2009 CHRONOLOGY: Major world events in 2009: Part 2

Dec 31, 2009, 16:16 GMT

Berlin - Following is a part two of a chronology of major world events that took place in 2009:

MAY

3 - US airstrike kills 140 civilians in Afghanistan's Farah province.

3 - Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's wife announces her plans to divorce, a decision that comes after a newspaper report of her husband attending the 18th birthday party of a lingerie model.

4 - Nepal's Maoist government collapses after eight months over sacking of army chief.

7 - Patxi Lopez is sworn in as the first pro-Spanish prime minister of Spain's Basque region.

9 - Jacob Zuma sworn in as South African president.

10 - Chad repels rebel attack, killing over 200 fighters aiming to reach the capital N'Djamena and depose President Idriss Deby.

16 - Alliance led by India's ruling Congress Party wins a decisive victory in general elections.

18 - Sri Lankan troops kill Tamil rebel leader Velupillai Prabhakaran, ending 26-year civil war.

19 - House of Commons speaker Michael Martin resigns over abuse of expense claims by British parliamentarians.

21 - Egyptian billionaire real-estate tycoon Hisham Talaat Mustafa sentenced to death for the murder of Lebanese pop singer Suzanne Tamim.

23 - Former South Korean president Roh Moo Hyun commits suicide following bribery investigation.

25 - At least 100 people killed, 10,000 affected as cyclone Aila hits eastern India, Bangladesh.

25 - North Korea conducts its second underground nuclear test.

JUNE

1 - US car giant General Motors enters bankruptcy; exits six weeks later under government control.

1 - Air France Airbus crashes into Atlantic off northeastern Brazil killing 228 people, no survivors. Search called off in August after 51 bodies found.

3 - Organization of American States (OAS) lifts 47-year-old suspension of Cuba from membership. For readmission, Cuba must apply and demonstrate it is living up to OAS principles of democracy and human rights, the OAS says.

4 - Obama gives historic speech at Cairo University to reach out to Muslim world.

5 - Fire kills 48 young children at daycare centre in Hermosillo, Mexico.

8 - Omar Bongo, Africa's longest-serving president, dies in a Barcelona hospital aged 73 after 41 years in power.

9 - Royal Dutch Shell agrees to pay 15.5 million dollars to settle a lawsuit accusing it of human rights abuses brought by the families of activists executed in Nigeria.

12 - UN Security Council votes for new sanctions against North Korea following nuclear test.

12 - Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wins landslide victory in presidential election opposition claims was rigged. Large numbers of demonstrators and dissidents following days of protests.

12 - UN Security Council imposes even tougher sanctions against North Korea for exploding nuclear device.

14 - Seven Germans, a Briton and a South Korean kidnapped in restive north-western Yemeni province of Saada. Three found dead and fate of the six others remains unknown.

25 - King of Pop Michael Jackson dies from the hospital anaesthetic Propofil intended to help him with insomnia, just days before a planned comeback tour starting in London.

28 - Military coup topples Honduran President Manuel Zelaya. Honduras subsequently suspended from OAS.

29 - Bernard Madoff, chief symbol of US financial greed, is sentenced to 150 years in prison for decades-long, 65- billion-dollar 'Ponzi' rip off scheme.

JULY

1 - Egyptian pharmacist Marwa el-Shirbini stabbed to death in a Germany courtroom in a racially motivated attack against the pregnant 31-year-old. The assailant is given life imprisonment on November 12.

1 - Sweden assumes rotating presidency of the European Union.

5 - Deadly riots erupt in far western Chinese city of Urumqi between Uighurs and Han Chinese. At least 197 people die.

8 - President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono wins by a landslide in Indonesian presidential elections.

8 - The Group of Eight most-industrialised nations' summit begins in the earthquake devastated Italian city of L'Aquila.

11 - Barack Obama arrives in Ghana for his first official visit to Africa as US president - upsetting Kenya, where his father was born.

July 12 - Lithuania gains its first-ever female president when 53- year-old Dalia Grybauskaite is sworn into office. A former EU commissioner, she won a landslide victory in elections held in May.

17 - Pope Benedict XVI breaks his wrist in a fall during his summer vacation in the Italian Alps.

18 - Mauritania's former military leader Mohammed Ould Abdul Aziz wins presidential elections.

23 - Carmaker Porsche's big to take over Volkswagen fails, and VW instead takes over Porsche. Both boards adopt the plan. Porsche chief executive Wendelin Wiedeking resigns.

24 - The 'Arctic Sea', a Finnish-owned, Maltese-registered ship with a 15-strong Russian crew boarded by pirates in the Baltic Sea. Russia navy forces free the freighter off Cape Verde Islands weeks later.

29 - Malam Bacai Sanha declared winner of presidential elections to replace assassinated Joao Bernardo Vieira in Guinea-Bissau and vows to change the nation's role as hub for drugs smuggling.

30 - Nigerian authorities finally restore order after five days of violence during which an Islamist sect attacked police stations. More than 800 people, including the sect leader, are killed.

30 - ETA car bomb kills two police officers on Majorca.

31 - Philippine democracy icon and former president Corazon Aquino dies, millions of Filipinos turn out for her wake.

AUGUST

7 - Britain's Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs released from jail on compassionate grounds.

8 - A centre-right coalition achieves a working majority in Moldova's parliament, and begins assembling the first non-Communist government in the former Soviet republic, in a decade.

8 - Typhoon Morakot hits kills more than 760 people in Taiwan.

11 - Myanmar democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi sentenced to 3 years prison, sentence later commuted to 18 months house arrest.

11 - Josef Scheungraber, 90, former Germany army officer, is jailed for life in Munich for June 1944 military atrocity (10 dead) in an Italian village.

17 - Collapse at Sayano-Shushenskaya hydro-electric plant, Russia's largest, leaves more than 70 dead.

18 - Former South Korean president and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Kim Dae Jung dies.

19 - At least 100 people killed in coordinated wave of bomb attacks in central Baghdad.

20 - Afghanistan begins drawn out presidential elections marred by allegations of widespread vote-rigging. Hamid Karzai sworn in to new, five-year term on November 19.

20 - Abdel Basset al-Megrahi, who was convicted of the 1988 Lockerbie bombing of a Pan Am airliner which killed 270 people, freed from jail in Scotland for health reasons.

21 - Hungarian President Laszlo Solyom refused entry to Slovakia amid diplomatic row over Slovak restrictions on use of minority languages.

25 - Senator Edward 'Ted' Kennedy, 77, dies of brain cancer, two weeks after sister Eunice Shriver, 88, dies of stroke.

26 - Blast in Kandahar, Afghanistan, kills 43 people.

27 - Saudi Arabia's deputy interior minister, Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, survives an assassination attempt when a man wanted on terrorism charges blows himself up in the minister's office.

28 - Court puts girl, 13, who wanted to sail solo around the world, in state custody.

29 - India's first lunar mission ends after contact is lost with the spacecraft.

30 - Opposition Democratic Party of Japan wins landslide victory in general elections, ousts ruling Liberal Democrats.