The US election and Trump’s return
Featured image: Wikimedia Commons — 2024 United States presidential election (freely licensed)
The 2024 US presidential election was among the most turbulent in modern history, and it ended with Donald Trump’s return to power.
In May, Trump was convicted of 34 felonies in a New York hush-money trial, becoming the first former US president found guilty of a crime.
After a widely criticised debate performance in June raised doubts about his age and fitness, President Joe Biden withdrew from the race on 21 July and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris.
Days earlier, on 13 July, Trump had survived an assassination attempt at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, where a gunman grazed his ear, killed one spectator, and wounded two others; a second apparent attempt followed in September.
On 5 November, Trump defeated Harris, winning both the electoral college and the national popular vote.
He became the first person in more than a century to win two non-consecutive presidential terms, and the first convicted felon elected to the office.
The Baltimore bridge collapse
Featured image: Wikimedia Commons — Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse (freely licensed)
In the early hours of 26 March 2024, the container ship Dali lost power shortly after leaving the Port of Baltimore and struck a support pier of the Francis Scott Key Bridge.
The 1.6-mile bridge, which had stood since 1977, collapsed into the Patapsco River within seconds.
Six construction workers who were repairing the road surface were killed, and two others were rescued.
A mayday call from the ship’s crew moments before impact allowed authorities to halt traffic onto the bridge, preventing further deaths.
The collapse blocked one of the busiest ports on the US East Coast, whose main shipping channel did not fully reopen for around 11 weeks.
Footage of the ship striking the bridge and the span crumpling into the river was broadcast around the world.
The Great North American eclipse
Featured image: NASA — 2024 total solar eclipse (public domain)
On 8 April 2024, a total solar eclipse swept across North America, drawing one of the largest audiences for an astronomical event in history.
The path of totality — where the Moon completely blocked the Sun — crossed Mexico, the United States from Texas to Maine, and eastern Canada before ending over the Atlantic.
Around 32 million people in the US lived within the path, with tens of millions more travelling to see it.
At its peak, totality lasted up to about four and a half minutes, briefly turning day to twilight and revealing the Sun’s faint outer atmosphere, the corona.
A partial eclipse was visible across all 48 contiguous US states. It was the last total solar eclipse visible from the contiguous United States until 2044.
The biggest year for elections in history
Featured image: Wikimedia Commons — 2024 Indian general election (freely licensed)
2024 was the biggest year for elections ever, with countries home to around half the world’s population going to the polls.
India held the largest election in history, staged over six weeks with nearly a billion eligible voters; Narendra Modi won a rare third consecutive term, though his party lost its outright majority and had to govern in coalition.
In the United Kingdom, Keir Starmer’s Labour Party won a landslide on 4 July, ending 14 years of Conservative government.
South Africa’s African National Congress lost its parliamentary majority for the first time since the end of apartheid in 1994.
Elections across the European Union brought gains for far-right and nationalist parties.
In many countries, incumbent governments were punished by voters frustrated by inflation and the cost of living.
The CrowdStrike global IT outage
Featured image: Wikimedia Commons — 2024 CrowdStrike-related IT outages (freely licensed)
On 19 July 2024, a faulty software update from the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike triggered what has been described as the largest IT outage in history.
The flawed update to its Falcon security software caused around 8.5 million Microsoft Windows computers worldwide to crash and display the so-called “blue screen of death.”
It was not a cyberattack but an accidental defect in a routine update.
The disruption grounded thousands of flights, forced hospitals to postpone procedures, and hit banks, media outlets, and government services across multiple continents.
Many affected machines could not recover on their own and had to be fixed one by one, by hand. Estimates put the global financial damage in the billions of dollars.
The Paris Olympics
Featured image: Wikimedia Commons — 2024 Summer Olympics (freely licensed)
The 2024 Summer Olympics were held in Paris from 26 July to 11 August.
In a break with tradition, the opening ceremony took place not in a stadium but along the River Seine, with around 7,500 athletes sailing through the city on a flotilla of boats in pouring rain.
The ceremony featured performances from stars including Lady Gaga and Céline Dion, and the Olympic cauldron rose into the night sky beneath a balloon.
Several events were staged against the backdrop of Paris landmarks, with beach volleyball played beneath the Eiffel Tower.
The United States topped the overall medal table, finishing level with China on gold medals.
Organisers cleaned up the Seine sufficiently to hold open-water swimming events in the river.
Bangladesh’s uprising
Featured image: Wikimedia Commons — 2024 Bangladesh quota reform movement (freely licensed)
In the summer of 2024, Bangladesh was shaken by a student-led uprising that toppled its long-serving government.
Protests that began in July over a quota system for government jobs escalated into a nationwide movement against Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina after a violent crackdown killed hundreds of people.
On 5 August, Hasina resigned and fled the country by helicopter to neighbouring India, ending more than 15 years in power. Crowds stormed and ransacked her official residence in the capital, Dhaka.
The army announced the formation of an interim government, which was soon led by the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus.
Several hundred people are estimated to have been killed over the course of the unrest.
Hurricanes Helene and Milton
Featured image: Wikimedia Commons — Hurricane Helene (2024) (freely licensed)
Two powerful hurricanes struck the southeastern United States within two weeks of each other in the autumn.
Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida’s Big Bend region on 26 September as a Category 4 storm, then drove far inland, causing catastrophic flooding in the mountains of western North Carolina around the city of Asheville.
More than 200 people were killed across six states, making Helene the deadliest hurricane to strike the US mainland since Katrina in 2005.
On 9 October, Hurricane Milton came ashore on Florida’s Gulf coast near Sarasota, spawning tornadoes and battering communities still reeling from Helene.
Together the two storms caused well over $100 billion in damage. The rapid intensification of both was linked to unusually warm ocean waters.
SpaceX catches a rocket
Featured image: Wikimedia Commons — SpaceX Starship (freely licensed)
On 13 October 2024, SpaceX achieved a milestone in spaceflight during the fifth test of Starship, the largest and most powerful rocket ever built.
After launching from the company’s Starbase site in Texas, the rocket’s enormous first-stage booster, Super Heavy, returned to the launch site around seven minutes later.
Rather than landing on legs or splashing into the sea, the booster was caught in mid-air by two giant mechanical arms — nicknamed “chopsticks” — mounted on the launch tower.
It was the first time a rocket booster had ever been caught this way, a key step toward SpaceX’s goal of making Starship fully and rapidly reusable.
The upper-stage spacecraft continued around the world and splashed down in the Indian Ocean. SpaceX later revealed the catch had come within about a second of being aborted.
South Korea’s martial law crisis
Featured image: Wikimedia Commons — 2024 South Korean martial law crisis (freely licensed)
On the night of 3 December 2024, South Korea’s president, Yoon Suk Yeol, stunned the country by declaring martial law in a late-night television address, citing “anti-state forces.”
It was the first such declaration in South Korea since 1980. Yoon dispatched troops and police to the National Assembly, apparently to stop lawmakers from overturning the decree.
Legislators climbed fences and pushed past soldiers to reach the chamber, then voted unanimously to lift martial law within hours. Yoon rescinded the order at around 4:30am, after it had lasted roughly six hours.
The National Assembly impeached him on 14 December, suspending him from office and plunging the country into a prolonged political crisis.
War across the Middle East
Featured image: Wikimedia Commons — Israel–Hezbollah war (freely licensed)
The war that began with the October 2023 Hamas attack widened across the Middle East in 2024, as fighting in Gaza continued and the Palestinian death toll rose into the tens of thousands.
In April, Iran launched its first-ever direct attack on Israeli soil, firing hundreds of drones and missiles in retaliation for a strike on its consulate in Damascus; most were intercepted.
Conflict with the Iran-backed Lebanese group Hezbollah escalated sharply in September, when thousands of Hezbollah pagers exploded simultaneously in an attack attributed to Israel, followed by an intense bombing campaign and a ground invasion of southern Lebanon.
On 27 September, an Israeli airstrike on Beirut killed Hezbollah’s longtime leader, Hassan Nasrallah.
Iran fired another large barrage of missiles at Israel on 1 October, and Israel struck back at Iranian military sites. A ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah took effect in late November.
The fall of Assad in Syria
Featured image: Wikimedia Commons — Fall of the Assad regime (freely licensed)
In one of the year’s most dramatic turns, the decades-old Assad dictatorship in Syria collapsed in a matter of days.
On 27 November, a coalition of rebel groups led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) launched a surprise offensive from the country’s northwest.
In under two weeks they captured Aleppo, Hama, and Homs, meeting little resistance from a Syrian army worn down by years of war and no longer propped up as firmly by its allies Russia and Iran, both distracted by their own conflicts.
On 8 December, the rebels swept into the capital, Damascus, and President Bashar al-Assad fled to Russia, which granted him asylum.
His fall ended his family’s roughly 50 years of rule and a 13-year civil war that had killed hundreds of thousands and displaced millions.
Crowds poured into the streets to celebrate, as questions loomed over the country’s future under its new Islamist-led leadership.