January 21, 2008 (Monday)
- A Turkish court bans YouTube for the second time because of clips deemed disrespectful to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. (PhysOrg.com)
- An Israeli TecSAR spy satellite is launched aboard an Indian Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle. (PhysOrg.com)
- President of Venezuela Hugo Chávez disallows the exportation of agricultural goods and promises to nationalize any farm that does. (BBC News)
- 2008 stock market downturn:
- Stock markets around the world plunge amid growing fears of a U.S. recession, fueled by the 2007 subprime mortgage financial crisis. (BBC News) (thisislondon.co.uk)[permanent dead link]
- North American Markets: U.S. markets are closed for Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Stock futures are down, with March contracts on the Dow Jones Industrial Average trading 482 points lower to 11,624. S&P 500 futures are also down 55 points to 1,270.10 and NASDAQ-100 futures are down 72.25 points to 1,777.25. The Toronto Stock Exchange loses over 500 points during morning trading at 12,233. (MarketWatch) (CBC)
- European Markets: The French CAC 40 index closes down 6.8% at 4,744.45, the German DAX 30 index closes down 7.2% at 6,790.19, and the UK's FTSE 100 index closes down 5.5% at 5,578.20. (MarketWatch)
- Asian Markets: The Indian Sensex is down 1,408.35 points, or 7.4%, to 17,605.35, tumbling a record 11% down at one point in the day. Hong Kong's Hang Seng index ends the day down 5.5% at 23,818.86. Japan's Nikkei falls 3.9% to 13,436.94. (MarketWatch)
- A gas explosion at an illegal mine in Shanxi, China kills at least 20. (BBC News)
- Former Liberian warlord Joshua Milton Blahyi confesses that he is responsible for at least 20,000 deaths during the First Liberian Civil War. (CNN)
- The Na-Dene language of Eyak goes extinct with the death of Marie Smith Jones, its last native speaker. (BBC)