In 2008 Fidel Castro steps down as leader of Cuba after 49 years of power. He took power in 1959 when he led a revolution to oust the dictator Fulgencio Batista. Castro then led the first communist government in the western hemisphere. In 2006 Castro granted temporary power to his brother while he underwent surgery and today the 83 year old has announced that he will not accept another term in power. Raul Castro continued as leader of Cuba and the communist party and in 2011 he was elected as President of Cuba.

In 2001 Foot and mouth disease was detected in an Essex abattoir. This was the first case of the disease in the United Kingdom for 20 years and meant that all milk and other animal products from the UK were banned from export. Foot and Mouth is highly infectious causing blisters in the mouth and lameness. When the last major outbreak of Foot and Mouth was seen in the UK in 1967, a total of 442,000 cattle were slaughtered but this outbreak was much worse. Although a five mile exclusion zone was set up around the abattoir where the disease was found in 27 pigs, and exclusion zones around the two farms that cattle had come from, over 2,000 cattle were diagnosed with the disease in the space of a year. A little fewer than 4 million cattle were slaughtered in an attempt to contain the spread. The U.K. was finally cleared of foot and mouth disease in January of 2002 and was believed to of cost 2.4 billion to the farming industry and between 2 and 3 billion to the tourism industry.

In 1473 Nicholas Copernicus was born in Torun, Poland and he would grow up to be a great Mathematician, astronomer and physicist who would discover the truth about the movement of our solar system and place in the Universe. It had long been believed that the Earth was centre of the Universe and all celestial bodies would orbit us but Copernicus was the first person to formulate the heliocentric model of the solar system. This system puts the sun at the centre (helio from the Latin Helios meaning Sun) and puts planet Earth as one of the orbiting bodies. Copernicus was originally trained to be a canon in the Catholic Church but his discoveries directly lead Galileo to question the teachings of the church and pope. Copernicus published his discover in 'De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium' which means 'On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres' which he completed in 1530 but not published until early 1544, shortly before Copernicus’s death on the 24th of May 1544.