2005
YouTube is born
Three former PayPal employees registered a domain to share home videos. The first upload, eighteen seconds at the San Diego Zoo, was titled "Me at the zoo." Within a year Google bought the company for $1.65 billion in stock and the entire history of moving images began migrating onto everyone's phone.
John Paul II dies
The Polish pope who had helped bring down communism, who had survived a 1981 assassination attempt and visited 129 countries, died at the Vatican after a long Parkinson's decline. Four million pilgrims filed past his coffin in St. Peter's Square. "Santo subito," the crowds chanted. Sainthood would come within nine years.
Kashmir earthquake
A magnitude 7.6 quake shook the mountains of Pakistani-administered Kashmir, flattening schools at the start of the day and killing more than 86,000 people in one of the deadliest earthquakes of the century. Children buried under collapsed classrooms became the disaster's defining image. India and Pakistan briefly cooperated across the Line of Control to deliver relief.
Beirut bomb kills Hariri
A truck bomb on the Beirut corniche killed former Lebanese prime minister Rafic Hariri and twenty-one others in a massive explosion that left a crater in the seafront road. Lebanese poured into Martyrs' Square in what came to be called the Cedar Revolution. Within months Syrian troops withdrew after twenty-nine years of occupation, though their political shadow lingered.
Hurricane Katrina drowns New Orleans
The levees failed before noon and most of the city went underwater. More than 1,800 people died, mostly poor and Black, and tens of thousands were marooned in the flooded Superdome and on highway overpasses for days. The federal response collapsed on television and George W. Bush's presidency never recovered.
London 7/7 bombings
Four British-born suicide bombers detonated rucksacks packed with homemade peroxide explosives on three Underground trains and a double-decker bus during the morning commute, killing fifty-two passengers and injuring over seven hundred. London had won the Olympic bid the day before. Tony Blair flew back from the G8 summit in Scotland to a city stunned and defiant in equal measure.
Benedict XVI elected
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the German theologian who had been John Paul II's doctrinal enforcer for twenty-four years, became the first pope from his country in nearly a thousand years. He was seventy-eight, bookish, and clearly uncomfortable on the loggia. His papacy would prove brief, marked by scandal and controversy, and would end with a resignation unprecedented in six hundred years.