2020s
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- Snippet from Wikipedia: 2020s
The 2020s (pronounced "twenty-twenties" shortened to "the '20s" and referred to as the twenties) is the current decade, which began on January 1, 2020, and will end on December 31, 2029.
The 2020s began with the COVID-19 pandemic — the first reports of the virus were published on December 31, 2019, though the first cases are said to have appeared nearly a month earlier — which caused a global economic recession as well as continuing financial inflation concerns and a global supply chain crisis.
Several anti-government demonstrations and revolts occurred in the late 2010s and early 2020s which world leaders have called it an "angry decade", including a continuation of those in Hong Kong against extradition legislation; protests against certain local, state and national responses to the COVID-19 pandemic; others around the world, particularly in the United States against racism and police brutality; one in India against agriculture and farming acts; one in Israel against judicial reforms; another in Indonesia against the omnibus law on jobs; ongoing protests and strikes in France against pension reform; an ongoing political crisis in Peru, Armenia, and Thailand; and many in Belarus, Eswatini, Myanmar, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Iran, China, and Russia against various forms of governmental jurisdiction, corruption and authoritarianism; along with citizen riots in the United States and Brazil in an attempt to overturn election results.
Ongoing military conflicts include the Myanmar civil war, the Ethiopian civil conflict, the Kivu conflict, the Mali war, the Yemeni civil war, the Somali civil war, the Syrian civil war, and the Russo-Ukrainian War. The latter concluded with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, making it the largest conventional military offensive in Europe since World War II, and resulting in a refugee crisis, disruptions to global trade, and an exacerbation of economic inflation. Smaller conflicts include the insurgency in the Maghreb, the Iraq insurgency, the Philippine drug war, and the Mexican drug war. The year 2021 saw the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan and the fall of Kabul to the Taliban, ending twenty years of war in that country, and leading to the republican loyalist uprising against the new emirate government.
With many extreme weather events worsening in the early 2020s, several world leaders have called it the "decisive decade" for climate action as ecological crises continue to escalate. In February 2023, a series of powerful earthquakes killed at least 57,000 people in Turkey and Syria; this event fell within the top ten deadliest earthquakes of the 21st century.
Technological advances and changes on technology from the past decades have been made and used, benefitting many, such as the use of teleconferencing, online learning, streaming services, e-commerce and food delivery services to compensate for lockdown orders. 5G networks have launched around the globe at the start of the decade as well, and became prevalent in smartphones. Significant improvements in the complexity of artificial intelligence have occurred with artificial intelligence art and chatbots becoming more accessible and mainstream. The private space race also greatly accelerated in the 2020s, as did government-funded space projects such as the James Webb Space Telescope and Ingenuity helicopter.
During this decade, on November 15, 2022, the world population grew to over 8 billion people, and in 2023, India overtook China as the most populous country in the world.