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Japan's Taro Aso, a conservative and former foreign minister, becomes prime minister, succeeding Yasuo Fukuda, who stepped down amid criticism of his handling of domestic issues.
A truck bomb explodes outside the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, Pakistan, killing more than 50 people and wounding hundreds. A previously unknown group, Fedayeen Islam, takes responsibility for the attack.
Days after a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas expired, Hamas begins launching rocket attacks into Israel, which retaliates with airstrikes that kill about 300 people. Israel targets Hamas bases, training camps, and missile storage facilities.
Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, who is under investigation for corruption, resigns.
Cuban president Fidel Castro, who temporarily handed power to his brother Raúl in July 2006 when he fell ill, permanently steps down after 49 years in power.
Dmitri A. Medvedev, a former aide to Russian president Vladimir Putin, wins the presidential election in a landslide. Putin will remain in a position of power, serving as Medvedev's prime minister
At a news conference in Baghdad, a reporter for Al Baghdadia, a Cairo-based satellite television network, hurls his shoes at President Bush and calls him a "dog." The shoes narrowly miss Bush's head.
Three men wearing ski masks steal four pieces of artwork from the Zurich Museum in one of the largest art robberies in history.
Some 400 Buddhist monks participate in a protest march in Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, to commemorate 1959's failed uprising against China's invasion and occupation of Tibet. March 14: Violence breaks out, with ethnic Tibetans clashing with Chinese citizens. Chinese police suppress the demonstrations, and Tibetan leaders say that more than 100 Tibetans are killed
More than 170 people are killed and about 300 are wounded in a series of attacks on several landmarks and commercial hubs in Mumbai, India. Indian officials say ten gunmen carried out the attack
As many as 90 Afghan civilians, 60 of them children, die in an airstrike by coalition troops in the western village of Azizabad. It is one of the deadliest airstrikes since the war began in 2001, and the deadliest for civilians. The U.S. military refutes the figures, which were confirmed by the UN.
Connecticut's Supreme Court rules that a state law that limits marriage to heterosexual couples and a civil union law that protects gay couples violate equal protection rights guaranteed by the constitution.
Democratic senator Barack Obama wins the presidential election against Sen. John McCain, taking 338 electoral votes to McCain's 161.
Voters in California narrowly pass a ballot measure, Proposition 8, that overturns the May 15, 2008, California Supreme Court decision that said same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry.
Sen. Barack Obama delivers a pivotal speech on race, denouncing the provocative remarks on race made by his former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Jr., but explains that the complexities of race in America have fueled anger and resentment among many African Americans.
As many as 68,000 people are killed and thousands injured when an estimated 7.9 magnitude earthquake strikes Sichuan, Gansu, and Yunnan Provinces in western China.
At their annual meeting, members of the Group of 8, the U.S., Japan, Germany, Britain, France, Italy, Canada, and Russia, set goals to cut in half by 2050 the amount of greenhouse gases emitted into the environment.
Cyclone Nargis ravages Myanmar's Irrawaddy Delta and Yangon, killing 78,000 people and leaving up to a million homeless.
In 2008, the estimated number of polar bears left in the wild is about 20,000.
he Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a 17-mile-long looped track located an average of 300 feet beneath the Swiss-French border, accelerated two beams of particles to 1.2 trillion electron volts (TeV) and then smashed them together.