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Top Song(s)
• Justin Timberlake - Sexyback
• Gnarls Barkley - Crazy
• Beyonce - Irreplaceable
• Mariah Carey - All I Want For Christmas is You
• The Scissor Sisters - I Don't Feel Like Dancin'
Top Film(s)
• • The Departed
• The Prestige
• Children of Men
• Pan's Labyrinth
• Casino Royale
Best Selling Book(s)
• Water for Elephants - Sara Gruen
• New Moon - Stephenie Meyer
• The Road - Cormac McCarthy
• The Girl Who Played with Fire - Stieg Larsson
• Eat, Pray, Love - Elizabeth Gilbert
Famous Deaths
• January 15 - James Hillier, Canadian-American inventor (co-created the electron microscope)
• February 15 - Robert Adler, Austrian-American inventor (remote control for television)
• March 6 - Jean Baudrillard, French cultural theorist, philosopher, political commentator and photographer
• April 23 - Boris Yeltsin, Russian politician and 1st President of Russian Federation (1991-99)
• May 5 - Theodore Harold Maiman, American Inventor and engineer (created 1st working laser)
• June 14 - Kurt Waldheim, Austrian 4th Secretary-General of the United Nations and 9th President of Austria
• July 11 - Alfonso López Michelsen, 24th President of Colombia (1974-78)
• August 10 - Henry Cabot Lodge Bohler, American member of Tuskegee Airmen
• October 16 - Barbara West, English survivor of the Titanic sinking
November 8 - Chad Varah, English founder of charity The Samaritans
Medical/Science/Technology
• Social networking service Twitter launched publicly.
• Last sightings of the Western black rhinoceros and of the natural-born Northern white rhinoceros.
• The sequence of the last chromosome in the Human Genome Project is published in the journal Nature.
• NASA's Stardust mission successfully ends, the first to return dust from a comet.
• Baiji (Yangtze river dolphin) declared "functionally extinct".
• Haifan Lin discovers Piwi-interacting RNA.
• Pluto is redesignated as a dwarf planet by the International Astronomical Union.
• NASA's Cassini-Huygens spacecraft discovers geysers of a liquid substance shooting from Saturn's moon Enceladus.
• The National Science Foundation opened an office in Beijing.
• Researchers have completed the first computer simulations of the workings of every atom in a virus.
Political
• January 7 – Embroiled in scandals, former U.S. House Leader Tom DeLay announces he will not seek to reassume his former post.
• January 9 - Vice President Dick Cheney complains of shortness of breath and is treated at the hospital.
• January 10 – Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger proposes a $125.6 billion budget increasing spending without raising taxes.
• January 31 – Samuel Alito is sworn in as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.
• February 11 – Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shoots and wounds a lawyer while quail hunting in southern Texas.
• February 16 - The state of Minnesota sues AIG for underreporting premiums to reduce its tax bill refusing a settlement of $1.2 million.
• March 22 – The Federal Reserve stops the publishing of M3 money supply data.
• July 10 – Henry Paulson is sworn in as the new Secretary of Treasury, succeeding John W. Snow.
• November 7 – Mid-term elections result in the Democrats gaining control of both houses of Congress.
• December 13 – U.S. Senator Tim Johnson suffers a brain hemorrhage during a conference call with reporters.
National
• January 3 – Twelve dead coal miners and one survivor are discovered in the Sago Mine disaster near Buckhannon, West Virginia.
• January 11 – The Augustine Volcano in Alaska erupts twice, marking its first major eruption since 1986.
• February 3 – Suspicious fires destroy three small churches and damage two others in Bibb County, Alabama.
• March 2 – The colorized $10 bill is released, with the same ink and features of the $20 and $50 bills that preceded it.
• March 16 – The Blu-ray disc format is released in the United States.
• April 29 – Massive anti-war demonstrations and a march down Broadway in New York City mark the third year of war in Iraq.
• May 1 – The Great American Boycott takes place across the United States as marchers protest for immigration rights.
• June 25 – Warren Buffett donates over $30 billion to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
• August 27 – Comair Flight 5191, carrying 50 people, crashes shortly after takeoff from Blue Grass Airport in Lexington, Kentucky.
• September 15 – Spinach contaminated with E. coli kills two and poisons over 100 others in 20 states.
Worldwide
• January 1–4 – Russia temporarily cuts shipment of natural gas to Ukraine during a price dispute.
• February 17 – A massive mudslide occurs in Southern Leyte, Philippines killing an estimated 1,126 people.
• March 10 – Michelle Bachelet becomes the first female president of Chile.
• July 1 – The Qinghai–Tibet railway begins operation.
• July 11 – A series of seven bomb blasts hits the city of Mumbai, India, killing more than 200 people.
• August 22 – Pulkovo Aviation Enterprise Flight 612 crashes near the Russian border in Ukraine, killing all 170 people on board.
• September 1 – Analog terrestrial television is switched off in Luxembourg, being the first country to do so.
• October 9 - North Korea claims to have conducted its first-ever nuclear test.
• November 12 – The breakaway state of South Ossetia holds a referendum on independence from Georgia.
• December 29 – UK settles its Anglo-American loan, post-WWII loan debt.