January:
- A stampede during the Stoning of the Devil ritual on the last day at the Hajj in Mina, Saudi Arabia, kills at least 362 pilgrims
- NASA’s Stardust mission ends successfully, the first to return dust from a comet
- NASA launches the first space mission to Pluto as the New Horizons spacecraft begins a nine-year journey
- The Walt Disney Company buys Pixar Animation Studios from Lucasfilm for $7.4 billion
- Charles Kennedy resigns as leader of the Liberal Democrats, admitting he has a drinking problem
- A whale is discovered swimming in the River Thames
- Sven-Göran Eriksson announces he will quit as England manager after this summer’s World Cup, ending his five-year reign
February:
- Egyptian passenger ferry, MS al-Salam Boccaccio 98, sinks in the Red Sea killing over 1,000 people
- Stephen Harper is elected Prime Minister of Canada
- The 2006 Winter Olympics are held in Turin, Italy; Germany top the medal table with 11 gold and 29 overall medals
- A massive mudslide occurs in Southern Leyte, Phillipines killing an estimated 1,126 people
- An Islamist demonstration is held outside the Danish embassy in London in response to the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoon controversy
- Around £53 million is stolen from a Securitas depot in Tonbridge, Kent in the largest cash robbery in British crime history
March:
- NASA’s Cassini-Huygens spacecraft discovers geysers of a liquid substance shooting from Saturn’s moon Enceladus, signalling a possible presence of water
- Michelle Bachelet becomes the first female President of Chile
- The UN General Assembly vote overwhelmingly to establish the UN Human Rights Council
- Microblogging and social media networking site Twitter is launched
- A total solar eclipse occurs, visible from Africa
- The debating chamber of the National Assembly for Wales, the Senedd, designed by Richard Rogers is opened by the Queen
- Sir Menzies Campbell is elected leader of the Liberal Democrats
- British peacemaker, Norman Kember, along with three Canadians are rescued by SAS troops following the Christian Peacemaker hostage crisis
- A smoking ban comes in effect in all enclosed public places in Scotland
April:
- President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad confirms that Iran has successfully produced a few grams of low-grade enriched uranium
- The BBC announces that Grandstand, it’s flagship sports TV programme, will be phased out after nearly 50 years on the air
May:
- The Human Genome Project publishes the last chromosome sequence in Nature
- The Eurovision Song Contest, held in Athens, is won by Finnish band Lordi with their song “Hard Rock Hallelujah”
- The 6.4 magnitude earthquake shakes central Java in Indonesia with an MSK intensity of IX (Destructive), leaving more than 5,700 dead and 37,000 injured
- Middlesbrough manager, Steve McClaren, agrees to become the next manger of the England national football team after the World Cup
- Charles Clarke is dismissed as Home Secretary and Margaret Beckett replaces Jack Straw as Foreign Secretary in a reshuffle of Tony Blair’s cabinet
- Fathers 4 Justice invade the set of the National Lottery
June:
- Montenegro declares its independence from Serbia and Montenegro after a referendum and becomes a sovereign state; Serbia declares its independence two days later ending an 88-year union
- The 2006 FIFA World Cup takes place in Germany; Italy defeat France 5-3 on penalties in the final to claim their fourth title, only after Golden Ball Winner Zinedine Zidane is sent off for head butting Marco Materazzi during extra-time
- Israel launches an offensive in the Gaza Strip in response to rocketfire by Hamas into Israeli territory
- The United States Armed Forces withdraws it’s forces from Iceland, thereby disbanding the Iceland Defence Force
July:
- A series of bomb blasts hit Mumbai, India, killing more than 200 people
- Israeli troops invade Lebanon in response to Hezbollah kidnapping two Israeli soldiers and killing three others; Hezbollah declares open war against Israel two days later
- George W Bush greets Tony Blair with the phrase “Yo, Blair”
- Arsenal move into the Emirates Stadium after 93 years at nearby Highbury; the 60,000 seater stadium is the largest club stadium to have been built in English football since Maine Road, home of Manchester City from 1923 to 2003
August:
- Sixty-one schoolgirls are killed in the Chencholai bombing by the Sri Lankan Air Force
- Pulkovo Aviation Enterprise Flight 612 crashes near the Russian border in Ukraine, killing all 170 people on board
- The International Astronomical Union defines “planet” at its 26th General Assembly, demoting Pluto to the status of dwarf planet 76 years after its discovery
September:
- The Royal Thai Army overthrows the government of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra in a coup d’état
- Gol Transportes Aéreos Flight 1907 collides with a business jet over the Amazon rainforest, killing all 154 on board the former
- Fourteen personnel are killed in Britain’s worst single military loss since the Falklands War when RAF Hawker Siddeley Nimrod suffers an in-flight fire and subsequently crashes in Afghanistan
- Richard Hammond suffers a serious brain injury when he crashes a jet-powered car while filming for Top Gear
October:
- The internet activist website WikiLeaks is founded
- Fredrik Reinfeldt replaces Göran Persson as Prime Minister of Sweden
- North Korea claims to have conducted its first-ever nuclear test
- Google purchases YouTube for $1.65 billion
- South Korean Ban Ki-moon is elected as the new Secretary-General of the UN, succeeding Kofi Annan
- Manchester’s Beetham Tower, the tallest building in the UK outside of London, is opened
- The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change is published by the UK government
November:
- No.5, 1948 by Jackson Pollock becomes the worlds most expensive painting after it’s sold privately for $140 million
- Microsoft releases Office 2007
- Former President of Iraq Saddam Hussein is sentenced to death by hanging by the Iraqi Special Tribunal
- The breakaway state of South Ossetia holds a referendum on its independence from Georgia
- A toxic waste dumping incident occurs in Côte d’Ivoire by a Panama ship sent by a Singaporean oil company, causing 3 death and the poison treatment of 1,500 people
- A series of car bombs and mortar attacks in Sadr City, Baghdad, kills at least 215 people and injures 257 others
- Daniel Craig makes his debut as James Bond when Casino Royale, the 21st Bond film, is released
- Russian defector Alexander Litvinenko dies in London having been poisoned by Polonium-210
December:
- Hassan Dahir Aweys’ conspiracy to assassinate Somali government officials becomes the first post on WikiLeaks
- The military seize power in Fiji in a coup d’état led by Commodore Frank Bainimarama
- The Nintendo Wii is released in Europe
- Mexican President, Felipe Calderón, sends the military to combat the drug cartels and reduce violence in the state of Michoacán, intimating the Mexican Drug War
- Ethiopia admits its troops have intervened in Somalia
- The UK settles its Anglo-American loan, an agreement made to keep afloat the British economy in the aftermath of the Second World War
- Tom Stephens, a 37-year old Tesco worker, and Steve Wright, a 48-year old forklift truck driver, are arrested on suspicion of murdering five prostitutes in the Ipswich area
Other:
- Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion is published
- Earning over $1 billion worldwide, surpassing this milestone in a record-breaking 63 days, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest is the highest grossing film of 2006
- Spending 11 weeks in the top 10, 9 of which at number one, Gnarls Barkley had the best-selling single of the year with “Crazy”
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