Read history

12:30 p.m. EDT, 7 October 2001

U.S. forces began combat operations against al-Qaeda and Taliban targets in Afghanistan at approximately 12:30 p.m. EDT on 7 October 2001, with British forces participating directly. The opening attack used about 15 land-based bombers, about 25 carrier strike aircraft and approximately 50 Tomahawk missiles launched from U.S. and British ships and submarines.

B-2 bombers flew to Afghanistan from the continental United States while carrier aircraft launched from USS Enterprise and USS Carl Vinson. More than 40 countries granted air-transit or landing rights.

What was hit

Targets included Taliban military and government facilities around Kabul, Herat, Shindand, Shibirghan, Mazar-e Sharif and Kandahar, along with al-Qaeda infrastructure, air defences, airfields, radar and communications facilities.

Humanitarian drops of food and medical supplies began alongside the attacks. At 1:00 p.m. EDT, Bush announced the strikes from the White House Treaty Room, describing their purpose as disrupting Afghanistan's use as a terrorist base and attacking the Taliban's military capability.

Not yet a ground invasion

The first day was an air-and-missile campaign rather than a mass coalition ground crossing. The initial deployment of U.S. special-operations ground troops followed on 19 October, and the Taliban government did not fall on 7 October.

Asked at the same-day briefing whether bin Laden had been personally targeted, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said no. Canada, Australia, Germany and France had pledged forces, but Bush distinguished those pledges from Britain's direct participation in the opening operation.

2 February 2007, in Paris

The IPCC released the Summary for Policymakers of Working Group I's contribution to the Fourth Assessment Report in Paris on 2 February 2007, under the title Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Representatives of 113 governments had approved the text line by line over the preceding week.

The summary declared warming of the climate system "unequivocal," citing observed temperature increases, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising average sea level.

Two judgments, not one

Attribution carried its own calibrated phrase. The summary concluded that most observed global-average warming since the mid-20th century was "very likely" caused by the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse-gas concentrations — with "very likely" defined as greater than 90% assessed probability.

That threshold had strengthened since 2001, when the comparable conclusion was only "likely." The estimated global surface-temperature increase from 1906 to 2005 was given as 0.74 °C, with a 90% interval of 0.56–0.92 °C.

One volume of the assessment

This was not the complete Fourth Assessment Report. The other working-group contributions and the Synthesis Report had not yet been released, and the full AR4 cycle was scheduled for completion later in 2007.

Working Group I, co-chaired by Susan Solomon and Dahe Qin, assessed observations, causes and projections; impacts and mitigation belonged to the other working groups. The wider AR4 process drew on more than 3,500 experts from more than 130 countries.

3 October 2008

The House of Representatives concurred in the Senate amendments to H.R. 1424 by 263 votes to 171 on 3 October 2008, and President George W. Bush signed the bill the same day as Public Law 110-343. The House had rejected an earlier rescue measure 205–228 on 29 September.

The Senate had attached the revised stabilization package to H.R. 1424, a pre-existing bill, and passed it 74–25 on 1 October before returning it for the decisive House vote.

$700 billion, released in stages

Division A created the Troubled Asset Relief Program and authorised the Treasury secretary to purchase or insure qualifying troubled assets from financial institutions. The maximum was $700 billion, but only $250 billion was available at enactment.

A further $100 billion required presidential certification, and a final $350 billion was subject to congressional review. No $700 billion fund was deposited or spent that day.

More than a bailout bill

The enacted package temporarily raised federal deposit-insurance coverage from $100,000 to $250,000 per depositor, and carried tax extenders, energy incentives and Alternative Minimum Tax relief outside TARP.

The program named for troubled assets changed course quickly. Eleven days later, on 14 October, Treasury announced a $250 billion Capital Purchase Program to buy preferred shares in banks.

An email to a mailing list

On 31 October 2008 — or possibly 1 November, according to a second surviving archive — a sender using the name Satoshi Nakamoto posted a message titled “Bitcoin P2P e-cash paper” to the Cryptography Mailing List. It linked to a nine-page paper at bitcoin.org describing a fully peer-to-peer electronic-cash proposal requiring no trusted third party.

The announcement listed five principal properties, including peer-to-peer prevention of double-spending and Hashcash-style proof of work for coin creation and network security. The paper cited Adam Back's Hashcash and Wei Dai's b-money.

31 October or 1 November

The mailing list's own Pipermail archive dates the message to Friday, 31 October 2008 at 14:10 EDT — 18:10 UTC. The Mail-Archive copy displays 1 November at 16:16:33 −0700.

The two timestamps differ by more than a timezone conversion, probably because the archives recorded different stages of a moderated delivery or import. Most modern histories use 31 October, but 1 November is not simply an error.

What the email was not

It was an announcement and a link, not the launch of an operational network; no bitcoins were created or spendable that day. The paper was not peer-reviewed, and “Satoshi Nakamoto” is a byline and email identity rather than a verified civil identity or proof of a single author.

The paper proposed ordering transactions through an ongoing chain of hash-based proof-of-work, with the chain representing the greatest accumulated CPU effort treated as authoritative — a security claim conditional on honest nodes collectively controlling more CPU power than any cooperating attacker. It never uses “blockchain” as one word.

The first preserved reply, from James A. Donald on 2 November, said such a system was badly needed and then questioned whether it would scale.

4 November 2008

U.S. voters chose Democratic senator Barack Obama and running mate Joe Biden over Republican senator John McCain and his running mate, Alaska governor Sarah Palin, on 4 November 2008. The certified result was 365 electoral votes to 173.

Obama took 69,498,516 popular votes to McCain's 59,948,323 — 52.93% against 45.65%, a margin of 9,550,193 out of 131,313,820 cast. He became the first African American elected president of the United States.

Two speeches

Late that night McCain telephoned Obama, then conceded publicly before supporters in Phoenix, saying that the American people had spoken clearly. He quieted boos from his own audience while acknowledging the election's significance for African Americans.

Obama addressed supporters in Chicago's Grant Park as president-elect, emphasising both the historic result and the work ahead.

One district in Nebraska

Obama carried Nebraska's 2nd Congressional District while McCain carried the state and its other districts — the first split of Nebraska's electoral votes since it adopted district allocation.

The 365–173 figure is the final certified total rather than what was known when the race was first projected. Voters technically selected presidential electors, who cast the formal ballots later; Obama was inaugurated on 20 January 2009.

3 January 2009, 18:15:05 UTC

Bitcoin's pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, created the chain's genesis block on 3 January 2009 — block height 0, containing no previous-block hash. Its header records Unix time 1231006505, which corresponds to 18:15:05 UTC.

The canonical block hash begins with nineteen zeroes: 000000000019d6689c085ae165831e934ff763ae46a2a6c172b3f1b60a8ce26f.

A newspaper headline inside the block

The block's coinbase input carries the text "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks." That establishes the block could not have been made before that newspaper date.

It proves an earliest possible date, not Nakamoto's nationality, location or political intentions. The symbolic intent behind the choice is undocumented; reading it as a manifesto is inference.

Fifty coins that cannot move

The block holds a single generation transaction nominally worth 50 BTC. Bitcoin Core documents that this output cannot be spent, because it did not originally enter the transaction database.

A public, continuously operating network did not demonstrably begin at that instant. The public Bitcoin v0.1 release announcement followed several days later — Nakamoto described it as alpha, experimental, open-source software using a peer-to-peer network with no central server — and block 1 appeared roughly six days after the genesis block.

17 December 2010, in Sidi Bouzid

Municipal officers confronted Mohamed Bouazizi, a 26-year-old fruit-and-vegetable vendor, in Sidi Bouzid on 17 December 2010 and confiscated his produce and work equipment. After failing to obtain redress from local authorities, he set himself on fire outside the governorate headquarters.

He survived the burning with critical injuries. He died in hospital 18 days later, on 4 January 2011.

A crowd, and a phone video

A solidarity gathering and protest formed outside the governorate that day; scholarly reconstruction places the first protest at around midday. Demonstrations spread across Sidi Bouzid the same day.

That evening his cousin Ali Bouazizi filmed the protests and posted a video to Facebook titled "The Intifada of the People of Sidi Bouzid." President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali left on 14 January, 28 days after the protests began.

What is disputed

Accounts disagree over whether the municipal officer Fedia Hamdi slapped, spat on or verbally abused Bouazizi. Hamdi denied striking him, witnesses disputed the allegation, and a court later dismissed the case.

Early reports frequently described Bouazizi as an unemployed university graduate; later family testimony and scholarship say he had not finished high school. What is firmly established is the confiscation and his failed attempt to get a hearing.

14:46:24 JST, 11 March 2011

A magnitude-9.1 megathrust earthquake occurred beneath the Pacific near northeastern Honshu at 14:46:24 Japan Standard Time on 11 March 2011; USGS locates it at 38.297°N, 142.373°E and 29 kilometres depth. The Japan Meteorological Agency's principal technical account gives Mw 9.0 — the same earthquake, a different solution.

The rupture ran along the subduction boundary where the Pacific plate descends beneath the plate carrying northeastern Japan, and it generated a destructive tsunami.

Three minutes, then the water

JMA issued its first tsunami warnings and advisories at 14:49, about three minutes after the earthquake. The initial forecast underestimated the eventual wave heights because the magnitude could not be determined accurately within those first minutes.

Later observations exceeded 9.3 metres at Soma and 8.6 metres at Ishinomaki before gauges failed or were overtopped. Post-disaster field investigation found a localised maximum run-up of 40.1 metres at Ryōri Bay in Ōfunato, Iwate Prefecture — a run-up measurement, not a 40-metre offshore wave.

Station blackout at Fukushima Daiichi

Eleven operating reactors at the Onagawa, Fukushima Daiichi, Fukushima Daini and Tokai Daini sites shut down automatically after the earthquake. At Fukushima Daiichi the tsunami flooded electrical equipment and disabled every operating emergency diesel generator except the one at Unit 6, producing station blackouts and loss of major cooling functions.

Japan declared a nuclear emergency at 19:03. At 21:23 it ordered evacuation within 3 kilometres of Fukushima Daiichi and sheltering from 3 to 10 kilometres; the reactor explosions and the wider 20-kilometre zone came on later days.

1 May in Washington, 2 May in Abbottabad

At 1:25 p.m. EDT on 1 May 2011, President Barack Obama, CIA Director Leon Panetta and JSOC commander Admiral William McRaven approved execution of the operation, and helicopters departed Afghanistan at 1:51 p.m. Two reached bin Laden's Abbottabad compound at 3:30 p.m. EDT — 12:30 a.m. Pakistan time on 2 May.

One helicopter crashed, but the assault continued without injury to the U.S. team. The damaged aircraft was deliberately destroyed before the force left.

Nine minutes, then forty

U.S. special-operations forces found bin Laden on the third floor and killed him at 3:39 p.m. EDT. The compound-clearing operation ran nearly 40 minutes, and the force departed at 4:10 p.m.

They removed his body and collected material from the compound. Contemporaneous U.S. information put the number killed there at five, including bin Laden.

The account was corrected the next day

At 11:35 p.m. EDT Obama spoke from the White House East Room, announcing that a U.S. operation had killed bin Laden in Abbottabad and taken custody of his body. At 12:59 a.m. EDT on 2 May, the body was buried at sea from USS Carl Vinson in the North Arabian Sea.

The White House retracted the first briefing's implication that a woman had been used as a human shield, and said bin Laden was unarmed when shot. A woman on the first floor was killed in crossfire; bin Laden's wife was wounded but survived.

05:17:57 UTC, 6 August 2012

Curiosity entered the Martian atmosphere at 05:10:46 UTC and touched down inside Gale Crater at 05:17:57 UTC on 6 August 2012. The autonomous sequence from entry to wheels-down took about seven minutes, and radio delay made intervention from Earth impossible throughout.

NASA received touchdown confirmation at 10:31:45.4 p.m. PDT on 5 August, almost 14 minutes after the landing itself. The signal arrived via the Mars Odyssey orbiter and the Deep Space Network antenna at Canberra, Australia.

The rocket backpack flew away

After heat-shield and parachute deceleration, a rocket-powered descent stage lowered the 1,982-pound rover to the surface on cables. Curiosity landed directly on its wheels, severed the cables, and the descent stage flew off to crash at a safe distance.

It did not stay behind as a lander platform. Navigation data placed the rover about two kilometres northeast of the intended centre of its landing ellipse on Aeolis Palus.

Then months of checkout

Curiosity immediately returned a wide-angle view of rocky ground, then began configuration and instrument checkout rather than full science operations. Its first 90 Martian days went to configuring and testing systems.

The site was named Bradbury Landing on 22 August, so the name is retrospective when applied to touchdown day.

12 December 2015, at Le Bourget

The Conference of the Parties adopted the Paris Agreement through decision 1/CP.21 at COP21 in Le Bourget, Paris, on 12 December 2015. COP president and French foreign minister Laurent Fabius brought down the gavel after the parties accepted the final text, and the hall responded with sustained applause.

The adopted agreement set a goal of holding warming well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels, while pursuing efforts to limit it to 1.5 °C.

Shall, should

Immediately before adoption, legal and linguistic experts presented technical corrections — among them changing Article 4.4 from "shall" to "should." Fabius certified the disputed wording as an editorial error.

The UNFCCC documents the change as a technical correction. Reuters reported that it was resolved privately after US negotiators objected.

Adopted is not in force

Adoption completed the Durban Platform negotiating mandate, but it did not make the treaty operative. Signature, ratification and the Article 21 entry-into-force thresholds all still lay ahead; 175 parties signed on the opening day in 2016.

The agreement assigns no central emissions quota to each country. Parties must prepare, communicate and maintain successive nationally determined contributions and pursue domestic measures toward them. The wider agreement also addresses adaptation and finance.

20 December 2020: France closes the crossing for 48 hours

After Britain warned of a faster-spreading SARS-CoV-2 variant, France announced on 20 December 2020 a 48-hour suspension, beginning at midnight, of travel by people from the United Kingdom by road, air, sea and rail. Only unaccompanied freight could continue.

The Netherlands, Italy, Belgium and several other European countries suspended passenger travel from Britain on or around the same day while authorities assessed the variant.

What was actually known about the variant

The lineage was then called VUI-202012/01; the names B.1.1.7 and Alpha did not yet exist. British genomic surveillance had identified 1,108 UK cases of it by 13 December.

Preliminary modelling put the increase in transmissibility at 40% to 70%. On 20 December that remained a preliminary finding, and authorities had not established the variant's severity or its effect on vaccines.

It had already been detected outside Britain — in Australia, Denmark, Italy, Iceland and the Netherlands among others.

Australia's restrictions had a different cause

Australian states tightened domestic travel rules the same weekend, but for a separate reason: the Avalon cluster in Sydney.

New South Wales reported 68 linked cases on 20 December and imposed additional Greater Sydney restrictions that night. The variant cases found in Australia were detections in quarantine and did not establish that it was spreading in the Australian community.