2024 in review

Donald Trump

He won all seven swing states.

💡 Did you know? Trump became only the second president with two non-consecutive terms.

Butler

His raised-fist photo with "Fight! Fight! Fight!" went around the world.

💡 Did you know? A spectator died; the gunman was shot dead.

Assad

Bashar al-Assad fled to Moscow.

💡 Did you know? The offensive took just eleven days from launch to Damascus.

budget row

Scholz called a confidence vote in December and lost it as planned.

💡 Did you know? The collapse fell on the very day of Trump's election win.

Spain

Germany fell to the eventual champions in the quarter-final: 2 to 1 in the 119th minute.

💡 Did you know? 16-year-old Lamine Yamal became the tournament's breakout star.

Seine

It was the first opening ceremony ever held outside a stadium.

💡 Did you know? Despite pouring rain, hundreds of thousands lined the banks.

cannabis

Cultivation clubs launched in July.

💡 Did you know? Germany became the largest EU country with legal cannabis.

Notre-Dame

About 2,000 craftspeople carried out the rebuild.

💡 Did you know? Macron had personally promised the five-year deadline and kept it.

Starship booster

The 70-metre colossus hovered precisely into the catch arms.

💡 Did you know? Musk calls the catch tower "Mechazilla".

artificial intelligence

AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton simultaneously warned about his own technology.

💡 Did you know? AlphaFold predicted the structure of nearly every known protein.

CrowdStrike

It counts as the biggest IT outage in history.

💡 Did you know? The fix was often manual: computer by computer, in safe mode.

Franz Beckenbauer

The memorial was held in Munich's Allianz Arena.

💡 Did you know? Only three men have won the World Cup as player and coach; he was one.

Alexei Navalny

Thousands defied bans to attend his Moscow funeral.

💡 Did you know? The documentary "Navalny" had won the 2023 Oscar.

South Korea

Lawmakers climbed fences to reach the vote.

💡 Did you know? It was South Korea's first martial law since 1980.

100,000 dollars

Spot Bitcoin ETFs had been approved at the start of 2024.

💡 Did you know? At the famous 2010 pizza purchase, one bitcoin was worth a fraction of a cent.

Raygun

Breaking made its Olympic debut in Paris and likely its farewell.

💡 Did you know? Her real name is Rachael Gunn: she holds a PhD in cultural studies, on the breaking scene.

Nemo

It brought the 2025 contest to Basel.

💡 Did you know? Switzerland's first win in 1956 was also the very first Eurovision.

Valencia

In many places the warning text arrived only after the water did.

💡 Did you know? It was Spain's worst flood disaster in decades.

Inside Out 2

The new star in the head: the emotion Anxiety.

💡 Did you know? China's "Ne Zha 2" snatched the record as early as 2025.

dissolution of the National Assembly

The National Rally list had won the European election in France with more than 31 percent of the vote.

💡 Did you know? In the snap elections the left-wing New Popular Front came first, but without an absolute majority.