vaccines only work if you get them into people’s arms, and the post COVID-19 pandemic has fuelled a growing resistance to vaccination. It’s bad to see decades of public health progress undone by opportunistic political dogma. A small but growing minority of parents are refusing to get their kids vaccinated. That’s not freedom; that’s perverse when a child dies from a preventable infectious disease (See “1963”)

• 2023, Dec: The world’s biggest iceberg, known as A23a, broke free and began to move out of Antarctic waters into the Southern Ocean in the area known as Iceberg Alley. This colossal ice mass covers an area of 1,500 square miles, has a volume of 263 cubic miles, and weighs nearly one trillion tons. It is now caught in what’s known as a Taylor column, a current that forms around seamounts. It will eventually melt, probably near the island of South Georgia in the South Atlantic. (As it is already floating in the oceanic will not contribute to global sea level rise.) (See “2002, Feb-Apr”)

• 2023, Dec: 2023 was the planet’s warmest year on record, according to an analysis by scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI). Along with the historic heat, other notable climate findings were: A. The global ocean heat content set a new record high: The 2023 upper ocean heat content, which addresses the amount of heat stored in the upper 2,000 meters of the ocean, was the highest on record. Ocean heat content is a key climate indicator because the ocean stores 90% of the excess heat in the Earth system. B. Polar sea ice was scant: The 2023 annual Antarctic sea ice extent (coverage) averaged 3.79 million square miles in 2023, the lowest on record. Arctic sea ice coverage averaged 4.05 million square miles in 2023, ranking among the 10 lowest years on record. C. December 2023 set records: Global surface temperature in December 2023 was 2.57 degrees F (1.43 degrees C) above the 20th-century average — the warmest December on record. For the ninth consecutive month, the global ocean surface temperature was also record warm. Looking regionally, North America and South America both had their warmest December on record

• 2024, Jan: Canada’s population grew by 3.2% in 2023, reaching 40,769,890 as of January 1, 2024, the highest rate since 1957, when it grew 3.3% (when more than 37,000 Hungarian refugees fled to Canada after Soviet troops crushed an uprising in November 1956.) Demographers point out that growth rates above 3% have never been seen in a developed country since the 1950s. Canada’s population grew by 1,271,870 for the year 2023, with 471,770 immigrants and 804,900 temporary residents (most of whom are foreign workers)

• 2024, Jan: Taiwan voters elected the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which does not support unification with China. The result sort of defied China, who favoured the KMT (Kuomintang) party whose vote share was stagnant. The DPP did not get a legislative majority, as they have done in the 2016 and 2020 elections. A third party, the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) doesn’t support unification but favours better relations with Beijing, won 26% of the vote and secured 8 legislative seats and will likely hold the balance of power. The result, said party leader and Taiwan president William Lai, showed that faced with the choice between democracy and authoritarianism, Taiwan “stands on the side of democracy”. China will somehow petulantly show their displeasure at the result (they’ll fire off a few missiles and have their jets buzz Taiwan), as they regard Taiwan as their sovereign territory and want “reunification”. The US (President Biden) continued to indicate that they do not support Taiwan independence. Canada in December signed a Foreign Investment Promotion and Protect Agreement. Most Taiwanese people do not identify as Chinese, and only a small minority support eventual unification with China (See “1979, Jan”)

• 2024, Jan: Canada’s territory Nunavut assumed powers over their public lands, waters and the non-renewable resources each contain. These powers, formerly exercised by the federal government, mean that the residents (most of whom are Inuit) of Nunavut will become the decision-makers over their own physical territory. This is the largest land transfer (two million square kilometres) in Canadian history. Nunavut makes up one-fifth of the country’s land mass. Nunavut was created as its own territory, separate from the Northwest Territories, in 1999. The Northwest Territories and Yukon went through similar processes, known formally as devolution, years ago

• 2024, Jan: Japan becomes the fifth country in history to reach the moon when its spacecraft landed on the lunar surface. Rovers were launched and data were being transmitted back to Earth from their Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM). It seems that their objective of a “pinpoint landing”, i.e aiming at a target of just 100 metres, was achieved. They do have a power supply issue that may limit collection of moon data

• 2024, Jan: A Federal Court Justice ruled that the Canadian federal government’s decision to declare a public emergency back in February 2022 did not satisfy the requirements of the Emergencies Act. The Canadian Civil Liberties Association and the Canadian Constitution Foundation felt the issues at stake regarding PM Trudeau’s invoking of the Emergencies Act to end the trucker blockades (the “freedom convoy” in Ottawa and border crossing in Windsor and Coutts, Alberta) were too important to let the conclusions of former Ontario justice Paul Rouleau’s inquiry into the use of the Emergencies Act become the final word on the matter, so they challenged them in court. In January, 2024 Federal Court Justice Richard Mosley decided in favour of the two groups, ruling the the government’s “decision to declare a public order emergency (did) not satisfy the requirements of the Emergencies Act” and that “temporary measures adopted to deal with the protests infringed provisions of the Canadian Charter of Rights.” The Justice did make it clear he’s no convoy sympathizer; he said that had he been in the government’s position, “I may have agreed that it was necessary to invoke the Act.” He called their actions an “unacceptable breakdown in public order.” Defining security threats to suit political needs likely will be difficult to tolerate, although it seems likely the Trudeau government didn’t relish using the emergency powers, but the Ontario government didn’t mobilize the police to deal with the situation. The federal government will appeal the decision which is good in order get to whatever the final legal ruling will be, and then make whatever amendments and updates are required to the act. Also it should always be incumbent on the state to justify any limitation on rights, no matter how modest (See “2022, Feb”)

• 2024, Jan: A jury has ordered Donald Trump to pay an additional $83.3 million (US) in damages to advice columnist E. Jean Carroll, on top of the $5 million award made in March 2023 (This is Trump charge #5: Carroll assault case – a civil case). Carroll says he damaged her reputation by calling her a liar after she accused him of sexual assault. Last May a different jury awarded Carroll $5 million, finding Trump responsible for sexually abusing her and then defaming her by claiming she made it up. This new jury was only asked how much Trump should pay Carroll for two statements he made as president when he answered reporters’ questions after excerpts of Carroll’s memoir were published. Status as of March 2024: Trump has appealed both cases; he must post the $83.3 million by March 9, which he did (See “2019, Dec”, “2021, Jan”, “2023, June”, “2023, Aug” and “2024, Feb”)

• 2024, Jan: Kamila Valieva, the teenage Russian figure skater whose positive doping test upended her sport at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, was banned from competition for four years. The punishment, announced by the Swiss-based Court of Arbitration for Sport, was related to a tainted sample Valieva, who was 15 at the time, gave at a competition. The doping positive was made public, and from then on, and with the world watching her every move, Valieva began to crumble. In her final performance – the women’s free skate – she stumbled and fell, barely making it to the finish. Her coach, Eteri Tutberidze, was caught on live television giving her a stern look and reprimanding her by saying, in Russian: “Why did you let it go?” The positive result only emerged two months later – in the middle of the Olympics, and only a day after Valieva had led Russia to victory in the team competition. The ban will be retroactive to Dec. 25, 2021, the arbitrators ruled, meaning it will end in 2025, just in time for Valieva to compete at the next Winter Olympics, in 2026. Russia will be stripped of its first-place finish, with the victory awarded to the US team that finished second in Beijing. Japan will be elevated to silver from bronze and Canada, which finished fourth, will be awarded the bronze medal. For the first time in Olympic history, no medal ceremony was held

• 2024, Jan: A drone struck a remote American outpost in Jordan, on the border with Syria, killing three American troops and injuring dozens of others. America blames Iran-backed militants and has promised to respond. No American soldier has died in an enemy air strike for 50 years. The last occasion was April 15th 1953, during the Korean war. This was also the first lethal drone attack on American troops – a milestone in modern war. America has not conducted major military operations on Iranian soil since a botched hostage rescue in 1980. It has not openly struck Iranian forces outside of Iraq and Syria since Operation Praying Mantis in 1988, which was in response to Iran’s emplacement of sea mines in the Persian Gulf during the Iran-Iraq war. During the Iraq war, when Iran sponsored many of the same militias now causing havoc, supplying them with potent explosives, America’s Joint Special Operations Command established a secretive group, Task Force 17, to go after Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its elite Quds Force. Israel has already been targeting IRGC commanders in Damascus and elsewhere in a series risky strikes. The Middle East continues to be a time-bomb (See “1980, Sept-1988, Aug” and 1988, April”)

• 2024, Jan: Israel has accused the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) of having staff that were involved in Hamas’s assault on Israel on October 7th. In response more than ten governments, including those of America and Germany – its two largest funders – have announced that they are freezing donations. It is unclear exactly how much cash is being withheld and how long the freeze will last. But UNRWA says that without the money it will be forced to cease operations at the end of February. UNRWA now caters to the almost 6m descendants of the Palestinians displaced from their homes in the aftermath of Israel’s war of independence in 1948. It operates in Gaza and the West Bank as well in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. It is the only UN agency that serves a specific group of refugees in a specific geographical area. It is the backbone of humanitarian logistics in Gaza, and its collapse would make the humanitarian crisis far worse and create longer-term problems. Difficult questions arise in the long term though regarding whether it is sufficiently neutral, transparent and accountable (See “1917, Nov” and “1948, May”)

• 2024, Jan: China Evergrande, a massive property company, has been ordered to dismantle itself. Its collapse in 2021 sent China’s housing market into a tailspin. It controls dozens of businesses and is more than US$300-billion in debt. The company’s liquidation puts it in the same universe as Lehman Brothers, the US bank that filed for bankruptcy in 2008. Courts in Hong Kong and China will determine the winners and losers among the company’s creditors. Evergrande’s liquidation will be a litmus test for foreign investors in Chinese companies that have run into trouble. The real estate market remains in a slump: in 2023 China’s housing sales fell 6.5% and real estate development fell 9.6%. It’s also a trial of China’s legal system and its willingness to accept the rule of law in Hong Kong. More generally, it may be a symptom of an economic model that has reached its limits. China’s per capita income is still only about a fifth that of the US. The government i.e. the Communist Party, focuses on inflating supply, and not so much on demand, with the consequence being deflation. The fact that China has nearly four million apartments that no one wants to buy, and on top of that around 10 million apartments that developers have already sold but have not finished building is a vast and unclear bust (See “2008, Sept”)

• 2024, Feb: Conservative talk show host Tucker Carlson interviewed Russian President Putin in Moscow. The former Fox news presenter immediately found himself on the receiving end of a lengthy and controversial history lecture. The “Tuck” never once challenged Putin about war crimes, his unprovoked invasion, or his murder of civilians. He fawned endlessly about Moscow’s excellent hospitality and supermarkets. It was not journalism but publicity for Putin. It was a joke

• 2024, Feb: The dismissal of the Ukrainian military commander-in-chief, General Valerii Zaluzhnyi. He was appointed by President Zelenskyy in 2021 and had commanded through the darkest hours of the Russian large-scale invasion in February 2022 and the successes of the Kharkiv and Kherson offensives. His dismissal had been the subject of rumour and speculation for some time. Zaluzhnyi’s public comment on Ukrainian strategy, his intervention in the mobilization debate, the inability to forge a military force that could execute a successful counteroffensive in 2023, and undoubtedly an array of other factors resulted in a breakdown in trust between the President and commander-in-chief. The commander of Ukrainian Ground Forces, General Oleksandr Syrskyi, was elevated as the new Ukrainian military commander-in-chief 

• 2024, Feb: Trump said he would disregard Article 5 – NATO’s mutual-defence clause – if the victim of aggression had not met NATO’s target of spending 2% of GDP on defence. (The threshold by the way is not, as Trump appears to believe, a payment to America.) Worse still, he said that he would urge Russia to attack: “I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want.” These are extraordinary comments and will be very disturbing in Europe. Trump came close to pulling out of NATO in his first term, according to John Bolton, his national security adviser. In 2016 just five members of NATO met the 2% threshold, which last year was turned into a floor rather than a target. A majority are likely to do so by the summer of 2024. Some members are arming themselves to the teeth: Poland is spending 4% of GDP. The Baltic Defence Line is being built and involves 600 or so small bunkers on the Estonian border alone. Europe has a long way to go before it can defend itself, but the complacency of 2016, when Trump was elected president, is gone for good 

• 2024, Feb: Trump was fined $355 million plus interest, with the judge finding “overwhelming evidence” that he and his lieutenants at the Trump Organization made false statements “with the intent to defraud.” (This is Trump charge #6: Trump business fraud – a civil case). Trump inflated and deflated property valuations at will, in order to obtain more favourable loans or to cut his tax bill. When finally confronted by prosecutors after years of this, Trump argued that he’d done nothing wrong because banks didn’t lose any money. (As was noted, this is irrelevant to whether Trump committed fraud.). The judge barred Trump from serving as an officer of any New York company for three years, and his sons for two. The judge also ruled that a court-appointed monitor would continue to oversee the company for at least three years. This is the first time a former president of the US, or likely nominee for the presidency in a major party, has been found by a court to have committed extensive fraud and fined hundreds of millions of dollars. And this was a civil action, not criminal. Current status (March 2024): Trump has appealed the case; he also has until late March to put up the money (See “2019, Dec”, “2021, Jan”, “2023, June”, “2023, Aug” and “2024, Jan”)

• 2024, Feb 11: An estimated 123.7 million viewers tuned in for Super Bowl LVIII, the largest audience for a single-network telecast to date, according to average audience estimates from Nielsen. The broadcast averaged 120.3 million viewers on CBS alone, making it the largest audience for a single-network telecast to date. Also, the halftime show is now drawing more than the game, a far cry from the NFL’s first Super Bowl halftime show which featured marching bands! Taylor Swift’s appearance (and she didn’t even perform!) at the 58th Super Bowl at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas helped drive the audience for the NFL showcase. NFL officials have credited Swift’s presence at the games with driving a sudden surge in the popularity of the sport among young women. Of the 50 most-watched broadcasts in America last year, 44 were sporting ones (See “1967, Jan”)

• 2024, Feb: Russian dissident Alexei Navalny dies in a remote Russian prison. His death practically extinguishes the last real political opposition – albeit weakened – that still remained inside Russia following Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, his crackdown on freedom of speech and the passage of increasingly draconian laws aimed at stamping out any dissent. In recent years, Navalny became a cautionary tale for others who chose to challenge the Kremlin. Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, the vehicle for his political activism, was dismantled and his allies were either imprisoned or scared into exile. With continued access to social media through his lawyers, Navalny was able to needle the Kremlin with acerbic humour. This is a stark challenge for Russia’s opposition, which must now figure out how to sustain the unity he created and seize the movement he left behind. Navalny’s return to Russia, however futile it may have seemed, showed that standing up for freedom of thought and expression is a rational response to tyranny. His defiance signalled to others who felt the same way but lacked his courage that they were not alone. His widow, Yulia Navalnaya, vowed to continue his fight (See “2020, Aug”)

• 2024, Feb: The Ukrainians pulled their forces out of Avdiivka. They had held the town against continual Russian attacks for more than 4 months. This battle started in early October 2023 (though Avdiivka had been a front line town in the war for 9 years). Shortages of equipment, in particular artillery ammunition which had been much of US aid, made holding the town too potentially costly. Ukraine is trying hard to preserve its soldiers lives, and can only risk them if they have a far greater chance of taking a toll on the enemy. With ammunition running low, that risk of significant Ukrainian losses without much larger Russian losses, apparently was too high. The fall of Avdiivka, a city that was once home to some 30,000 people but is now a smoking ruin, is the first major gain Russian forces have achieved since May of last year

• 2024, Feb: A federal grand jury indicted informant Alexander Smirnov for lying and “creating a false and fictitious record” when he made a number of allegations about the Bidens, including that they had accepted bribes. Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD), the top Democrat on the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, told reporters on February 21 that “the impeachment investigation essentially ended yesterday, in substance if not in form, with the explosive revelation that Mr. Smirnov’s allegations about Ukrainian Burisma payments to Joe Biden were concocted along with Russian intelligence agents. And it appears like the whole thing was not only obviously false and fraudulent but a product of Russian disinformation and propaganda. And that’s been the motor force behind this investigation for more than a year.”

• 2024, Feb: The first private spacecraft to land successfully on the Moon touched down. The spacecraft, named Odysseus and built by Intuitive Machines in Houston, Texas, also became the first lunar lander since 1972. The implications are historic. For the first time, a spacecraft built by a private company rather than a country’s national space agency is operating on the moon. The landing included the debut of a NASA-developed landing system that used lasers to help spot hazards as the lander approached the surface. The landing demonstrates that – while difficult – the moon is an achievable and realistic goal for private companies and national space agencies with more modest budgets than the US or China. The Canadian Space Agency is one such entity. Canada’s first lunar rover, a small four-wheeled robot built by Canadensys, will be moonward bound as early as 2026

• 2024, Feb: The Alabama Supreme Court decided that cells awaiting implantation for in vitro fertilization are children and that the accidental destruction of such an embryo falls under the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act. In an opinion concurring with the ruling, Chief Justice Tom Parker declared that the people of Alabama have adopted the “theologically based view of the sanctity of life” and said that “human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God.” In a subsequent interview, Parker claimed that “God created government” and called it “heartbreaking” that “we have let it go into the possession of others.” Biden said the ruling reflected an “outrageous” disregard for women’s choice. According to a new survey from the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution, more than half of Republicans believe the country should be a strictly Christian nation – either adhering to the ideals of Christian nationalism (21%) or sympathizing with those views (33%)

• 2024, March: Sweden formally joins NATO, becoming its 32nd member and ending decades of neutrality after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. With the addition of the new Nordic member states – Finland joined last year – Putin, now finds himself faced with an enlarged and motivated NATO, one that is no longer dreaming of a permanent peace but instead facing years of trying to contain a newly aggressive, imperial Russia. Ulf Kristersson, the Swedish prime minister, pledged that Sweden, which had largely dismantled its ground forces after 1989 but has maintained a powerful air force and navy, would soon reach NATO’s goal of spending 2% of GDP on the military. Given Sweden’s geography, including Gotland, the island that helps control the entrance to the Baltic Sea, membership will make defence and deterrence easier to accomplish (See “2023, April” and “2023, Oct”)

• 2024, March: After a shellacking in the Super Tuesday primary voting, Nikki Haley ended her presidential bid. This cleared the way for Trump’s march to the presidential nomination and setting up a general election match with Democratic President Joe Biden. She represented a last-ditch bid by Reaganite Republicans to take back their party. She refused to endorse Trump and reprised a central campaign argument that he is too divisive to win. Trump aged 77 and Biden aged 81 will thus become the two oldest election opponents. Note update: on May 22, during an event at the Hudson Institute, while Haley stopped short of wholeheartedly endorsing Trump’s candidacy, she said she’d vote for him

• 2024, March: Haiti became under a state of emergency. Gangs freed thousands of prison inmates and attacked the country’s main airport, all while Prime Minister Ariel Henry is absent from the country. Armed criminal gangs, who control large swathes of the country, launched a coordinated assault to remove the prime minister. Henry, who came to power under a deal agreed with the opposition following the 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moise, was supposed to step down in February so elections could be held. In recent months, gangs have pushed beyond the capital city, Port-au-Prince, into rural areas overwhelming security forces in one of the world’s most impoverished countries. Henri has now resigned (April), the consequences of which will unfold (See “1697”, “1791, Aug”, “1804, Jan” and “2010, Jan”)

• 2024, March: The US House of Representatives advanced a bill to force a sale of the popular video-sharing app TikTok, on the grounds that it’s a “foreign adversary controlled application”. (A lot of people call this a “TikTok ban”, but in fact it’s not. The bill in Congress would simply force TikTok’s corporate ownership to change; the video service itself, with all its silly dance videos and bad news analysis, would remain.) TikTok has launched all-out campaign to keep the bill from getting out of committee. The app sent a push notification to its users, urging them to call their representatives and stop the bill. The campaign failed, and the bill passed the committee 50-0, with leaders of both parties voicing support. President Biden has said that if Congress passes it, he’ll sign it. In a stunning reversal, Trump came out swinging against a TikTok ban. One American who does not [want to force TikTok to sell] is Jeff Yass, a conservative hedge-fund manager who has a $33 billion stake in TikTok and has reportedly threatened to cut off funding to Republicans who support the divestment bill. TikTok is an important tool for influencing public opinion in the US. Certainly the app spies on Americans for the Chinese Communist Party.  But the bigger concern about TikTok isn’t spying – it’s propaganda. About a third of young Americans, and a seventh of Americans in general, now regularly get their news from the app. The problem here isn’t that the news young Americans get on TikTok is bad — much of it certainly is bad, but that’s more of a problem with news consumers than with the app. The problem is that the news is subtly and invisibly controlled by a foreign adversary government(See “2016, Sept” and “”2024, April”) 

• 2024, March: Trump seems desperate at a rally: “If I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath…for the country.” This is what he said March 17 at a rally outside the Daytona International Airport in Vandalia, Ohio. He also warned that if he didn’t win, ”I don’t think you’re going to have another election, or certainly not an election that’s meaningful.” In the rest of his speech he repeated his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, which have been utterly discredited. He praised the people serving sentences in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol – calling them “hostages” and “unbelievable patriots,” commending their spirit, and promising to help them if elected in November. He cast migrants as threats to American citizens – claiming without evidence that other countries were emptying their prisons of “young people” and sending them across the border. ”I don’t know if you call them ‘people,’ in some cases,’ he said. “They’re not people, in my opinion.” He later referred to them as “animals.” This past week, Trump’s own former VP, Mike Pence, had enough integrity to refuse to endorse Trump. If other current and former Republican officials had an ounce of integrity, they would do the same

• 2024, March: The incumbent president Putin won with 88% of the vote in the Russian presidential election, the highest percentage in a presidential election in post-Soviet Russia, gaining a fifth term in what was widely viewed as a foregone conclusion. In January 2020 Putin had drafted a constitutional amendment that would allow him to remain president for two more terms (See “2012, March”)

• 2024, March: A terrorist attack on the Crocus City concert hall in Moscow was conducted by radical Islamists. An affiliate of the Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the attack, despite growing evidence that the Afghan branch of IS, known as Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP), masterminded the attack. At least 137 people were killed and many more were wounded. Four men, all thought to be citizens of Tajikistan, were charged with terrorism. Russia has tried to pin at least some blame on Ukraine. In a televised statement Putin said that Ukraine had opened a border “window” for the terrorists to escape from Russia 

• 2024, March: Third party candidate Robert F. Kennedy, chose a controversial running mate, Nicole Shanahan. This adds complexity to the US fall presidential election. Kennedy is a conspiracy theorist (COVID-19, vaccine, gun violence, etc.) and even his four siblings have denounced his candidacy. Shanahan has attracted the same level of derision. It is feared that his presence gives a platform to his dangerous ideas and could have a negative impact on Biden (See “2000, Nov”)

• 2024, April: A total solar eclipse took place on April 8, visible across North America and dubbed the Great North American Eclipse by some media. Depending where you viewed it, the light dimmed into an eerie hue (Peterborough) or plunged the day into darkness (say, Niagara Falls). The silhouette of the moon ate into the yellow orb of the sun, obscuring all but the silvery glow of the corona – and the temperature dropped about ten degrees (again depending where you watched it.) A solar eclipse occurs when the Moon passes between Earth and the Sun, thereby obscuring the image of the Sun for a viewer on Earth. A total solar eclipse is a product of the natural world. It happens without elaborate stagecraft, without any outlay of capital. For this reason alone, it’s a rare occurrence. And there won’t be another in North America until 2044

• 2024, April: Canada announces a defence policy that calls for a sharper focus on its Arctic – and finally commits to the 2% of GDP target. Named Our North, Strong and Free it includes a fleet of early-warning aircraft (known as AWACS)and tactical lift helicopters (to replace its aging Griffon fleet), maritime sensors to detect missiles and ships as well as a satellite ground station in the Arctic and expanded runways and port facilities. This includes looking at options to replace aging submarines, purchase new light armoured vehicles and tanks and acquire ground-based air defence systems. The military is also short some 15,000 people that need to be saught. The spending noted amounts to $73 billion over the next 20 years; of that, $8.1 billion will roll out in the next 5 years. This increases Canada’s defence spending to 1.76% of GDP from 1.33%, while still falling short of NATO’s 2% target. Subsequently the Liberals announced they would move that to the 2% target. These expenditures are facing federal deficit and debt ballooning, so hopefully they will be protected from future cuts, as Canada’s NATO target should be made

• Note: on July 11, the final day of the NATO summit in Washington, Canada says it will reach its NATO commitment to spend 2% of its GDP on defence by 2032. 23 of the 32 NATO allies are expected to meet the 2% target this year. Canada’s defence budget is estimated at $29.9 billion for 2024. Only the US, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Poland and Turkey spend more in terms of real dollars

• 2024, April: A new model for resolving Aboriginal land claims was reached in BC when the province formally accepted that the Haida nation has aboriginal title to all one million hectares of the islands of Haida Gwaii. The province was influenced by a 1997 Supreme Court of Canada ruling (known as Delgamuukw) that confirmed Aboriginal title – the right to possession of ancestral lands – exists. In that judgement, the high court said the Crown has a duty to resolve land title claims through negotiation, rather than litigation. The agreement will serve as a model for First Nations across Canada to have their title recognized

• 2024, April: The US Senate passed a $95 billion national security supplemental bill that provides funding, mostly for military supplies, to Ukraine, Israel, and the Indo-Pacific and humanitarian aid for war-torn countries; requires the sale of TikTok; and permits confiscating Russian assets. MAGA Republicans are still adamantly opposed to aid for Ukraine, but a strong bipartisan majority has finally gotten the chance to weigh in. The bill includes US$61-billion in aid to Ukraine and US$26-billion for Israel.The initial aid package includes vehicles, Stinger air-defence munitions, additional ammunition for high-mobility artillery rocket systems, 155 mm artillery ammunition, TOW and Javelin anti-tank munitions

• 2024, April: Re Trump charge #3: “election interference” (See 2023, Aug):The jury heard from David Pecker, Trump’s longtime executive assistant and the former publisher of The National Enquirer, who explained how he had worked to bury negative stories and help elect Trump. Pecker, a longtime associate of the former president, talked at length about a “catch and kill” scheme that he said he had entered into with Trump and his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, during a 2015 meeting at Trump Tower. The publisher said he would purchase the rights to unsavoury stories he had no intention of running. Whatever way the outcome of this trial unfolds, one of Trump’s strategies will be to allow him to trumpet the notion that he is a political prisoner – a term he has employed to describe many of the imprisoned principals in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capital

• 2024, April: The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments whether and, if so, to what extent “does a former President enjoy presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct alleged to involve official acts during his tenure in office.” It’s new territory for the top court, as a president has never faced criminal charges before Trump. This is a question that could affect whether former president Trump can be prosecuted for his efforts to reverse a 2020 election loss to President Joe Biden. The court could declare for the first time that former presidents may not be prosecuted for conduct related to official acts during their time in office. Or the justices could simply reject the immunity claim outright, or rule that former presidents do retain some immunity for their official actions, but that Trump’s actions fall beyond that scope. 
• A decision was issued July 1 when the Supreme Court in Donald J. Trump v. United States decided that a president cannot be prosecuted for crimes committed in actions that fall under a president’s “official duties”. This will send the federal criminal prosecution of Trump for his post-election actions back to an appeals court for further litigation. This would delay the trial until after the November election. Trump could shut down the case if he takes office January 2025. This decision is a direct result of the fact that Trump stacked the court with extremists, who have worked with extremist justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas to overturn longstanding legal precedents that protect civil rights. On top of this the US Supreme Court has now also gutted civil rights protections and taken away a woman’s right to choose. It’s not overstating it to say that this moves the US toward a theocracy overseen by a dictator 

• 2024, April: Charged with “corrupting the earth”, a rapper in Iran was sentenced to death by hanging. If this sounds medieval, that’s because it is. It’s a charge reflective of the geriatric men and mindset that rule Iran. (For example it also doesn’t allow women artists to sing publicly for fear of arousing men.) The 33-year old rapper, Toomaj Salehi, raps about clerical corruption, freedom and unity and has 2.5 million followers on Instagram. This totalitarian theocracy is fragile and ripe for radical change (See “1906, Aug”, “2015, Apr”, “2018, May” and “2023, May”) 

• 2024, May: The first shipments of crude through the Trans Mountain pipeline arrived on the West Coast of Canada (Burnaby, BC) more than a decade after the project was launched to bring landlocked Alberta crude to lucrative overseas markets. This was the most expensive infrastructure project in Canadian history. Buyers from the US and beyond will begin to erase the deep discount on Alberta crude prices (reducing the price spread between the US benchmark West Texas Intermediate crude and the lower-priced Western Canadian Select heavy crude.) This 1,150 kilometre pipeline may be the last to be built in Canada (See “2018, May” and “2021, Jan”)

• 2024, May: Canada’s Charter of Rights is shaping up to be a major conflict area between the Conservative Party of Canada and the Liberal Party. Conservative leader, Pierre Poilieve, has stated that he intends to override the Charter of Rights by means of the notwithstanding clause purely for its own sake: to set a precedent, to make a point, to show that he can, to own the libs. (Poilieve has stated that he will use it to revive legislation imposing consecutive, rather than concurrent sentences in cases of multiple murders.) Plus the conservative provincial governments have made a number of decisions to override the Charter, by means of the notwithstanding clause. This has been coming. The late senator Eugene Forsey’s warning, that the clause was a “dagger pointed to the heart of our fundamental freedoms” – that its mere presence implied the rights in the Charter were not guaranteed, but contingent, thus almost inviting its use – has instead been vindicated. But as Andrew Coyne has said “the Charter is essentially a promise, a written contract with the public, in which Parliament and the provinces agreed to respect certain limits in their laws and acts, so far as these touched upon the rights of the people. It is not up to the signatories of a contract to decide for themselves whether they have abided by it. That is what the courts are for.” Trudeau needs to pass a resolution in the House foreswearing any federal use of the notwithstanding clause, and then legislation committing the federal government to use the power of disallowance against its use by the provinces… or against any pre-emptive use (See “1982, April”)

• 2024, May: Slovakia’s populist prime minister, Robert Fico, was shot in an assassination attempt. He is controversial as his government seems to have abandoned Slovakia’s pro-Western course and will follow in the footsteps of Hungary under its populist Prime Minister Viktor Orban. Slovakia, a nation of 5.4 million that belongs to NATO, has recently halted arms deliveries to Ukraine. The attack come as political campaigning heats up three weeks ahead of Europe-wide elections to choose lawmakers for the European Parliament. Concern is mounting that populist and nationalists similar to Fico could make gains in the 27-member bloc. Fico’s nationalist-populist Smer Partyis still safely in power

• 2024, May: President Ebrahim Raisi of Iran was killed along with the country’s foreign minister, Hossein Amir Abdollahian, in a helicopter crash. The death of Raisi, a conservative hard-line Shiite cleric who violently crushed dissent and was widely viewed as a possible successor to Iran’s supreme leader, 85-year old Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (who holds ultimate power with a final say on foreign policy and Iran’s nuclear program), comes during a particularly tumultuous period for Iran. During Raisi’s tenure the country had been roiled by protests and economic upheaval and engaged in a long shadow war with Israel, which burst into the open in an exchange of direct strikes last month. Abdollahian was considered closely aligned with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps; he was also believed to have had a close relationship with Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, the powerful leader of the Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force, whom the US killed in a drone strike in 2020. (Elections were then called on July 5/24 and Masoud Pezeshkian won the presidency.) (See “2005, July”. “2-15, Apr” and “2024, July”)

• 2024, May: The lead prosecutor at the International Criminal Court announced he would seek arrest warrants for leaders on both sides of the Israel-Hamas war on charges of crimes against humanity. Subjects include Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, along with Hamas’ political leader Ismail Haniyeh, Gaza chief Yahya Sinwar, and military head Mohammed Deif. A panel of three judges will decide whether to issue the arrest warrants. President Biden subsequently said the effort to arrest Netanyahu and Gallant was “outrageous,” adding “whatever this prosecutor might imply, there is no equivalence between Israel and Hamas.”

• 2024, May: China is angry with Taiwan, again, and has sent warplanes and ships around Taiwan to show its anger. The cause, tis time, is over the self-governing island’s inauguration of new leaders who refuse to accept its insistence that Taiwan is part of China. Chinese forces have surrounded Taiwan and they have shown simulated missiles hitting key population and military targets. Taiwan’s 23 million people have lived under the threat of Chinese invasion since the two sides split during a civil war in 1949. 35 of the 49 Chinese warplanes just tracked have flown across the de facto boundary between the two sides. Taiwan’s new president, Lai Ching-te, has urged China to stop its military intimidation and said Taiwan “was a sovereign independent nation in which sovereignty lies in the hands of the people.”

• 2024, May: A Manhattan jury found Trump guilty of all 34 counts of falsifying business records in his hush money trial, an unprecedented and historic verdict that makes him the first former president in US history to be convicted of a felony. Prosecutors accused Trump of  taking part in an illegal conspiracy to undermine the integrity of the 2016 presidential election and an unlawful plan to suppress negative information, which included concealing a hush money payment to an adult film star. A felony conviction of a former president or party frontrunner is unprecedented, but Trump, who is the 2024 presumptive GOP nominee, can still run for office. Trump called the jury’s decision a “disgrace” and said the “real verdict” will come during the presidential election on November 5. President Joe Biden said on social media that his 2024 rival can only be defeated at the ballot box (See “2023, March”)

• 2024, May: NATO members France then Britain gave Ukraine permission to fire their long-range missiles into Russia against military targets. Subsequently, the US agreed but limited targets to the Kharkiv region, now under attack by Russia. This is a meaningful escalation. In early June France announced they and a coalition of allies will send NATO troops to Ukraine as military trainers – in defiance of those who believe this is escalatory and could lead to a nuclear clash 

• 2024, June: Claudia Sheinbaum will be the first woman to head the Mexican state, the first person of Jewish origin, the first from the academic left. These “firsts” will generate much excitement internationally. They should not obscure, however, her most important qualification: her career-long subservience to Mexico’s autocratic president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Over the past six years López Obrador has sought to subvert the multiparty competitive democracy that his country achieved in the 1990s. He has weakened the independent election agency that guaranteed free and fair elections. He has broken the laws and disregarded the customs that limited the president’s power to use the state to favour his preferred candidates. He has undermined the independence of the judiciary. Sheinbaum’s electoral victory concentrates more power in López Obrador’s Morena party than any other Mexican government has wielded since the days of one-party rule. Mexico’s problem is that the criminal syndicates outgun the government. The presidency will now be occupied by a protégée beholden to a predecessor who aspires to control everything from behind the scenes. The impending power struggle between them can only work to the advantage of the forces of criminality and chaos that threaten to consume the country

• 2024, June: After years of complications, Boeing has launched astronauts to space for the first time. Two veteran NASA astronauts are now on their way to the International Space Station. This particular commute to the space station is a major moment in American space travel. Barry Wilmore, the mission commander, and Sunita Williams, the pilot, are test-driving the new vehicle, known as Starliner. It’s the first time Boeing has launched astronauts into space, and the first time a woman has flown a trial of a new orbital spacecraft. Boeing has a long history as a space contractor – it worked on Apollo rockets, the space station, and many projects in between. It’s also the primary contractor for NASA’s newest rocket, the Space Launch System, which is scheduled to launch astronauts toward the moon later this decade. With Starliner, Boeing is attempting to prove that it can deliver the nation’s astronauts to the space station and back by itself – and keep up with SpaceX, which has been doing the job since 2020. Update: NASA and Boeing announced that its departure from the ISS on this shakeout cruise had been pushed back to no earlier than June 18, to accommodate a planned June 13 NASA spacewalk and to allow more time for Starliner checkouts (they have noticed five small helium leaks in Starliner’s propulsion system.)

• 2024, June: Narendra Modi won re-election as India’s prime minister, though by a far narrower margin than expected. With his third consecutive term, the charismatic strongman has still sealed his position as the country’s most significant leader in generations. He fell short of an outright majority and well short of expectations. He will now depend on other, much smaller, parties to govern. This is a likely a good thing: India is less likely to become an autocracy

• 2024, June: Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un signed a security partnership between their countries that said they would “provide mutual assistance in case of aggression.” The two authoritarian leaders essentially resurrected a 1961 agreement between North Korea and the Soviet Union. The agreement also calls for the two countries to work together toward a “just and multipolar new world order.” Putin needs weapons for the war in Ukraine, and in exchange, he might provide not only the economic support Kim Jong Un needs but also transfer the technology North Korea needs to develop nuclear weapons. China, which declared a “no limits” partnership with Russia in February 2022 just before Russia invaded Ukraine, kept distant from the new agreement between Russia and North Korea. The two nations, beyond sharing a small 10-mile land border, have a history of alignment since WWII

• 2024, June: The first debate took place between President Joe Biden and presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump for the US election in the fall. The debate was a disaster for both candidates. Biden appeared old and slow, forgetful at times and unimpressive. Trump was mean, dissembling and rambling. Biden began with a weak start but improved as the evening wore on. Indeed, he covered his bases too thoroughly, listing the many accomplishments of his administration in such a hurry that he was sometimes hard to understand. Trump came out strong but faded and became less coherent over time. His entire performance was either lies or rambling non-sequiturs. As one commentator said he lied so incessantly throughout the evening that it took CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale almost three minutes, speaking quickly, to get through the list. Virtually everything he said was a lie. His string of lies, non-sequiturs, and specious arguments were so abundant that it was impossible to fact-check or rebut them in the amount of time it took to say them. Trying to figure out how to respond made Biden look confused, because he didn’t know where to start grappling with the flood that had just hit him. Killing the mic of the person not speaking tonight actually made the technique more effective. The CNN journalists running the debate did not challenge anything either candidate said. Stage performance has trumped substance. Ironically the next day at a rally in Raleigh, North Carolina, Biden seemed vigorous. He almost shouted “I don’t debate as well as I used to. But I know what I do know: I know how to tell the truth. I know right from wrong. And I know how to do this job. I know how to get things done.” The challenge will be whether it is wise to replace Biden, in time for the Democratic nominating convention in August to nominate someone else

• 2024, July 1: The US Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in finding the president of the United States has some immunity over actions conducted while in office. This stunning decision overturned the fundamental principle of the USA that no one is above the law. In Donald J. Trump v. U.S., the Supreme Court ruled that a president could not be prosecuted for crimes committed as part of his official duties. The case stems from former President Donald Trump’s challenge to four felony charges over alleged interference with the 2020 election. The court’s majority opinion draws a distinction between official and unofficial acts of the office of the presidency. Trump’s conversations with the attorney general are characterized as official acts, while conversations with others – including then-Vice President Mike Pence – may be categorized as unofficial depending on the context. The court directs lower courts to parse through the allegations to determine which acts may be prosecuted as unofficial acts (See “2023, Aug”)

• 2024, July 5: Masoud Pezeshkian, a reformist and cardiac surgeon, won Iran’s snap presidential election. The election was called after President Ebrahim Raisi died in a helicopter crash on May 19. Pezeshkian won decisively with almost three million more votes than Saeed Jalili, a hardliner and former nuclear negotiator (with the lowest turnout since the 1979 revolution) reflected deep public discontent and political apathy about the theocracy. Those in the know say don’t be fooled if this signals anything positive for reform. Iran refers to itself as an Islamic Republic, but it is neither. Iran’s system of governance for the past 45 years has been one ruled by a Supreme Jurisconsult; the current man in this position is Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (who btw owns assets exceeding US$95-billion). He is an unelected moral, spiritual and political guide who controls everything (judiciary, army,  media, foreign and domestic policies); the country thus is more a totalitarian theocracy. Also Iran has 12-man unelected body which wields considerable power and that can veto all laws that do not “conform to Islamic criteria.” It’s called the Guardian Council. This is an arranged marriage of state and religion (See “1979, March”, “1979, Nov” and “2024, May”)

• 2024, July: The UK centre-left Labour Party won a landslide victory led by PM Keir Starmer

• 2024, July: A left-wing coalition unexpectedly surged in France and the far-right National Rally fell short of predictions. But no coalition captured a majority in Parliament, meaning months of gridlock 

• 2024, July 13: An assassination attempt was made against former President Donald J. Trump at a rally. Besides wounding him, it also killed a father of two and critically wounded two other men. The FBI believe the gunman acted alone. Trump stood up with blood on his face, exposed to the crowd, and told the agents to wait. He raised his fist in the air in front of an American flag in what instantly became an iconic image. He appeared to yell, “Fight, fight, fight!” to the crowd before being ushered offstage

• 2024, July 15-18: The Republican National Convention took place in Milwaukee, Wisconsin (just two days after the attempted assassination of Trump). Trump accepts the party nomination with a lengthy speech recounting assassination attempt. Minutes after he recounted his harrowing tale, Trump, as he so often does, stepped on his own message. Often veering away from his prepared remarks, Trump peppered his speech with interjections about the former Democratic House speaker (“crazy Nancy Pelosi”) or a hated news program (“De-Face the Nation”). While promising to “make America great once again”, he painted a picture of an American hellscape under Biden’s leadership. (BTW, Wisconsin is considered a key swing state in determining the winner of the Electoral College.)

• 2024, July 15: Donald Trump selected J.D. Vance, the Ohio senator and “Hillbilly Elegy” author, to be his running mate. Vance, the junior US senator from Ohio, then accepted the party’s nomination for vice president. Vance, a political newcomer and onetime Trump critic, is an ambitious, telegenic ideologue who relishes the spotlight. “Donald Trump picked J.D. Vance as his running mate because Vance will do what Mike Pence wouldn’t on Jan. 6: bend over backwards to enable Trump and his extreme MAGA agenda, even if it means breaking the law and no matter the harm to the American people,” said Jen O’Malley Dillon, Biden-Harris 2024 chair. He would not have certified the results of the 2020 election. (Here’s what Vance said in response to George Stephanopoulos’s question “Had you been vice president on January 6th, would you have certified the election results?” His answer: “If I had been vice president, I would have told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia, and so many others that we needed to have multiple slates of electors and I think the U.S. Congress should have fought over it from there.”)

• 2024, July 21: President Biden withdrew from the Presidential race. He did it in a letter released on his personal Twitter site. He has thrown his support behind Vice President Harris. The entire Trump campaign apparatus was focused on Biden and that putting extremist Ohio senator J.D. Vance on the ticket “was something of a luxury meant to run up margins with the base in a blowout rather than persuade swing voters in a nail-biter.”

• 2024, July: One-third of the buildings in the townsite of Jasper, Alberta were destroyed by a wildfire. About 25,000 people, including 5,000 town residents, were ordered the leave as the fast-moving flames approached

• 2024, July: Venezuela’s presidential election ended with two conflicting outcomes. Incumbent President Nicolás Maduro, of the ruling United Socialist Party, was declared the winner but the opposition coalition, led by Edmundo González, has demanded the voting tally sheets which he claims will show he won (See “2002, Apr”, 2017, Aug” and “2022, Jan”)

• 2024, July 29: President Biden called for three major changes to the US Supreme Court to restore trust and accountability. He called for a constitutional amendment to make clear that no president is above the law or immune from prosecution for crimes committed while in office. This is a direct response to the Supreme Court’s decision of July 1, 2024, in Donald J. Trump v. United States that a president cannot be prosecuted for crimes committed in actions that fall under a president’s “official duties.” The White House said, “President Biden shares the Founders’ belief that the President’s power is limited – not absolute – and must ultimately reside with the people.” The “No One Is Above the Law Amendment will state that the Constitution does not confer any immunity from federal criminal indictment, trial, conviction, or sentencing by virtue of previously serving as President.” Biden also called for eighteen-year term limits for Supreme Court justices. Noting that Congress approved term limits for the presidency, Biden pointed out that “[t]he United States is the only major constitutional democracy that gives lifetime seats to its high court Justices.” “Term limits would help ensure that the Court’s membership changes with some regularity; make timing for Court nominations more predictable and less arbitrary; and reduce the chance that any single Presidency imposes undue influence for generations to come,” the White House wrote. Biden also called for Congress to “pass binding, enforceable conduct and ethics rules that require Justices to disclose gifts, refrain from public political activity, and recuse themselves from cases in which they or their spouses have financial or other conflicts of interest. Supreme Court Justices should not be exempt from the enforceable code of conduct that applies to every other federal judge.” This, too, reflects the problems of the modern court, where several justices, especially Justice Clarence Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito, have accepted large gifts from those with business before the court and have refused to recuse themselves from those cases (See “2024, April”)

• 2024, July 31: Hamas’ top political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, was assassinated by Israel in Tehran, capital of Iran. This is an explosive event amid the region’s volatile, intertwined conflicts because of its target and the decision to carry it out in Tehran. Of course, Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said revenge was “our duty” and that Israel had “prepared a harsh punishment for itself” by killing “a dear guest in our home.” Haniyeh’s killing could prompt Hamas to pull out of negotiations for a ceasefire and hostage release deal in the 10-month-old war in Gaza. The Middle East is close to a devastating regional war

• 2024, Aug 1: The largest and most complex E-W prisoner swap since the Cold War took place. Russia freed wrongly convicted Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich. Moscow also released Vladimir Kara-Murza, and a British-Russian dissident journalist, Alsu Kurmasheva. The sweeping deal involved 24 prisoners and seven counties and months of negotiations. One key to the deal was Germany agreeing to release a Russian hit man, Vadim Krakow. These exchanges are emblematic of an era of state-sponsored hostage-taking by autocratic governments seeking leverage over rivals. But one dilemma with these swaps is that certain countries are defined as “abductor states” (such as Russia and North Korea). So leaders like Putin can pluck foreigners from the streets and imprison them on spurious charges – something a Western leader can’t do (See “2023, March” and “2023, April”)

• 2024, Aug 3: Ukrainian soldiers conducted a daring incursion into Russian territory, in the Kursh border region. They have forced a large-scale evacuation of Russian residents and shown up the weakness of Russia’s control of its border. So far it’s mostly a symbolic reversal for Putin, as Ukraine has limited resources to push much deeper into Russia. The main objective apparently was to draw Russian troops away from the Donbas stronghold, and to create bargaining chips for any future negotiation

• 2024, Aug 6: Vice President Kamala Harris picks the Minnesota governor Tim Walz as her running mate. Walz, 60, has both executive and legislative experiences. He was first elected governor of Minnesota in 2018 and won a second term four years later. Despite the state not being a traditional Democratic stronghold, Walz won both races with ease. He is also a US military veteran, having served in the Army National Guard for 24 years after joining it at the age of 17. Before running for Congress, he worked as a school teacher

• 2024, Aug 20: Michelle Obama gave what has been described as a truly extraordinary speech at the Democratic National Convention. It called out Trump and his allies, who are trying to destroy that world view that ”the belief that you can do unto others, if you love thy neighbours, if you work and scrape and sacrifice, it will pay off. If not for you, then maybe for your children or your grandchildren.”  She warned that demonizing others and taking away their rights, “only makes us small.” “It demeans and cheapens our politics.” It is “up to us to be the solution that we seek.” “Whether you’re a Democrat, Republican, Independent, or none of the above, “ she said, “this is our time to stand up for what we know in our hearts is right…for decency and humanity, for basic respect, dignity and empathy. For the values at the very foundation of this democracy.”

• 2024, Aug 22: Vice President Kamala Harris gave her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. She used her speech to present herself as a pragmatic leader who could unite all Americans behind a “new way forward,” painting her opponent, Trump, as a dangerous and “unserious man” whose election would alter the foundation of American democracy. Harris, a former prosecutor, presented the lengthiest and most serious case she has made against Trump as a presidential candidate. She reframed issues such as reproductive rights as a question of government interference. At stake in the election, Harris said, were “the freedom to live safe from gun violence, in our schools, communities, and places of worship; the freedom to love who you love openly and with pride; the freedom to breathe clean air, drink clean water, and live free from the pollution that fuels the climate crisis; and the freedom that unlocks all the others: The freedom to vote.”

• 2024, Aug 23: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. endorsed Trump for president. A controversial member of America’s most famous political family, the independent presidential candidate suspended his campaign and removed his name from the ballot in 10 battleground states. He had been polling in the single digits ~5%). He is nephew of former president John Fitzgerald Kennedy and had become a mouthpiece for conspiracy theories, particularly on health issues such as vaccines. Trump then asked him to serve on his transition team if the GOP presidential nominee wins another term in office

• 2024, Aug 23: The Afghanistan Taliban codified a long set of rules governing morality, ranging from requiring women to cover their faces, banning men from shaving their beards as well as skipping prayer and religious fasts, and banning car drivers from playing music. The morality ministry (the Ministry for the Prevention of Vice & Propagation of Virtue) is promoting the rules as in line with Islamic sharia law 

• 2024, first half: A post-COVID global surge in communicable diseases is taking place. According to an analysis by the disease forecasting firm Airfinity and the news organization Bloomberg, over 40 countries have experienced a tenfold increase in the incidence of at least one of 13 infectious diseases since 2022, compared with pre pandemic numbers. André Picard of the Globe and Mail has suggested some reasons. First, vaccination rates have fallen both in the developing world (COVID-related disruptions) but vaccine hesitancy in Western countries. Climate change is also driving the spread of infectious diseases (tropical diseases moving to typically more temperate climates). Pathogens are jumping species with humans moving into closer contact with wild and domestic animals (with the outbreak of avian influenza virus H5N1 from birds to cattle to humans an example.) Tuberculosis still kills 1.3 million people per year (poor housing and overcrowding). Disinformation fuels denial, and responses are very political and partisan

• 2024, Sept 3: A law will go into effect in Louisiana (on Oct 1) that reclassifies the drug misoprostol as a controlled dangerous substance. Misoprostol can be used for abortion. It is also used for routine reproductive care and during medical emergencies to treat postpartum hemorrhage. It is on the World Health Organization’s list of essential medications, a list containing those medications that are the most effective and safe to meet a health care system’s most important needs. After antiabortion activists targeted the drug, Louisiana governor Jeff Landry signed a law reclassifying it as a controlled dangerous substance. The reclassification means that the drug will no longer be easily available on obstetric hemorrhage carts. Trump is proud of what he’s done and if he wins, he will threaten to bring the crisis he created for Louisiana women to all 50 states 

• 2024, Sept 3: Russian airstrikes on a Ukrainian military institute and nearby hospital killed at least 50 people and wounded 270 others. The strike on the central Ukrainian city of Poltava is considered the war’s deadliest single attack this year

• 2024, Sept 4: A significant escalation in the Russia/Ukraine war took place when hundreds of powerful Iranian missiles were delivered to Russia. Britain argued that it changes the debate and justifies allowing Ukraine to use long-distance missiles anywhere in Russia. British PM Sir Keir Starmer stated “Russia started this conflict. Russia illegally invaded Ukraine. Russia can end this conflict straight away…They caused the conflict; they’re the ones who are acting unlawfully. Ukraine has a right to self-defense.” Britain and America owe Ukraine support because they pushed Ukraine to surrender its nuclear arsenal as the Soviet Union dissolved. In return, they signed the Budapest Memorandum in 1994, pledging to protect the country from invasion by Russia or any other country. Russia also signed, then proceeded to invade Ukraine twice, once in 2014 and most recently in 2022. Britain and America did not send troops to repel these invasions. The three signatories to the Memorandum reneged on their pledges (See “1994, Dec”)

• 2024, Sept 10: The Trump/Harris debate took place; Trump lost it (although he said, of course, he won). Much of it centred around the central question about America’s place in the world: should the US continue to play a leading role in global affairs or will, as Foreign Affairs says “a rising tide of populism and isolationism, best embodied by Trumps “America first” movement, lead the country to disengage?” Regarding styles, Harris had to figure out how to counter Trump’s dominance displays (which has been his style), while also appealing to the American people. She figured it out and played Trump cleverly. He took the bait, and self-destructed. Harris’s attacks accomplished what they set out to. She met an ”angry Trump”; he would not look at her during the debate. CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale said that “no major presidential candidate before Donald Trump has ever lied with this kind of frequency.” Trump really lost it when Harris baited him with his rally sizes, and in his fury repeated the lie about immigrants eating pets! By the end of the debate Harris had delivered a clear message about her hopes for the country. Right after the debate, Taylor Swift endorsed Harris

• 2024, Sept 15: A second attempt to assassinate Trump occurred at his Florida golf course. The man has a long history of trouble with the law and an obsession with the war in Ukraine. He apparently lay in wait for nearly 12 hours without anyone noticing him. He did not have a line of sight nor fire his AK-47 assault rifle. The US Secret Service opened fire on him and he fled, to be picked up 70 kms away on the highway

• 2024, Sept 17: Hundreds of pagers, maybe thousands, belonging to Hezbollah leadership, operatives and supporters exploded when they received a message. 24 hours later, two-way radios (“walkie-talkies”) also began to explode. It appears that Israel had penetrated the pager network and installed a very small amount of explosive material that could be detonated from afar. Hezbollah’s internal security system was totally compromised. This is weaponizing a communications infrastructure itself, all at zero risk to Israel’s military personnel. This is a new way to wage war

Sources

Magazines: National Geographic; The Economist; The Atlantic; Foreign Affairs; The New Yorker; The Walrus; Harpers; Canada’s History

Newspaper sources: Globe & Mail; New York Times, Peterborough Examiner; etc.

Radio: CBC Ideas

TV: Rick Steves Travel Show

Obituaries

Web sources: Wikipedia; Britannica; Inside History; The Canadian Encyclopedia

Blogs: Heather Cox Richardson; Diane Francis on America and the World, etc. 

Personal travel diaries

Books (a sampling): 

• Tamin Ansary: The Invention of Yesterday: A 50,000-year History of Human Culture, Conflict, and Connection (2019) plus his book Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes (2009)
• Sarah Bakewell: Humanly Possible: 700 Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope (2023)
• Joanna Chiu: China Unbound: A New World Disorder (2021)
• Jared Diamond: Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997)
• Will and Ariel Durant: The Story of Civilization, an 11-volume set of books covering both Eastern and Western civilizations for the general reader, with a particular emphasis on European (Western) history. It took this husband and wife team 40 years to write, from 1935 to 1975
• Yuval Noah Harari: Homo Deus, A Brief History of Tomorrow (2015) plus Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011)
• 32 problems in World History; Source readings and interpretations by Edwin Fenton (1964)
• E. D. Hirsch, Jr.: Cultural Literacy – What Every American Needs to Know (1988) plus The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy (2002)
• Lynn Hunt: History: Why It Matters (2018)
• Linda Jaivin: The Shortest History of China (2021)
• H.W. and Dora Jane Janson: The Story of Painting: from cave painting to modern times (1952)
• Tony Judt: Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005) 
• Margaret MacMillan: The Uses and Abuses of History (2003)
• Paul Kennedy: Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War (2013)
• World History edited by Prof Patrick O’Brien (2003) 
• J. M. Roberts: The Pelican History of the World (1988)
• Barbara H. Rosenwein: A Short History of the Middle Ages (3rd edition, 2009)
• Vaclav Smil: How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We’re Going (2022)
• William Irwin Thompson: At the Edge of History (1972) 
• Arnold Toynbee: A Study of History (1934 to 1961)
• John Vaillant: Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast (2023)
• Simon Winchester: The Perfectionists: How precision Engineers Created the Modern World (2018)
• Smithsonian Time Lines of History (2011)
• Oxford History of the British Empire (1998)