Paris - Donald Trump's return to the White House, Israel's expansion of the Gaza war into Lebanon, and the Olympics that lit up Paris were among the news events that marked 2024. AFP looks back at 12 major stories that made the headlines:
War in the Mideast - More than a year into the war unleashed when Palestinian armed group Hamas launched the deadliest attack on Israel in its history on October 7, 2023, there has been no let-up in the violence.
The conflict expanded as Israel turned its focus on Hezbollah and extended its offensive into Lebanon. In a major turning point, on September 27, Israel's air force carried out a huge strike on Hezbollah's south Beirut stronghold, killing the movement's leader Hassan Nasrallah. Israel then launched a ground offensive in southern Lebanon on September 30 against Hezbollah's strongholds there.
The conflict has killed at least 3,768 people in Lebanon since October 2023, according to the health ministry, most of them since September 2024. On the Israeli side, authorities say at least 82 soldiers and 47 civilians have been killed in the war with Hezbollah.
The Israeli military has also killed several key figures of Hamas in Gaza, including Yahya Sinwar. Hamas's attack resulted in the deaths of 1,206 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.
Of the 251 people taken hostage in the Gaza Strip on October 7, 97 are still held captive, including 34 the Israeli military says are dead.
Repeated ceasefire negotiations have failed and those who remain in Gaza have been plunged into what the UN has described as "an abyss of suffering" and "the most profound of humanitarian disasters".
The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said the death toll from the war there has reached 44,235 people, the majority of them civilians. The United Nations considers the figures reliable.
- Russia-Ukraine conflict escalates - After a failed counteroffensive in 2023, following Russia's invasion on February 24, 2022, Ukraine in August launched a surprise incursion into Russia's Kursk region. One of the aims of the offensive -- the largest by a foreign army on Russian soil since World War II -- was to divert Moscow's forces from fighting in eastern Ukraine.
However, the effort seems to have fallen short of that goal. Russia has responded with deadly strikes and Kyiv's outgunned and outmanned troops have struggled to hold back steady advances from Russian forces, notably in the eastern Donetsk region. The West, Ukraine, and South Korea say thousands of North Korean soldiers are in Russia.
In November Ukraine for the first time used Western-supplied long-range missiles against Russia, after getting US and British clearance. Russia responded by hitting Ukraine with an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) without a nuclear warhead, vowing to continue such attacks if Kyiv continued its attacks with Western weapons. Putin has also threatened to attack countries providing the weapons to the Ukrainians, brandishing the threat of nuclear weapons.
Trump is back - Donald Trump once again stunned the world, and wrong-footed pollsters who had projected a very tight race, to win the US presidential election. He won all seven swing states, keeping control of the House and winning back the Senate. He is also on course to win the popular vote. He beat his Democrat rival Kamala Harris, who had been parachuted into the process just 100 days before the election after the 81-year-old outgoing President Joe Biden pulled out. That was just one twist in a particularly tumultuous campaign that also included two failed assassination attempts on Trump, who faced four indictments and a criminal conviction. He returns to the White House on January 20, 2025.
Russia tightens grip - Vladimir Putin began his fifth term as Russian president in May after winning a presidential election that the West slammed as a sham. His nemesis Alexei Navalny died in February in murky circumstances in the Arctic prison where he had been serving a 19-year sentence for leading an "extremist" organization. Since his death, Russian authorities have escalated a campaign against the Kremlin critic's backers, allies, and family -- arresting journalists who covered his court hearings and adding his wife, Yulia Navalnaya, to a "terrorists and extremists" blacklist. In August Moscow negotiated the biggest East-West prisoner swap since 2010, releasing 16 Westerners and Russians including US journalist Evan Gershkovich, in exchange for 10 Russians.
Paris Olympics joy - The Summer Games in the French capital brought a welcome respite, particularly in the host country that had for weeks been gripped by bitter political jockeying caused by snap parliamentary elections. But for three sunny weeks, Paris and its world-famous monuments and sites, from the Eiffel Tower to Versailles, welcomed a spectacular display of sport, kicking off with an extravagant (if rain-drenched) opening ceremony along the Seine. Records tumbled and stars were crowned, from home crowd darling and swim sensation Leon Marchand to US gym genius Simone Biles who made a joyful return to glory.
Social media scrutiny - In 2024 social media titans faced growing scrutiny of their practices. In France in August, the Russian-born founder of the controversial Telegram app, Pavel Durov, was arrested and charged with failing to curb extremist and illegal content on his network, which has 900 million users. TikTok, meanwhile, was in the crosshairs of the US Federal Trade Commission, which accused it of violating child privacy laws. But it was arguably US billionaire Elon Musk and his social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, that drew the most fire. In August, X was banned for 40 days in Brazil -- its largest Latin American market with 22 million users -- in a legal tussle over disinformation. Supreme Court judge Alexandre de Moraes branded X a danger to democracy. The platform became available again in October after it agreed to pay some $5.2 million in fines for flouting court decisions. Another social media heavyweight, TikTok, faces trouble in the United States following a law backed by Joe Biden ordering the popular app to divest from Bytedance, its Chinese owner. TikTok has until January to find a buyer or face the ban, but President-elect Trump has voiced opposition to it. - Chinese decline - Beijing launched a salvo of measures aimed at boosting its economy including reductions in key rates and an increase in the debt limit for local authorities. The world's second-biggest economy has been hit by a property crisis and sluggish household consumption. It has also been locked in bitter trade disputes with the United States and European Union after the entry into force of steep increases in US customs duties on electric cars, batteries for electric vehicles, and solar panels. In response, Beijing has slapped "temporary anti-dumping measures" on imports from the EU of products including cognac. With Trump's US election win China also fears the imposition of increased customs duties on all its goods imported into the United States.
Deadly flooding - The summer of 2024 was the hottest ever recorded on Earth. Relentless global warming provoked heatwaves, droughts and deadly flooding, with the wet weather proving particularly dramatic. An unusually intense rainy season in West and Central Africa unleashed a humanitarian crisis killing hundreds of people and displacing hundreds of thousands of others. In September of wild weather, Hurricane Helene pounded the southeast United States, Typhoon Krathon slammed into Taiwan and Storm Boris brought floods and devastation to central Europe. Typhoons Yagi and Bebinca left a trail of destruction in Asia while deadly floods hit Nepal, Japan, and west and central Africa. And in October a devastating Mediterranean storm lashed eastern Spain, triggering its worst floods in decades that killed more than 200 people.
Africa's youth rise up - In Senegal, Bassirou Diomaye Faye became the youngest president since Independence in 1960, elected in March at the age of 44 on the promise of radical change in a country where 75 percent of the population is under 35 years old. In Kenya in June, a protest movement by demonstrators in their twenties forced President William Ruto to withdraw an unpopular budget proposal and reshuffle his government. Young people were also the drivers of change in Botswana, playing a key role in the historic electoral victory in October of the opposition against a party that had ruled since independence nearly six decades ago.
Far-right gains in Europe - European elections in June confirmed nationalist and far-right parties rising in France, Germany, Belgium, Austria, Italy and the Netherlands. This also translated at the national level. Austria's far-right Freedom Party won a historic victory in legislative elections. In France, a republican bloc prevented the far-right National Rally from coming to power in snap parliamentary elections, but fell out swiftly after the vote.
The AFD in Germany won a regional election for the first time and achieved historically high scores in two others. And meanwhile, in England and Northern Irelan,d dozens of towns were rocked by anti-immigration riots fuelled by far-right agitators. - Venezuela's strong man - Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro won a third six-year term in July, but the results of the vote were contested by the opposition and internationally.
After the announcement of his victory, protests erupted that were brutally repressed by government forces, leaving 27 people dead and some 200 injured. More than 2,400 people were arrested. The opposition candidate, Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia, took refuge in Spain and the opposition leader, Maria Corina Machado, is also living in hiding. - Taylor Swift mania - US megastar Taylor Swift pursued her world tour, which in 2023 had already topped the symbolic bar of one billion dollars in revenue, and was on course to double that by the end of December, according to the US magazine Pollstar. Swift kicked off the European leg of her "Eras Tour" in May in Paris and rounded if off in August, attracting hundreds of thousands of fans or "Swifties". But the three concerts scheduled in Vienna were cancelled after authorities arrested a man in connection with an Islamist attack plot.
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