Annual Answers

Argentina, Australia, Luxembourg, Rwanda and South Korea all became members of the UN Security Council on New Year’s Day.
At his public inauguration, President Obama put his left hand on bibles once owned by President Lincoln and Martin Luther King.
A cleaning woman was badly injured while cleaning an empty commuter train in the middle of the night in Sweden in January when she accidentally started it. It ran off the tracks and crashed into a 3-storey residential building. Charges of stealing the train were dropped.
DNA tests in February showed that remains found under a local government car park in Leicester belonged to King Richard III.
UK Prime Minister David Cameron visited Amritsar in February and expressed remorse but did not apologize for the Jallianwala Bagh massacre on 13 April 1919.
Prof Michael Edwards, the first Briton to be so honoured, was elected to the Académie Française in February.
Mexican business magnate Carlos Slim in March topped the Forbes annual list of the richest people in the world for the 4^th year in a row.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai in March accused the Afghan Taliban of conspiring with the US armed forces to destabilize his country.
220 people out walking or fishing on the ice had to be rescued from 2 large ice floes that broke off from the coast of Latvia in March.
Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands abdicated on 30 April, following the example of her mother, Queen Juliana, and grandmother, Queen Wilhelmina. She is now known as Princess Beatrix.
Margaret Thatcher was described in a 1975 State Department cable, published by Wikileaks in April, as “the personification of a British middle class dream come true”.
Golden Fresh Land is a Burmese newspaper that was first published on April 1^stafter the press laws in Burma were relaxed.
Poachers located and killed the last 30 rhinos in Mozambique after being guided to them by poorly-paid game rangers in the Limpopo National Park.
Ex-president and ex-convict Joseph Estrada was elected mayor of Manila in May.
AS Monaco was unwelcome in the top division of French football because the club is registered in Monaco and so exempt from French taxes, including the proposed new 75% tax on high earners. Other teams argued that this gave Monaco an unfair financial advantage.
Former President Bill Clinton was paid half a million dollars to give a 45-minute speech in honour of the 90^th birthday in June of Israeli president Shimon Peres.
Nine North Korean teenagers were captured in Lao PDR in June and forcibly returned to Pyongyang via China.
The journalists who took a plane from Moscow to Cuba in June in the mistaken belief that NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden was on board discovered that their wasted 11-hour trip was on a no-alcohol Aeroflot flight.
In his first official trip outside Rome, Pope Francis went to the island of Lampedusa in July where he threw a wreath into the sea and held a mass to pay tribute to the many immigrants who have drowned trying to reach Europe.
British multinational drug manufacturer GlaxoSmithKline admitted in July that its senior executives in China appeared to have paid bribes to officials and doctors.
EU foreign policy representative Dame Catherine Ashton was taken in July to an undisclosed location to meet deposed President Mohamed Morsi of Egypt, who hadn’t been told where he was being detained.
Vietnam in August carried out its first execution by lethal injection on 27-year-old Nguyễn Anh Tuấn, convicted of murder and robbery after it changed the method of execution from firing squad. Executions had been delayed when many countries refused to export the drugs used in the injection. At the time of this execution 586 inmates remained on death row in Vietnam.
The British NGO Karma Nirvana campaigns against forced marriages and in August advised young women being taken from the UK to be married against their will to hide a spoon in their underwear. The spoon would set off the security metal detectors giving the women a chance to talk to security personnel in private.
An 800 kilometre long canyon that is up to 800 metres deep was discovered in August under the 3 km thick ice sheet covering Greenland. It was discovered during climate change research.
Controversial spiritual guru Asaram Bapu, who was criticized for claiming that victims of rape would not be attacked if they addressed their attackers as brothers, was arrested in September on a rape charge filed by a teenage girl.
64-year-old Diana Nyad swam from Cuba to Florida, without a shark cage, over three days in September.
After voting to remove wrestling from the 28 Olympic sports in February, the International Olympic Committee in September selected the same sport, wrestling, back onto the list.
In October Prince Harry went half way round the world and back for a weekend trip to Australia to celebrate the 100^th anniversary of the Australian Navy.
The former President of Liberia Charles Taylor flew into London in October to serve the remainder of a 50-year sentence for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The Netherlands had agreed to hold his trial in The Hague on condition that he was not imprisoned in the Netherlands; the UK passed special legislation to allow him to serve his time in a British maximum-security prison.
Football teams in France’s top two leagues in October threatened to go on strike over government plans for a 75% tax on earnings of over one million euros. In a show of solidarity, AS Monaco said they would join the strike, even though they don’t pay the tax (and wouldn’t have anyone to play if there was a strike).
Malala Yousafzai’s book ‘I am Malala’ was banned in Pakistani private schools in November for being anti- Pakistan and anti-Islamic. The book says her father thinks Salman Rushdie’s book The Satanic Verses was offensive to Islam but should be read and countered, and also mentions the 2 million Ahmadis in Pakistan “who say they are Muslim though our government says they are not”.
In November, Albania, Germany and Belgium all refused to help Syria destroy its (extremely large) stockpile of chemical weapons.
The November agreement with Iran over its nuclear programme was negotiated with the P5 plus 1, or the 5 permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany.
It was revealed in December that so many US and UK spies were involved in playing massively multiplayer online role-playing games like World of Warcraft that special measures had to be taken to ensure they didn’t spy on each other. They suspected that terrorists were using the anonymity provided by the games to pass information.
US President Barack Obama, Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt of Demark and Prime Minister David Cameron of the United Kingdom caught taking a selfie together at Nelson Mandela’s memorial service in December
59 recordings of the Beatles from 50 years ago were officially released in December. They were released to ensure continued copyright protection.

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