Another mass shooting captured global attention in July. In Norway, 32-year-old Anders Behring Breivik set off a bomb in Oslo and later attacked a summer camp, murdering 77 civilians, many of them teenagers, some as young as 14.

London Riots

While Breivik had written extensively about what he called "cultural Marxism" and rising "Islamization" in his country, Norwegian forensic psychiatrists in November declared him insane at the time of the attack, saying he suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. He faces lifelong compulsory psychiatric treatment and likely will avoid a prison term, authorities said.

The next month, riots spread across London, Manchester and other cities and towns in the U.K., killing five, resulting in more than 3,300 arrests and causing an estimated $328 million in damage. British police, caught by surprise, were criticized for not stepping in more quickly or firmly in some cases. The uprisings' causes -- with some blaming racism and poverty, others a culture of entitlement -- are still being debated.

The riots cast a pall across Britain in what had been a year uplifted by the April 29 marriage of Prince William to Kate Middleton in Westminster Abbey. As many as 1 million people lined London's streets, and an estimated 2 billion watched on television. By some estimates, the wedding added about 620 million pounds ($971 million) to the country's tourism revenue.

Steve Jobs

In the U.S. one of America's leading public schools, Penn State University, was rocked in November when Jerry Sandusky, a former assistant to legendary football coach Joe Paterno, was accused of sexually assaulting or having inappropriate contact with at least eight underage boys on or near school property over a 15-year period. A grand jury returned a 40-count indictment against Sandusky, who has said he is innocent. The university fired Paterno and President Graham Spanier, saying neither had done enough after the allegations first surfaced.

The death in October of Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Jobs, who had pancreatic cancer, precipitated a global outpouring. Mourners flocked to Apple stores from New York to Hong Kong, while a crowd gathered in San Francisco's Mission Dolores Park for an iPhone-lit vigil.

Jobs wasn't simply a pivotal player in ushering in the age of personal computers, he was a digital visionary who changed the way music and movies are distributed and who, with the invention of the iPhone, took the concept of the cell phone to heights unimagined by competitors. He was 56.

Another death, of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il on Dec. 17, elevated to the head of the nuclear state his son, Kim Jong Un, about whom little is known, including his exact age.