War, indictments, 'Barbie': Top 10 stories from 2023 in Nation & World

These were some of the stories that defined 2023:

Hamas raid sparks bloody Gaza war

The bloodiest war between Israel and Hamas began Oct. 7, when militants broke through the walls surrounding the seaside enclave of the Gaza Strip. Its fighters killed some 1,200 people in Israel and took more than 200 others hostage, spiriting them back into the territory.

The attack, described as the worst one-day mass killing of Jews since the Holocaust, stunned an Israel that had believed its border wall, technologically advanced military and intelligence services broadly protected them from all but harassing militant rocket fire. Israel’s Embattled Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, already reeling from months of protests over his hard-right government’s attempts to overhaul Israel’s judiciary and corruption allegations, launched a massive campaign of retaliatory airstrikes.

The offensive in Gaza has been one of the most devastating military campaigns in recent history. As of Wednesday, more than 21,100 Palestinians, most of them women and children, had been killed, according to the Health Ministry in Hamas-ruled Gaza.

More:2023's top 23 Michigan stories: Tumultuous year leaves bittersweet taste

Trump’s legal woes mount

Former President Donald Trump’s campaign to reclaim the White House played out next to a series of legal challenges that will spill over into the election year.

Trump became the first former U.S. president to face criminal charges when he was indicted in New York in March on state charges stemming from hush money payments made during the 2016 presidential campaign to bury allegations of extramarital sexual encounters. He pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.

Also, special counsel Jack Smith has been leading two federal probes related to Trump, both of which have resulted in charges against the former president. The first to result from those investigations came in June when Trump was indicted on charges he mishandled top secret documents at his Florida estate. The indictment alleged that Trump repeatedly enlisted aides and lawyers to help him hide records demanded by investigators and cavalierly showed off a Pentagon “plan of attack” and classified map.

Smith’s second case against Trump was unveiled in August when the former president was indicted on felony charges for working to overturn the results of the 2020 election in the run-up to the violent riot by his supporters at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The four-count indictment includes charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States government and conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding: the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s victory. It describes how Trump repeatedly told supporters and others that he had won the election, despite knowing that was false, and how he tried to persuade state officials, then-Vice President Mike Pence and finally Congress to overturn the legitimate results.

Trump is also charged alongside 18 other people with violating Georgia’s anti-racketeering law by scheming to overturn his 2020 election loss. The indictment, handed up in August, accuses Trump or his allies of suggesting Georgia’s Republican secretary of state could find enough votes for him to win the battleground state; harassing an election worker who faced false claims of fraud; and attempting to persuade Georgia lawmakers to ignore the will of voters and appoint a new slate of Electoral College electors favorable to Trump.

A civil fraud trial against Trump and his business empire is poised to wrap up in January. The judge overseeing the case, Arthur Engoron, resolved the lawsuit’s top claim before the trial even began, ruling that Trump routinely deceived banks, insurers and others by exaggerating the value of assets on paperwork used in making deals and securing loans. Engoron will decide on six remaining claims in New York Attorney General Letitia James’ lawsuit, including allegations of conspiracy, falsifying business records and insurance fraud.

Trump's lawyers are also fighting to overturn a decision barring him from Colorado's ballot under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which prohibits anyone who swore an oath to support the Constitution and then “engaged in insurrection” against it from holding office. The Colorado Supreme Court ruling is the first time in history the provision has been used to try to prohibit someone from running for the presidency.

Trump in 2023 also was ordered to pay $5 million in compensatory and punitive damages to writer E. Jean Carroll for sexual abuse and defamation, but the jury concluded he had not raped the columnist in a luxury department store dressing room in the 1990s.

Hunter Biden indicted

After regaining power over the House of Representatives, Republicans advanced an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden, whom the GOP has sought to link to the business dealings of his son, Hunter. No evidence has emerged to prove the president in his current or previous office abused his role or accepted bribes. However, questions have arisen about the ethics surrounding the international business dealings of Hunter and the president's brother, James Biden.

Hunter Biden, meanwhile, was indicted on three felonies and six misdemeanors, including filing a false return and tax evasion felonies, as well as misdemeanor failure to file and failure to pay.  The charges are centered on at least $1.4 million in taxes he owed between 2016 and 2019. During that time, he schemed to avoid taxes while spending money on “drugs, escorts and girlfriends, luxury hotels and rental properties, exotic cars, clothing ... in short, everything but his taxes," prosecutors wrote. The charges were filed after the implosion of a plea deal over the summer that would have spared him jail time in exchange for guilty pleas to misdemeanor tax charges. The agreement was pilloried as a “sweetheart deal” by Republicans.

McCarthy comes, goes as House speaker

U.S. Rep. Kevin McCarthy began 2023 poised for a position of new-found power as speaker of the House of Representatives after Republicans had reclaimed the chamber. But it quickly unraveled as the hard-right Freedom Caucus and its allies, many aligned with former President Donald Trump, refused to go along with compromises emanating from the speaker's office. The discord was there from the start. It took a record 15 votes over four days for McCarthy to line up the support he needed to win the post he had long coveted, finally prevailing on a 216-212 vote with Democrats backing leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York and six Republican holdouts voting present. Not since the Civil War era has a speaker’s vote dragged through so many rounds of counting.

McCarthy emerged from the fight weakened, especially considering Republicans held only a fragile margin in the chamber, and after later in the year brokering a budget-cutting debt deal with Biden, a small hard-right rebellion was enough to become the only speaker in history to be voted out of the job.

Heading into 2024, new House Speaker Mike Johnson will start the year under the same pressure to pass legislation to keep the government funded that led McCarthy's ouster.

Putin survives mutiny as war plods on

Yevgeny Prigozhin rose from being an ex-con and hot dog vendor to winning lucrative Kremlin contracts and heading a formidable mercenary army. But it all came to a sudden end when the private plane carrying him and others mysteriously exploded over Russia. Prigozhin's Aug. 23 death put an exclamation point on what had already been an eventful year for the brutal mercenary leader. His Wagner Group troops brought Russia a rare victory in its grinding war in Ukraine, capturing the city of Bakhmut. But internal friction with Russian military leaders later burst into the open, with Prigozhin briefly mounting an armed rebellion — the most severe challenge yet to President Vladimir Putin’s rule. The rebellion was called off and a deal was struck in less than 24 hours. However, just two months later, Prigozhin joined the list of those who have run afoul of the Kremlin and died unexpectedly.

Meanwhile, on the battlefield, the year started with high hopes for Ukrainian troops planning a counteroffensive against Russia but ended with a disappointing stalemate and anxiety about the future of Western aid for Kyiv’s war effort.

A season of strikes

The long-battered American labor movement flexed its muscle in 2023, taking advantage of widespread worker shortages to demand — and receive — significantly better pay and benefits. From Hollywood writers and actors to autoworkers to hotel workers, 510,000 laborers staged 393 strikes in the first 11 months of 2023, according to Cornell University’s Labor Action Tracker.

Hollywood writers and actors, as a result of their walkouts, secured higher pay and protection from the unrestricted use of artificial intelligence, among other concessions. The unions' gains marked a resurgence for their workers after years following the Great Recession of 2007-09 when union power further dwindled, wage gains languished and employers seemed to have their pick of job candidates. An explosive economic rebound from the COVID-19 recession of 2020 and a wave of retirements left companies scrambling to find workers and provided labor unions with renewed leverage. Still, even now, unions remain a shadow of what they were: As of last year, roughly 10% of U.S. employees belonged to labor unions, way down from 20% in 1983. And back in the 1970s, the United States experienced an average of 500 strikes a year, involving 2 million workers, said Johnnie Kallas, a labor expert at Cornell.

‘Barbie,’ ‘Oppenheimer’ duke it out

For the first time in more than two decades, the top three movies at the box office this year didn't include a sequel or a remake. “Barbie,” “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” and “Oppenheimer" led all movies in ticket sales in 2023, potentially signaling that moviegoers are more interested in something fresh.

Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie,” from Warner Bros., was the year’s runaway hit, with more than $1.4 billion in ticket sales worldwide. It was a blockbuster like none seen before: an anarchic comedy that set a string of records for a movie directed by a woman. Nearly as unprecedented was the success of Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer,” a three-hour drama that nearly grossed $1 billion. As different as it and “Barbie” were, they were each lauded as original feats of cinema and personal statements by its directors.

Global markets rally

Over the past three years, the global economy has absorbed one hit after another. A devastating pandemic. The disruption of energy and grain markets stemming from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. A resurgence of inflation. Punishing interest rates. And yet economic output kept growing in 2023, if only modestly. Optimism grew about a “soft landing” — a scenario in which high rates tame inflation without causing a recession. The head of the International Monetary Fund praised the global economy for its “remarkable resilience.’’ From Austria to New Zealand, stock markets rallied through the year. As inflation eased, stocks climbed despite sluggish global economic growth.

Still, the accumulated shocks are restraining growth. The IMF expects the global economy to expand just 2.9% in 2024 from an expected 3% this year. A major concern is a weakened China, the world's No. 2 economy. Its growth is hobbled by the collapse of an overbuilt real estate market, sagging consumer confidence and high rates of youth unemployment.

Twitter becomes X

A little more than a year ago, Elon Musk walked into Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters, fired its CEO and other top executives and began transforming the social media platform into what's now known as X.

Since then, the company has been bombarded by allegations of misinformation, endured significant advertising losses and suffered declines in usage. Disney, Comcast and other high-profile advertisers stopped spending on X after the liberal advocacy group Media Matters issued a report showing that their ads were appearing alongside material praising Nazis. (X has sued the group, claiming it “manufactured” the report to “drive advertisers from the platform and destroy X Corp.”) The problems culminated when Musk went on an expletive-ridden rant in an on-stage interview about companies that had halted spending on X. Musk asserted that advertisers that pulled out were engaging in “blackmail” and, using a profanity, essentially told them to get lost. “Don’t advertise,” X's billionaire owner said.

Titanic tour sub implodes

A submersible carrying five people to the Titanic in June imploded near the site of the shipwreck and killed everyone on board, authorities said Thursday, bringing a tragic end to a saga that included an urgent around-the-clock search and a worldwide vigil for the missing vessel. A sliver of hope that for a few days remained for finding the five men alive was wiped away when the Coast Guard announced that debris had been found roughly 1,600 feet from the Titanic in North Atlantic waters. Aboard had been OceanGate Expeditions CEO and pilot Stockton Rush; two members of a prominent Pakistani family, Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood; British adventurer Hamish Harding; and Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet.

Compiled from Associated Press reports.