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.