Sichuan earthquake
Nearly 70,000 dead, thousands under collapsed schools
On 12 May 2008 a magnitude 7.9 earthquake devastated Wenchuan County and nearby areas of Sichuan. Some 69,000 people died, 18,000 went missing and nearly 5 million were left homeless. Thousands of the dead were schoolchildren, and shoddily built schools became a cause of public anger in China.
Wikipedia (Russian) · Wikipedia (English) · 21st century
Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1997 Kyoto Protocol — 11 years earlier
- 2008 Global financial crisis — same year
Europe
- 1989 Invention of the World Wide Web — 19 years earlier
- 1989 Fall of the Berlin Wall — 19 years earlier
- 2002 Euro notes and coins — 6 years earlier
- 2010 Eurozone debt crisis — 2 years later
- 2012 Discovery of the Higgs boson — 4 years later
Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1985–1991 Perestroika — 23 years earlier
- 1986 Chernobyl disaster — 22 years earlier
- 1989 Revolutions of 1989 — 19 years earlier
- 1991 Dissolution of the Soviet Union — 17 years earlier
Middle East
- 1990–1991 Gulf War — 18 years earlier
- 1993 Oslo Accords — 15 years earlier
- 2011–2024 Syrian civil war — 3 years later
Africa
- 1983–1985 The Ethiopian famine — 25 years earlier
- 1994 End of apartheid in South Africa — 14 years earlier
- 1998–2003 Second Congo War — 10 years earlier
- 2011 Independence of South Sudan — 3 years later
Americas
- 1983 Birth of the Internet: ARPANET adopts TCP/IP — 25 years earlier
- 2001 September 11 attacks — 7 years earlier
- 2003 Human genome sequenced — 5 years earlier
- 2007 Apple unveils the iPhone — 1 year earlier
- 2010 Haiti earthquake — 2 years later
Oceania
- 1992 The Mabo decision — 16 years earlier
Alive at the time
- Nelson Mandela (aged 90)
- Neil Armstrong (aged 78)
- Edmund Hillary (aged 89)
- Jimmy Carter (aged 84)
- Fidel Castro (aged 82)
- Elizabeth II (aged 82)
- Gabriel García Márquez (aged 81)
- Mikhail Gorbachev (aged 77)
- Pelé (aged 68)
- Claude Lévi-Strauss (aged 100)