Kay Ryan's The Best of It spans a career of forty-five years with a wealth of poems, usually short, witty and iconoclastic but also often tender and full of joy

A demonstration in Rabat demands that the king of Morocco relinquish some of his powers is followed by King Mohammed VI announcing on television plans for reform

Benghazi, by now firmly in the control of rebels, becomes the temporary headquarters of Libya's newly formed National Transitional Council

The United Nations Security Council passes Resolution 1973, authorizing the international community to use force to protect civilians in Libya

Muammar Gaddafi's tanks are on the verge of reaching Benghazi to enter the city and carry out his promised cleansing of the city of rebel traitors

The first air strikes by NATO, authorized by the UN, destroy sufficient of Gaddafi's armour just in time to save Benghazi from a proclaimed massacre of rebel civilians

Surgeons in Sweden achieve the first artificial living organ transplant, after using the patient's own stem cells to coat a plastic replica of his windpipe

With no sign of a deal between Obama and Republicans on raising the debt limit, fears grow that the USA might default on its debts on August 2

An Al-Qaeda suicide bomb attack, on worshippers leaving the Saints' Church in Alexandria, kills 21 Coptic Christians and injures 97 others

Rockhopper Exploration announce plans for offshore oil production in Falkland waters, to begin in 2016

The percentage of American Indians living in urban areas of the USA is now 70%, up from 45% in 1970 and 8% in 1940

About 80 people are killed and more than 1000 injured in a clash between fans at a football match in the Egyptian city of Port Said

The death of Lonesome George, a giant tortoise in the Galapagos Islands, means that his subspecies becomes extinct

Experts who gave tragically wrong earthquake advice at L'Aquila in 2009 are given six-year sentences for manslaughter

Plans are published for an ambitious Garden Bridge, designed for pedestrians by Thomas Heatherwick, to span the Thames in London with trees and a garden on its surface

Scientists at Cambridge university prove that there is quadruple helix DNA in humans, promising potential protection against cancer

The BBC's annual Reith Lectures are given by a well-known and distinguished transvestite ceramic artist, winner of the Turner Prize, Grayson Perry

Thirty Greenpeace activists protesting against drilling in the Arctic are arrrested when armed Russians storm their ship, the Arctic Sunrise

The US government suffers a shut-down when Republicans in Congress refuse to pass a spending bill unless Obamacare is reduced

Putin absorbs Sevastopol and the Republic of Crimea within the Russian Federation, after encouraging a referendum for Russians in these southeast regions of Ukraine

In a take-over by Chilean students at the University del Mar an artist calling himself Papas Fritas frees students from allegedly $500 million of debt by burning the signed documents for their student loans

Separatists in the east Ukraine regions of Luhansk and Donetzk hold a referndum asking their supporters whether they want to establish semi-independent states