JANUARY
January 1: ? Dilma Rousseff assumes office as Brazil President. ? India joins the United Nations Security Council as a non-permanent member for a two-year term. ? Estonia becomes the first former Soviet republic to adopt the euro.
January 11: Russia and the U.S. enact a historic nuclear cooperation pact in Moscow .
January 12: Indian-American Namrata "Nikki" Randhawa Haley is sworn in as the first woman and non-white Governor of South Carolina.
January 14: The 23-year-old Tunisian dictatorship collapses following President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali's hasty exit to Saudi Arabia .
January 26: Music composer A.R. Rahman is honoured with the Crystal Award of the World Economic Forum as the annual meeting of world elites opens at Swiss ski resort of Davos.
January 29: The Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak designates Ahmed Shafik Prime Minister. Omar Suleiman made Vice-President.
FEBRUARY
February 1: A two-million strong rally in Cairo 's Tahrir Square calls for an end to the Hosni Mubarak regime in Egypt .
February 4: Thein Sein, a military general-turned-civilian is elected Myanmar 's first President under its 2008 Constitution.
February 6: Jhalanath Khanal is sworn-in Nepal Prime Minister.
February 19: The first cosmic census reveals the presence of at least 50 billion planets in the Milky Way.
MARCH
March 2: The Order of St. Andrew, Russia's highest honour, is conferred on the last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
March 7: Jacques Chirac becomes the first French President since 1958 to go on trial on criminal charges.
March 9: The Discovery space shuttle returns to earth after its final flight wrapping up a 27-year career.
March 11: An 8.9 offshore earthquake unleashes a 23-ft. tsunami in Japan leaving 8,199 people dead and 12,722 missing.
March 23: Abel Prize for the year 2011 is awarded to U.S. mathematician John Willard Milnor for his pioneering discoveries in topology geometry, algebra.
APRIL
April 4: Nursultan Nazarbayev is re-elected Kazakhstan 's President.
April 5: The Guardian's coverage of the WikiLeaks publication of secret cables wins for it the "Newspaper of the Year" at the 2011 Press Awards given in London .
April 11: The ban on full-face veils comes into effect in France .
April 14: The world's five major emerging economies - Brazil , Russia , India , China and South Africa (BRICS) - draw up action plan for better coordination on the world stage at a summit in Sanya , China .
April 18: ? Goodluck Jonathan wins Nigerian presidential polls. ? Indian-American physician Siddhartha Mukherjee's book on cancer, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer wins the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in the general non-fiction category. Jennifer Egan wins the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for her novel A Visit From The Goon Squad. Carol Fuzy a photographer from The Washington Post becomes the first journalist to win four Pulitzer Prizes.
April 19: Syria lifts an emergency law that has been in force for 48 years following month-long protests in which at least 200 have died.
April 21: Popular singer-turned-politician Michel Martelly is declared winner of Haiti 's presidential election.
April 26: Congolese children's right activist Murhabazi Namegabe wins the $100,000 World's Children's Prize for the Rights of The Child.
April 27: Singapore 's elder statesman Lee Kuan Yew is returned to Parliament unopposed for the fifth successive term.
April 29: Britain 's Prince William marries long-time girlfriend Kate Middleton at Westminster Abbey, London .
MAY
May 1: Al-Queda supremo Osama bin Laden (54) is killed in a U.S. Special Forces operation in Abbottabad near the Pakistan capital, Islamabad .
May 3: Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper wins majority in Canadian parliamentary polls.
May 8: Singapore 's long-governing People's Action Party wins absolute majority in parliamentary polls held a day earlier.
May 11: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is awarded the Sydney Peace Prize's Gold Medal.
May 17: Phillip Roth, one of America 's most prolific novelists, is named winner of the £ 60,000 Man Booker International Prize
May 19: Arjun Vajpayee, a school boy from Noida, achieves a rare double, after being the youngest Indian to scale Mt. Everest, he scales Mt. Lhotse , the world's fourth highest peak.
May 21 : India 's GSAT-8 - the largest and heaviest satellite built by the ISRO is launched from Kourou French Guiana by Ariane-5 rocket.
May 22: U.S. director Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life wins top honours at the Cannes Film Festival. Kirsten Dunst bags best actress for her role in Lars von Trier's apocalyptic psychodrama Melancholia. France 's Jean Dujardin gets best actor for part in Michel Hazanavicius's silent movie The Artist.
May 26: George Atkinson (16) from Surbition, a London suburb becomes the youngest person ever to climb the highest mountains of all the seven continents after scaling Mt. Everest .
JUNE
June 2: Indian-American Sukanya Roy (14) wins the crown at the Spelling Bee championship in Maryland , U.S.
June 13: Turkey 's ruling Justice and Development party led by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan wins parliamentary polls by a wide margin.
June 17: ? The United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon gets Security Council support for a second five-year term. ? The Swiss Parliament gives nod for amendments to tax treaties with nations, including India making it easier to track black money.
June 25: Hindi films Dabangg and My Name is Khan bag top honours at the 12 th International Indian Film Academy Awards in Toronto , Canada .
June 26: Jose Graziano da Silva of Brazil is elected Director-General of the Food and Agriculture Organisation.
June 28: French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde is elected IMF Managing Director.
June 30: The World's longest sea bridge, spanning 36.48 km across the mouth of the Jiaozhou bay in eastern Shandong Province , China opens to traffic. Undersea tunnel running parallel to the bridge too ready. High-speed rail link between Shanghai and Beijing inaugurated.
JULY
July 8: Space shuttle Atlantis lifts off on its last voyage since the launch of the programme in 1981 from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral , Florida .
July 9: South Sudan declares independence from Sudan to become the world's 193 rd Nation.
July 10: ? Australia unveils its most sweeping economic reform in decades, with a plan to tax carbon emissions from the nation's worst polluters. ? The News of the World shuffles into history with a final edition after a run for 168 years.
July 19: Hina Rabbani Khar is sworn in Pakistan 's Foreign Minister, thus becoming the youngest and first woman to occupy the post.
July 21: The EU summit in Brussles comes out with a second international bailout package for Greece .
July 25: ? India and the Republic of Korea ink a civil nuclear agreement after a meeting between presidents Pratibha Patil and Le Myung-bak in Seoul . ? The Bangladesh Swadhinata Sammanona (Bangladesh Freedom Honour) is conferred on Indira Gandhi at a function in the capital Dhaka . ? Iran , Iraq and Syria sign a $ 10 billion gas pipeline deal.
July 27: Indians Harish Hande and Nileema Mishra among six winners of the 2011 Ramon Magsaysay award announced in Manila .
AUGUST
August 4: ? Standard & Poor's for the first time removes the U.S. Government from its list of risk-free borrowers. ? Yingluck Shinawatra is elected the first woman and 28 th Prime Minsiter of Thailand by the House of Representatives.
August 12: China puts into orbit Pakistan 's first communications satellite, PAKSAT-1R, from a launch centre in western Sichuan province.
August 17: The Sukhoi fifth generation stealth fighter, T-50 being jointly developed by Russia and India makes public debut at a Moscow air show.
August 24: Steve Jobs, the iconic leader of Apple, quits as CEO due to illness.
August 28: ? Baburam Bhattarai is elected Nepal Prime Minister by the nation's legislature-Parliament. ? Tony Tan is elected Singapore President after a dramatic recount.
August 30: Yoshihiko Noda becomes Japan 's sixth Prime Minister in five years.
SEPTEMBER
September 11: The 9/11 Memorial at Ground Zero in New York is opened to the public as the U.S. remembers over 3000 killed on September 11, 2001 in terrorist attacks.
September 12: Miss Angola Leila Lopes is crowned Miss Universe 2011 at a pageant in the Brazilean capital Sao Paulo .
September 15: ? The "Red bloc" led by Thorning-Schmidt wins parliamentary polls in Denmark . ? Scientists announce the discovery of a new planet Kepler 16b that has two Suns.
September 18: Mad Men wins the Best Drama Emmy for the fourth year. Modern Family bags the Best Comedy gong. Kate Winslet gets Best Actress Emmy for her role in Period drama Mildred Pierce at the 63 rd Annual Prime time Emmy Awards in Los Angeles .
September 22: European scientists report of tiny specks called neutrinos apparently travelling faster than light.
September 25: ? Saudi women gain the right to vote and run as candidates in the local elections to be held in 2015. ? Wangari Muta Maathai (71) the first African woman to win a Nobel Peace Prize dies of cancer. ? Barcelona bans bull fighting on grounds of cruelty to animals. ? French Socialists wrest control of the Senate gaining 175 of the 348 seats in a historic win, for the first time since the Fifth Republic was founded in 1958.
September 29: China launches its first space laboratory module the 8.5 tonne Tiangong-1, or Heavenly Palace from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre.
OCTOBER
October 1: Denmark imposes a "fat tax" on foods such as butter and oil.
October 3: Bruce A. Beutler of the U.S. , Jules Hoffmann of Luxembourg and Ralph Steinman of Canada (who died of pancreatic cancer on Sept. 30) are awarded the Medicine Nobel for 2011 for laying bare the structure of the immune system.
October 4: Saul Perlmutter and Adam G. Riess of the U.S. and U.S. - Australian Brian P. Schmidt jointly win the 2011 Physics Nobel Prize for discovering the accelerating expansion of the Universe.
October 5: Steve Paul Jobs (56), the iconic co-founder of Apple dies of pancreatic cancer in California .
October 6: Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer wins the Literature Nobel Prize. ? Israeli scientist Daniel Shechtman is awarded the Chemistry Nobel Prize for discovering quasicrystals.
October 7: Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, compatriot and peace activist Leymah Gbowee and Tawakul Karman of Yemen , a pro-democracy campaigner are awarded the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize.
October 10: Two American economists Thomas Sargent and Christopher Sims are awarded the Nobel Prize for their 'research on cause and effect in the Macroeconomy'.
October 11: Israel and Palestinian Hamas sign a complex swap deal in the Egyptian capital Cairo that will result in the release of abducted Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit and over 1,000 Palestinian prisoners.
October 13: The former Presidents of Ghana and Brazil , John Agyekm Kufuor and Luiz Inacio Lula do Silva are awarded the World Food Prize 2011 at a function at the State Capital in Des Moines , Iowa .
October 16: Fauja Singh (100) becomes the oldest person to complete a full distance marathon after taking part in the Scotiabank Toronto Waterfront Marathon in Canada .
October 17: ? British billionaire Sir Richard Branson names spaceport American the world's first built-from-scratch commercial spaceport in Upham , New Mexico . ? British Novelist Julian Barnes is declared winner of 2011 Man Booker Prize for his novella " The Sense of an Ending ", in London .
October 20: ? The toppled Libyan strongman Muammar Qadhafi is killed by new regime forces while trying to flee his home town of Sirte . ? U.S. President Barack Obama honours Indian-American activist Vijaya Emani posthumously with the Presidential Citizens Medal.
October 22: Louisiana 's Indian-American Governor Bobby Jindal is re-elected for a second term.
October 27: Saudi Arabian Interior Minister Nayef bin Abdel-Aziz al-Saud is named Crown Prince and Vice Prime Minister.
October 28: The royal daughters of the U.K. will soon get regal right to rule after Britain and 15 Commonwealth Nations agree to repeal male primogeniture laws, on the sidelines of the CHOGM Summit in Perth .
October 30: Kamalesh Sharma is re-appointed Commonwealth Secretary-General at the CHOGM meeting in Perth , Australia .
October 31: In a historic vote at its headquarters in Paris , UNESCO grants full membership to Palestine .
NOVEMBER
November 1: China launches its Shenzhou-8 unmanned spacecraft from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre.
November 2: Pakistan Cabinet decides to grant MFN status to India .
November 4: Six volunteers complete a 520-day 'Mars Mission' at an isolation module in Moscow in a bid to simulate the effects of a return trip to the red planet.
November 7: ? Political leaders in Greece clinch a historic deal to form a national unity government. ? Venezuela 's Ivian Sarcos is crowned Miss World 2011 at a pageant in London .
November 9: The Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou step down.
November 10: Senior banker Lucas Papademos is named Prime Minister of the new Greek interim government. ? Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf is declared re-elected for a second term after winning a runoff held on November 8.
November 12: The Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi resigns.
November 13: Economist Mario Monti is named Italian Prime Minister.
November 16: Myanmarese leader Aung San Suu Kyi accepts the 2002 UNESCO-Madanjeet Singh Prize for the Promotion of Tolerance and Non-violence.
November 23: James Murdoch quits U.K. newspapers.
November 26: New Zealand Prime Minister John Key wins a second term.
DECEMBER
December 5: Astronomers confirm the discovery of an earth-like planet Kepler 22b about 600 light years away.
December 11: 190 nations sign an agreement to work toward a future treaty on global climate at the U.N. talks over climate change at Durban . Kyoto Protocol get extension till 2017.
December 12 : Canada pulls out of the Kyoto Protocol.
December 15: ? The U.S. formally ends military operations in Iraq which began in March 2003, at a simple ceremony in Baghdad . ? A French court sentences Venezuelan militant 'Carlos the Jackal' to lifer for four deadly attacks in France in the 1980s.
December 17: The Kim Jong-il (69), North Korea 's reclusive "Dear Leader" dies of heart attack while on a train journey. Son, Kim Jong-un, named successor.
December 22: Large Hardon Collider finds new variant of particle.
December 23: China launches its first test train that can travel at 500 kmph in Qindao , Shandong province.
December 31: Indian-American Nobel laureate Venkatraman Ramakrishnan is conferred knighthood by Britain . |
