Jan. 4: Burj Dubai, the world’s tallest tower at 818 Metres (2,684 feet), is opened by Dubai’s ruler Sheikh Mohammad Bin Rashid al Maktoum.
Jan. 15: Russia ratifies European Human Rights Convention.
Jan. 17: James Cameron’s science fiction blockbuster Avatar fetches for him Best Drama and Best Director at the 67th annual Golden Globes Awards in Beverly Hills, California. Meryl Streep gets Best Actress award for Julie & Julia.
Jan. 19: British chocolate bar maker Cadbury is bought by U.S. giant Kraft Foods in a $19 billion deal ending more than 180 years of history.
Jan. 22: U.S. astronaut Timothy “TJ” Creamer aboard the International Space Station becomes the first person to tweet live from space.
Jan. 27: Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa is re-elected for a second term.
Jan. 31: A.R. Rahman wins two Grammy awards for his song ‘Jai Ho’ and outstanding soundtrack for the film Slumdog Millionaire at the 52nd annual Grammy Awards in Los Angeles.
Feb. 7: Laura Chinchilla is elected the first woman President of Costa Rica by a landslide.
Feb. 14: Viktor Yanukovych is officially declared winner in the Ukrainian presidential polls.
Feb. 20: Kathryn Bigelow’s Iraq war movie The Hurt Locker sweeps the BAFTAs picking up six gongs out of eight she was nominated for.
Feb. 25: Victor Yanukovych is sworn in Ukraine’s President.
March 5: The U.S. House of Representatives passes the Hiring Incentive to Restore Employment Act, a jobs bill of $15 billion.
March 7: Iraq war drama The Hurt Locker bags the Best Picture Oscar at the 82nd Academy Awards in Los Angeles. Kathryn Bigelow becomes the first woman to be awarded Best Director. Sandra Bullock gets Best Actress Award (The Blind Side) Jeff Bridges strikes gold in the Best Actor category.
March 11: Myanmar promulgates new poll laws targeting democracy campaigner Aung San Suu Kyi.
March 12: Sebastian Pinera is sworn in Chile President.
March 14: Katie Spotz (22) becomes the youngest person to row solo across the Atlantic Ocean and the first American to row a boat without help from mainland to mainland. She left on January 3 from Dakar, Senegal.
March 18: The U.S. President Barack Obama signs into law the $17.5 billion Hiring Incentive to Restore Employment Act (the “HIRE Act”).
March 19: Atom Smasher sets record as beams of protons circulate at 3.5 trillion electron volts in both directions around the 27 km tunnel housing the Large Hadron Collider under the Swiss-French border at Geneva.
March 20: Girija Prasad Koirala (86), Nepal’s five-time Prime Minister, freedom fighter and political hero dies at his daughter’s house in Kathmandu.
A volcano under a glacier in Iceland erupts after almost 200 years.
Oscar, a Spanish man undergoes the world’s first full face transplant at a Barcelona hospital.
March 21: The U.S. House of Representatives passes the Senate version of the healthcare reform bill by a narrow but firm margin of 219- 212.
March 22: Tejdeep Singh Rattan becomes the first turbaned Sikh in a generation to join the U.S. Army.
March 24: The Abel Prize for Mathematics for 2010 is awarded to American Mathematician John Torrence Tate for his work in “Algebraic Number Theory.”
March 25: The former premier Iyad Allawi’s secular Iraqiya bloc wins Iraq polls.
March 30: Scientists at the European Centre for Nuclear Research near Geneva smash proton beams into each other with record energy at a nano-fraction of a second slower than the speed of light using the Large Hadron Collider.
March 31: Mauritius Prime Minister Navin Ramgoolam dissolves the 70-member National Assembly and calls for elections on May 5.
April 2: A report of the Committee on Constitutional Reforms is tabled in Pakistan National Assembly.
April 5: The Discovery space shuttle blasts off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Centre in Florida with seven astronauts, including three women mission specialists on a 13- day mission aboard the International Space Station.
April 7: India and China sign an agreement to set up a hotline between Prime Ministers Manmohan Singh and Wen Jiabao, after talks in Beijing.
Thailand Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva promulgates emergency following a brief gate crash by protesters at the Parliament premises.
April 8: Presidents Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev sign a Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty at a meeting in Prague.
Pakistan National Assembly passes the 18th Amendment Bill that seeks to bring back the 1973 Constitution.
April 9: President Rajapaksa-led ruling alliance in Sri Lanka records an emphatic win in polls.
April 10: Polish President Lech Kaczynski and a high level delegation are killed after a plane carrying 97 persons crashes in thick fog near the Smolensk airport in western Russia. Poland declares a week’s official mourning.
April 12: British-Indian author Rana Dasgupta wins the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for 2010 for his epic tale Solo. Australian Glenda Guest’s Siddon Rock adjudged Best First Book.
April 15: The volcanic eruption in Iceland creates massive ash cloud disrupting flight services in Europe.
Pakistan Senate passes the 18th Amendment — seeking to strip the presidency of its powers and restore them to Parliament.
Deposed President of Kyrgyzstan Kurmanbek Bakiyev steps down after earlier leaving the country for the neighbouring Kazakhastan.
April 18: Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari signs the 18th Amendment Bill restoring parliamentary democracy.
April 20: Shuttle Discovery and its astronauts return to earth wrapping up their 15-day, 9.7 million km journey to the International Space Station.
The Deepwater Horizon rig operated by British Petroleum sinks in the Gulf of Mexico following an explosion leaving 11 workers dead.
April 21: Dissanayake Mudiyanselage Jayaratne is appointed Sri Lankan Prime Minister.
April 22: Chamal Rajapaksa is elected Sri Lanka Parliament Speaker.
April 24: The Hubble Space Tele scope celebrates the 20th anniversary of its launch on April 24, 1990.
April 25: The Austrian President, Heinz Fischer, wins a second sixyear term.
April 26: Sudan’s President Omar Hassan El-Bashire registers a decisive election win.
April 27: Oh Eun-sun, a South Korean mountaineer becomes the first woman to scale the world’s 14 highest mountains.
April 28: The 16th SAARC summit opens in the Bhutan capital Thimphu.
April 29: Belgium’s Lower House of Parliament votes to ban wearing burqa in public, becoming the first state in Europe to do so.
May 2: The European Union and the IMF approve a $146 billion package to rescue debt-ridden Greece.
May 6: Goodluck Jonathan is sworn in Nigerian President.
The three-party alliance of Prime Minister Navin Ramgoolam wins 41 of the 60 seats in the Mauritius National Parliament.
May 7: The British election throws up a hung parliament and the Labour Party handed down defeat after 13 years in Power. Shahabana Mahmood and Yasmin Qureshi become Britain’s first women Muslim MPs.
Myanmar’s National League for Democracy led by Aung San Suu Kyi ceases to exist.
World Wide Web launches Arabic URLs, Egypt begins registering names under the .misr domain
May 9: The European Union announces a €750 billion special European fund to bailout failing euro zone economies.
May 11: British Prime Minister Gordon Brown resigns.
May 12: Conservative leader David Cameron assumes office as Britain’s Prime Minister and Liberal Democrat Nick Clegg takes over as Deputy Prime Minister.
May 13: Social activist Ela Bhatt receives the Niwano Peace Prize for 2010 for her contribution to the uplift of poor women in India.
May 15: Australian schoolgirl sailor Jessica Watson sails into history becoming the youngest person to circumnavigate the globe solo, non-stop and without help.
May 19: The French Cabinet approves a draft law to ban burqa from public spaces.
Anglo-Irish writer J. G. Farrell is posthumously awarded a special one-off “lost” Booker Prize for his novel Troubles published in 1970.
May 22: Arjun Vajpai (16), a schoolboy from New Delhi becomes the youngest Indian to successfully climb Mount Everest.
Apa Sherpa climbs peak for a record 20th time.
Jordan Romero (13), from Big Bear, California becomes the youngest person in the world to conquer Mt. Everest.
May 24: South Korea announces “far-reaching trade restrictions” against North Korea.
May 25: Argentina turns 200.
May 26: Shuttle Atlantis wraps up a 25-year career, including 32 missions covering 120 million miles and lands at NASA’s Kennedy Space Centre in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
May 27: President Pratibha Patil seeks China’s backing for a permanent UNSC seat for India during the summit meeting with President Hu Jintao.
Reducing Emissions for Deforestation and Degradation (REDD+), an international programme to protect forests, gets nod at a meeting in Oslo.
May 28: Prime Minister Madhav Kumar Nepal to step down.
Ready for a “new starting point”, top Chinese leaders tell President Pratibha Patil.
June 2: Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai escapes bid on life after a three-member Taliban suicide squad targets a peace meet in Kabul.
June 3: Sir Paul McCartney is awarded the Gershwin Prize, the highest American award for popular song.
June 4: Naoto Kan is elected Japanese Prime Minister.
June 6: The 160-metre Capital Gate tower in Abu Dhabi is recognised as the “furthest leaning manmade tower in the world by Guinness World Records.”
June 8: India and the Czech Republic sign three agreements. A Joint Commission on Economic Cooperation is set up.
June 9: American novelist Barbara Kingsolver’s The Lacuna wins the year’s £30,000 Orange Prize for fiction, Britain’s highly-regarded literary honour for women writers.
June 14: U.S. geologists discover $ 1 trillion worth of untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan.
June 16: British Petroleum agrees to pay $ 20 billion into an oil spill fund.
June 18: Pakistani-American terror suspect Faisal Shahzad is indicted by a grand jury in the U.S. District Court of Manhattan in the botched Times Square car bombing.
June 21: Pakistan-born American Faisal Shahzad pleads guilty to the Times Square car bomb bid 100 times.
June 24: Julia Gillard is sworn in Australia’s first woman Prime Minister.
June 26: The G8 summit in Canada renews its ban on the sale of enrichment and reprocessing technology to India.
June 27: Guineans cast ballots in the West African nation’s first democratic election since independence in 1958.
Kyrgyzstan voters approve a new Constitution in a referendum backing radical changes from a presidential to a parliamentary form of government.
India and Canada sign a civil nuclear cooperation agreement in Toronto.
June 28: India and Japan begin talks on civil nuclear cooperation in Tokyo.
June 29: China and Taiwan sign a historic pact – the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement in the southwest Chinese city of Chongqing.
June 30: Benigno Aquino III is sworn in the Philippines President.
July 1: Christian Wulff (51) becomes Germany’s youngest-ever President.
July 2: The United Nations General Assembly votes to create “U.N. Women” (UNW) for accelerating gender equality and women’s empowerment.
July 3: Rosa Otunbayeva is sworn in Kyrgyzstasn’s President in the capital Bishkek and becomes the first woman head of state in Central Asia.
July 4: Bronislaw Kamorowski wins Poland’s run off presidential elections.
July 5: Iceland authorities exhume the body of chess legend Bobby Fischer to carry out a paternity test to settle a dispute over his estate.
July 7: A Solar Impulse airplane takes off on a pioneering round-the clock flight attempt at Payerne airport in Switzerland.
July 8: Solar Impulse, a giant glider-like aircraft completes the first night flight propelled by solar energy.
July 10: The European spacecraft Rosetta performs a flyby of Lutetia, a massive potato-shaped asteroid.
July 12: The International Criminal Court at The Hague charges Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir with genocide in Darfur.
July 15: Argentina becomes the first country in Latin America to legalise same-sex marriage following a landmark Senate vote after a 15-hour debate.
July 16: Germany and China ink a series of deals reportedly worth several billion dollars.
July 17: Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard calls for general election set for August 21.
NASA’s wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer or WISE completes its first survey of the entire sky.
July 18: The world celebrates “Nelson Mandela International Day” as the anti-apartheid icon turns 92.
July 22: Kosovo’s declaration of independence from Serbia in February 2008 legal, says the International Court of Justice in a ground breaking ruling.
July 26: A Spanish man Oscar, who underwent the world’s first full face transplant on March 20 at a Barcelona hospital, appears on television.
July 30: India and the U.S. sign an agreement for reprocessing spent nuclear fuel in Washington.
Aug. 4: Kenyan voters overwhelmingly approve a new Constitution in a referendum.
Aug. 11: British researchers announce the emergence of a new class of antibiotic-resistant superbug – NDM-1 (New Delhi metallobetalactamase- 1)
Aug. 19: Last U.S. combat brigade leaves Iraq seven years after leading the invasion of the nation.
Aug. 23: Miss Mexico Jimena Navarrete is crowned Miss Universe 2010 at the 59th annual pageant held in Las Vegas.
Aug. 27: Kenya’s President Mwai Kibaki signs a new Constitution into law.
Aug. 28: China passes a first-of its- kind law to set up “mediation committees” to handle conflicts at the grassroots level.
Aug. 29: Russia’s Prime Minister Vladimir Putin opens oil pipeline to China.
The Sinabung volcano on the Indonesian island of Sumatra erupts for the first time in 400 years.
Aug. 30: The Sri Lankan Cabinet approves changes to the 1978 Constitution and lifts ban on a third term in office for President Mahinda Rajapaksa.
Aug. 31: The President Barack Obama announces the end of the U.S. combat mission in Iraq.
Sept. 3: India and South Korea sign landmark memoranda of understanding on defence, in Seoul.
Sept. 4: A 7 magnitude earthquake devastates New Zealand.
Sept. 6: Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame is sworn in for a second term at the capital Kigali.
Sept. 7: Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard wins a 17-day political marathon to lead a minority government in a hung Parliament.
Officials hoist a 70 foot steel column salvaged from the rubble after the September 11 2001 attack on the World Trade Center at ground zero in New York.
Sept. 8: Hyundai Motor unveils BlueOn, South Korea’s first full-speed electric car in the capital Seoul.
Sept. 11: Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere bags the Golden Lion Prize at the 67th Venice Film Festival. The Silver Lion for best director goes to Alex de la Iglesia for Balada triste de Trompeta (A Sad Trumpet Ballad).
Sept. 19: China suspends contacts with Japan.
Sept. 20: European leaders offer $ 1.3 billion on the first day of a three-day summit on the Millennium Development Goals at the United Nations, New York.
Fredrik Reinfeldt is re-elected Swedish Prime Minister.
Sir Mota Singh, the United Kingdom’s first Sikh and Asian Judge receives the Pride of India Award 2009 instituted by the India International Foundation, in London.
Sept. 23: The 2010 World Statesman Award is presented in absentia to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in New York.
Sept. 29: Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa approves a 30- month rigorous jail term for the former Army chief Sarath Fonseka.
Oct. 1: China’s lunar probe Chang’e–2 is successfully launched from the Xichang Satellite Launch Centre in Sichuan province.
Oct. 4: Dr. Robert G. Edwards, British scientist and IVF pioneer, who created Louise Brown the world’s first test tube baby in 1978 is awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize for Medicine.
Oct. 5: Andre Geim of the Netherlands and Russian–British national Konstantin Novoselov are jointly awarded the Nobel Physics Prize for their works on graphene, the world’s thinnest and strongest Nano material.
Oct. 6: Richard F. Heck of the U.S. and Ei-ichi Negishi and Akira Suzuki of Japan are chosen for the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for the development of “palladium–catalysed cross-coupling”.
Oct. 7: Mario Vargas Llosa, celebrated Peruvian–Spanish author is chosen for the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Oct. 8: Jailed Chinese political activist, Liu Xiaobo is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Oct. 11: Peter Diamond and Dale Mortensen of the U.S. and British- Cypriot Christopher Pissarides win the Economics Nobel for their work on explaining demand–supply gap in the labour market and elsewhere.
Oct. 12: India is elected a nonpermanent member of the United Nations Security Council.
British writer and journalist Howard Jacobson’s novel The Finkler Question bags the Man Booker Prize 2010.
Oct. 13: Thirty three miners trapped since August 5 in the collapsed San Jose mine in Chile’s Atacama desert are pulled out safely using the “Phoenix” rescue capsule.
Oct. 19: Author J.K. Rowling is presented the first Hans Christian Andersen Literature Prize.
Oct. 21: Three senior peers, including Labour’s Lord Swraj Paul, are suspended from the British House of Lords over their expenses claims.
Oct. 23: Legendary Everest climber Chhewang Nima Sherpa (43), is feared killed after being swept away by an avalanche while fixing ropes for a climbing group on the 7,129- metre Mt. Baruntse.
Oct. 26: China unveils the world’s fastest bullet train linking Shanghai and Hangzhou, which will run at 350 km per hour.
The Iraq High Tribunal sentences to death former Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz.
At least 30 people are killed after Indonesia’s most volatile volcano Mount Merapi erupts.
Oct. 27: France’s Parliament grants final approval to a bill raising the retirement age from 60 to 62.
India signs the convention on Supplementary Compensation for Nuclear Damage at the IAEA headquarters in Vienna.
Oct. 30: Alexandria Mills from the U.S. is crowned Miss World 2010 at a glittering ceremony in Sanya, China.
Nov. 1: Dilma Rousseff becomes Brazil’s first-ever woman President.
Nov. 2: Britain and France sign an unprecedented 50-year nuclear deal.
The Republican Party sweeps to power in the election to the 112th United States Congress. Democrats’ strength in Senate slashed. Nimrata Nikki Randhawa Haley is elected South Carolina Governor.
British Labour peer Swraj Paul resigns as Deputy Speaker of the House of Lords.
Nov. 3: Indonesia’s Mount Merapi erupts with its biggest blast yet shooting searing ash kilometres into the air. One hundred and ninety one people are killed as Indonesia’s Mount Merapi unleashes its most powerful eruption in a century.
Indian-American Kamala Harris wins election for Attorney-General of California.
Nov. 9: Rolls-Royce signs a record $1.2-billion deal to sell jet engines to China Eastern Airlines.
Nov. 12: G20 summit in Seoul agrees to curb “persistently large imbalances” in saving and spending.
The 16th Asian Games gets off to a colourful start in Guangzhou, China.
Nov. 13: Aung Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s celebrated pro-democracy leader is freed from house arrest in Yangon.
Nov. 19: Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa is sworn in for a second term in Colombo.
Nov. 24: The world’s first tiger summit wraps up in Russia, with leaders giving nod to a Global Tiger Recovery Programme.
Nov. 27: The fuelling of Iran’s first nuclear plant in Bushehr is completed.
The 15-day 16th Asian Games in Guangzhou, China concludes.
Nov. 29: The 10-day 16th United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change opens in Cancun, Mexico.
Dec. 4: India’s Nicole Faria is crowned Miss Earth Talent 2010 in Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam.
Dec. 7: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is arrested by the British police following surrender at a Central London police station.
Dec. 8: Space X, a private U.S. firm conducts a perfect launch into orbit and back of the Dragon Capsule.
Dec. 10: Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in absentia at an Oslo ceremony.
Dec. 12: Kosovo votes in its first elections since declaring independence from Serbia in 2008.
Dec. 15: The Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is named Time magazine’s 2010 Person of the Year.
The U.N. Security Council eases sanctions on Iraq. Curtains on oil for-food programme.
Dec. 16: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is freed.
Dec. 17: Venezuelan lawmakers vote to let President Hugo Chavez bypass Parliament and rule by decree for 18 months.
Dec. 18: The U.S. Senate votes to repeal the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell law that will allow the military to permit gays to serve openly.
Dec. 19: Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko wins a fourth straight term in office.
Dec. 21: Iraq’s Parliament confirms Nouri al-Maliki as Prime Minister for a second term.
Dec. 22: The U.S. Senate passes the New START treaty with Russia.
Australia apologises and makes a payout to Indian doctor Mohamed Haneef for wrongly detaining and charging him with involvement in a terrorism plot in Britain in 2007.
Dec. 23: A commemorative coin marking the engagement of Britain’s Prince William and Kate Middleton is released in London.
Dec. 24: The Russian Parliament gives preliminary approval for New START treaty.
Dec. 25: An earthquake causes a minor tsunami in the South Pacific.
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