The U.S. returns sovereignty to an interim government in Iraq, but maintains roughly 135,000 troops in the country to fight a growing insurgency.
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What Happened in June?
Deaths, raids, and battles. Examine landmark historical events that took place in June. Dates for earlier events may be approximate.
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Montenegro's parliament declares the Republic's independence, severing 88 years of union with Serbia. Montenegro officially became the 192nd member of the United Nations on June 28, 2006.
The 47-memberUN Human Rights Council holds its first session in Geneva, on June 15, 2006, replacing the highly criticized United Nations Commission on Human Rights. The council was charged with the mission to strengthen the promotion and protection of fundamental freedoms worldwide, with a more robust and specialized mandate. More
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Construction of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault begins. The vault is intended to safeguard the seeds of the world’s food plants in the event of a global crisis. The secure facility is built into the side of a mountain on Spitsbergen, the largest of the Svalbard islands, a Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean. The vault was formally open with its first consignment of seeds on February 26, 2008. More
Miksu, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
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The Bald Eagle is removed from the list of threatened species, making it an Endangered Species Act success story. Bald eagles had been decimated by habitat destruction and degradation, as well as by illegal shooting and contamination of their food source by the insecticide known as DDT.
In the mid-1900s, they were in danger of extinction throughout most of their range. Bald eagles are still protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act. Both laws prohibit killing, selling, or otherwise harming eagles, their nests or eggs. More
Apple Inc starts selling its first mobile “smartphone,” the iPhone, a device that went on to revolutionize the industry.
The World Health Organization (WHO) declares H1N1 swine flu to be a global pandemic on June 11, 2009. The first such incident in over forty years and the third recent flu pandemic involving the H1N1 virus; the first being the 1918 –1920 Spanish flu pandemic and the second being the 1977 Russian flu.
There were 491,382 lab-confirmed) cases Some studies estimated that the number of cases including asymptomatic and mild cases was about 700 million to 1.4 billion people. ( 11 to 21 percent of the global population of 6.8 billion at the time. Lab confirmed deaths were 18,449 with estimated excess deaths of 284,000 - More
Bernard Madoff, American hedge-fund investment manager is sentenced to up to 150 years in prison for operating the largest Ponzi scheme in history worth an estimated $65 billion.
Originally arrested on December 11, 2008, he pleaded guilty in March 2009 to 11 federal felonies, including securities fraud and money laundering. He died in prison in 2021.
Approximately, over $15 billion was recovered from Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme, with the SIPA Trustee recovering about $14.8 billion and the Justice Department distributing over $4.3 billion to victims, allowing them to recoup nearly 94% of their losses, thanks to extensive legal actions and settlements.
Liu Yang. a Chinese military transport pilot becomes the first Chinese woman in space when she and two other crew members were launched aboard the spacecraft Shenzhou 9.
Edward Snowden, a former CIA employee, reveals thousands of classified NSA documents to journalists Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Barton Gellman, and Ewen MacAskill. Snowden came to international attention after stories based on the material appeared in The Guardian, The Washington Post, and other publications. Later in June, Edward Snowden, comes forward and admits that he is the source of the recent NSA leaks. On September 2, 2020, a U.S. federal court ruled in United States v. Moalin that the U.S. intelligence's mass surveillance program exposed by Snowden was illegal and possibly unconstitutional. More
Freedom of the Press Foundation, CC BY 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden reveals his identity to The Guardian and is publicly identified as the source of leaked classified documents, exposing mass surveillance programs. More
The U.S. Supreme Court legalizes same-sex marriage nationwide. More
Activist Bree Newsome scales a thirty-foot flagpole and removes the Confederate battle flag from the South Carolina Statehouse grounds. She and a collaborator, James Tyson were arrested and the flag went back up. Following the controversy resulting from her action, a vote on the presence of the flag on the Statehouse grounds took place among South Carolina's House of Representatives on July 9, which resulted in the final removal of the flag the following Friday. The charges against Newsome and Tyson were later dropped. More
The United Kingdom votes in a referendum to withdraw from the European Union, with 51.9 percent supporting Britain's exit (“Brexit”) and 48.1 percent opposing the move. it marked the first time a country had decided to leave the organization.
The withdrawal process commenced following the referendum and the subsequent notification to the European Council on March 29, 2017. The actual withdraw was completed on 1 February 2020. The Withdrawal Agreement came into force regulated the orderly withdrawal of the UK from the EU the UK remained subject to EU law and remained part of the European Union Customs Union. The complete separation came into force at 23:00 GMT on January 31, 2020 (00:00 February 1 2020 CET). More