The US ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, is killed in a terrorist attack on the embassy in Benghazi

US embassies in Yemen and Egypt are attacked, as the protests against Innocence of Muslims spread

Burma's president Thein Sein says that he would accept Aung San Suu Kyi as his successor

A gunman severely wounds a 14-year-old Pakistani girl, Malala Yousafzai, because of her protests against the Taliban suppression of girls' schools

The Nobel Peace Prize, set up by the Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, is awarded in a controversial decision tto the European Union

Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner, jumping from a balloon 24 miles up, becomes the first man to break the speed of sound in freefall

Experts who gave tragically wrong earthquake advice at L'Aquila in 2009 are given six-year sentences for manslaughter

Superstorm Sandy, after devastating much of the Caribbean, reaches the east coast of the USA, killing more than 100 people

Barack Obama wins a second term, defeating Republican Mitt Romney in the US presidential election

The UN General Assembly, defying Israel, grants Palestine the status of a non-member observer state

At a UN Climate Change conference in Qatar there is agreement to extend the existing Kyoto Protocol to 2020

Adam Lanza shoots and kills twenty children and six staff members in the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connnecticut

In The Orphan Master's Son Adam Johnson follows the central character in a successful and increasingly terrifying career through the horrors of contemporary North Korea

Anish Kapoor's 114.5 metres tall sculpture, AncelorMittal Orbit, is erected in the Queen Elizabeth Park, created in East London for the Olympic Games

Hilary Mantel wins the Booker Prize with Bring Up the Bodies, the second volume of her projected trilogy, having won it in 2009 with the first volume, Wolf Hall

The Burj Qatar in Doha, by the French architect Jean Nouvel, is named by the Council on Tall Buildings the best of its kind in the Middle East and North Africa

Benni Stefano, Italy's leading satirical novelist, publishes Di tutti le ricchezze ("Of all the riches") about unexpected disturbances in the quiet life of a retired professor

The first community opera, Free Will, composed online by a group of volunteers, has its premiere in the Finnish medieval castle of Olavinlinna

One of four versions of The Scream, painted by Edvard Munch, is sold by Sotheby's in New York for nearly $120 million, becoming the most expensive work of art sold at auction

The German novelist and poet Herta Müller publishes Vater telefoniert mit den Fliegen ("Father is calling the Flies"), her first book of poetry since winning the Nobel Prize in 2009

Argentina submits a claim for large areas of the South Atlantic, including the Falkland Islands, under the 1982 Law of the Sea Convention

The title of the Venice Biennale is The Encylopedic Palace, with a scale model displayed of Marino Auriti's imaginary museum of all the world's knowledge

The entire Neanderthal genome is sequenced, from the toe bone of a 150,000-year-old individual found in a cave in Siberia

American artist Jeff Koon's Balloon Dog (Orange) sells at Christie's in New York for $58.4 million, becoming the most expensive work by a living artist sold at auction

Plans are published for an ambitious Garden Bridge, designed for pedestrians by Thomas Heatherwick, to span the Thames in London with trees and a garden on its surface