2012-A YEAR IN REVIEW

Here it is almost halfway through the first month of the New Year already! As usual it was another momentous year on good old planet Earth. What stood out for you in 2012?


I think the one news story that stood out and hung over us Earthlings all year was the prediction that the world was going to end on December 21st of 2012 so we had the whole year to talk about it. And we did that a lot. Talk about it, that is. I can safely say that I didn’t really believe it right from the start, but that’s easy to say now, isn’t it? To me that would be the “story of the year” if I had to choose only one.

But, then again, there were so many global news-worthy events throughout the year from the Costa Concordia Cruise Ship catastrophe off of the Italian coast in January to the Newport Connecticut elementary school shooting in December and so much more in between it’s really, really hard to just pick one story.

There were stories of tragedy, inspiration, exasperation and hilarity and I will now give you just a few of the more notable stories from 2012:

• The Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II marks the 60th anniversary of her accession to the thrones of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

• The 2012 World Expo takes place in Yesou, South Korea.

• CERN announces the discovery of a new particle, (the “God” particle), with properties consistent with the Higgs boson after experiments at the Large Hadron Collider.

• Nik Wallenda tightrope walks across Niagara Falls.

• The 2012 Summer Olympics were held in London, England.

• Curiosity, the Mars Science Laboratory mission’s rover, successfully lands on Mars.

• The NHL lock out begins and lasts into the New Year.

• Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner becomes the first person to break the sound barrier without any machine assistance during a record space dive out of a helium-filled balloon from 24 miles (39 kilometers) above Roswell, New Mexico.

• Hurricane Sandy kills at least 209 people in the Caribbean, Bahamas, United States and Canada.

• Barack Obama is elected to a second term as U.S. President.

• Toronto Mayor Rob Ford is removed from office.

There were also some notable deaths in 2012 including Canadian Snowboarder Sarah Burke, Montreal Canadien great Emile “Butch” Bouchard, former Montreal Expo All-Star Gary Carter, Canadian Figure Skating legend Barbara Ann Scott, Astronaut Neil Armstrong, American entertainers Ernest Borgnine, Andy Griffith, Whitney Houston, Phyllis Diller and Larry Hagman, to name just a few.

Mother Earth will continue to spin and 2013 will have its own unique stories. Have a great year, Faithful Reader, and, God willing, we will do this all over again in twelve short months.

“Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.”-Buddha.