1990

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• On 11 February, Nelson Mandela is released from prison after 27 years. He begins negotiating the end of apartheid with President F W de Klerk.

• On 21 February, Africa's last colony, Namibia, becomes independent of South Africa.

• On 25 February, US-backed Violeta Barrios de Chamorro is elected president of Nicaragua, her anti-Communist coalition ending Sandinista rule.

• On 11 March, Lithuania declares itself independent of the Soviet Union.

• Elections in East Germany on 18 March – the first free polls since 1933 – end its Communist regime.

• In Britain on 31 March, a huge anti-poll tax demonstration centred on Trafalgar Square, London, ends in rioting and looting.

• On 15 May, home-produced beef is banned from British schools and hospitals over concern about bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or 'mad cow disease'.

• On 27 May, the National League for Democracy (NLD) wins the general election in Burma. This victory is ignored by the military junta, and the NLD leader Aung San Suu Kyi remains under house arrest.

• On 29 May, Boris Yeltsin is elected president of the Russian Federation. He and other reformers resign from the Communist party on 12 July.

• On 6 August, Benazir Bhutto's government in Pakistan is dismissed by the prime minister on charges of corruption and ineptitude. At the elections in October, her party suffers great defeat at hands of the Islamic Democratic Alliance.

• On 9 August, Iraqi troops invade Kuwait, beginning the Gulf War (ends 1991).

• On 3 October, East and West Germany are reunified.

• On 7 November, Mary Robinson is elected the first woman president of Ireland.

• In Britain on 22 November, Margaret Thatcher resigns as prime minister. She is succeeded by John Major.

• On 9 December, Lech Walesa is elected president of Poland.

• The Hubble Space Telescope is placed in earth orbit, but its lenses are found to produce fuzzy pictures. When the telescope is repaired by US astronauts in December 1993, the resulting photographs of galaxies in their infancy are extraordinary.

• Notable films include Cinema Paradiso directed by Giuseppe Tornatore, Cyrano de Bergerac with a very physical long-nosed hero in Gérard Dépardieu and elegant English subtitles by Anthony Burgess, and Dances with Wolves, which won the best director and best film Oscars for Kevin Costner.

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