Era · 1945 – present
From the Cold War and the Space Race to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the world we live in today.
About 50 people died and damage reached roughly 15-20 billion US dollars; the disaster led to large-scale buyouts of flood-prone property and a rethinking of levee-based flood control.
The ANC won 62.65% of the vote, and Nelson Mandela became president of a Government of National Unity on 10 May 1994, formally ending apartheid.
An estimated 500,000-800,000 people, overwhelmingly Tutsi, were murdered before the Rwandan Patriotic Front defeated the genocidal government in July 1994.
The first fixed link between Britain and continental Europe since the Ice Age opened, carrying shuttle trains, Eurostar passenger trains and freight.
The earthquake killed 57 people, injured more than 8,700 and caused about 20 billion US dollars or more in damage, prompting major changes to steel-frame design, hospital safety and earthquake insurance.
Rabin died of his wounds the same night; Shimon Peres succeeded him, and the Oslo peace process lost its leading Israeli champion.
The war in Bosnia and Herzegovina ended, and the country was preserved as one state made up of two largely autonomous entities under international supervision.
More than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys were killed; international courts later ruled that the massacre was genocide.
The earthquake killed 6,434 people, destroyed or damaged about 250,000 buildings and caused around 10 trillion yen in losses, leading to reforms in disaster response and the rise of Japanese volunteer organisations.
The bombing killed 168 people, including 19 children; Timothy McVeigh was executed in 2001 and Terry Nichols received life sentences, and the attack led to new anti-terrorism and building-security laws.
The commission documented gross human rights violations from 1960 to 1994, granted amnesty to a minority of applicants and became a model for truth commissions worldwide.
Dolly proved that a specialised adult cell could be reprogrammed to produce a whole new animal, transforming developmental biology and prompting worldwide laws on human cloning.
