The World Chess Championship 2024, officially known as the World Chess Championship 2024 presented by Google, was a chess match between the reigning world champion Ding Liren and the challenger Gukesh Dommaraju to determine the World Chess Champion. The match took place between 25 November and 12 December 2024 in Singapore. It was played to a best of 14 games, with tiebreaks if required. The match was won by Gukesh 7½–6½ after 14 games. The win made Gukesh the 18th undisputed World Champion and, at age 18, the youngest of them.
Read more: World Chess Championship 2024
On 7 December 2024, the Syrian opposition group known as the Southern Operations Room led forces that entered the Rif Dimashq region of Syria from the south, and those forces then came within 20 kilometres (12 mi) of the capital Damascus. The Syrian Army withdrew from multiple points in the outskirts. Concurrently with the advance towards Damascus, opposition militia Tahrir al-Sham and the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army in the north launched an offensive into Homs, while the Revolutionary Commando Army advanced into the capital from the southeast. By 8 December 2024, rebel forces entered the city's Barzeh neighborhood. According to official state reports in Russian mass media and media footage, President Bashar al-Assad left Damascus by air to Moscow, where he has been granted asylum, sealing the fall of his regime.
A presidential election was held in Romania on 24 November 2024. A second round was to be held on 8 December 2024, as no candidate achieved an absolute majority in the first round. On 6 December 2024, the Constitutional Court of Romania annulled the results of the first round of the election, finding that a Russian influence operation had impacted the vote. This will be the ninth presidential election held in post-revolution Romania. The incumbent Klaus Iohannis, first elected in 2014 and then re-elected in 2019, must vacate the office at the end of his term, as the Romanian Constitution allows a president to be re-elected only once.
Read more: 2024–25 Romanian presidential election
On 14 December 2024, Yoon Suk Yeol, the president of South Korea, was impeached by the National Assembly following the second impeachment motion raised against him. This action came in response to Yoon's declaration of martial law on 3 December, which was overturned by the National Assembly and officially withdrawn six hours later.
Read more: Impeachment of Yoon Suk Yeol
On 5 December 2024, the Barnier government in France headed by Michel Barnier of The Republicans collapsed following a successful vote of no confidence in the National Assembly. Part of the 2024 French political crisis, the vote of no confidence was the first to pass since 1962 and resulted in Barnier's government being the shortest serving in the history of the French Fifth Republic.
Read more: Collapse of the Barnier government
An armed conflict between Israel and Hamas-led Palestinian militant groups has been taking place in the Gaza Strip and Israel since 7 October 2023. It is the fifth war of the Gaza–Israel conflict since 2008, and the most significant military engagement in the region since the Yom Kippur War in 1973. It is the deadliest war for Palestinians in the history of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.
On 1 October 2024, Israel invaded Southern Lebanon, marking the sixth Israeli invasion of Lebanon since 1978. The invasion took place after nearly 12 months of Israel–Hezbollah conflict. On 26 November, Israel and Lebanon signed a ceasefire agreement, mediated by France and the United States. The ceasefire went into effect on 27 November, though some attacks continue. Israel has reported 56 of its soldiers and 3,500 Hezbollah militants killed in the invasion, while the Lebanese government has reported Israel killing 2,720 people in Lebanon, mostly civilians.
Read more: 2024 Israeli invasion of Lebanon
On 24 February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine in a major escalation of the Russo-Ukrainian War, which started in 2014. The invasion, the largest and deadliest conflict in Europe since World War II, has caused hundreds of thousands of military casualties and tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilian casualties. As of 2024, Russian troops occupy about 20% of Ukraine. From a population of 41 million, about 8 million Ukrainians had been internally displaced and more than 8.2 million had fled the country by April 2023, creating Europe's largest refugee crisis since World War II.
Read more: Russian invasion of Ukraine
A civil war between two major rival factions of the military government of Sudan, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) under Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and its allies (collectively the Janjaweed coalition) under the Janjaweed leader Hemedti, began during Ramadan on 15 April 2023. Three minor (neutral) factions have also participated in the fighting: the Darfur Joint Protection Force; the SLM (al-Nur) under Abdul Wahid al-Nur; and the SPLM-N under Abdelaziz al-Hilu. Fighting has been concentrated around the capital city of Khartoum (the largest and initial battle of the war) and the Darfur region. As of 14 November 2024, at least 61,000 people had been killed in Khartoum State alone, of which 26,000 were a direct result of the violence. As of 5 July 2024, over 7.7 million were internally displaced and more than 2.1 million others had fled the country as refugees, and many civilians in Darfur have been reported dead as part of the Masalit massacres.
Read more: Sudanese civil war (2023–present)
(This site uses material from Wikipedia, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0)