Hindsight is 2020, and here are ten photos that capture it:
Residents of Lake Tabourie, Australia looked on
as flames burned through bush four days into the new year.
Exacerbated by climate change, the fires claimed over two dozen lives and 27 million acres of land.
Celebrations of when Britain officially quit the EU on January 31st
featured plenty of Union Jack finery. And then the real work began to hammer out the terms.
Mid-February, doctors in the Chinese city of Wuhan were examining the first waves of patients
infected with a new coronavirus that would soon become a global pandemic.
Over 1.5 million people would die from it by the year’s end.
As if one plague weren’t enough, 2020 took yet another page right out of the Old Testament.
This photo was taken in Kipsing, Kenya. The desert locust invasion across the Horn of Africa
was the worst in 25 years and caused an unprecedented threat to food insecurity.
Protests against police brutality erupted following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis
after Floyd, a black man, died in police custody.
On June 30th, China passed a wide- ranging security law for Hong Kong,
making it easier to punish protesters and reducing the city’s overall autonomy.
A pair of explosions at the Port of Beirut sent supersonic blasts through the Lebanese capital:
killing at least 154 people, wounding 5,000 more, and causing widespread destruction. The cause?
A neglected stockpile of ammonium nitrate. Belarusian opposition supporters staged a
flower protest — continuing the push for the resignation of the nation’s authoritarian leader,
President Alexander Lukashenko. There were additional pro-democracy demonstrations
in Thailand, Hong Kong, and Kyrgyzstan. While it took days to count all of the votes,
Kamala Harris, would go on to win the title of first female Vice President of the United States,
as well as the first ever to hold that office with Black or Asian ancestry.
In the Indian village of Thulasendrapuram, where Harris’ maternal grandfather was born,
residents showed their support even at the bus stop.
On November 9th, BioNTech and Pfizer announced they’d created a Covid-19
vaccine that was more than 90% effective. Dr. Ozlem Tureci and her husband, Ugur Sahin,
who founded BioNTech both have parents who moved to Germany from Turkey. The German
husband-and-wife team have been celebrated for showing what immigrants and their children can do.