Timeline 2010-2019: Europe

2010 *WikiLeaks published a series of leaks provided by Chelsea Manning.  Sweden issued an international arrest warrant for Assange, after questioning him months earlier about allegations of sexual assault. Assange was granted asylum (and citizenship) in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. He was expelled in 2019 and has been in prison awaiting extradition to the US.

The European sovereign-debt crisis led to Greece declaring bankruptcy. Austerity policies particularly affected Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain. 

Viktor Mihály Orbán, leader of the national conservative Fidesz party, elected prime minister of Hungary. 

*Eruptions of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland caused unprecedented disruption to international air travel, rendering transatlantic flight impossible and closing airways across much of Europe. The event was the largest air traffic shut-down since World War II.

*Scientific advances: Solar power is plunging in cost; Augmented Reality is entering the mainstream; the first demonstration of solar-sail technology, Scientists trap antimatter, Scientific advances: Speech-to-speech translation is common in mobile phones; robotic manipulation of non-rigid objects

2011- *European countries and the IMF forced Greece to accept the largest bailout package in recent history. In return, Greece was forced to drastically cut back its spending and privatized government assets, resulting in large protests and mass emigration. 

*Terrorist attacks in and near Oslo by Anders Behring Breivik killed 77 people, mostly children.

2012 - London hosts the Olympic Games 

2013 - Pope Francis became the first non-European Pope since Syrian Gregory III in the 8th century.

The Gaia mission is launched, designed to map over a billion – approximatey 1% of all stars within our Milky Way galaxy.

A meteor explodes over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk

2014 *Pope Francis elected, the first Jesuit pope, the first from the Americas, the first from the Southern Hemisphere, and the first pope from outside Europe since the 8th century Syrian Gregory III. His second encyclical Laudato si' (Praise Be to You) critiques consumerism and irresponsible development, laments environmental degradation and global warming, and calls all people of the world to take "swift and unified global action." Humbel and jovial, his detractors label him a communist and pagan.

# Pope recalling St Francis of Assisi greets Amazon shaman in Vatican in 2019.

*NATO ends combat operations in Afghanistan. 

*Winter Olympics in Sochi Russia, the most expensive in history ($51 billion), becomes circus of western gay activists protesting lack of visible gay emblems, amid Russian doping charges resulting in lost medals and suspension of the Russian Olympic Committee.

*Russian Federation annexes Crimea, causing widespread condemnation, a temporary suspension of Russia from the G8, and limited sanctions by the US.

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*The Gaia mission is launched.

*The US-backed coup against Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, led to an ultra-right nationalist government taking power, prompting native Russians in Donetsk and Lughansk to declare breakaway states. Crimeans held a referendum on annexation with Russia which passed overwhelmingly.

Canada marks its first ISIS volunteer killed in action.

The new World Trade Center is completed.

2015 -  The Eurasian Union is formed. 

Nine Charlie Hebdo employees journalists murder in Paris, including editor Stephane Charbonnier, and three Al Jazeera journalists held in prison in Cairo, though you can guess who got the media’s attention. 

Queen Elizabeth II is the longest reigning monarch in British history 

Scientific advances: The first solar aircraft to circumnavigate the globe.

2016 - Much of the western world began to experience a political backlash against globalization, especially immigration policy and free-trade agreements. This trend grew more evident after the Brexit vote in Britain.

Three-person babies was introduced in the UK. The controversial technique uses DNA from parents and combines it with healthy mitochondria from a female donor. 

Scientific advances: The Gotthard Base Tunnel is a railway tunnel through the Alps in Switzerland. It opened on 1 June 2016, and full service began on 11 December 2016. With a route length of 57.09 km, it is the world's longest railway and deepest traffic tunnel and the first flat, low-level route through the Alps.

The Juno probe arrived at Jupiter, 5 years after leaving Earth in 2011. Its goals: to determine precisely how much water is in Jupiter's atmosphere, to help confirm which planet formation theory is correct, and to study the workings of its enormous magnetic field. It found that Jupiter’s jet streams are like nothing on Earth, and help to give the planet it’s distinctive stripes. It has sent back images of a tangled magnetic field  under the surface, driven by a powerful dynamo, a host of dancing cyclones and zonal winds resulting from its magnetic field.

2017 -  Catalonia declares independence from Spain, but it is not recognised by any sovereign nation, while Madrid imposes direct rule.

The right-wing Alternative for Germany entered parliament for the first time.

2018 - The mass Yellow Vests movement across France calls for President Macron’s resignation, still alive (barely) a year later.

The populist anti-establishment Five Star Movement takes power in coalition with the right-wing National League.

Vladimir Putin won reelection for his second consecutive (fourth overall) term in office with 77% of the vote.

A missile defence shield is deployed in Europe. 

Russia hosts the FIFA World Cup.

Europe's Galileo satellite navigation system is fully operational 

The CHEOPS telescope is deployed to study exoplanets

Automated freight transport.  

LEDs dominate the lighting industry. 

The Stop 5G Space Appeal was launched in 2018 to resist the blanket implementation of 5G wireless. Electromagnetic radiation (EMR) from banks of thousands of tiny antennas makes people electro-hypersensitive. There are no legal limits on exposure to EMR. 

The final collapse of the Larsen B ice shelf in Antarctica.

https://www.futuretimeline.net/21stcentury/2010-2019.htm

2019 - Assange forcibly removed from Ecuadorian embassy and imprisoned in London.

Scientific advances: The ExoMars rover, a joint mission of the European Space Agency and the Russian space agency Roscosmo, touches down on Mars; the first manned outpost beyond the Moon begins assembly; the first mission to a gas giant using solar sail propulsion

Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, a Boeing 737 MAX 8 bound for Nairobi, crashes shortly after takeoff from Addis Ababa killing all 157 people on board.

Timeline 2010-2019: Africa and Asia

2010 - The deceleration in Africa’s growth since 2010 has been concentrated in two groups of economies – oil exporters and northern countries still rebuilding after the political convulsions of the Arab Spring. The economies of Egypt, Libya and Tunisia did not grow at all between 2010 and 2015, in stark contrast to average annual growth among the three economies of 4.8% in the previous decade. The rate of growth among oil exporters such as Algeria, Angola, Nigeria and Sudan fell sharply to 4% from 7.1%. 

East Africa is already a global leader in mobile phone use.

Africa is today home to 700 large – and increasingly pan-African – companies earning revenues of greater than $500 million.

About one-fifth of Africa’s GDP comes from a set of countries the World Economic Forum calls growth stars, with high rates of growth and a high score on stability. These countries, among them Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Kenya, Morocco and Rwanda, are not dependent on resources for growth, are actively reforming their economies, and are increasing competitiveness. 

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/05/what-s-the-future-of-economic-growth-in-africa/

Japan's Social Democratic Party leader Yukio Hatoyama elected in 2009 but resigns in 2010 over failure to close US military base on Okinawa. 

Benigno "Noynoy" Aquino, son of ex-president Corazon Aquino, is elected president of Philippines. The government signs a framework peace plan with the Muslim rebel Moro Islamic Liberation Front, ending a 40-year conflict that has cost an estimated 120,000 lives. Rodrigo Duterte became president in 2016, a populist and a nationalist, a vocal supporter of the extrajudicial killing of drug users and other criminals.

2011 - Japan is overtaken by China as world's second-largest economy. 

Kim Jong-Il dies; his son Kim Jong-Un takes power.

China's Three Gorges Dam is fully operational. China's Belt Road Initiative, reviving the Silk Road, captures the world's imagination---except for the US and most of western Europe. China began promoting its high tech 5G cell phone technology, seen as a security threat by the US.

Vietnam begins joint operation with the United States to clean up contamination from the toxic Agent Orange defoliant widely used by the US military during the Vietnam war.

China and Vietnam sign an agreement to manage the South China Sea dispute. It includes a hotline to deal with emergencies and a provision for twice-yearly bilateral meetings.

South Sudan becomes an independent nation Global population reaches 7bn 

A magnitude 9.0 earthquake caused a tsunami that severely damaged the Fukushima Daiichi and Fukushima Daini nuclear power plants. 

Global population reaches 7bn

2012 -  Japan recalls its ambassador to Seoul in protest at a visit to the Liancourt Rocks by South Korean President Lee Myung-bak. Both countries claim the islets, which Japan calls Takeshima and South Korea calls Dokdo.

China protests over Japanese ownership of a group of islands in the East China Sea administered by Japan as the Senkaku Islands and claimed by China as the Diaoyu Islands. Taiwan also claims the islands.

Japan is to expand its military base in Djibouti, a move observers say may counterbalance China's growing international influence. 

Japan's government approves a landmark change in security policy, paving the way for its military to fight overseas.

The Abraj Al-Bait Towers are completed in Mecca 

Tuaregs in Northern Mali overthrew Malian president Amadou Toumani Touré and declared it to be the independent state of Azawad. French troops restored Toure and Canadian troops joined the ‘peacekeeping mission’ in 2019. 

2013 - An eight-story factory building collapsed in the outskirts of Dhaka, Bangladesh, killing 1,129 people and injuring over 2,000 more, becoming the deadliest structural failure in history.

China’s first unmanned Moon landing.

The leader of the People's Republic of China, Xi Jinping, originally announced the Belt Road Initiative during official visits to Indonesia and Kazakhstan in 2013.

China's first unmanned Moon landing 

2014 - The Bharatiya Janata Party is elected in India with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a strong Hindu nationalist. 

*India's first Mars mission.

*Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared on 8 March 2014 after deviating westwards from its planned flight path to Beijing, the deadliest incident involving a Boeing 777 and the deadliest in Malaysia Airlines' history, until it was surpassed in both regards by Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, which was shot down while flying over eastern Ukraine four months later. The combined loss caused significant financial problems for Malaysia Airlines, which was renationalised by the Malaysian government in December 2014. Both crashes were unsolved, and resulted in conspiracy theories. The search for the missing airplane became the most costly in aviation history,. Several pieces of marine debris confirmed to be from the aircraft washed ashore in the western Indian Ocean during 2015 and 2016. 

As of February 2019, the Boeing 777 has been involved in 28 aviation accidents and incidents, including seven hull-losses (five in-flight and two in ground incidents) resulting in 541 fatalities along with three hijackings. A series of crashes of the Boeing 737 Max in 2018-9 led to its withdrawal for modification.

Philippines' Supreme Court approves a birth control law, which requires government health centres to distribute free contraceptives. 

2015 - In Myanmar, the first openly contested electionssince 1990 gave the National League for Democracy an absolute majority and in 2016 Htin Kyaw was elected as the first non-military president since the military coup of 1962, and Aung San Suu Kyi assumed the newly created role of State Counsellor, a role akin to a Prime Minister. 

Myanmar performs badly in the global Environmental Performance Index, among the worst in the South Asian region, only ahead of Bangladesh and Afghanistan, in terms of air quality, health impacts of environmental issues and biodiversity and habitat. Myanmar performs best in environmental impacts of fisheries, but with declining fish stocks. It also scores very good in environmental effects of the agricultural industry because of an excellent management of the nitrogen cycle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrogen_cycle

A heatwave in Southern India resulted in over 2,500 deaths. A related heatwave hit in Pakistan, killed over 2,000 people in Karachi alone. 

2016 -  The world's largest single-aperture telescope is completed in China.

China completes the largest environmental cleanup in its history.

The so-called Islamic State (IS) group acknowledges its operations in the Philippines in an official video, having recognised Isnilon Hapilon, an Abu Sayyaf leader, as "emir" there.

Scientific advances: India’s first manned space flight. India launches its second unmanned lunar probe. The International Lunar Observatory begins operations. 

2017 - Zimbabwe President Mugabe overthrown.

2018 *Mahathir bin Mohamad, appointed prime minister in 1981, retired in 2003, returned to the office in 2018. He is an outspoken critic of Israel and the West: there was no systematic campaign of terror outside Europe until the Europeans and the Jews created a Jewish state out of Palestinian land.  In a 2012 wrote that "Jews rule this world by proxy. and stated: "I am glad to be labeled antisemitic [...] How can I be otherwise, when the Jews who so often talk of the horrors they suffered during the Holocaust show the same Nazi cruelty and hard-heartedness towards not just their enemies but even towards their allies should any try to stop the senseless killing of their Palestinian enemies." Mahathir established the Kuala Lumpur Initiative to Criminalise War Forum in an effort to end war globally, as well as the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission to investigate the activities of the United States, Israel and its allies in Iraq, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories. He has also suggested that the September 11 attacks of 2001 might have been staged by the United States government.

*Donald Trump meets with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Singapore.

*The first soft landing on the far side of the Moon, by Chang'e 4 probe, named after the Chinese Moon goddess. Chang'e 4 landed in the Von Kármán crater, in the South Pole-Aitken Basin.

*The Emperor of Japan abdicates in favour of his son Crown Prince Naruhito.

*New Boeing 737 Max 8 plane operated by Indonesia's Lion Air crashes into the Java Sea, killing all 189 people on board. A similar crash in Ethiopia the following March leads to the grounding of the 737 Max 8 around the world pending investigations.

*The last of Nigeria’s rainforest felled.

2019 *Sudanese President Bashar overthrown

*Algerian President Bouteflika  overthrown

*India’s relations with Pakistan worsened, as the BJP returned with a larger majority in 2019. Following the suicide attack that killed more than 40 Indian soldiers in February by a young Kashmiri, reflecting the rise in youth militancy, India took administrative control of Kashmir, revoking its special status of limited autonomy. 

2000-2010 IN A NUTSHELL

The US continued its exploration of space, despite the continued domestic decay, violence, invasions, its path of imperialist world domination gone rampant, reinforced by corporate destruction of the world, caught in a mania of economic 'growth', where statistics no longer have any meaning. 'Growth' includes advertising, services, work and investment in undoing the toxic effects of industry, which will soon outpace production of 'goods'. By 2017?, the police security state arrived, making every person liable to spying in all areas of life.

Following the zig-zag of politics in Latin America is a textbook on US political intrigue, culminating in coups where necessary. The use of bribery and corruption charges is a convenient way to undermine the insurgent left. Accusations are made in pro-US media and, where there is no people’s voice, they stick whether legitimate or not. A notorious drug trafficer like Honduras’s Hernandez stay in power regardless of the constitution, with US support, even as US Congress exposes his flagrant corruption. 

The past decade has made ‘singularity’ almost a household word, used to refer to the point when technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unfathomable changes to human civilization. But this happened about 250 years ago, when capitalism took over from small scale, unregulated trade, before mass production, which came to mean reproduction of the means of production by machines themselves. 

Unregulated captialism acts as a conscious entity, as enshrined in US and other law of the corporation as a person. Making a computer a person follows logically from this great, initial singularity of modern times. The enshrining of neoliberalism around the world, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, has given full reign to this alien unhuman logic, bringing the world suddenly to an awareness of the possible end of civilization and the Earth itself as a habitable home.

This is the message of the decade.