Pakistan, border region with Afghanistan. A drone strike kills Sheikh Fateh Al Misri, an Al Qaeda operative believed to have orchestrated several attacks in Pakistan that left hundreds dead. The drone strike strategy has seen an increase in operations in September.

The merger between Continental and United Airlines is approved. The new airline, renamed United, will be the world’s largest, serving 370 destinations in 59 countries, with revenues of $29 billion, a fleet of approximately 700 aircraft, and 87,000 employees.

The merger between Continental and United Airlines is approved. The new airline, renamed United, will be the world’s largest, serving 370 destinations in 59 countries, with revenues of $29 billion, a fleet of approximately 700 aircraft, and 87,000 employees.

Worldwide, disaster deaths are 72,000 per year (a 10-year average). In the 1930s, they were 971,000 per year.

Iraq. Twenty attacks targeting Iraqi forces are unleashed in 13 cities, resulting in 48 deaths. Al Qaeda claims responsibility.

Somalia. Al-Qaeda-linked militias attack the government-controlled area in Mogadishu, killing four members of parliament and 33 others.

A shaft collapses in the San José mine, 800 kilometers from Santiago, Chile. Officials are still missing from the whereabouts of 33 miners. Contact is later established, and construction of a tunnel to reach them begins. Only in mid-October will they all be freed, in an incident that has kept the world on tenterhooks.

Cambodia. Duch, a Khmer Rouge leader who led the S-21 camp where 14,000 prisoners died, was found guilty of crimes against humanity, murder, and torture and sentenced to 35 years in prison.

Vienna. Ten Russian spies captured in the United States are exchanged for four double agents captured in Russia. This is the largest spy swap between the United States and Russia since the end of the Cold War. One of the four is Sergei Skripal, whose assassination attempt with a nerve agent will be carried out in England in 2018, sparking a diplomatic crisis between the UK and Russia.

Tokyo, newly elected center-left Prime Minister Hatoyama (Democratic Party) tearfully resigns. He leaves office following controversy over the continued existence of the U.S. military base in Okinawa. He is the fourth prime minister to resign in less than four years. He is replaced by former Finance Minister Naoto Kan.

German President Horst Köhler resigns after a gaffe regarding the mission in Afghanistan: he was criticized by political parties for saying that the choice was motivated by economic reasons.

Several Israeli army helicopters attempt to seize control of a fleet of peace activist ships attempting to break the blockade of Gaza and deliver food and medical supplies. The operation, carried out in international waters, goes smoothly on all vessels except the Turkish one, where the peace activists respond with clubs and bladed weapons. Soldiers open fire, resulting in at least nine deaths and numerous injuries. This event will lead to Israel’s international isolation.

Mustafa Abu Al Yazid, the operational and financial leader of what remains of the old Al Qaeda, is killed in a CIA drone strike in the Pakistani tribal area. The jihadist movement itself announces his disappearance.

The USAF launches a small, 9-meter-long, fully automatic, unmanned shuttle vehicle aboard an Atlas V rocket. It is a next-generation spy shuttle (code X-37B/OTV-1), far more advanced than NASA’s shuttle. Its fifth flight will remain in orbit for 780 consecutive days. Several units will be built.

A British Petroleum (BPE) oil platform (now called Beyond Petroleum) catches fire and then sinks in the Gulf of Mexico. The oil that will continue to leak from the field for weeks will cause a massive environmental disaster. Incredibly, scientific analyses conducted six months later at various sites in the Gulf of Mexico reveal no significant concentrations of pollutants.

Akatsuki, Japan’s mission to Venus. It was accompanied by Ikaros, the first solar sail, still in solar orbit today, and Shin’en, an interplanetary probe that lost contact shortly after separating from the mother probe. Akatsuki, at the crucial moment of entering Venusian orbit, went into safe mode, and missed the opportunity. But the Japanese team did not lose heart: they devised a rescue plan and, on December 7, 2015, fired its thrusters. Against all odds, it managed to enter Venusian orbit, subsequently taking fantastic photographs.

team of experts led by Danish scientists Eske Willerslev and Morten Rasmussen is analyzing the ancient remains of an ancestor of ours who lived 4,000 years ago on the west coast of Greenland, on the island of Qeqertasussuk. The remains were found in 1986, along with a lock of hair preserved in the ice, and would be rediscovered in 1986. Inuk died at a young age. The DNA of his hair was mapped, thus sequencing 80 percent of his genome. It was discovered that he belonged to the Saqqaq culture, descendants of populations who migrated from Siberia over 5,000 years ago and the first to inhabit Greenland. He had dark skin, brown eyes and hair, and was prone to baldness. He ate seabirds and seal meat, had blood type A+, and both his physique and metabolism were adapted to life in the Arctic climate, despite the fact that only a few generations had passed since his ancestors arrived in those lands. As of 2010, when the study was conducted, he was only the ninth human to have his entire genome sequenced. Ancient genomes are difficult to decipher. Even when enough tissue is preserved, it is often riddled with fungal and bacterial DNA. The very act of extracting tissue often damages it or adds human DNA to the list of contaminants.

Airline accident death rate: 0 – 0.2 per million passengers per year, since 2010 (0.00002%/year). It was 6 in 1972 (0.0006%/year).

The percentage of GDP spent on social welfare is still growing steadily. It is around 30% for countries like France and Italy, and around 20% for Australia, Canada, the USA, and the UK. In the 1970s, the figures were roughly halved for each country. At the beginning of the 20th century, they were practically zero.

The global homicide rate is 6 per 100,000 people per year (0.006%/year), and continues to decline. In the United States, it is 5 per 100,000 people per year (0.005%/year), and in England, it is 1 per 100,000 people per year (0.001%/year).

The iPad is introduced by Steve Jobs at an Apple conference at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater in San Francisco. It will be available for sale in April 2010. It will sell one million units within a month.

Andre Geim wins the Nobel Prize for the discovery of graphene, a two-dimensional version of graphite with exceptional properties in terms of Young’s Modulus, thermal and electrical conductivity, transparency, etc.

Siberia, in the Denisova Cave, in the Altai Mountains, in Russia, but almost on the border with Kazakhstan, China and Mongolia, excavations in successive waves bring to light the bones of a finger of a new Homo species: Homo Denisova.

The results of the Neanderthal genome are published and compared with the DNA of Homo sapiens. It turns out that 1% to 4% of the DNA of current populations in Europe and the Middle East, and consequently the Americas and Australia, derives from Neanderthals. However, the Neanderthal DNA that survives in us is only 60% of the original (that is, 40% has been lost forever, while 60% is present in billions of modern individuals, but with different genes in each individual, obviously). That same year, the DNA of Denisovans was also mapped, and it turns out that up to 6% of the current populations of Melanesia and Australian Aborigines are Denisovans.

Ali “Chemical Ali,” Ali Hassan al-Majid, one of Saddam Hussein’s closest aides, has been sentenced to death for the Halabija massacre. Five thousand Kurds lost their lives in a matter of minutes, suffocated by a deadly cocktail of tabun, sarin, and VX. The attack on the Kurdish village is considered the worst chemical attack against civilians in history. “Chemical Ali,” cousin of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, has already been sentenced to death for the repression of the Kurdish rebellion, the Anfal campaign of 1987-1988, which killed nearly 180,000 people, and the suppression of a Shiite insurrection in 1991.

A 7.0 earthquake on the Richter scale struck near Port-au-Prince in Haiti, leaving over 200,000 victims and over 300,000 homeless. Within hours of the tragedy, an international outcry, coordinated by the U.S. military, began.

December 2009 marked the first month since the start of the Iraq war in 2003 that no American soldiers were killed in combat. Since July, the number of combat casualties had never exceeded five per month.

Several CIA agents are killed in a Taliban suicide attack on a base in Khost, Afghanistan, near the border with Pakistan.

H1N1 swine flu outbreak

U.S. forces launched a missile attack on a jihadist training camp in the Abyan region of Yemen. The raid reportedly killed 34 terrorists, including Saleh Ali Kazemi, considered a leader of the extremist group and involved in an attack that killed seven Spanish tourists in 2007. The Americans reportedly acted in close coordination with Yemeni units. While local forces surrounded the camp area, the U.S. provided “fire and intelligence support.”

US President Barack Obama decides to send an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan. The decision is followed by NATO’s announcement of an additional 7,000 troops, primarily from the UK, Italy, and Georgia (not yet a NATO member).

Five car bombs explode in different areas of Baghdad, killing over 120 people.

NASA crashes the Centaur stage of the rocket carrying the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LUROS) into the Cabeus crater at the Moon’s south pole. The Centaur stage remains in orbit, along with the LCROSS (Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite) probe, which takes valuable images of the plume of impact material before crashing into the crater. LCROSS confirms the presence of abundant solid water in the crater. Clues had already come from Clementine and Lunar Prospector.

NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center announced that glycine, one of 20 amino acids, has been found in dust collected by the StarDust probe from comet Wild 2. This has been suspected for some time, but this is the first experimental finding.

Pakistani army launches large-scale offensive in Waziristan against Taliban

American President Barack Obama receives the Nobel Peace Prize.

Global Financial Crisis. George Papandreou, son of Andreas, newly appointed Greek Prime Minister, reveals that his country has a budget deficit of 13% of GDP, four times the Maastricht threshold, and that its public debt amounts to a staggering €410 billion.

Two hundred Taliban soldiers attack the American Forward Operating Base Keating in the Kamdesh District of Afghanistan. The battle rages for 12 hours, and the Taliban manage to enter the perimeter of the base, which was being cleared. Air support arrives, but is hampered by heavy black smoke and the steep slopes of the valley. An Apache is hit. By the end of the day, about a hundred Taliban and eight Americans remain on the ground.

Earthquake measuring 7.6 on the Richter scale in southern Sumatra: 1,100 dead

An 8.0 magnitude earthquake and tsunami in American Samoa killed 168 people.

Taliban commander Sher Muhammad Qasab died from wounds sustained in the firefight before his capture. At the time of his death, he was in custody in Pakistan after being captured by Pakistani troops.

UBS, the Swiss banking giant and the world’s second-largest wealth management company, will provide the United States with the names of 8,000 to 10,000 of its American clients suspected of tax evasion, after lengthy negotiations following an explicit request to the Swiss government by President Obama.

Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud was killed by a US drone strike in Pakistani tribal territory, near the border with Afghanistan. The most wanted Pakistani fighter, who ordered the assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Banazir Bhutto, was killed while receiving leg massages on the roof of his father-in-law’s house. The drone captured a woman, likely his wife, who was administering therapy to Mehsud to relieve the leg pain the diabetic Taliban leader was suffering from.

Svante Paabo and his collaborators demonstrate that 2% of human DNA in non-African populations derives from Neanderthals—a small but significant percentage, and well above the error threshold. Neanderthals, after all, are not entirely extinct: they live within us.

The new map of Venus’s southern hemisphere, completed by the European Space Agency (ESA) Venus Express, confirms the presence of granite (or ancient basaltic-volcanic rock dragged into the planet’s interior by continental drift and coming into contact with water before resurfacing via volcanoes), and therefore confirms the presence, at least in the past, of plate tectonics and volcanic activity.

A massive asteroid or comet, nearly 1 km in diameter, crashes into Jupiter at 57 degrees South, leaving a dark spot the size of the Pacific Ocean. It is first observed by Australian amateur astronomer Anthony Wesely. The explosion has been estimated to be over a thousand times larger than the Tunguska explosion and a million times larger than the Hiroshima bomb.

Riots between ethnic Han (Chinese) and Uighur (Turkish) people have resulted in deaths, injuries, and mass arrests in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, China.

Frank Postberg of the University of Heidelberg, analyzing data from the American Cassini probe, confirms the existence of a liquid water ocean beneath the surface of Enceladus, Saturn’s satellite.

Iran. Green Revolution. Thousands of supporters of opposition candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi take to the streets of Tehran to protest against Ahmadinejad. Forty Iranians are killed.

The Taliban are approaching the gates of Islamabad, Pakistan. The Pakistani army’s brutal counteroffensive begins, with the battle for control of the Swat Valley in search of Maulana Fazlullah, the region’s most powerful Taliban leader, in Mingora. Fleeing refugees speak of “dozens of Taliban suicide bombers” still ready to blow themselves up against troops. In the village of Puchar, soldiers hanged captured Taliban and left them dangling from trees. In the village of Sharzay, they dropped their bodies, wrapped in plastic bags, from helicopters directly onto Taliban positions. Artillery and air forces fire from afar as soon as they suspect they’ve located an enemy hideout.