Events that dominated headlines in 2008:

JANUARY

  • The French bank Societe Generale admits that a single securities trader lost it almost five billion euros (seven billion dollars) in unauthorised trades.

    • FEBRUARY

  • With support from many but not all western countries, Kosovo formally declares independence from Serbia. In Belgrade, rioters set fire to the US embassy.

    • MARCH

  • Dmitry Medvedev is elected president of Russia, succeeding Vladimir Putin, who is to stay on as his prime minister.
  • Violence erupts in Lhasa, capital of the Chinese autonomous region of Tibet.

    • APRIL

  • The opposition in Zimbabwe claims it has won elections, but president Robert Mugabe refuses to concede.
  • The passage of the Olympic flame through London and then Paris is marred by protests, causing anger in China.
  • The conservative Silvio Berlusconi wins a third term as prime minister of Italy.
  • Police in Austria arrest Josef Fritzl, who has kept his daughter locked up in a specially designed cellar for 24 years, fathering seven children by her.

    • MAY

  • Tens of thousands of people die and millions are made homeless when a cyclone devastates the secretive Asian state of Myanmar.
  • A massive earthquake hits the southwestern Chinese province of Sichuan, killing tens of thousands and causing massive destruction.
  • Rising food prices cause tension in many developing countries.

    • JUNE

  • Around 1000 inmates of an Afghan prison escape when Taliban guerrillas mount an attack.
  • Voters in Ireland reject the European Union's Lisbon Treaty, the successor to the doomed EU Constitution.
  • Veteran Zimbabwean leader Robert Mugabe claims victory in presidential elections despite widespread accusations of fraud.

    • JULY

  • The French-Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt is freed after being held hostage for six years by FARC guerrillas.
  • Iran once again refuses to freeze its uranium enrichment work, despite protest by countries which believe it is developing an nuclear bomb.
  • US stock markets plunge after two giant mortgage companies are revealed to be in deep financial trouble.
  • Serbian police capture the fugitive Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic, who is extradited to a UN war crimes tribunal in the Netherlands.
  • In one of several such incidents, a US missile fired from Afghanistan kills six people in a tribal zone of Pakistan.

    • AUGUST

  • Some 150 Hindu worshippers die in a stampede at a temple in northern India.
  • The Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who denounced the Soviet Gulag system of labour camps, dies aged 89.
  • Government forces in Georgia mount an assault on the breakaway region of South Ossetia, prompting a massive response from the military in neighbouring Russia.
  • The Summer Olympic Games in Beijing go off without incident.
  • Threatened with impeachment, Pervez Musharraf resigns as president of Pakistan.
  • Afghan officials say 76 civilians, many of them women and children, died when US forces attacked a village in the west of the country.
  • North Korea reverses a pledge to dismantle its nuclear installations.
  • The Caribbean hurricane season kills hundreds of people in several countries, notably Jamaica, the Dominican Republic and Haiti.

    • SEPTEMBER

  • The Pakistani parliament elects Asif Ali Zardari, the widower of the slain politician Benazir Bhutto, as the country's new president.
  • The giant US bank Lehman Brothers goes bankrupt after the government refuses to save it.
  • Chinese officials say that thousands of babies are ill after consuming tainted milk formula.
  • A truck bomb kills at least 60 people at a hotel in the Pakistani capital Islamabad.
  • US politicians agree on a $700-billion rescue plan for their economy.

    • OCTOBER

  • Stock markets crash around the world, evoking comparisons with the collapse of 1929.
  • The Austrian far right politician Joerg Haider dies in a high-speed car crash.
  • New fighting flares up in the mineral-rich east of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

    • NOVEMBER

  • US voters hand a convincing victory to the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama, who defeats the Republican John McCain and will be the first ever African-American president.
  • Pirates operating off the coast of lawless Somalia grab their biggest catch to date: a laden Saudi Arabian supertanker.
  • Heavily armed men landing by sea wreak havoc in the Indian city of Mumbai. At least 163 people die in three days of violence.
  • The Iraqi parliament approves a contentious agreement with the US, under which foreign forces will leave the country by 2011.

    • DECEMBER

  • A Thai court dissolves the country's ruling party, handing a victory to anti-corruption activists who have occupied the main Bangkok airport.
  • US President-elect Barack Obama announces that his former Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, will be his secretary of state.

    • AFP