January
Cristiano Ronaldo joined Saudi Arabian club Al Nassr for the “biggest salary ever in football”, leaving Manchester United after criticizing it publicly.
February
Residents of adjacent Palestinian villages knew from long experience to expect periodic acts of retaliation when a Palestinian shooter killed two Israeli settlers in the northern region of the occupied West Bank. However, few predicted the methodical wrath that night’s crowds from neighboring Israeli settlements would display.
Initial estimates from Israeli rights groups and Palestinian officials indicated that settlers destroyed and damaged at least 200 buildings in four Palestinian communities. One Palestinian source also claimed that one Palestinian had been murdered in the settler attack.
March
A 60-minute daily screen time limit for users under the age of 18 was introduced by the social media site TikTok in response to complaints about its dangerous and addictive algorithms. Young people would need to submit a passcode in order to continue using the service that day if they reached the new limit.
April
The Royal Institute of British Architects awarded Pakistani architect Yasmeen Lari the Royal Gold Medal for 2023 in appreciation of the humanitarian efforts “she has undertaken since her retirement”.
Lari, the first female architect in Pakistan, is the second woman after Zaha Hadid to be awarded the honor on her own. After leaving the professional business, she was honored for her socially conscious work and for building homes for the most marginalized groups in the nation.
May
The UK’s fertility regulator confirmed that a child was born using three people’s DNA for the first time. The remaining 0.1% of their DNA comes from a third donor woman. Their two parents make up the majority of their genetic makeup. The innovative approach was an attempt to prevent children from being born with potentially fatal mitochondrial abnormalities.
June
In the wake of Cyclone Biparjoy, more than 180,000 people were evacuated from India and Pakistan as it made impact as a category 1 storm near the Gujarat coast. In both countries, hundreds of thousands of evacuees were relocated to makeshift shelters. Low-lying coastal areas might be submerged by tidal waves as high as two to three meters, according to India’s Meteorological Department.
July
In Geneva, Switzerland, the world witnessed its first robot-human press conference. Questioning during the AI For Good UN summit, several humanoid robots were asked if they might rebel against their creators.
August
After 14 hours, eight people were spectacularly saved from a cable car in the northwest Pakistani province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The eight people—six of whom were teenagers—were hauled to safety after a sophisticated operation involving at least four helicopters and a team of zip wire professionals, fourteen hours after the cable lines snapped.
September
Chioma Nnadi, a fashion journalist, was appointed as the new editor of British Vogue, becoming the first black woman to lead a major fashion magazine.
British Vogue is a British fashion magazine based in London and first published in 1916. It is the British edition of the American magazine Vogue and is owned and distributed by Condé Nast.
October
In Iraq’s largest Christian town, a fire broke out during a wedding, leaving at least 94 people dead and 100 injured. The catastrophe occurred while hundreds of people were having a banqueting hall celebration in Qaraqosh, Nineveh province.
Officials from civil defense and witnesses reported that fireworks let off during the wedding and the groom’s dance started the fire. The blaze was fueled by highly flammable composite panels made of plastic and aluminum that coated the hall.
November
Russia launched the biggest artillery assault of the year on Ukraine, as the Ukraine’s commander in chief admitted that the conflict had come to a standstill.
December
More people have reportedly died in Gaza than in any earlier Arab confrontation with Israel in more than 40 years, possibly even since Israel’s foundation in 1948, during Israel’s 10-week-old war in the region.
The death toll from Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon has topped 20,000 for the first time, according to the Gaza Health Ministry’s announcement on Thursday. This figure is slightly higher than one of the most reliable estimations.