December 17 – United States President Barack Obama and Cuban President Raúl Castro announce the beginning of a process of normalizing relations between Cuba and the United States, ending a 54-year stretch of hostility between the two nations. In the 1950s and 1960s, African Americans who were well-off frequently saw less racial discrimination, both generally and in their own lives, than did those who were poor. February 20 – 2002 El Ayyat railway accident: A train fire in El Ayyat, Egypt kills at least 370 people.

LinkedIn acknowledged that it had been made aware of the breach, and said it had reset the passwords of affected accounts. February 14 – The State of Bahrain is declared a constitutional monarchy and becomes the Kingdom of Bahrain. Experian subsidiary Court Ventures fell victim in 2013 when a Vietnamese man tricked it into giving him access to a database containing 200 million personal records by posing as a private investigator from Singapore.Verizon’s CISO Chandra McMahon said at the time: “Verizon is committed to the highest standards of accountability and transparency, and we proactively work to ensure the safety and security of our users and networks in an evolving landscape of online threats. The abdication ends the Heisei era of Japan and ushers in the Reiwa era with new emperor Naruhito ascending to the throne on May 1. There is a lack of general agreement over how to pronounce specific years of the 21st century in English. The need for affirmative action will decline as black students SAT scores come to resemble those of whites with similar incomes. September 17 – The Occupy movement, an international protest movement against social and economic inequality, takes shape.

January 18 – The Sierra Leone Civil War comes to a conclusion with the defeat of the Revolutionary United Front by government forces. That frustrated group led a secessionist movement; what might embittered and resource-rich African Americans do?Displaced Palestinians were taking refuge at the hospital, resulting in a number of fatalities and injuries.

Academics have pointed out that the early years of previous centuries were commonly pronounced as, for example, "eighteen oh five" (for 1805) and "nineteen oh five" (for 1905). January 6 – The Boston Globe publishes results of an investigation leading to the criminal prosecutions of five Roman Catholic priests and bringing widespread attention to the sexual abuse of minors by Catholic clergy. The data are too sparse to be certain of any conclusion, especially for Asian Americans, but Latinos and probably Asians are more supportive of policies to encourage immigration and offer aid to immigrants than are African Americans and whites.The information was being sold as part of a collected dump also including the likes of MyFitnessPal (more on that below), MyHeritage (92 million), ShareThis, Armor Games, and dating app CoffeeMeetsBagel.