The United Arab Emirates and Bahrain normalised ties with Israel on September 15 as Palestinians condemned the move as a “stab in the back”.

EU leaders signed their post-Brexit trade deal with Britain and dispatched it to London on an RAF jet yesterday, setting their seal on a drawn-out divorce just hours before the UK brings its half-century European experiment to an end.

Britain became the first country to leave the European Union on January 31 following its 2016 Brexit referendum. But crucial talks on future ties and trade with the bloc dragged on for months, breaking deadline after deadline as negotiators try to avert a hard Brexit before a last-gasp deal on Christmas Eve.

The US and Chile yesterday reported their first cases of the more contagious variant of Covid-19 after several European and Asian countries confirmed its presence.

It was a year like no other. The world has seen many wars, ground shaking political unrests, revolutions and devastating natural calamities.

A record-breaking Atlantic hurricane season, flash floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and wildfires plagued already reeling communities from Australia to Turkey this year.

2020 saw US-China relations nosedive, with Trump calling Covid-19 the “China virus” and saying Beijing was responsible for “a mass worldwide killing”.

A massive explosion on August 4 destroyed much of Beirut’s port and devastated swathes of the capital, killing more than 200 and injuring at least 6,500.

On June 30, a year after a massive wave of demonstrations, China imposed a sweeping new security law on Hong Kong that opponents say undermines the semi-autonomous city’s liberties, promised under its handover from Britain in 1997. Pro-democracy lawmakers were ousted, harassed and arrested.

The world held its breath after top Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani was killed in a US drone strike in Iraq on January 3, days after pro-Iranian protesters storm the US embassy in Baghdad.

The killing of George Floyd, a 46-year-old African American, by white police officers on May 25 in Minneapolis sparked protests across the US and inspired anti-racism rallies across the world.

Deeply-divided Americans voted in record numbers in the November 3 presidential election between outgoing Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Joe Biden after a nasty election campaign.

Nearly 2,200 migrants died trying to reach Spain by sea this year, the vast majority of them on their way to the Canary Islands, a migrant rights group said Tuesday.

Donald Trump, facing a humiliating first veto override of his presidency, lashed out at Republican leaders in Congress on Tuesday as relations soured ahead of a crucial pair of runoff elections in Georgia that could determine control of the Senate.

NOTABLE DEATHS

Indonesia has banned the controversial and politically influential hardline group the Islamic Defender’s Front, the chief security minister announced yesterday.

On January 8, a Ukrainian International flight crashed in Iran, killing all 176 people on board. On January 11, it was revealed that the crash was due to missiles launched by Iran.Tehran said they mistook the airliner for enemy jet.

A Chinese court yesterday jailed 10 Hong Kong democracy activists for up to three years over a bid to flee the city by speedboat to Taiwan, as a crackdown on dissent in the territory intensifies.

On January 11, less than two weeks after it alerts a cluster of pneumonia cases “of unknown cause”, Beijing announces its first death from an illness which will become known as Covid-19.

Talks between India and China have yet to make headway to end a standoff on a disputed section of their Himalayan border, India’s defence minister said yesterday, as thousands of troops from both sides faced a freezing winter in the mountains.