The End is Near......... for this year.

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“To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven,” 2010 (MMX) is a common year that started on a Friday. In the Gregorian calendar, it is the 2010th year of the Common Era or Anno Domini designation; the 10th year of the 3rd millennium and of the 21st century; and the 1st of the 2010s decade. 2010 will end at midnight 31st December. WELCOME 2011 …for this year. Click each slide once to advance

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January 1st  – Spain takes over the Presidency of the Council of Europe Union from Sweden. January 1st  – A suicide bombing occurs at a volleyball game in northwestern Pakistan, killing at least 95, and injuring over 100. January 4th  – The tallest man-made structure to date, the Buri Khalifa in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, is officially opened. January 8th  – The Togo National Football Team is involved in an attack in Angola, and as a result withdraws from the African Cup Of Nations. January 12th  – A 7.0 magnitude earthquake occurs in Haiti, devastating the nation's capital, Port-au-Prince. With a confirmed death toll over 230,000 it is one of the deadliest on record. January 15th  – The longest annular solar eclipse of the 3rd millennium occurs. January 25th  – Ethiopian Airlines Flight 409 crashes into the Mediterranean Sea shortly after take-off from Beirut Rafic Hariri International Airport, killing all 90 people on-board.

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February 3rd  – The sculpture L’Homme Qui Marche (Walking Man) by Alberto Giacometti sells in London for 65 million sterling ($103.7 million), setting a new world record for a work of art sold at auction. February 12th - 28th  – The 2010 Winter Olympics are held in Vancouver and Whistler, Canada. February 18th  – The President of Niger, Tandja Mamadou, is overthrown after a group of soldiers storms the presidential palace and form a ruling junta, the Supreme Council for the Restoration of Democracy headed by chef d'escadron Salou Djibo. February 27th  – An 8.8-magnitude earthquake occurs in Chile, triggering a tsunami over the Pacific and killing 497. The earthquake is one of the largest in recorded history.

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March 8th  – Iraqi authorities have begun counting votes a day after the nation held parliamentary elections for only the second time since the 2003 US invasion. .  March 15th – GAVI, which is supported by the World Health Organization, the World Bank, UNICEF, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and vaccine makers, says it has 40 percent of the $7 billion it needs between now and 2015 to help meet that goal of supplying life-saving immunizations to millions of children in poor countries. March 16th  – The Kasubi Tombs, Uganda's only cultural World Heritage Site, are destroyed by fire. March 23rd  – The ROKS Cheonan, a South Korean Navy ship carrying 104 personnel, sinks off the country's west coast, killing 46. In May, an independent investigation blames North Korea, which denies the allegations

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April 7th   – Kyrgyz President Kurmanbek Bakiyev flees Bishkek amid fierce rioting, sparking a socio political crisis. Former foreign minister Roza Otunbayeva is placed at the head of an interim government as the opposition seizes control. April 10th  – The President of Poland, Lech Kaczyński, is among 96 killed when their airplane crashes in western Russia. April 13th  – A 6.9-magnitude earthquake occurs in Qinghai, China, killing at least 2,000 and injuring more than 10,000. April 14th  – Volcanic ash from one of several eruptions beneath Eyjafjallajökull an ice cap in Iceland, disrupts air traffic across Northern & Western Europe . April 20th  – The Deepwater Horizon oil platform explodes in the Gulf of Mexico, killing eleven workers. The resulting oil spill, one of the largest in history, spreads for several months, damaging the sea-waters. It prompted international debate and doubt about the practice and procedures of offshore drilling. April 27th   – Standard & Poor’s downgrades Greece’s sovereign credit rating to junk four days after the activation of a €45-billion EU–IMF bailout, triggering the decline of stock markets worldwide and of the Euro's value, and furthering a European sovereign debt crisis.

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May 2nd    – The Eurozone and the International Monetary Fund agree to a €110 billion bailout package for Greece. The package involves sharp Greek austerity measures. May 4th  – Nude, Green Leaves and Bust by Pablo Picasso sells in New York for US$106.5 million, setting another new world record for a work of art sold at auction. May 7th  – Scientists conducting the Neanderthal genome project announce that they have sequenced enough of the Neanderthal genome to suggest that Neanderthals and humans may have interbred. May 12th  – Afriqiyah Airways Flight 771 crashes at runway at Tripoli International Airport in Libya, killing 103 of the 104 people on board. May 20th  – Scientists announce that they have created a functional synthetic genome. May 20th  – 5 paintings worth €100 million are stolen from the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. May 22nd  – Air India Express Flight 812 overshoots the runway at Mangalore International Airport in India, killing 158 and leaving 8 survivors. May 31st  – Nine activists are killed in a clash with soldiers when Israeli Navy forces raid and capture a flotilla of ships attempting to break the Gaza blockade.

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June 3rd – Deep sea fish species found in the north Pacific Ocean have mysteriously been caught in the southwest Atlantic, on the other side of the world. It is unclear how the animals, a giant rattail grenadier, pelagic eelpout and deep sea squid, travelled so far. June 6th – Sea ice scientist wins national award… Natalia Galin, 27 a Tasmanian electrical engineer has developed technology to more accurately measure the thickness of snow on sea ice in Antarctica. June 9th   –  Ethnic riots in Kyrgystan between Kyrgyz and Uzbeks results in the deaths of hundreds. June 11th  – The 2010 FIFA World Cup is held in South Africa, and is won by Spain. June 26th – Sprawling Cities Getting Hotter Faster. The number of extreme hot summer days is increasing around the world with global warming, but sprawling cities are racking up these sweltering days faster than more compact cities are. This finding could be important to city planners, particularly because heat waves are a killer worldwide

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July 1st    – Belgium takes over the Presidency of the Council of the European Union from Spain. July 8th  – The first 24-hour flight by a solar powered plane is completed by the Solar Impulse. July 13th  – A study revealed that it was a Storm that Killed Half a Billion Trees in the Amazon in 2005. The study is the first to produce an actual tree body count after an Amazon storm. An estimated 441 million to 663 million trees were destroyed across the whole Amazon basin during the 2005 storm. July 25th  – Wikileaks, an online publisher of anonymous, covert, and classified material, leaks to the public over 90,000 internal reports about the United States-led involvement in the War in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2010. July 29th  – Heavy monsoon rains begin to cause widespread flooding in the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan. Over 1,600 are killed, and more than one million are displaced by the floods. July 30th  – An international team of scientists have hit Greenland bedrock after five years of drilling through 2.5 km of solid ice. Ice core samples from 130,000 to 115,000 years ago - the last time Earth's climate was a few degrees warmer than today - could help forecast the impacts of current global warming.

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August 10th   – The World Health Organization declares the H1N1 influenza pandemic over, saying worldwide flu activity has returned to typical seasonal patterns. August 18th   – British scientists say they have found new evidence that woolly mammoths died out 9,000 years ago because of climate change. The cause of their demise has been debated by scientists for many years and the most common theory is over-hunting by humans. But researchers from Durham University, in northern England, say climate change may have played a part. August 25th   – French engineers have begun an operation to drain a lake under a glacier on Mont Blanc which threatens to flood the Saint Gervais valley. The lake, which is said to contain 65,000 cubic metres (2.3m cubic ft) of water (almost the same amount as 26 Olympic swimming pools), was discovered last month during routine checks. August 31st   – A NASA satellite that spent seven years studying Earth's polar regions ended its successful mission by plunging back to Earth on purpose to burn up in the atmosphere. Some debris from the Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation satellite — known as ICESat — fell into the Barents Sea north of Norway and Russia .

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September 27th – U.S. Geological Survey geologist John Pallister. Stated that in May 2009 an ancient, dead lava field in northwest Saudi Arabia woke up and triggered 30,000 small earthquakes, creating a jagged five-mile-long crack in the ground. Despite being far from any currently active volcanic areas, the Harrat Lunayyir lava field shows all the signs of being charged up from below with a fresh supply of magma in preparation for a new eruption. The Harrat Lunayyir reawakening is a reminder to people all over the world that just about any volcanic field could come back to life September 28th   – Seven people are reported to have been killed and around 100 are missing after a landslide in Oaxaca, Mexico. September 29th – It's hard to think that anything floating in the sky could be heavy. According to Andrew Heymsfield of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, even a single, small puffy cloud can have 400 tons of water in it, or the equivalent weight of 100 elephants. The numbers get staggering as the clouds get bigger. Sticking with the elephant unit, Heymsfield estimated that a typical thunderstorm cloud -- a cumulonimbus -- has 15 million elephants worth of water floating in the air at any given time.

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October 10th   – The Netherlands Antilles are dissolved, with the islands being split up and given a new constitutional status. October 13th  – Thirty-three miners near Copiapó, Chile, trapped 700 metres underground in a mining accident in San José Mine, are brought back to the surface after surviving for a record 69 days. October 22nd  – The International Space Station surpasses the record for the longest continuous human occupation of space, having been continuously inhabited since November 2, 2000 (3641 days). October 23rd  – In preparation for the Seoul summit, finance ministers of the G-20 agree to reform the International Monetary Fund and shift 6% of the voting shares to developing nations and countries with emerging markets. October 25th  – An earthquake and consequent tsunami off the coast of Sumatra, Indonesia, kills over 400 people and leave hundreds missing. October 26th , Indonesia, have killed at least 240 people and forced hundreds of thousands of residents to evacuate.

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November4th    – Aero Caribbean Flight 883 crashes in central Cuba, killing all 68 people on board. November 11th  – The G-20 summit is held in Seoul, South Korea. Korea becomes the first non-G8 nation to host a G-20 leaders summit. November 13th  – Burmese opposition politician Aung San Suu Kyi is released from her house arrest. November 17th  – Researchers at CERN trap 38 antihydrogen atoms for a sixth of a second, marking the first time in history that humans have trapped antimatter. November 20th  – Participants of the 2010 NATO Lisbon summit issued the Lisbon Summit Declaration. November 21st  – Eurozone countries agree to a rescue package, estimated to be €85 billion, for the Republic of Ireland from the European Financial Stability Facility in response to the country's financial crisis. November 22nd  – A stampede during Bon Om Thook (Khmer Water Festival) celebrations in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, kills 347. November 23rd  – North Korea shells Yeonpyeong Island, prompting a military response by South Korea. The incident caused an escalation of tension on the Korean Peninsula and prompted widespread international condemnation.The United Nations declared it to be one of the most serious incidents since the end of the Korean War. November 28h  – WikiLeaks releases a collection of more than 250,000 American diplomatic cables, including 100,000 marked "secret" or "confidential". November 29th   – The 2010 United Nations Climate Change Conference was held in Cancún, Mexico.

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December 2nd –  NASA announces the discovery of new arsenic-based life form in California. December 8th  – Plants could grow larger and create a cooling effect in a world with twice as much carbon dioxide, but could not halt or reverse climate change, according to a NASA study. It has long been known that plants - which use carbon dioxide, sunlight and water to grow through the process of photosynthesis - are able to adapt to higher carbon dioxide levels by using nutrients more efficiently and growing bigger leaves. December 11th   –  Scientists look at whether climate change is causing ocean waves becoming bigger and more powerful. Using buoy data and models based on wind patterns, scientists say the waves off the coast of the Pacific Northwest and along the Atlantic seaboard from West Palm Beach, Fla., to Cape Hatteras, N.C., are steadily increasing in size. December 16th   –  Xiby has just ended his online news research having made use of available Internet resources. The gathered information has by now been read and one hopes eagerly to be shared.