The pilot of US Airways Flight 1549 lands his plane on Manhattan's Hudson River with no loss of life among his 155 passengers and crew

Amid unprecedented international enthusiasm Barack Obama is inaugurated as the fourteenth President of the USA

One of President Obama's first acts in office is to sign an order that the Guantanamo Bay detention camp is to be closed within a year (a promise that fails to be fulfilled)

President Obama, applying Keynesian economics, announces a massive stimulus package for the US economy (its eventual cost turns out to be $862 bn)

Peru's Supreme Court finds Alberto Fujimori guilty of authorizing death squads and sentences him to 25 years in prison

The sudden death of the pop star Michael Jackson triggers a world-wide emotional response

President Obama's radical bill of health care reform is passed by a margin of seven votes in the House of Representatives and is signed into law two days later

An explosion destroys BP's Deepwater Horizon oil rig, killing eleven people and starting a massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico

Geneticist Craig Venter announces that his team have inserted the genome of a bacterium into a cell to create the world's first synthetic life form

BP announces that a newly fitted cap has finally stopped the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico

President Obama signs into law a sweeping and radical package of reforms in the control of the US financial sector

US Federal estimates are that more than 200 million gallons of oil have spilled into the sea from the Deepwater Horizon disaster (the Exxon Valdez figure was 11 million)

Thirty-three miners are brought safely to the surface after being trapped deep underground for 69 days in the San José mine in Chile

Wikileaks publishes another batch of US government documents, this time diplomatic cables of which about 100,000 are maked 'secret' or 'confidential'

The return of Space Shuttle Atlantis to the Kennedy Space Centre ends NASA's 20-year space shuttle programme

President Obama announces a last-minute deal with congressional leaders on the debt limit, temporarily calming the fears of the financial markets

With no sign of a deal between Obama and Republicans on raising the debt limit, fears grow that the USA might default on its debts on August 2

NASA announces that it has photographic evidence from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter of possible liquid water on the planet in warm seasons

Standard & Poor's downgrades the USA's credit rating from AAA to AA+, further increasing the sense of gloom in stock exchanges

Juno, a solar-powered spacecraft, is launched from Cape Carnaveral on a mission to Jupiter

NASA launches a rocket carrying the roving science laboratory Curiosity, which is programmed to land on Mars on 6 August 2012

The USA formally declares an end to the Iraq War

NASA's Kepler mission discovers the first two earth-size planets outside our solar system

The percentage of American Indians living in urban areas of the USA is now 70%, up from 45% in 1970 and 8% in 1940

Iran blames the USA and Israel for the murder of one of their nuclear scientists by a suicide bomber on a motorcyle