I sort of live in this brain space where most world events just sort of annoy me or feel unreal, but here's a few I remember clearly:

• The Challenger Explosion: My dad wanted to be one of those teachers; my best friend in high school's mom was on the backup list. They sent us home from school. It was scary.
• The Fall of the Berlin Wall: We got to watch it live because it happened conveniently right after school, and the BBC is fine with letting kids understand history, so we had it all explained.
• The Salman Rushdie Scandal: All the talk of the fourth grade. What other fourth grade class would care about an adult writer (who was not just adult, but literary and magical-realist and post-colonial, and therefore way over our heads) who'd gotten himself in trouble with religious groups?
• The Vampire Killers: They were all over the news way before Columbine--kids who killed their parents, and it was blamed on Goth culture / music / video games / movies. At the time, I was Goth and I was terribly offended when our school declared we couldn't all sit together at lunch anymore.
• Carl Sagan's Death: This one still upsets me. He was my main reason for deciding to go to college, and I'd barely gotten started when he died. So I read every one of his books in a very short time, and it changed my idea of humanity.
• 9/11: That one affected everyone. I hated the sound of airplanes overhead for years, and that made me mad because planes are comforting to me.