January
13 – Harold Shipman, the former British doctor who is believed to have killed more than 200 people, is found dead in his prison cell one day prior to his 58th birthday. He is found hanging by a bed sheet strung around the bars of his cell at Wakefield Prison at 0620 GMT. Prison staff try to revive him, but he is pronounced dead at 0810 GMT.
February
01 – Janet Jackson‘s right breast and nipple (adorned with a nipple shield) are exposed by Justin Timberlake to the viewing public during a live broadcast of the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show on the CBS television network. The incident is henceforth referred to as a “wardrobe malfunction”
04 – Mark Zuckerberg launches Facebook from his Harvard dorm room.
05 – A group of Chinese cockle pickers is caught by the tides at night in Morecambe Bay, Lancashire, drowning 23 people. 21 bodies are recovered.
11 – Comcast launches an unexpected $54 billion hostile takeover bid for The Walt Disney Company.
15 – Dale Earnhardt Jr. wins the Daytona 500 exactly three years after his father’s tragic death at the same track.
March
11 – Coordinated Al-Qaeda train bombings in Madrid kill 193 people and injure around 2,000. Near simultaneous blasts hit Atocha station in the centre of the Spanish capital and two smaller stations, Santa Eugenia and El Pozo.
21 – HBO airs the series finale of Sex and the City, closing out a defining era of late-90s and early-2000s television fashion and feminist discourse.
28 – British actor Sir Peter Ustinov dies in Switzerland, aged 82.
30 – English-born American journalist Alistair Cooke dies of lung cancer at his home in New York City, aged 95, only four weeks after his last broadcast of Letter from America.
April
01 – Google introduces Gmail to the public with a revolutionary 1GB of free storage, completely disrupting existing email services like Yahoo and Hotmail.
13 – British television presenter Caron Keating dies at her mother’s house in Sevenoaks, Kent, aged 41. She had been diagnosed with breast cancer in 1997.
26 – The production of the final Oldsmobile car rolls off the assembly line, ending the 107-year history of America’s oldest active automotive brand.
28 – A Landmark office building at 30 St Mary Axe in the City of London (commonly called “The Gherkin”) opens.
May
06 – NBC airs the series finale of Friends, drawing over 52 million viewers and marking the symbolic end of the classic network sitcom era.
23 – The collapse of part of Terminal 2E at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle Airport kills four people, sparking global aviation design and safety audits.
June
05 – Former US President Ronald Reagan dies of pneumonia complicated by Alzheimer’s Disease at his home in Los Angeles. He is 93.
10 – A rebranding of the English Football League sees Division One become the Football League Championship, Division Two become League One, and Division Three become League Two.
11 – Ronald Reagan‘s funeral is held at Washington National Cathedral.
12 – A 1.3 kilogram chondrite-type meteorite strikes a house in Ellerslie, New Zealand, causing serious damage but no injuries.
22 – Convicted Belgian paedophile and child killer Marc Dutroux is sentenced to life in prison for the kidnap, rape and murder of six young girls in the mid-1990s. His ex-wife, Michelle Martin, is sentenced to 30 years in prison for kidnapping and rape. Co-accused Michel Lelievre received 25 years for kidnapping and drug-dealing. Michel Nihoul is jailed for five years for drug-dealing and fraud.
23 – Michael Moore’s highly political documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 opens in cinemas, becoming the highest-grossing documentary of all time amid intense political polarisation.
24 – Capital punishment is declared unconstitutional in New York.
28 – The United States hands power back to the Iraqi people at a low-key ceremony in Baghdad.
July
02 – The British Premier Inn chain is formed by the merger of the Travel Inn and Premier Lodge brands.
16 – American business magnate and TV personality Martha Stewart is sentenced to five months in prison plus five months in home confinement for lying to federal investigators.
31 – Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel close their second reunion tour with a free concert in front of the Colosseum in Rome. An estimated 600,000 fans attend.
August
12 – Lee Hsien Loong succeeds Goh Chok Tong as Prime Minister of Singapore.
12 – New Jersey Governor James McGreevey announces publicly that he is gay.
22 – The Scream (1910 painted version) and Madonna, two paintings by Edvard Munch, are stolen at gunpoint from the Munch Museum in Oslo, Norway.
24 – 89 passengers die after two airliners explode after flying out of Domodedovo International Airport near Moscow. The explosions are caused by suicide bombers from the Russian Republic of Chechnya.
25 – Cuba beats Australia 6-2 to win the baseball gold medal at the Athens Olympics. Japan takes bronze. The US does not qualify.
27 – In a huge upset in the men’s basketball semifinal at the Athens Olympics, Argentina beats a star-studded but unsettled US team 89-81. They go on to take the gold medal, and the US takes bronze.
September
01 – 03 – Chechen terrorists hold students, parents and teachers hostage in Beslan school, in North Ossetia–Alania (Russia). 334 people die during the three days.
07 – Hurricane Ivan, a Category 5 hurricane, hits Grenada, killing 39 people and damaging 90% of its buildings.
09 – A bomb explodes outside the Australian embassy in Jakarta, killing 10 people.
13 – Oprah Winfrey kicks off the 19th season of her talk show by gifting a brand-new car to all 276 audience members, in an iconic television moment.
17 – Tamil is declared the first classical language of India.
21 – Green Day releases American Idiot, an aggressive punk-rock opera that critiques post-9/11 American politics and redefines the band’s career.
23 – At least 1,070 people in Haiti are reported killed by floods caused by Hurricane Jeanne.
October
03 – ABC debuts Desperate Housewives, combining suburban satire with primetime soap opera tropes to score massive television ratings.
07 – British hostage Ken Bigley of Liverpool is beheaded by Islamic militants in Iraq.
07 – King Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia abdicates.
08 – Martha Stewart begins a five-month incarceration at Federal Prison Camp, Alderson, for insider trading and obstruction of justice.
16 – Seventeen-year-old Lionel Messi makes his league debut for FC Barcelona in a 1-0 win against cross-town rivals Espanyol at the Estadi Olímpic Lluís Companys, Barcelona.
19 – Myanmar prime minister Khin Nyunt is ousted and placed under house arrest by the SPDC on charges of corruption.
24 – Manchester United beats Arsenal 2-0 at Old Trafford, ending Arsenal’s Premier League record 49-game unbeaten streak.
25 – Cuba’s President Fidel Castro announces that transactions using the American Dollar will be banned by November 8.
27 – Boston Red Sox beat St. Louis, 3-0 in Game 4 at Busch Stadium to sweep the Cardinals and win their first Baseball World Series title since 1918, officially breaking the famous 86-year-old “Curse of the Bambino”.
29 – Princess Alice, Duchess of Gloucester, dies at Kensington Palace aged 102, making her the oldest British royal in history.
29 – Arabic news network Al Jazeera broadcasts an excerpt from a video of Osama bin Laden in which the terrorist leader first admits direct responsibility for the September 11 2001 attacks.
29 – In Rome, 25 European heads of state sign a treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe.
November
02 – George W Bush wins a second term as president of the United States, beating his Democratic rival, John Kerry, by a comfortable margin.
04 – 12 French soldiers, three UN personnel and hundreds of civilians die during the Côte d’Ivoire civil war.
06 – Seven people are killed when a train is derailed by a car deliberately left on a level crossing at Ufton Nervet in Berkshire, England.
06 – The Russian-owned, Liberian-flagged tanker Tropical Brilliance gets stuck in the Suez Canal for three days, blocking all traffic.
09 – Mozilla launches Firefox 1.0, initiating the first major challenge to Microsoft Internet Explorer’s absolute dominance in the “browser wars”.
11 – Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat dies in a hospital in Paris, France, after suffering multiple organ failure. He is 75.
16 – FOX premieres medical drama House, introducing an iconic, cynical anti-hero to the network television landscape.
18 – Massachusetts becomes the first American state to legalise same-sex marriage.
19 – The “Malice at the Palace” brawl breaks out between players and fans during an NBA game between the Indiana Pacers and Detroit Pistons, rewriting sports security rules.
21 – Nintendo launches the Nintendo DS handheld console, a dual-screen system that revolutionises portable gaming.
22 – The Orange Revolution begins in Ukraine, resulting from the presidential elections.
23 – Blizzard Entertainment releases “World of Warcraft”, a multiplayer online role-playing video game which becomes the world’s most subscribed game.
December
08 – The Union of South American Nations is formed via the Cuzco Declaration.
08 – Legendary metal guitarist “Dimebag” Darrell Abbott is tragically killed onstage during a performance in Ohio, when a deranged fan rushes onstage and shoots him multiple times with a 9mm semi-automatic pistol. Three other men are also killed and three others wounded, before the shooter, 25-year-old Nathan Gale, is shot in the head and killed by police.
13 – Former Chilean dictator, General Augusto Pinochet, is put under house arrest after being sued under accusations of nine kidnapping actions and manslaughter. The house arrest is lifted the same day on appeal.
15 – British Home Secretary David Blunkett resigns amid accusations that he used his position to fast-track a visa application for his ex-lover’s nanny. In his resignation statement, Mr Blunkett insists he has done nothing wrong, but says questions about his honesty have damaged the government.
16 – NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft is the first to cross the termination shock, where solar and interstellar winds merge.
20 – A gang of thieves steals £26.5 million from Northern Bank’s Donegall Square West headquarters in Belfast, one of the largest bank robberies in British history. Nobody is ever found directly responsible for the crime.
26 – A 9.3 magnitude earthquake creates a tsunami that devastates Sri Lanka, India, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, the Maldives, and other coastal regions of the Indian Ocean, killing about 230,000 people.
30 – A fire in the República Cromagnon nightclub in Buenos Aires, Argentina kills 194.
31 – The official opening of Taipei 101, then the tallest skyscraper in the world, at a height of 509 metres (1,670 feet).
Also this year . . .
- The XXVIII Summer Olympics are held in Athens, Greece.
- Jennifer Hawkins (Australia) is crowned Miss Universe.
- NATO and the European Union incorporate most of the former Eastern Bloc.
- ‘Makybe Diva’ wins the Melbourne Cup for the second year in a row.