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 28,600 cases and more than 11,300 deaths were recorded before the epidemic ended in 2016, prompting reforms of global outbreak response and the first effective Ebola vaccine.
President Viktor Yanukovych fled Kyiv and was removed by parliament on 22 February 2014; early elections followed and Ukraine signed the EU Association Agreement.
The Boeing 777 is believed to have crashed in the southern Indian Ocean; despite the largest search in aviation history and debris found in Africa, the main wreckage and the cause remain unknown.
ISIS ruled a self-declared caliphate across much of Iraq and Syria for nearly five years before an international coalition and local forces destroyed it in 2019; it survives as an insurgent network with affiliates abroad.
Philae became the first spacecraft to land on a comet, though it bounced into a shaded crevice, while the Rosetta orbiter studied the comet for more than two years.
Russia incorporated Crimea and Sevastopol as federal subjects; Ukraine and most UN member states do not recognise the annexation, and Western sanctions followed.
The earthquake and its aftershocks killed nearly 9,000 people in Nepal, destroyed about half a million homes and badly damaged UNESCO-listed monuments, causing losses of about 7 billion US dollars.
Nearly every country agreed to hold global warming well below 2°C and pursue 1.5°C, through national pledges strengthened every five years; the treaty entered into force on 4 November 2016.
The Supreme Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment requires every state to license and recognise marriages between two people of the same sex.
The first stage of an orbital-class rocket was landed upright and intact after launching a payload to orbit, paving the way for routine booster reuse.
The first direct detection of gravitational waves, and the first observation of two black holes merging, opened gravitational-wave astronomy and earned a Nobel Prize in 2017.
Over a million people reached the EU in 2015; border fences, the closure of the Balkan route and the EU-Turkey Statement of March 2016 sharply reduced arrivals.
