2016In the Brexit referendum of June 23, 52 percent of the voting British public opted to leave the European Union. The wheels were set in motion for the United Kingdom to invoke Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, but the Britons continue to be in turmoil over leaving.Image by Hannibal Hanschke/Reuters
2018A data mining scandal involving Cambridge Analytica, the sale of data from some 50 million Facebook users, a Congressional grilling for founder Mark Zuckerberg, and the loss of $119 billion in stock value in a single day spelled a terrible year for the world’s leading social media network. In other Big Tech news, Apple became the fi rst American publicly traded company to reach $1 trillion in value, beating other Silicon Valley giants such as Amazon and Microsoft.Image by Win McNamee/Reuters
2019In one of the largest climate mobilisations in history, an international protest by young people and adults addressed the climate crisis and demanded action just before the UN Climate Summit was held in September in New York. Later, 500,000 people marched in a protest led by activist Greta Thunberg and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in Montreal. In its fi rst report since 2005, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) warned that biodiversity loss is “unprecedented”, with over a million species now threatened with extinction, largely as a result of human actions.Image by Ricardo Moraes/Reuters
