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10 Years That Shook the World: A Timeline of Events from 2001

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From 9/11 to the launch of the iPod, from the creation of " to the 2004 tsunami, from the Enron Bankruptcy to the killing of Osama bin Laden, 10 Years That Shook the World is the story of an extraordinary decade. For each year, Loretta Napoleoni presents events not as a chronology bus as dispatches from the world's collective memory. Topics like politics, economics, celebrities, and the environment intersect and converge to reveal the accelerating pace of globalization and the changes that have affected us all.

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2011

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About the author

Loretta Napoleoni

24 books85 followers
Loretta Napoleoni is the bestselling author of Maonomics, Rogue Economics, Terror Incorporated and Insurgent Iraq. She is an expert on terrorist financing and money laundering, and advises several governments and international organizations on counter-terrorism and money laundering. As Chairman of the countering terrorism financing group for the Club de Madrid, Napoleoni brought heads of state from around the world together to create a new strategy for combating the financing of terror networks.

Napoleoni is a regular media commentator for CNN, Sky and the BBC. She is among the few economists who predicted the credit crunch and the recession, and advises several banks on strategies to counter the current ongoing crisis. She lectures regularly around the world on economics, terrorism and money laundering.

Loretta is also a columnist and writes about terrorism, money laundering and the economy for several European financial papers including El Pais, The Guardian and Le Monde. In the 1990s she was among the first journalists to interview the Red Brigades, the Italian Marxist armed group. She subsequently spent three years interviewing members of other terrorist organizations. In 2003 she interviewed followers of al Zarqawi in both Europe and in the Middle East.
Born and raised in Rome, in the mid 1970s she became an active member of the feminist movement and a political activist. She was a Fulbright scholar at Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in Washington DC and a Rotary Scholar at the London School of Economics. She has a PhD in economics and a Masters of Philosophy in international relations and one in terrorism.

She began her career as an economist, working for several banks and international organizations in Europe and the US. In the early 1980s she spent 2 years in Budapest at the National Bank of Hungary working on a project for the convertibility of the florin that ten years later became the blueprint for the convertibility of the rouble. In he 1980s she worked for a UK registered Russian Bank, Moscow Narodny Bank, which acted as the foreign branch of the Bank of Foreign Trade. This position afforded her a unique insight into the Soviet economy. In 1992 she produced the final documentation for the structure of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, IBRD. She teaches a course at Judge Business Schools, Cambridge.

Napoleoni ’s books include Modern Jihad (Pluto Press, London, 2003); Terror Inc. (Penguin, London, 2004); Insurgent Iraq (Seven Stories Press, New York, 2005); Terror Incorporated (Seven Stories Press, New York, 2005); Rogue Economics (Seven Stories Press, New York, 2008); Terror and the Economy (Seven Stories Press, New York, 2010) and Maonomics: Why Chinese Communists Are Better Capitalists Than We Are (Seven Stories Press 2011) . Her latest book is the best seller Islamist Phoenix (Seven Stories Press, New York, 2014). “The IS doesn’t want to destroy. They want to build the 21st century version of the Calliphate and that is what makes them so dangerous”. Her books are translated into 18 languages including Chinese and Arabic. She lives in London and in the US with her husband and their four children.

Napoleoni is currently working at a book linking the post 9/11 Western foreign policy, the kidnapping and refugee crisis. Based upon original interviews with former hostages, negotiators, member of the crisis unit, kidnap owes and refugees, the book will unveil how post 9/11 Western foreign policy is responsible for the birth of a new breed of criminal and terrorist engaged in kidnapping of Westerners and trafficking migrants. Napoleoni defines these people Merchant of Men.

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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
Profile Image for LoLo.
295 reviews47 followers
January 1, 2013
The politics of fear start to take shape: in the collective imagination, tomorrow will bring more menace than today.

10 Years That Shook the World is a very intriguing concept – evaluating the most important events of each year from 2001 to 2011 and listing them in order of most important to least in terms of overall impact on the world. It looks at global events: war, changing technology, natural disasters, economics, and politics and shows what relevance they have had to the world. The intriguing part is that Loretta Napoleoni has used the concept of one of the biggest influences of the decade to relay her research: Each event she mentions is kept to roughly 140 characters of information.

Napoleoni intended for this book to be a quick run through of the last decade for those who, like me, were in school and may have missed/not understood some of what was happening in the world. It is world events at their most basic, but they provide a great overview of events and do a great job of showing the cause of effect of most of them.

There were some events that I had missed the importance of, or missed all together, and some events that seemed even more horrible on page. I have included some below:

2003:

Over 25,000 people die in an earthquake in Iran

In the run up to the invasion of Iraq, an estimated 11m people around the world take their rage to the streets to protest against the looming war. It is the largest protest in human history.

Widespread looting follows the fall of Saddam Hussein. Despite international warnings, US forces choose not to protect the Baghdad Museum and other important sites.
The Iraqi museum’s collections include some of most precious objects from the dawn of human civilisation. As a result, thousands of historical items are stolen.
Three of the Bush administration’s most senior cultural advisors resign in protest.

With over 200,000 songs when launched, iTunes sells more than 1m downloads in the US in just two weeks; by 2008 the iTunes store would become the top music vendor in America.


2004:
The aid raised amounts to an estimated $7,100 per victim (of the Southeast Asia tsunami), as compared to flood victims in Bangladesh the same year, who received only $3 per victim.


2007:
In Yemen, water is scarce. 40% of irrigation water goes to grow the drug khat, widely used by Yemenis, with farmers receiving 20 times the return they would growing potatoes.

A survey reveals that 6 out of 10 Americans knew the iPhone release date, compared with 2 out of 10 who were able to locate Israel on a map.


2008:
In the 1970s a CEO was paid roughly 40 times as much as the average worker. By the beginning of the 21st century, however, CEOs were making 367 times the salary of an average worker.


2009:
After being bailed out by the US government, AIG announces it will pay its top executives $165m in bonuses. Both Democrats and Republicans are shocked and angered by the announcement.


2010:
Ove 230,000 die in an earthquake in Haiti.

The ILO also estimates that 39% of the workforce lives below the poverty line, earning less than $2 a day. This is about 1.2bn people worldwide.

2011:
Mexican deaths linked to drug-related violence reach 34,000 people since the beginning of the war on drugs initiated by Mexican President Felipe Calderon in 2006.
Profile Image for Buckle Button Zip.
66 reviews3 followers
December 28, 2012
We are in a state of information and media overload, which makes it difficult to cut through to the truth, see the patterns and understand the lies. This book gives the events of the past 10 years to me in black and white, in a short and concise manner. And now I see everything: politics, policies, environmental changes and social movement, more clearly. Turn off the tv, and read this instead.
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