Timeline 2017 January - March
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2017 Jan 1, In California new laws went into effect that included an increase in the minimum wage from $10 and hour to $10.50 an hour for businesses with 26 or more employees.
(SSFC, 1/1/17, p.A10)
2017 Jan 1, In Illinois a new law took effect that mandated an hour of training for stylists, barbers, cosmetologists, hair braiders and nail technicians for abuse training as part of their licensing process.
(SFC, 1/2/17, p.A4)
2017 Jan 1, In NYC three new subway stations opened to the public on the Second Avenue line.
(SFC, 1/2/17, p.A4)
2017 Jan 1, In Texas an accidental pesticide poisoning left four children dead. Phosphine gas was likely released when a father used a garden hose to wash away a pesticide under a mobile home.
(SFC, 1/4/17, p.A6)
2017 Jan 1, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation brought into force a policy on research that it supports calling for the research, when published, to be freely available to all. On March 23 the foundation announced that it will pay the cost of putting such research in one particular repository of freely available papers.
(Econ, 3/25/17, p.69)
2017 Jan 1, In Bahrain a prison break led to the death of a police officer and the escape of ten inmates convicted on terrorism charges, setting off a manhunt across the tiny island nation.
(AP, 1/1/17)(Econ, 1/21/17, p.40)
2017 Jan 1, In Brazil a rebellion began late today at the Anisio Jobim prison complex in Manaus. By the next day 57 people were killed in the riot sparked by a war between rival drug gangs. Many of those slain were beheaded or dismembered. An estimated 225 inmates escaped and only 48 were recaptured. Officials later said members of the FDN, Familia do Norte (Family of the North), organized the massacre seeking to wipe out the Sao Paulo-based rival Comando da Capital (PCC).
(Reuters, 1/2/17)(AP, 1/3/17)(AP, 2/22/17)(Econ, 1/7/17, p.26)
2017 Jan 1, British economist Anthony Atkinson (b.1944)) died. His 40 books included: “Inequality: What Can Be Done" (2015).
(Econ, 1/7/17, p.57)
2017 Jan 1, In Burundi a gunman killed Emmanuel Niyonkuru (54), the country’s environment and water minister early today, the first senior government figure to be murdered in nearly two years of political violence.
(Reuters, 1/1/17)
2017 Jan 1, In China new regulations went into effect regarding the country’s salt industry, easing a monopoly that has existed in some form for more than 2,000 years.
(AP, 1/3/17)
2017 Jan 1, In northern China heavy smog caused hundreds of flights to be canceled and highways to shut, disrupting the first day of the New Year holiday.
(Reuters, 1/1/17)
2017 Jan 1, China’s state news agency Xinhua reported that a court in the eastern province of Anhui has handed out sentences of up to 20 years in jail for 67 people involved in a mafia-style gang that engaged in gambling, extortion and violence.
(Reuters, 1/1/17)
2017 Jan 1, In Congo DRC rival groups agreed a deal for hauling the country out of a perilous political crisis. Under a landmark accord, the country's contested president, Joseph Kabila, who under the constitution should have left office on December 20, will stay in power until elections are held at the end of 2017. During this period a so-called National Transition Council will be set up, headed by opposition leader Etienne Tshisekedi, and a prime minister will be named from opposition ranks.
(AFP, 1/1/17)
2017 Jan 1, Denmark police arrested Chung Yoo-ra (20), an equestrian competitor and the daughter of Choi Soon-sil, a central figure in a South Korean influence-peddling scandal that led to President Park Geun-hye's impeachment. She will face extradition proceedings following her arrest on an Interpol request from Seoul.
(Reuters, 1/2/17)
2017 Jan 1, Gambian security agents closed three private radio stations near the capital, Banjul, amid an escalating political crisis triggered by President Yahya Jammeh's refusal to accept his election defeat.
(Reuters, 1/2/17)
2017 Jan 1, In Hong Kong nearly 5,000 people marched in a New Year's Day protest against an attempt by the semi-autonomous Chinese city's government to disqualify four pro-democracy lawmakers.
(AP, 1/1/17)
2017 Jan 1, In Indonesia a massive fire erupted in a boat carrying hundreds of local tourists to an island north of Jakarta, leaving at least 23 dead and 17 injured. Another 17 people were missing and 194 were rescued following the blaze on the Zahro Express.
(AFP, 1/1/17)
2017 Jan 1, A top commander said Iraqi forces have retaken more than 60 percent of eastern Mosul from the Islamic State group since the battle for the city began in mid-October.
(AFP, 1/1/17)
2017 Jan 1, The Israeli government ruled that it would not release to their families the bodies of Hamas militants killed during attacks on Israelis but would instead bury them.
(AFP, 1/1/17)
2017 Jan 1, In Italy a bomb squad officer in Florence lost an eye and had to have a hand amputated after a suspicious package he was examining exploded before dawn.
(AP, 1/1/17)
2017 Jan 1, Malta took up the rotating presidency of the EU Council of Ministers.
(Econ, 1/14/17, p.49)
2017 Jan 1, Hundreds of irate Mexicans marched in Mexico City to protest a steep rise in gasoline prices. The protests erupted into looting in several parts of the country.
(AFP, 1/2/17)(SFC, 1/5/17, p.A2)
2017 Jan 1, In Mexico at least five people were killed over the New year’s weekend in Acapulco including three men found decapitated.
(SFC, 1/3/17, p.A2)
2017 Jan 1, In Morocco more than 1,000 migrants tried to jump a high double fence between Morocco and the Spanish enclave of Ceuta in a violent assault that saw one officer lose an eye. Two managed to get through, but were badly injured.
(AFP, 1/1/17)
2017 Jan 1, In Poland new legislation went into effect that removed previous requirements for private landowners who want to cut down trees to apply for permission, pay compensation and plant new trees. The legislation reportedly led to a massacre of trees across the country.
(SSFC, 4/16/17, p.C14)
2017 Jan 1, In Slovakia train and railway station patrols set up by a far-right parliamentary party became illegal as of today. The People's Party Our Slovakia had launched the unarmed patrols in April following a violent incident on a passenger train, claiming the state was unable to keep people safe.
(AP, 1/1/17)
2017 Jan 1, South Korea's impeached Pres. Park Geun-hye broke a month-long silence over her alleged role in a corruption scandal, publicly denying charges of wrongdoing and saying that the accusations against her were "fabrication and falsehood."
(Reuters, 1/1/17)
2017 Jan 1, Syrian government warplanes resumed their bombardment of the rebel-held Wadi Barada valley northwest of Damascus after nearly 24 hours with no air raids. A monitoring group and rebels said Russian- and Turkish-backed ceasefire largely held in other areas on its third day.
(Reuters, 1/1/17)
2017 Jan 1, In northwestern Syria an air raid late today struck several cars killing at least eight people, including al-Qaida-linked fighters and a senior commander with a Chinese Islamic militant faction. The dead included a senior al-Qaida commander known as Khattab al-Qahtani, who was from the Gulf region and fought for the group in Afghanistan. Abu Omar al-Turkistani, a top commander with the Turkistan Islamic Party, and a Syrian al-Qaida commander known as Abu Muatasem al-Deiri, were also killed.
(AP, 1/2/17)
2017 Jan 1, In Turkey 39 people were killed and dozens wounded when a gunman stormed the popular Reina nightclub in Istanbul and sprayed bullets at revelers celebrating the New Year. The gunman was later identified as an Uzbek jihadist with the IS code name of Ebu Muhammed Horasani. In 2020 Albulkadir Masharipov of Uzbekistan was sentenced to life in prison.
(AFP, 1/1/17)(AFP, 1/8/17)(SFC, 9/8/20, p.A2)
2017 Jan 1, In Yemen an air strike hit a house in Marib, killing five members of the same family. Four civilians, including three children, were killed in rebel bombing that targeted residential areas in the southwestern city of Taez.
(AFP, 1/2/17)
2017 Jan 2, US House Republicans voted 119-74 in a secret caucus meeting to eviscerate the Office of Congressional Ethics, the independent body created in 2008 to investigate allegations of misconduct by lawmakers following several bribery and corruption scandals.
(SFC, 1/3/17, p.A5)(SFC, 1/4/17, p.A1)
2017 Jan 2, A powerful storm across the US south left four people dead when a tree fell on their mobile home in Rehobeth, Alabama. A woman in Georgia and a man in Florida were also killed.
(SFC, 1/3/17, p.A4)(SFC, 1/4/17, p.A12)
2017 Jan 2, In the SF Bay Area electric bus maker Proterra of Burlingame raised $140 million in its latest funding round. The company said it has sold more than 300 buses to transit agencies across North America.
(SFC, 1/3/17, pad)
2017 Jan 2, In Maine Sister Frances Carr, the last lifelong Shaker, died in Sabbathday Lake. The offshoot of Quakers had begun in England in the 1740s.
(Econ, 1/14/17, pp.)
2017 Jan 2, Afghan Pres. Ashraf Ghani suspended Abdul Razaq Wahidi, his minister for telecommunications and information technology, while he is investigated over a levy on mobile telephone charges. At least one police officer was killed by a roadside bomb in Logar province. A Taliban ambush in the northeastern Badakhshan province killed at least four police. In Takhar province a Taliban fighter was killed while planting a mine.
(Reuters, 1/2/17)(AP, 1/2/17)(AP, 1/3/17)
2017 Jan 2, Britain's government announced plans to build 17 new towns and villages across the English countryside in a bid to ease a chronic housing shortage.
(Reuters, 1/2/17)
2017 Jan 2, British police shot and killed Mohammed Yassar Yaqub of Huddersfield (27) during an operation in which five other people were arrested.
(AP, 1/3/17)
2017 Jan 2, John Berger (b.1926), influential British art critic and prize-winning author, died in France. The self-declared revolutionary had controversially backed the far-left Black Panthers. He won the 1972 Booker Prize for Fiction for his experimental novel "G.", set in pre-World War I Europe. His “Ways of Seeing" (1972) spawned a BBC series and ushered in a political perspective to art criticism.
(AFP, 1/3/17)(SFC, 1/3/17, pp.)
2017 Jan 2, In Chile a large fire burned 150 homes in the historic port city of Valparaiso.
(AFP, 1/3/17)
2017 Jan 2, Beijing and other cities across northern and central China were shrouded in thick smog, prompting authorities to delay dozens of flights and close highways.
(AP, 1/2/17)
2017 Jan 2, In Congo DRC a regional official said at least six people have been hacked to death in the troubled northeast in two attacks last week in Irumu territory blamed on Ugandan rebels. A civil society leader in Ituri, reported that 14 people were killed in the attacks, which took place in the villages of Saboko and Bialee.
(AFP, 1/2/17)
2017 Jan 2, In Croatia around 50 migrants staged a protest in Zagreb claiming they have suffered attacks by unknown assailants.
(AFP, 1/2/17)
2017 Jan 2, A senior Egyptian judge arrested on corruption charges was found dead in his cell having hanged himself. Wael Shalaby, a deputy chief justice in the country's administrative courts system, resigned Dec 31 shortly before he was arrested and was charged the following day with taking a bribe.
(Reuters, 1/2/17)
2017 Jan 2, India's top court prohibited politicians from using religion and caste to garner votes, a verdict that could force political parties to change their strategy in upcoming elections.
(Reuters, 1/2/17)
2017 Jan 2, India and Sri Lanka agreed to release fishermen in each others' custody, a move that is likely to ease tensions between the countries which have held fishermen captive for crossing territorial waters.
(Reuters, 1/2/17)
2017 Jan 2, Iranian state TV reported the country's coast guard has detained 21 fishermen and their three boats from neighboring Arab nations for straying into its territorial waters and fishing rare species.
(AP, 1/2/17)
2017 Jan 2, In Iraq a suicide bomber driving a pickup loaded with explosives struck a bustling market in Baghdad, killing at least 36 people in an attack claimed by the Islamic State group. Three smaller bombings elsewhere in the city killed another seven civilians and wounded at least 30.
(AP, 1/2/17)
2017 Jan 2, A court in Kuwait sentenced father Salem Buhan (26) and mother Amira Hussein (23) to death after finding them guilty of torturing their three-year-old daughter until she died. They were arrested in May and accused of beating and torturing the girl until she died and then keeping her body in a freezer for a week. The ministry said the couple were drug addicts.
(AFP, 1/2/17)
2017 Jan 2, In Somalia a suicide bomber detonated an explosives-laden vehicle at a security checkpoint near Mogadishu's international airport, killing at least three people.
(AP, 1/2/17)
2017 Jan 2, Syria's army advanced as it battled to capture a rebel region that is key to the capital's water supply, launching strikes and artillery fire threatening a fragile nationwide truce.
(AFP, 1/2/17)
2017 Jan 2, Ten Syrian rebel factions suspended talks on new peace negotiations, accusing President Bashar al-Assad's regime of violating a four-day-old ceasefire with attacks near Damascus.
(AFP, 1/3/17)(SFC, 1/4/17, p.A2)
2017 Jan 2, In eastern Thailand a van and a pickup collided and caught fire on a highway, killing 25 people in Chonburi province.
(AP, 1/2/17)
2017 Jan 2, Ukraine reported a one-third drop in its use of natural gas and general energy savings that will be cheered by its financial backers from the IMF.
(AFP, 1/2/17)
2017 Jan 2, In Yemen an air strike by the pro-government Saudi-led coalition killed five Shiite rebels when it targeted a convoy of three vehicles in Marees, in the southern province of Daleh. Six other insurgents were killed in a similar raid on two vehicles in Al-Makhdara, in the central province of Marib. Shelling by government forces killed three more rebels in the same area of Marib. Air strikes across several regions killed two civilians in the western province of Hodeida.
(AFP, 1/2/17)
2017 Jan 3, President-elect Donald Trump announced he has nominated Reagan-era lawyer Robert Lighthizer, described as an advocate of greater protectionism, as US trade representative.
(AFP, 1/3/17)
2017 Jan 3, US House Republicans scrapped their plan eviscerate the Office of Congressional Ethics, after the move drew a public backlash and a Twitter scolding from Pres.-elect Donald Trump.
(SFC, 1/3/17, p.A5)
2017 Jan 3, Ford Motor Co. said that it is canceling plans to build a $1.6 billion car plant in Mexico and will instead invest $700 million to increase production in Michigan.
(SFC, 1/4/17, p.C1)
2017 Jan 3, In Minnesota a federal appeals court ruled that a program for keeping sex offenders confined after they complete their prison sentences is constitutional.
(SFC, 1/4/17, p.A6)
2017 Jan 3, Toyota began moving hundreds of jobs out of its northern Kentucky headquarters as part of a nationwide consolidation of the company's operations.
(AP, 1/3/17)
2017 Jan 3, Albania suspended the reopening of schools after the New Year's break because of frigid weather and concern about the spread of flu.
(AP, 1/3/17)
2017 Jan 3, Haitian officials said an electoral tribunal has rejected claims that massive voter fraud marred the November presidential election victory of first-time candidate Jovenel Moise.
(AP, 1/3/17)
2017 Jan 3, Imprisoned Iranian human rights activist Arash Sadeghi ended a 71-day hunger strike as his detained wife won a temporary release from prison, a day after his case sparked a rare unauthorized protest in Tehran.
(AP, 1/3/17)
2017 Jan 3, In Iran two pipelines were reportedly bombed in Khuzestan province. The next day the Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahwaz claimed responsibility. Iranian Interior Ministry spokesman Salman Samani denied the claim.
(AP, 1/4/17)
2017 Jan 3, Moldova's new Pres. Igor Dodon stripped the ex-president of Romania of his recently-acquired Moldovan citizenship, saying he obtained it illegally. Traian Basescu and his wife Maria were awarded citizenship of the troubled ex-Soviet republic, formerly part of Romania. Dodon favors closer relations with Russia, while Basescu has called for the reunification of Romania and Moldova.
(AP, 1/3/17)
2017 Jan 3, Mozambique's Renamo opposition party said it had extended a ceasefire by two months to allow talks with President Filipe Nyusi's government, raising hopes for a nascent peace process.
(Reuters, 1/3/17)
2017 Jan 3, Nigerian anti-drug officers said they found 9.15 kg (20 pounds) of cocaine worth $4.7 million "factory-packed" inside a new pair of shoes that arrived at Abuja airport on a flight from Brazil.
(Reuters, 1/3/17)
2017 Jan 3, In Romania Sevil Shhaideh, poised to become the country's first female and Muslim prime minister, was offered a job as deputy premier after the country's president declined to nominate her for the top government job.
(AP, 1/3/17)
2017 Jan 3, Taiwan strongly objected to the deportation from Vietnam to China of four Taiwanese nationals suspected of telecommunications fraud, saying the move was carried out under pressure from Beijing.
(Reuters, 1/3/17)
2017 Jan 3, Turkmenistan said that it has restricted natural gas deliveries to Iran over unpaid debts. Iranian state media have put the figure demanded by Turkmenistan at around $2 billion.
(AP, 1/3/17)
2017 Jan 3, In southern Yemen pro-government forces attacked al-Qaida militants, killing 15 jihadis but losing 11 of their own troops.
(AP, 1/3/17)
2017 Jan 3, In southern Yemen at least three soldiers were killed in clashes with al Qaeda militants in Shuqra in an operation launched by the internationally recognized government of President Abd-Rabu Mansour Hadi.
(Reuters, 1/4/17)
2017 Jan 4, Pres.-elect Donald Trump chose Jay Clayton, a Wall Street attorney, as his nominee to head the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
(SFC, 1/5/17, p.A5)
2017 Jan 4, In Chicago a federal jury convicted Hobos gang boss Gregory “Bowlegs" Chester, alleged hit man Paris Poe and four others for racketeering conspiracy.
(SFC, 1/5/17, pea)
2017 Jan 4, In Kentucky former LaRue County High School principal Stephen Kyle Goodlett (36) was indicted in Louisville on federal charges of possessing and transporting child pornography. He had admitted to investigators that he has a pornography addiction and downloaded images from phones confiscated from students.
(AP, 1/5/17)
2017 Jan 4, In Massachusetts about $20 million in cash was found hidden inside a box spring in a Westborough apartment. It was seized as part of a wide-ranging investigation into the TelexFree internet telecom company that authorities say was actually a massive international pyramid scheme. Cleber Rene Rizerio Rocha was charged with conspiring to commit money laundering. TelexFree filed for bankruptcy in 2014, its assets frozen, and its two principals were indicted on federal charges of wire fraud and conspiracy.
(AP, 1/6/17)(SFC, 1/7/17, pea)
2017 Jan 4, In Nevada Faraday Future’s FF91 was unveiled during a press event for CES17 in las Vegas. The company was backed by Chinese billionaire Jia Yueting. Production was scheduled to start in Nevada this year with first deliveries in 2018.
(SFC, 1/5/17, pp.)
2017 Jan 4, Macy’s said it will move forward with 68 store closures and eliminate more than 10,000 jobs following a disappointing holiday shopping season.
(SFC, 1/5/17, pp.)
2017 Jan 4, In China Chen Zhongshu, the land and resources chief of Panzhihua city in Sichuan province, allegedly shot and injured two leaders of the city as the pair held a meeting in a conference center, and later killed himself.
(AP, 1/4/17)
2017 Jan 4, In southern China a man armed with a kitchen knife stabbed 11 children at a kindergarten in Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, seriously wounding three, the latest such attack in recent years.
(AFP, 1/4/17)
2017 Jan 4, Czech authorities said they had detected highly-contagious bird flu at two small poultry farms and in dead swans in the first such cases in a decade.
(AFP, 1/4/17)
2017 Jan 4, Egypt released political activist Ahmed Maher (36), a leading figure in the 2011 revolt that toppled the government, after he completed his jail term. Maher was the founder and spokesman of the April 6 protest movement, one of the main groups that campaigned for more freedom under longtime ruler Hosni Mubarak.
(AFP, 1/5/17)
2017 Jan 4, In France former Kosovar PM Ramush Haradinaj was arrested at Basel Mulhouse Freiburg airport on a Serbian warrant. He faced possible extradition to Serbia to face war crimes charges.
(AP, 1/5/17)
2017 Jan 4, French customs officials intercepted 70 kg of Captagon, dubbed the "jihadists' drug", at Paris's Charles de Gaulle airport, a first for France. Another 67 kg of the drug were found at the airport in February. Captagon, a type of amphetamine, is one of the most commonly used drugs among fighters in the Syrian war.
(AFP, 5/30/17)
2017 Jan 4, The Gambia's army chief reaffirmed his loyalty to Pres. Yahya Jammeh despite the threat of a regional military intervention if the strongman refuses to step down.
(AFP, 1/4/17)
2017 Jan 4, Indian officials said police have rescued nearly 200 children, most of them under the age of 14, who had been found working in a brick kiln in the southern state of Telangana in one of the biggest operations in the region.
(Reuters, 1/4/17)
2017 Jan 4, In India a 24-year-old housemaid died in hospital, two weeks after she was admitted with multiple fractures and injuries. She had said she was abused by her New Delhi employers after being lured to the city with the promise of a job.
(Reuters, 1/6/17)
2017 Jan 4, The UN said more than 2,000 Iraqis a day are fleeing Mosul, several hundred more each day than before U.S.-led coalition forces began a new phase of their battle to retake the city from Islamic State.
(Reuters, 1/4/17)
2017 Jan 4, The Israeli government said China has agreed for thousands of migrant construction laborers to work in Israel in a bid to alleviate a housing crisis.
(AFP, 1/4/17)
2017 Jan 4, Israel released billionaire businessman Beny Steinmetz from house arrest without charge, following his detention over bribery allegations involving BSGR in Africa.
(Reuters, 1/4/17)
2017 Jan 4, Israeli Sergeant Elor Azaria, who shot dead a Palestinian assailant lying wounded and motionless on the ground in the occupied West Bank last March 24, was convicted of manslaughter in one of the most polarizing cases in Israel's history.
(Reuters, 1/4/17)
2017 Jan 4, Italy vowed to increase deportations of migrants whose asylum requests have been rejected, after a riot in a reception center sparked by the death of a young woman.
(AFP, 1/4/17)
2017 Jan 4, Niger said around 20 more members of the jihadist group Boko Haram have surrendered. About 50 Boko Haram fighters have now given themselves up since December 27.
(AFP, 1/5/17)
2017 Jan 4, Pakistan's Supreme Court asked the police to look into allegations that a 10-year-old girl working as a maid was tortured by her employers, an influential judge and his wife, after disturbing photographs of the girl, purporting to show her badly beaten and bruised, circulated on social media. A day earlier the girl's parents announced they have "forgiven" the judge and his wife, apparently after reaching a financial settlement.
(AP, 1/4/17)
2017 Jan 4, In Pakistan four campaigners of the Civil Progressive Alliance of Pakistan (CPAP) activist group went missing.
(Reuters, 1/19/17)
2017 Jan 4, Palestinian fisherman Mohammed Al-Hissi (33) disappeared after colliding with an Israeli navy ship off the Gaza coast.
(AP, 1/7/17)
2017 Jan 4, In the southern Philippines more than 100 suspected Muslim rebels stormed a jail before dawn allowing 158 inmates to escape. Six inmates were killed in firefights with police and eight others were caught and returned to prison.
(SFC, 1/5/17, pea)
2017 Jan 4, Romania's Parliament approved a left-leaning government led by Sorin Grindeanu, who vowed to stop thousands of Romanians emigrating, build highways and encourage the consumption of local produce.
(AP, 1/4/17)
2017 Jan 5, US Pres.-elect Donald Trump selected former Indiana Sen. Dan Coats to lead the office of the Director of National Intelligence.
(SFC, 1/6/17, p.A5)
2017 Jan 5, America's top intelligence official said that Russia undoubtedly interfered in the US 2016 presidential election but stopped short of using the explosive description "an act of war," telling lawmakers such a call isn't within the purview of the US intelligence community. Senior US officials said the CIA has identified Russian officials who fed material hacked from the Democratic National Committee and party leaders to WikiLeaks at the direction of Russian President Vladimir Putin through third parties.
(AP, 1/5/17)(Reuters, 1/6/17)
2017 Jan 5, The US State and Treasury department said Hamza bin Laden, a son of Osama bin Laden, and Ibrahim al-Banna, a leader of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), have been added to the US counter-terrorism blacklist, a move to keep them from using the US financial system.
(Reuters, 1/5/17)
2017 Jan 5, In Chicago four people were charged with hate crimes in connection with a video broadcast live on Facebook that showed a mentally disabled white man (18) being beaten and taunted, threatened with a knife and forced to drink from a toilet.
(SFC, 1/6/17, pea)(SFC, 1/7/17, pea)
2017 Jan 5, Mercedes-Benz said it is recalling nearly 48,000 SUVs in the US to fix a sensor problem that could stop the front passenger air bag from inflating in a crash.
(AP, 1/5/17)
2017 Jan 5, Argentine firefighters struggled to control a series of wildfires that have devastated nearly one million hectares (2.5 million acres) of the country's famous pampas. The largest was started by a lightning strike on New Year's weekend and was now 10 km across.
(AFP, 1/5/17)
2017 Jan 5, Bahrain announced that it has restored the power of its domestic spy service to make some arrests, reversing a key reform recommended in the wake of the crackdown that followed the country's 2011 Arab Spring protests.
(AP, 1/5/17)
2017 Jan 5, Bahrain's prosecution extended by two weeks the detention of Shiite opposition leader Nabil Rajab over spreading "false information" about the Sunni-ruled kingdom.
(AFP, 1/5/17)
2017 Jan 5, Brazilian President Michel Temer said the country will build new prisons in every state to relieve overcrowding after a "horrific" riot that left 56 inmates dead.
(AFP, 1/5/17)
2017 Jan 5, The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said women in the Lake Chad basin, where the borders of Chad, Cameroon, Niger and Nigeria meet, have been forced to sell sex to survive due to an insurgency by Boko Haram fighters that has driven millions from their homes and left children to starve.
(Reuters, 1/5/17)
2017 Jan 5, Cyprus' biggest bank said it has fully repaid 11.4 billion euros ($11.9 billion) of emergency cash it received to stay afloat during a 2013 banking crisis that forced the island to need a multibillion euro rescue deal from its eurozone partners.
(AP, 1/5/17)
2017 Jan 5, Egypt’s Interior Ministry said one suspect was killed and three others arrested in a police raid in connection with a bomb attack that killed six policemen in Cairo on December 9. Those arrested in the raid on the outskirts of Cairo belonged to a militant group called the Hasm Movement, which claimed responsibility for the attack.
(Reuters, 1/5/17)
2017 Jan 5, French authorities started slaughtering ducks in the main foie gras-producing region to try to contain a dangerous form of bird flu.
(AP, 1/5/17)
2017 Jan 5, Guyana narrowly passed a bill late today that allows officials to raid the commercial bank accounts of business owners who owe a large amount of unpaid taxes.
(AP, 1/6/17)
2017 Jan 5, In Haiti Guy Philippe (48) a key figure in the 2004 ouster of then-President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and later ran for president himself, was arrested. He had been indicted in 2005 on US cocaine trafficking charges but managed to elude capture.
(AP, 1/6/17)
2017 Jan 5, An Indonesian government minister clarified that the country was suspending only part of its military cooperation with Australia, as that country promised its investigation of an alleged insult of Indonesian beliefs was nearly complete. Australian Defense Minister Marise Payne said the issue began in November, after an Indonesian military officer raised concerns about teaching materials and remarks made at an army language-training facility in western Australia.
(AP, 1/5/17)
2017 Jan 5, Iraqi forces launched an offensive against the Islamic State group near the Syrian border, piling further pressure on the jihadists' crumbling "caliphate".
(AFP, 1/5/17)
2017 Jan 5, In Iraq several attacks in and around Baghdad killed at least 27 people including a suicide car bombing in a commercial area in central Baghdad that killed at least 11 civilians.
(AP, 1/5/17)(SFC, 1/6/17, p.A3)
2017 Jan 5, Israeli police questioned PM Benjamin Netanyahu for a second time as part of a probe into whether he illegally accepted gifts from wealthy supporters.
(AFP, 1/5/17)
2017 Jan 5, Namibian plaintiffs, including some from New York, sued Germany over a genocide carried out by German colonial troops in the early 1900s, in which more than 100,000 people were killed. They sued under the Alien Tort Statute, a 1789 US law often invoked in human rights cases.
(AP, 1/6/17)
2017 Jan 5, Nigerian soldiers found one of the Chibok schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram nearly three years ago wandering in the bush with her baby near the Islamic extremist group's forest stronghold. More than 200 of the girls remain missing.
(AP, 1/5/17)(SFC, 1/6/17, p.A2)
2017 Jan 5, A Nigerian official said three teenage girls suspected of planning a triple suicide bomb attack in a town frequently targeted by Boko Haram have been shot dead. The girls were intercepted at Bakin Dutse village, some five km from Madagali.
(AFP, 1/5/17)
2017 Jan 5, Philippines’s police chief Ronald dela Rosa said security forces had effectively broken the backbone of Ansar Al-Khilafah Philippines (AKP) with the killing of its leader, Mohammad Jaafar Maguid, and the arrest of his three AKP colleagues.
(Reuters, 1/7/17)
2017 Jan 5, In Sri Lanka hundreds of opposition supporters and farmers protested the government's plan to lease a southern seaport to a Chinese-controlled joint venture in exchange for the heavy loans to build the port.
(AP, 1/5/17)
2017 Jan 5, A Swiss insurance agency ruled that an Uber driver is an employee for whom the company must pay social security contributions, dealing a blow to the US ride-hailing platform that says drivers are independent contractors.
(Reuters, 1/5/17)
2017 Jan 5, In Syria at least ten people were killed in a car blast in the coastal province of Latakia where two Russian bases are located.
(Reuters, 1/5/17)
2017 Jan 5, In Syria the Jabar citadel on the banks of Lake Assad was taken by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) alliance.
(Reuters, 1/6/17)
2017 Jan 5, Thailand’s Interior Ministry said flooding in the south has killed at least five people, disrupted transportation and spoiled tourists' holidays at one of the country's most popular resort islands.
(AP, 1/5/17)
2017 Jan 5, Two senior Turkish military officers were jailed for life for involvement in July's failed coup attempt that killed almost 250 people, marking the first conviction related to the putsch.
(Reuters, 1/5/17)
2017 Jan 5, In western Turkey a car bombing outside a courthouse in Izmir killed two people. The Kurdish PKK militant group was suspected. Turkish police shot dead two assailants. A day later police detained 18 people in connection to the attack.
(Reuters, 1/5/17)(SFC, 1/7/17, p.A2)
2017 Jan 5, Zimbabwe's wildlife agency said it has sold 35 elephants to China to ease overpopulation and raise funds for conservation, amid criticism from animal welfare activists that such sales are unethical.
(AP, 1/5/17)
2017 Jan 6, Attorneys confirmed that Shilo Heavenly Quine (57), a California inmate, had become the first US inmate to receive state-funded sex-reassignment surgery. In 1980 Quine and an accomplice had shot and killed Shahid Ali Baig, a father of three, stealing his car and $80 during a drug and alcohol rampage in Los Angeles.
(SFC, 1/9/17, p.D2)
2017 Jan 6, In Florida US Army National Guard veteran Esteban Santiago (26) of Anchorage, Alaska, shot and killed five people and wounded six at the Fort Lauderdale airport. He opened fire with a 9mm semiautomatic handgun that he appears to have legally checked on a flight from Alaska. In May, 2018, Santiago pleaded guilty to 11 of 22 counts. Santiago avoided a death penalty and was sentenced to life in prison.
(AP, 1/7/17)(SFC, 5/23/18, p.A6)(SFC, 8/18/18, p.A7)
2017 Jan 6, In southern Texas three duck hunters went missing. Their bodies were recovered the next day near Matagorda Bay.
(SFC, 1/9/17, p.A5)
2017 Jan 6, In Afghanistan unidentified gunmen killed eight members of the Hazara minority who were working as miners in the northern province of Baghlan.
(Reuters, 1/6/17)
2017 Jan 6, In Bangladesh Nurul Islam Marzan was one of two people killed in a shootout early today in Dhaka. Marzan was suspected of being one of the leaders of the July 1, 2015, attack on a popular cafe in Dhaka that left 20 people dead. Saddam Hossain, an accomplice of Marzan, was also killed.
(AP, 1/6/17)(SFC, 1/7/17, p.A2)
2017 Jan 6, Brazil was hit by its second explosion of grisly prison violence this week, as inmates beheaded and mutilated their rivals at the Monte Cristo Farm Penitentiary (PAMC) in Roraima state, leaving 31 inmates dead.
(AFP, 1/6/17)(SFC, 1/7/17, p.A6)
2017 Jan 6, In Bulgaria snowstorms paralyzed traffic and cut electricity to hundreds of thousands of people. In Romania atomic energy producer Nuclearelectrica was forced to shut down its No. 1 reactor.
(Reuters, 1/6/17)
2017 Jan 6, Canada posted its first trade surplus in more than two years, driven by record exports to countries other than the United States.
(AFP, 1/6/17)
2017 Jan 6, Blizzards swept parts of Europe, causing at least nine deaths, closing roads and resulting in traffic accidents, travel delays and medical evacuations. In Poland, the cold was blamed for five deaths in 24 hours. Ukraine officials reported that four people had died from effects of the cold in the Lviv region near the Polish border.
(AP, 1/6/17)
2017 Jan 6, In southwestern France workers wearing masks and protective clothes gassed thousands of ducks, in a massive cull that was ordered in an attempt to prevent a spread of the H5N8 bird flu virus.
(Reuters, 1/6/17)
2017 Jan 6, In Ivory Coast disgruntled soldiers demanding salary increases and the payment of bonuses seized control of Bouake city and launched mutinies in Daloa and Korhogo.
(Reuters, 1/6/17)(AP, 1/6/17)
2017 Jan 6, Lebanese group Hezbollah said a temporary ceasefire has been agreed in a rebel-held area near Damascus which Syrian government forces and their allies are trying to recapture from insurgents.
(Reuters, 1/6/17)
2017 Jan 6, In Libya the captured spokesman of the Revolutionary Shura Council of Benghazi, a coalition of armed groups controlling two remaining militia strongholds in Libya's second largest city, confirmed during videotaped interrogations the killing of Wissam Ben Hamid, leader of militia groups in the eastern city of Benghazi, in an air strike nearly a month ago.
(AP, 1/7/17)
2017 Jan 6, In Mexico a gunman shot and wounded an official from the US consulate in the western city of Guadalajara. On Jan 8 prosecutors said the alleged gunman, a US citizen, has been arrested.
(AFP, 1/8/17)(SFC, 1/9/17, p.A4)
2017 Jan 6, Mexican police confirmed that two people in Hidalgo have died following confrontations with police over gasoline price hikes. This raised the death toll in the protests to six.
(SFC, 1/7/17, p.A2)
2017 Jan 6, In Mexico two men were shot to death on a beach in the once-glamorous Pacific coast resort of Acapulco.
(AP, 1/7/17)
2017 Jan 6, Russia's military said it has begun scaling down its deployment to Syria, as the regime intensified its bombardment of a rebel-held district home to the capital's main water source.
(AFP, 1/6/17)
2017 Jan 6, In Syria an air strike killed Sheikh Younes Shoueib, a member of Jabhat Fateh al-Sham group and its shura council, and his son. The group accused the US-led coalition of carrying out the strike.
(Reuters, 1/6/17)
2017 Jan 6, Thai authorities warned of flash floods across the south as torrential rains lashed the region leaving at least eight people dead, delaying flights and disrupting holidays during peak tourist season.
(AFP, 1/6/17)
2017 Jan 7, US Pres.-elect Donald Trump called for a closer relationship between the US and Russia.
(SSFC, 1/8/17, p.A7)
2017 Jan 7, Oliver Schmidt, a former Volkswagen US executive and champion of "clean diesel," was arrested in Florida. He headed VW's US Energy and Environmental Office in 2014 and 2015 before returning to live in Germany. He was charged with defrauding the United States in the cover up cheating of US emissions tests.
(Reuters, 1/9/17)
2017 Jan 7, Beijing announced that China's foreign exchange reserves fell by $320 billion last year, as authorities sought to support the yuan against a soaring dollar which is encouraging capital outflows.
(AFP, 1/7/17)
2017 Jan 7, Heavy snowfall and below-freezing temperatures continued to sweep across the European continent causing more than a dozen deaths. In Poland two men died of cold, bringing the nation's death toll from winter weather to 55 since Nov 1.
(AP, 1/7/17)(AP, 1/8/17)
2017 Jan 7, Ghana's new President Nana Akufo-Addo (72) pledged to cut taxes to boost the economy at his swearing in ceremony, whilst also promising to protect the public purse by getting value for money on services.
(Reuters, 1/7/17)
2017 Jan 7, Iraqi government troops made fresh progress in their push against IS inside the northern city of Mosul, dislodging militants from new areas and for the first time reaching the nearest point to Tigris river that divides the city since the operation began in mid-October.
(AP, 1/7/17)
2017 Jan 7, In Ivory Coast gunfire broke out at a military base in Abidjan, as unrest triggered by soldiers demanding wage increases and bonuses appeared to spread.
(Reuters, 1/7/17)
2017 Jan 7, In Pakistan Samar Abbas, president of the Civil Progressive Alliance of Pakistan (CPAP), an anti-extremism activist group, went missing. This was days after four other campaigners disappeared in a way that has alarmed supporters of free speech.
(Reuters, 1/11/17)
2017 Jan 7, Philippine security forces a foreign national and his female companion who were suspected of being connected to a militant group supporting Islamic State. The foreigner, believed to be Pakistani, was identified as Abu Naila.
(Reuters, 1/7/17)
2017 Jan 7, Mario Soares (92), Portugal's former president (1986-1996), died in Lisbon.
(AFP, 1/7/17)
2017 Jan 7, In Saudi Arabia Taie bin Salem bin Yaslam al-Saya'ari died alongside another extremist in a shootout with officers in Riyadh, wearing a suicide bomb vest and clutching a machine gun.
(AP, 1/8/17)
2017 Jan 7, In South Korea hundreds of thousands of protesters returned to the streets of Seoul demanding impeached Pres. Park Geun-Hye's immediate removal and the salvaging of the April 16, 2014, sunken Sewol ferry which left more than 300 dead.
(AFP, 1/7/17)
2017 Jan 7, A South Korean Buddhist monk (64) set himself on fire to protest the country’s settlement with Japan on compensation for wartime sex slaves. The monk suffered third-degree burns.
(SFC, 1/9/17, p.A2)
2017 Jan 7, In Sri Lanka at least 21 people were injured in violent clashes between government supporters and villagers marching against what they say is a plan to take over private land for an industrial zone in which China will have a major stake.
(AP, 1/7/17)
2017 Jan 7, In Syria at least 48 people were killed when a tanker truck bomb ripped through the center of a busy commercial district of Azaz, a rebel-held town along the Turkish border.
(AFP, 1/7/17)
2017 Jan 7, Turkey ordered the dismissal of almost 8,400 civil servants and the closure of over 80 associations, including sports clubs, in the latest round of purges after the July failed coup.
(AFP, 1/7/17)
2017 Jan 7, Turkish PM Binali Yildirim commenced a two-day visit to Iraq, the first since the two governments quarreled over the presence of unauthorized Turkish troops in northern Iraq.
(AP, 1/7/17)
2017 Jan 7, In Turkey a heavy snowstorm paralyzed life in Istanbul, with hundreds of flights cancelled and the Bosporus closed to shipping traffic.
(AFP, 1/7/17)
2017 Jan 7, Yemeni government forces launched operation "Golden Spear," to drive Huthi rebels from all of Yemen's Red Sea coast. At least 55 Huthis were killed in fighting and 72 others wounded. Clashes over the next 24 hours also killed 13 loyalist forces.
(AFP, 1/8/17)(AFP, 1/9/17)
2017 Jan 8, The US military vowed to increase the scope and complexity of its European training exercises to deter Russian aggression, as more US tanks, trucks and other equipment arrived in Germany for a big buildup on NATO's eastern flank.
(Reuters, 1/8/17)
2017 Jan 8, A US Navy destroyer fired three warning shots at four Iranian fast-attack vessels after they closed in at a high rate of speed near the Strait of Hormuz.
(Reuters, 1/9/17)
2017 Jan 8, SeaWorld in San Diego hosted its last killer whale performance, the culmination of its promise to phase out the decades-old show after criticism of its treatment of the captive marine mammals.
(Reuters, 1/8/17)
2017 Jan 8, In California the Pioneer Cabin Tree in Calaveras Big Tree State Park fell due to rain and soggy ground. A hole in the base of the giant sequoia had been enlarged in 1881 and cars began passing through in 1920. The 32-foot diameter tree was about two thousand years old.
(SFC, 1/10/17, p.A10)
2017 Jan 8, In the northeastern US a snowstorm dumped more than a foot of snow in areas of southern New England. 19.5 inches fell on East Bridgewater, Mass.
(SFC, 1/9/17, p.A5)
2017 Jan 8, Brazilian authorities confirmed that four more inmates have died in a penitentiary rebellion in the city of Manaus, as the overall death toll from a week of bloodshed in Brazilian prisons approached 100.
(AP, 1/8/17)
2017 Jan 8, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani (82), former Iranian president (1989-1997) died in hospital in Tehran after suffering a heart attack. In 2003 Forbes magazine put his personal wealth at over $1 billion.
(Reuters, 1/8/17)(Econ, 1/14/17, p.82)
2017 Jan 8, In parts of Europe blizzards and dangerously low temperatures persisted, prompting Pope Francis to draw attention to the homeless suffering in freezing weather.
(AP, 1/8/17)
2017 Jan 8, In eastern France a bus skidded off a slippery stretch of Route 79, killing four Portuguese passengers and leaving more than a dozen injured.
(AP, 1/8/17)
2017 Jan 8, In Haiti 11 people died at the scene of a bus and truck crash outside of the northwestern town of Port-de-Paix. Another nine people were declared dead after being transported to hospitals in Gros Morne and Gonaives.
(AP, 1/9/17)
2017 Jan 8, Iraqi special forces battling Islamic State reached the eastern bank of the Tigris river in Mosul for the first time in a three-month, US-backed offensive to capture the city from the militants. In Baghdad, a suicide attacker killed 9 people when he drove an explosives-rigged car into vegetable market in the mainly Shi'ite Muslim eastern Jamila district. A few hours later, a suicide bomber wearing an explosive vest blew himself up at a market in another mostly Shi'ite district, Baladiyat, killing seven. Three additional bombings around Baghdad killed seven more people.
(Reuters, 1/8/17)(SFC, 1/9/17, p.A2)
2017 Jan 8, Ivory Coast soldiers ended a two-day mutiny in the second city Bouake and other key areas after reaching a deal on their demands for pay rises, housing and faster promotion.
(AFP, 1/8/17)
2017 Jan 8, In Mexico police in Sonora state fought a pitched three-hour battle to free a border rail crossing at Nogales that had been blocked by people protesting a 20% gasoline price increase.
(AP, 1/9/17)
2017 Jan 8, In Nigeria five suicide bombers trying to infiltrate the northeastern city of Maiduguri and died in explosions that killed at least three civilians.
(AP, 1/9/17)
2017 Jan 8, Pakistani media said the country’s recently retired army chief Raheel Sharif has been appointed to lead a new Saudi-military alliance to fight terrorism.
(Reuters, 1/8/17)
2017 Jan 8, Pakistani police said 13 people have been killed in a head-on collision between a car and a passenger van in the eastern province of Punjab.
(AP, 1/8/17)
2017 Jan 8, A Palestinian rammed a truck into a group of Israeli soldiers visiting a popular tourist spot in Jerusalem, killing four and wounding at least 15 people. The driver was killed. An Israeli soldier fired on the attacker and distributed video of him saying he shot after realizing it was not an accident.
(AFP, 1/8/17)
2017 Jan 8, In Syria a car bomb exploded in a government-held area outside Damascus, killing at least five people and wounding 15. The al-Qaida-linked Fatah al-Sham Front claimed the attack.
(AP, 1/8/17)
2017 Jan 9, In Florida Orlando police Master Sgt. Debra Clayton (42) was killed after approaching suspect Markeith Lloyd (41), wanted in the December killing of his pregnant ex-girlfriend Sade Dixon (24). Officer Norman Lewis was killed in a motorcycle crash during a massive manhunt for Lloyd, who was captured on Jan 17.
(SFC, 1/10/17, p.A7)(SFC, 1/18/17, p.A5)(SSFC, 1/29/17, p.A8)
2017 Jan 9, In Kentucky Garry Morrison (51) killed his mother and his girlfriend inside his rural home near Morehead. He then set his home on fire and died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound as deputies responded.
(SFC, 1/10/17, p.A6)
2017 Jan 9, Angolan health officials said they had recorded the country's first two cases of the Zika virus, a French tourist (two months ago) and a resident in the capital Luanda (last week).
(AFP, 1/9/17)
2017 Jan 9, Bosnian Serbs celebrated a controversial holiday in defiance of the country's other ethnic groups, its constitutional court and the international community. On Jan 9, 1992, Bosnian Serbs declared the creation of their own state in Bosnia.
(AP, 1/9/17)
2017 Jan 9, In England a 24-hour strike by London Underground station staff shut down much of the city’s subway network.
(SFC, 1/10/17, p.A2)
2017 Jan 9, The Czech Republic said it has approved a plan for Czech and Slovak air forces to cooperate in protecting air spaces over the two neighboring countries that once formed Czechoslovakia. Slovakia's government had already approved the deal.
(AP, 1/9/17)
2017 Jan 9, In Egypt militants attacked a police checkpoint in the northern Sinai Peninsula using a stolen garbage truck packed with explosives, killing at least eight people and setting off clashes with security forces. The Islamic State’s local affiliate soon claimed responsibility.
(AP, 1/9/17)(SFC, 1/11/17, p.A2)
2017 Jan 9, French police arrested 17 people in relation to the robbery last Oct 3 in Paris of more than $10 million in jewels from Kim Kardashian West.
(SFC, 1/10/17, p.A2)
2017 Jan 9, A Gambian foreign ministry source said President Yahya Jammeh has fired 12 ambassadors after they called for him to step aside and allow opposition leader Adama Barrow to take power.
(AFP, 1/9/17)
2017 Jan 9, Iraqi special forces made further advances against Islamic State in Mosul, pushing militants from another eastern district and edging closer to army units nearby.
(Reuters, 1/9/17)
2017 Jan 9, Israeli authorities charged two Palestinians, arrested last month, with helping to smuggle hundreds of cameras to the Gaza Strip for the Islamic militant group Hamas and others.
(AP, 1/9/17)
2017 Jan 9, Italy's anti-establishment 5-Star Movement voted to cut its ties with the anti-EU UK Independence Party (UKIP) and to hook up instead with the Liberals in the European Parliament. The liberal group rejected the request, ending a short-lived courtship.
(Reuters, 1/9/17)(AP, 1/9/17)
2017 Jan 9, Ivory Coast's PM Daniel Kablan Duncan resigned along with his government, a day after the end of a short-lived army mutiny that raised security fears in the world's top cocoa producer. The resignation was standard procedure as it follows legislative elections in December. Ivorian state employees meanwhile began a five-day strike to protest against pension cuts ranging from 30 to 50 percent and a plan to raise the retirement age from 55 to 60.
(AFP, 1/9/17)
2017 Jan 9, Japanese drugmaker Takeda Pharmaceutical said it will buy US cancer drug developer Ariad Pharmaceuticals in a $5.2 billion deal that the companies expect to close by the end of February.
(AP, 1/9/17)
2017 Jan 9, Northern Ireland's power-sharing government was on the brink of collapse after Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness, the leader of Sinn Fein, announced he was resigning. The announcement ramped up pressure on First Minister Arlene Foster, leader of the Democratic Unionist Party, to step down over her handling of a botched renewable energy scheme that wasted public funds.
(AFP, 1/9/17)
2017 Jan 9, In North Korea seven miners were initially trapped after the collapse at the Unryul mine, a leading iron ore producer in the country's southwest. One miner was rescued 10 days later but six others were found dead.
(AP, 3/20/17)
2017 Jan 9, Pakistan's military says it has successfully test-fired a submarine-launched cruise missile for the first time, giving it a "credible second strike capability."
(AP, 1/9/17)
2017 Jan 9, Pakistani opposition lawmakers called for an investigation into the disappearance of four social activists last week, including a prominent university professor who often spoke out over disappearances of fellow campaigners.
(Reuters, 1/9/17)
2017 Jan 9, Turkish Airlines canceled 277 domestic and international flights to and from Istanbul's two airports due to heavy snow.
(AP, 1/9/17)
2017 Jan 9, UAE media reported that the United Arab Emirates has ordered the removal from a textbook of the term "Persian Gulf" for the waterway that is the subject of a bitter naming dispute with Iran.
(AFP, 1/9/17)
2017 Jan 10, President Obama bid farewell to the nation in a wide-ranging speech that urged Americans not to abandon a sense of unified purpose and defended many of his presidency’s accomplishments.
(CSM, 1/11/17)
2017 Jan 10, The board of directors of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art announced that their new museum would be built in the Exposition Park of Los Angeles.
(SFC, 1/11/17, p.A1)
2017 Jan 10, The Archdiocese of Boston and the New England Historic Genealogical Society announced that they were teaming up to create an online database of hundreds of thousands of Roman Catholic Church documents to help people trace their family histories.
(SFC, 1/11/17, p.A6)
2017 Jan 10, In North Carolina Dylann Roof was sentenced to death for the June 17, 2015, killing of nine black church members during Bible study in Charleston.
(SFC, 1/11/17, p.A7)
2017 Jan 10, The United States blacklisted British Ghanaian jihadist Alexanda Amon Kotey, a surviving member of the notorious Islamic State kidnapping cell popularly known as "The Beatles," as a global terrorist threat. Kotey is still thought to be at large somewhere in or near the IS stronghold of Raqa, in eastern Syria.
(AFP, 1/10/17)
2017 Jan 10, In Afghanistan two large bombings near government offices in Kabul killed at least 38 people, including civilians and military personnel. Earlier in the day, a suicide bomber on foot struck in the southern Helmand province, killing at least seven people. In Kandahar province five UAE officials were among 12 people killed when explosives hidden in a sofa detonated inside the governor's compound. The spate of attacks killed a total of 57 people.
(AP, 1/10/17)(AFP, 1/11/17)(AFP, 2/15/17)
2017 Jan 10, In Albania three men in their 50s froze to death, and municipal authorities took several hundred homeless people to heated shelters.
(Reuters, 1/10/17)
2017 Jan 10, Argentina said it has struck a deal with labor unions and energy companies aimed at attracting investment to the Vaca Muerta shale deposit in southwestern Neuquen province, one of the world's biggest unconventional hydrocarbons deposits.
(AP, 1/10/17)
2017 Jan 10, In Bosnia three people in remote parts of the country froze to death, while nearly 50,000 in the central town of Zenica lost their home heating due to a malfunction in a boiler at the ArcelorMittal steel mill, which provides thermal power to households.
(Reuters, 1/10/17)
2017 Jan 10, British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn told the BBC that "I would like to see some kind of high-earnings cap" to reduce inequality. He said that it should kick in at a level "somewhat higher" than his own 138,000 pound ($167,000) annual salary.
(AP, 1/10/17)
2017 Jan 10, UKIP founder Nigel Farage said Farage said that all differences with 5-Star had been resolved and that Italy's anti-establishment 5-Star Movement has backtracked from plans to quit the UKIP grouping in the European Parliament.
(Reuters, 1/10/17)
2017 Jan 10, Cameroon’s government said its troops have in recent weeks killed some 100 Boko Haram fighters and freed "hundreds of hostages" held by the group.
(AFP, 1/11/17)
2017 Jan 10, China's top economic planner pledged to continue cutting steel and coal production, which have been a source of trade friction with many countries.
(AP, 1/10/17)
2017 Jan 10, A Congolese police source said opposition leader Okombi Salissa (55), who unsuccessfully challenged President Denis Sassou Nguesso (73) at the polls, has been arrested. Salissa has sought to stop Nguesso from returning to power in March.
(AFP, 1/10/17)
2017 Jan 10, Rival Cypriot leaders returned to the negotiating table in Geneva to press on with an ambitious bid to end decades of conflict, with talks centered on the island's future system of government.
(AFP, 1/10/17)
2017 Jan 10, In Czech Rep. the wife of former Czech PM Petr Necas was convicted of leaking a classified document and received an 18-month suspended sentence. Jana Necasova — Jana Nagyova at the time — leaked the content of a 2012 report by the country's BIS spy agency to Ivo Rittig, a lobbyist.
(AP, 1/10/17)
2017 Jan 10, EU anti-trust regulators cleared the French government's massive restructuring of troubled state-owned nuclear reactor builder Areva.
(AFP, 1/10/17)
2017 Jan 10, A European court rejected an appeal by a Turkish-born couple who were fined in Switzerland for keeping their daughters out of mixed-gender, mandatory public school swimming lessons for reasons linked to their Muslim faith.
(AP, 1/10/17)
2017 Jan 10, Former German President Roman Herzog (82) died. He served as chief justice of Germany's highest court before winning the presidency in 1994.
(AP, 1/24/17)
2017 Jan 10, In Hong Kong Clare Hollingworth (b.1911), a British war correspondent, died. She was the first to report the Nazi invasion of Poland that marked the beginning of World War II.
(AP, 1/10/17)(Econ, 1/21/17, p.78)
2017 Jan 10, In Iceland new center-right coalition announced it had agreed to make conservative Independence Party leader Bjarni Benediktsson the country's next prime minister, 10 weeks after a snap election. The Independence Party formed a coalition with the smaller Reform and Bright Future parties holding 32 of 63 seats in Parliament.
(AFP, 1/10/17)(SFC, 1/12/17, p.A2)
2017 Jan 10, Iraqi forces pushed Islamic State fighters back further in Mosul in a renewed effort to seize the northern city and deal a decisive blow to the militant group, though progress was slow in some districts.
(Reuters, 1/10/17)
2017 Jan 10, Israeli troops in the occupied West Bank shot dead a Palestinian who attacked them during an overnight operation to arrest suspected militants at the Al-Fara refugee camp. A Palestinian rights group said the man was shot in his home at point blank range.
(AFP, 1/10/17)
2017 Jan 10, Italian police announced the arrest of a London-resident nuclear engineer and his sister on suspicion of running a cyber snooping operation targeting politicians, public bodies and companies. Media cited charge sheets which identified them as Giulio Occhionero (45) and his sister Francesca Maria Occhionero.
(AFP, 1/10/17)
2017 Jan 10, Kazakhstan’s National Anticorruption Bureau said former economy minister Kuandyk Bishimbayev (36) has been arrested on suspicion of bribery. He was dismissed from his ministerial post by President Nursultan Nazarbayev in late 2016 after just a few months in office.
(Reuters, 1/10/17)
2017 Jan 10, Morocco faced an unprecedented political deadlock after the Islamist PM Abdelilah Benkirane broke off talks on forming a coalition government following three months of fruitless effort.
(AFP, 1/10/17)
2017 Jan 10, Palestinian leaders called for prayers at mosques across the Middle East this week to protest plans by President-elect Donald Trump to move the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.
(AFP, 1/10/17)
2017 Jan 10, In Poland six people died over a 24-hour period as temperatures plunged across Europe, bringing the toll of hypothermia deaths in the country to 71 since November.
(AFP, 1/10/17)
2017 Jan 10, Romania announced six more deaths in recent days as temperatures plunged across Europe.
(AFP, 1/10/17)
2017 Jan 10, Gunmen in Syria abducted Shiraaz Mohamed, a South African freelance photographer who was traveling with aid workers to the border with Turkey.
(AP, 1/14/17)
2017 Jan 10, In Tanzania at least 12 people drowned when a boat capsized near a coastal town. At least 27 others were rescued.
(Reuters, 1/10/17)
2017 Jan 10, In Turkey a man suspected of trying to force his way into a police station in Gaziantep, a city near the Syrian border, was shot dead.
(AFP, 1/10/17)
2017 Jan 10, The United Arab Emirates announced plans to invest 600 billion dirhams ($163 billion) in projects to generate almost half the country's power needs from renewables.
(AFP, 1/10/17)
2017 Jan 10, Zimbabwe wildlife park rangers killed two poachers in Hwange National Park.
(SFC, 1/13/17, p.A2)
2017 Jan 11, The US and five other world powers approved Iran importing as much as 130 tons of uranium.
(AP, 1/13/17)
2017 Jan 11, President-elect Donald Trump angrily denounced the publishing of claims he had been caught in a compromising position in Russia and attacked US intelligence agencies over the leak of the information. President Vladimir Putin's spokesman said the Kremlin has not collected compromising information about Trump.
(Reuters, 1/11/17)
2017 Jan 11, In Illinois Corey Walgren (16), an honors student at Naperville North High School, jumped to his death from a five-story parking deck after being interviewed by school officials about a video he had made of having sex with a classmate. In 2019 the city of Naperville approved a $125,000 settlement to the Walgren family.
(SFC, 9/13/17 p.A8)(SFC, 9/2/19, p.A6)
2017 Jan 11, Texas executed inmate Christopher Wilkins (48) for the killing of two men in 2005 over a drug deal.
(SFC, 1/12/17, p.A6)
2017 Jan 11, Thirteen funds and five firms managing over 2 trillion pounds ($2.4 trillion) launched an online tool at the London Stock Exchange called the Transition Pathway Initiative. It allows asset managers to check what companies have done to prepare for a low-carbon economy.
(AP, 1/11/17)
2017 Jan 11, Aid agencies said dozens of migrants are at risk of freezing to death in Europe after heavy snowfall and bitterly cold temperatures hit Greece and the Balkans. The UN Missing Migrants Project has recorded 11 migrant deaths in the Mediterranean since the start of the year. The recent cold snap was blamed for at least 73 deaths.
(AP, 1/11/17)(SFC, 1/12/17, p.A2)
2017 Jan 11, In Cameroon four young suicide bombers were killed in the restive Far North province, located just across the border from the epicenter of Boko Haram's insurgency in Nigeria.
(AFP, 1/11/17)
2017 Jan 11, Arthur Manuel (b.1951), a leader of Canada’s indigenous “First Nations," died.
(Econ, 1/28/17, p.78)
2017 Jan 11, An Egyptian court upheld an earlier ruling to freeze the assets of Mozn Hassan and her group, Nazra for Feminist Studies, as well as Mohammed Zaraa and Atef Hafez, both of the Arab Organization for Criminal Reform.
(AP, 1/11/17)
2017 Jan 11, In Germany the spectacular new Elbphilharmonie concert hall in Hamburg, begun in 2007, hosted its first concert, several years behind schedule and far over the original budget. The cost to taxpayers climbed from an initially planned 77 million euros in 2003 to 789 million euros ($835 million).
(AP, 1/11/17)(Econ, 1/21/17, p.71)
2017 Jan 11, The Israeli military said the Palestinian militant group Hamas has chatted up dozens of Israeli soldiers online using photos of young women and Hebrew slang to gain control of their phone cameras and microphones.
(Reuters, 1/11/17)
2017 Jan 11, Kazakhstan's veteran leader Nursultan Nazarbayev (76) gave the green light for constitutional reforms that could dilute the sweeping powers he has amassed as president and force his eventual successor to share power with other institutions.
(Reuters, 1/11/17)
2017 Jan 11, Eastern Libyan military commander Khalifa Haftar was given a tour of a Russian aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean, a show of Kremlin support for the faction leader who opposes Libya's UN-backed government.
(Reuters, 1/11/17)
2017 Jan 11, Norway began shutting off FM radio signals and planned to have all of its radio networks only on Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) by the end of the year.
(SFC, 1/11/17, p.A4)
2017 Jan 11, Hamas detained Gaza comedian Adel al-Mashwakhi (32), just hours after he posted the one-minute clip with the title, "Hamas, it's enough!"
(AP, 1/12/17)
2017 Jan 11, Officials said Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has ordered government agencies to ensure free access to contraceptives for 6 million women who cannot obtain them, in a move expected to be opposed by the Roman Catholic church.
(AP, 1/11/17)
2017 Jan 11, Poland's parliament was paralyzed as liberal opposition MPs refused to end an unprecedented protest against what they say are anti-democratic actions by the government.
(AFP, 1/11/17)
2017 Jan 11, Puerto Rico's newly elected governor signed his first law — one aimed at boosting the US territory's economy via public-private partnerships.
(AP, 1/12/17)
2017 Jan 11, In northern Syria airstrikes in Idlib province killed at least 10 suspected al-Qaida-linked militants. Airstrikes resumed on a Damascus suburb despite the cease-fire, killing at least one woman and injuring several others.
(AP, 1/11/17)
2017 Jan 11, In Venezuela Tareck El Aissami (42), Pres. Maduro's new hardline vice-president, announced the arrest of opposition lawmaker Gilber Caro saying he was caught with a rifle and explosives.
(AFP, 1/12/17)(Econ, 2/18/17, p.30)
2017 Jan 11, In southern Yemen a car bombing claimed by Al-Qaeda seriously wounded a senior security official and killed one of his guards in Loder, Abyan province. Heavy fighting continued to rage near the strategic Red Sea strait of Bab al-Mandab in western Yemen, leaving dozens dead and wounded.
(AFP, 1/11/17)(AP, 1/11/17)
2017 Jan 11, Zimbabwe wildlife park rangers killed one poacher in the Hurungwe safari area.
(SFC, 1/13/17, p.A2)
2017 Jan 12, Pres. Obama awarded Vice-Pres. Joe Biden the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.
(SFC, 1/13/17, p.A5)
2017 Jan 12, The Obama administration repealed a measure granting automatic residency to virtually every Cuban who arrived in the United States, whether or not they had visas, ending a longstanding exception to US immigration policy. This also stopped Cuban doctors who defect from a third country from getting fast-track entry to the US.
(Reuters, 1/13/17)(Econ, 1/21/17, p.28)
2017 Jan 12, Pres. Obama added roughly 6,000 acres to the California Coastal national Monument.
(SFC, 1/13/17, p.D1)
2017 Jan 12, The United States blacklisted 18 senior Syrian officials it said were connected to the country's weapons of mass destruction program, after an international investigation found Syrian government forces were responsible for chlorine gas attacks against civilians.
(Reuters, 1/12/17)
2017 Jan 12, The US government EPA accused Fiat Chrysler of failing to disclose software in some of its pickups and SUVs with diesel engines that allows them to emit more pollution than allowed under the Clean Air Act. Fiat Chrysler quickly issued a statement denying any wrongdoing.
(AP, 1/12/17)(Econ, 1/21/17, p.10)
2017 Jan 12, US troops and tanks began streaming into Poland as part of one of the largest deployments of US forces in Europe since the Cold War. The Atlantic Resolve mission will see more than 3,000 American soldiers and heavy equipment deployed in Poland and nearby NATO partners Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary on a rotational basis.
(AFP, 1/12/17)
2017 Jan 12, US Senate Republicans took the first major step toward repealing the Affordable Care Act, approving a budget blueprint that would allow them to gut health care without the threat of a Democratic filibuster.
(SFC, 1/13/17, p.A5)
2017 Jan 12, The US federal government’s Drought Monitor pronounced 42% of California drought free.
(SFC, 1/13/17, p.A1)
2017 Jan 12, James Mattis, President-elect Donald Trump's pick for US defense secretary, accused Russia of trying to break up NATO and said China was destroying trust with its neighbors.
(AFP, 1/12/17)
2017 Jan 12, Human Rights Watch on issued a sharp warning that the rise of populist politicians in the United States and Europe threatened modern rights movements and potentially even Western democracy.
(AFP, 1/12/17)
2017 Jan 12, UCSF announced a $500 million donation from the Helen Diller Foundation, the biggest gift in campus history, to recruit students and faculty for “High risk, high-reward" research.
(SFC, 1/12/17, p.A7)
2017 Jan 12, In Baltimore a huge house fire killed six children.
(SFC, 1/13/17, p.A5)
2017 Jan 12, Novelist and filmmaker William Peter Blatty (89) died in Maryland. His books included “The Exorcist" (1971).
(SFC, 1/14/17, p.A5)
2017 Jan 12, Albania’s Serious Crime Court sentenced former Peshkopi mayor Shukri Xhelili to 32 months in jail after he was found guilty of having fondled and kissed a 20-year-old woman in his office while she resisted, then taken her to a hotel room in Tirana and promised a pay rise in exchange for sexual favors.
(AP, 1/12/17)
2017 Jan 12, Dozens of flights at London's Heathrow Airport were canceled amid forecasts of snow and strong winds in Britain.
(AP, 1/12/17)
2017 Jan 12, Human Rights Watch said in a report that Egypt has banned public criticism and peaceful opposition, and that security forces routinely torture detainees and forcibly disappeared hundreds last year.
(AP, 1/12/17)
2017 Jan 12, Iraqi forces joined flanks in northern Mosul and drove back Islamic State militants in the southeast in a renewed push that has brought them closer to controlling the eastern half of the city.
(Reuters, 1/12/17)
2017 Jan 12, In Libya self-declared PM Khalifa Ghwell said his forces have seized at least three ministries in the capital and is declaring a return of his government after what he described as a yearlong failure of PM Fayez Serraj, the current UN-backed premier.
(AP, 1/12/17)
2017 Jan 12, In Pakistan journalist Muhammad Jan (37) was shot and killed while returning home by unidentified assailants. He had worked for the Urdu-language daily Qudrat and was teaching at a school.
(AP, 1/14/17)
2017 Jan 12, Thousands of Palestinians participated in a demonstration in the Gaza Strip to protest chronic power cuts during the cold winter season.
(AP, 1/12/17)
2017 Jan 12, Poland's main opposition party ended its weekslong blockade of parliament, stepping back in what had been a bitter standoff with the populist ruling party.
(AP, 1/12/17)
2017 Jan 12, In Romania two tigers were among a number of animals that died when a fire broke out at an animal shelter which houses animals retired from the circus.
(AP, 1/12/17)
2017 Jan 12, Turkish lawmakers brawled and threw chairs as parliament approved three more articles in a hugely controversial bill bolstering the powers of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
(AFP, 1/12/17)
2017 Jan 12, Human Rights Watch in an annual report accused the Ukrainian government and Russian-backed separatists of holding dozens of civilians in arbitrary detention in Ukraine's industrial east, where fighting has killed more than 9,600 people since 2014.
(AP, 1/12/17)
2017 Jan 12, In Venezuela the son of Raul Baduel, a retired general turned critic of Pres. Maduro, said authorities had revoked the parole of his father who served six years in jail for corruption.
(AFP, 1/12/17)
2017 Jan 13, The Obama administration moved to lift the trade embargo against Sudan in response to the east African nation's recent cooperation in helping to tackle terrorism. The lifting of the sanctions slapped on Sudan by the Clinton administration will however be delayed by 180 days to encourage Sudan to do more to fight terrorism and improve its record on human rights.
(Reuters, 1/13/17)
2017 Jan 13, US Environmental Protection Agency chief Gina McCarthy finalized a determination that the landmark fuel efficiency rules instituted by President Barack Obama should be locked in through 2025, a bid to maintain a key part of his administration's climate legacy.
(Reuters, 1/13/17)
2017 Jan 13, The US Environmental Protection Agency denied $1.2 billion in claims for economic losses stemming from a 2015 toxic wastewater spill accidentally triggered by the agency at a defunct Colorado mine, that fouled waterways in Colorado, New Mexico and Utah.
(AP, 1/13/17)
2017 Jan 13, The US Justice Dept. announced Chicago police have violated the constitutional rights of residents for years following a yearlong investigation.
(SFC, 1/14/17, p.A5)
2017 Jan 13, The US attorney’s office in Detroit announced that Japan-based Takata has agreed to plead guilty to a single criminal charge and will pay $1 billion in fines and restitution for a years-long scheme to conceal a deadly defect in its automotive bag inflators.
(SFC, 1/14/17, p.D1)
2017 Jan 13, It was announced that Moody’s Corp. of NYC has agreed to pay almost $864 million to settle federal and state claims that it gave inflated ratings to risky mortgage investments in the years leading up to the financial crises.
(SSFC, 1/15/17, p.A5)
2017 Jan 13, Former Jerusalem Post chief editor Ari Rath (92), who advocated the peaceful coexistence of Israelis and Palestinians, died in Vienna.
(AP, 1/13/17)
2017 Jan 13, Lord Snowdon (b.1930), born as Antony Armstrong-Jones, the society photographer and filmmaker who married Britain's Princess Margaret and continued to mix in royal circles even after their divorce, died.
(AP, 1/13/17)
2017 Jan 13, Canada must "phase out" Alberta's oil sands and end the country's dependence on hydrocarbons, PM Justin Trudeau said.
(AFP, 1/13/17)
2017 Jan 13, In Ecuador at least 19 people were killed and more than a dozen injured when a long distance passenger bus collided with an off-duty school bus along a highway near the Pacific coastline.
(AP, 1/14/17)
2017 Jan 13, Egyptian police reportedly killed 10 Islamic militants in a shootout in al-Arish. However, the residents said six of those killed had been in police custody since October.
(AP, 1/15/17)
2017 Jan 13, Hungary's right-wing PM Viktor Orban said he has defied Brussels by reintroducing the systematic detention of migrants arriving in the country in response to recent "terror" attacks in Europe.
(AFP, 1/13/17)
2017 Jan 13, Ivory Coast's government and rebel troops reached a final deal at talks in Bouake, at the close of a tense day which saw outbreaks of gunfire at barracks across the country.
(AFP, 1/14/17)
2017 Jan 13, A Mexican federal judge ordered a drug lord convicted in the 1985 killings of a US Drug Enforcement Administration agent and a Mexican government pilot to pay relatives of the victims nearly $1 million in compensation. The order was directed at Ernesto "Don Neto" Fonseca Carrillo, co-founder of the Guadalajara cartel, for the case of the kidnapping, torture and killing of DEA agent Enrique "Kiki" Camarena.
(AP, 1/14/17)
2017 Jan 13, In northeastern Nigeria three female suicide bombers killed at least six people and injured 14 in a crowded market in the town of Madagali. Gunmen kidnapped five students and two staff, including a Turkish national, from an international school in the southern state of Ogun.
(Reuters, 1/13/17)(Reuters, 1/14/17)(SFC, 1/14/17, p.A2)
2017 Jan 13, Peru’s Pres. Pedro Pablo Kuczynski said ten treatment plants will be constructed on rivers emptying into Lake Titicaca to cleanup uncontrolled pollution.
(SSFC, 1/15/17, p.A3)
2017 Jan 13, Saudi Arabia's highest-ranking cleric warned of the "depravity" of cinemas and music concerts, saying they would corrupt morals if allowed in the ultra-conservative kingdom.
(AFP, 1/13/17)
2017 Jan 13, Sweden pledged to end a surge of gang violence in the southern town of Malmo as the latest in a string of shootings left a 16-year old boy dead. Over the past two weeks alone, the town has seen five shootings, of which two were fatal.
(Reuters, 1/13/17)
2017 Jan 13, Syria's army and its allies advanced near Damascus. The region's governor said rebels had let engineers enter a damaged pumping station that supplies most of the capital's water.
(Reuters, 1/13/17)
2017 Jan 13, In Yemen at least 12 Houthi fighters died in fresh clashes in Dhubab.
(AFP, 1/14/17)
2017 Jan 14, A SpaceX Falcon 9 successfully blasted off from California carrying a payload for Iridium Communications Inc. The rocket’s first stage soon landed upright on a droneship south of Vandenberg Air Force Base.
(SSFC, 1/15/17, p.A7)
2017 Jan 14, Feld Entertainment, the owner of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, said it will close forever in May after 146 years of circus operations.
(SSFC, 1/15/17, p.A7)
2017 Jan 14, California historian Kevin Starr (b.1940) died. He was best known for his mammoth series of history books: Americans and the California Dream."
(SFC, 1/16/17, p.A1)
2017 Jan 14, The leaders of Australia and Japan agreed to boost cooperation between their militaries, as Japan tries to shore up security ties throughout the Asia-Pacific region amid concern over China's growing military might.
(AP, 1/14/17)
2017 Jan 14, Unilever, a British-based consumer goods maker, said all of its plastic packaging would be fully reusable, recyclable or compostable by 2025.
(Reuters, 1/14/17)
2017 Jan 14, In China Beijing's Mayor Cai Qi said the air quality target for 2017 is to keep PM2.5 at an annual average of around 60 micrograms per cubic meter, more than double the acceptable standard set by the World Health Organization (WHO).
(Reuters, 1/14/17)
2017 Jan 14, In China linguist Zhou Youguang (b.1906) died. He is considered the father of modern China's Pinyin Romanization system.
(AP, 1/14/17)(Econ, 1/21/17, p.72)
2017 Jan 14, In Iceland Birna Brjansdottir (20) went missing after a night out with friends. Her body was found in Selvogsviti, 58 km (36 miles) from the capital on the other side of the country after a weeklong search. She was reportedly strangled before being thrown into the ocean where she drowned.
(AP, 1/25/17)(AFP, 2/7/17)
2017 Jan 14, In India Sunil Rastogi (38), a tailor, was arrested by police investigating sexual assaults on three girls aged between nine and ten in eastern Delhi in January and December. Rastogi confessed to abducting "hundreds" of girls since 2004 -- luring them with new clothes, and taking them to secluded places such as derelict buildings, where he would sexually assault and rape them.
(Reuters, 1/17/17)
2017 Jan 14, In eastern India at least 19 people drowned and others were missing after their overcrowded boat capsized in a river near Patna, Bihar state. The next day five more bodies were recovered from the Ganges river after as rescuers ended search operations.
(AP, 1/14/17)(Reuters, 1/15/17)
2017 Jan 14, Iraqi government troops retook the eastern edge of a third bridge in Mosul and a cluster of buildings inside Mosul university.
(AP, 1/14/17)
2017 Jan 14, Only four people survived the sinking of a migrant ship carrying around 100 people that went down 30 miles (49 kilometers) off the Libyan coast. Around 180 people were presumed to have died in the first major migrant boat disaster of 2017 in the Mediterranean following interviews with a handful of survivors.
(AP, 1/15/17)(AFP, 1/17/17)
2017 Jan 14, Malawi’s agriculture minister said armyworms have destroyed 2,000 hectares of crops in Malawi, spreading to nine of its 28 districts in the last few weeks.
(Reuters, 1/14/17)
2017 Jan 14, In the Philippines Islamist militants allied with Islamic State freed a South Korean cargo ship captain and a Filipino member of his crew held captive for more than three months on a southern island.
(Reuters, 1/14/17)
2017 Jan 14, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte said he has ordered his troops to bomb extremists who flee with their captives in a bid to stop a wave of kidnappings at sea, calling the loss of civilian lives in such an attack "collateral damage."
(AP, 1/15/17)
2017 Jan 14, A Saudi Arabia soldier was killed by cross-border fire from Yemen amid the kingdom's campaign against Shiite rebels there.
(AP, 1/15/17)
2017 Jan 14, Serbia launched provocative train service to Kosovo's Serbian north. Because the central Kosovo government has no real control over the predominantly ethnic Serb north and that region's borders with Serbia, it has appealed to the European Union to "stop this illegal train".
(AFP, 1/14/17)
2017 Jan 14, In Syria the Islamic State group launched one of its fiercest assaults yet on the besieged city of Deir Ezzor, leaving more than 30 regime fighters and jihadists dead.
(AFP, 1/14/17)
2017 Jan 14, A Thai air force pilot died when his fighter jet crashed at an air show during the country's Children's Day.
(AP, 1/14/17)
2017 Jan 14, Ukrainian government forces and the pro-Russian separatist rebels fighting in eastern Ukraine accused each other of disrupting a fragile truce declared late December.
(AFP, 1/14/17)
2017 Jan 14, In Yemen an overnight air strike by a pro-government Arab coalition on a rebel assembly in Zaydiya, in Hodeida province, left nine Huthis dead. Five pro-government fighters were killed in overnight clashes around Dhubab and 14 others wounded.
(AFP, 1/14/17)
2017 Jan 15, US resident Senad Cejvan (31) was reported extradited to the Dutch Caribbean island of Saba to face charges in the April 2015 killing of Kavya Guda (24) an American medical student.
(AP, 1/16/17)
2017 Jan 15, An Afghan official says that at least six Afghan civilians were killed when their vehicle was hit by a roadside bomb in eastern Nangarhar province.
(AP, 1/15/17)
2017 Jan 15, Bahrain executed three Shi'ite Muslim men convicted of killing three policemen in a 2014 bomb attack, the first such executions in over two decades, drawing condemnation from foreign officials including Shi'ite power Iran.
(Reuters, 1/15/17)
2017 Jan 15, Brazilian police entered the Alcaçuz prison in the northeastern state of Rio Grande do Norte where authorities expect the death toll from a riot to rise from the current 10. Members of rival drug gangs apparently started the clash a day earlier.
(Reuters, 1/15/17)
2017 Jan 15, Prince Charles, long a critic of man-made climate change, published the book "Climate Change" with Tony Juniper, a former Friends of the Earth director, and Emily A, a Cambridge University climate scientist.
(AP, 1/15/17)
2017 Jan 15, Ramzan Kadyrov, the hardline pro-Moscow head of Russia's Northern Caucasus Republic of Chechnya, said that more than 50 suspected militants were detained in the biggest sting operation of recent years.
(Reuters, 1/15/17)
2017 Jan 15, Armed Congolese rebels crossed back overnight into the country from their longtime refuge in Uganda. At least 200 former members of M23, an ethnic Tutsi group defeated by the Congolese army three years ago, took over a village in North Kivu province.
(AFP, 1/15/17)
2017 Jan 15, Egypt said it will make further "significant" cuts to energy subsidies, raise taxes and seek more international financing as it pursues economic reforms this year.
(AFP, 1/15/17)
2017 Jan 15, In France representatives from 70 countries met in Paris to try to revive stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts. Neither Israel nor the Palestinians attended the conference.
(AFP, 1/15/17)
2017 Jan 15, In eastern India at least six people were killed in a stampede during a Hindu religious festival.
(AP, 1/15/17)
2017 Jan 15, Indonesia and Japan said they have agreed to step up maritime security and start discussions on a major railway project to link the Southeast Asian nation's capital and second-biggest city.
(Reuters, 1/15/17)
2017 Jan 15, Iraqi special forces swept through the campus of Mosul University to clear it of any remaining Islamic State militants after taking full control of the area.
(Reuters, 1/15/17)
2017 Jan 15, Jordan's King Abdullah reshuffled his cabinet but retained Hani Mulki as prime minister, granting him more scope to tackle the threat of Islamist militants and to press ahead with unpopular IMF-mandated reforms to cut spiraling public debt.
(Reuters, 1/15/17)
2017 Jan 15, South Sudan’s Minister of Information Michael Makuei said that Dec. 15th was the expiration date for the deployment of peacekeepers to bolster the existing 12,000 UN troops. He said a new resolution is needed for the additional troops. Makuei also announced that President Salva Kiir has created four new states in South Sudan bringing the total number to 32.
(AP, 1/15/17)
2017 Jan 15, Sudan extended a ceasefire for six months in the war-torn regions of Darfur, Blue Nile and South Kordofan.
(AFP, 1/15/17)
2017 Jan 15, Syrian government forces shelled a village in a rebel-controlled area near Damascus, killing at least 12 civilians and injuring several others who were taking shelter in a banquet hall. In eastern Syria, Islamic State group militants kept up their offensive on government-held areas of the contested city of Deir el-Zour, attacking a military air base from several fronts.
(AP, 1/15/17)
2017 Jan 15, Turkey's state-run news agency said nine Turkish colonels have been detained in northern Cyprus as part of the investigation into the movement allegedly responsible for a failed coup in July.
(AP, 1/15/17)
2017 Jan 16, US motor giant Ford announced the recall of 4,500 1.6-litre Kuga cars in South Africa after nearly 40 incidents in which vehicles were reported to have burst into flames.
(AFP, 1/16/17)
2017 Jan 16, In Florida three men working on a Key Largo road project collapsed and died after trying to rescue a man stuck while working in a drainage manhole.
(SFC, 1/17/17, p.A4)
2017 Jan 16, US astronaut Eugene Cernan (b.1934), the last man to walk on the moon, died in Houston, Texas. Cernan, James Lovell and John Young were the only three astronauts to voyage twice to the moon.
(Reuters, 1/17/17)(SFC, 1/17/17, p.A5)
2017 Jan 16, A Bangladesh court sentenced 26 people, including a politician and three officials of an elite security battalion, to death in the grisly, politically motivated killings of seven people in 2014. Nur Hossain, the main suspect, was found guilty of hiring members of his Rapid Action Battalion to kill his rival to establish supremacy in local politics and business.
(AP, 1/16/17)(SFC, 1/17/17, p.A2)
2017 Jan 16, Brazilian authorities said a new uprising has broken out at the Alcaçuz prison where 26 inmates were killed by a rival gang faction over the weekend.
(Reuters, 1/16/17)
2017 Jan 16, British company Rolls Royce, in a deal with American, British and Brazilian regulators, agreed to pay £671 million to settle allegations that it had in the past secured sales with bribery of officials in six countries in schemes that lasted more than a decade.
(Econ, 1/21/17, p.54)(Reuters, 5/8/20)
2017 Jan 16, An Egyptian court ruled against the government's attempt to transfer two Red Sea islands to Saudi Arabia, an embarrassment for President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi that could deepen tensions with his onetime Gulf patron.
(AP, 1/16/17)
2017 Jan 16, India's election commission backed Uttar Pradesh chief minister Akhilesh Yadav, in his battle with his father, Mulayam Singh Yadav, for control of their party, a feud PM Narendra Modi wants to exploit in a crucial election.
(Reuters, 1/16/17)
2017 Jan 16, In southern India police arrested an American man (42) in Hyderabad on suspicion of circulating child pornography on the internet.
(Reuters, 1/19/17)
2017 Jan 16, Iraqi forces battling the Islamic State group in Mosul retook the Nabi Yunus area where the jihadists levelled one of the city's most well-known shrines in 2014. Two other neighborhoods in eastern Mosul were also retaken from the IS.
(AFP, 1/16/17)
2017 Jan 16, Israeli border police shot dead a 17-year-old Palestinian youth as violence erupted near the town of Bethlehem between a crowd of stone-throwing Palestinians and Israeli troops.
(Reuters, 1/16/17)
2017 Jan 16, It was announced the Italy’s Luxottica, a maker of fancy specs, will merge with Essilor, a French producer of eye lenses.
(www.essilor.com/en/investors/essilor-and-luxottica/)(Econ, 1/21/17, p.54)
2017 Jan 16, Japan's PM Shinzo Abe promised Vietnam six new patrol boats during a visit to the Southeast Asian country, which is locked in a dispute with China over the busy South China Sea.
(Reuters, 1/16/17)
2017 Jan 16, In Libya forces loyal to Marshal Khalifa Haftar retook a district in Benghazi from jihadists after fighting that killed nine soldiers in two days.
(AFP, 1/16/17)
2017 Jan 16, Lithuania said it plans to use EU funds to build a fence on the border with Russia's highly militarized Kaliningrad exclave to boost security and prevent smuggling.
(AFP, 1/16/17)
2017 Jan 16, In Mexico at least five people, including four foreigners, were killed and 15 were wounded early today when a shooter opened fire at a nightclub in the Playa del Carmen resort during the BPM electronic music festival in Quintana Roo state.
(Reuters, 1/16/17)
2017 Jan 16, Mozambique, caught between a scandal over hidden debt that has prompted an aid cut-off and a commodity price slump, said it would miss a $60 million interest payment.
(AFP, 1/16/17)
2017 Jan 16, In Nigeria three suicide bombers, including a child, exploded at dawn at the northeastern University of Maiduguri, killing a university professor and another child. The bombers also died.
(AP, 1/16/17)
2017 Jan 16, Oman said it has accepted 10 detainees from the US prison at Guantanamo Bay ahead of President Barack Obama leaving office, part of his efforts to shrink the facility he promised to close.
(AP, 1/16/17)
2017 Jan 16, A court in Pakistan sentenced a mother to death for burning her daughter alive as punishment for marrying without the family's consent. Zeenat Rafiq (18) married Hassan Khan and eloped to live with his family a week before she was killed last June 8.
(Reuters, 1/16/17)
2017 Jan 16, Fuel from Qatar arrived in the Gaza Strip, helping ease a crippling power shortage that has sparked rare demonstrations against the territory's Hamas rulers who responded with a crackdown on protesters.
(AP, 1/16/17)
2017 Jan 16, Low-cost Saudi carrier flynas signed an $8.6-billion deal with European plane manufacturer Airbus to purchase 80 A320neo single-aisle jets.
(AFP, 1/16/17)
2017 Jan 16, In South Korea special prosecutors accused Lee Jae-yong, the only son of Samsung’s chairman Lee Kun-hee, of bribery, embezzlement and perjury. Three days later a court rejected a request for his arrest.
(Econ, 1/21/17, p.53)
2017 Jan 16, In Syria the Islamic State continued its fiercest assault in a year against a besieged government enclave in the city of Deir al-Zor, trying to cut it off from a nearby military air base. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that at least 82 people had been killed.
(Reuters, 1/16/17)
2017 Jan 16, In Turkey Abdulkadir Masharipov, the Uzbek gunman who carried out the New Year’s attack on Istanbul’s Reina nightclub, was detained in Istanbul.
(AP, 1/17/17)
2017 Jan 16, In southeastern Turkey a roadside bomb in a pre-dominantly Kurdish city killed three policemen and wounded three others.
(AP, 1/16/17)
2017 Jan 16, A Turkish cargo jet crashed near Kyrgyzstan's Manas airport, killing at least 37 people including 4 crew members. Most of the dead were residents of a village struck by the Boeing 747 as it tried to land in dense fog. 23 of 43 houses in the village were destroyed.
(Reuters, 1/16/17)(SFC, 1/17/17, p.A3)
2017 Jan 16, The UN humanitarian aid official in Yemen said that the civilian death toll in the nearly two-year conflict has reached 10,000, with 40,000 others wounded.
(AP, 1/16/17)
2017 Jan 16, Lawyers at a UN court urged Turkey to release Judge Aydin Sedaf Akay, who is being held in connection with July's coup attempt, saying his detention was delaying a Rwandan politician's conviction for genocide.
(Reuters, 1/17/17)
2017 Jan 16, Former Yugoslav army general Vlado Trifunovic (78) died in Serbia. His treason conviction by Serbia's wartime nationalist leadership became a symbol of the senselessness of the 1990s' Balkan conflict.
(AP, 1/17/17)
2017 Jan 17, Pres. Obama commuted the prison sentence of Chelsea Manning (29), who has served seven years of a 35-year sentence for disclosing hundreds of thousands of classified documents on US military and foreign policy. Manning was set to go free on May 17.
(SFC, 1/18/17, p.A1)
2017 Jan 17, Pres. Obama announced over 270 grants of clemency. Those pardoned included baseball sluggers Willie McCovey (79) and Duke Snyder (d.2011), who both pleaded guilty on July 20, 1995, to tax fraud.
(SFC, 1/18/17, p.A9)
2017 Jan 17, The US Office of Foreign Asset Control imposed sanctions against Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik, blocking access to his assets and banning any US national from doing business with him.
(Reuters, 1/18/17)
2017 Jan 17, In San Francisco the Golden State Warriors held a ground-breaking ceremony for their new Mission Bay $1 billion Chase Arena.
(SFC, 1/18/17, p.A1)
2017 Jan 17, In the SF Bay Area Gin Lu Shwe (70), a former Cupertino school board member, was reported missing. His body was found on Jan 25 in the foothills of Tulare County. Christopher Ellebracht (38), a one-time handyman for Shwe, was arrested on Jan 22.
(SFC, 1/31/17, p.C2)
2017 Jan 17, Brazilian police used rubber bullets and tear gas to break up a renewed clash between drug gangs in the Alcaçuz prison where 26 inmates were butchered by rivals in recent days.
(Reuters, 1/17/17)
2017 Jan 17, Britain will quit the European Union's single market when it exits the bloc, PM Theresa May said, in a decisive speech that quashed speculation she would seek a compromise deal to stay inside the world's biggest trading bloc.
(Reuters, 1/17/17)
2017 Jan 17, British American Tobacco announced that will take over Reynolds American Inc. for $49 billion to create the world's largest publicly traded tobacco company. It would seek to capitalize on growing demand for electronic cigarettes in the US and traditional ones in developing countries. BAT already owned 42% of Reynolds.
(AP, 1/17/17)(Econ, 1/21/17, p.51)
2017 Jan 17, The European Court of Human Rights ruled that Russia's policy of refusing to allow Americans to adopt Russian children was discriminatory, a decision Moscow said it would appeal.
(AFP, 1/17/17)
2017 Jan 17, The EU said Lithuania can use EU funds to install surveillance systems on its border with Russia's militarized Kaliningrad exclave but not to build a fence.
(AFP, 1/17/17)
2017 Jan 17, Gambian Pres. Jammeh declared a state of emergency, after refusing to hand power to opposition leader Adama Barrow who won an election on Dec. 1.
(Reuters, 1/17/17)
2017 Jan 17, An Indian court sentenced 39 people to 10 years in prison each for buying and selling girls in Karnataka state, signaling a rare victory for prosecutors in a country where fewer than two in five trafficking cases ends in a conviction.
(Reuters, 1/18/17)
2017 Jan 17, In Iran five memorandums of understanding were signed at a ceremony attended by Syrian PM Emad Khamis and Iranian VP Eshaq Jahangiri in Tehran. Iran will be granted a license to become a mobile service operator in Syria under agreements to expand economic ties between the countries.
(Reuters, 1/17/17)
2017 Jan 17, In Iraq a car bomb blast in southern Baghdad killed at least seven people and wounded 20.
(Reuters, 1/17/17)
2017 Jan 17, Israeli troops shot dead a Palestinian who had tried to stab a soldier at a checkpoint in the occupied West Bank.
(Reuters, 1/17/17)
2017 Jan 17, In Ivory Coast a mutinous soldier was killed in Yamoussoukro, as fresh trouble erupted after troops took to the streets, firing shots in the air and terrifying residents.
(AP, 1/17/17)
2017 Jan 17, Lithuania signed an agreement with the United States formalizing the presence of US troops in the small Baltic country bordering Russia and Belarus.
(AP, 1/17/17)
2017 Jan 17, Malaysian, Australian and Chinese authorities ended today the deep-sea search for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 without any trace being found of the plane that vanished in 2014 with 239 people on board.
(Reuters, 1/17/17)
2017 Jan 17, In Mexico gunmen attacked the state prosecutor’s office in Cancun killing four people.
(SFC, 1/18/17, p.A2)
2017 Jan 17, Moldova's new Pres. Igor Dodon, who is visiting Russia on his first trip abroad, voiced hope for rebuilding "strategic" ties with Moscow and hinted that the ex-Soviet nation could eventually shelve a trade pact with the European Union.
(AP, 1/17/17)
2017 Jan 17, It was reported that Morocco has offered Gambia's President Yahya Jammeh asylum in return for accepting election defeat and stepping down.
(AFP, 1/17/17)
2017 Jan 17, A Nigerian Air Force fighter jet on a mission against Boko Haram extremists mistakenly bombed a refugee camp, killing at least 76 refugees and wounding more than 100 in northeast Rann. Estimates later rose to as many as 236 people killed in the botched air strike.
(AP, 1/17/17)(Reuters, 1/18/17)(AFP, 1/21/17)
2017 Jan 17, Senior Romanian intelligence official Florin Coldea announced his retirement after a businessman indicted on wide-ranging corruption charges claimed he had a close relationship with the officer.
(AP, 1/17/17)
2017 Jan 17, In in Davos, Switzerland, the annual World Economic Forum opened. Chinese President Xi Jinping gave the opening address urging the world to "say no to protectionism" and warning that "no one will emerge as a winner in a trade war.
(AP, 1/17/17)
2017 Jan 17, In Syria Russian warplanes carried out air strikes on Islamic State targets south of al-Bab in coordination with Turkey.
(Reuters, 1/18/17)
2017 Jan 17, Thailand's Eastern Special Development Zone (ESDZ), a special economic zone, was setup for three provinces in eastern Thailand. Collectively, these provinces occupy an area of 13,266 square km (5,122 sq mi).
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Economic_Corridor)
2017 Jan 17, Ukraine said it has filed a case against Russia at the United Nations' highest court, accusing Moscow of illegally annexing Crimea and illicitly funding separatist rebel groups in eastern Ukraine. Kiev also is seeking compensation for deadly incidents including the 2014 shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17.
(AP, 1/17/17)
2017 Jan 17, The UN said Somalia risks slipping back into famine, as worsening drought has left millions without food, water or healthcare in a country crippled by decades of war.
(Reuters, 1/17/17)
2017 Jan 17, The Vatican demanded that the leaders of the Knights of Malta, a worldwide Catholic chivalric and charity group, cooperate with an inquiry into alleged irregularities ordered by Pope Francis.
(Reuters, 1/17/17)
2017 Jan 17, In Yemen a rocket fired by Houthi rebels killed six civilians, including women and children, when it hit an area in southern Taiz province.
(AP, 1/17/17)
2017 Jan 18, The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that 2016 was the hottest of modern times -- the third year in a row to break records.
(AFP, 1/18/17)
2017 Jan 18, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, President-elect Donald Trump's choice to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, said he would honor the Congressional intent and timetables of the U.S. Renewable Fuel Standard.
(Reuters, 1/18/17)
2017 Jan 18, In northern Afghanistan Taliban bomb maker Kamal Khan inadvertently killed himself and his four sons overnight, while building a cache of roadside bombs in Sar-i-Pul province.
(AP, 1/18/17)
2017 Jan 18, Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik said he was proud of being blacklisted by the United States for obstructing a 1995 peace agreement and called on Bosnian authorities to declare the US ambassador persona non grata in retaliation.
(Reuters, 1/18/17)
2017 Jan 18, In Brazil a heavily armed military police force entered the Alcacuz prison without violence. Authorities said they were transferring 220 inmates to other prisons to avoid more clashes.
(AP, 1/19/17)
2017 Jan 18, The first direct freight train service from China to Britain arrived in London, another leg in Beijing's plans for closer trade ties with Europe along a modern-day Silk Road.
(AP, 1/18/17)
2017 Jan 18, The International Monetary Fund said that Egypt is making progress with its economic reform program, although it will still take time to improve living standards in a poor country beset with rocketing inflation.
(AP, 1/18/17)
2017 Jan 18, A court in southwest France gave the go-ahead for the extradition of Stephen Carruthers (43), a suspected pedophile arrested on Jan 8, who is one of Britain's most wanted fugitives.
(AFP, 1/18/17)
2017 Jan 18, Gambia's parliament has passed a resolution to allow President Yahya Jammeh to stay in office for another three months, as the veteran leader showed no sign of preparing to hand over power and Senegal moved soldiers towards the border.
(Reuters, 1/18/17)
2017 Jan 18, Iraqi commanders said their forces have retaken control of east Mosul from the Islamic State group, three months after a huge offensive against the jihadist bastion was launched.
(AFP, 1/18/17)
2017 Jan 18, In Israel demolitions in the Arab Israeli village of in Umm al-Heiran, that activists say has been targeted by racist policies, sparked violence in which a policeman and his alleged attacker were killed.
(AFP, 1/18/17)
2017 Jan 18, Israeli nuclear whistle-blower Mordechai Vanunu was convicted of violating the terms of his release, more than a decade after completing an 18-year jail term. Vanunu was convicted of meeting with two US nationals in Jerusalem in 2013 without having permission to do so, and will be sentenced in two months.
(AP, 1/23/17)
2017 Jan 18, In Italy four powerful earthquakes, magnitude 5.1-5.7, reverberated through the Amatrice area still recovering from deadly tremors last year. More than 130,000 homes were without electricity.
(AFP, 1/18/17)
2017 Jan 18, In Italy the four-star spa Hotel Rigopiano in the central Abruzzo region was struck by an avalanche following earthquakes in the region. At least 30 people were missing, including at least two children. By Jan 21 rescuers found 11 survivors, but 24 people remained missing. By Jan 26 the final death toll reached 29 as all remaining bodies were pulled from the rubble.
(AP, 1/19/17)(AFP, 1/20/17)(Reuters, 1/22/17)(SFC, 1/27/17, p.A2)
2017 Jan 18, Ivory Coast's main port of Abidjan, was shut down when angry security forces began firing into the air during protests by mutinous troops.
(AFP, 1/18/17)
2017 Jan 18, In Libya US B-2 bombers carried out air strikes against Islamic State camps outside of Sirte. More than 80 Islamic State fighters were reported killed.
(Reuters, 1/19/17)
2017 Jan 18, It was reported that nearly a million people are hungry and in urgent need of food aid in the Madagascar area, according to the World Food Program (WFP).
(AFP, 1/18/17)
2017 Jan 18, In Mali at least 60 people including five suicide bombers were killed when a vehicle packed with explosives detonated inside a military camp in Gao.
(Reuters, 1/18/17)(SFC, 1/19/17, p.A2)
2017 Jan 18, A new Mexican poll by Grupo Reforma showed President Enrique Pena Nieto's approval rating has fallen to a historic low of 12 percent.
(AP, 1/18/17)
2017 Jan 18, In northern Mexico a teenage student (15) suffering from depression opened fire at an American school in Nuevo Leon state, injuring three students and a teacher then shooting himself in the chin in what state officials called an unprecedented attack that was caught on video. The shooter died at a hospital.
(Reuters, 1/18/17)(SFC, 1/19/17, p.A2)
2017 Jan 18, In Morocco Sheikh Sidi Hamza al-Qadiri al-Boutchichi (95), head of one of the country’s biggest Sufi orders, died in Oujda.
(AFP, 1/18/17)
2017 Jan 18, Puerto Rico police Chief Michelle Hernandez ordered police to stop releasing information including the location of a crime, a suspect's criminal background and the amount of drugs seized or money stolen in certain cases.
(AP, 1/19/17)
2017 Jan 18, Russian authorities said they have extended US intelligence leaker Edward Snowden's Russian residency permit by three years.
(AFP, 1/18/17)
2017 Jan 18, Senegal presented a draft resolution to the UN Security Council seeking support for ECOWAS efforts to press Gambian leader Yahya Jammeh to step down. At least 26,000 people have fled Gambia into Senegal fearing President Yahya Jammeh's decision to stay in power.
(AFP, 1/18/17)(AP, 1/18/17)
2017 Jan 18, Syria and Russia signed an agreement allowing Russia to significantly expand its naval facility in the Mediterranean port of Tartus and keep using it for 49 years.
(AP, 1/20/17)
2017 Jan 18, Turkey's parliament embarked on a second round of voting on a contentious package of constitutional amendments that would give President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's office new executive powers.
(AP, 1/18/17)
2017 Jan 18, In Venezuela Eliannys Vivas (9) died of diphtheria. Her death and a wider outbreak of diphtheria, showed how vulnerable the country is to health risks amid a major economic crisis that has sparked shortages of basic medicines and vaccines.
(Reuters, 2/10/17)
2017 Jan 19, The Obama administration passed the Organic Livestock and Poultry Practices rule that required an increase in the amount of space required for livestock and poultry, provide more access to the outdoors and outlaw the use of subtherapeutic antibiotics. On Dec. 15 the Trump administration scrapped the rule.
(SSFC, 12/24/17, p.L9)
2017 Jan 19, It was revealed that Steven Mnuchin, Pres.-elect Donald Trump’s pick to be Treasury secretary, failed to disclose nearly $100 million of his assets on Senate Finance Committee disclosure documents and failed to mention his role as a director of an investment fund located in a tax haven.
(SFC, 1/20/17, p.A7)
2017 Jan 19, The documentary film “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power" premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. It was directed by Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk and starred Al Gore, Barack Obama and Donald Trump.
(http://tinyurl.com/mwd79dv)(Econ, 1/28/17, p.74)
2017 Jan 19, Miguel Ferrer (b.1955), film and TV star, died at his home in Santa Monica. His films included “Robocop" (1987). He was currently playing Assistant Director Owen Granger on the CBS series “NCIS: Los Angeles." Miguel was the son of Academy Award winner Jose Ferrer (1912-1992).
(SSFC, 1/22/17, p.C15)
2017 Jan 19, In Hawaii four men and two women moved into a man-made dome for the next eight months as part of a human behavior study that could help NASA plan for sending astronauts on a mission to Mars.
(SFC, 1/20/17, p.A7)
2017 Jan 19, Belgian media said a local court has handed out prison sentences of up to eight years for a group of 14 people convicted of falsifying documents used by Islamist militants in attacks in Paris and Brussels.
(Reuters, 1/19/17)
2017 Jan 19, In Brazil images on Globo television showed prisoners at the Alcacuz Penitentiary in the yard, throwing rocks at each other and setting up barriers. Injured inmates could be seen being carried away.
(AP, 1/19/17)
2017 Jan 19, In Brazil a plane crash killed Supreme Court Justice Teori Zavascki just weeks before he was scheduled to issue a ruling that could have revealed accusations against politicians in several Latin American countries. Four others were also killed. The crash was likely to delay, though not derail, the "Car Wash" investigation, the largest corruption investigation in Brazil's history.
(AP, 1/20/17)(Econ, 1/28/17, p.30)
2017 Jan 19, In Bulgaria Rumen Radev took his oath of office as president, preparing the way for him to formally take over the post from Rosen Plevneliev on Jan 22.
(AP, 1/19/17)
2017 Jan 19, The European Union said it has given Zambia about $69 million to expand electricity supply in the continent's second biggest copper producer, which faces a power deficit that has hit mining and agriculture.
(Reuters, 1/19/17)
2017 Jan 19, In France it was announced that aircraft-engine company Safran has agreed to buy seat and cabin manufacturer Zodiac Aerospace in a deal worth 8.5 billion euros ($9.1 billion).
(AP, 1/19/17)
2017 Jan 19, Gambian president-elect Adama Barrow was sworn in at the country's embassy in Senegal, as African troops massed at the border to force incumbent Yahya Jammeh to quit after his election defeat.
(AFP, 1/19/17)
2017 Jan 19, German lawmakers legalized cannabis use for medical purposes for people with serious diseases such as certain cancers and multiple sclerosis.
(AFP, 1/19/17)
2017 Jan 19, In northern India a truck loaded with sand collided with a school bus early today, killing at least 24 young children in Uttar Pradesh state.
(AP, 1/19/17)
2017 Jan 19, In Iran at least 20 firefighters were reported killed when the 17-storey Plasco building, Tehran’s oldest high-rise, collapsed following a fire. Altogether at least 30 people were killed. Habibollah Elghanian, a prominent Iranian-Jewish businessman, had built the structure. He was arrested for ties to Israel and sentenced to death and executed after the 1979 Islamic revolution. On Jan 27 the final death toll was put at 26 including 16 firefighters.
(AFP, 1/19/17)(Reuters, 1/20/17)(SFC, 1/20/17, p.A6)(SSFC, 1/22/17, p.A4)(AP, 1/27/17)
2017 Jan 19, University lecturers in Kenya began a strike over pay, joining doctors who walked out in early December, crippling the country's healthcare.
(AFP, 1/19/17)
2017 Jan 19, A Kosovo court sentenced seven Albanian citizens on charges of terror, participating in terror groups and recruiting for Islamic terror groups in Syria. The defendants received prison sentences ranging from 2 ½ to 4 ½ years.
(AP, 1/19/17)
2017 Jan 19, Mexican drug kingpin Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman was extradited to the US on charges he ran the world's largest drug-trafficking organization during a decades-long criminal career.
(Reuters, 1/20/17)
2017 Jan 19, Police in southern Mexico found the dismembered bodies of a 2-year-old toddler and a woman in plastic bags in Chilpancingo, Guerrero state. Earlier this week the severed heads of six men were found in a plastic bag on the roof of a sport utility vehicle in Chilpancingo, with six headless bodies inside.
(AP, 1/20/17)
2017 Jan 19, In Pakistan hardline religious protesters of Tehreek Labaik Ya Rasool Allah threw stones at supporters of five missing activists in Karachi, and demanded that police charge the missing men under a blasphemy law that carries a mandatory death sentence.
(Reuters, 1/19/17)
2017 Jan 19, International aid workers opened a new desalination plant in the Gaza Strip, bringing some relief to a territory where 97 percent of the water is undrinkable. The plant will initially produce 6,000 cubic meters of water a day. In all, the population uses 150,000 cubic meters a day, most of it from a depleted coastal aquifer.
(AP, 1/19/17)
2017 Jan 19, Poland's interior minister defended a decision to post photos of some anti-government protesters to illustrate the country's "zero tolerance for breaches of the law," but opposition lawmakers called it an act of "political revenge" intended to intimidate government critics.
(AP, 1/19/17)
2017 Jan 19, Puerto Rico's governor reversed an order by the US territory's police chief that sought to greatly limit the release of public information about criminal cases.
(AP, 1/19/17)
2017 Jan 19, In Saudi Arabia six British nationals were reported killed and several more injured in a road crash as they traveled to Medina.
(AFP, 1/19/17)
2017 Jan 19, Slovenia said it will allow hunters to kill 93 brown bears and up to 8 wolves this year in order to keep those animal populations from growing. Last year hunters killed 83 bears and 4 wolves.
(AP, 1/19/17)
2017 Jan 19, At Davos, Switzerland, PM Theresa May unveiled her vision for Britain after Brexit, describing its future role as a defender of free trade and globalization in a speech intended to ease concerns among the global business elite.
(Reuters, 1/19/17)
2017 Jan 19, In Syria shells slammed into the city of Aleppo, killing two people as thousands of government supporters gathered in a main square nearby to celebrate last month's capture of the city's eastern neighborhoods from rebels. The Islamic State killed 12 people in Palmyra by shooting and beheading them.
(AP, 1/19/17)(SFC, 1/20/17, p.A2)
2017 Jan 19, In Syria US warplanes bombed an al-Qaida training camp killing more than 100 militants in Idlib province.
(SFC, 1/21/17, p.A6)
2017 Jan 19, Turkey’s government extended emergency for another three months.
(Econ, 1/21/17, p.41)
2017 Jan 20, President Obama signed his final bill. It codified the Presidential Innovation Fellows Program. The program, which he created in 2012. Its mandate: bring top tech talent to Washington to address a range of issues facing federal government programs, from transparency to technology education.
(CSM, 1/21/17)
2017 Jan 20, Donald Trump was sworn in as the 45th president of the United States, ushering in a new political era that has been cheered and feared in equal measure. Washington DC was rocked by violent protests against the businessman-turned-politician, with black-clad anti-establishment activists smashing windows, setting vehicles on fire and fighting with riot police who responded with stun grenades.
(AFP, 1/20/17)(Reuters, 1/21/17)
2017 Jan 20, In Washington, DC, at least six journalists were charged with felony rioting after they were arrested while covering violent protests that took place just blocks from the inauguration parade of Pres. Trump. The journalists were among 230 people detained in the anti-Trump protests.
(SFC, 1/26/17, p.A6)
2017 Jan 20, As Pres. Trump delivered his inauguration speech Michael Flynn, Trump’s national security advisor, sent a text to a business partner that a joint plan between Russia and Flynn’s business allies to build nuclear power plants in the Middle East was “good to go."
(SFC, 12/7/17, p.A5)
2017 Jan 20, John Albers (17) was shot and killed by police as he backed a minivan out of his family's garage. Officers were responding to a report that he was making suicidal comments on social media. Albers was shot 13 times. In 2019 his mother reached a $2.3 million settlement with the city of Overland Park.
(http://tinyurl.com/ybsrqdh7)(SFC, 1/16/19, p.A5)
2017 Jan 20, In Louisiana Sylvester Holt shot and killed Simone Veal (32) and police Officer Michael Louviere (26), who had tried to intervene. Holt then shot and killed himself following an hours-long standoff on a New Orleans bridge. Holt had been romantically involved with Veal.
(SFC, 1/21/17, p.A17)(SSFC, 1/22/17, p.A10)
2017 Jan 20, The Michigan School Reform Office said that 38 state schools are failing and subject to closure.
(SFC, 1/21/17, p.A7)
2017 Jan 20, Montana reached a $25 million settlement with more than 1,000 victims of asbestos-related disease over claims that health officials failed to bring attention to the hazards of a contaminated mine in Libby. The mine was closed in 1999.
(SFC, 1/21/17, p.A7)
2017 Jan 20, Sheldon Adelson’s Las Vegas Sands Corp. agreed to pay $6.96 million to US authorities to end a more than five year corrupt practices investigation of the firms’ former relationship with a consultant in China and Macao. This was in addition to a $9 million payment made in April to settle a US SEC investigation that found some payments to the consultant were not properly authorized or documented.
(SFC, 1/21/17, p.A8)
2017 Jan 20, In northern Afghanistan two people, including a police commander, were killed in an explosion after a sticky bomb was attached to the commander's car in Balkh province. Taliban insurgents stormed a police checkpoint in the northeastern province of Kapisa, killing three policemen. A day later Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid, in a text to journalists, accused government forces of killing six civilians in a January 20 attack in Kapisa.
(AP, 1/20/17)(AP, 1/21/17)
2017 Jan 20, In Australia a man (26) deliberately drove into pedestrians, killing four and injuring more than 20, in the center Melbourne. Police eventually rammed the car and shot the driver in the arm, before dragging him from the vehicle and arresting him. Police said the incident was not terrorism-related.
(Reuters, 1/20/17)
2017 Jan 20, In central China at least 12 people were killed after a hotel was buried in a landslide in Nanzhang county, Hunan province.
(AP, 1/20/17)(SFC, 1/23/17, p.A2)
2017 Jan 20, Gambia's army chief General Ousman Badjie said that he recognized new President Adama Barrow as the new commander-and-chief and would not fight a regional force poised to depose Yahya Jammeh, who has refused to step down.
(Reuters, 1/20/17)
2017 Jan 20, Germany said its diplomats have helped broker a ceasefire between the Syrian government and rebel forces in a mountainous valley near Damascus, a deal designed to restore water supplies to the capital.
(Reuters, 1/20/17)
2017 Jan 20, In Iraq the Islamic State blew up a landmark hotel in western Mosul in an apparent attempt to prevent advancing Iraqi forces from using it as a base in their offensive to capture the city.
(Reuters, 1/22/17)
2017 Jan 20, In northern Italy a bus carrying Hungarian students home from a school ski trip to France slammed into a highway barrier and burst into flames just before midnight, killing at least 16 people. 39 others survived, but some were seriously injured.
(AP, 1/21/17)
2017 Jan 20, Kosovo’s Deputy PM Hajredin Kuci said that the government wanted to modernize its property system and foster greater equality and prosperity in the Balkan country. This will, for the first time, clearly define formal ownership and encourage women to inherit and own land in their own right.
(Reuters, 1/20/17)
2017 Jan 20, Mexico’s national Immigration Institute said it put 91 Cubans on a federal police airplane and flew them back to Cuba after the Cuban government accepted their return.
(SFC, 1/21/17, p.A2)
2017 Jan 20, Police in Peru arrested former transport official Edwn Luyo as part of a massive graft scandal implicating Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht and several regional governments. Luyo headed the committee that awarded Odebrecht a contract in 2009 to build Lima's elevated metro.
(AP, 1/21/17)
2017 Jan 20, A South Korean court said that the government had broken the law during the 1960s and 1970s by detaining prostitutes who catered to US soldiers and by forcing them to undergo treatment for venereal diseases. The court ordered the government to pay 57 plaintiffs $4,240 each in compensation for physical and psychological damage.
(SFC, 1/21/17, p.A4)
2017 Jan 20, The Syrian government and experts said Islamic State militants have destroyed parts of the second-century Roman amphitheater and an iconic monument known as the Tetrapylon in the historic town of Palmyra.
(AP, 1/20/17)
2017 Jan 20, In northern Syria the Islamic State group killed five Turkish soldiers and wounded nine others in a car bomb attack in the village of Sulfaniyeh, near Al-Bab.
(AP, 1/20/17)
2017 Jan 20, In Turkey rocket attacks hit the Istanbul police headquarters and the offices of the ruling AK Party. There were no reports of casualties.
(Reuters, 1/22/17)
2017 Jan 20, UN human rights envoy Yanghee Lee ended a 12-day visit to Myanmar with a bleak evaluation of the government's ability to deal with the problems facing the country's ethnic minorities. She said the situation there was deteriorating.
(AP, 1/20/17)
2017 Jan 20, In Yemen a suspected US drone strike killed a local military instructor for Al-Qaeda in southern al-Bayda province.
(AFP, 1/22/17)
2017 Jan 21, Large crowds of women, many wearing bright pink knit hats, poured into downtown Washington to march in opposition to US President Donald Trump. Legions of women flooded parks, streets and city squares from Sydney to Paris to Philadelphia, marching in solidarity as a show of empowerment and a stand against Donald Trump.
(Reuters, 1/21/17)(AP, 1/21/17)
2017 Jan 21, William Norris (89), a retired judge of the Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals (1980-1997), died in Los Angeles. His 1988 ruling on gays in the military paved the way for gay rights.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Albert_Norris)(SFC, 2/2/17, p.D2)
2017 Jan 21, In Mississippi four people were killed when a tornado hit the Hattiesburg area.
(SSFC, 1/22/17, p.A7)
2017 Jan 21, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said that he is requiring health insurance companies to cover medically necessary abortions and most forms of contraception at no cost to women.
(SSFC, 1/22/17, p.A7)
2017 Jan 21, In northeastern Brazil military police took control of Alcacuz prison after fighting between rival gangs had left 26 inmates dead, the latest in a spate of violence in the country's penitentiaries.
(AP, 1/21/17)
2017 Jan 21, Representatives of Libya's neighbors meeting in Cairo warned the North African nation's main rival factions against seeking to settle their differences through military force, as Egypt announced that efforts were underway to bring their leaders together to chart a "joint vision" for the country. The representatives came from Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Algeria, Chad, Niger and Tunisia as well as the UN envoy to Libya.
(AP, 1/21/17)
2017 Jan 21, In Egypt eight people were killed after a shell landed on a house in southern Rafah, in the north of Sinai.
(Reuters, 1/21/17)
2017 Jan 21, Gambia’s defeated leader Yahya Jammeh announced that he has decided to relinquish power.
(SFC, 1/21/17, p.A4)
2017 Jan 21, In India a train crash late today killed 39 passengers in Andhra Pradesh state.
(AFP, 1/22/17)
2017 Jan 21, Authorities in the Netherlands and Spain arrested five male and two female suspects, all Dutch nationals, over the last 245 hours over the robbery of $72 million in jewelry, one the world's biggest ever heists, from Amsterdam's airport in 2005.
(AFP, 1/21/17)
2017 Jan 21, In Pakistan a bomb exploded in a market in Parachinar, the capital of the Kurram tribal region, killing at least 24 people and wounding at least 50. The Taliban claimed responsibility.
(AP, 1/21/17)(AFP, 1/22/17)
2017 Jan 21, A group of Russian hackers claimed to have shut down the website of the African Cup of Nations soccer tournament in a protest at organizers holding it in Gabon, where Pres. Ali Bongo Ondimba retained power in disputed elections last year.
(AP, 1/21/17)
2017 Jan 21, Russian security forces in Dagestan tracked down and killed two suspected militants in the village of Vperyod, Kizlyar region.
(AP, 1/21/17)
2017 Jan 21, Two Saudi men blew themselves up during a gunbattle with security forces in Jeddah. One man was later identified as Khaled al-Serwani, linked to an attack in 2015 that killed a worshipper at a Shi'ite mosque in Najan. The 2nd man, Nadi al-Medhiani, had served time in prison after fighting abroad and had ties to a militant suspected of involvement in attacks claimed by Islamic State.
(Reuters, 1/24/17)
2017 Jan 21, South Korean prosecutors arrested President Park Geun-hye's culture minister and her former top presidential adviser over allegations that they blacklisted artists critical of the government. Culture Minister Cho Yoon-sun and ex-presidential chief of staff Kim Ki-choon had allegedly drawn up a list of some 9,500 artists and cultural figures to be excluded from government funding programs.
(AP, 1/21/17)(Econ, 1/28/17, p.34)
2017 Jan 21, Spanish police said they have arrested 16 people, including Dutch, Spanish, Colombian, Brazilian, Belgian, Chilean and Moroccan citizens, on suspicion of forming a criminal organization, and trafficking in arms and drugs.
(AP, 1/21/17)
2017 Jan 21, In Syria a car bomb blast killed at least seven civilians at the Rukban camp for displaced Syrians by the border with Jordan.
(AFP, 1/21/17)(SSFC, 1/22/17, p.A4)
2017 Jan 21, In Syria six Russian warplanes carried out airstrikes on Islamic State targets in Syrian province of Deir ez-Zor.
(Reuters, 1/21/17)
2017 Jan 21, Turkey parliament adopted a block of constitutional amendments intended to cement Pres. Erdogan’s grip over the country.
(Econ, 2/4/17, p.46)
2017 Jan 21, Turkish broadcaster Haberturk said prosecutors have issued arrest warrants for more than 400 people, including soldiers and security officers, in 48 provinces across the country following July's failed coup. Zulfukar Sukru Kanberoglu of the TMSF fund was one of 367 people dismissed from state institutions under the latest four decrees, which also reinstated 124 civil servants.
(Reuters, 1/21/17)(Reuters, 1/23/17)
2017 Jan 21, In Yemen two suspected US drone strikes in the al-Soumaa district of killed Abu Anis al-Abi, an al-Qaida area field commander, and two others, who were riding a motorcycle.
(AFP, 1/22/17)(SFC, 1/23/17, p.A2)
2017 Jan 22, In Florida Mark Baumer (33) was killed on Highway 90 while walking barefoot across the US to raise awareness about climate change.
(SFC, 1/24/17, p.A5)
2017 Jan 22, James Stephen Boggs (b.1955), artist and trickster, died in Tampa, Fla. He is best known for his hand-drawn depictions of banknotes.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._S._G._Boggs)(Econ, 2/4/17, p.78)
2017 Jan 22, In Georgia (US) 14 people died in weekend tornadoes and thunderstorms, with seven dying in Cook County in the southern part of the state.
(Reuters, 1/23/17)
2017 Jan 22, The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey police said they have arrested Alesandel Rodriguez of New Jersey for avoiding tolls nearly 900 times owing unpaid fees of more than $56,000. An investigation found some 888 violations.
(SFC, 1/23/17, p.A5)
2017 Jan 22, In Texas one person was killed and five others injured after two men robbed a jewelry store in San Antonio. One robber was wounded and the 2nd was arrested later that night.
(SFC, 1/23/17, p.A5)
2017 Jan 22, The documentary film “Plastic China" premiered at the Utah Sundance Film Festival. Director Jiu-liang Wang captured a Chinese countryside covered almost entirely in imported plastic.
(http://tinyurl.com/yc93w8of)
2017 Jan 22, China’s state planner ordered the closure of 111 golf courses, after a multi-year campaign to tackle illegal development in the sector. A further 18 golf courses have been ordered to return illegally occupied land, and 47 have been told to stop construction.
(Reuters, 1/22/17)
2017 Jan 22, Equatorial Guinea's opposition denounced the government's decision to welcome exiled Gambian President Yahya Jammeh, who flew to the Central African nation over the weekend after 22 years in power. A special adviser to Gambia’s Pres. Barrow accused Jammeh of plundering state coffers for $11 million and shipping out luxury vehicles by cargo plane prior to his departure.
(AP, 1/23/17)(Econ, 1/28/17, p.41)
2017 Jan 22, Egypt's National Defense Council extended the military's participation in a Saudi-led operation in Yemen. It did not specify how long the extension would be for.
(Reuters, 1/22/17)
2017 Jan 22, French left-wing voters cast ballots in a nationwide presidential primary aimed at producing a Socialist candidate strong enough to confront formidable conservative and nationalist rivals in the April-May general election.
(AP, 1/22/17)
2017 Jan 22, In Gambia West African troops were seen approaching the capital, Banjul, as they sought to secure the country and allow new President Adama Barrow to take office. Dictator Yahya Jammeh fled Gambia overnight en route to Equatorial Guinea as the regional force was poised to remove him.
(Reuters, 1/22/17)(Econ, 1/28/17, p.41)
2017 Jan 22, In Germany the agriculture ministers of the G20 leading economies said greater global efforts should be taken to safeguard precious world water supplies to secure food production.
(Reuters, 1/22/17)
2017 Jan 22, In India lawmakers in Tamil Nadu state passed an emergency order allowing bull-taming festivals (Jallikattu) to resume after a court ban on the traditional events led to mass protests. The Supreme Court had banned Jallikattu in 2014 and upheld the ban earlier this month.
(Reuters, 1/23/17)(Econ, 1/28/17, p.36)
2017 Jan 22, In northeastern India rebels ambushed a patrol vehicle in Assam state, killing two paramilitary soldiers. An ongoing government counterattack has killed several rebels. Rebels participating in the attack included the United Liberation Front of Assam and groups from neighboring Manipur state.
(AP, 1/22/17)
2017 Jan 22, An Iranian appeals court confirmed a five-year jail sentence for British-Iranian aid worker Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe on security charges. She works for the Thomson Reuters Foundation, a London-based charity that is independent of Thomson Reuters and operates independently of Reuters News.
(Reuters, 1/22/17)
2017 Jan 22, Iraqi forces retook two areas from the Islamic State group in Mosul, sealing their control of the east bank three months into an offensive to reclaim the city. Army Col. Sabhan Hasan al-Jubouri died in fighting on the eastern bank.
(AFP, 1/22/17)(Reuters, 1/22/17)
2017 Jan 22, In Israel the municipality of Jerusalem granted final approval for the construction of hundreds of new homes in east Jerusalem, while a hard-line Cabinet minister pushed the government to annex a major West Bank settlement as emboldened Israeli nationalists welcomed the presidency of Donald Trump.
(AP, 1/22/17)
2017 Jan 22, Masaya Nakamura (91), the "Father of Pac-Man," died in Japan. He founded Namco, part of Bandai Namco, the Japanese video game company behind the hit creature-gobbling game in 1955. Pac-Man, designed by Namco engineer and video game maker Toru Iwatani, went on sale in 1980, at a time when there were few rival games, such as Space Invaders.
(AP, 1/30/17)
2017 Jan 22, In Romania thousands marched through Bucharest and other cities to protest a government proposal to pardon thousands of prisoners which critics say could reverse the anti-corruption fight.
(AP, 1/22/17)
2017 Jan 22, Police in Spain said that 75 people have been arrested and more than 3,500 stolen artifacts and pieces of art seized in a joint operation with 17 other European countries that dismantled an int’l. cultural goods trafficking ring.
(SFC, 1/23/17, p.A2)
2017 Jan 22, In Sweden teenager and two men in their 20s were arrested in the city of Uppsala, after police received tips about a rape and live streaming in a closed Facebook group from users.
(AP, 1/24/17)
2017 Jan 22, In Syria US-led coalition jets conducted 14 air strikes near Deir al-Zour.
(Reuters, 1/23/17)
2017 Jan 22, In Taiwan thousands of military personnel, teachers, police and civil servants protested a plan to reform the pension system outside of the Presidential Office in Taipei, as a national conference to discuss reform was held in the Office. Pensions for the armed forces wee expected to go bust in 2020; for private sector workers in 2027; for teachers in 2030; and for civil servants in 2021.
(Reuters, 1/22/17)(Econ 5/20/17, p.34) ,
2017 Jan 22, Turkish authorities said they have captured two men believed to be among those responsible for rocket attacks on the Istanbul police headquarters and the offices of the ruling AK Party on Jan 20. One of the assailants was captured by police early today, while the other was shot dead later in the day in the northwestern province of Tekirdag. Police identified them as a members of the outlawed Revolutionary People's Liberation Army-Front (DHKP-C).
(Reuters, 1/22/17)
2017 Jan 22, In Yemen three suspected members of al Qaeda were killed by what local officials said they believed were two separate US drone strikes in the al-Soumaa district of southern al-Bayda province. Clashes killed at least 66 people over the last 24 hours, as pro-government forces pushed to oust rebels from a key stretch of coastline.
(Reuters, 1/22/17)(AFP, 1/22/17)
2017 Jan 23, US President Donald Trump withdrew the US from the Trans Pacific partnership.
(Reuters, 1/24/17)(SFC, 1/24/17, p.A5)
2017 Jan 23, US President Donald Trump's administration asked the Environmental Protection Agency to temporarily halt all contracts, grants and interagency agreements pending a review. Trump also signed an executive order temporarily halting all government hiring outside the military.
(Reuters, 1/24/17)
2017 Jan 23, President Donald Trump signed an executive action reinstating the so-called Mexico City Policy, which bars international non-governmental organizations that perform or promote abortions from receiving US government funding.
(www.cnn.com/2017/01/23/politics/trump-mexico-city-policy/index.html)
2017 Jan 23, Bobby Freeman (b.1940), San Francisco’s first rock ’n’ roll teen star, died at his home in Daly City. His 1958 song “Do You Want to Dance" reached No. 5 on the Billboard singles chart. The song became known as “Do You Wanna Dance" and was performed by a number of other musicians including the Beach Boys.
(SFC, 2/15/17, p.D4)
2017 Jan 23, South Dakota Rep. Mathew Wollman (R) resigned after admitting that he had sexual contact with two interns. He said both interns were over 21 and that the sex was consensual.
(SFC, 1/24/17, p.A5)
2017 Jan 23, London's mayor issued a "very high" air pollution alert for the first time, as cold, windless weather allowed emissions across the whole of southeast England to build up over the weekend.
(AP, 1/23/17)
2017 Jan 23, US-based Liberty Media, controlled by billionaire John Malone, closed its $8 billion deal to acquire Formula One. Former boss Bernie Ecclestone was named “chairman emeritus."
(Econ, 1/28/17, p.54)
2017 Jan 23, In China Xu Xiang, an investor who pumped up stocks, was found guilty of market manipulation. He was sentenced to five-and-a-half years in jail and fined $1.6 billion, a record in China for economic crimes.
(Econ, 2/18/17, p.38)
2017 Jan 23, The bodies of 10 people believed to be Indonesian migrants were found washed ashore in Malaysia not far from a capsized boat. 2 Indonesians were rescued.
(AP, 1/23/17)
2017 Jan 23, Iraq's PM Haider al-Abadi ordered an investigation into violations of human rights and other abuses purportedly committed by government troops and paramilitary forces battling the Islamic State group to retake the city of Mosul.
(AP, 1/23/17)
2017 Jan 23, In Kazakhstan indirect 2-day talks began in Astana between the Syrian government and rebels. The talks were hosted by Russia, Turkey and Iran.
(Reuters, 1/23/17)(Econ, 1/28/17, p.39)
2017 Jan 23, In Northern Ireland Sinn Fein named Michelle O'Neill to succeed Martin McGuinness and lead the Irish nationalist party into elections in March, marking a shift towards a generation not directly involved in decades of conflict.
(Reuters, 1/23/17)
2017 Jan 23, Lawmakers in the Krakow region of Poland, considered the area with the dirtiest air in the country, approved an anti-smog plan that calls for replacing the most polluting heating stoves by 2023.
(AFP, 1/24/17)
2017 Jan 23, Spanish police said a pan-European crackdown on illegal arms trafficking has resulted in 664 guns being seized and 245 people with arrests in Belgium, Britain, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Finland, Greece, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania and Sweden.
(AP, 1/23/17)
2017 Jan 23, In Syria Russian jets pounded Islamic State in the eastern province of Deir al-Zor, seeking to thwart a full-blown assault by the militants against the last district in the region still held by the Damascus government.
(Reuters, 1/23/17)
2017 Jan 23, In Tanzania Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan asked Pres. John Magufuli to take action against the network of an exiled cleric he blames for last year's failed coup.
(AFP, 1/23/17)
2017 Jan 23, Uganda said it had returned dozens of former combatants of a Democratic Republic of Congo rebel group to a military camp after they tried to sneak back to their own country in disguise last week.
(Reuters, 1/23/17)
2017 Jan 23, Pope Francis blasted the "money stained with blood" and "evil power" wielded by Italian organized crime as he met the heads of the country's anti-mafia squad.
(AFP, 1/23/17)
2017 Jan 23, Venezuela's opposition parties launched a new round of protests aimed at forcing President Nicolas Maduro from power and ending 18 years of socialist rule, but they fell well short of the massive demonstrations of the past.
(Reuters, 1/23/17)
2017 Jan 23, In Yemen forces allied with the internationally-recognized government seized control of Mokha, a strategic Red Sea port after waging an assault against Shiite rebels. Emirati-led troops marched into Mokha port and set their sights on Hodeidah.
(AP, 1/23/17)(Econ, 4/8/17, p.42)
2017 Jan 24, Pres. Trump signed executive actions to accelerate the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipeline projects and to decree that American steel should be used for pipelines built in the United States. Trump invited Keystone builder TransCanada to resubmit its application to the State Department for a presidential permit to construct and operate the pipeline.
(Reuters, 1/24/17)(SFC, 1/25/17, p.A5)
2017 Jan 24, FBI Director James Comey said the Pres. Trump has asked him to stay on as head of the law enforcement agency.
(SFC, 1/25/17, p.A5)
2017 Jan 24, An unknown author wrote an FBI note about the bureau's investigation of National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, questioning whether the goal was "Truth/Admission" or "to get him to lie." This was the same day of Flynn's White House FBI interview. The note was only made public in late April, 2020.
(CBS News, 4/30/20)
2017 Jan 24, Michigan state environmental officials said Flint’s water system no longer has levels of lead exceeding the federal limit.
(SFC, 1/25/17, p.A5)
2017 Jan 24, Afghanistan’s attorney general ordered the arrest of nine employees of VP Rashid Dostum in connection with allegations of kidnapping and torturing a former ally.
(SFC, 1/25/17, p.A2)
2017 Jan 24, A top Bangladesh official said his country has begun planting one million palm trees nationwide to help prevent hundreds of people being killed by lightning strikes every year.
(AFP, 1/24/17)
2017 Jan 24, The UK Supreme Court ruled that PM Theresa May must give parliament a vote before she can formally start Britain's exit from the European Union, giving lawmakers who oppose her Brexit plans a shot at amending them.
(Reuters, 1/24/17)
2017 Jan 24, An Estonian defense official said his country is experimenting with the idea of cyberconscription, a move that gives draftees with tech skills the chance to work shoring up their military's electronic infrastructure.
(AP, 1/24/17)
2017 Jan 24, EU security commissioner Julian King says Europe faces a growing threat of cyber-attacks from criminals and those plotting to destabilize the 28-nation bloc politically.
(AFP, 1/24/17)
2017 Jan 24, Heavy pollution enveloping much of Europe prompted emergency measures across the continent.
(AFP, 1/24/17)
2017 Jan 24, French Interior Minister Bruno Le Roux said that his government has requested blocks for 834 websites and that 1,929 more be pulled from search engines' results as part of the fight against "child pornographic and terrorist content". He also said French authorities ordered the blockage or removal of more than 2,700 websites in 2016.
(AP, 1/24/17)
2017 Jan 24, The board of state-run Electricite de France voted to start the process of closing the two reactors at the 39-year-old Fessenheim plant, near the German border.
(AP, 1/24/17)
2017 Jan 24, Gambia's parliament revoked a state of emergency imposed last week by former President Yahya Jammeh shortly before he fled into exile, as the tiny West African country slowly recovered from its political crisis.
(Reuters, 1/24/17)
2017 Jan 24, At least 15 Haitian migrants drowned in the Turks & Caicos Islands after their small and crowded boat capsized near the British Caribbean territory. 69 people were on the boat.
(AP, 1/25/17)(AP, 1/27/17)
2017 Jan 24, Hong Kong said it would release the nine Singaporean armored vehicles it seized in November on their way home from military exercises in Taiwan, easing tensions between China and Singapore.
(Reuters, 1/24/17)
2017 Jan 24, Israel announced plans for 2,500 more settlement homes in the occupied West Bank, the second such declaration since US President Donald Trump took office signaling he would be less critical of such projects than his predecessor.
(Reuters, 1/24/17)
2017 Jan 24, A Jerusalem court reached a plea bargain with a former chief rabbi of Israel that will have him serve time for corruption. Yona Metzger will serve 3.5 years in prison and pay a $1.3 million fine.
(AP, 1/25/17)
2017 Jan 24, In central Italy a helicopter ferrying an injured skier off the slopes crashed into a mountainside and killed all six people aboard in the Abruzzo area.
(AP, 1/24/17)
2017 Jan 24, Japan successfully launched its first military communications satellite. The Kirameki-2 is designed to upgrade its network in the face of China's increasingly assertive maritime activity and North Korea's missile threat.
(AP, 1/24/17)
2017 Jan 24, In Kazakhstan Russia, Turkey and Iran backed a shaky truce between Syria's warring parties and agreed to monitor its compliance. On the ground rebels faced continued fighting on two fronts, which could undermine the deal.
(Reuters, 1/24/17)
2017 Jan 24, In Mozambique Turkish Pres. Recep Tayyip Erdogan called on leader Filipe Nyusi to take action against the exiled cleric he blames for last year's failed coup.
(AFP, 1/24/17)
2017 Jan 24, Pakistan successfully tested a new nuclear capable surface-to-surface missile that is able to deliver multiple warheads and evade radar detection.
(Reuters, 1/24/17)
2017 Jan 24, The Russian military says its bombers have struck Islamic State positions in the province of Deir el-Zour in the third such raid in four days.
(AP, 1/24/17)
2017 Jan 24, Saudi Arabia warned that the Shamoon computer virus, first reported in 2012, has returned with at least one major petrochemical company apparently affected. The original infection was blamed on Iran.
(SFC, 1/25/17, p.A2)
2017 Jan 24, In Somalia at least four soldiers were killed and five wounded when a roadside bomb that Islamist militant group al Shabaab said it planted exploded outside a military camp in Afgoye near Mogadishu.
(Reuters, 1/24/17)
2017 Jan 24, In northwest Syria heavy fighting erupted between the jihadist group Jabhat Fateh al-Sham and Free Syrian Army factions who were represented at the Astana talks.
(Reuters, 1/24/17)
2017 Jan 24, In Thailand Briton Tony Kenway was the victim of a gangland-style slaying in the resort town of Pattaya.
(AP, 9/28/17)
2017 Jan 24, Turkey said it would not hand over al-Bab to Syrian forces after driving out Islamic State. The Turkish-backed rebels are closer to doing so than the Syrian army, having already reached the town's outskirts.
(Reuters, 1/25/17)
2017 Jan 24, Uzbekistan’s Supreme Court said it has granted a mass amnesty to 39,748 convicted prisoners and detainees awaiting trial. The amnesty was passed by parliament last October and entered force this month.
(AFP, 1/24/17)
2017 Jan 24, Pope Francis demanded the obedience of the Grand Master of the Knights of Malta and his resignation. The next day Vatican said that it is taking over the embattled Knights of Malta after its leader Mathew Festing (67) defied Pope Francis in a dispute over condoms.
(SFC, 1/26/17, p.A2)(Econ, 3/18/17, p.63)
2017 Jan 25, President Donald Trump announced he would seek a probe into what he calls widespread voter fraud in the election that brought him to power, hammering away at allegations widely dismissed as baseless. Trump also ordered the Dept. of Homeland Security to allocate funds for building a wall along the Mexican border.
(AFP, 1/25/17)(SFC, 1/26/17, p.A1)
2017 Jan 25, It was reported that the Trump administration is mandating that any studies or data from scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) undergo review by political appointees before they can be released to the public.
(SFC, 1/26/17, p.A4)
2017 Jan 25, Mary Tyler Moore (80), star of 1970s sitcom "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," died at her home in Greenwich, Conn.
(SFC, 1/26/17, p.A1)
2017 Jan 25, The San Francisco Board of Education voted to remove Columbus Day from the academic calendar and replace it with Indigenous People’s Day.
(SFC, 1/27/17, p.D2)
2017 Jan 25, The Dow Jones Industrial Average passed 20,000 for the first time.
(Econ, 1/28/17, p.61)
2017 Jan 25, Britain’s PM Theresa May announced that the government would publish a white paper setting out its approach to Brexit.
(Econ, 1/28/17, p.49)
2017 Jan 25, The EU's executive arm said Bulgaria and Romania must do more to meet European Union standards on crime, corruption and judicial reform.
(AFP, 1/25/17)
2017 Jan 25, The EU unveiled plans to increase training for the Libyan coast guard as part of new measures to stop African migrants leaving for Europe in a feared spring surge.
(AFP, 1/25/17)
2017 Jan 25, French investigators launched a preliminary probe into claims the wife of presidential candidate Francois Fillon earned 500,000 euros ($538,000) for a suspected fake job as his parliamentary aide.
(AFP, 1/25/17)
2017 Jan 25, German police carried out dawn raids against far-right suspects accused of plotting attacks on refugees, Jews and police officers, and detained two suspects.
(AFP, 1/25/17)
2017 Jan 25, In Iraq local residents said Islamic State fighters have taken up sniper positions in buildings on the west bank of the Tigris river ahead of an expected government offensive into that side the city. Iraqi forces estimated the number of militants inside Mosul at 5,000-6,000 at the start of the battle, and have said 3,300 have been killed in the fighting.
(Reuters, 1/25/17)
2017 Jan 25, Hundreds of Italians whose homes were devastated in a series of deadly earthquakes protested in Rome at the slow pace of government aid as the death toll from the Jan 18 avalanche-hit hotel rose to 24.
(AFP, 1/25/17)
2017 Jan 25, Jamaica’s Usain Bolt lost one of his nine Olympic gold medals when the International Olympic Committee stripped Jamaica of their 4x100m relay win at the 2008 Beijing Games after relay teammate Nesta Carter, who ran the first leg of the race, was found to have tested positive for banned substance Methylhexanamine.
(AFP, 1/25/17)
2017 Jan 25, Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev said he will delegate some of his sweeping powers to the Central Asian nation's parliament and cabinet, a move that could facilitate an eventual political transition.
(Reuters, 1/25/17)
2017 Jan 25, Kuwait hanged seven prisoners in a mass execution that included a royal family member.
(SFC, 1/26/17, p.A3)
2017 Jan 25, Libyan troops routed Islamic militants from a key area they controlled in Benghazi. The two-year campaign to push militants out of Benghazi was led by Khalifa Hifter, who is not recognized by the UN-backed government in Tripoli.
(AP, 1/25/17)
2017 Jan 25, Philippine troops launched airstrikes and ground assaults that reportedly wounded one of Southeast Asia's most-wanted militant suspects who is trying to establish a new base for an alliance backing the Islamic State group. Isnilon Hapilon managed to flee from a camp in Butig town in southern Lanao del Sur province. Two days of airstrikes killed 15 Muslim militants linked to the Islamic State group.
(AP, 1/27/17)(AP, 1/29/17)
2017 Jan 25, In Poland hundreds of students are gathering in downtown Warsaw and other cities to protest the country's populist government, with a range of demands that includes better ties with the European Union and protecting the environment.
(AP, 1/25/17)
2017 Jan 25, Poland's state-run defense firm PGZ said it has signed a memorandum of understanding with French military shipbuilder DCNS that could allow them to work together on building submarines in Poland.
(Reuters, 1/25/17)
2017 Jan 25, In Somalia 28 people were killed when Al-Shabaab fighters attacked the popular Dayah in Mogadishu, setting off two car bombs and opening fire on security guards. 4 al-Shabab attackers were also killed.
(AFP, 1/25/17)(SFC, 1/26/17, p.A3)
2017 Jan 25, Syrian government forces and their allies drove Islamic State militants out of several villages northeast of Aleppo over the last 24 hours. One Turkish soldier was killed and five were wounded in a clash with Islamic State militants near al-Bab.
(Reuters, 1/25/17)
2017 Jan 25, In Syria six long-range Russian bombers struck Islamic State targets in Deir al-Zor province.
(Reuters, 1/25/17)
2017 Jan 26, Steve Bannon, Pres. Trump’s chief White House strategist, said the media is the “opposition party" and “should keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while."
(http://tinyurl.com/j64qmxa)(SFC, 1/27/17, p.A6)
2017 Jan 26, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists warned that comments by US President Donald Trump on nuclear weapons and climate change have helped make the world less safe, moving its symbolic "Doomsday Clock" 30 seconds closer to midnight.
(AFP, 1/26/17)
2017 Jan 26, It was reported that employees from more than a dozen US government agencies have established a network of unofficial "rogue" Twitter feeds in defiance of what they see as attempts by President Donald Trump to muzzle federal climate change research and other science.
(Reuters, 1/26/17)
2017 Jan 26, Scientists said they have grown human cells inside pig embryos, a very early step toward the goal of growing livers and other human organs in animals to transplant into people.
(AP, 1/26/17)
2017 Jan 26, Johnson & Johnson said it will buy Swiss drugmaker Actelion in a $30 billion deal that both secures promising research and bolsters the product portfolio controlled by the US health care giant.
(AP, 1/26/17)
2017 Jan 26, Mike Connors (b.1925), TV and film actor, died in in Los Angeles. He starred as a hard-hitting private eye on the TV series “Mannix" (1967-1975).
(SFC, 1/27/17, p.A6)
2017 Jan 26, In Ohio Gabriel Taye (8) hanged himself in his bedroom with a necktie. It was later reported that school surveillance video showed a bully knocking Taye unconscious two days before his suicide.
(SFC, 5/13/17, p.A5)
2017 Jan 26, In Texas Terry Edwards (43) was executed for a fatal 2002 robbery in in Dallas that left two Subway employees dead.
(SFC, 1/27/17, p.A6)
2017 Jan 26, Austria's new Pres. Alexander Van der Bellen called for a tolerant and diverse nation free of ideological and racial hatred in an inauguration speech that embraced the ideal of a united Europe.
(AP, 1/26/17)
2017 Jan 26, In Austria 14 people were arrested as some 800 police investigating possible members of the Islamic State jihadist group carried out raids in Vienna and Graz in the south. the raids reportedly focused on the network of Ebu Tejma, a Muslim preacher from Bosnia jailed for 20 years last July in Graz for recruiting young IS fighters.
(AFP, 1/26/17)
2017 Jan 26, Brazilian police issued an arrest warrant for businessman Eike Batista, famous for amassing and then losing a multi-billion-dollar fortune.
(AP, 1/26/17)
2017 Jan 26, Britain’s Conservative government introduced a long-awaited bill to start the country's exit from the European Union and gave the House of Commons less than two weeks to consider it.
(AP, 1/26/17)
2017 Jan 26, Britain’s High Court ruled that Royal Dutch Shell cannot be sued in London over oil spills in Nigeria, in a setback to attempts to hold British multinationals liable at home for their subsidiaries' actions abroad. The court also said the claimants should be able to use Nigerian courts.
(Reuters, 1/26/17)
2017 Jan 26, German geologist Kay Holtzmann, contracted by the Dutch-British multinational Royal Dutch Shell's Nigeria subsidiary, wrote a letter to the Bodo Mediation Initiative saying the company "fiercely opposed" environmental testing and is concealing data showing thousands of Nigerians are exposed to health hazards from a stalled cleanup of the worst oil spills in the West African nation's history.
(AP, 3/24/17)
2017 Jan 26, Chile’s government said forest fires in the central regions of O'Higgins and El Maule have killed 9 people over the past week, displaced thousands and destroyed entire villages. A state of emergency was in effect and by early February the death toll reached 11.
(AP, 1/26/17)(SSFC, 2/5/17, p.A6)
2017 Jan 26, China released a new list of items banned for export to North Korea, ranging from wind tunnels to plutonium, following a new round of United Nations sanctions and complaints from US President Donald Trump that Beijing was not doing enough to pressure its communist neighbor.
(AP, 1/26/17)
2017 Jan 26, French skipper Francis Joyon smashed the record for the fastest sail around the world by more than four days and he won the Jules Verne Trophy.
(AP, 1/26/17)
2017 Jan 26, An aircraft carrying Gambian President Adama Barrow arrived in the capital Banjul, days after his predecessor Yahya Jammeh fled into exile under pressure from regional forces.
(Reuters, 1/26/17)
2017 Jan 26, Germany's Parliament extended the country's training mission in northern Iraq for another year.
(AP, 1/26/17)
2017 Jan 26, In Germany more than 15,000 turkeys were being culled after the new bird flu subtype H5N5 was confirmed on a north German farm.
(Reuters, 1/26/17)
2017 Jan 26, Greece's Supreme Court ruled against the extradition of eight Turkish soldiers who fled to Greece in July after a failed coup attempt in Turkey, a decision which angered Ankara and further strained relations between the two neighbors. Turkey issued an arrest warrant for the eight former army officers.
(Reuters, 1/26/17)(AFP, 1/26/17)
2017 Jan 26, In Indonesia a deputy chairwoman of the independent Corruption Eradication Commission, Basaria Panjaitan, announced that Constitutional Court Judge Patrialis Akbar and 10 other people were caught "red-handed" in an anti-graft sting.
(AP, 1/26/17)
2017 Jan 26, Israeli officials gave final approval to 153 east Jerusalem settler homes, adding to a sharp increase in such projects since US Pres. Donald Trump took office.
(AFP, 1/26/17)
2017 Jan 26, In Kashmir two separate avalanches buried a military post and swept away a patrol in Gurez, burying a total of 21 Indian soldiers. Seven soldiers were rescued. Over the next two days the remaining 14 bodies were recovered. Five of the rescued soldiers died on Jan 30.
(AP, 1/27/17)(SFC, 1/28/17, p.A2)(AP, 1/30/17)
2017 Jan 26, In Libya Yousuf Mubarak Welayti, an Emirati national detained since 2015 on spying charges, was found dead after militiamen stormed the detention center where he was being held and killed him.
(AP, 1/26/17)
2017 Jan 26, Lithuania and Poland said they would not allow the United States to locate new secret prisons on their soil if President Donald Trump chooses to reinstate an old CIA program that detained and interrogated terrorism suspects abroad.
(Reuters, 1/26/17)
2017 Jan 26, Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto said he had scrapped plans to meet Donald Trump next week after the US president tweeted Mexico should cancel the meeting if it was not prepared to pay for his proposed border wall.
(Reuters, 1/26/17)
2017 Jan 26, Pakistan's television regulator banned well-known talk show host Aamir Liaquat Hussain for hate speech, after he hosted shows accusing liberal activists and others of blasphemy, an inflammatory allegation that could put their lives at risk.
(Reuters, 1/26/17)
2017 Jan 26, Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte apologized to South Korea after policemen last October killed, one of its citizens, then said he wanted to hang rogue police and send their heads to Seoul. The police accused of kidnapping and killing Jee Ick-joo were anti-narcotics officers.
(Reuters, 1/26/17)
2017 Jan 26, Puerto Rico's new governor signed a labor reform bill that targets the private sector and aims to stimulate the island's economy amid concerns that it infringes on workers' rights.
(AP, 1/26/17)
2017 Jan 26, Romania’s High Court of Cassation and Justice gave Alina Bica, the former chief prosecutor for the agency that investigates organized crime and terrorism, a 3 ½-year sentence for aiding a wrongdoer. The former head of the tax authority, Serban Pop, received five years for influence trafficking. Businessman Horia Simu received a 4-year term for buying influence.
(AP, 1/26/17)
2017 Jan 26, Sudanese opposition leader and ex-prime minister Sadiq al-Mahdi (81) returned to the country more than two years after he fled abroad.
(AFP, 1/26/17)
2017 Jan 26, Syrian Islamist rebel group Ahrar al-Sham said six other rebel factions had joined its ranks in northwestern Syria in order to fend off a major assault by a powerful jihadist group. Fateh al-Sham, once allied with al Qaeda and formerly known as the Nusra Front clashed with fighters from Ahrar al-Sham and Suqour al-Sham in the northern rebel stronghold of Idlib province.
(Reuters, 1/26/17)
2017 Jan 26, In northeastern Tanzania a massive mound of earth collapsed early today at a Chinese-owned gold mine in Nyarugusu village, burying at least 13 workers, including a Chinese national.
(AP, 1/26/17)
2017 Jan 26, The UN Security Council voted unanimously to keep the UN peacekeeping force in Cyprus for another six months and urged Greek and Turkish Cypriots "to grasp the current opportunity" to reunite the divided Mediterranean island.
(AP, 1/26/17)
2017 Jan 27, President Donald Trump made his debut as a statesman, welcoming British PM Theresa May as the first foreign leader to visit his White House. In their news conference Trump said that his defense secretary’s opposition to torture will override his own belief that enhanced interrogation does work.
(AFP, 1/27/17)(SFC, 1/28/17, p.A6)
2017 Jan 27, President Donald Trump signed an executive order banning refugees from Muslim-majority countries. A US federal law enforcement official said any non-U.S. citizen from Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia or Yemen is now barred from entering the United States.
(AP, 1/28/17)
2017 Jan 27, President Donald Trump called and pressured Mexico’s Pres. Enrique Pena Nieto to stop saying publicly that his government would never pay for a wall along the southern US border. Pena agreed to stop talking about the wall.
(SFC, 8/4/17, p.A4)
2017 Jan 27, The SEC said Joseph Meli (42) and Matthew Harriton (52) persuaded at least 125 investors in 13 states to contribute a total of $81 million towards their ticket re-selling business. Almost $2 million was diverted for personal expenses and at least $48 million of incoming funds was used to pay make Ponzi payments to earlier investors. In a parallel action by the US attorney’s office in the Southern District of New York Meli and Steven Simmons (48) of Connecticut were arrested on charges of conspiracy, securities fraud and wire fraud for participating in an alleged Ponzi scheme in a hedge fund.
(SSFC, 1/29/17, p.A9)
2017 Jan 27, In Washington state King County police detectives shot and killed Mi'Chance Dunlap-Gittens (17) in sting operation in a Seattle suburb. Chance was hit at least 8 times before a fatal shot to the back of his head. Dunlap-Gittens and a 16-year-old companion, DaJohntae Richard, had been deceived by sheriff’s detectives into believing the van contained a teenage prostitute and her pimp who wanted to buy several bottles of illicit alcohol. An internal revue later cleared the officers of wrongdoing. In 2020 King County agreed to a $2.5 million settlement with the boy's family.
(https://tinyurl.com/y9rzccd5)(SFC, 5/6/20, p.A10)
2017 Jan 27, Oscar-nominated British actor John Hurt (77), known for his roles in "Elephant Man" and "Harry Potter", died in Norfolk after a battle with pancreatic cancer.
(AFP, 1/28/17)(SSFC, 1/29/17, p.A6)
2017 Jan 27, Two Iraqi men with visas to enter the United States were detained at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport, hours after Pres. Trump's executive order put a four-month hold on allowing refugees into the United States and temporarily barred travelers from Syria and six other Muslim-majority countries.
(Reuters, 1/28/17)
2017 Jan 27, It was reported that Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada, leader of the Afghan Taliban, recently replaced "shadow" governors in 16 of the country's 34 provinces. A list named another eight provincial-level officials, including one whose job will be to offer technical support for major attacks on urban areas.
(Reuters, 1/27/17)
2017 Jan 27, It was reported that Belgium has sealed an agreement with France and the Netherlands to draw up passenger lists and introduce passport checks on Thalys and Eurostar international rail services.
(AP, 1/27/17)
2017 Jan 27, Brazilian construction company Odebrecht said it was willing to sell off its remaining projects and businesses in Peru as it faces a massive graft inquiry and calls from the government to leave the Andean country.
(Reuters, 1/27/17)
2017 Jan 27, Britain's biggest retailer Tesco agreed to buy wholesaler Booker for £3.7 billion in a surprise play to become the nation's top food business, slash costs and take on German-owned discounters.
(AFP, 1/27/17)
2017 Jan 27, Xiao Jianhua vanished after crossing the Hong Kong border to China. In 2016 The Hurun Report, a China rich list founded in 1999 by Rupert Hoogewerf in Britain, named Xiao Jianhua as China’s 32nd wealthiest man with a fortune of $6 billion.
(Econ, 2/4/17, p.38)(Econ, 2/18/17, p.38)
2017 Jan 27, Colombian rebel leader Pastor Alape warned that criminal gangs are attempting to take over coca-growing regions being abandoned by the guerrillas to expand cultivation of the plant used to make cocaine.
(AP, 1/27/17)
2017 Jan 27, Croatia's Jewish community boycotted the official Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony after authorities failed to remove a plaque bearing a World War II Croatian pro-Nazi salute from the town of Jasenovac, where tens of thousands of Jews, Serbs and Roma perished in a wartime death camp.
(AP, 1/27/17)
2017 Jan 27, The European Commission imposed anti-dumping duties on steel products from China and Taiwan to stop them flooding Europe's struggling steel market.
(AP, 1/27/17)
2017 Jan 27, The European Union prolonged for a year sanctions against dozens of Tunisians, including ousted president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, accused of illegally using state funds.
(AP, 1/27/17)
2017 Jan 27, Moroccan authorities said they had arrested seven suspected militants linked to Islamic State and seized weapons and explosive belts.
(Reuters, 1/27/17)
2017 Jan 27, In Nigeria armed jihadists from the Islamic State-supported Al-Barnawi faction of Boko Haram launched a midnight attack on troops in the village of Kamuya. At least three Nigerian soldiers were killed. Boko Haram claimed it killed five soldiers.
(AFP, 1/28/17)
2017 Jan 27, The World Food Program said around 1.8 million people are at risk of starvation in northeast Nigeria, victims of an Islamist insurgency that is undermining efforts by the WFP.
(Reuters, 1/27/17)
2017 Jan 27, Pakistani police said they filed a criminal case against the parents of slain social media celebrity Qandeel Baloch, alleging they were bribed to change their testimony to protect one of two sons facing trial in her suspected 'honor killing'.
(Reuters, 1/27/17)
2017 Jan 27, Senior Hamas leader Ismail Haniya returned to Gaza after five months abroad. Haniya had left in September to perform the Muslim hajj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia, returning via Gulf countries and Egypt, where he sought to mend frayed relations.
(AFP, 1/27/17)
2017 Jan 27, In Somalia the al-Shabab extremist group attacked a Kenyan military base early today. Kenya's military said nine soldiers were killed and that more than 70 al-Shabab extremists were killed. Al-Shabab said 51 Kenyan soldiers were killed.
(AP, 1/27/17)(SFC, 1/28/17, p.A4)
2017 Jan 27, Spanish rescuers pulled nearly 300 people from two rubber boats in waters off the Libyan coast and were looking for 100 more believed to be on another boat missing since Jan 22.
(AP, 1/27/17)
2017 Jan 27, Thai police said they have arrested a gang of wedding crashers led by a Buddhist monk who scammed couples by pretending to be officials with royal links and demanding money for their prestigious presence at nuptials.
(AP, 1/27/17)
2017 Jan 27, A Thai military court halved the sentence for Burin Intin from an original 22 years, 8 months for two offenses because he pleaded guilty to the lese majeste charge as well as to violating the Computer Crime Act by posting illegal content.
(AP, 1/27/17)
2017 Jan 27, Turkey's top diplomat threatened punitive measures against Greece, including scrapping an agreement on the return of migrants, after the Greek Supreme Court ruled against extraditing eight Turkish officers who escaped from their country by helicopter after the failed coup attempt.
(AP, 1/27/17)
2017 Jan 28, US Pres. Donald Trump elevated his chief strategist Steven Bannon to full membership in the National Security Council and downgraded the director of the national intelligence and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
(SFC, 1/30/17, p.A5)
2017 Jan 28, President Donald Trump told Japan's PM Shinzo Abe that the United States is committed to ensuring Japan's security.
(Reuters, 1/28/17)
2017 Jan 28, Pres. Trump had an hour-long discussion with Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin. The White House said it was a significant start to improving relations between the US and Russia.
(SSFC, 1/29/17, p.A7)
2017 Jan 28, Immigration lawyers sued to block Pres. Donald Trump's order halting the entry of refugees and foreign nationals from seven predominantly Muslim countries to the United States, saying numerous people have already been unlawfully detained. A Department of Homeland security spokeswoman said people holding so-called green cards, making them legal permanent US residents, are included in President Donald Trump's executive action.
(Reuters, 1/28/17)
2017 Jan 28, NY federal judge Ann Donnelly granted a stay to prevent deportations of people with valid visas detained on entry to the US following President Trump’s executive order barring refugees.
(http://tinyurl.com/hvm7wwa)(SFC, 1/30/17, p.A1)
2017 Jan 28, Bharati Mukherjee (76), Indian-American writer, died at NY Univ. Hospital. Her books included “The Tiger’s Daughter" (1972).
(SFC, 2/3/17, p.D3)
2017 Jan 28, PM Theresa May said Britain did not agree with US President Donald Trump's curbs on immigration after coming under criticism from lawmakers in her own party for not condemning his executive order when initially questioned.
(Reuters, 1/29/17)
2017 Jan 28, China marked that start of the lunar Year of the Rooster as families reunited for festivities, fireworks and food.
(AP, 1/28/17)
2017 Jan 28, France and Germany expressed mounting alarm at key decisions by US Pres. Donald Trump in his first week in office, saying they raised many issues of concern.
(AFP, 1/28/17)
2017 Jan 28, Gambian President Adama Barrow said that every aspect of his tiny west African state would need an overhaul after ex-leader Yahya Jammeh's 22-year rule, but that its dread secret police would remain.
(AFP, 1/28/17)
2017 Jan 28, Germany confirmed that high-ranking Turkish soldiers, who worked at NATO facilities in Germany but were suspended after the failed coup in Turkey in July, have requested asylum. Der Spiegel and broadcaster ARD reported that about 40, mostly high-ranking Turkish soldiers, have requested asylum.
(Reuters, 1/28/17)
2017 Jan 28, Iraqi special forces Brig. Gen. Haider Fadhil said French officials tested a chemical from Mosul this week and confirmed it was a mustard agent. It was found alongside a cache of Russian surface-to-surface missiles.
(AP, 1/28/17)
2017 Jan 28, In India the BW Maple, with a total capacity of 82,000 cubic meters of liquefied petroleum gas, was half full when it collided near Chennai with the Indian ship Dawn Kanchipuram. Days later port authorities impounded the two ships and detained their crews after the collision caused an oil spill affecting marine life and local fishing.
(Reuters, 2/3/17)
2017 Jan 28, In Madagascar at least 47 people, including 10 children and a newly-wed couple, were killed when a truck carrying a wedding party and guests veered off the road and plunged into the Mananara river.
(AFP, 1/29/17)
2017 Jan 28, Thousands of Mongolians stood in frigid weather for the second time this winter to protest the government response to smog that routinely blankets their capital.
(AP, 1/28/17)
2017 Jan 28, It was reported that heavily-armed police are guarding the streets of Podgorica, the capital of Montenegro, after a spike in gangland violence rattled the Balkan country, which is on the brink of joining NATO.
(AFP, 1/28/17)
2017 Jan 28, The Dutch government announced that it is putting 10 million euros into an int’l. fund to finance access to birth control, abortion and sex education for women in developing nations after Pres. Trump cut US funding for such services.
(SSFC, 1/29/17, p.A4)
2017 Jan 28, In Nigeria gunmen believed to be Boko Haram Islamic extremists attacked a convoy of motorists along a recently secured highway. At least 15 trucks laden with food were seized when the Islamists struck at the Korowaso forest. More than 20 people were feared dead.
(AP, 1/29/17)(AFP, 1/30/17)
2017 Jan 28, In Russia over 2,000 people rallied in St. Petersburg to protest plans by the city authorities to give the landmark St. Isaac's Cathedral to the Russian Orthodox Church amid an increasingly passionate debate over the relationship between the church and state.
(AP, 1/28/17)
2017 Jan 28, In Spain hundreds of protesters rallied in Barcelona over what they considered an out-of-control tourism boom that has damaged their ability to live and work in the northeastern Spanish city. A soaring tourism business has fueled higher prices for rent and property sales, leaving many of the city's 1.6 million residents priced out of the city center.
(AP, 1/28/17)
2017 Jan 28, Swedish photographer Lennart Nilsson (94) died. His pictures of fetuses developing in the womb illustrated a 1965 book was translated into several languages.
(AP, 1/28/17)
2017 Jan 28, Syria's army entered Ain al-Fijeh, a key water pumping station outside the capital, for the first time in four years after a deal with rebels.
(AFP, 1/28/17)
2017 Jan 28, Several Syrian Islamist factions including al Qaeda's former branch in the country said they were joining forces, as clashes between jihadists and more moderate rebels raged on in northwestern areas.
(Reuters, 1/28/17)
2017 Jan 28, In Turkey British PM Theresa May signed a $125 million defense equipment deal with Turkey and promised to push for more trade between the NATO allies, but cautioned Ankara on human rights following last year's failed coup.
(Reuters, 1/28/17)
2017 Jan 28, UAE state news agency WAM reported that the air force of the United Arab Emirates has shot down an Iranian-made drone in Yemen.
(Reuters, 1/28/17)
2017 Jan 28, UN sanctions monitors reported to the world body's Security Council that the Saudi Arabia-led military coalition has carried out attacks in Yemen that "may amount to war crimes".
(Reuters, 1/29/17)
2017 Jan 28, A military official said Yemeni government forces have advanced into the Red Sea town of Mokha but Shiite Huthi rebels are still putting up fierce resistance. At least 19 rebels were reported killed and 23 wounded over the last 24 hours.
(AFP, 1/28/17)
2017 Jan 29, President Trump and Saudi Arabia's King Salman came to an agreement to support safe zones in Syria and Yemen while strengthening efforts to fight the spread of Islamic terrorism.
(CSM, 1/30/17)
2017 Jan 29, A global backlash against US President Donald Trump's immigration curbs gathered strength as several countries including long-standing American allies criticized the measures as discriminatory and divisive.
(Reuters, 1/29/17)
2017 Jan 29, An American Airlines flight arrived in Miami from Bogota, Colombia. It was flagged for maintenance and sent to Tulsa where seven bricks of cocaine were found in the nose gear.
(SFC, 1/31/17, p.A5)
2017 Jan 29, In Bahrain an off-duty policeman was shot dead in what the interior ministry called a "terrorist act".
(Reuters, 1/29/17)
2017 Jan 29, In Canada a shooting at a Quebec City mosque killed six people. Alexandre Bissonnette and Mohamed el Khadir were soon identified as suspects. One was arrested at the scene of the attack and the second called 911 from his car, saying he was armed but wanted to cooperate with police. PM Justin Trudeau called it an act of terrorism.
(AP, 1/30/17)
2017 Jan 29, China’s Xinhua news agency reported that the national audit office found that 17.6 billion yuan ($2.56 billion) earmarked for water pollution prevention work in 2016 was not effectively used.
(AP, 1/29/17)
2017 Jan 29, In Dagestan Russian security forces killed three suspected militants during a firefight in the town of Khasavyurt.
(AP, 1/29/17)
2017 Jan 29, In Egypt Hazem Salah Abu Ismail, an Islamist former presidential hopeful, was sentenced to five years in prison for inciting his supporters to "besiege" a Cairo court in December 2012. Five other defendants received the same jail terms, while another 13 were sentenced to 10 years in prison in absentia.
(AFP, 1/29/17)
2017 Jan 29, In France more than 1.3 million voters took part in the runoff vote organized by Socialists to pick their candidate for the presidential election, a higher turnout than at the same time in last week’s first round. Benoit Hamon (49) won the party nomination with almost 59% of the vote.
(Reuters, 1/29/17)(SFC, 1/30/17, p.A2)
2017 Jan 29, In Germany the bodies of six teenagers were found dead in a garden house following a Saturday night party near the southern city of Wuerzburg. Investigators later said they all died of carbon monoxide poisoning.
(AP, 1/29/17)(AP, 1/31/17)
2017 Jan 29, Haiti held a final round of legislative contests that close a repeatedly derailed election cycle that started in 2015.
(AP, 1/29/17)
2017 Jan 29, Iran test-launched a medium-range ballistic missile that exploded after 630 miles (1,010 km).
(Reuters, 1/31/17)
2017 Jan 29, Iraqi parliamentarians said they will lobby against new travel limits to the United States by Iraqis, arguing both countries need to uphold their fight against Islamic State (IS).
(Reuters, 1/29/17)
2017 Jan 29, Twenty-two people, mostly Chinese tourists, wore life vests and formed a human chain at sea to drift more than 10 hours before they could be rescued off Malaysia's coast after their boat sank in turbulent waters. Three bodies were recovered, and six other people from the boat were missing.
(AP, 1/29/17)
2017 Jan 29, In Myanmar a gunman killed a legal adviser for the ruling National League for Democracy, shooting the lawyer in the head at close range as he walked out of the Yangon airport. The gunman was arrested after he killed Ko Ni, a prominent member of Myanmar's Muslim minority, and wounded a taxi driver who tried to stop him from fleeing. The suspect was identified as Kyi Linn (53) from Mandalay. A second suspect, Aung Win Zaw (46), was detained in Kayin State on January 30. On Feb 25 a senior security officials said the assassination was the result of a personal political grudge and not part of a bigger conspiracy by the military.
(AP, 1/29/17)(AFP, 2/4/17)(AP, 2/25/17)
2017 Jan 29, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte accused the United States of risking regional stability by building permanent arms depots in his country, and threatened to respond by scrapping a security treaty between them.
(Reuters, 1/29/17)
2017 Jan 29, Philippine military Chief of Staff Gen. Eduardo Ano said the body of the suspected Indonesian militant, known by his nom de guerre Mohisen, was recovered by troops along with three dead Filipino followers of militant leader Isnilon Hapilon, who was seriously wounded in the hilly outskirts of Butig town in Lanao del Sur province.
(AP, 1/29/17)
2017 Jan 29, In Romania thousands of people marched through Bucharest and other cities to protest a government proposal to pardon thousands of prisoners.
(AP, 1/29/17)
2017 Jan 29, In Rwanda 30 individuals, claiming to be members of the M23 Congolese militia group, were apprehended saying they sought refuge and were fleeing a Congo army offensive.
(AFP, 1/30/17)
2017 Jan 29, Syrian state-controlled TV said rebels have begun to evacuate Barada Valley as part of an agreement to surrender the capital region's primary water source to government control.
(AP, 1/29/17)
2017 Jan 29, In northern Syria a Turkish soldier was killed in clashes with Islamic State militants near al-Bab.
(Reuters, 1/29/17)
2017 Jan 29, Dmitry Markelov died from shrapnel and bullet wounds while on a clandestine mission in Syria for the Russian state. In 2019 his wife decided to go public because she and her daughter were unable to access state benefits they would be entitled to as dependents of someone killed in combat.
(Reuters, 2/15/19)
2017 Jan 29, Three Ukrainian servicemen were killed when pro-Russian rebels attacked government positions in Avdiyivka, cutting off power supplies to the eastern frontline town.
(Reuters, 1/29/17)
2017 Jan 29, Yemeni medical and military sources said the bodies of at least 90 Huthi rebels were taken to a hospital in the Red Sea city of Hodeida, which is controlled by the insurgents, while 19 dead soldiers were taken to the southern port city of Aden following clashes over the last 24 hours.
(AFP, 1/29/17)
2017 Jan 29, In central Yemen elite US forces launched a dawn raid against Al-Qaeda in Bayda province, killing at least 14 suspected jihadists in an operation in which an American soldier also died. Nearly 30 others, including women and children, were also killed.
(AFP, 1/29/17)(AP, 1/29/17)
2017 Jan 30, US President Donald Trump fired top federal government lawyer Sally Yates after she took the extraordinarily rare step of defying the White House and refused to defend new travel restrictions targeting seven Muslim-majority nations.
(Reuters, 1/30/17)
2017 Jan 30, Pres. Trump signed an executive action aimed at cutting regulations for small businesses. White House officials called the directive a "one in, two out" plan, requiring government agencies requesting a new regulation to identify two others they will cut. Trump also denied his recent immigration order was to blame for the chaos at the nation's airports over the weekend.
(AP, 1/30/17)
2017 Jan 30, Researchers said nearly one in four US children suffers from chronic bullying at school, a problem that may lead to poor academic performance and low confidence over time.
(AFP, 1/30/17)
2017 Jan 30, In Los Angeles County bicyclist Agustin Rodriguez (46) was killed in a hit and run that dragged him several hundred feet. Suspect Andrea Dorothy Chan Reyes fled the scene and the country. She was arrested in Australia in 2018 and in 2020 was returned to the US to face trial.
(https://tinyurl.com/y5jjxocp)(SSFC, 11/1/20, p.A9)
2017 Jan 30, Harold Rosen (90), a driving force in the development of modern satellite communications, died at his home in Los Angeles County.
(SSFC, 2/5/17, p.C13)
2017 Jan 30, General Motors Co (GM) and Honda Motor Co Ltd said they will jointly produce hydrogen fuel cell power systems in the United States from around 2020, to cut costs and ramp up output in the hope of increasing take-up of the zero-emission cars.
(Reuters, 1/30/17)
2017 Jan 30, Argentina changed its immigration law to make it easier to deport foreigners who commit crimes and to prohibit individuals with criminal records from entering the country.
(Reuters, 1/30/17)
2017 Jan 30, Austria's coalition government promised to ban Muslim face-covering veils and to restrict eastern European workers' access to the labor market, in a package of policies aimed at countering the rise of the far-right Freedom Party.
(Reuters, 1/30/17)
2017 Jan 30, Bosnia indicted Visnja Acimovic (44), known as 'Beba', a Bosnian Serb woman for taking part in the killing of 37 Muslim Bosniak prisoners of war in the eastern town of Vlasenica in June 1992. The bodies were found in a mass grave in 2000.
(http://tinyurl.com/zjqaeq6)(Reuters, 1/30/17)
2017 Jan 30, The head of Brazil's Supreme Court validated 77 plea bargains with officials from a construction giant targeted by a major corruption probe, a step that is likely to significantly widen investigations into top politicians and businessmen.
(AP, 1/30/17)
2017 Jan 30, In Brazil fallen tycoon Eike Batista (60) was arrested at Rio de Janeiro's airport after returning to face corruption charges. He personified Brazil's economic boom and once boasted he'd become the world's richest man.
(AFP, 1/30/17)
2017 Jan 30, Chad's foreign minister Moussa Faki Mahamat was named as the new AU Commission chairperson, beating four others to succeed South Africa's Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma.
(AFP, 1/30/17)
2017 Jan 30, In Greece a migrant was found dead in his tent on Lesbos island, the third death there in a week, raising alarm about the grim living conditions in Greek camps.
(Reuters, 1/30/17)
2017 Jan 30, Iraq's lawmakers backed a non-binding "reciprocity measure" that would bar Americans from entering Iraq in retaliation for Pres. Donald Trump's banning of Iraqis and citizens of six other majority-Muslim countries from traveling to the US.
(AP, 1/30/17)
2017 Jan 30, Former Israeli chief rabbi, Yona Metzger, was found guilty of taking bribes on multiple occasions, as well as fraud and obstructing justice. He faced three-and-a-half years in prison and a fine $1.3 million. Metzger stepped down in July 2013 after 10 years in office.
(AFP, 1/30/17)
2017 Jan 30, Italian police said they had dismantled a major people smuggling network responsible for trafficking hundreds of people across Europe.
(AFP, 1/30/17)
2017 Jan 30, Mexico’s medical oversight agency reported the seizure of almost 47,000 Chinese-made HIV testing kits in Veracruz that it said could give false negative results.
(AP, 2/1/17)
2017 Jan 30, Myanmar police arrested Myint Swe in southeastern Karen state. Police alleged he hired the suspected gunman, Kyi Lin, who was arrested right after he shot Ko Ni in the head at close range at the Yangon airport on Sunday and tried to flee.
(AP, 2/2/17)
2017 Jan 30, Norway's Lutheran Church voted in favor of new ceremonial language that will allow its pastors to conduct same-sex marriages, bringing it into line with several other mainstream Protestant denominations abroad.
(Reuters, 1/30/17)
2017 Jan 30, The Philippine police chief stopped the use of the national police force in anti-drug operations and disbanded all police anti-narcotics units after the president's brutal crackdown was used as a cover by rogue officers to kidnap and kill a South Korean man for money.
(AP, 1/30/17)
2017 Jan 30, In the Philippines Iris Mittenaere (23), a dental student from Lille city, France, won the Miss Universe crown in a pageant, saying her triumph will make the beauty contest more popular in Europe and help her efforts to put more underprivileged children in school.
(AP, 1/30/17)
2017 Jan 30, It was reported that historians in Poland have put online what they say is the most complete list of Nazi SS commanders and guards at the Auschwitz concentration camp in hopes some of them can still be brought to justice.
(AP, 1/30/17)
2017 Jan 30, Puerto Rico's governor signed a fiscal emergency law that in part aims to pay some of the US territory's nearly $70 billion public debt.
(AP, 1/30/17)
2017 Jan 30, Syria warned of safe zones for civilians that US President Donald Trump has expressed interest in creating, saying it would have to come in coordination with the Syrian government, otherwise it would be unsafe and violate the Arab nation's sovereignty.
(AP, 1/30/17)
2017 Jan 30, In Syria six long-range Russian bombers launched an air strike against Islamic State positions in Deir al-Zor province, destroying two command points and several arms storehouses.
(Reuters, 1/30/17)
2017 Jan 30, In Ukraine a sudden surge in clashes between government forces and Russian-backed rebels killed at least six people despite a tattered truce in Ukraine's war-scarred east.
(AFP, 1/30/17)
2017 Jan 30, In central Yemen a suspected US drone strike killed two al-Qaida militants in Shabwa province.
(AP, 1/30/17)
2017 Jan 30, Yemeni rebel "suicide" boats attacked a Saudi warship on patrol in the Red Sea, killing two sailors in what the Saudi-led coalition called an escalation of the nearly two-year-old war.
(AFP, 1/31/17)
2017 Jan 31, President Donald Trump nominated Neil Gorsuch (49) for a lifetime job on the US Supreme Court, picking the federal appeals court judge to restore the court's conservative majority and help shape rulings on divisive issues such as abortion, gun control, the death penalty and religious rights.
(Reuters, 2/1/17)
2017 Jan 31, US Republicans delayed indefinitely planned Senate committee votes on President Donald Trump's picks to be Health and Treasury secretaries after Democrats boycotted the session and demanded more information on the two nominees' past financial behavior.
(AP, 1/31/17)
2017 Jan 31, A US official confirmed that the United States has provided Syrian fighters battling the Islamic State group with armored vehicles for the first time. A US-backed alliance of Syrian militias said it saw signs of increased US support for their campaign against Islamic State with President Donald Trump in office, a shift that would heighten Turkish worries over Kurdish power in Syria.
(AFP, 1/31/17)(Reuters, 1/31/17)
2017 Jan 31, Peter Navarro, Pres. Trump’s senior trade advisor, declared the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), a half-negotiated trade pact between the EU and America, to be dead.
(Econ, 2/4/17, p.21)
2017 Jan 31, US federal energy regulators approved construction of Energy Transfer Partners LP's Rover natural gas pipeline from Pennsylvania to Ontario.
(Reuters, 2/3/17)
2017 Jan 31, A group of professional cheerleaders in the SF Bay Area sued the NFL demanding higher wages and fair labor practices.
(SFC, 2/2/17, p.D1)
2017 Jan 31, Missouri executed Mark Christeson (37) for his role in the murder of Susan Brouk and her two children in 1998.
(SFC, 2/1/17, p.A6)
2017 Jan 31, In Pennsylvania Daniel Dimitri (50) was killed in Philadelphia by a speeding police officer. Adam Soto was soon fired and in 2019 he was ordered to serve three to twelve months in county jail for killing Dimitri while drag racing with another officer.
(SSFC, 1/13/19, p.A8)
2017 Jan 31, Afghan forces said they were holding off a Taliban offensive in Helmand province, as reinforcements and air support arrived. Both sides reported heavy fighting as Taliban militants attacked government positions in Sangin district. In the northeast the Taliban shot and killed Amir Begum, a woman accused of adultery in the Yumgan district.
(Reuters, 1/31/17)(AP, 2/1/17)
2017 Jan 31, The African Union readmitted Morocco after a 33-year absence, deferring the issue of Western Sahara for another day.
(AFP, 1/31/17)
2017 Jan 31, An Austrian court sentenced three Afghan asylum seekers to prison over the gang-rape of a woman at a train station last April.
(Reuters, 1/31/17)
2017 Jan 31, The management of Romantik Seehotel Jaegerwirt, in the Austrian Alps, said that they've been repeatedly targeted by cybercriminals. One recent infection with ransom software — on Dec. 6 — resulted in a complete shutdown of hotel computers.
(AP, 1/31/17)
2017 Jan 31, Brazil said unemployment hit a record 12 percent between October and December, even as the economy is forecast to slowly exit deep recession.
(AFP, 1/31/17)
2017 Jan 31, Britain passed a law that posthumously pardoned thousands of men convicted under now-abolished anti-homosexuality laws, and many more still alive can now apply to have their criminal convictions wiped out.
(AP, 1/31/17)
2017 Jan 31, In Cameroon an armed group attacked a UN technical team working along the border between Nigeria and Cameroon, killing five people and wounding several near the border town of Kontcha.
(Reuters, 2/1/17)
2017 Jan 31, Colombian FARC rebels gathered in demobilization zones to start a historic disarmament process to end Latin America's last major armed conflict.
(AFP, 1/31/17)
2017 Jan 31, The Congolese army said armed fighters belonging to the former M23 rebel group had captured four crew members of a military helicopter which crashed in eastern Congo DRC last week, and that three died after being tortured.
(Reuters, 1/31/17)
2017 Jan 31, Czech Foreign Minister Lubomir Zaoralek said hackers have breached dozens of email accounts at the Foreign Ministry in an attack resembling one against the US Democratic Party that the former Obama administration blamed on Russia.
(Reuters, 1/31/17)
2017 Jan 31, The Islamic State group in Egypt claimed that its fighters killed and wounded 20 Egyptian soldiers in four days of clashes in northern Sinai.
(AP, 1/31/17)
2017 Jan 31, The Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies (CIHRS), a non-government organization, published a 95-page report saying Law 10 of 1914, or the Assembly Law was repealed by parliament in 1928.
(Reuters, 2/5/17)
2017 Jan 31, Germany began sending tanks and other equipment to Lithuania as part of a NATO mission to beef up the defense of eastern Europe and send a signal of resolve to Russia, which has denounced the build-up as an act of aggression.
(Reuters, 1/31/17)
2017 Jan 31, Iran said it would never use its ballistic missiles to attack another country and defended its missile tests, saying they are neither part of a nuclear accord with world powers nor a UN Security Council resolution endorsing the pact.
(Reuters, 1/31/17)
2017 Jan 31, Israeli authorities said that nine Venezuelan Jewish converts will be allowed to move to Israel in light of the humanitarian crisis in Venezuela, reversing an earlier decision to keep them out.
(AP, 1/31/17)
2017 Jan 31, Italian police arrested three citizens on suspicion of smuggling helicopters and surface-to-air missiles into Libya and Iran between 2011 and 2015 in violation of international embargoes.
(Reuters, 1/31/17)
2017 Jan 31, Kenya extradited Baktash and Ibrahim Akasha to the US. They had been arrested by Kenyan police over two years ago after allegedly handing over 99kg of heroin and 1kg of methamphetamine to people working for America’s Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA).
(Econ, 2/11/17, p.45)
2017 Jan 31, Pakistani supporters of Islamist leader Hafiz Saeed staged small protests and condemned the United States, after police detained the accused architect of an attack on the Indian city of Mumbai that killed 166 people in 2008.
(Reuters, 1/31/17)
2017 Jan 31, The Philippine Supreme Court prohibited a group of police officers from entering a slum community to prevent them from threatening villagers who have accused them of ruthlessly killing four residents in an anti-drug raid.
(AP, 1/31/17)
2017 Jan 31, Poland's government-affiliated history institute said it had new evidence that Lech Walesa, who led protests and strikes that shook communist rule in the 1980s, had been a paid informant for the secret police in the 1970s.
(Reuters, 1/31/17)
2017 Jan 31, Portugal's Supreme Court ruled that missing British girl Madeleine McCann's parents can't sue for libel a former detective Goncalo Amaral, who published a book, “The Truth of the Lie" (2008), alleging they were involved in their daughter's disappearance in May 2007.
(AP, 1/31/17)
2017 Jan 31, Romania’s government passed an emergency decree that in effect decriminalized official misconduct resulting in financial damage of less than $200,000. Within an hour more than 10,000 protesters were on the streets. The decree was rescinded on Feb 5.
(Econ, 2/11/17, p.39)
2017 Jan 31, Russia sources said Sergei Mikhailov and Dmitry Dokuchaev, who worked for the cyber wing of Russia's FSB domestic intelligence service until their arrests in December, are accused of cooperating with the CIA. Ruslan Stoyanov, head of the investigation unit at Moscow-based cybersecurity giant Kaspersky, was also reported detained.
(AP, 1/31/17)(AFP, 2/1/17)
2017 Jan 31, In Sierra Leone human rights defender Abdul Fatoma appeared on a radio show in which he challenged the government and the anti-corruption commission to do more to make authorities accountable, in a system that he says answers only to itself. He was later arrested, bailed without charge, and summoned twice to parliament to answer questions, yet denied an audience when he showed up.
(AFP, 3/7/17)
2017 Jan 31, Slovenia’s national Statistics Bureau said that the number of overnight stays by American tourists has jumped by 10 percent in 2016 when compared to 2015. The tourism boom was partly because it is the native country of US first lady Melania Trump.
(AP, 1/31/17)
2017 Jan 31, In South Sudan fresh clashes broke out around Malakal, the latest turn in the struggle for the capital of the oil-producing Upper Nile region.
(Reuters, 1/31/17)
2017 Jan 31, Switzerland said it would lift its 40-year ban on gay and bisexual men giving blood but will still prohibit donations from those who have had sex in the last year.
(AFP, 1/31/17)
2017 Jan 31, Turkey arrested two MPs from the main pro-Kurdish party, including its chief spokesman, the latest move in a crackdown on the group ahead of a vote on changing the constitution.
(AFP, 1/31/17)
2017 Jan 31, Ukrainian forces and Russian-backed rebels were locked in fighting for a third straight day at a flashpoint town that left thousands shivering without power and sparked renewed EU concern about security in its backyard.
(AFP, 1/31/17)
2017 Jan 31, The UN children's agency (UNICEF) launched an appeal for $3.3 billion to help 48 million children caught up in crises worldwide amid fears of a funding cut from top donor the United States.
(AFP, 1/31/17)
2017 Jan, Pres. Donald Trump created the Victim Of Immigration Crime Engagement Office, known by its acronym VOICE, by executive order during his first week in office.
(AP, 6/11/21)
2017 Jan, The US approved marabu, an artisanal charcoal made from the marabu weed, as the first legal import from Cuba in more than 50 years.
(Econ 6/3/17, p.30)
2017 Jan, According to the Oxfam charity the world’s eight richest men owned as much wealth ($426 billion) as half the world’s population combined ($409 billion).
(Econ, 1/21/17, p.63)
2017 Jan, News broke that Peter Thiel, an Internet billionaire and advisor to Pres. Donald Trump, had a New Zealand citizenship and a $10m-lakeside estate there.
(Econ, 3/11/17, p.71)
2017 Jan, Bahrain held some 2,600 political prisoners, many of them children.
(Econ, 1/21/17, p.39)
2017 Jan, Bangladesh revived a much-criticized 2015 plan to move new and old refugees from Myanmar to the island of Thengar Char - which floods at high tide - surprising aid groups who were not consulted and consider the relocation impracticable.
(Reuters, 2/1/17)
2017 Jan, In Brazil Joao Doria, the new mayor of Sao Paulo, helped paint over 70 panels of street art along Avenida 23 de Maio dating back to 2015. The move sparked a protest and the mayor promised a museum of street art to showcase authorized, privately funded murals by artists chosen by an independent committee.
(SFC, 3/25/17, p.A4)
2017 Jan, China’s government admitted that Liaoning province had faked its fiscal data from 2011 to 2014. About half of the province’s legislators have been removed for obtaining their positions through fraud.
(Econ, 1/28/17, p.63)
2017 Jan, China expelled 32 South Korean Christian missionaries this month. Some 1000 South Korean missionaries worked in China.
(AP, 2/11/17)
2017 Jan, China’s city of Shenzhen and Hong Kong agreed to develop the Lok Ma Chau Loop as an innovation and technology park.
(Econ, 4/8/17, SR p.12)
2017 Jan, In Haiti overcrowding, malnutrition and infectious diseases that flourish in jammed quarters have led to an upsurge of inmate deaths, including 21 at the Port-au-Prince penitentiary just this month.
(AP, 2/20/17)
2017 Jan, In Jordan retired Maj. Gen. Mohammed Otoom (63) was detained for protesting on social media against the government’s planned price hikes and its purported failure to go after corrupt officials.
(SFC, 2/2/17, p.A3)
2017 Jan, In Kenya Aggrey Idri Ezibon, a member of a South Sudanese opposition group, and Dong Samuel Luak, a human rights lawyer disappeared in Nairobi. In 2019 a report by the UN Security Council panel of experts said multiple credible sources suggested that the two men were likely killed by South Sudanese National Security Service (NSS) officers on Jan. 30, 2017, on a farm owned by President Salva Kiir.
(Reuters, 5/1/19)
2017 Jan, Nigeria seized OPL 245 oil block, labelling it the proceeds of a crime. In 2011 Eni and Shell had paid $1.3 billion for the block. Prosecutors alleged that over $500 million ended up in front companies for former Pres. Goodluck Jonathan.
(Econ, 3/4/17, p.54)
2017 Jan, In South Africa poachers cut through fences at an animal park and decapitated and chopped the paws off three male lions, possibly for use in traditional healing rituals.
(AP, 6/4/17)
2017 Jan – 2017 Feb, In China some 140 people died of avian influenza. Officials later said a tiny genetic change in the H7N9 strain has allowed the virus to more easily infect humans.
(SSFC, 3/26/17, p.C14)
2017 Feb 1, The Trump administration condemned Iran for its recent test of a ballistic missile saying it was putting Tehran “on notice" and threatening reprisals.
(SFC, 2/2/17, p.A3)
2017 Feb 1, President Donald Trump warned in a phone call with his Mexican counterpart that he was ready to send US troops to stop "bad hombres down there" unless the Mexican military does more to control them.
(AP, 2/2/17)
2017 Feb 1, The US Army Corp of Engineers said it had taken initial steps to review requests to approve the final permit to finish the controversial Dakota Access pipeline, which has been the focus of protests for months.
(Reuters, 2/1/17)
2017 Feb 1, San Francisco police announced a suspension of collaboration with FBI counterterrorism efforts. The city’s two-officer Joint Terrorism Task Force had been established in 2007.
(SFC, 2/2/17, p.A12)
2017 Feb 1, In Colorado Joshua Cummings (37) walked up to Denver transit Officer Scott Von Lanken (56) and shot him from behind in the neck. Von Lanken was killed and Cummings was taken into custody.
(SFC, 2/2/17, p.A4)
2017 Feb 1, Texas Rep. Gov. Greg Abbott blocked funding for the first time over sanctuary cities after Austin’s Sheriff Sally Hernandez said she would stop honoring all immigration holds in her jails following Pres. Trump’s inauguration.
(SFC, 2/2/17, p.A4)
2017 Feb 1, It was reported that Volkswagen has agreed to pay at least $1.22 billion to fix or buy back nearly 80,000 polluting diesel cars in the United States, the latest move in its attempt to draw a line under its diesel emissions scandal.
(Reuters, 2/1/17)
2017 Feb 1, In southern Afghanistan an insurgent rocket attack killed a civilian in Lashkar Gah, Helmand province. In eastern Khost province, five policemen and three small children were wounded when a police vehicle hit a remotely detonated roadside bomb. In eastern Nangarhar province six civilians and a border police officer were wounded when a sticky bomb attached to a police vehicle went off in the provincial capital of Jalalabad.
(AP, 2/1/17)
2017 Feb 1, British MPs voted 498 to 114 to honor the Brexit referendum and invoke Article 50. The Scottish National Party and Liberal Democrats opposed the bill.
(Econ, 2/4/17, p.49)
2017 Feb 1, In Egypt the price of two key staples, sugar and cooking oil, were modestly increased for ration card holders as TV talk shows and newspapers went abuzz after reports emerged that the country's parliament's speaker and his two deputies are using state funds to buy cars worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
(AP, 2/1/17)
2017 Feb 1, The EU and Mexico said they would accelerate free trade talks amid a wave of protectionist threats by US President Donald Trump.
(AFP, 2/1/17)
2017 Feb 1, Embattled French presidential candidate Francois Fillon said he would run in France's upcoming election despite fake job allegations targeting his wife that have put his campaign on the rocks.
(Reuters, 2/1/17)
2017 Feb 1, A German court ordered German-Turkish author Akif Pirincci to pay a fine of 11,700 euros ($12,490) for incitement over a speech he gave at an anti-Islam rally. Pirincci was a speaker at a rally staged in Dresden in October 2015 by a group called the Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West, or PEGIDA. He described asylum-seekers as "invaders" and lamented that the Nazi's concentration camps had been closed.
(AP, 2/7/17)
2017 Feb 1, Germany's government approved the use of ankle bracelets to monitor extremists considered potentially dangerous as it moves to get tough on suspected jihadists after the Berlin truck attack.
(AFP, 2/1/17)
2017 Feb 1, Germany arrested Tunisian asylum-seeker Haikel S. (36) on suspicion of planning an Islamist attack. He was also wanted in his homeland over a deadly 2015 assault on a Tunis museum favored by Western tourists.
(Reuters, 2/1/17)
2017 Feb 1, Guyana said it has secured nearly $80 million from Britain to pave part of a 350-mile (560-km) jungle highway that is expected to increase trade with Brazil.
(AP, 2/1/17)
2017 Feb 1, Hungary’s PM Viktor Orban granted 2.4 billion forints ($9 million) in the budget to the renovating and building of Russian Orthodox churches, the day before he received Russia’s Pres. Putin in Budapest.
(Reuters, 9/29/17)
2017 Feb 1, In northern India a six-story tannery building under construction collapsed, killing at least five workers and possibly trapping up to 50 others in Kanpur city, Uttar Pradesh state.
(AP, 2/1/17)
2017 Feb 1, In Israel rightist protesters scuffled with Israeli police carrying out a court order to evict settlers from the illegal Amona outpost in the occupied West Bank, hours after the government announced more construction in larger settlements.
(Reuters, 2/1/17)
2017 Feb 1, Italy launched a new fund to help African countries control their borders, in the latest of a slew of measures pushed by the European Union to stop migrants reaching Europe.
(Reuters, 2/1/17)
2017 Feb 1, Libyan sources said around 70 soldiers from the forces of commander Khalifa Haftar have been sent to Russia for treatment, in one of the first overt signs of cooperation between Moscow and one of Libya's armed factions.
(Reuters, 2/1/17)
2017 Feb 1, In Mexico the body of Juan Ontiveros, a human rights activist and member of the Tarahumara indigenous group, was found in Guadalupe y Calvo. His brother escaped the attack and later told authorities it arose from a conflict between members of two families.
(AP, 2/3/17)
2017 Feb 1, In the Netherlands a major computer malfunction crippled traffic at Amsterdam's Schiphol airport for hours, causing delays or cancellations of more than 100 flights at one of Europe's largest transportation hubs. The outage was caused by faulty hardware.
(Reuters, 2/1/17)
2017 Feb 1, In the Philippines Communist rebels said they were ending a six-month cease-fire effective Feb 10 accusing the armed forces of encroaching on rebel territory and reneging on a promise to release jailed comrades. According to the army three unarmed soldiers were waylaid and murdered by Communist guerrillas.
(SFC, 2/2/17, p.A2)(Econ, 2/11/17, p.31)
2017 Feb 1, Romania’s top judicial watchdog announced a court challenge on to a government decree decriminalizing some graft offences in what critics say is the biggest retreat on reforms since the country joined the European Union a decade ago.
(Reuters, 2/1/17)
2017 Feb 1, Serbia introduced a lockdown for migrants in their refugee center outside Belgrade after an alleged attack against a woman walking with her children.
(AP, 2/1/17)
2017 Feb 1, Slovakia’s PM Robert Fico Slovakia introduced a new police unit to fight terrorism and far-right extremism.
(AP, 2/1/17)
2017 Feb 1, A South African government investigation revealed that at least 94 mentally ill patients died after authorities moved them last year from hospital to unlicensed health facilities that were compared to "concentration camps".
(AFP, 2/1/17)
2017 Feb 1, In South Africa workers and managers in the chicken industry marched to the office of the EU delegation in Pretoria, alleging their livelihoods are in jeopardy because of allegedly illegal dumping of EU chicken meat in the local market.
(AP, 2/1/17)
2017 Feb 1, In Syria air strikes hit Red Crescent offices in the northwestern city of Idlib after midnight, injuring several staff and causing extensive damage.
(Reuters, 2/1/17)
2017 Feb 1, Ukraine government forces and Russian-backed separatists exchanged mortar and rocket fire for a 4th day around the flashpoint eastern town of Avdiivka that sits just north of the rebels' de facto capital Donetsk. The Ukrainian military said three of its soldiers had died overnight while the rebels said as many civilians had been killed. The bodies of seven soldiers killed in the fighting were brought to Kiev.
(AFP, 2/1/17)(Econ, 2/4/17, p.44)
2017 Feb 1, Zimbabwe started levying a 15 percent value-added tax on basic foodstuffs, dealing a further blow to cash-strapped consumers already battling to survive in an ailing economy.
(AFP, 2/1/17)
2017 Feb 1, Zimbabwean pastor Evan Mawarire was arrested at Harare airport as he returned to the country after several months abroad. He had led a surge of protests last year against President Robert Mugabe's authoritarian government.
(AFP, 2/1/17)
2017 Feb 2, US ties with ally Australia were strained over a reported acrimonious phone call between their two leaders. Australia's PM Malcolm Turnbull insisted that a deal struck with the Obama administration that would allow mostly Muslim refugees rejected by Australia to be resettled in the United States was still on, despite President Donald Trump dubbing the agreement "dumb" and vowing to review it.
(Reuters, 2/2/17)(AP, 2/2/17)
2017 Feb 2, The US Treasury Department said it will allow companies to do some transactions with Russia's Security Service (FSB), despite cyber-sanctions put in place by former President Barack Obama.
(Reuters, 2/2/17)
2017 Feb 2, The US military said 11 civilians were killed in four separate air strikes by the US-led coalition fighting Islamic State in Iraq and Syria between Oct. 25 and Dec. 9.
(Reuters, 2/2/17)
2017 Feb 2, Delaware authorities ended a nearly 24-hour hostage standoff at the 2,500-prisoner James T. Vaughn Correctional Center after guard, Sgt. Steven Floyd (47), was killed. Floyd was one of four staff members taken hostage. One inmate said they were demanding better education and rehabilitation programs.
(SFC, 2/3/17, p.A6)
2017 Feb 2, In Pennsylvania the Punxsutawney Phil groundhog saw his shadow and predicted six more weeks of winter.
(SFC, 2/3/17, p.A6)
2017 Feb 2, Belarus said it suspected Russia was trying to restore a formal border zone between the two countries, a move it said flouted agreements on freedom of movement and trade and raised questions about Moscow's real intent.
(Reuters, 2/2/17)
2017 Feb 2, Bolivian President Evo Morales inaugurated the $7 million Museum of the Democratic and Cultural Revolution in his native village of Orinoca.
(AP, 2/3/17)
2017 Feb 2, Brazil's Supreme Court named Justice Edson Fachin to oversee cases against politicians caught in a giant corruption probe after the previous judicial pointman Teori Zavascki was killed in an air crash.
(AFP, 2/2/17)
2017 Feb 2, British PM Theresa May's government published its blueprint for Brexit after winning a first parliamentary vote on a bill that would empower her to start pulling Britain out of the EU.
(AFP, 2/2/17)
2017 Feb 2, In eastern China 9 people were buried in the collapse of a group of homes. Four homes, each between four and five stories tall, tumbled in the city of Wenzhou, Zhejiang province.
(AP, 2/2/17)
2017 Feb 2, Congo DRC’s opposition leader Etienne Tshisekedi (84) died in Brussels, where he had been flown for medical treatment January 24 just as talks were scheduled to end the nation's months-long political crisis.
(AFP, 2/2/17)
2017 Feb 2, American Airlines formally opened an office in Havana, and an executive said the company will move ahead with its plans for Cuba despite uncertainty over what President Donald Trump's administration will bring.
(AP, 2/2/17)
2017 Feb 2, European Union lawmakers sealed an agreement to allow Georgian citizens into Europe's passport-free area without visas for short stays.
(AP, 2/2/17)
2017 Feb 2, The European Court of Human Rights ruled that Russia violated the rights of opposition politician and anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny by breaking up demonstrations and detaining him on seven occasions between 2012 and 2014.
(Reuters, 2/2/17)
2017 Feb 2, In France an identity check degenerated in the Paris suburb of Aulnay-sous-Bois. A man (22) was severely injured after allegedly being sodomized with a police baton. One police officer was soon charged with rape and three others with assault.
(AP, 2/6/17)
2017 Feb 2, Guyana sentenced to death two men for a 2008 massacre in which nine civilians and three police officers were killed. Prosecutors said Dennis Williams and Royden Williams were part of a group that went to the jungle community of Bartica to steal from gold miners and wound up killing the 12 people.
(AP, 2/3/17)
2017 Feb 2, In northeastern India hundreds of protesters marched in the Nagaland state capital after setting ablaze half a dozen government buildings to protest a court decision. The protesters opposed a court ruling that would reserve 33 percent of seats for women in local municipal elections.
(AP, 2/2/17)
2017 Feb 2, Israeli police forced hardline Jewish settlers from the barricaded synagogue of the wildcat Amona outpost in the occupied West Bank, completing an emotive battle to evict residents.
(AFP, 2/2/17)
2017 Feb 2, Residents in northern Kenya said armed cattle herders have been flooding onto farms and wildlife conservancies in their drought-ravaged area, leading to violence in which at least 11 people have been killed and a tourist lodge torched.
(Reuters, 2/2/17)
2017 Feb 2, Nigeria’s government said it will soon pay all the overdue cash stipends it owes former militants who signed up for an amnesty in 2009 in the Niger Delta oil hub.
(Reuters, 2/2/17)
2017 Feb 2, Warsaw's mayor harshly denounced a government plan to enlarge the Polish capital to incorporate 32 neighboring municipalities, describing it as the type of power grab one expects in an authoritarian state like Belarus or Russia.
(AP, 2/2/17)
2017 Feb 2, Romania's PM Sorin Grindeanu insisted that the government will press ahead with decrees decriminalizing certain corruption offences, defying the country's biggest protests since the end of communism.
(AFP, 2/2/17)
2017 Feb 2, Kremlin critic Vladimir Kara-Murza (35) was hospitalized after collapsing in Moscow. On Feb 7 his wife said he suffered from "acute poisoning" by an unknown substance, two years after a suspected poisoning nearly killed him.
(AFP, 2/7/17)
2017 Feb 2, In Sudan Mudawi Ibrahim Adam (58), a prominent human rights activist and engineering professor at the University of Khartoum, started an indefinite hunger strike. He was arrested in December by security forces as part of a crackdown on opposition leaders and activists.
(AFP, 2/11/17)
2017 Feb 2, Syria's military said it had captured a string of towns and part of a key highway from the Islamic State group in the northern province of Aleppo.
(AFP, 2/2/17)
2017 Feb 2, Thai media organizations protested a bill that would require journalists to be licensed and would establish a council that can penalize news outlets for violating professional standards. The bill was submitted today to a military-appointed body tasked with reforming the Thai government.
(AP, 2/2/17)
2017 Feb 2, Wildlife anti-trafficking organization Freeland said that almost three tons of scales from endangered African pangolins, hidden in sacks, were seized last December at Bangkok's main airport. The haul was worth more than $1 million dollars on the illegal market, and represented as many as 6,000 dead animals. The scales were sent from Kinshasa in Congo, via Turkey with a final destination listed as Vientiane, Laos.
(AP, 2/2/17)
2017 Feb 2, In Turkey German Chancellor Angela Merkel urged Turkey to uphold democracy as the country heads toward a critical referendum on boosting the powers of the presidency, while Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan took offense at her reference to "Islamist terror," saying the words cannot be placed together.
(AP, 2/2/17)
2017 Feb 2, Ukraine's Pres. Petro Poroshenko appealed for more global pressure against Russia on as Moscow-backed rebels and government forces clashed around a frontline town for a fifth day in a surge of fighting that has claimed a reported 21 lives.
(AFP, 2/2/17)
2017 Feb 2, The United Nations' highest court ruled that it has the authority to adjudicate in a maritime boundary dispute between Kenya and Somalia over stretches of the Indian Ocean potentially rich in oil and gas.
(Reuters, 2/2/17)
2017 Feb 2, In southern Yemen suspected Al-Qaeda militants killed six policemen and their jihadist group was targeted in a raid likely carried out by the US Navy.
(AFP, 2/2/17)
2017 Feb 3, US stock market shares climbed as Pres. Donald Trump signed an executive order asking the Treasury to conduct a 120-day review of America’s financial regulations. Trump’s eighth executive order listed seven core principles for regulating America’s financial system.
(Econ, 2/11/17, p.11)(Econ, 2/11/17, p.57)
2017 Feb 3, US President Donald Trump's defense secretary warned North Korea of an "effective and overwhelming" response if it chose to use nuclear weapons, as he reassured South Korea of steadfast US support.
(Reuters, 2/3/17)
2017 Feb 3, Seattle-based US District Judge James Robart issued a court ruling that blocked Pres. Donald Trump’s ban on travelers from seven Muslim countries.
(AFP, 2/4/17)
2017 Feb 3, The United States said it has moved a Navy destroyer to off the coast of Yemen to protect waterways from Houthi militia aligned with Iran, amid heightened tension between Washington and Tehran.
(Reuters, 2/3/17)
2017 Feb 3, The US Treasury sanctioned 13 individuals and 12 entities under its Iran sanctions authority, days after the White House put Tehran "on notice" over a ballistic missile test and other activities. Trump administration officials said sanctions were only the initial steps in response to Iranian provocative behavior.
(Reuters, 2/3/17)(SFC, 2/4/17, p.A6)
2017 Feb 3, In northern Afghanistan eight police officers, all members of the same family, were killed after a colleague working with the Taliban drugged and shot them at a checkpoint in Faryab province.
(AFP, 2/3/17)
2017 Feb 3, Veteran Angolan President Jose Eduardo dos Santos announced he will not run in August elections, signaling the end to 37 years in power and naming his defense minister as the candidate to succeed him.
(AFP, 2/3/17)
2017 Feb 3, Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko said a Russian move to create border zones near his country's frontier looked like a political attack and that Moscow had threatened to halve oil supplies to Minsk.
(Reuters, 2/3/17)
2017 Feb 3, China’s central bank raised a series of short-term interest rates.
(Econ, 2/11/17, p.63)
2017 Feb 3, Police in southwestern Democratic Republic of Congo killed at least eight members of Bundu dia Kongo (BDK), a separatist religious sect, escalating tensions in a normally peaceful part of a conflict-ravaged country.
(Reuters, 2/3/17)
2017 Feb 3, Ethiopian officials said nine Yemenis deported from the United States in the wake of US President Donald Trump's travel ban were flown to Ethiopia, then taken to neighboring Djibouti.
(Reuters, 2/3/17)
2017 Feb 3, EU leaders met in Malta to discuss how to slow migration and recommit to their union following Britain’s decision to leave and a perceived threat to the bloc from US Pres. Donald Trump.
(SFC, 2/4/17, p.A3)
2017 Feb 3, A French soldier shot and wounded a man armed with a machete and carrying two bags on his back as he tried to enter the Paris Louvre museum in what the government said appeared to have been a terrorist attack. The attacker was shot four times after slightly injuring a soldier patrolling the nearby underground mall. An Egyptian Interior Ministry official confirmed the next day that the attacker is Egyptian-born Abdullah Reda Refaie al-Hamahmy (28).
(Reuters, 2/3/17)(AP, 2/4/17)
2017 Feb 3, Iran said it had barred a US wrestling team from the Freestyle World Cup competition in retaliation for an executive order by President Donald Trump banning visas for Iranians.
(Reuters, 2/3/17)
2017 Feb 3, Malaysia’s PM Najib Razak dispatched a ship with thousands of tons of food and emergency supplies for Myanmar's Rohingya Muslims, but it was unclear where the bulk of the aid would be delivered.
(Reuters, 2/3/17)
2017 Feb 3, Mexico began a 90-day consultation on what its NAFTA negotiating position should be.
(Econ, 2/11/17, p.27)
2017 Feb 3, Mexico's health ministry confirmed the first case of a Zika-related severe birth defect known as microcephaly.
(AP, 2/4/17)
2017 Feb 3, The Norwegian security service said nine personal civil-servant email accounts have been targeted by hackers in "spear-phishing" attacks believed to be associated with Russian intelligence. No classified information was taken.
(AP, 2/3/17)
2017 Feb 3, Pakistani PM Nawaz Sharif inaugurated one of the first highway sections of his government's planned $11.5 billion spending plan on roads intended to expand trade and speed up economic growth.
(Reuters, 2/3/17)
2017 Feb 3, A lawyer said Pakistan has denied identity cards to the family of Shakeel Afridi, the jailed doctor believed to have helped the CIA hunt down Osama bin Laden in 2011, blocking college enrolment for his children.
(Reuters, 2/3/17)
2017 Feb 3, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte said that he has scrapped a six-month cease-fire with communist rebels and asked several rebel leaders who were freed for the negotiations to return to prison or face arrests abroad.
(AP, 2/4/17)(SFC, 2/4/17, p.A2)
2017 Feb 3, In the Philippines environment secretary Gina Lopez ordered 23 of the country’s 41 mines to close permanently and another five to suspend operations indefinitely for alleged environmental violations.
(Econ, 2/25/17, p.33)
2017 Feb 3, Polish police raided the Monitoring Center on Racist and Xenophobic Behavior and the private homes of some of its board members, seizing computers. the group has exposed ties between local officials, prosecutors and right-wing groups in Bialystok.
(AP, 2/3/17)
2017 Feb 3, Rwanda's government approved the dismissal of 200 police officers implicated in corruption.
(AP, 2/6/17)
2017 Feb 3, Serbia blamed Kosovo for the collapse of European Union-mediated talks as tensions escalated in the Balkans amid reports of troop movements and war rhetoric.
(AP, 2/3/17)
2017 Feb 3, South Africa's department of agriculture said that scientific tests have confirmed the presence of the invasive fall armyworm in the country's maize belt.
(Reuters, 2/3/17)
2017 Feb 3, In northwestern Syria unidentified air strikes killed at least 12 Islamist rebel fighters in Idlib province.
(Reuters, 2/3/17)
2017 Feb 3, Clashes between Ukrainian forces and Moscow-backed rebels left two more dead in the flashpoint town of Avdiivka and five others elsewhere in bloodshed that has prompted the US to condemn Russia's "aggressive" stance.
(AFP, 2/3/17)
2017 Feb 3, The United Nations removed the name of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a former Afghan warlord, from its Islamic State group and al-Qaida sanctions list.
(AP, 2/4/17)
2017 Feb 3, The UN human rights office said Myanmar's security forces have committed mass killings and gang rapes of Rohingya Muslims and burned their villages since October in a campaign that probably amounts to crimes against humanity and possibly "ethnic cleansing".
(Reuters, 2/3/17)
2017 Feb 3, Zimbabwean protest leader Evan Mawarire was remanded in custody by a court in Harare on Friday after police arrested him on charges of subverting the government and inciting public violence.
(AFP, 2/3/17)
2017 Feb 4, President Donald Trump said he respects Vladimir Putin, and when an interviewer called the Russian leader "a killer," Trump said the United States has many of them.
(AP, 2/5/17)
2017 Feb 4, US authorities suspended President Donald Trump's controversial ban on travelers from seven Muslim countries, following a court ruling that blocked its enforcement.
(AFP, 2/4/17)
2017 Feb 4, It was reported that Louis Marinelli, leader of the “Yes California" campaign to make California its own country, has partnered and received financial support from the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia, a Kremlin-supported political group. Marinelli was reported to be living and teaching in Russia.
(SFC, 2/4/17, p.A1)
2017 Feb 4, Damien Chazelle (32) won the top honor at the Directors Guild of America awards for his work on “La La Land."
(SFC, 2/6/17, p.A4)
2017 Feb 4, Penn State student Timothy Piazza (19) died two days after falling several times with toxic levels of alcohol following a Feb 2 Beta Theta Pi fraternity pledge ceremony. Friends failed to summon immediate help. 18 fraternity members faced criminal charges. On Sep 1, 2017, a judge threw out involuntary manslaughter charges and felony assault counts and ordered 12 fraternity members to stand trial on lesser counts. Piazza had been given at least 18 drinks in less than 90 minutes. In 2019 three former Penn. State fraternity members were issued minimum jail sentences of one to three months.
(SFC, 5/6/17, p.A6)(SFC, 9/2/17, p.A9)(SFC, 11/14/17, p.A7)(SFC, 4/4/19, p.A6)
2017 Feb 4, In northern Albania a hydrogen gas explosion at chromium mine in Bulqiza killed three Chinese miners.
(AP, 2/10/17)
2017 Feb 4, In Brazil police in Espirito Santo state went on strike. During the ten day strike 143 people were murdered as all hell broke out in Vitoria, the state capital.
(Econ, 2/25/17, p.30)
2017 Feb 4, In Britain several thousand people demonstrated outside the US embassy in London against President Donald Trump and his temporary ban on refugees and nationals from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States. Thousands marched in London demanding that the British government withdraw its invitation to Trump for a state visit.
(Reuters, 2/4/17)(SSFC, 2/5/17, p.A4)
2017 Feb 4, China issued its first strategic plan for territory development and preservation, outlining the protection of arable land reserves and islands. The plan demanded the retention of 1.825 billion mu of arable land by 2030, an area equivalent to about the size of South Africa.
(Reuters, 2/4/17)
2017 Feb 4, France's far-right National Front detailed 144 proposals for party leader Marine Le Pen's election bid, including leaving the euro and a vote on EU membership.
(Reuters, 2/4/17)
2017 Feb 4, German weekly magazine Der Spiegel sparked controversy at home and abroad with a front cover illustration of US President Donald Trump beheading the Statue of Liberty.
(Reuters, 2/4/17)
2017 Feb 4, The Guyanese government said it has lifted a 19-month ban on scrap metal exports while it drafts new operating regulations after complaints about buyers raiding everything from tombs to security grill work and manhole covers. A black market in scrap metal emerged since the trade was banned in June 2015.
(AP, 2/4/17)
2017 Feb 4, In Italy dozens of the illegal fliers appeared mysteriously around Rome picturing a stern-looking Pope Francis, a list of accusations against him, and the words "Where's your mercy?".
(AFP, 2/6/17)
2017 Feb 4, James Ibori, who as governor of oil-rich Delta State became one of Nigeria's richest and most powerful men, returned to the country after serving a sentence for corruption in Britain. Ibori served half his 13-year sentence after pleading guilty in 2012 to 10 counts of fraud and money-laundering.
(Reuters, 2/4/17)
2017 Feb 4, In northern Pakistan at least 13 people were killed in an avalanche that buried five homes following heavy snowfall in the town of Chitral.
(AP, 2/5/17)
2017 Feb 4, The Philippines' Catholic Church assailed President Rodrigo Duterte's war on drugs for creating a "reign of terror" among the poor, in sermons read out at services that will be repeated to congregations across the country on Feb 5.
(Reuters, 2/4/17)
2017 Feb 4, The leaders of Romania's coalition government suggested it could back down on its emergency decree to decriminalize official misconduct as thousands of citizens took to the streets in protest for the fifth consecutive day.
(AP, 2/4/17)
2017 Feb 4, Alexei Navalny, Russia's most prominent opposition figure, opened his first regional office for a presidential bid, despite an imminent court verdict that could bar him from running.
(AP, 2/4/17)
2017 Feb 4, In Syria an alliance of US-backed Kurdish-led militias started a new phase of its campaign against the Islamic State-held city of Raqqa, aiming to complete its encirclement and sever the road to militant strongholds in Deir al-Zor province.
(Reuters, 2/4/17)(SSFC, 2/5/17, p.A4)
2017 Feb 4, In Taiwan a bill banning the euthanizing animals in shelters came into effect. This followed the tragic suicide last year of Chien Chih-cheng, a vet burdened with the task of putting down animals.
(AFP, 2/5/17)
2017 Feb 4, The Turkish military said it has hit 59 Islamic State targets and killed 51 militants in northern Syria as part of its ongoing incursion.
(Reuters, 2/4/17)
2017 Feb 4, In Ukraine Lugansk People's Militia commander Oleg Anashchenko died when his automobile exploded. Militia spokesman Andrei Marochko accused Ukrainian special services of causing the explosion.
(AP, 2/4/17)
2017 Feb 4, Pope Francis named a top Vatican archbishop as his new envoy to the troubled Knights of Malta and gave him "all necessary powers" to help the religious order reform its constitutions and elect a new leader.
(AP, 2/4/17)
2017 Feb 4, Polisario Front chief Brahim Ghali said "all options are open" for Western Sahara's independence struggle and voiced hope for renewed talks with Morocco after its readmission to the African Union.
(AFP, 2/5/17)
2017 Feb 4, The leader of al-Qaida's affiliate in Yemen released an audio recording in which he describes President Donald Trump as the "White House's new fool" and said a Jan 29 US raid against the group killed 25 people, including 11 women and children.
(AP, 2/5/17)
2017 Feb 5, President Donald Trump drew fire from Republicans and Democrats alike, after he defended a softer stance on Russia, playing down political assassinations and Moscow's invasion of Ukraine.
(AFP, 2/5/17)
2017 Feb 5, The 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco denied the Justice Department's request for an immediate reinstatement of President Donald Trump's ban on accepting certain travelers and all refugees.
(AP, 2/5/17)
2017 Feb 5, In Texas Tom Brady led the New England Patriots on five straight scoring drives that equaled 31 straight points. The last touchdown wrapped up a 34-28 victory over the Atlanta Falcons in the first-ever overtime in the Super Bowl's 51-year history.
(AP, 2/6/17)
2017 Feb 5, Afghan officials said more than a 100 people have been killed in a series of avalanches triggered by days of heavy snowfall around the country, including 50 in one village, warning the death toll could rise still further.
(AFP, 2/5/17)
2017 Feb 5, The website of Austria's parliament was brought down for 20 minutes. A Turkish hackers' group, Aslan Neferler Tim (ANT), or Lion Soldiers Team, whose website says it defends the homeland, Islam, the nation and flag, without any party political links, claimed the attack.
(Reuters, 2/7/17)
2017 Feb 5, China’s state news agency Xinhua cited mayor Cai Qi as saying Beijing will intensify its battle against choking air pollution this year and aims to cut coal use by 30 percent.
(Reuters, 2/5/17)
2017 Feb 5, In eastern China a fire at the Zuxintang foot massage parlor killed 18 people and injured two others in Tiantai county, Zhejiang province.
(AP, 2/5/17)
2017 Feb 5, Egypt's top Islamic authority rejected the president's suggestion for legislation that would invalidate the practice of men verbally divorcing their wives.
(AP, 2/5/17)
2017 Feb 5, Iran lifted a ban on US wrestlers, allowing them to take part in the Freestyle World Cup later this month in the Iranian city of Kermanshah. Media said the ban was lifted after the "discriminative restrictions" on Iranian nationals traveling to the US was suspended by a US federal judge.
(AP, 2/5/17)
2017 Feb 5, Israel's Supreme Court gave a small group of settlers in the occupied West Bank a brief respite from a demolition order, giving them until March 5 to leave.
(AFP, 2/5/17)
2017 Feb 5, Italy's premier emphasized the significance of NATO and outlined a new agreement between Italy and Libya to fight human trafficking during a phone call with U.S. President Donald Trump.
(AP, 2/5/17)
2017 Feb 5, In Japan about 200 protesters marched through the streets of Tokyo's Shinjuku district carrying banners to protest a hotel chain under fire for books its president wrote denying the Nanjing Massacre in wartime China ever happened. APA group founder and president, Toshio Motoya, has placed books of his revisionist views on history in every room of the company's 400-plus APA Hotels.
(Reuters, 2/5/17)
2017 Feb 5, A 50-meter concrete wall in the northern Kosovo city of Mitrovica was pulled down following an agreement between the government and the country's ethnic Serb minority. The Serbs, who do not recognize Kosovo as a state, started constructing the wall in December, saying it was to protect against a landslip.
(AP, 2/5/17)(Reuters, 2/5/17)
2017 Feb 5, Morocco’s Deputy Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita said his country will "never recognize" Western Sahara's independence despite rejoining the African Union after a decades-long dispute over the territory.
(AFP, 2/5/17)
2017 Feb 5, Myanmar police arrested a Buddhist monk in northern Rakhine state after finding 400,000 pills of methamphetamine in his car. A search of his monastery turned up 4.2 million pills along with a grenade and ammunition.
(SFC, 2/8/17, p.A2)
2017 Feb 5, The Philippine government derided Catholic bishops as "out of touch" after they used weekend sermons to attack a war on drugs they said had created a "reign of terror" for the poor.
(Reuters, 2/5/17)
2017 Feb 5, Romania's government repealed an emergency decree that decriminalizes some official misconduct following massive demonstrations and condemnation from abroad. Protests still raged on for a sixth straight day.
(AP, 2/5/17)(AFP, 2/5/17)
2017 Feb 5, Somalia's al-Shabab extremist group killed four men accused of spying for the CIA and the Kenya and Somali governments. The killings were carried out in a public square in Jamame, Lower Jubba region.
(AP, 2/6/17)
2017 Feb 5, Turkish police detained 448 suspected Islamic State group members in nationwide raids just over a month after an attack on an Istanbul nightclub claimed by the jihadists.
(AFP, 2/5/17)
2017 Feb 5, Ukraine's military says two soldiers were wounded in fighting with rebels in the separatist east, but that artillery attacks were significantly lower after a week in which fighting surged.
(AP, 2/5/17)
2017 Feb 6, San Francisco’s Mayor Ed Lee and Supervisor Jane Kim announced a deal to make City College of San Francisco free of charge to all city residents.
(SFC, 2/7/17, p.C1)
2017 Feb 6, In Florida ex-convict Joseph Schreiber (32) pleaded no contest to torching the Islamic Center of Fort Pierce last Sep 11. He was sentenced to 30 years in prison.
(SFC, 2/7/17, p.A6)
2017 Feb 6, In Mississippi four people were shot and killed following an argument at a nightclub in Yazoo City. Briddell Barber (27) was soon arrested and charged with four counts of first-degree murder.
(SFC, 2/7/17, p.A5)
2017 Feb 6, Missouri Rep. Gov. Eric Greitens signed a bill making his state the 28th right-to-work state banning union fees and dues.
(SFC, 2/7/17, p.A5)
2017 Feb 6, Fadi Yassine (42) of Lebanon made a court appearance in Brooklyn, New York and will be transferred to Cedar Rapids, Iowa to face charges of conspiring to violate the Arms Export Control act. He was arrested in connection with a scheme to smuggle guns purchased in Iowa to his country.
(AP, 2/7/17)
2017 Feb 6, The indigenous Sami people of Europe's Arctic north, formerly nomadic reindeer herders in Lapland, celebrated their national day with hundreds of events across the Nordic lands. The Sami settled with their reindeer herds 9,000 years ago in Europe's Arctic and now number 70,000 people spread across Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia.
(AP, 2/6/17)
2017 Feb 6, Australian church data showed that seven percent of Catholic priests working in Australia between 1950 and 2010 were accused of child sex crimes but few were pursued, as hearings began over allegations dating back decades.
(Reuters, 2/6/17)
2017 Feb 6, Queen Elizabeth II, the world's longest reigning sovereign, set a new record as the first British monarch to reach her sapphire jubilee, with 65 years on the throne.
(AFP, 2/6/17)
2017 Feb 6, Cambodian police said they arrested a Japanese man and two Cambodians last week suspected of tricking Cambodian women into working in the sex trade in Japan.
(AP, 2/6/17)
2017 Feb 6, The EU’s top diplomats vowed to uphold sanctions against Russia for destabilizing conflict-torn Ukraine.
(SFC, 2/7/17, p.A2)
2017 Feb 6, French presidential candidate Francois Fillon apologized for the "error" he made in hiring his wife as a parliamentary aide and denied she was paid for a fake job.
(AFP, 2/6/17)
2017 Feb 6, In India Cyrus Mistry, the boss of Tata until last October, was finally booted out of the company. Natarajan Chandrasekaran, the boss of Tata Consultancy Services, took over as chairman on Feb 21. Mistry’s family held an 18% stake in Tata Sons, the main holding company.
(Econ, 2/11/17, p.54)
2017 Feb 6, Israel’s parliament passed a new law legalizing dozens of Jewish outposts built on private Palestinian land.
(AFP, 2/7/17)
2017 Feb 6, The World Bank approved $200 million for repairing Lebanon's unsafe roads.
(AP, 2/7/17)
2017 Feb 6, A Myanmar patrol boat opened fire on Bangladeshi fishermen. Nurul Amin (26) was killed, one fisherman was wounded and another went overboard but swam to safety when a Myanmar navy vessel approached their boat at speed in the Naf river which forms the border in that area.
(Reuters, 2/8/17)
2017 Feb 6, Hundreds of Nigerians marched to protest poverty and corruption as President Muhammadu Buhari's prolonged absence abroad for medical tests raised political and economic tensions.
(AP, 2/6/17)
2017 Feb 6, In Pakistan Afghan diplomat Mohammad Zaki Abdu was shot and killed by his security guard inside the consulate in the port city of Karachi.
(AP, 2/6/17)
2017 Feb 6, A Palestinian rocket launched from Gaza struck Israel, causing no casualties or damage, in a rare attack that drew Israeli air strikes against Palestinian militant targets.
(Reuters, 2/6/17)
2017 Feb 6, Peruvian prosecutors opened a formal investigation into suspicions that former president Alejandro Toledo took $20 million in bribes from Brazilian construction firm Odebrecht, which is at the heart of a regional scandal.
(AP, 2/7/17)
2017 Feb 6, South Sudan’s Pres. Salva Kiir said that soldiers who rape civilians should be shot, trying to mollify citizens outraged by abuses by security forces and quell growing international anger over attacks.
(Reuters, 2/6/17)
2017 Feb 6, Syrian government forces advanced on the northern Islamic State-held city of al-Bab, cutting off the last supply route that connects it to militant strongholds further east towards Iraq.
(Reuters, 2/6/17)
2017 Feb 6, Tanzania’s President John Magufuli told security forces to crack down on the drugs trade and said no one should be spared, even if they are top politicians or their relatives.
(Reuters, 2/6/17)
2017 Feb 6, Turkey said it has now detained nearly 750 suspects in a police operation against the Islamic State group.
(AP, 2/6/17)
2017 Feb 6, Yemen's Shiite rebels said they have "successfully" fired a ballistic missile at Riyadh for the first time, vowing more attacks on the Saudi capital.
(AP, 2/6/17)
2017 Feb 7, VP Thomas Pence cast his vote to confirm charter school advocate Betsy DeVos as US education secretary breaking a 50-50 Senate tie.
(SFC, 2/8/17, p.A4)
2017 Feb 7, US federal prosecutors said Jermine Prosper (39), native of Guyana, was sentenced last week to five years in federal prison after pleading guilty to smuggling dozens of guns. He had legally purchased about 50 guns in the Atlanta and smuggled them in shipping barrels to Guyana, where they were sold on the streets.
(AP, 2/7/17)
2017 Feb 7, The US Army said that it will allow the $3.8 billion Dakota Access oil pipeline to cross under a Mississippi River reservoir in North Dakota.
(SFC, 2/8/17, p.A6)
2017 Feb 7, In northern California the Dept. of Water Resources discovered a large amount of debris coming out of the concrete-lined spillway of the Oroville Dam. Release of water was stopped and engineers found a massive crater in the spillway.
(SSFC, 2/19/17, p.A19)
2017 Feb 7, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D) was rebuked by the Senate for a reading a 1986 letter by Coretta Scott King that dated to Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions’ failed judicial nomination. The Senate was debating Sessions’ nomination for attorney general.
(SFC, 2/8/17, p.A5)
2017 Feb 7, Richard Hatch (b.1945), former star of the TV series “Battleship Galactica" (1978-1979), died in Los Angeles.
(SFC, 2/9/17, p.D3)
2017 Feb 7, In Afghanistan 22 people were killed in a bomb blast outside the Supreme Court in the center of Kabul, in what appeared to be the latest in a series of attacks on the judiciary. The Islamic State soon claimed responsibility.
(Reuters, 2/7/17)(Reuters, 2/8/17)
2017 Feb 7, Brazilian federal troops began to reestablish control over the state of Espirito Santo, where scores of people are reported to have been killed since the police went on strike. Police stopped patrolling on Feb 4 and criminals quickly ran amok.
(AFP, 2/7/17)
2017 Feb 7, Brexit Minister David Jones told the House of Commons that Parliament would get to approve the deal "before it is concluded" and before the European Parliament votes on it.
(AP, 2/7/17)
2017 Feb 7, Colombia opens peace talks with its last active rebel group, the ELN, seeking to replicate its historic accord with the FARC guerrillas and deliver "complete peace" after 53 years of war.
(AFP, 2/7/17)
2017 Feb 7, The European Union appointed 19 international judges to a special court that will prosecute ethnic Albanian rebels for crimes during and immediately after Kosovo's war for independence (1998-2000). The Kosovo Specialist Chambers judges come from 12 EU countries and the United States and Canada.
(AP, 2/7/17)
2017 Feb 7, Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy was ordered to stand trial in an inquiry into alleged campaign finance fraud during his failed 2012 re-election bid.
(AP, 2/7/17)
2017 Feb 7, Gangs of French youths torched cars and bins in a showdown with police in a north Paris suburb overnight in a grim reminder of the simmering tension that sparked weeks of more serious rioting in the area a decade ago. It was the third night of tension since four police officers were suspended pending an inquiry into accusations they had used excessive force on Feb 2 while arresting a 22-year-old man there, including shoving a baton into his anus.
(Reuters, 2/7/17)
2017 Feb 7, Jovenel Moise (48) was sworn as Haiti's 58th president, ending a protracted electoral crisis that had created a vacuum of power in the impoverished, disaster-prone Caribbean nation.
(AFP, 2/7/17)
2017 Feb 7, Ivory Coast special forces troops fired in the air in towns in the north and south of the country, weeks after soldiers and security forces mutinied over pay in the west African nation. They appeared to be angling for a deal with the government along the lines of one struck with mutinous soldiers in January that offered some of them large one-off lump sum payments.
(AFP, 2/7/17)
2017 Feb 7, US superstar Madonna adopted twin girls in Malawi, raising to four the total number of children she has adopted from the southern African nation.
(AFP, 2/7/17)
2017 Feb 7, Nigerian troops saved the life of a young woman strapped with explosives and killed another suicide bomber, apparently primed by Boko Haram Islamic extremists to attack the northeastern city of Maiduguri.
(AP, 2/7/17)
2017 Feb 7, Palestinian Pres. Mahmud Abbas called a new Israeli law legalizing dozens of Jewish outposts built on private Palestinian land an "attack against our people".
(AFP, 2/7/17)
2017 Feb 7, Peru's attorney general announced he would seek the arrest of former President Alejandro Toledo (2001-2006) on charges of laundering of assets and influence trafficking.
(AP, 2/7/17)
2017 Feb 7, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte berated 228 policemen accused of a variety of offenses, threatening on national television that he would send them to a southern island to fight militants dreaded for beheading captives.
(AP, 2/7/17)
2017 Feb 7, Romania's President Klaus Iohannis told lawmakers the country is in a "fully-fledged" political crisis, after hundreds of thousands demonstrated against a government measure that would weaken the country's anti-corruption drive.
(AP, 2/7/17)
2017 Feb 7, In Syria air strikes on Al-Qaeda's former affiliate killed 26 people including 16 civilians in Idlib city. The headquarters of Fateh al-Sham Front and the surrounding neighborhood were battered by at least 10 strikes at dawn.
(AFP, 2/7/17)
2017 Feb 7, Amnesty International accused Syria's government of hanging up to 13,000 people at a notorious prison over five years in a "policy of extermination", between 2011 and 2015. The damning report was titled "Human Slaughterhouse: Mass hanging and extermination at Saydnaya prison".
(AFP, 2/7/17)
2017 Feb 7, Tanzania’s deputy minister of health said he has ordered the arrest of three men accused of promoting homosexuality.
(SFC, 2/8/17, p.A2)
2017 Feb 7, Thailand’s PM Prayuth Chan-ocha said that Somdej Phra Maha Muniwong (89) has been appointed by King Vajiralongkorn Bodindradebayavarangkun as the 20th supreme patriarch of the Buddhist order. His predecessor died in 2013 at age 100.
(AP, 2/7/17)
2017 Feb 7, Thailand's cabinet approved measures worth $1 billion to help farmers in its flood-hit south.
(Reuters, 2/7/17)
2017 Feb 7, A Thai court sentenced Australian Antonio Bagnato (28) to death for the murder of a countryman who was an alleged confederate in a drug smuggling gang. He was found guilty of killing former Hells Angels member Wayne Schneider in November 2015 after he and accomplices beat and kidnapped the victim from his luxury villa in the Pattaya resort area.
(AP, 2/7/17)
2017 Feb 8, Rep. Sen. Jeff Sessions was confirmed as Pres. Donald Trump’s attorney general.
(SFC, 2/9/17, p.A4)
2017 Feb 8, Former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman (70) was released from a federal prison where he was serving a six-year sentence for bribery and obstruction of justice. He will serve the remainder of his sentence on house arrest.
(SFC, 2/9/17, p.A4)
2017 Feb 8, In Louisiana some 31 people were reported injured after six tornadoes tore through New Orleans and other parts of the state, pounding across highways and streets and leaving trees, power lines and homes leveled.
(Reuters, 2/8/17)
2017 Feb 8, Maine indicted Ronald Paquin (74), a former Roman Catholic priest, on 29 counts of sexual misconduct dating to the 1980s. Paquin had spent more than a decade in a Massachusetts prison for raping an altar boy.
(SFC, 2/9/17, p.A4)
2017 Feb 8, In North Carolina a 3-judge panel temporarily blocked a new law requiring state Senate confirmation for Gov. Roy Cooper’s Cabinet members. The law was passed in the waning days of Rep. Gov. Pat McCrory.
(SFC, 2/9/17, p.A6)
2017 Feb 8, In Ohio Reagan Tokes (21), an Ohio State Univ. student, was last seen leaving work at a Columbus restaurant. Her nude body was found the next day near a park entrance in Grove City. On February 11 DNA evidence led police to arrest convicted sex offender Brian Golsby (29).
(SSFC, 2/12/17, p.A8)
2017 Feb 8, In Afghanistan at least six Afghan employees of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) were killed as they carried supplies to areas in Jowzjan province hit by deadly snow storms. Islamic State gunmen were suspected. Two Red Cross staff members were kidnapped. On Sep 5, 2017, the Red Cross said the two kidnapped staff members have been released.
(Reuters, 2/8/17)(Reuters, 9/5/17)
2017 Feb 8, A Brazilian zoologist said an outbreak of yellow fever has claimed the lives of more than 600 monkeys and dozens of humans in the Atlantic rainforest region, threatening the survival of rare South American primates.
(Reuters, 2/8/17)
2017 Feb 8, Colombia's chief prosecutor said that suspicions of illegal campaign contributions to President Juan Manuel Santos are based on testimony of a rancher Otto Bula, connected to the leader's opponents, who has been jailed for allegedly channeling bribes on behalf of the Brazilian Odebrecht construction firm.
(AP, 2/8/17)
2017 Feb 8, The head of Estonia's foreign intelligence service said that Russia was "the greatest source of a threat" to Estonia in cyberspace because Estonia is a member of both the EU and NATO. He also said Estonia has teamed up with the US Secret Service ahead of its first EU presidency to train local officials to handle cyber threats.
(AP, 2/8/17)
2017 Feb 8, In Austria interior and defense ministers from 15 European countries agreed to come up with new measures to ensure that the overland route from Greece remains shut for migrants seeking new lives in other EU nations and those trying to bring them in illegally.
(AP, 2/8/17)
2017 Feb 8, The Czech government said it has decided to double its quota for Ukrainian workers, due to an acute labor shortage as the economy continues to grow strongly.
(Reuters, 2/8/17)
2017 Feb 8, In Greece hundreds of firefighters in uniform took to the streets of Athens, saying roughly one third of their jobs are at risk due to hiring restrictions placed on the public sector by Greece's international bailout conditions.
(AP, 2/8/17)
2017 Feb 8, In Iraq hundreds of supporters of Iraqi cleric Moqtada al-Sadr demonstrated in Baghdad to demand electoral reform ahead of a planned provincial vote in September.
(AFP, 2/8/17)
2017 Feb 8, Israeli and Palestinian rights groups petitioned the Supreme Court asking it to strike down a new law allowing expropriation of private Palestinian land for Jewish settlers.
(AFP, 2/8/17)
2017 Feb 8, Mexican electoral authorities annulled the results of town council elections in San Juan Achiutla, Oaxaca, because married women had been prevented from voting. Achiutla officials had argued that married women don't perform community work and thus can't vote.
(AP, 2/9/17)
2017 Feb 8, In the Philippines as many as 15,000 people were left homeless after a huge fire engulfed an overcrowded slum in Manila, destroying thousands of homes and sending residents fleeing with their few possessions.
(AFP, 2/8/17)
2017 Feb 8, Romania's defiant PM Sorin Grindeanu easily survived a no-confidence vote even as his government continued to face nationwide protests over its efforts to weaken anti-corruption laws.
(AFP, 2/8/17)
2017 Feb 8, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny accused the Kremlin of trying to block him from running in next year's presidential election after a court found him guilty of embezzlement. A court in Kirov found Navalny guilty of embezzlement in relation to a timber firm called Kirovles, and gave him a five-year suspended prison sentence.
(Reuters, 2/8/17)
2017 Feb 8, The Russian embassy in Nigeria said seven Russian sailors and a Ukrainian have been kidnapped in Nigerian waters from the BBC Caribbean, a cargo vessel flagged in Antigua and Barbuda.
(AP, 2/8/17)
2017 Feb 8, In Somalia members of the upper and lower houses of parliament elected former PM Mohamed Abdullahi Farmajo as president.
(SFC, 2/9/17, p.A2)
2017 Feb 8, Syrian government jets bombed a rebel-held district of Homs city in the west of the country, killing at least nine people.
(Reuters, 2/8/17)(AP, 2/8/17)
2017 Feb 8, Turkey said Syrian rebels backed by the Turkish military have captured the outskirts of the Islamic State-held city of al-Bab in northern Syria.
(Reuters, 2/8/17)
2017 Feb 8, Turkish presidency sources said President Tayyip Erdogan and US President Donald Trump agreed in an overnight phone call on joint action against Islamic State in the Syrian towns of Raqqa and al-Bab, both held by the militants.
(Reuters, 2/8/17)
2017 Feb 8, In eastern Ukraine Mikhail Tolstykh (36), the military chief of a self-proclaimed Russian-backed Donetsk republic, was blown up with a grenade launcher. Rebels blamed Ukrainian security services.
(AFP, 2/8/17)(Econ, 2/11/17, p.38)
2017 Feb 8, Senior UN officials said more than 1,000 Rohingya Muslims may have been killed in a Myanmar army crackdown, suggesting the death toll has been a far greater than previously reported.
(Reuters, 2/8/17)
2017 Feb 8, The UN appealed for $2.1 billion to provide desperately needed aid to millions of people in war-ravaged Yemen this year, warning the country could soon face famine.
(AFP, 2/8/17)
2017 Feb 8, Pope Francis issued a stinging criticism of atrocities against Myanmar's Rohingya minority, saying they had been tortured and killed simply because they wanted to live their culture and Muslim faith.
(Reuters, 2/8/17)
2017 Feb 8, Zimbabwe's Constitutional Court dismissed a case against President Robert Mugabe (92) lodged by an activist who accused the aging leader of violating the southern African country's supreme law during protests last year.
(Reuters, 2/8/17)
2017 Feb 8, Zimbabwean protest leader Evan Mawarire was released on bail by a court in Harare after police arrested him on charges of subverting the government and inciting public violence.
(AFP, 2/8/17)
2017 Feb 9, President Donald Trump reaffirmed Washington's long-standing "one China" policy in a call with Beijing's leader.
(AP, 2/10/17)
2017 Feb 9, The Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals refused to reinstate a temporary travel ban on refugees and citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries, but the government planned to fight back on multiple legal fronts.
(Reuters, 2/10/17)
2017 Feb 9, Alabama’s attorney general Luther Strange was sworn in as the new interim Republican senator and will serve until November 2018, when a special election will be held to fill the seat for the remainder of Jeff Sessions’ term, which ends in January of 2020.
(SFC, 2/10/17, p.A6)
2017 Feb 9, In Arizona the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deported Guadalupe Garcia de Rayos, an immigrant mother in Phoenix, to Mexico. Seven protesters were arrested.
(SFC, 2/10/17, p.A8)
2017 Feb 9, In Louisiana an explosion and fire at a Phillips 66 pipeline station in Paradis left two employees hospitalized and one missing.
(SFC, 2/11/17, p.A6)
2017 Feb 9, In Missouri Frank Ancona (51), the leader of a Ku Klux Klan group, was fatally shot. His wife Melissa (44) and stepson Paul Edward Jinkerson (24) were soon charged with his murder. On April 19, 2019, Malissa Ancona was sentenced to life in prison following a deal in which she pleaded guilty to 2nd-degree murder and abandonment of a corpse.
(SFC, 2/22/17, p.A4)(SSFC, 4/21/19, p.A6)
2017 Feb 9, The Federal Aviation Administration canceled all inbound and outbound flights at John F. Kennedy Airport amid a winter storm that barreled its way through the northeastern United States. More than 3,500 flights were canceled across the region.
(Reuters, 2/9/17)(SFC, 2/10/17, p.A9)
2017 Feb 9, In Washington state an electrical failure at the 32-acre West Point Treatment Plant, next to Seattle’s largest park, resulted in catastrophic flooding and damaged an underground network of equipment. This led to a raw sewage flow into the Puget Sound that continued to Feb 16. Damages were estimated at $25 million.
(SFC, 3/27/17, p.A5)
2017 Feb 9, In southern Afghanistan 22 civilians, mostly women and children, were killed during a joint operation against Taliban insurgents carried out by US and Afghan forces in the Sangin district of Helmand province.
(AP, 2/12/17)
2017 Feb 9, The top US commander in Afghanistan said he needs several thousand more international troops in order to break a stalemate in the long war with Taliban insurgents, signaling the matter may soon be put before President Donald Trump.
(Reuters, 2/9/17)
2017 Feb 9, The Native American Standing Rock Sioux Tribe filed a last-ditch legal challenge to block the $3.8 billion Dakota Access oil pipeline project after the company constructing it won federal permission to tunnel under the Missouri River.
(Reuters, 2/9/17)
2017 Feb 9, In Brazil more than 100 people have been reported killed, with schools and businesses closed and public transportation at a standstill, as a six-day strike by police in the state of Espirito Santo showed no signs of abating.
(Reuters, 2/9/17)
2017 Feb 9, A British immigration tribunal upheld a government decision to strip four men of citizenship. They had been convicted of grooming girls for sex in a case that fueled racial tensions. They now faced deportation to Pakistan.
(AP, 2/9/17)
2017 Feb 9, The World Health Organization (WHO) said that China has taken steps to end its once-widespread practice of harvesting organs from executed prisoners but that it's impossible to know what is happening across the entire country.
(AP, 2/9/17)
2017 Feb 9, Egyptian police closed down the Al-Nadeem Center for Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence, an organization that treats victims of torture and trauma.
(AP, 2/9/17)
2017 Feb 9, The European Union announced aid worth 225 million euros ($240 million) for Gambia as President Adama Barrow warned that the nation was "virtually bankrupt" due to economic mismanagement by the former regime.
(AFP, 2/9/17)
2017 Feb 9, A French court threw out a complaint by a federation of Catholic families that dating site Gleeden's business model is illegal and anti-social because it encourages extramarital affairs.
(AP, 2/9/17)
2017 Feb 9, French carmaker PSA Group, maker of Peugeot and Citroen vehicles, said it has been referred to prosecutors over its diesel emissions.
(Reuters, 2/9/17)
2017 Feb 9, Germany reported the world’s largest current-account surplus of about €270 billion ($300 billion).
(Econ, 2/11/17, p.40)
2017 Feb 9, Some 450 German special commandos made 12 coordinated raids and arrested two men suspected of planning an imminent Islamist attack in Goettingen.
(Reuters, 2/9/17)
2017 Feb 9, German neo-Nazi Maik Schneider (29) was sentenced to eight years jail for the August 2015 arson in the high school sports hall in Nauen that had been designated to house refugees. He received an additional term of one year and six months for other xenophobic crimes.
(AFP, 2/9/17)
2017 Feb 8, Ljubisa Beara (77), a Bosnian Serb commander convicted of war crimes over the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, died in a German prison.
(AP, 2/10/17)
2017 Feb 9, Hungary said it plans to hold migrants in border camps made up of shipping containers while their asylum requests are settled.
(AP, 2/9/17)
2017 Feb 9, In central Israel a Palestinian (18) opened fire and stabbed shoppers with a screwdriver near a busy open air market wounding at least six people in Petah Tikva.
(AP, 2/9/17)
2017 Feb 9, Kenya's High Court blocked the government's decision to close the Dadaab refugee camp -- the world's largest -- and force Somali refugees to return home.
(AFP, 2/9/17)
2017 Feb 9, A study by Mexico’s government and independent experts was released indicating the number of monarch butterflies wintering in Mexico dropped by 27 percent this year, reversing last year's recovery from historically low numbers.
(AP, 2/9/17)
2017 Feb 9, In Myanmar production at Hangzhou Hundred-Tex Garment Company in Yangon was halted. Workers had demanded a better performance review system and healthcare coverage. Later in the month hundreds of workers stormed the Chinese-owned factory making clothes for Swedish fashion retailer Hennes & Mauritz. They damaged facilities including textile machinery, computers and surveillance cameras.
(Reuters, 3/7/17)
2017 Feb 9, NATO alliance deputy head Rose Gottemoeller said all 28 member allies fully support Ukraine as it faces the worst upsurge in fighting against pro-Russian rebels in two years.
(AFP, 2/9/17)
2017 Feb 9, In Nigeria more than 700 people took to the streets in Abuja to protest against the government's economic policy in a sign of mounting public anger in the oil producer grappling with recession.
(Reuters, 2/9/17)
2017 Feb 9, In northern Nigeria Boko Haram killed one person and abducted a seven-year-old boy from the village of Kaumutaiyahi near Chibok.
(AFP, 2/10/17)
2017 Feb 9, Panamanian prosecutors took law firm partners Ramon Fonseca Mora and Jurgen Mossack into custody and searched their offices. The Mossack-Fonseca firm has been accused of setting up offshore accounts that allowed the Brazilian construction firm Odebrecht to funnel bribes to multiple countries. On April 21 Mora and Mossack were released on bail.
(SSFC, 2/12/17, p.A4)(SSFC, 4/23/17, p.A4)
2017 Feb 9, A Serbian court rejected an extradition request by Montenegro for Nemanja Ristic, a suspect in an alleged pro-Russia plot to overthrow the small Balkan country's government.
(AP, 2/10/17)
2017 Feb 9, In northern Syria a Russian warplane "accidentally" hit a building on with Turkish soldiers inside, killing at least three troops and wounding 11 near al-Bab. Russia intervened to halt a clash between Syrian government forces and Turkey-backed Syrian rebels, the first confrontation between them as both sides fight Islamic State in the area.
(AP, 2/9/17)(Reuters, 2/10/17)
2017 Feb 9, Turkish officials said police have detained four Islamic State group suspects who were allegedly planning to carry out a "sensational" attack and seized 24 suicide attack belts during an anti-terror operation in Gaziantep.
(AP, 2/9/17)
2017 Feb 10, President Donald Trump and PM Shinzo Abe opened two days of talks looking to cement a decades-old alliance between Japan and the United States that has been under strain because of the Republican's positions on trade and security.
(Reuters, 2/10/17)
2017 Feb 10, White Tennessee police Officer Josh Lippert (32) fatally shot Jocques Clemmons (31), a black man who was carrying a gun, following a traffic stop in East Nashville. Witnesses later said Clemmons was shot in the back while running away. No charges were filed against Lippert.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Jocques_Clemmons)(SFC, 8/5/17, p.A6)
2017 Feb 10, In Virginia Mohamed Jalloh (27) was sentenced to 11 years in prison for attempting to provide material support to a terrorist group. He had admitted traveling to Africa to join the Islamic State group and had pleaded guilty last October.
(SFC, 2/11/17, p.A6)
2017 Feb 10, Ford Motor CEO Mark Fields said Ford will invest $1 billion over the next five years in Argo AI, a months-old company specializing in machine learning by former leaders of self-driving teams at Google and Uber.
(SFC, 2/11/17, p.D1)
2017 Feb 10, US investment firm Blackstone said it is buying London-based Aon's technology-enabled benefits and human resources assets in a deal valued at up to $4.8 billion.
(AP, 2/10/17)
2017 Feb 10, In Angola a stadium stampede killed at least 17 and injured scores during a domestic soccer league match between host side Santa Rita de Cassia and Recreativo de Libolo in the northern town of Uige. The host team blamed the stampeded on police error. The death toll soon climbed to 22.
(AFP, 2/11/17)
2017 Feb 10, In Brazil Public Safety Director Andre Garcia said 703 military police officers in Espirito Santo have been charged with the crime of revolt. Military police patrol Brazil’s cities and are barred by law from going on strike.
(SFC, 2/11/17, p.A2)
2017 Feb 10, British police said 794 pounds (360 kg) of cocaine with a street value of up to 50 million pounds ($62 million) have washed up on beaches in eastern England.
(AP, 2/10/17)
2017 Feb 10, In Canada the Manitoba Criminal Code Review Board announced it has given Will Baker, formerly known as Vince Li, an absolute discharge, meaning he is no longer subject to monitoring. Baker, a diagnosed schizophrenic, killed Tim McLean (22), a carnival worker who was a complete stranger to Baker, in 2008. A year later he was found not criminally responsible due to mental illness.
(AP, 2/11/17)
2017 Feb 10, The Islamic State group in Egypt claimed to have executed five men it accuses of spying for the army, which is battling the jihadists in the Sinai Peninsula.
(AFP, 2/11/17)
2017 Feb 10, French anti-terrorist police arrested four people in Montpellier, including a girl (16), suspected of preparing an "imminent" attack.
(AFP, 2/10/17)
2017 Feb 10, Hong Kong police arrested a man, surnamed Cheung (60), for arson after a fire engulfed a subway train, injuring 17 people and triggering the evacuation of the Tsim Sha Tsui station during rush hour.
(AFP, 2/10/17)
2017 Feb 10, In Iraq at least five people were killed and 19 wounded in two suicide bombings that hit an army position and a restaurant in eastern Mosul.
(Reuters, 2/10/17)
2017 Feb 10, Italy adopted measures to accelerate the asylum process, easing pressure on shelters and speeding deportations of those whose appeals are rejected.
(Reuters, 2/10/17)
2017 Feb 10, Libyan security officials said Islamic State militants have shifted to desert valleys and inland hills southeast of Tripoli as they seek to exploit Libya's political divisions after defeat in their former stronghold of Sirte.
(Reuters, 2/10/17)
2017 Feb 10, East Libyan forces lost a Mi-35 combat helicopter near the central town of Zalla. Two crew members were killed. It was not clear if the helicopter had been shot down or crashed because of a technical fault.
(Reuters, 2/11/17)
2017 Feb 10, The head of Lithuania's state tourism agency resigned after admitting her agency promoted the Baltic country in an international social media campaign by using landscape photos taken in other countries.
(AP, 2/10/17)
2017 Feb 10, Amnesty International urged Myanmar's government to suspend operations at the Letpadaung mine copper mine, jointly owned by its army and a Chinese state enterprise, until its impact on human rights and the environment is properly addressed.
(AP, 2/10/17)
2017 Feb 10, In northern Nigeria at least eight soldiers were killed in a Boko Haram ambush in the Mafa area east of Maiduguri.
(AFP, 2/10/17)
2017 Feb 10, Seven Pakistani fishermen, who remained jailed in Yemen for over a decade, returned home following efforts by the ICRC and Pakistan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
(AP, 2/11/17)
2017 Feb 10, Peruvian police launched a manhunt for ex-president Alejandro Toledo, once hailed as an anti-corruption champion, after a judge ordered his arrest over accusations he took $20 million in bribes.
(AFP, 2/10/17)
2017 Feb 10, A Philippines court granted protection to families of five people killed or wounded by police and the right to access police case reports, in the first successful legal challenge to President Rodrigo Duterte's deadly crackdown on drugs.
(Reuters, 2/10/17)
2017 Feb 10, In the southern Philippines a magnitude 6.7 nighttime earthquake killed eight people and injured more than 120 in Surigao del Norte province. The number of people killed was later reduced to four.
(AP, 2/11/17)(AP, 2/12/17)(AP, 3/5/17)
2017 Feb 10, South Africa’s Pres. Zuma said state utility Eskom would sign new renewable energy contracts, angering coal transport workers who say such contracts will lead to 30,000 job losses in the coal industry.
(AP, 3/1/17)
2017 Feb 10, Swedish banking group SEB issued its first green bond, raising 500 million euros ($532 million) for loans to low-carbon projects.
(Reuters, 2/13/17)
2017 Feb 10, In southern Thailand Sama-ae Doloh, a sub-district chief in Pattani province, was fatally shot by heavily armed men who stopped him on his way to work. In neighboring Narathiwat province, two people were fatally shot by five masked men at a rubber trading store.
(AP, 2/10/17)
2017 Feb 10, In Turkey police used tear gas to disperse protesters trying to enter Ankara University to denounce a government decree that dismissed 330 academics. At least five protesters were detained.
(AP, 2/10/17)
2017 Feb 10, The United Nations received a notice from Gambia's reversing its withdrawal from the International Criminal Court.
(AP, 2/14/17)
2017 Feb 10, Yemeni government forces took full control of the Red Sea coastal town of Mokha after weeks of deadly fighting with Shiite rebels and their allies. UNHCR spokesman William Spindler said that 34,000 people have fled their homes in Yemen after fierce fighting erupted in the port towns of Mokha and Dhubab on the Red Sea.
(AFP, 2/10/17)(AP, 2/10/17)
2017 Feb 11, In Connecticut the Yale Univ. Pres. Peter Salovey said a residential college in New Haven commemorating John Calhoun, the 19th century white supremacist statesman from South Carolina, will be renamed for Grace Murray Hopper, a computer scientist and Navy rear admiral.
(SSFC, 2/12/17, p.A8)
2017 Feb 11, In Afghanistan a suicide bomber killed seven people and wounded 20 others outside a bank in Lashkar Gah, Helmand province. A local official said that an American military air strike killed a number of civilians in a recent bombing in Sangin district north of Lashkar Gah.
(Reuters, 2/11/17)
2017 Feb 11, In Brazil military police in the southeastern state of Espirito Santo rejected a return-to-work agreement aimed at ending a strike that has paralyzed several cities and led to an outburst of violence in which more than 130 people have reportedly died. More than 3,000 federal troops now patrolled the streets.
(AP, 2/11/17)
2017 Feb 11, London's Sotheby's auction house opened the "Erotica: Passion & Desire" show of over 150 titillating items to explore the varied attitudes to nudity and sex across eras and continents ahead of an auction for the next week.
(AFP, 2/10/17)
2017 Feb 11, Sam Rainsy, the self-exiled leader of Cambodia's opposition party, he would resign his post, a shock blow to a movement struggling to unseat the country's authoritarian premier. Rainsy has led the Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP) since its creation in 2012 and has spent over a year in France to avoid several lawsuits.
(AFP, 2/11/17)
2017 Feb 11, In China EHang, a drone-making startup, performed a 1000 UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) formation light show named “Meteor Sky" at the Guangzhou city center on the sky of the famous Canton Tower.
(http://www.ehang.com/news/249.html)(Econ, 3/11/17, p.64)
2017 Feb 11, In France some 15,000 people marched in the eastern city of Strasbourg demanding that Turkey release Kurdish separatist leader Abdullah Ocalan, as Europe's Kurds held their biggest annual gathering.
(AFP, 2/11/17)
2017 Feb 11, In France 37 people were arrested in the Paris suburbs when clashes erupted after a protest over the Feb 2 assault of a young black man allegedly sodomized with a police truncheon.
(AFP, 2/12/17)
2017 Feb 11, Millions of voters in Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous state, cast their ballots in a contest seen as a key test for Narendra Modi halfway through his first term as prime minister.
(AFP, 2/11/17)
2017 Feb 11, In Indonesia tens of thousands gathered at the national mosque in Jakarta for mass prayers urging people to vote for a Muslim governor of the city as the country prepares for regional elections next week.
(AP, 2/11/17)
2017 Feb 11, Indonesian officials said up to 40,000 people were caught in severe flooding following days of torrential rain in West Nusa Tenggara province. The death toll from landslides on Bali resort island rose to 13.
(AP, 2/11/17)
2017 Feb 11, In Iraq six demonstrators and one policeman were killed in clashes between security forces and protesters loyal to prominent Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr who had gathered in Baghdad to demand political reforms.
(AFP, 2/11/17)(AP, 2/12/17)
2017 Feb 11, The Iraqi air force carried out a strike on a house where Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was thought to be meeting other commanders. It published the names of 13 Islamic State commanders it said had been killed in the air strike, but the list did not include Baghdadi. Three other Islamic State positions in western Iraq were targeted in the same wave of air strikes, killing 64 fighters.
(Reuters, 2/13/17)
2017 Feb 11, In New Zealand a new pod of 240 whales swam aground at a remote beach just hours after weary volunteers managed to refloat a different group of whales following an earlier mass stranding. In total, more than 650 pilot whales have beached themselves over two days on Farewell Spit at the tip of the South Island. About 350 of the whales were dead, 100 were refloated by volunteers and more than 200 managed to swim away unassisted.
(AP, 2/11/17)(SSFC, 2/12/17, p.A4)
2017 Feb 11, North Korea launched a missile from an area called Panghyon in its western region just before 8 a.m. (2300 GMT Saturday). It flew about 500 km (300 miles). Japan’s PM Shinzo Abe called the launch "absolutely intolerable" and said North Korea must comply with UN Security Council resolutions. Pres. Trump speaking alongside Abe said that the USA is behind Japan, our great ally, 100 percent.
(Reuters, 2/12/17)
2017 Feb 11, A top Philippine official said police have sacked nearly 100 policemen since the start of the year because they were found to be drug users.
(AP, 2/11/17)
2017 Feb 11, In Poland hundreds of protesters with flags and banners marched in downtown Warsaw against the ruling party's plan to enlarge the capital by incorporating 32 neighboring municipalities.
(AP, 2/11/17)
2017 Feb 11, Police in Sicily confiscated four olive companies, farmland, villas and other property that anti-Mafia prosecutors contend belong to the business empire of Italy's top Mafia boss, who has been on the run for more than 20 years.
(AP, 2/11/17)
2017 Feb 11, South Sudanese Lt. Gen. Thomas Cirillo Swaka resigned while telling President Salva Kiir "you have disgraced yourself" by subjecting the conflict-torn country to ethnic bias and "unacceptable cycles of violence."
(AP, 2/11/17)
2017 Feb 11, Spain’s PM Mariano Rajoy was reelected as the leader of the conservative Popular Party for a 4th term.
(SFC, 2/13/17, p.A2)
2017 Feb 11, In northern Syria Turkish troops and Syrian rebels entered the Islamic State-held town of Al-Bab, as government forces moved closer to the jihadist bastion. one Turkish soldier was killed and another wounded in clashes with IS fighters.
(AFP, 2/11/17)
2017 Feb 12, British singer-songwriter Adele won five Grammys at the 59th annual Grammy Awards ceremony in Los Angeles.
(SFC, 2/13/17, p.C1)
2017 Feb 12, Singer Al Jarreau (b.1940), winner of seven Grammy Awards, died in Los Angeles.
(SFC, 2/13/17, p.D4)
2017 Feb 12, In northern California authorities ordered at least 188,000 people living below Lake Oroville to evacuate, shortly after engineers spotted a hole in the spillway that was eroding back toward the top.
(CSM, 2/13/17)
2017 Feb 12, In Florida a small plane carrying three people went missing late today seven miles south of Cedar Key.
(SFC, 2/14/17, p.A5)
2017 Feb 12, Brazil’s state's Department of Public Safety said in a statement that nearly 900 military police officers are on duty in Espirito Santo. On a normal day, around 2,000 officers would be patrolling. Families and friends of the police officers continued their protest outside barracks, demanding higher pay for the officers.
(AP, 2/12/17)
2017 Feb 12, Hollywood musical "La La Land" picked up five British Bafta movie awards, at a glitzy London ceremony charged with filmmakers' political messages.
(AFP, 2/13/17)
2017 Feb 12, Cambodia's main opposition party named Kem Sokha as its acting president after exiled leader Sam Rainsy resigned unexpectedly in the face of a possible ban ahead of elections.
(Reuters, 2/12/17)
2017 Feb 12, Germany’s parliamentary assembly elected former foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier (61) as the new head of state. He vowed to stand up to simplistic populist rhetoric.
(AFP, 2/12/17)(SSFC, 2/12/17, p.A4)
2017 Feb 12, Greek soldiers successfully defused a World War II bomb in Thessaloniki, after evacuating tens of thousands of people from the area.
(AFP, 2/12/17)
2017 Feb 12, Iraqi forces thwarted an attempt by around 200 jihadist fighters to flee their bastion of Tal Afar towards Syria, west of the city of Mosul.
(AFP, 2/13/17)
2017 Feb 12, An Israeli court ordered Haifa Chemicals to shut down the country's largest ammonia tank, which has been a point of contention for years, with residents and environmental groups warning it is a major health hazard.
(Reuters, 2/12/17)
2017 Feb 12, In Kashmir a protester was killed and dozens of others wounded as government forces fired at demonstrators demanding an end to Indian rule following a gunbattle that killed four suspected rebels, two soldiers and a civilian.
(AP, 2/12/17)
2017 Feb 12, The chairman of Pakistan's senate says the body will not welcome any US delegation, member of Congress or dignitary in Islamabad after the US failed to issue a visa to the senate's deputy chairman, a member of the right-wing Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam political party, to attend a meeting at the United Nations.
(AP, 2/12/17)
2017 Feb 12, Peru’s Pres. Pedro Pablo Kuczynski asked US Pres. Donald Trump to extradite former Peruvian Pres. Alejandro Toledo on suspicion of taking bribes from the Brazilian construction company Odebrecht.
(SFC, 2/13/17, p.A4)
2017 Feb 12, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte said he would not stand in the way of his minister's decision to close several mines in the southern Philippines after he saw the damage they had done to the environment.
(Reuters, 2/12/17)
2017 Feb 12, Somaliland said the United Arab Emirates can establish a military base in its territory. The UAE government in January submitted a formal application seeking permission from the Somaliland government to open a military base in the port town of Berbera. Ethiopia and Djibouti opposed the plan.
(AP, 2/12/17)
2017 Feb 12, Supporters of Spain's Podemos party handed Pablo Iglesias a clear victory in a battle for the far-left party's direction, re-electing him as leader and backing his call to return to the streets as a protest movement.
(AFP, 2/12/17)
2017 Feb 12, Swiss voters approved a measure to make it easier for third-generation immigrants to become citizens, crushing rightwing nationalists who had stoked fears about granting nationality to more Muslims.
(AFP, 2/12/17)
2017 Feb 12, Syria's opposition announced its 21-member delegation, including 10 rebel representatives, for a new round of UN-sponsored peace talks in Geneva scheduled for February 20.
(AFP, 2/12/17)
2017 Feb 12, Turkey's president said his troops and allied Syrian fighters have reached the heart of the Islamic State stronghold of al-Bab in northern Syria and will eventually march on the extremists' de facto capital, Raqqa.
(AP, 2/12/17)
2017 Feb 12, Turkmenistan voted with a massive announced turnout in a presidential vote expected to tighten strongman Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov's hold over the gas-rich Central Asian country. Berdymukhamedov won with 98% of the vote.
(AFP, 2/12/17)(Econ, 2/18/17, p.33)
2017 Feb 12, Yemeni security officials said inter-militia fighting has flared up at the airport in the southern coastal city of Aden, with a government-allied helicopter gunship firing on fighters in the area, killing three.
(AP, 2/12/17)
2017 Feb 13, Former banker Steven Mnuchin was sworn in as US Treasury secretary, following a Senate vote deeply divided along party lines.
(CSM, 2/14/17)
2017 Feb 13, Michael Flynn resigned from his position as President Trump's national security adviser after weeks of confusion and speculation over reports that he misled Vice President Mike Pence and other officials about his contacts with Russia.
(AP, 2/14/17)
2017 Feb 13, The US Department of Treasury labeled Venezuela’s VP El Aissami a drug "kingpin," accusing him of facilitating shipments by air and sea, and having links to drug gangs in Mexico and Colombia. The United States also sanctioned Samark Lopez, a man it termed El Aissami's frontman. Aissami’s assets reportedly included three lavish apartments in the Four Season complex of Miami and a Gulfstream jet.
(Reuters, 2/14/17)(Econ, 2/18/17, p.30)
2017 Feb 13, In northern California emergency crews prepared loads of rock to be dropped by helicopters to seal the crumbling Oroville Dam spillway that threatens to inundate communities along the Feather River.
(Reuters, 2/13/17)
2017 Feb 13, Aileen Clarke Hernandez (b.1926), civil rights activist and the 2nd leader of NOW (1970-1971), died in Orange County, Ca.
(SFC, 3/2/17, p.D1)
2017 Feb 13, In New England some 675 US flights were canceled, scores of vehicle crashes reported and schools and government offices shuttered as the third winter storm in five days slammed the area.
(Reuters, 2/13/17)
2017 Feb 13, DuPont and Chemours Co said they had agreed to pay about $671 million in cash to settle several lawsuits related to the leak of a toxic chemical in Parkersburg, West Virginia. Perfluorooctanoic acid, also known as PFOA or C-8, used to make Teflon, has been linked to cancer and other diseases.
(Reuters, 2/13/17)
2017 Feb 13, Scientists said shrimp-like creatures living in the deepest parts of the oceans contain high levels of man-made toxins.
(Reuters, 2/13/17)
2017 Feb 13, Canada’s PM Justin Trudeau met with US Pres. Trump at the White House ahead of a roundtable discussion about women in the workplace. Ivanka Trump, the president's daughter, was involved in recruiting participants and setting the agenda for the roundtable.
(AP, 2/13/17)
2017 Feb 13, In CongoDRC more than 100 people were killed in clashes between Congolese soldiers and militia fighters mainly armed with machetes and spears in clashes that began Feb 9 in the Dibaya area of Kasai-Central province.
(AP, 2/14/17)
2017 Feb 13, Mostafa el-Abbadi (88), Egyptian scholar, died. He was the man behind the recreation of the Great Library of Alexandria, which opened in 2002.
(Econ, 3/11/17, p.86)
2017 Feb 13, In the French Alps at least four skiers were killed in an avalanche near the resort of Tignes. Rescuers said they are trying to dig out five others from the snow with shovels.
(AP, 2/13/17)
2017 Feb 13, Georgia's Orthodox Church was rocked after police announced the arrest of a priest over a suspected poisoning plot targeting a high-ranking Church figure. Prosecutors said they caught archpriest Giorgi Mamaladze with sodium cyanide on February 10 as he boarded a plane to Berlin, where Patriarch Ilia II (83) was awaiting a gallbladder operation.
(AFP, 2/13/17)
2017 Feb 13, Seijun Suzuki (93), Japanese B-movie director, died. His prolific output from gangster films to fantasies influenced international filmmakers including Quentin Tarantino.
(AFP, 2/22/17)
2017 Feb 13, A Kenyan court jailed seven union officials for a month over a doctors strike that has crippled public hospitals for 10 weeks. The seven doctors were released on Feb 15 in an effort to encourage negotiations to end the strike.
(AFP, 2/13/17)(AP, 2/15/17)
2017 Feb 13, In Malaysia Kim Jong Nam (46), the half-brother of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, was assassinated at an airport in Kuala Lumpur, telling medical workers before he died en route to a hospital that he had been attacked with a chemical spray, later identified as the VX nerve agent. South Korean media said North Korean female agents killed him using poisoned needles. Jong-Nam had reportedly travelled using a fake passport under the name of Kim Chol.
(AP, 2/14/17)(AFP, 2/14/17)(Econ, 3/4/17, p.29)
2017 Feb 13, A Pakistani judge banned Valentine's Day celebrations in the country's capital, saying they are against Islamic teachings.
(AP, 2/13/17)
2017 Feb 13, In eastern Pakistan a suicide bomber plowed a motorcycle into a group of police escorting a protest rally in Lahore, killing 15 people and wounding nearly 60. Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, a breakaway Taliban faction, claimed the attack.
(AP, 2/13/17)(Econ, 2/25/17, p.32)
2017 Feb 13, Hamas elected in secret Yahya Sinwar, a hardline member of the Palestinian Islamist movement's armed wing, as its new Gaza leader, indicating a tougher stand against longtime adversary Israel.
(AP, 2/13/17)
2017 Feb 13, Former Panamanian Vice-President Ricardo Arias Calderon (83) died. He had served under President Guillermo Endara after President Manuel Noriega was ousted in a 1989 military invasion.
(AP, 2/14/17)
2017 Feb 13, Romania's Parliament agreed to hold a referendum on public support for fighting official corruption.
(AP, 2/13/17)
2017 Feb 13, Syrian jihadists seen as close to Islamic State battled a rival hardline Islamist faction in northwestern Syria.
(Reuters, 2/13/17)
2017 Feb 13, In Taiwan a bus carrying tourists on a trip to view cherry blossoms flipped over on an expressway ramp in Taipei, killing 32 people and injuring many others.
(AP, 2/13/17)
2017 Feb 13, A Tanzanian court sentenced a married couple to 20 years in jail each for illegal possession of 210 pieces of ivory from 93 poached elephants. Peter and Leonida Loi Kabi had pleaded not guilty.
(Reuters, 2/14/17)
2017 Feb 13, The UN said more than 1.5 million South Sudanese have become refugees and their humanitarian needs are overwhelming aid efforts during the country's civil war.
(AP, 2/13/17)
2017 Jan 14, Pres. Donald Trump asked FBI Director James Comey to shut down the federal investigation into former national security advisor Michael T. Flynn, the day after Flynn resigned.
(SFC, 5/17/17, p.A6)
2017 Feb 14, Pres. Donald Trump issued major disaster declarations to enable federal funding for California to aid spillway damage on the Oroville Dam and help the with widespread effects of January’s storms.
(SFC, 2/15/17, p.A10)
2017 Feb 14, US ambassador Deborah Malac said the United States will give over $25 million in humanitarian aid to Uganda, to help the nation cope with a huge influx of refugees fleeing conflict in east Africa.
(AFP, 2/14/17)
2017 Feb 14, In Texas storms packing heavy rains, lashing winds and tornadoes hit the Houston metropolitan area, ripping roofs off homes, blowing windows out of frames and leaving tens of thousands of people without power.
(Reuters, 2/14/17)
2017 Feb 14, Mazda said it is recalling about 174,000 small cars in the US because the seats can change angles suddenly, making the vehicles hard to drive.
(AP, 2/14/17)
2017 Feb 14, Brazilian President Michel Temer issued a decree to deploy 9,000 soldiers in Rio de Janeiro's metropolitan area until Feb. 22, one week before Carnaval ends. The soldiers are to help out amid police officers' strike threats and riots led by anarchists during state legislature votes on austerity measures as the annual Carnaval celebrations take off.
(AP, 2/14/17)
2017 Feb 14, The government of China awarded Pres. Trump valuable rights to his own name in the form of a 10-year trademark for construction services.
(SFC, 2/16/17, p.A2)
2017 Feb 14, In China residents in an oil town near the border with Russia protested against a planned aluminum plant over pollution fears.
(AP, 2/14/17)
2017 Feb 14, In central China a gas explosion at the Zubao Coal Mine in Hunan province killed at least nine people. The official death toll climbed to 10 after investigators found a miner who had been listed as "injured".
(AP, 2/18/17)
2017 Feb 14, In China three attackers with knives killed five people and injured another five before being shot dead by police in a remote oasis town in Xinjiang province.
(Econ, 2/25/17, p.38)(Econ 5/6/17, p.42)
2017 Feb 14, Congo police made a pre-dawn raid on a separatist group in Kinshasa, killing four people but failing to arrest Ne Muanda Nsemi, a self-styled religious prophet and leader of Bundu dia Kongo (BDK).
(Reuters, 2/14/17)
2017 Feb 14, In the Dominican Republic two journalists were shot dead during a live 103.5 FM radio broadcast in San Pedro de Macoris.
(AFP, 2/15/17)
2017 Feb 14, Human Rights Watch said the huge newly-built Ethiopian Gibe III dam is cutting off the supply of water to Lake Turkana in northern Kenya.
(AFP, 2/14/17)
2017 Feb 14, Seven Hong Kong police officers were convicted of a lesser charge in the assault of pro-democracy activist Ken Tsang, whose videotaped beating during the height of 2014 pro-democracy protests sparked outrage.
(AP, 2/14/17)
2017 Feb 14, India's top court upheld the corruption conviction of Sasikala Natarajan, the head of the ruling party in Tamil Nadu state, ending her chances of becoming the southern state's next chief minister.
(AP, 2/14/17)
2017 Feb 14, An Italian court convicted a Moroccan-born man and his wife on charges of international terrorism in connection with an Islamic State plot to carry out attacks in Rome during the Holy Year in 2016. Abderrahim Moutaharrik, and his wife, Salma Bencharki were sentenced to six years and five years in jail, respectively.
(AP, 2/14/17)
2017 Feb 14, In Japan Toshiba Corp.'s chairman resigned after the company logged such massive losses in its nuclear business that it must sell its lucrative computer-chip business to avoid going belly-up.
(AP, 2/14/17)
2017 Feb 14, In northern Kashmir four Indian soldiers and four militants were killed in gunbattles in Bandipora district, in the second outbreak of violence between security forces and separatists in three days.
(Reuters, 2/14/17)
2017 Feb 14, In Luxembourg a passenger train and a freight train collided, killing one person and injuring several more.
(AFP, 2/14/17)
2017 Feb 14, Malian television said hundreds had fled villages close to the city of Macina after clashes between Fulani herders and Bambara farmers over the weekend. The death toll from the armed confrontation had risen to 20 from 13.
(AFP, 2/15/17)
2017 Feb 14, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas met secretly with the CIA chief in the West Bank, as they expressed concern over the Trump administration's suggestion that a two-state solution to the conflict with Israel is optional.
(AP, 2/15/17)
2017 Feb 14, In the Philippines environment secretary Gina Lopez cancelled 75 mining projects on the grounds that they would harm ecologically sensitive areas.
(Econ, 2/25/17, p.33)
2017 Feb 14, In northwestern Syria two days of fighting left 69 fighters dead, including 39 from the Levant Liberation Committee and 30 dead from Jund al-Aqsa, including four suicide attackers who blew up vehicles that they were driving.
(AP, 2/14/17)
2017 Feb 14, Turkish PM Binali Yildirim said Turkey-backed rebels have largely taken control of Syria's al-Bab from Islamic State militants, but a war monitoring group said the jihadists still controlled most of the town.
(Reuters, 2/14/17)
2017 Feb 14, Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan met Saudi Arabia's top leadership during a visit to further strengthen ties as part of a Gulf tour ahead of Syria peace talks.
(AFP, 2/14/17)
2017 Feb 14, Venezuela's powerful vice president called his blacklisting by the United States on drug charges an "imperialist aggression" in the first bilateral flare-up under new US President Donald Trump.
(Reuters, 2/14/17)
2017 Feb 14, Police in Vietnam stopped hundreds of protesters from marching to present compensation claims against a steel plant over a toxic spill last year.
(Reuters, 2/14/17)
2017 Feb 15, President Donald Trump and PM Benjamin Netanyahu renewed the US-Israel partnership in defiance of international pressure for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Shortly before Trump was to welcome Netanyahu to the White House, a senior US official briefed reporters that Washington would no longer insist that any peace deal lead to a recognized Palestinian state.
(AFP, 2/15/17)
2017 Feb 15, US President Donald Trump's defense secretary warned NATO allies that they must honor military spending pledges to ensure the United States does not "moderate" support for the alliance.
(Reuters, 2/15/17)
2017 Feb 15, White House chief of staff Reince Priebus asked FBI Director James Comey and deputy director Andrew McCabe to dispute media reports that Donald Trump's campaign advisers were frequently in touch with Russian intelligence agents during the election. This request became public on Feb 24.
(AP, 2/24/17)
2017 Feb 15, The US Justice Dept. sided with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to provide a narrower definition of who is a fugitive from justice, saying the term should only apply if those people had fled a state to avoid prosecution. This cleared the way for some people with outstanding arrest warrants to purchase guns.
(SFC, 10/12/17, p.A5)
2017 Feb 15, US fast-food executive Andrew Puzder withdrew his nomination for labor secretary under Pres. Donald Trump.
(SFC, 2/16/17, p.A6)
2017 Feb 15, Algeria's military forces killed 5 suspected extremists in an operation around Bouira, one of the country's last Islamic militant holdouts.
(AP, 2/17/17)
2017 Feb 15, Gay rights campaigners protested outside the Church of England's General Synod in London as Anglican bishops from around the world prepared to vote on a report ruling out accepting gay marriage.
(AFP, 2/15/17)
2017 Feb 15, US troops deployed in Bulgaria and armored vehicles and heavy equipment are to arrive by the end of the week under a planned NATO operation to support its Eastern European allies.
(Reuters, 2/15/17)
2017 Feb 15, The European Parliament backed a contested EU-Canada free trade deal, facing down protests by activists and Donald Trump-inspired calls for protectionism. It also voted for a plan to raise the cost for firms to produce carbon.
(AFP, 2/15/17)(Econ, 2/18/17, p.62)
2017 Feb 15, German airline Lufthansa said it has struck a deal to solve a bitter labor dispute with pilots that over five years has cost it an estimated half a billion dollars and more than a dozen strikes.
(AP, 2/15/17)
2017 Feb 15, India launched the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle, built by the Indian Space Research Organization, carrying a record 104 satellites, 88 of which were made by Planet, a San Francisco-based company founded in 2010.
(Econ, 2/18/17, p.57)
2017 Feb 15, Indonesia held local elections. In Jakarta Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, a Christian of Chinese descent also known as Ahok, won with 43% of the vote, forcing him into a runoff against Anies Baswedan on April 19.
(Econ, 2/18/17, p.33)
2017 Feb 15, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani visited Oman and Kuwait for talks to improve relations with Gulf neighbors, strained by the conflicts in Syria and Yemen.
(AFP, 2/15/17)
2017 Feb 15, In Iraq a suicide bomber detonated an explosives-laden vehicle in a Shiite majority neighborhood of Baghdad, killing at least 15 people.
(Reuters, 2/15/17)
2017 Feb 15, Malaysian police arrested a woman in the apparent assassination of Kim Jong Nam, the North Korean leader's exiled half-brother who South Korean spies say once begged his sibling to spare his life. The woman had checked into local hotels under the Vietnamese name of Doan Thi Huong.
(AP, 2/15/17)(Reuters, 2/17/17)
2017 Feb 15, Moldova's intelligence agency said it has broken up a suspected extremist Islamic group that was spreading propaganda online and whose members had illegal weapons.
(AP, 2/15/17)
2017 Feb 15, Montenegro's parliament voted to strip two pro-Russian opposition MPs of their immunity over alleged involvement in a foiled coup last October, but a prosecutor ruled the pair would not be arrested.
(AFP, 2/15/17)
2017 Feb 15, Tropical storm Dineo hit the coastline of Mozambique. At least two people were killed and in and further casualties were expected.
(Reuters, 2/16/17)
2017 Feb 15, North Korean officials spent hours trying to talk Malaysia out of conducting an autopsy on Kim Jong Un's estranged half-brother, who was murdered at Kuala Lumpur airport on Feb 13.
(Reuters, 2/15/17)
2017 Feb 15, In northwestern Pakistan two suicide bombings killed at least six people in Peshawar following an almost three-month-long lull in the volatile region.
(AP, 2/15/17)(AFP, 2/17/17)
2017 Feb 15, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte supported his environment minister's decision to cancel nearly a third of contracts for undeveloped mines, saying it was based on law.
(Reuters, 2/15/17)
2017 Feb 15, In Serbia several thousand people joined renewed protests in Belgrade over the shady demolition last year in an area marked for a United Arab Emirates-financed real estate project.
(AP, 2/15/17)
2017 Feb 15, UAE state media said Juma Mohammed Abdullah Al Kaabi, its ambassador to Afghanistan, has died of wounds sustained in a January 10 bombing in Kandahar that also killed five other UAE officials.
(AFP, 2/15/17)
2017 Feb 15, The UN children's agency launched a $110 million appeal to help two million acutely malnourished children across Sudan, including hundreds of thousands living in conflict areas.
(AFP, 2/15/17)
2017 Feb 15, Pope Francis insisted that indigenous groups must give prior consent to any economic activity affecting their ancestral lands, a view that conflicts with the Trump administration, which is pushing to build a $3.8 billion oil pipeline over opposition from American Indians.
(AP, 2/15/17)
2017 Feb 15, Venezuela suspended CNN in Spanish after a report by the network alleging government workers sold passports to members of a Middle East terror group.
(SFC, 2/16/17, p.A2)
2017 Feb 15, In Yemen at least one Saudi-led airstrike in Arhab, 25 miles from the rebel-held capital of Sanaa, killed at least five people.
(AP, 2/15/17)
2017 Feb 16, A number of US cities held “A Day Without Immigrants" actions in response to Pres. Trump’s policy on immigration.
(SFC, 2/16/17, p.A7)
2017 Feb 16, A jury convicted former Georgia National Guard sergeant of fatally shooting an off-duty police officer outside a restaurant in Griffin nearly three years ago. Michael Bowman faced a possible death sentence following the Troup County jury's verdict in the May 31, 2014, killing of Griffin police officer Kevin Jordan.
(AP, 2/17/17)
2017 Feb 16, Parts of Maine and New Hampshire received more than a foot of wet, heavy snow. Eastport, Maine, recorded 69 inches of snow over a 10-day period. Andover, Maine, had 79 inches of snow on the ground, the 2nd highest level recorded in the state.
(SFC, 2/17/17, p.A5)
2017 Feb 16, In Texas Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg announced that Houston would decriminalize possession of less than 4 ounces of marijuana, beginning March 1.
(CSM, 2/18/17)
2017 Feb 16, In Afghanistan at least 12 civilians were killed and three others wounded when their vehicle struck a roadside bomb in the eastern Paktika province. The Islamic State group launched an attack on security posts killing 17 soldiers in the Dih Bala district in eastern Nangarhar province. Soldiers reportedly killed 21 IS fighters.
(AP, 2/16/17)(AP, 2/17/17)
2017 Feb 16, Albanian police said they have arrested a man who allegedly had 1.25 metric tons (1.38 tons) of dried cannabis hidden under his house. Police say the drugs were going to be smuggled into Italy.
(AP, 2/16/17)
2017 Feb 16, In Benin four Christian priests from an anti-voodoo cult were arrested and charged for their suspected role in five deaths during prayers held last month in anticipation of the end of the world.
(Reuters, 2/17/17)
2017 Feb 16, In southeastern Brazil two passenger buses collided head-on, killing at least nine people and injuring 46 near the city of Teodoro Sampaio west of Sao Paulo.
(AP, 2/16/17)
2017 Feb 16, China's Ministry of Public Security said it is banning carfentanil and three similar drugs as of March 1, closing a major regulatory loophole in the fight to end America's opioid epidemic.
(AP, 2/16/17)
2017 Feb 16, A feud over Cyprus' troubled history led to the abrupt halt of reunification talks between the ethnically split island's rival leaders, with confusion and much finger pointing over who walked out on whom.
(AP, 2/16/17)
2017 Feb 16, Egypt swore in nine new ministers to the cabinet of PM Sherif Ismail, along with five new governors, including the country's first female governor.
(AP, 2/16/17)
2017 Feb 16, France's parliament approved a bill criminalizing websites that carry purposely false information with the aim of dissuading women from having abortions.
(AP, 2/16/17)
2017 Feb 16, In France the Troadec family -- Pascal and Brigitte, both aged around 50, their son Sebastien (21) and his sister Charlotte (18) – were last seen in Nantes. Bloodstains found in the house in a suburb of Nantes later matched the DNA of three of the four missing persons. On March 5 the sister and brother-in-law of Pascal Troadec were remanded in custody.
(AFP, 2/28/17)(AFP, 3/5/17)
2017 Feb 16, In Germany foreign ministers from 20 of the world's leading nations (G20) met in Bonn to discuss current conflicts and ways to prevent future crises against a backdrop of uncertainty among allies and adversaries over the direction of US foreign policy.
(AP, 2/16/17)
2017 Feb 16, In Germany a union representing ground staff has called on its members to go on strike at Berlin's two airports, leading to the cancelation of some 210 flights.
(AP, 2/16/17)
2017 Feb 16, Greek authorities seized 1.3 tons of marijuana in a truck crossing into the country from Albania, a major illegal drugs producer.
(AP, 2/17/17)
2017 Feb 16, In Iraq a car packed with explosives blew up in southern Baghdad, killing at least 55 people and wounding more than 60, in the deadliest such attack in Iraq this year.
(Reuters, 2/16/17)(SFC, 2/17/17, p.A2)
2017 Feb 16, In Italy taxi drivers in Rome, Milan and Turin staged wildcat strikes to protest proposed legislation they say will favor Uber and other car-sharing services.
(AP, 2/16/17)
2017 Feb 16, In Kazakhstan Syrian government officials sat face-to-face with rebels for the second time in three weeks, as diplomats stepped up efforts to lay the groundwork for UN-brokered peace talks next week.
(AP, 2/16/17)
2017 Feb 16, Malaysian authorities announced two more arrests in the Feb 13 death of Kim Jong Nam, the North Korean leader's half-brother. Siti Aisyah (25) of Indonesia and her boyfriend were arrested as suspects in Nam’s death.
(AP, 2/16/17)
2017 Feb 16, Myanmar's government said the military has ended its four-month counterinsurgency operation in troubled Rakhine state, where it had been accused of rape, torture and other abuses against Muslim Rohingya minority residents.
(AP, 2/16/17)
2017 Feb 16, NATO said it had received a new and detailed request from Libya's UN-backed government to train and develop its military, depleted by years of conflict and facing an Islamist militant threat as well as division among Libyan militias.
(Reuters, 2/16/17)
2017 Feb 16, Dutch artist and illustrator Dick Bruna (89), creator of beloved children's character Miffy the white rabbit, died in Utrecht. Miffy, the white bunny with two dots for eyes and a cross for her mouth, was inspired by a rabbit seen hopping around the garden during a family seaside holiday in 1955.
(AFP, 2/17/17)
2017 Feb 16, In southern Pakistan 88 people were killed when a suicide bomber detonated explosives at the Sufi Lal Shahbaz Qalandar shrine in the town of Sehwan Sharif. The Islamic State claimed responsibility.
(Reuters, 2/16/17)(AFP, 2/17/17)
2017 Feb 16, Portugal's attorney general's office said prosecutors are bringing charges of corruption, money-laundering and forgery against Angolan Vice President Manuel Vicente as part of an investigation in Lisbon. Vicente is suspected of bribing a Portuguese magistrate to favor him in two investigations.
(AP, 2/16/17)
2017 Feb 16, The Saudi Arabian Interior Ministry said authorities have arrested 18 suspects belonging to the Islamic State group, including bomb makers.
(AP, 2/16/17)
2017 Feb 16, In Saudi Arabia a three-day Comic-Con event opened in the Red Sea city of Jeddah. The festival of anime, pop art, video gaming and film-related events attracted a largely youthful crowd of thousands. On Feb 23 the government's General Authority for Entertainment said organizers of the event would be penalized for an unspecified violation.
(AFP, 2/24/17)
2017 Feb 16, In Somalia two civilians were killed in an al-Shabab mortar attack outside the presidential palace during a handover ceremony for the country's new leader, President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed, also known as Farmajo.
(AP, 2/16/17)
2017 Feb 16, In Syria four Russian servicemen were killed when they their vehicle was struck by a roadside in the center of the country. The loss raised the total Russian combat casualties so far in Syria's war to 27.
(AP, 2/20/17)
2017 Feb 16, A Swedish court sentenced Haisam Omar Sakhanh (46), a Syrian refugee, to life imprisonment for participation in the 2012 mass execution of seven government troops in Syria.
(AP, 2/16/17)
2017 Feb 16, The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said Zimbabwe is likely to be the country hardest hit by an outbreak of armyworms that is destroying crops and threatening food security in southern Africa.
(Reuters, 2/16/17)
2017 Feb 17, The US Senate approved former Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Pruitt, a climate change skeptic, has been an ardent critic of the agency for years.
(SFC, 2/18/17, p.A7)
2017 Feb 17, Craig Deare, whom Pres. Donald Trump appointed a month ago to head the National Security Council's Western Hemisphere division, was escorted out of the Executive Office Building, where he worked in Washington. A day earlier Deare had slammed the Trump administration for its policies on Latin America, specifically its rocky start to relations with Mexico.
(AP, 2/19/17)
2017 Feb 17, A powerful Pacific storm blew into southern California killing at least two people.
(SFC, 2/18/17, p.A9)
2017 Feb 17, Prof. Theodore Lowi (b.1931), Cornell political science scholar, died in Ithaca, NY. His books included “The End of Liberalism: The Second Republic of the United States" (1969), “The Politics of Disorder" (1971) and “American Government: Incomplete Conquest" (1976).
(SSFC, 2/26/17, pp.)
2017 Feb 17, In Afghanistan Taliban forces stormed several Afghan security posts in eastern Kunar province, killing five police officers. Taliban attacks on security posts in Nangarhar province 17 soldiers. 21 militant fighters were also killed.
(AP, 2/17/17)(SFC, 2/18/17, p.A2)
2017 Feb 17, Algeria's military forces killed 9 more suspected extremists in an ongoing operation around Bouira, one of the country's last Islamic militant holdouts.
(AP, 2/17/17)
2017 Feb 17, Bosnia's prosecution office brought charges against Kemal Causevi, a former head of the country's tax authority, over accepting close to 1 million euros ($1.1 million) in bribes to defraud the state of customs revenue. Two men who owned several trade companies were also charged.
(AP, 2/17/17)
2017 Feb 17, Mayor Sadiq Khan said motorists in London who own old polluting vehicles are to be hit with a new charge from October, two days after the EU ordered Britain to cut air pollution.
(AFP, 2/17/17)
2017 Feb 17, In Egypt at least five soldiers were killed and two injured by a roadside bomb in the restive Northern Sinai.
(Reuters, 2/17/17)
2017 Feb 17, Finnish lawmakers rejected a petition from more than 100,000 people demanding the repeal of a law allowing same-sex marriage effective on March 1.
(AP, 2/17/17)
2017 Feb 17, Donald Tsang (72), a former leader of Hong Kong (2005-2012), was convicted of corruption over a luxury apartment in mainland China intended for his retirement.
(AP, 2/17/17)
2017 Feb 17, Indonesia's national police chief said Siti Aisyah, the Indonesian woman arrested for suspected involvement in the killing of the North Korean leader's half-brother in Malaysia, was duped into thinking she was part of a comedy show prank.
(AP, 2/17/17)
2017 Feb 17, In Iraq the Islamic State group attacked a battalion of state-sponsored militia southeast of Tikrit, killing at least eight militia members.
(AP, 2/17/17)
2017 Feb 17, In Iraq US-led military coalition forces destroyed a building in the main medical complex of western Mosul that was suspected of housing an Islamic State command center. The IS soon disputed the assertion, saying in an online statement that the strike killed 18 people, mostly women and children, and wounded 47 others.
(Reuters, 2/18/17)
2017 Feb 17, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu said he would shelve his additional role as communication minister after police questioned him over allegations he negotiated a deal for good press coverage with a newspaper owner.
(Reuters, 2/17/17)
2017 Feb 17, In Kazakhstan seven army soldiers died in an avalanche in the ex-Soviet republic's southern mountains. Rescuers saved 16 other soldiers who had been trapped by the avalanche.
(AP, 2/17/17)
2017 Feb 17, Malaysian police arrested a North Korean man, identified as Ri Jong Chol (b.1970), in connection with the murder of Kim Jong Nam, the estranged half-brother of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Malaysia performed a second autopsy on Nam after the first proved inconclusive and a diplomatic spat over his body escalated.
(Reuters, 2/18/17)(SFC, 2/18/17, p.A2)
2017 Feb 17, In northern Mexico five suspects and a taxi driver were killed in two shootouts between drug cartel gunmen and marines in the border city of Reynosa.
(AP, 2/18/17)
2017 Feb 17, In Montenegro dozens of women who braved cold weather to spend a night outside government headquarters to protest cuts in state aid for mothers of three or more children dispersed and agreed to meet a government delegation next week.
(AP, 2/17/17)
2017 Feb 17, In Morocco hundreds of migrants stormed the border between Morocco and Spain at Ceuta, days after Morocco warned the EU of fresh migrant trouble following a row over a trade deal.
(AFP, 2/17/17)
2017 Feb 17, Mozambique disaster officials said Cyclone Dineo has killed seven people, injured 55 and affected hundreds of thousands across southern Mozambique.
(AFP, 2/17/17)
2017 Feb 17, Nigerian troops and civilian self-defense fighters repelled multiple suicide bombers in Maiduguri. Nine bombers and two civilians were reported killed.
(SFC, 2/18/17, p.A2)
2017 Feb 17, North Korea said it would "categorically reject" the post mortem conducted by Malaysia on one of its citizens who died in Kuala Lumpur this week, and demanded that the body of Kim Jong Nam be released immediately.
(Reuters, 2/17/17)
2017 Feb 17, Pakistani forces said they had killed more than 100 "terrorists" after 88 people died in an attack claimed by the Islamic State group on a Sufi shrine which stoked fears of a fresh surge in militancy.
(AFP, 2/17/17)
2017 Feb 17, In Peru a gunman killed five people and injured nine at a shopping center in Lima.
(Econ, 2/25/17, p.30)
2017 Feb 17, The Philippines' former justice secretary, a senator and prominent critic of President Rodrigo Duterte's deadly anti-drug crackdown, was charged by prosecutors accusing her of receiving bribes from detained drug lords. Sen. Leila de Lima denied the charges. When she was a top human rights official, de Lima tried unsuccessfully to have Duterte prosecuted when he was still a city mayor for unlawful deaths occurring during his deadly anti-drug crackdown.
(AP, 2/17/17)
2017 Feb 17, Polish environmental groups filed a complaint with the European Union against national and local authorities for failing to fight lethal levels of smog. Antiquated coal-fired power plants generate nearly all of Poland's electricity, giving it some of the most toxic air in the 28-member EU. Energy Minister Krzysztof Tchorzewski said pollution does not shorten people's lives.
(AFP, 2/17/17)(Reuters, 2/17/17)
2017 Feb 17, South Korean authorities arrested Lee Jae-yong (48) a vice-chairman at Samsung Electronics, for alleged bribes worth $36 million to win government support for a smooth company leadership transition and a contentious merger of two Samsung companies.
(SFC, 2/18/17, p.A2)
2017 Feb 17, South Sudan's labor minister Gabriel Duop Lam resigned and declared allegiance to rebel leader Riek Machar, making him the second top official to quit in the war-torn country this week.
(AFP, 2/17/17)
2017 Feb 17, In South Sudan Khalid Ono Loki, the former head of military courts, resigned alleging corruption and a military fractured along ethnic lines. It is the third top official in a week to leave while criticizing the government of President Salva Kiir.
(AP, 2/18/17)
2017 Feb 17, The Spanish government said it had approved the extradition of 269 "Chinese citizens" as part of a year-long investigation into an Internet fraud ring operated from several Spanish cities, including Madrid and Barcelona.
(Reuters, 2/18/17)
2017 Feb 17, Spain‘s Princess Cristina was found not guilty of being an accessory to fraud but her husband was convicted and sentenced to more than six years in prison.
(AP, 2/17/17)
2017 Feb 17, Thailand’s PM Prayuth Chan-ocha announced that a government committee has approved construction of an 800-megawatt coal power plant near pristine beaches on the Andaman Sea.
(SFC, 2/18/17, p.A2)
2017 Feb 17, Turkey's military said it was close to taking Syria's al-Bab from Islamic State, but a war monitor said the jihadists still controlled 90 percent of the town itself and that shelling and air strikes had killed dozens of civilians in recent days. Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Turkish shelling and air strikes had killed 45 civilians, including 18 children, during the past 48 hours.
(Reuters, 2/17/17)
2017 Feb 17, In Turkey publishers closed down Girgir magazine, established in 1972 and a once top-selling satirical magazine, following a Moses cartoon that was deemed to be offensive to Jews and Muslims.
(AP, 2/17/17)
2017 Feb 17, In Turkey a car bomb exploded near the lodgings of judges and prosecutors in the mainly Kurdish town of Viransehir in Sanliurfa province. 26 people were soon detained following the attack.
(AP, 2/18/17)
2017 Feb 17, Uganda warned that its resources are strained by the more than 400,000 refugees who have poured into the country in recent months from South Sudan's civil war.
(AP, 2/17/17)
2017 Feb 17, The UN World Meteorological Organization said the extent of sea ice in the Arctic and Antarctic last month was the lowest on record for January, while concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere hit a January record.
(Reuters, 2/17/17)
2017 Feb 18, Omar Abdel Rahman (b.1938), the Egyptian jihadist spiritual leader linked to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, died at the Federal correction Complex in Butner, N.C., While serving a life sentence.
(AFP, 2/18/17)(SSFC, 2/19/17, p.A10)
2017 Feb 18, Clyde Stubblefield (73), a former drummer for James Brown, died in Madison, Wis. His short solo on Brown’s 1970 single “Funky Drummer" was sampled on more than 1,000 songs and served as the backbeat on for countless hip-hop tracks.
(SFC, 2/20/17, pp.)
2017 Feb 18, In Argentina a passenger bus has flipped over on an Andean highway, killing 19 of the 42 people aboard.
(AP, 2/18/17)
2017 Feb 18, In Belgium one person died and 27 were injured, three seriously, when a train derailed shortly after leaving a station east of Brussels.
(AFP, 2/18/17)
2017 Feb 18, China announced that it will temporarily stop its imports of coal from North Korea for the rest of this year (including coal for which customs applications have been made but not yet processed). China will suspend all imports of coal from North Korea starting Feb. 19 as part of its efforts to implement UN sanctions against the country.
(AFP, 2/18/17)(Reuters, 2/19/17)
2017 Feb 18, Thousands of Gambians gathered at Independence Stadium to witness the official inauguration of President Adama Barrow and celebrate the country’s independence anniversary. Barrow said orders have already been given for all those detained without trial to be released.
(AP, 2/19/17)
2017 Feb 18, In western Guatemala an 83-year-old woman and her disabled son were murdered in Flores Costa Cuca, prompting calls for the army to patrol the streets.
(Econ, 2/25/17, p.30)
2017 Feb 18, Kenyan officials said police have arrested two Kenyans who were deported from Turkey on suspicion of training with the Islamic State organization in neighboring Syria.
(AP, 2/18/17)
2017 Feb 18, Tens of thousands of Malaysians rallied in Kuala Lumpur to support the adoption of a strict Islamic penal code, a proposal religious minorities fear could infringe their rights.
(Reuters, 2/18/17)
2017 Feb 18, Pakistani authorities shut down a second key border crossing into Afghanistan, halting trade supplies to the neighboring landlocked country and increasing tensions between the two nations in the wake of a bloody suicide bombing at a beloved shrine in Pakistan.
(AP, 2/18/17)
2017 Feb 18, In the Philippines thousands of Catholic faithful gathered in Manila for a "show of force" in the biggest rally yet to stop extrajudicial killings in President Rodrigo Duterte's drug war.
(AFP, 2/18/17)
2017 Feb 18, The Kremlin announced that Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed an order for Russia to recognize passports and other documents issued by separatist rebel authorities in eastern Ukraine. Russian lawmaker, Vladimir Dzhabarov, said the measure does not formally recognize the rebel authorities as legitimate.
(AP, 2/18/17)
2017 Feb 18, Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said after meeting with his Ukrainian, German and French counterparts in Munich that a Feb. 20 ceasefire between Ukraine and Russian-backed separatists has been agreed.
(Reuters, 2/18/17)
2017 Feb 18, In Saudi Arabia one person was killed and three others injured as a result of an Aramco oil pipeline leak in the east of the kingdom.
(AP, 2/19/17)
2017 Feb 18, South African President Jacob Zuma (74) said that the state's anti-graft agency, the Special Investigating Unit (SIU), was owed almost 390 million rand ($30 million) by government departments and called on them to repay the debt.
(Reuters, 2/18/17)
2017 Feb 18, In Spain thousands of protesters marched in Barcelona to demand that Spain's conservative-led government increase its efforts to take in refugees from war-torn countries like Syria. Spain has taken in just 1,100 refugees of the over 17,000 it has pledged to accept.
(AP, 2/18/17)
2017 Feb 18, Sri Lankan police arrested an army officer and two soldiers over the alleged abduction, assault and illegal detention of journalist Keith Noyahr in 2008, during the war against separatist rebels.
(Reuters, 2/18/17)
2017 Feb 18, Syrian warplanes bombarded a besieged rebel-held district of Homs, killing at least two people and raising the death toll from nearly two weeks of air strikes there to more than 20. Warplanes also hit insurgent-controlled areas in Deraa in southern Syria during a series of heavy raids over the last day.
(Reuters, 2/18/17)
2017 Feb 18, In northern Syria a US-backed predominantly Kurdish force captured the village of Jawees in an ongoing move to close in on the Islamic State de facto capital of Raqqa.
(SSFC, 2/19/17, p.A2)
2017 Feb 18, Taiwan said it "deeply regrets" a Feb 17 decision by the Spanish government to deport to China around 200 Taiwanese nationals suspected of telecom fraud.
(Reuters, 2/18/17)
2017 Feb 18, Hundreds of Venezuelans marched to demand the release of opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez, the annual demonstration taking on added urgency after President Donald Trump met with the activist's wife and his administration slapped drug sanctions on the country's vice president.
(AP, 2/18/17)
2017 Feb 19, In Florida a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket successfully launched space station supplies from NASA’s launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center.
(SFC, 2/20/17, p.A7)
2017 Feb 19, In Massachusetts hundreds scientists, environmental activists and their supporters rallied in Boston to protest what they see as increasing threats to science and research in the US.
(SFC, 2/20/17, p.A6)
2017 Feb 19, In Abu Dhabi Australia's Defence Industry Minister Christopher Pyne and Sheikh Mohammed, who is also Deputy Supreme Commander of the UAE Armed Forces, met on the sidelines of the biennial International Defence Exhibition and Conference (IDEX). The two agreed to consider a 10-year defense plan that could include more than 1 billion Australian dollars ($767 million) in sales to the UAE.
(Reuters, 2/19/17)
2017 Feb 19, In Colombia a bombing in Bogota killed a police officer and seriously wounded several others. ELN rebels later claimed responsibility.
(AP, 2/27/17)
2017 Feb 19, Ecuador held elections choosing between a candidate who vowed to continue President Rafael Correa's populist platform or one of several more conservative contenders who pledge to attack corruption and cut taxes to stimulate the Andean nation's flagging economy. Ruling party leftist Lenin Moreno was just shy of a first-round victory and faced ex-banker Guillermo Lasso in a runoff on April 2.
(AP, 2/19/17)(SFC, 2/22/17, p.A2)
2017 Feb 19, French activists demonstrated in Paris and other cities against corruption amid a presidential campaign marked by a fake jobs investigation and other legal scandals.
(AP, 2/19/17)
2017 Feb 19, Gambian police arrested 51 people in a former stronghold of ex-president Yahya Jammeh for harassing followers of new leader Adama Barrow, amid lingering tensions following Jammeh's flight into exile.
(Reuters, 2/20/17)
2017 Feb 19, Thousands of Georgians rallied in the capital in support of Rustavi-2, the country's opposition-minded television station, that they suspect is about to be transferred to a more government-friendly owner.
(AP, 2/19/17)
2017 Feb 19, In Iraq US-backed Iraqi forces launched a ground offensive to dislodge Islamic State militants from their remaining stronghold in western Mosul. Save the Children warned that around 350,000 children are trapped in western Mosul.
(Reuters, 2/19/17)(AFP, 2/19/17)
2017 Feb 19, Italy's ex-prime minister Matteo Renzi resigned as head of the center-left Democratic Party (PD), triggering a leadership battle as the country's ruling party grapples with the threat of a split.
(AFP, 2/19/17)
2017 Feb 19, Kuwait's supreme court sentenced a top bureaucrat to 10 years in jail for joining and fighting with the Islamic State jihadist group in Syria and Iraq.
(AP, 2/19/17)
2017 Feb 19, Malaysian police said four North Korean suspects in the murder of Kim Jong Nam, the estranged half-brother of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, fled Malaysia on the day he was attacked at Kuala Lumpur airport and apparently killed by a fast-acting poison.
(Reuters, 2/19/17)
2017 Feb 19, The Mongolian government and envoys from the International Monetary Fund said that they and other partners have agreed on terms for a more than $5 billion loan package to the north Asian country to help get its economy back on track. The IMF agreed to lend Mongolia $440 million over three years to help it avoid default and rebuild its reserves.
(AP, 2/19/17)(Econ, 2/25/17, p.32)
2017 Feb 19, Hamas military courts in Gaza sentenced three Palestinians to death for allegedly spying for Israel and upheld the sentences of three others.
(AP, 2/19/17)
2017 Feb 19, The Philippines' Bureau of Immigration arrested Cody Dean Turner. The convicted American pedophile, wanted by US authorities for a string of crimes, will be deported for being an undocumented and undesirable alien.
(AP, 2/22/17)
2017 Feb 19, In Somalia a car bomb ripped through a market in Mogadishu, killing 39 people and injuring around 50.
(Reuters, 2/19/17)
2017 Feb 19, In Sri Lanka at least 11 people were killed and 24 others rescued after the boat they were traveling in capsized off of the southwestern coast.
(AP, 2/19/17)
2017 Feb 19, Syrian government forces fired rockets at a rebel-held area on Damascus's outskirts, pressing an attack that began the day before and has killed up to 16 people.
(Reuters, 2/19/17)
2017 Feb 19, The United Arab Emirates (UAE) awarded 4.5 billion dirhams ($1.2 billion) in military procurement deals, part of a total of 20 billion dirhams worth of purchases it expects to make at an arms fair this week.
(Reuters, 2/19/17)
2017 Feb 19, The United Arab Emirates' main state oil company said it has signed a deal giving China National Petroleum Company an 8 percent stake in a major onshore oil project. The Abu Dhabi National Oil Company said CNPC will pay an initial $1.77 billion for the concession operated by the Abu Dhabi Company for Onshore Petroleum Operations, also known as ADCO.
(AP, 2/19/17)
2017 Feb 20, US Pres. Donald Trump appointed Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster as his new national security advisor to succeed the disgraced Mike Flynn.
(SFC, 2/21/17, p.A4)(Econ, 2/18/17, p.22)
2017 Feb 20, Angola's likely next president Joao Lourenco declared war on graft in the notoriously corrupt country, as he starts to shape his public image ahead of elections due in August.
(AFP, 2/20/17)
2017 Feb 20, Bangladesh's foreign minister called on the international community on to address Myanmar's treatment of its Rohingya Muslim minority, tens of thousands of whom have fled in recent months to Bangladesh from its mainly Buddhist neighbor.
(Reuters, 2/20/17)
2017 Feb 20, In France Vjeran Tomic (49), a criminal known as "Spiderman," was jailed for eight years for stealing five paintings in 2010 worth 100 million euros ($106 million) from a Paris museum.
(AP, 2/20/17)
2017 Feb 20, Greece agreed to compromise on new bailout reforms in a bid to break a deadlock with its EU-IMF creditors that has sparked fears of a new Grexit crisis. Greece agreed to legislate new reforms to come into effect in 2019. In return, Greece's creditors agreed to send their bailout inspectors back to Athens next week for further talks to complete a long overdue review of Greece's progress in its bailout program.
(AFP, 2/20/17)(AP, 2/24/17)
2017 Feb 20, Police in Guinea fired tear gas as hundreds of students armed with stones and sticks demonstrated in Conakry over strikes by teachers that have blocked them from going to classes for weeks. The government late today signed an agreement with the country's two largest teachers' unions, ending strikes that closed schools since the beginning of the month. Teachers would have to wait until September for salary increases.
(AP, 2/20/17)(AP, 2/21/17)
2017 Feb 20, Iraqi forces backed by jets and helicopters battled their way towards southern Mosul and prepared to take on the Islamic State group's stronghold in the city's west bank.
(AFP, 2/20/17)
2017 Feb 20, Jamal al-Harith (50), a former Guantanamo Bay detainee released in 2004, died in a suicide bomb attack on Iraqi-led coalition forces near Mosul. He was a Muslim convert from Manchester, England, born as Ronald Fiddler.
(http://tinyurl.com/zjw8622)(SFC, 2/23/17, p.A3)
2017 Feb 20, At least 74 bodies of African migrants washed ashore in western Libya, the latest tragedy at sea along a perilous but increasingly popular trafficking route to Europe.
(AP, 2/21/17)
2017 Feb 20, In Libya 13 African migrants suffocated inside a shipping container while being transported over four days from the central town of Bani Walid to Khoms. The dead were among 69 migrants, many from Mali, who were packed into the container.
(AP, 2/23/17)
2017 Feb 20, In Morocco more than 350 migrants stormed the Spanish border at Ceuta, days after one of the largest rush of arrivals over the frontier in more than a decade.
(AP, 2/20/17)
2017 Feb 20, Norway said it has joined an international initiative to raise millions of dollars to replace shortfalls left by US President Donald Trump's ban on US-funded groups worldwide providing information on abortion.
(Reuters, 2/20/17)
2017 Feb 20, Pakistani airstrikes killed "dozens" of militants in the Wucha Bibi area of North Waziristan along the Afghan border.
(AP, 2/20/17)
2017 Feb 20, Philippine retired policeman, Arturo Lascanas, said that Pres. Rodrigo Duterte had operated a "Davao death squad".
(Reuters, 2/21/17)
2017 Feb 20, Portugal's government says it has paid back to the IMF half the money it received from the institution as part of a bailout in 2011.
(AP, 2/20/17)
2017 Feb 20, A Portuguese court ordered police to extradite former CIA agent Sabrina de Sousa to Italy, where she is due to serve a four-year prison sentence. De Sousa was among 26 Americans convicted for kidnapping suspect Osama Moustafa Hassan Nas, also known as Abu Omar, from a Milan street on Feb. 17, 2003.
(AP, 2/21/17)
2017 Feb 20, Vitaly Churkin, Russia's envoy to the United Nations, died suddenly in New York, one day before turning 65.
(AFP, 2/20/17)
2017 Feb 20, South Sudan declared famine in some parts of the country, with more than three years of war leaving nearly five million hungry in what aid groups called a "man-made" tragedy.
(AFP, 2/20/17)
2017 Feb 20, Syrian government forces escalated their bombing campaign around Damascus, raining shells down on rebel territory and sending out a "bloody message" just days before renewed peace talks in Geneva. At least 7 people were reported killed.
(AFP, 2/20/17)
2017 Feb 20, In northern Syria 11 members of the same family were killed on as Turkey-backed Syrian rebels advanced on the town of Al-Bab held by Islamic State jihadists.
(AFP, 2/20/17)
2017 Feb 20, Turkey dismissed 227 more judges and prosecutors as part of investigations into last July's failed coup, meaning close to 4,000 members of the judiciary have now been purged.
(Reuters, 2/20/17)
2017 Feb 20, In Uganda the African Gold Refiner, primarily owned by a Belgian investor, was launched amid concerns about the source of its minerals.
(AP, 2/20/17)
2017 Feb 20, Ukraine's military accused pro-Moscow rebels of breaking a new ceasefire deal barely hours after it came into effect, as Western powers warned Russia over its actions in the former Soviet state. One soldier was killed and another wounded in fighting in the country's separatist east despite the new truce that started at midnight.
(AFP, 2/20/17)
2017 Feb 21, The Washington-based Syria Institute accused the Syrian government of depopulating Sunni-majority areas in Homs as it fights to consolidate its power.
(AP, 2/21/17)
2017 Feb 21, In California former Kenneth Arrow (95), a former Stanford professor and Nobel prize winner in economics (1972), died at his home in Palo Alto.
(SFC, 2/22/17, p.A12)
2017 Feb 21, A federal judge ruled that Texas cannot cut off Medicaid dollars to Planned Parenthood over secretly recorded videos taken by antiabortion activists in 2015.
(SFC, 2/22/17, p.A4)
2017 Feb 21, Restaurant Brands, created by the 2014 merger of Burger King and Tim Horton, said it is buying fried chicken chain Popeyes for $1.8 billion.
(SFC, 2/22/17, p.C2)
2017 Feb 21, Yahoo announced a $350 million hit on its previously announced $4.8 billion sale to Verizon in a concession for security lapses that exposed personal information stored in more than 1 billion Yahoo user accounts.
(AP, 2/21/17)
2017 Feb 21, Kenneth Arrow (b.1921), 1972 Nobel Prize winning American economist, died.
(Econ, 3/4/17, p.62)
2017 Feb 21, In Australia a light plane crashed into a shopping mall shortly after takeoff in the city of Melbourne. The Australian pilot and four American tourists were killed including Russell Munsch, a founding Texas law firm partner who had litigated some of the most prominent bankruptcy cases in the US.
(AP, 2/21/17)
2017 Feb 21, An Austrian court approved a US extradition request for Ukrainian oligarch Dymitro Firtash, suspected of paying millions of dollars in bribes to Indian officials.
(AP, 2/21/17)
2017 Feb 21, Azerbaijan's Pres. Ilham Aliyev (55) appointed his wife Mehriban (52) as the first vice president of the, the person next in line in the nation's power hierarchy.
(AP, 2/21/17)
2017 Feb 21, Bahraini lawmakers voted to change the constitution to allow civilians to be tried in military courts. Between February 9 and February 19, police arrested 20 residents of Shiite villages, aged between 20 and 65 and including four women, in what the government described as a crackdown on "terror cells".
(AP, 2/21/17)(AFP, 2/22/17)
2017 Feb 21, Chinese police and media reports said a prefecture in restive Xinjiang region has ordered all vehicles to be equipped with GPS-like tracking software. An official said the policy was needed so that drivers "can be tracked wherever they go" and residents had until June 30 to comply.
(AFP, 2/21/17)
2017 Feb 21, Authorities in southwest Germany authorized a ban on older diesel cars from driving in the city of Stuttgart starting next year.
(AP, 2/21/17)
2017 Feb 21, Ghana's President Nana Akufo-Addo said that he inherited an economy reeling from huge fiscal deficits, rising inflation and high unemployment despite an IMF program designed to stimulate growth.
(AFP, 2/21/17)
2017 Feb 21, Israeli Sergeant Elor Azaria, who killed a wounded and incapacitated Palestinian assailant on March 24, 2016, was sentenced to 18 months' imprisonment, in a show of leniency that drew Palestinian outrage after one of the most divisive trials in Israel's history.
(Reuters, 2/21/17)
2017 Feb 21, Investigating magistrates in Italy froze millions of euros worth of assets belonging to prominent banker Giampietro Nattino, who they believe used the Vatican bank and another Holy See financial department for market manipulation.
(Reuters, 2/21/17)
2017 Feb 21, Thousands of Italian taxi drivers protesting legislation they say will favor Uber clashed with riot police, intensifying a weeklong cab strike that has crippled transportation in Rome, Milan and Turin.
(AP, 2/21/17)
2017 Feb 21, The Mexican Institute of Industrial Property, or IMPI for its initials in Spanish, approved three Trump trademarks. A fourth was granted last Oct. 6, about a month before the US election. The new approvals, valid through 2026, list the trademark owner as the company DTTM Operations LLC, with an address in the Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in New York.
(AP, 3/12/17)
2017 Feb 21, Dutch lawmakers voted in favor of tolerating the cultivation of cannabis, a move that could bring to an end a key paradox of the relaxed Dutch policy on marijuana and hashish.
(AP, 2/21/17)
2017 Feb 21, In northwestern Pakistan a group of suicide bombers with grenades and assault rifles struck outside a courthouse, killing six people in the town of Tangi in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. The attack was claimed by a Taliban splinter group.
(AP, 2/21/17)
2017 Feb 21, Philippine Senator Leila de Lima, a staunch critic of Pres. Rodrigo Duterte, urged the Cabinet to declare the president unfit to rule, describing him as a "sociopathic serial killer" because of his war on drugs and allegations he once ran a hit squad.
(Reuters, 2/21/17)
2017 Feb 21, Romanian MPs voted to definitively shelve a controversial decree that had sought to water down anti-corruption legislation but ended up unleashing the nation's biggest protests in a quarter-century.
(AFP, 2/21/17)
2017 Feb 21, In South Africa Susan Howarth died, two days after an attack at her farm. Her British husband, Robert Lynn, survived and has said he was burned with a blowtorch and slashed with a knife by assailants demanding money. Three suspects were being held without bail. Their next court appearance was set for March 10.
(AP, 2/28/17)
2017 Feb 21, Swedish police began investigating a riot that broke out overnight in a predominantly immigrant suburb in Stockholm after officers arrested a suspect on drug charges.
(AP, 2/21/17)
2017 Feb 21, In Turkey Figen Yuksekdag, the co-chair of the opposition pro-Kurdish party, lost her seat in parliament after an appeals court confirmed her conviction on terrorism-related charges. The party has appealed to the European Court of Human Rights seeking the lawmakers' release, so that they may be allowed to campaign ahead of a referendum on expanding President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's powers.
(AP, 2/21/17)
2017 Feb 21, Ukraine's Pres. Petro Poroshenko called for new sanctions against Russia over its decision to recognize passports issued by separatist authorities in eastern Ukraine, while the Kremlin accused Ukraine of denying vital documents to people in the rebel regions.
(AP, 2/21/17)
2017 Feb 21, UNICEF said nearly 1.4 million children are at "imminent risk" of death in famines in Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan and Yemen.
(Reuters, 2/21/17)
2017 Feb 22, The US Supreme Court sided with California-based Life Technologies Corp. in a patent infringement case that limits the international reach of US patent laws. The justices ruled unanimously that the company's shipment of a single part of a patented invention for assembly in another country did not violate patent laws.
(AP, 2/22/17)
2017 Feb 22, More than 6,000 e-mails were made public that showed close ties between Scott Pruitt, the new administrator of the EPA, with major oil and gas producers, electric utilities and political groups tied to the Koch brothers and their efforts to roll back environmental regulations during Pruitt’s tenure as attorney general of Oklahoma.
(SFC, 2/23/17, p.A4)
2017 Feb 22, In Kansas a racially motivated shooting at a crowded suburban Kansas City bar left Srinivas Kuchibhotla of India dead and two other men hospitalized. Adam Purinton (51) used "racial slurs" before he opened fire as patrons of Austins Bar and Grill in Olathe watched the University of Kansas-TCU basketball game on television. Ian Grillot (24) ran at the gunman to stop him from fleeing and was shot in the hand and chest. On June 9 a federal grand jury indicted Purinton on hate crime charges. On August 8, 2018, Purinton was sentenced to three consecutive life terms.
(AP, 2/24/17)(SFC, 3/29/17, p.A4)(SSFC, 6/11/17, p.A11)(SFC, 8/8/18, p.A4)
2017 Feb 22, In North Dakota opponents of the Dakota Access pipeline burned structures in their camp near Cannon Ball as part of a leaving ceremony ahead of a government deadline to get off of federal property.
(SFC, 2/23/17, p.A4)
2017 Feb 22, A navigation error forced SpaceX to delay its shipment to the International Space Station (ISS), following an otherwise smooth flight from NASA's historic moon pad. The delivery was completed the next day.
(AP, 2/22/17)(SFC, 2/24/17, p.A12)
2017 Feb 22, Amnesty Int’l. released a 408-page annual report of rights abuses and named US Pres. Donald Trump, Hungarian PM Viktor Orban, Turkish Pres. Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Philippines Pres. Rodrigo Duterte among leaders “wielding a toxic agenda" that dehumanizes entire groups of people.
(SFC, 2/23/17, p.A3)
2017 Feb 22, The British government announced that Cressida Dick (56) is to be commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, making her the first woman to serve as Britain's most senior police officer.
(AFP, 2/22/17)
2017 Feb 22, Ian Stewart, the partner of British children's author Helen Bailey, was convicted of killing her and dumping her body in a cesspool in a financially motivated murder. The body of Bailey (51) was found last July in a cesspool under the garage of the home she shared with Stewart. The next day Stewart was sentenced to at least 34 years in prison.
(AP, 2/22/17)(AP, 2/23/17)
2017 Feb 22, A British national was arrested at a London airport on suspicion of staging a cyber-attack on Deutsche Telekom last November that knocked around a million German households offline.
(AFP, 2/23/17)
2017 Feb 22, China announced plans to have 50,000 football academies by 2025 as part of an ambitious blueprint to grow into a soccer superpower.
(AP, 2/22/17)
2017 Feb 22, The government of CongoDRC said that it was opening an investigation after video this month showed soldiers massacring civilians in central Kasai province.
(SFC, 2/23/17, p.A2)
2017 Feb 22, In Egypt militants killed a Coptic Christian man and burned his son alive, then dumped their bodies on a roadside in el-Arish. Three other Christians in Sinai were killed earlier, either in drive-by shootings or with militants storming their homes and shops.
(AP, 2/24/17)
2017 Feb 22, France and Germany won backing from the European Union's executive for proposals to tighten security across Europe, which include giving more powers to governments to monitor frontiers with other EU states.
(Reuters, 2/22/17)
2017 Feb 22, Haiti’s President Jovenel Moise and two legislative leaders agreed upon the nomination of Dr. Jack Guy Lafontant as prime minister.
(AP, 2/23/17)
2017 Feb 22, Iraq's government-sanctioned paramilitary forces, made up mainly of Shiite militiamen, launched a new push to capture villages west of the city of Mosul from Islamic State militants.
(AP, 2/22/17)
2017 Feb 22, In Niger at least 15 soldiers were killed in an attack by Islamic extremists near the village of Interzawane close to the border with Mali.
(SFC, 2/24/17, p.A2)
2017 Feb 22, In northeastern Nigeria at least seven soldiers were killed in a Boko Haram attack on military positions in the town of Gajiram.
(AFP, 2/24/17)
2017 Feb 22, Pakistan said it will send paramilitary forces to crack down on Islamic militants in the Punjab province, a move that the ruling party of PM Nawaz Sharif had long rejected because of opposition among its Islamist supporters.
(AP, 2/22/17)
2017 Feb 22, In Puerto Rico thousands of public university students went on strike to protest looming budget cuts amid a deep economic crisis.
(AP, 2/22/17)
2017 Feb 22, Federal officials in Puerto Rico indicted three doctors and the owner of a medical equipment company in a $1.3 million Medicare fraud scheme.
(AP, 2/22/17)
2017 Feb 22, Russia's highest court overturned the conviction of Ildar Dadin, a jailed opposition activist, and ordered him released more than a year after he was sent to prison. In December 2015 became the first person to be convicted of breaking a new law against protesters.
(AP, 2/22/17)
2017 Feb 22, Russia successfully launched a cargo ship to the International Space Station (ISS) from Kazakhstan.
(AP, 2/22/17)
2017 Feb 22, Somalia's new Pres. Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed was inaugurated, promising his people that the era of al Shabaab and other Islamist militant groups was over. He called on al Shabaab's thousands of fighters to surrender, promising them "a good life" if they did.
(Reuters, 2/22/17)
2017 Feb 22, A South African court ruled that the government's decision to withdraw from the International Criminal Court (ICC) without parliament's approval was unconstitutional.
(AP, 2/22/17)
2017 Feb 22, The Syrian army and its allies took a small district on the outskirts of Aleppo from rebels.
(Reuters, 2/22/17)
2017 Feb 22, Turkey’s defense ministry officials said they will allow female soldiers to wear a headscarf with their uniforms, marking a symbolic shift for a military that has traditionally seen itself as a guardian of state secularism.
(Reuters, 2/22/17)
2017 Feb 22, In Geneva WTO Director-General Roberto Azevedo said that the required two-thirds of member states have ratified the first multilateral trade agreement reached under the World Trade Organization since it was created over a generation ago.
(AP, 2/22/17)
2017 Feb 22, Yemen's President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi said that Saudi Arabia has earmarked $10 billion in aid for the reconstruction of provinces retaken from Shiite Huthi rebels.
(AFP, 2/22/17)
2017 Feb 22, In Yemen Major General Ahmed Saif al-Yafei, second-in-command of Yemen’s army, was killed outside the strategic the Red Sea coast city of al-Mokha when a missile fired by the Iran-aligned Houthi movement hit an army camp.
(Reuters, 2/22/17)
2017 Feb 23, President Donald Trump said he wants to ensure the US nuclear arsenal is at the "top of the pack," saying the United States has fallen behind in its weapons capacity.
(Reuters, 2/24/17)
2017 Feb 23, It was reported that agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) in southern Virginia had used shadowy cigarette sales to funnel millions of dollars into a secret bank account to finance undercover investigations and pay informants in an effort to catch cigarette smugglers.
(SFC, 2/23/17, p.A12)
2017 Feb 23, Albania's main opposition Democratic party boycotted parliament in their street protest calling for free and fair elections, saying they don't trust the left-wing government to hold the June 18 parliamentary elections fairly and want a caretaker cabinet instead.
(AP, 2/23/17)
2017 Feb 23, Albanian police said they have launched a nationwide operation to try to prevent the planting of cannabis.
(AP, 2/23/17)
2017 Feb 23, Australia's highest-paid public servant announced his resignation, two weeks after the revelation that he made 5.6 million Australian dollars ($4.3 million) last year sparked a public furor and created a political headache for the government. Lebanese-born former banker Ahmed Fahour said he was leaving because Australia Post had transformed from a traditional mail service to a parcel and e-commerce business during his seven years at the helm.
(AP, 2/23/17)
2017 Feb 23, Storm Doris slammed into the British Isles causing flight disruptions at Europe's busiest air hub and train cancellations. One person was reported killed.
(AFP, 2/23/17)
2017 Feb 23, A Cambodian court sentenced prominent land rights activist Tep Vanny to 2 1/2 years in prison on charges of committing violence at a protest she helped lead outside of Prime Minister Hun Sen's residence in March 2013. Vanny said all the protesters in the incident were women, and were so weakened by a long walk to the prime minister's house that they were in no shape to beat up government security forces, and in fact were beaten by them.
(AP, 2/23/17)
2017 Feb 23, Congo's army said has killed at least 16 former members of a rebel group after they re-entered the country's east. Fighting near Rutshuru began a day earlier and by today the army had captured 68 former M23 rebels and 39 others surrendered.
(AP, 2/23/17)
2017 Feb 23, In Egypt suspected Islamic militants gunned down a Coptic Christian man and stabbed his daughter to death inside his home in el-Arish, northern Sinai, the seventh such killing in a month's time in the restive region.
(AP, 2/24/17)
2017 Feb 23, Hundreds of French high-school students staged an unauthorized anti-police rally, blocking the entrances to a dozen schools in Paris in the latest in a series of protests over the Feb 2 alleged rape of a young black man with a police baton.
(Reuters, 2/23/17)
2017 Feb 23, Iraqi forces thrust into Mosul airport on the southern edge of the jihadist stronghold for the first time since the Islamic State group overran the region in 2014.
(AFP, 2/23/17)
2017 Feb 23, An Israeli court ordered Nael Barghouti, a senior Hamas member, to complete his life sentence, after the man was freed in a 2011 swap of hundreds of inmates for an Israeli soldier held by Hamas.
(AP, 2/23/17)
2017 Feb 23, An Israeli fighter jet shot down a drone belonging to the Islamist group Hamas that had taken off from the Gaza Strip.
(Reuters, 2/23/17)
2017 Feb 23, In the disputed region of Kashmir three Indian soldiers and a woman were killed when rebels ambushed soldiers in the southern Shopian area.
(AP, 2/23/17)
2017 Feb 23, In Libya fighting erupted between two rival armed groups in eastern Tripoli after one accused the other of kidnapping four of its members.
(AFP, 2/25/17)
2017 Feb 23, The Mexican government made clear to visiting US emissaries that it will not accept deportees from third countries under any circumstances.
(AP, 2/24/17)
2017 Feb 23, The International Boundary and Water Commission notified the Tijuana State Public Service Commission of a sewage spill from Mexico's Tijuana River. US officials believed it had started at least two weeks earlier and dumped roughly 143 million gallons (541 million liters) of sewage into the Pacific Ocean. The spill polluted 20 miles (32 km) of coastland from the areas of Rosarito in Mexico to Coronado in California.
(Reuters, 3/3/17)
2017 Feb 23, In Pakistan an explosion in a building under construction ripped through a market in an upscale neighborhood in Lahore, killing ten people. Officials later said it was most probably an accident caused by a gas leak, not a bomb.
(AP, 2/23/17)(Reuters, 2/24/17)
2017 Feb 23, In the Philippines an arrest warrant was issued for Senator Leila de Lima (57), but she dodged police and sought refuge in the Senate. She has spent nearly a decade trying to link Duterte to death squads that have allegedly killed thousands of people.
(AFP, 2/23/17)
2017 Feb 23, The South African government called for calm after a wave of xenophobic violence in which dozens of shops and houses owned by immigrants have been torched and looted.
(AFP, 2/23/17)
2017 Feb 23, Spain's National Court has sentenced Rodrigo Rato, a former head of the International Monetary Fund, to 4 ½ years in prison for misusing a Spanish bank's corporate credit card during his 2010-12 leadership of Bankia.
(AP, 2/23/17)
2017 Feb 23, Syrian jets bombed rebel-held areas of Aleppo, Deraa and Hama provinces and insurgents fired rockets at government targets, just as peace talks were set to resume in Geneva.
(Reuters, 2/23/17)
2017 Feb 23, The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said IS fighters were still present in parts of Al-Bab and that rebels were in control of less than half of it. Turkish-backed Syrian rebels said they had fully captured the town of Al-Bab from the Islamic State group, marking a key defeat for the jihadists after weeks of heavy fighting.
(AFP, 2/23/17)
2017 Feb 23, Syrian peace talks under the auspices of the United Nations resumed in Geneva, 10 months after falling apart over escalating bloodshed in the war-torn country. The UN's Syria envoy met rival negotiators, but even getting them into the same room appeared uncertain as hopes remained slim for a breakthrough.
(AP, 2/23/17)(AFP, 2/23/17)
2017 Feb 23, UN aid agencies and donor countries gathered in Oslo for a two-day meeting to raise emergency aid for millions of people threatened by famine in the Lake Chad region, which comprises northeast Nigeria, northern Cameroon, western Chad and southeast Niger.
(AFP, 2/23/17)
2017 Feb 24, In Afghanistan at least 10 police officers and the wife of a police commander were killed in an ambush by Islamic States group militants in northern Zawzjan province.
(AP, 2/25/17)
2017 Feb 24, In Bangladesh thousands of people marched in Dhaka to demand a Lady Justice statue, installed last December, be removed from the Supreme Court complex. Islamists oppose idol worship and consider the Lady Justice statue anti-Islamic.
(AP, 2/24/17)
2017 Feb 24, Revelers across Brazil began Carnival celebrations, taking to the streets to dance, drink beer and spirits, and blow off steam at a time of economic angst and fury with politicians over a sprawling corruption scandal.
(AP, 2/25/17)
2017 Feb 24, Egyptian airport officials said that authorities are more than doubling the cost of entry visas for foreign visitors starting next week. It was reported that inflation reached almost 30 percent in January, up five percent over the previous month, driven by the floatation of the Egyptian pound and slashing of fuel subsidies enacted by President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi in November.
(AP, 2/24/17)
2017 Feb 24, France's centrist presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron (39) gave the first clear outlines of his economic program, promising a mix of public spending cuts and fresh investment to stimulate sluggish growth.
(AFP, 2/24/17)
2017 Feb 24, Guatemala's immigration office ordered the expulsion of a ship run by a Dutch nonprofit organization that performs free abortions onboard in international waters. The ship, operated by Women on Waves, travels the globe offering abortion services to women in countries where the procedure is illegal.
(AP, 2/25/17)
2017 Feb 24, Guyana said it is investigating allegations that the Chinese embassy has been using its diplomatic status to bring in tax-free goods from China and distribute them to local merchants.
(AP, 2/24/17)
2017 Feb 24, Iraq's PM Haider al-Abbadi said he had ordered the Iraqi air force to strike Islamic State positions inside Syria in retaliation for recent bomb attacks in Baghdad.
(Reuters, 2/24/17)
2017 Feb 24, Iraqi forces entered west Mosul neighborhoods, a key stronghold in the shrinking "caliphate" of the Islamic State group, which replied with deadly suicide attacks in Iraq and Syria.
(AFP, 2/24/17)
2017 Feb 24, Italian police said nearly 100 staff at the Loreto Mare hospital in Naples have been questioned in connection with a widespread absenteeism scandal, including a doctor who skived off to play tennis.
(AFP, 2/24/17)
2017 Feb 24, Malaysian police said sometime in the hours after poisoning Kim Jong Nam, the half-brother of North Korea's leader, one of his two attackers began to vomit. It was apparently an early indication of the immensely powerful toxin that was used in the killing: the chemical warfare agent VX.
(AP, 2/24/17)
2017 Feb 24, In Norway fourteen donor countries, with the US conspicuously absent, pledged $672 million in emergency aid for people threatened by famine after eight years of Boko Haram violence in the Lake Chad region, but the sum is just a fraction of what the UN says is needed.
(AFP, 2/24/17)
2017 Feb 24, A Pakistani court acquitted Mohammad Ishaq, an Islamic preacher who was sentenced to death four years ago on charges of blasphemy. In 2013 a citizen had accused him of claiming in conversation to actually be God.
(AP, 2/28/17)
2017 Feb 24, Hundreds of Palestinian protesters clashed with Israeli soldiers in the West Bank city of Hebron on the anniversary of a 1994 massacre carried out by a far-right Jewish settler.
(AFP, 2/24/17)
2017 Feb 24, Leila de Lima, Philippine senator and staunch critic of President Rodrigo Duterte's war on drugs, was in police custody following her high-profile arrest for drugs offences that she described as a vendetta that would fail to silence her.
(Reuters, 2/24/17)
2017 Feb 24, Slovenia introduced a law on same-sex partnership that grants legal rights to gay unions but does not allow them to adopt or undergo in-vitro fertilization.
(AP, 2/24/17)
2017 Feb 24, South African police fired stun grenades, rubber bullets and water cannon Friday as the latest wave of anti-immigrant protests broke out in Pretoria, while President Jacob Zuma condemned anti-foreigner violence and appealed for calm. Police said 136 people had been arrested in the past 24 hours.
(AP, 2/24/17)
2017 Feb 24, In Syria an Islamic State car bomb killed 51 people in the village of Sousian held by rebels. A second blast took place 2 km south of Sousian later today.
(Reuters, 2/24/17)(AFP, 2/24/17)
2017 Feb 24, Two Turkish soldiers were killed while clearing mines in the town of Tadef south of al-Bab, Syria.
(Reuters, 2/24/17)
2017 Feb 24, In Yemen a suicide bomber killed eight people at the entrance to the Najda Army Camp in Zinjibar, Abyan province. Twenty rebels and six tribal fighters were killed in heavy fighting near Walad Rabi district, Baida province. Nine other rebels died when tribal fighters ambushed their convoy in the Sawmaa region.
(AFP, 2/24/17)
2017 Feb 25, Donald Trump announced he will skip the annual White House correspondents' dinner on April 29, the first US president to do so in 36 years. The tradition began in 1921 in which journalists invite the US president for a light-hearted roast. Richard Nixon, who despised the media, skipped the event in 1972. Ronald Reagan missed the event in 1981 when he was recovering after being shot in an assassination attempt.
(AFP, 2/26/17)(SSFC, 2/26/17, p.A10)
2017 Feb 25, In Atlanta the Democratic Party’s 447 National Committee members elected former Obama labor secretary Tom Perez to be their new party chair. Perez became the first Latino to hold the post. Perez tapped runner-up Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) as deputy chair.
(SSFC, 2/26/17, p.A11)
2017 Feb 25, In Louisiana Neilson Rizzuto (25) was arrested after he plowed into a crowd at a Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans while intoxicated. 21 people were hospitalized.
(SFC, 2/26/17, p.A4)
2017 Feb 25, In Texas Air Force Tech. Sgt. Anthony Lizana (35) was sentenced to three months of confinement, one month of hard labor and given a dishonorable discharge following his conviction of misconduct with eight women.
(SFC, 2/27/17, p.A4)
2017 Feb 25, The Afghan Interior Ministry said 38 militants, including 23 IS fighters, were killed in separate operations conducted by Afghan security forces in Nangarhar and Helmand provinces over the past two days. Two students were reported killed when a mortar struck a school's classroom in Laghman province.
(AP, 2/25/17)
2017 Feb 25, Albanian police sued the leader of the country's opposition Democratic Party for allegedly inciting calls for violence. A day earlier Democratic Party leader Lulzim Basha urged "citizens to violently react against state institutions," a crime that, if proven, carries up to a three-year jail sentence.
(AP, 2/25/17)
2017 Feb 25, Five Azerbaijani soldiers were killed during fighting in the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region. Azerbaijan and neighboring Armenia traded blame for the outbreak of violence.
(AP, 2/25/17)(Reuters, 2/27/17)
2017 Feb 25, Britain’s tallest man Neil Fingleton (36), a 7-foot 7-inch actor who played the giant Mag the Mighty in "Game of Thrones," died of heart failure.
(AP, 2/27/17)
2017 Feb 25, Egyptian state news said a Cairo has court acquitted one of deposed President Hosni Mubarak's closest aides in a retrial in a corruption case. Zakaria Azmi, Mubarak's former chief of staff, had been sentenced to seven years in prison in 2012 and fined 36.4 million Egyptian pounds ($6 million) on charges of making illegal gains.
(Reuters, 2/25/17)
2017 Feb 25, France said it will send a contingent of counterterror forces to help the army in Niger after militants ambushed a military patrol on Feb 22 killing 16.
(AFP, 2/26/17)
2017 Feb 25, In Germany a student (35) rammed his car into a group of pedestrians, killing one person and injuring two others in Heidelberg. The accused was shot and wounded by police after fleeing the scene on foot while wielding a knife.
(AFP, 2/26/17)
2017 Feb 25, Iran announced plans to buy 950 tons of uranium ore from Kazakhstan over three years and said it expects to get Russian help in producing nuclear fuel.
(Reuters, 2/25/17)
2017 Feb 25, Iraqi forces backed by jets and helicopters battled jihadists inside west Mosul. Shifa Gardi, a female reporter working for Iraqi Kurdish channel Rudaw, was killed by the explosion of a roadside bomb during the fighting in Mosul. Four bombs went off near a minor pipeline from an oilfield close to the northern city of Kirkuk. One member of the Kurdish security forces was killed.
(AFP, 2/25/17)(Reuters, 2/25/17)
2017 Feb 25, Israel's military fired tear gas across the border into Lebanon, breaking up a small Lebanese protest against cameras installed there.
(AP, 2/25/17)
2017 Feb 25, In Libya a ceasefire went into force in Tripoli after two days of fighting between rival gunmen injured nine people and forced residents to cower indoors.
(AP, 2/25/17)
2017 Feb 25, Palestinian authorities recovered the bodies of three workers who had inhaled toxic gas in a smuggling tunnel beneath Gaza's border with Egypt.
(AP, 2/25/17)
2017 Feb 25, In southern Romania thousands of people turned out for a pro-government rally in the town of Targoviste, hoping to boost the popularity of the center-left government following massive anti-corruption protests.
(AP, 2/25/17)
2017 Feb 25, In Syria a suicide assault on two security service bases in of Homs killing at least 32 people, including General Hassan Daabul, a top intelligence chief.
(AFP, 2/25/17)(SSFC, 2/26/17, p.A8)
2017 Feb 25, Thailand's military junta removed the chief of the department responsible for overseeing Buddhist affairs and replaced him with a police officer, amid a stand-off between officials and monks at the country's largest temple.
(Reuters, 2/25/17)
2017 Feb 26, The United States called on Russia to "immediately" observe the ceasefire in Ukraine, accusing combined Russian and separatist forces of targeting international monitors.
(AFP, 2/26/17)
2017 Feb 26, The 89th Academy Awards were held in Hollywood. Actors Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty wrongly announced the top Oscar went to "La La Land," instead of "Moonlight," after they were handed the wrong envelope. Moonlight was based on a semi-autobiographical play by Tarell Alvin McCraney.
(AP, 2/27/17)(Econ, 3/4/17, p.70)
2017 Feb 26, At the Hollywood 89th Academy Awards the film "The White Helmets," a focus on the Syrian Civil Defense, won the best documentary award.
(AP, 2/27/17)
2017 Feb 26, In California Evin Olsen Yadegar (46) of Modesto was shot and killed in Ripon as she attempted to evade police officers after a low-speed chase following a battery report. In 2018 Deputy Justin Wall was charged with felony manslaughter.
(http://tinyurl.com/yavdzdo6)(SFC, 7/18/18, p.D1)
2017 Feb 26, In Philadelphia a visitor to the Jewish Mount Carmel Cemetery discovered more than 100 headstones vandalized. This came less than a week after a Jewish cemetery in suburban St. Louis reported more than 150 headstones vandalized.
(SFC, 2/27/17, p.A4)
2017 Feb 26, Bill Paxton (61), TV and film actor, died from complications due to surgery. His films included “Apollo 13" (1995) and “Titanic" (1997).
(SFC, 2/27/17, p.D3)
2017 Feb 26, Joseph Wapner, the California judge who presided over the TV hit “The people’s Court" (1981-1993) died at his home in Los Angeles.
(SFC, 2/27/17, p.D3)
2017 Feb 26, In Afghanistan Taliban leader Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada issued a statement calling on Afghans to plant more trees. The Afghan Public Health Ministry has said up to 4000 citizens die each year in Kabul due to illnesses brought on or exacerbated by air pollution.
(AP, 2/26/17)
2017 Feb 26, In eastern Algeria a suicide bomb attack hit a police station in the city of Constantine. Police said two officers were injured. The Islamic State jihadist group soon claimed responsibility.
(AFP, 2/27/17)
2017 Feb 26, Australia and Indonesia said that full military ties between the two countries had been restored, after Indonesia’s military suspended cooperation in January because of "insulting" teaching material found at an Australian base.
(Reuters, 2/26/17)
2017 Feb 26, In Belarus about 3,000 people demonstrated across the country against an unpopular new labor law that targets the unemployed. Many people were unhappy with a so-called "anti-sponging" law that forces citizens to pay the equivalent of $250 if they work less than half the year and do not register with nation's labor exchanges.
(AP, 2/26/17)
2017 Feb 26, Gerald Kaufman (86), the longest-serving lawmaker in Britain's House of Commons, died.
(AP, 2/27/17)
2017 Feb 26, Cambodian cabinet spokesman Phay Siphan posted remarks on Facebook this weekend saying US President Donald Trump's attacks on the media are an inspiration to his own country to observe limits on freedom of expression.
(AP, 2/27/17)
2017 Feb 26, China’s police ministry said more than 800 people have been arrested in a crackdown on unlicensed banking operations as Beijing tries to stem outflows of money from the country.
(AP, 2/27/17)
2017 Feb 26, Egyptian Christians fearing attacks by Islamic State group militants fled the volatile northern part of the Sinai Peninsula for a fourth day, after a string of sectarian killings there sent hundreds packing and raised accusations the government is failing to protect the minority.
(AP, 2/26/17)
2017 Feb 26, In Germany the bodies of a woman (76) and a man (81) were discovered dead at a house in Koenigsdorf, about 30 km (19 miles) south of Munich. On March 120 police said they have arrested a Polish national woman (49) and were seeking her brother, Robert Pludowsk (43), in connection with the killing.
(AP, 3/10/17)
2017 Feb 26, In northeastern India at least 16 people were killed and 50 injured when a truck taking them to a church service overturned after hitting a concrete barricade on a highway in Meghalaya state.
(AP, 2/26/17)
2017 Feb 26, Iraqi forces battled jihadists in west Mosul, aiming to build a floating bridge across the Tigris to establish an important supply route linked to the recaptured east bank.
(AFP, 2/26/17)
2017 Feb 26, In Kyrgyzstan hundreds of people protested after authorities detained a prominent opposition leader on fraud and corruption charges that his supporters say are politically motivated. Omurbek Tekebayev was arrested early today after arriving at the main airport outside the capital Bishkek on a flight from Vienna.
(AP, 2/26/17)
2017 Feb 26, In Pakistan the show, "Pakistan First with President Musharraf", debuted on Bol TV, a channel that recently ran afoul of government regulators when one of its hosts was accused of hate speech. Musharraf now lived in Dubai and faced several criminal cases at home.
(AP, 2/28/17)
2017 Feb 26, In the Philippines 13 people facing drug charges escaped from a police detention facility in Manila after sawing through iron bars.
(Reuters, 2/26/17)
2017 Feb 26, Thousands of Russians marched through Moscow shouting slogans such as "Russia will be free!" and "Putin is war!" to mark two years since opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was gunned down outside the Kremlin.
(AP, 2/26/17)
2017 Feb 26, Russian opposition activist Ildar Dadin was released from his jail in the remote Altai region in southern Siberia after Russia's Supreme Court annulled his 2½-year sentence last week because of procedural violations.
(AP, 2/26/17)
2017 Feb 26, Saudi King Salman arrived in Malaysia to kick off a multi-nation tour aimed at boosting economic ties with Asia.
(AP, 2/26/17)
2017 Feb 26, Saudi Arabia launched a parallel equity market designed to boost small and medium enterprises. It closed up 20 percent, the maximum allowed in a single day.
(AFP, 2/26/17)
2017 Feb 26, In Spain Chinese telecoms giant ZTE unveiled what it said is the world's first smartphone compatible with the lightening-fast 5G mobile internet service on the eve of the start of the Mobile World Congress. Networks expect to have 5G up and running by 2020.
(AFP, 2/26/17)
2017 Feb 26, Shamael al-Nur (36), a Sudanese female journalist and critic of government policies, said that she is under fire from hardliners who have accused her of "insulting Islam" in one of her columns. Nur has written that Islamic regimes were increasingly busy with "matters of virtue and women's dress rather than health and education issues".
(AFP, 2/26/17)
2017 Feb 26, The Syrian army and its allies made a sudden advance into areas held by Islamic State in northwest Syria, as the jihadist group retreated after losing the city of al-Bab to Turkey-backed rebels. Government warplanes pounded a rebel-held neighborhood in the central city of Homs, killing at least three and wounding dozens. A top al-Qaeda official was reportedly killed in an airstrike in Idlib province.
(Reuters, 2/26/17)(AP, 2/26/17)(AP, 2/27/17)
2017 Feb 26, Syrian activists called for the Assad government to engage in serious talks on political transition and for the United Nations to strengthen the fragile ceasefire as violence engulfed parts of the country.
(Reuters, 2/26/17)
2017 Feb 26, In northwestern Syrian a Hellfire missile fired by a CIA drone killed senior al-Qaeda leader Abu al-Khayr al-Masri (59), a son-in-law of Osama bin Laden, while he was riding in a car near Idlib.
(Reuters, 2/3/17)(Econ, 3/18/17, p.24)
2017 Feb 26, Pope Francis became the first pontiff to visit an Anglican church in Rome.
(AP, 2/26/17)
2017 Feb 27, In southern California former teacher Robert Ruben Ornelas was sentenced to 190 years in federal prison for traveling to the Philippines to have sex with young girls and videotaping the encounters.
(AP, 2/28/17)
2017 Feb 27, In southern California a small plane heading to San Jose crashed shortly after taking off from Riverside Municipal Airport killing three of five people onboard. Two homes were destroyed in the crash.
(SFC, 2/28/17, p.A6)
2017 Feb 27, In Detroit, Mi., Japanese auto parts maker Takata pleaded guilty to fraud and agreed to pay $1 billion in penalties for concealing an air bag defect blamed for at least 16 deaths, most of them in the US.
(SFC, 2/28/17, p.D3)
2017 Feb 27, It was reported that laboratory mice exposed to Enterovirus D68 often developed sudden –onset paralysis in one or more limbs. The virus has hit more than 200 US children with polio-like paralysis since 2014.
(SFC, 2/27/17, p.A1)
2017 Feb 27, An Afghan policeman turned his rifle on his colleagues at a checkpoint in southern Helmand province killing 11 of them before fleeing.
(SFC, 3/1/17, p.A2)
2017 Feb 27, China’s latest combat drone flew for the first time. The Wing Loong II can carry up to 1,058 pounds of bombs and missiles. State media said it was expected to become a leading export.
(SFC, 3/2/17, p.A2)
2017 Feb 27, Egyptian police arrested 22 people after hundreds went on a rampage in the coastal city of Port Said to protest death sentences for 10 residents for their part in a deadly 2012 soccer riot.
(AP, 2/28/17)
2017 Feb 27, The EU extended its arms embargo and some targeted sanctions against Belarus for another year after it saw insufficient progress to end them.
(AP, 2/27/17)
2017 Feb 27, EU member states approved visa-free travel for Georgia, after agreeing safeguards to prevent any upsurge in arrivals from the former Soviet satellite.
(AFP, 2/27/17)
2017 Feb 27, Germany's Interior Ministry said a new report showing more than 3,500 attacks in 2016 on migrants and their homes is "alarmingly high and cause for concern." Interior Ministry spokesman Johannes Dimroth said authorities are prosecuting the crimes aggressively and the numbers are now falling.
(AP, 2/27/17)
2017 Feb 27, A German court convicted two illegal street racers who caused a deadly high-speed car crash of murder and handed them life prison terms in a landmark ruling. Hamdi H. and Marvin N. were each sentenced to maximum jail terms for the Feb 1 tragedy near Berlin's landmark KaDeWe shopping center.
(AFP, 2/27/17)
2017 Feb 27, Hungary said it has begun building a second fence on its border with Serbia to stop migrants from freely entering the country.
(AP, 2/27/17)
2017 Feb 27, Iraqi forces pushed deeper into western Mosul, gaining control of a neighborhood along the Tigris River and the foot of one of the city's five bridges amid intense clashes with Islamic State militants.
(AP, 2/27/17)
2017 Feb 27, Israeli aircraft carried out a series of strikes in Gaza, wounding at least four people, after a rocket fired from the Palestinian territory hit an empty area in southern Israel.
(Reuters, 2/27/17)
2017 Feb 27, Malaysian PM Najib Razak said that oil major Saudi Aramco will invest $7 billion in a mammoth oil processing hub in Malaysia, making it the single largest investor in the Southeast Asian country.
(AP, 2/27/17)
2017 Feb 27, In the Philippines four senators, who supported a staunch critic of leader Rodrigo Duterte's war on drugs, lost important positions in the Senate.
(Reuters, 2/27/17)
2017 Feb 27, In the Philippines Abu Sayyaf militants posted a video of the killing of Jurgen Kantner (70), an elderly German captive, after a deadline for a $600,000 ransom passed. Kantner and a companion were taken captive in November while sailing on a 53-footer yacht near Sabah.
(Reuters, 2/27/17)
2017 Feb 27, The Somali government warned of a looming famine. The UN humanitarian office said five million Somalis, out of a population of ten million, need humanitarian assistance.
(SFC, 2/28/17, p.A2)
2017 Feb 27, In Somalia a huge overnight fire engulfed Mogadishu’s main market, killing at least two people.
(AP, 2/27/17)
2017 Feb 27, South Africa deported 97 Nigerians for various offences following a series of raids, amid heightened bilateral tensions over anti-immigrant violence in South Africa.
(AP, 3/1/17)
2017 Feb 27, South Korean police said four of the eight North Koreans, identified as suspects in the Feb 13 assassination of Kim Jong Nam in Malaysia, were agents from North Korea’s Ministry of State Security.
(SFC, 2/28/17, p.A3)
2017 Feb 27, In northwestern Spain some 120 guests ate, drank, danced and even set off fireworks. But when desserts arrived, they drove away in the blink of an eye, leaving behind unpaid bills amounting to thousands of euros. On March 7 authorities said one man from Romania has been detained as police investigated a trail of similar incidents.
(AP, 3/7/17)
2017 Feb 27, In Sri Lanka gunmen opened fire on a prison bus near Colombo, killing five prisoners and two warders on their way to court in what was believed to be a gangland dispute.
(Reuters, 2/27/17)
2017 Feb 27, Syrian government or Russian airstrikes on the rebel-held Idlib province killed at least 11 people. Government forces seized territory from the Islamic State group on several fronts in the country's north.
(AP, 2/27/17)(AFP, 2/27/17)
2017 Feb 27, The United Nations refugee agency said more than 31,000 South Sudanese refugees - mostly women and children - have crossed the border into Sudan this year, fleeing famine and conflict.
(Reuters, 2/27/17)
2017 Feb 27, The UN World Health Organization (WHO) issued a list of the top dozen bacteria most dangerous to humans, warning that doctors are fast running out of treatment options. They included Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Staphylococcus aureus.
(AP, 2/27/17)(Econ, 3/4/17, p.65)
2017 Feb 28, President Donald Trump addressed Congress for the first time, selling his policies and laying out the case for a $54 billion boost in military spending and cuts in domestic programs and foreign aid. “Above all we will keep out promises to the American people." Trump called for repealing the Affordable Care Act and slashing regulations at the FDA. He also called for dramatic changes in immigration, education and health care. Trump also signed an executive order mandating a review of “Waters of the United States" (WOTUS), a rule aimed at protecting small streams and wetland ds from development and pollution.
(AFP, 2/28/17)(SFC, 3/1/17, p.A1)(SFC, 3/1/17, p.A5)(Econ, 3/4/17, p.24)
2017 Feb 28, US VP Mike Pence administered the oath of office to Wilbur Ross (79), a day after the Senate voted to confirm him as commerce secretary.
(SFC, 3/1/17, p.A5)
2017 Feb 28, Tornadoes and storms killed at least three people and destroyed homes in Illinois and Missouri. Tornado spotters reported at least 23 twisters in Illinois, Missouri, Iowa, Tennessee and Indiana.
(Reuters, 3/1/17)(SFC, 3/2/17, p.A6)
2017 Feb 28, Austria's intelligence services confirmed a news report that they have tracked down a US-based Turkish hacker who attacked several government websites. A Turkish activist, identified as Arslan A., directed the attacks from his home in Bowling Green, Kentucky.
(AP, 2/28/17)
2017 Feb 28, In Canada Pres. Donald Trump’s two eldest sons attended the grand opening of their company’s new hotel and condominium tower in Vancouver where they were greeted by protests.
(SFC, 3/1/17, p.A4)
2017 Feb 28, Chinese authorities said that Ismael Arciniegas (72), a retired Colombian journalist, was killed by lethal injection after a last-ditch diplomatic effort by Colombia to save his life failed. He was arrested in 2010 trying to smuggle four kg of cocaine into China in exchange for $5,000.
(AP, 2/28/17)
2017 Feb 28, China and Russia vetoed a UN Security Council resolution that would have imposed new sanctions on Syria for using chemical weapons against its own citizens.
(SFC, 3/1/17, p.A3)
2017 Feb 28, In Egypt top Muslim and Christian clerics from the Middle East gathered in Cairo for a two-day conference on promoting co-existence, as sectarian conflict continues to ravage the region. The leading religious authority in Sunni Islam lashed out at supporters of abortion rights, sexual reassignment and globalization, saying they aim to "annihilate all Abrahamic religions."
(AFP, 2/28/17)(AP, 3/1/17)
2017 Feb 28, In Germany a man (24) killed his grandmother in Muellrose, then ran over and killed two police officers as he fled from them in Brandenburg state. The man was arrested short time later.
(AP, 2/28/17)
2017 Feb 28, In Iraq hundreds of civilians fled through the desert to escape fighting and privation in Mosul, joining thousands of others who left their homes amid dire conditions in the city's west.
(AFP, 2/28/17)
2017 Feb 28, The Italian foreign ministry said in a statement that an inspection had found "irregularities" in granting visas at its consulate in the Iraqi city of Irbil and that the head of the visa section has been replaced. Visa-seekers, including Syrians, Arab and Kurdish Iraqis, had allegedly paid as much as 10,000 euros ($10,600) for visas instead of the actual 90-euro ($96) fee.
(AP, 2/28/17)
2017 Feb 28, In Lebanon a civilian was killed and four wounded in fierce clashes that rocked Ain al-Hilweh, the country’s largest Palestinian refugee camp for the sixth day.
(AFP, 2/28/17)
2017 Feb 28, A Lithuanian court jailed a Russian citizen and one of its own nationals for spying for Moscow. The former Lithuanian captain pleaded guilty and was handed a five-year sentence. The Russian citizen, who pleaded innocent, was sentenced to 10 years and six months.
(AFP, 2/28/17)
2017 Feb 28, In Malaysia oil giant Saudi Aramco signed a $7 billion deal to take a 50 percent stake in a mega Malaysian oil refinery project, in a pact expected to help Saudi Arabia increase trade in Southeast Asia.
(AP, 2/28/17)
2017 Feb 28, The Philippines' main antinarcotics agency signed an agreement with the military to harness troops in President Rodrigo Duterte's deadly anti-drug crackdown after he barred the national police force from carrying out the campaign to cleanse its ranks of rogue personnel.
(AP, 2/28/17)
2017 Feb 28, Somalia's new President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed declared a national disaster for a drought that threatens millions of people and is creating fears of a full-blown famine.
(AP, 2/28/17)
2017 Feb 28, South Korean special prosecutors indicted Samsung's de facto chief on bribery, embezzlement and other charges linked to a political scandal that has toppled President Park Geun-hye. Yonhap news said Samsung would scrap its Future Strategy Office and devolve power to individual affiliates as part of broad reforms.
(AP, 2/28/17)(Econ, 3/4/17, p.52)
2017 Feb 28, South Korea’s Lotte Mart supermarket chain signed a deal allowing America to build the THAAD anti-missile system on land owned by the company. The company’s businesses in China were adversely affected with sudden tax and safety inspections and a scarcity of buyers.
(Econ, 3/18/17, p.41)
2017 Feb 28, Syrian government forces and their allies from the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah reached the outskirts of Palmyra in their push to drive Islamic State militants from the ancient town.
(AP, 2/28/17)
2017 Feb 28, The UN said nearly 1,500 children have been recruited by Yemen's warring parties, mostly the Shiite Huthi rebels, since March 2015.
(AFP, 2/28/17)
2017 Feb, The US Dept. of Homeland Security set up the fake Univ. of Farmington in Farmington Hills, Mi., in a sting operation to expose immigration fraud. In 2019 authorities charged eight recruiters of enlisting at least 600 people to enroll in the school to maintain student visa status and remain in the US.
(SFC, 2/1/19, p.A9)
2017 Feb, Maryland’s highest court ruled that people can’t be held in jail because they can’t afford bail.
(Econ, 4/15/17, p.26)
2017 Feb, Two aides of Pres. Donald Trump staged a raid on the Manhattan office of Dr. Harold N. Bornstein, who had served as Trump's personal doctor of 36 ears. This followed an interview with the NY Times in which Bornstein said that Trump took a drug to promote hair growth. All of Trump's medical files, including handwritten records and printed lab results, were removed.
(SFC, 5/2/18, p.A6)
2017 Feb, In North Carolina officers fired at and killed Kenneth Lee Bailey (24) after he ran from a house where officers had come to arrest him. Bailey had violated terms of his pre-trial release on armed-robbery charges. State criminal investigators found empty bullet shells and a handgun near where Bailey fell. In September a prosecutor said no charges would be filed because the officers were afraid for their lives.
(http://tinyurl.com/y77h9lzx)(SFC, 9/27/17, p.A6)
2017 Feb, In Wyoming a new supercomputer began critical climate change research at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Cheyenne. About 70 percent of its costs came from the National Science Foundation.
(SFC, 2/18/17, p.A11)
2017 Feb, Scientists reported that the deepest ocean trenches are loaded with pollutants. Amphilopods, a type of crustacean, captured in the Mariana trench off Guam and the Kermadec trench off New Zealand had levels of polychlorinated biphenyls, once widely used in electrical equipment, that were almost off the scale.
(Econ, 2/18/17, p.67)
2017 Feb, Amazon, the fifth most valuable firm in the world, reported higher profits but lower revenues. 92% of its value was due to profits expected after 2020.
(Econ, 3/25/17, p.18)
2017 Feb, The Afghan government announced that its forces have killed Qari Saifullah Akhtar, a Taliban leader repeatedly captured and released by Pakistan.
(Econ, 2/25/17, p.33)
2017 Feb, Brazil’s only aircraft carrier, never battle-ready, was mothballed.
(Econ 7/8/17, p.31)
2017 Feb, Parks Canada reintroduced a herd of plains bison to the country's oldest national park in Banff, Alberta.
(Reuters, 2/13/17)
2017 Feb, A sophisticated hacking group that pursues Chinese government interests broke into the website of a private US trade group. The hackers left a malicious link on web pages where members of the National Foreign Trade Council (NFTC) register for upcoming meetings, according to researchers at Fidelis Cybersecurity and a person familiar with the trade group.
(Reuters, 4/6/17)
2017 Feb, Authorities in Democratic Republic of Congo expelled a filmmaker and researcher working for Greenpeace following a trip to forest communities affected by industrial logging.
(Reuters, 3/1/17)
2017 Feb, Egypt opened the Rafah border crossing to the Gaza strip to commercial traffic.
(Econ, 4/22/17, p.42)
2017 Feb, Unemployment in Japan fell to 2.8%, the lowest rate since 1994.
(Econ, 4/8/17, p.63)
2017 Feb, In Malaysia Pastor Raymond Koh, who ran a charity that helped the underprivileged, was kidnapped by masked men in Kuala Lumpur. In 2019 the country's human rights commission said he was probably abducted by agents of Special Branch, a police intelligence unit.
(Reuters, 4/3/19)
2017 Feb, In Mali Gloria Cecilia Narvaez, a Colombian nun, was kidnapped by the al Qaeda-linked Macina Liberation Front, near the border with Burkina Faso. She was freed in 2021.
(Reuters, 10/10/21)
2017 Feb, Russia’s state-owned Rosneft signed a cooperation agreement with Libya’s National Oil Corp.
(Econ, 3/18/17, p.53)
2017 Feb, Singapore’s Supreme Court upheld the conviction and fining of three activists who took part in a protest about the management of the Central Provident Fund, a compulsory savings scheme administered by the government.
(Econ, 3/11/17, p.40)
2017 Feb, Trinidadian state security officials launched intensive surveillance and monitoring of the country's homegrown Islamist movements. Security officials and terrorism experts believed that as many as 125 fighters and their relatives have traveled from Trinidad and Tobago to Turkey and on to IS-controlled areas over the last four years, making the country of 1.3 million people the largest per-capita source of IS recruits in the Western Hemisphere.
(AP, 2/16/17)
2017 Feb, Turkish authorities arrested Deniz Yucel, a journalist for Germany’s Die Welt newspaper, on charges of propaganda in support of a terrorist organization and inciting the public to violence. Yucel, a dual Turkish and German national, was initially detained after he reported on emails that a leftist hacker collective had purportedly obtained from the private account of Berat Albayrak, Turkey's energy minister and Erdogan's son-in-law.
(Reuters, 3/19/17)
2017 Feb, In Ukraine a small group of irregulars and volunteers blocked railway traffic across the line of control halting freight between separatist territories and the rest of Ukraine. Pres. Poroshenko opposed the blockade but support for it soared and the government joined them imposing a trade and energy blockade on the occupied territories. separatists responded by seizing control of all the coal mines and steel and chemical plants owned by Rinat Akhmetov, Ukraine richest oligarch.
(Econ 5/27/17, p.46)
2017 Feb, Uzbekistan released Muhammad Bekjanov (63), editor of the opposition newspaper Erk, following 18 years in prison. Bekjanov later said he was subjected to such harsh torture that he forgot the names of his daughters, but was kept alive by the support of human rights groups.
(Reuters, 3/3/17)
2017 Feb, Vatican-based Cardinal Raymond Burke, the most outspoken critic of Pope Francis, spent two days in Guam presiding over the trial of Archbishop Anthony Apuron, who was accused of molesting altar boys.
(Econ, 3/18/17, p.62)
2017 Feb, In Yemen Saudi and Emirati-backed forces fought each other over control of Aden’s airport.
(Econ, 4/8/17, p.42)
2017 Feb, Zimbabwe appealed to international donors for $100 million to help those affected by recent floods. Since December, southern floods have killed 246 people, injured 128 and left nearly 2,000 homeless.
(AP, 3/5/17)
2017 Mar 1, The Washington Post reported that Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a former US senator, received Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak in his office in September. A 2nd encounter was in July at a Heritage Foundation event that was attended by about 50 ambassadors, during the Republican National Convention. During sworn testimony at his Senate confirmation hearing in January, Sessions responded to a question from Democratic Senator Al Franken that he did not "have communications with the Russians" during the course of the presidential campaign.
(Reuters, 3/2/17)
2017 Mar 1, Former Montana Rep. Ryan Zinke was sworn in as US interior secretary.
(SFC, 3/2/17, p.A6)
2017 Mar 1, US federal prosecutors announced racketeering charges against seven Baltimore police officers alleging illegal stops, thefts and fake reports.
(SFC, 3/3/17, p.A7)
2017 Mar 1, Tom Pritzker, chairman and president of the Chicago-based Hyatt Foundation, announced that Catalonia-based architects Rafael Aranda, Carme Pigem and Ramon Vilalta have won the 2017 Pritzker Architecture Prize.
(AP, 3/1/17)
2017 Mar 1, In Oregon a house fire in the small town of Riddle left four children dead.
(SFC, 3/2/17, p.A5)
2017 Mar 1, The DJIA rose above 21,000 for the first time and closed at a record 21,115.55. All four major US stock exchanges reached record highs.
(SFC, 3/2/17, p.C2)
2017 Mar 1, US salmonella illnesses linked to turtles began to infect people. According to the US Centers for Disease Control some 37 people across 13 states were diagnosed with salmonella until August 3.
(SFC, 8/30/17, p.A5)
2017 Mar 1, In Afghanistan a pair of near-simultaneous Taliban suicide bombings struck Kabul, targeting a sprawling police compound and offices of the country's intelligence agency and killing 16 people.
(AP, 3/1/17)
2017 Mar 1, The UN's World Meteorological Organization published the highest temperatures on record in three Antarctic zones, setting a benchmark for studying how climate change is affecting this crucial region.
(AFP, 3/1/17)
2017 Mar 1, Austrians became eligible to receiving up to 4,000 euros ($4,300) in rebates to help offset the higher price of an electric vehicle. Neighboring Germany introduced a comparable premium last year.
(Reuters, 3/20/17)
2017 Mar 1, British Land said Chinese property magnate Cheung Chung Kiu has agreed to buy its London's distinctive "Cheesegrater" skyscraper for £1.15-billion.
(AFP, 3/1/17)
2017 Mar 1, Gustav Metzger, Germany-born British inventor of auto-destruct art, died in London.
(Econ, 3/18/17, p.90)
2017 Mar 1, In Cambodia migrant worker Oeut Ang said he fired shots that killed Kem Ley last July because he was upset over the $3,000 he was owed. Kem Ley's relatives believe the suspect isn't telling the whole truth and that the government may have masterminded the killing.
(AP, 3/1/17)
2017 Mar 1, The World Health Organization (WHO) said it has noticed changes in the bird flu virus now spreading in China, but says the risk of the disease spreading easily between people remains low. It also said scientists have identified genetic changes suggesting the viruses are resistant to Tamiflu, the recommended treatment for the illness, in about 7 percent of recent cases.
(AP, 3/1/17)
2017 Mar 1, Colombia's FARC rebels begin disarming under a historic peace deal, beginning the delicate transition from guerrilla army to political party after more than half a century at war.
(AFP, 3/1/17)
2017 Mar 1, In CongoDRC Congolese, Tanzanian and French workers were abducted from Canada’s Banro Mining Corp.'s Namoya gold mine. Rebels of the Rahiya Mutomboki group demanded $1 million in ransom for the five workers. The Tanzanian was soon released. The French man and three Congolese were released on May 27.
(AP, 3/2/17)(AP, 5/28/17)
2017 Mar 1, It was reported that a network of schools in Ethiopia linked to Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, accused by Turkey of masterminding a failed coup attempt last year, is changing ownership to a group of educators from Germany.
(AP, 3/1/17)
2017 Mar 1, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia signed agreements in areas ranging from trade to aviation as the kingdom's monarch visited the world's most populous Muslim-majority country for the first time in almost half a century.
(AFP, 3/1/17)
2017 Mar 1, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and Turkey's President Tayyip Erdogan agreed to improve ties, including in the fight against terrorism, on the sidelines of an economic cooperation summit in the Pakistani capital Islamabad.
(Reuters, 3/1/17)
2017 Mar 1, Macedonian President Gjeorge Ivanov said he cannot give a mandate to form a government to the leader of the Social Democrats who won a parliamentary majority by getting the support of ethnic Albanian parties.
(Reuters, 3/1/17)
2017 Mar 1, A Malaysian court charged two young women, accused of smearing VX nerve agent on the estranged half-brother of North Korea's leader, with murder.
(AP, 3/1/17)
2017 Mar 1, Nepal said it has forced 2,500 old vehicles off roads in Kathmandu, part of a fight against alarming air pollution levels that have hit nine times World Health Organization (WHO) limits.
(Reuters, 3/1/17)
2017 Mar 1, A Norway appeals court ruled that Norway did not violate the human rights of mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik by isolating him in jail, overturning a lower court ruling from last year.
(AP, 3/1/17)
2017 Mar 1, A Palestinian broke into a home in a West Bank settlement near Hebron and stabbed an Israeli, who then shot and killed the intruder.
(AP, 3/1/17)
2017 Mar 1, Polish European Parliament lawmaker Janusz Korwin-Mikke told the European parliament that "women must earn less than men because they are weaker, they are smaller, they are less intelligent." Two days later in Warsaw he said it is a "20th-century stereotype that women have the same intellectual potential as men," and that the stereotype "must be destroyed because it is not true."
(AP, 3/3/17)
2017 Mar 1, Human Rights Watch said that Poland is endangering asylum-seekers fleeing persecution in the Russian province of Chechnya and elsewhere by returning them summarily to Belarus.
(AP, 3/1/17)
2017 Mar 1, In Portugal American ex-CIA agent Sabrina de Sousa won a last-minute reprieve from a Lisbon court and will no longer be extradited from Portugal to Italy, where a court convicted her of taking part in the kidnapping of a Muslim cleric. The court ruled that Sabrina de Sousa must be released immediately since Italy had cancelled its detention and extradition request for her.
(AP, 3/1/17)
2017 Mar 1, Puerto Rico's Gov. Ricardo Rossello submitted a fiscal plan that rejects austerity measures sought by a federal control board and instead proposes alternative ways to boost revenue and cut spending amid an economic recession.
(AP, 3/1/17)
2017 Mar 1, In Somaliland DP World, a Dubai-based port operator, began working from Berbera’s beachside hotel. Three weeks later the UAE revealed plans for 25-year lease of air and naval bases alongside.
(Econ, 4/8/17, p.42)
2017 Mar 1, In South Africa thousands of coal truck drivers descended on Pretoria to protest against the country's renewable energy program, after President Jacob Zuma expressed support for the sector last month.
(Reuters, 3/1/17)
2017 Mar 1, Prosecutors in Madrid launched an "urgent" investigation into a conservative association that chartered a bus displaying a large, anti-transgender message to tour Spain, drawing widespread condemnation.
(AFP, 3/1/17)
2017 Mar 1, In northern Syria the Turkish army and allied Syrian rebels attacked villages held by US-allied militias near the city of Manbij. Russian-backed Syrian government forces and their allies recaptured the historic Palmyra citadel, on the city's western outskirts, from Islamic State fighters.
(Reuters, 3/1/17)
2017 Mar 1, In Ukraine a fifth of a million phone users in the rebel-controlled eastern city of Donetsk were cut off from the rest of the country. Russian-backed rebels in eastern Ukraine said they are taking over 40 factories and coal mines. They include those owned by tycoon Rinat Akhmetov, whose foundation has been the largest provider of humanitarian aid to a war-battered population.
(Reuters, 3/1/17)(AP, 3/1/17)
2017 Mar 1, UN investigators said both sides in the battle for Aleppo committed war crimes, including Syrian government aircraft that "deliberately" bombed and strafed a humanitarian convoy, killing 14 aid workers and halting relief operations. Their report said Syrian and Russian forces conducted daily air strikes on rebel-held eastern Aleppo between July and its fall on December 22, killing hundreds and destroying hospitals.
(Reuters, 3/1/17)
2017 Mar 1, Marie Collins, a leading member of a group advising Pope Francis on how to root out sex abuse in the Catholic Church, quit in frustration, citing "shameful" resistance within the Vatican.
(Reuters, 3/1/17)
2017 Mar 1, A UN official said fighting around Yemen's port of Mokha has forced some 45,000 people from their homes, with many facing continued uncertainty and the threat of further displacement.
(AP, 3/1/17)
2017 Mar 2, Several congressional Republicans called on Attorney General Jeff Sessions to recuse himself from investigations into alleged Russian meddling in the US presidential election after it emerged he met last year with Russia's ambassador but did not disclose the contacts in Senate testimony. Sessions became the second high-ranking member of the Trump administration to take a hit over conversations with Russia's envoy to the US, recusing himself from any probe that examines communications between Trump aides and Moscow.
(Reuters, 3/2/17)(AP, 3/3/17)
2017 Mar 2, US VP Mike Pence swore in retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson as secretary of housing and former Texas Gov. Mike Perry as energy secretary.
(SFC, 3/3/17, p.A6)
2017 Mar 2, The Kansas Supreme Court ruled that the state’s spending on public education was unconstitutionally low.
(SFC, 3/3/17, p.A6)
2017 Mar 2, US federal prosecutors announced they have captured members of the MS-13 street gang who killed three Long Island high school students last year with a machete and baseball bats.
(SFC, 3/3/17, p.A6)
2017 Mar 2, In Nebraska a prison riot at the Tecumseh State Correctional Institution left two inmates dead. About 40 inmates refused to return to their cells after staff members reported a fire to one of the housing units.
(SFC, 3/4/17, p.A6)
2017 Mar 2, Snap, the parent company of social media Snapchat, closed at $24.48, a 44% jump over its IPO price of $17. The company had started in 2011 as Picaboo. The securities sold had no voting power so all the power stayed with co-founders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy.
(SFC, 3/3/17, p.C1)(Econ, 2/4/17, p.53)(Econ, 2/11/17, p.56)
2017 Mar 2, In Afghanistan a suspected US drone strike killed Qari Abdullah, a top commander of the militant Haqqani network. He was the man who in 2014 accompanied US Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl when he was handed over to US authorities.
(AP, 3/3/17)
2017 Mar 2, An Austrian court found eight Iraqi nationals guilty of gang-raping a German tourist on New Year's Eve, 2015, and sentenced them to prison terms of between nine and 13 years.
(AP, 3/2/17)
2017 Mar 2, Nations and philanthropists pledged close to $200 million for family planning at an international conference in Brussels that aimed to make up for the gap left by President Donald Trump's ban on US funding to groups linked to abortion.
(AP, 3/2/17)
2017 Mar 2, Canada adopted a military doctrine that explicitly acknowledges soldiers’ right to use force to protect themselves, even when the threat comes from children.
(Econ, 4/1/17, p.28)
2017 Mar 2, Croatia's conservative government formed a council to deal with the country's previous pro-Nazi and Communist regimes in a bid to overcome the deep divisions that still exist over the Balkan nation's past.
(AP, 3/2/17)
2017 Mar 2, The Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia urged the European Union to boost the role of national parliaments under a planned overhaul of the bloc's decision-making process.
(Reuters, 3/2/17)
2017 Mar 2, In Egypt German Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi held talks on ways of slowing migration to Europe, including tightening control over borders.
(AP, 3/2/17)
2017 Mar 2, Egypt's top appeals court found Hosni Mubarak innocent of involvement in the killing of protesters during the 2011 uprising that ended his 30-year rule, in a final ruling that could see the former president walk free.
(Reuters, 3/2/17)
2017 Mar 2, In Italy three skiers were killed in an avalanche in the northern Alps. Another five people were injured at Plan de la Gabba.
(AP, 3/2/17)
2017 Mar 2, In southern Italy two African workers were killed late today after fire broke out at a camp housing hundreds of migrants who pick fruit and vegetables near Foggia.
(Reuters, 3/3/17)(AP, 3/3/17)
2017 Mar 2, Northern Ireland began voting in snap elections to resolve a political crisis fuelled by bad blood and Brexit. The DUP and Ulster Unionists won only 38 seats in the 90-member Assembly The pro-British Democratic Unionist Party narrowly remained the largest party following the closest-ever election for the provincial assembly. If the conservative and pro-British Democratic Unionist Party and the socialist and pro-Irish republican Sinn Fein cannot resolve their differences within three weeks of the vote, the assembly's executive could be suspended and the province fully governed from London.
(AFP, 3/2/17)(Reuters, 3/4/17)(Econ, 3/11/17, p.56)
2017 Mar 2, Kurdish forces seized an oil facility in Kirkuk to send a message to the Iraqi government to build a refinery.
(Reuters, 3/2/17)
2017 Mar 2, Mexican journalist Cecilio Pineda Birto was shot dead in Ciudad Altamirano while in a hammock at a car wash waiting for his car to be serviced.
(AP, 3/3/17)
2017 Mar 2, Nigeria filed criminal charges of corruption against oil multinationals Royal Dutch Shell and Eni over the $1.1 billion sale of one of Africa's richest oil blocks. Malabu Oil, secretly set up by former Oil Minister Dan Etete, was awarded OPL 245 while he was oil minister. Nigeria's government got only $210 million from the deal.
(AP, 3/4/17)
2017 Mar 2, Nusrat al-Islam, officially known as Jama'a Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin', was formed in Mali as an umbrella coalition of four al-Qaida-aligned groups.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jama%27at_Nasr_al-Islam_wal_Muslimin)(Econ., 6/20/20, p.77)
2017 Mar 2, Pakistan announced plans to bring its militancy-wracked tribal areas into the mainstream political fold by ending a de facto system of direct rule that critics said suppressed development and fuelled extremism.
(AFP, 3/2/17)
2017 Mar 2, Pakistan said it will conduct its first census in 19 years. The 70-day data-gathering campaign will start March 15.
(Reuters, 3/2/17)
2017 Mar 2, In Pakistan a suspected US drone strike killed two men on a motorcycle in a village near the Afghanistan border.
(Reuters, 3/2/17)
2017 Mar 2, It was reported that the shores of Peru’s Lake Titicaca, South America's largest lake, are littered with dead frogs, discarded paint buckets and bags of soggy trash and that the water itself contains toxic levels of lead and mercury. Untreated sewage water drains from two dozen nearby cities and illegal gold mines high in the Andes dump up to 15 tons of mercury a year into a river leading to the lake.
(AP, 3/2/17)
2017 Mar 2, Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny accused PM Dmitry Medvedev of controlling a property empire including mansions, yachts and vineyards financed by oligarchs through a network of shadowy non-profit organizations.
(AFP, 3/2/17)
2017 Mar 2, In Somalia at least 57 al-Shabab members were killed after African Union troops from Kenya and Somali forces attacked one of its camps outside Afmadhow.
(AP, 3/2/17)
2017 Mar 2, In South Africa emergency workers dug through rubble in Johannesburg after part of the Charlotte Maxeke hospital's roof collapsed, reportedly trapping several patients.
(AFP, 3/2/17)
2017 Mar 2, South Sudan announced it would increase work permit fees for foreign workers from the $100-$300 range to between $1,000 and $10,000 per year, depending on the qualifications of the worker. International aid agencies on March 10 warned this would worsen a humanitarian crisis in the famine-hit country. In early April South Sudan suspended the plans to charge foreign workers a $10,000 work permit fee, after criticism that it would create a huge expense for aid organizations.
(AFP, 3/11/17)(AP, 4/3/17)
2017 Mar 2, A Madrid judge banned a bright orange bus emblazoned with an anti-transgender message from driving through the Spanish capital on the grounds that it was discriminatory and could provoke hate crimes.
(Reuters, 3/2/17)
2017 Mar 2, In Sudan Bakri Hassan Saleh, a former army general and top aide to President Omar al-Bashir, was sworn in as the country’s first prime minister since the post was scrapped in a 1989 Islamist-backed coup.
(AFP, 3/2/17)
2017 Mar 2, Sweden reintroduced compulsory military service, seven years after abandoning it, to respond to global security challenges including Russia's assertive behavior in the Baltic Sea region.
(AFP, 3/2/17)(SFC, 3/3/17, p.A4)
2017 Mar 2, Syrian troops backed by Russian jets completed the recapture of the historic city of Palmyra from the Islamic State group. Fighters of the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) announced they would cede several villages to the government as part of a deal brokered by Russia to avoid conflict with Turkey.
(AFP, 3/2/17)
2017 Mar 2, Syrian warplanes carried out eight air strikes in a rebel-held district of the mostly government-controlled city of Homs. The air strikes killed two civilians and wounded more than 24 people in al-Waer, as UN-sponsored peace talks continued in Geneva.
(Reuters, 3/2/17)
2017 Mar 2, In western Ukraine eight miners died when a methane gas explosion tore through a pit in the western Lviv region.
(AFP, 3/2/17)
2017 Mar 2, The United States carried out 25 air strikes in Yemen targeting al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in al-Maraqisha, a rugged mountainous area where al Qaeda militants took refuge last year.
(Reuters, 3/2/17)(Econ, 3/18/17, p.24)
2017 Mar 3, In Florida Circuit Judge Milton Hirsch ruled that Miami-Dade County violated the US Constitution when it agreed to jail people slated for deportation. Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez allowed county jails to hold immigrants awaiting deportation after Pres. Trump threatened to cut federal funding from sanctuary cities that did not cooperate with federal immigration authorities.
(SFC, 3/4/17, p.A6)
2017 Mar 3, A DC federal appeals court ruled that wolves in Wyoming should be stripped of Endangered Species Act protections and management given to the state rather than the US government, a decision that opens the door for hunting of the animals.
(Reuters, 3/3/17)
2017 Mar 3, California Gov. Jerry Brown's finance department decided that the state's $64 billion high-speed rail project is ready to lay some track.
(AP, 3/4/17)
2017 Mar 3, In Afghanistan at least eight civilians, including four children, were killed in an attack late today in western Farah province. Family members said they were hit by an airstrike.
(AP, 3/4/17)
2017 Mar 3, Colombia’s human rights watchdog said a total of 120 civil leaders have been killed in Colombia in the past 14 months.
(AFP, 3/3/17)
2017 Mar 3, The 28-nation EU's executive Commission said that it and the US Food and Drug Administration have endorsed an accord that updates a 1998 agreement on manufacturing practices. It means that EU and US regulators will be able to rely on each other's information on premises that make medicines or their ingredients.
(AP, 3/3/17)
2017 Mar 3, In France charities expressed outrage as the mayor of the port Calais, which has symbolized Europe's refugee crisis, signed a ban a day earlier on gatherings that could stop aid groups distributing meals to migrants and refugees.
(Reuters, 3/3/17)
2017 Mar 3, Chancellor Angela Merkel said Tunisia had agreed to take back 1,500 rejected Tunisian migrants from Germany, after an attack by a Tunisian on a Christmas market in Berlin which killed 12 people.
(Reuters, 3/3/17)
2017 Mar 3, German carmaker Mercedes said it is recalling about 1 million cars and SUVs worldwide because a starter part can overheat and cause fires.
(AP, 3/3/17)
2017 Mar 3, Former Haitian Pres. Rene Preval (b.1943) died. He was the only leader of the country to win and complete two terms (1996-2001 and 2006-2011).
(SFC, 3/4/17, p.A2)
2017 Mar 3, Hungary’s Opimus Group, a major print and online media company, said Lorinc Meszaros, a close ally of PM Viktor Orban, has acquired an ownership stake in the company, adding weight to suspicions that the company's closure of the largest opposition newspaper last year was politically motivated.
(AP, 3/3/17)
2017 Mar 3, In Iraq thousands of civilians fled Mosul overnight as government forces advanced north of a sprawling military base near the city's airport. Seven people, among them five children, were reported hospitalized over the past two days near Mosul with injuries from chemical weapons.
(AP, 3/3/17)(AFP, 3/3/17)
2017 Mar 3, In Iraq rival Kurdish groups clashed in the northwestern Sinjar region. The YBS, a local affiliate of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), said the fighting began when the Peshmerga Rojava tried to seize its positions in Khanasor. The YBS accused Turkey of instigating the violence.
(Reuters, 3/3/17)
2017 Mar 3, In Ireland government-appointed investigators announced the finding of a mass grave containing the remains of babies and young children from the 1950s at a former Catholic orphanage. Excavations since November at the site of the former Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, County Galway, had found an underground structure divided into 20 chambers containing "significant quantities of human remains." 800 children had died as residents of the facility, which closed in 1961.
(AP, 3/3/17)
2017 Mar 3, East Libyan forces said they carried out air strikes and clashed with rival factions close to major oil terminals as they sought to fend off the latest challenge to their control of the ports. Libya's National Oil Corporation (NOC) held an urgent meeting to review crude loading schedules and emergency measures to protect oil facilities after clashes around the major terminals of Es Sider and Ras Lanuf.
(Reuters, 3/3/17)(Reuters, 3/4/17)
2017 Mar 3, The Libyan Coast guard rescued 115 refugees and reported that 25 others have gone missing.
(SFC, 3/4/17, p.A2)
2017 Mar 3, Malaysian officials said they have deported Ri Jong Chol, a North Korean man, who was released from custody after police found insufficient evidence to charge him in the Feb 13 murder of Kim Jong Nam, the half-brother of North Korea's leader.
(AP, 3/3/17)
2017 Mar 3, Pakistani police said about 1,300 suspected militants have been arrested in a sweep of hideouts in Punjab province. Another 36 militants died in shootouts with police and in paramilitary operations since the two-week sweep began last month.
(AP, 3/3/17)
2017 Mar 3, Lazar Stojanovic (73), a Serbian film director and an anti-war activist during the 1990s, died in Belgrade. His film "Plastic Jesus" was banned in the 1970s because of its criticism of totalitarian regimes. Stojanovic was sentenced to three years in prison, while the film was released in 1990s.
(AP, 3/4/17)
2017 Mar 3, South Sudan said it has arrested four soldiers after residents accused the army of beating and raping civilians in a small village near the capital last month.
(Reuters, 3/3/17)
2017 Mar 3, Tanzanian President John Magufuli ordered the confiscation of passports belonging to foreign employees of an Indian infrastructure company. The 29 billion shilling ($13 million) water project in the southern town of Lindi was expected to be finished in March 2015 but was still incomplete.
(Reuters, 3/3/17)
2017 Mar 3, In Thailand former Air Vice Marshal Chitpong Thongkum, a former palace medical adviser, was jailed for five and a half years for insulting the monarchy and other charges, a day after another disgraced aide to the new king was charged in a separate case.
(Reuters, 3/3/17)
2017 Mar 3, Turkey accused Germany of scandalous behavior in cancelling rallies of Turkish citizens in two German towns due to be addressed by Turkish ministers and said Berlin provided a "shelter" for people committing crimes against his country.
(Reuters, 3/3/17)
2017 Mar 3, Ukrainian state agencies sought to detain Roman Nasirov, the head of the tax and customs service, over the alleged embezzlement of around $75 million - a potentially landmark case after patchy anti-graft efforts from the Western-backed authorities. Television footage from the previous evening showed an apparently unconscious Roman Nasirov being stretchered into an ambulance and taken to Kiev's Feofania hospital.
(Reuters, 3/3/17)
2017 Mar 3, In Ukraine dozens of sex workers and human rights campaigners gathered in Kiev demanding the legalization of prostitution in the post-Soviet state.
(AFP, 3/3/17)
2017 Mar 3, The UN said Sri Lankan security and police forces are reportedly still committing rape and torture, and the country must investigate and prosecute those involved as well as those implicated in past wartime atrocities.
(Reuters, 3/3/17)
2017 Mar 3, Yemeni officials said US jets carried out dozens of airstrikes on al-Qaida targets in Yemen overnight and in the past 48 hours in one of the lengthiest, sustained operations inside this conflict-torn Arab country.
(AP, 3/3/17)
2017 Mar 3, Two Zimbabwean journalists were arrested over a newspaper report that described President Robert Mugabe as "in bad shape" when he flew to Singapore for what officials called a scheduled medical check-up.
(AFP, 3/3/17)
2017 Mar 4, Pres. Donald Trump claimed that Barack Obama had tapped his phones and that it was up to Congress to investigate the matter.
(Econ, 3/11/17, p.27)
2017 Mar 4, It was reported that about 62,000 people, who were held at Colorado’s Aurora Detention Facility, have joined together in a lawsuit saying they were required to work for as little as $1 a day.
(SFC, 3/4/17, p.A4)
2017 Mar 4, In New York a man in Schenectady threw gasoline on his wife and set her on fire. Elizabeth Gonzales died the next day. Antonio Bargallo (69) was taken into custody.
(SFC, 3/7/17, p.A6)
2017 Mar 4, US Customs officers arrested Juan Carlos Luperon as he carried 10 pounds of cocaine taped to his legs at NYC’s Kennedy Airport following his arrival from the Dominican Republic.
(SSFC, 3/12/17, p.A9)
2017 Mar 4, Bahrain said it has arrested 25 suspected members of a terror group allegedly backed by Iran on the island nation.
(AP, 3/4/17)
2017 Mar 4, China said it will raise its defense budget by about 7 percent this year, continuing a trend of lowered growth amid a slowing economy despite regional tensions over the South China Sea and other issues.
(AP, 3/4/17)
2017 Mar 4, Senior Chinese government adviser Luo Fuhe warned that the country's internet censorship is hampering scientific research and economic development, in a rare public criticism of a sensitive policy that the government has vigorously defended.
(AP, 3/4/17)
2017 Mar 4, Iran said the six-year prison term of Ahmad Montazeri, son of Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, has been suspended after approval by the country's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei following a request by a top cleric.
(AP, 3/4/17)
2017 Mar 4, Jordan hanged 15 death row prisoners including 10 convicted prisoners with ties to Islamic extremism who carried out five shootings and a bombing since 2003. It was the largest round of executions in the kingdom in at least a decade.
(AFP, 3/4/17)
2017 Mar 4, East Libyan forces carried out air strikes around major oil ports as they sought to regain control of the area from a rival faction. Strongman Khalifa Haftar conceded the loss of Ras Lanuf's main airfield to forces led by Islamists of the Benghazi Defence Brigades.
(Reuters, 3/4/17)(AFP, 3/4/17)
2017 Mar 4, Malaysia expelled North Korea's ambassador for refusing to apologize for his strong accusations over Malaysia's handling of the investigation into the killing of the North Korean leader's half-brother.
(AP, 3/4/17)
2017 Mar 4, In Pakistan unidentified gunmen killed attorney Mohammed Jan Gigyani in northwestern Shabqadar town. Gigyani was a prominent lawyer affiliated with the secular Qaumi Watan political party. Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, a breakaway faction of Pakistani Taliban militants claimed responsibility for the killing.
(AP, 3/4/17)
2017 Mar 4, Somalia's PM Hassan Ali Khaire announced that 110 people have died from hunger in the past 48 hours in a single region as a severe drought threatens millions of people across the country.
(AP, 3/4/17)
2017 Mar 4, Spanish police arrested 24 members of a Colombian drug ring seeking to establish a network for the wholesale distribution of cocaine.
(AP, 3/4/17)
2017 Mar 4, Syrian government forces supported by Russian air power and artillery seizing eight more northern villages today and around 90 villages since mid-January. Tens of thousands of Syrian civilians have fled the ferocious fighting against Islamic State group jihadists over the past week. At least 11 civilians were killed and dozens more wounded in air strikes on the village of Oqayrabat village, Hama province, that a monitor said were likely carried out by Russia.
(AFP, 3/4/17)
2017 Mar 4, A Syrian military jet crashed in Turkey’s southern border province of Hatay. The pilot was rescued after a nine hour search and had "a few" broken bones and was receiving treatment at a local hospital, but wasn't in critical condition.
(AP, 3/5/17)
2017 Mar 4, The United Nations announced aid worth $5 million (4.7 million euros) to help people affected by the humanitarian crisis in the violence-wracked Kasai region of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
(AFP, 3/4/17)
2017 Mar 4, The annual report by a UN panel of experts on North Korea said North Korean weapons barred by UN sanctions have ended up in the hands of UN peacekeepers in Africa.
(AP, 3/4/17)
2017 Mar 5, US agriculture officials said that tens of thousands of chickens have been destroyed at a Tennessee chicken farm due to a bird flu outbreak. 30 other farms within a six-mile radius were being quarantined.
(AP, 3/6/17)(SFC, 3/6/17, p.A4)
2017 Mar 5, It was reported that US federal authorities have approved a plan to move nearly 1,500 desert tortoises from California’s Marine base at Twentynine Palms so that the marine Corps can use the area for training with tanks and live ammunition.
(SSFC, 3/5/17, p.A11)
2017 Mar 5, Gladys Hansen (1925), San Francisco historian, died. Her books included “Denial of Disaster" (1989) in which she showed that the 1906 San Francisco earthquake left 3,000 – 4,000 people dead as opposed to the official count of 478.
(SSFC, 3/12/17, p.C12)
2017 Mar 5, In Afghanistan at least five members of the Afghan security forces were killed early today when their checkpoint came under an insurgent attack in northeastern Kunduz province. 18 insurgents were killed by airstrikes in the Imam Sahib district of Kunduz province.
(AP, 3/5/17)
2017 Mar 5, Azerbaijan and Iran agreed to work towards completing their portion of a planned freight railway route from Europe to South Asia.
(Reuters, 3/5/17)
2017 Mar 5, Bahrain's parliament approved a constitutional change allowing military courts to try civilians.
(AP, 3/5/17)
2017 Mar 5, Britain agreed to arrange 10 billion pounds ($12.3 billion) in loans to finance infrastructure projects in Iraq over a 10 year period, in a program that would only benefit British companies.
(Reuters, 3/5/17)
2017 Mar 5, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang pledged to make the country's smoggy skies blue again and "work faster" to address pollution caused by the burning of coal for heat and electricity at the opening of the annual National People's Congress.
(AP, 3/5/17)
2017 Mar 5, China's top economic official trimmed the country's growth target and warned of dangers from global pressure for trade controls as Beijing tries to build a consumer-driven economy and reduce reliance on exports and investment.
(AP, 3/5/17)
2017 Mar 5, Anti-India protests erupted in Indian-controlled Kashmir following a fierce gunbattle in which two rebels and a counterinsurgency policeman were killed.
(AP, 3/5/17)
2017 Mar 5, The Iranian judiciary said on authorities have arrested an Iranian-American on charges of defrauding people seeking US residence of $2.6 million.
(Reuters, 3/5/17)
2017 Mar 5, Iraqi forces battled the Islamic State group in hours of heavy clashes in west Mosul. The number of people who fled fighting in the area topped 45,000. At least six suicide car bombs dispatched by militants were destroyed before reaching troops.
(AFP, 3/5/17)(SFC, 3/6/17, p.A2)
2017 Mar 5, Japan's ruling party approved a change in party rules that could pave the way for Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to become the country's longest-serving leader in the post-World War II era.
(AP, 3/5/17)
2017 Mar 5, In central Japan a helicopter conducting a mountain rescue exercise crashed with nine local officials aboard. At least three people were feared dead.
(AFP, 3/5/17)
2017 Mar 5, In Panama a bus carrying farmworkers went off a highway in Anton killing 18 people and injuring 37 others.
(SFC, 3/6/17, p.A2)
2017 Mar 5, A Sudanese court sentenced three human rights activists to a year each in jail after convicting them of publishing fake reports or spying. Khalafalla Al-Afif, Midhat Hamdan and Mustafa Adam were arrested on May 23 last year after security agents raided their office in Khartoum.
(AFP, 3/5/17)
2017 Mar 5, The UN said tens of thousands of civilians have fled offensives against the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria, where the jihadists are battling to keep what remains of their territory.
(AFP, 3/5/17)
2017 Mar 5, In Yemen the United States launched a new wave of air raids against Al-Qaeda, as jihadists fled from towns being targeted to mountainous areas. Suspected al Qaeda militants opened fired on a military checkpoint in the southern province of Abyan, killing six troops and a civilian.
(AFP, 3/5/17)(Reuters, 3/5/17)
2017 Mar 5, Zimbabwean junior doctors called off a three-week strike saying the government had partially met their demands, a day before a one-day walkout by other public sector workers.
(Reuters, 3/5/17)
2017 Mar 6, US Pres. Donald Trump signed a revised executive order temporarily banning people from six Muslim-majority countries (Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen). The revision would become effective on March 16.
(SFC, 3/7/17, p.A1)(Econ, 3/11/17, p.29)
2017 Mar 6, US House Republicans unveiled the American Health Care Act (AHCA) to overhaul Obamacare and Pres. Trump endorsed it.
(Econ, 3/11/17, p.28)
2017 Mar 6, Researchers said 11 of 27 species of Hawaii’s reef fish are experiencing some level of overfishing.
(SFC, 3/7/17, p.A6)
2017 Mar 6, In North Carolina Oliver Funes Machada (18), reportedly an illegal immigrant from Honduras, beheaded his mother (35). In 2018 he was judged not guilty by reason of insanity.
(http://tinyurl.com/ybx4eysy)(SFC, 10/23/18, p.A7)
2017 Mar 6, CSX appointed E. Hunter Harrison (72), a veteran railway executive, as CEO. Harrison had announced his departure from Canadian National (CN) on Jan 18.
(Econ, 3/11/17, p.63)
2017 Mar 6, IBM released the first commercial program for universal quantum computers. Various startups have released their own quantum software.
(Econ, 3/11/17, TQ p.10)
2017 Mar 6, Afghan officials said they have ordered the Afghan Turk CAG Educational NGO (ATCE), a network of schools regarded with suspicion by the Turkish government, to be transferred to a foundation approved by Ankara.
(Reuters, 3/6/17)
2017 Mar 6, Bahrain's government filed a lawsuit to dissolve the secular Waad political party, the second-such organization it has targeted in the last year as part of an intense crackdown on opposition in the island nation.
(AP, 3/6/17)
2017 Mar 6, The European Union approved plans for a military headquarters to coordinate overseas security operations. The facility will initially run three operations: civil-military training missions in Mali, the Central African Republic and Somalia.
(AFP, 3/6/17)
2017 Mar 6, The European Union said it has cleared Hungary to build two nuclear reactors with Russian help after Budapest made commitments to safeguard competition in the energy sector.
(AP, 3/6/17)
2017 Mar 6, French carmaker PSA announced the acquisition of General Motors' European subsidiary, which includes the Opel and Vauxhall brands, for 1.3 billion euros ($1.38 billion).
(AFP, 3/6/17)
2017 Mar 6, The French-made Peugeot 3008 was voted European car of the year on the eve of the opening of the Geneva motor show.
(Econ, 3/11/17, p.63)
2017 Mar 6, Greek authorities said they have seized more than half a million illegally made amphetamine pills, their largest haul to date and thought to be destined for the Middle East.
(Reuters, 3/6/17)
2017 Mar 6, Israeli police questioned PM Benjamin Netanyahu for a fourth time in a corruption investigation that has prompted political rivals to start looking to a "post-Bibi" Israel.
(Reuters, 3/6/17)
2017 Mar 6, In Kenya the body of rancher Tristan Voorspuy was found 190 km (118 miles) north of Nairobi. He was shot dead while inspecting some of his lodges, which had been burned by attackers. 379 pastoralist herders were soon arrested for invading ranches that led to the killing of the British farmer. Samson Lokayi (25), suspected of involvement in the death of Voorspuy, was arrested on March 12.
(AP, 3/6/17)(AFP, 3/14/17)
2017 Mar 6, In Kenya one of Africa's oldest and largest elephants was killed by poachers in Tsavo National Park. Two poachers believed to be responsible for the killing were soon apprehended.
(AFP, 3/6/17)
2017 Mar 6, In Myanmar some 30 people died in clashes between ethnic rebels and security forces after fighters from the predominantly ethnic Chinese Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA) launched a pre-dawn attack on police posts in the capital of the northeastern Kokang region, Laukkai.
(Reuters, 3/6/17)
2017 Mar 6, Nepali police shot and killed at least three ethnic Madhesis in the country's restive southern plains as they tried to disrupt an opposition rally organized by the Communist Unified Marxist-Leninist (UML) party that opposes any change to the country’s post-monarchy charter.
(Reuters, 3/6/17)
2017 Mar 6, Nigeria’s former Adamawa state governor James Bala Ngilari was jailed for five years after being found guilty of corruption related to procurement of cars while in office.
(Reuters, 3/6/17)
2017 Mar 6, North Korea fired four banned ballistic missiles that flew about 1,000 km (620 miles) on average, with three of them landing in waters that Japan claims as its exclusive economic zone. The EU condemned North Korea for firing four banned ballistic missiles and said it would consult with Japan and international partners on how to react.
(AP, 3/6/17)
2017 Mar 6, North Korea said it has ordered Malaysia's ambassador out of the country in a tit-for-tat after Malaysia expelled North Korea's envoy over the death of Kim Jong Nam at Kuala Lumpur's airport.
(AP, 3/6/17)
2017 Mar 6, Palestinian militant Basil al-Araj (31) was killed in a shootout with Israeli forces in the West Bank. Police said he headed a group planning attacks against Israeli targets and collected weapons for the group.
(AP, 3/6/17)
2017 Mar 6, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte signed an executive order creating a joint command to mobilize 21 state agencies behind his bloody war on drugs, prioritizing "high-value" targets and going after all levels of the illicit trade. The order was published on March 10.
(Reuters, 3/10/17)
2017 Mar 6, Retired Philippine police officer Arturo Lascanas testified that President Rodrigo Duterte and his men were linked to nearly 200 killings that the officer and a "death squad" carried out when Duterte was mayor of Davao City.
(AP, 3/6/17)
2017 Mar 6, Russian and South African communications officials pledged to work on collaborative media activities.
(Econ, 3/18/17, p.53)
2017 Mar 6, South Korea received the first components of THAAD, an American anti-missile system.
(Econ, 3/18/17, p.41)
2017 Mar 6, In Syria US-backed militias cut the last main road out of Islamic State-held Raqqa, severing the highway between the group's de facto capital and its stronghold of Deir al-Zor province.
(Reuters, 3/6/17)
2017 Mar 6, In Thailand a statement from the Royal Palace said King Vajiralongkorn Bodindradebayavarangkun has approved stripping the honorary title from Phra Dhammajayo (72), head of the Dhammakaya sect, because of the criminal charges against him.
(AP, 3/6/17)
2017 Mar 6, Turkish security forces launched one of their largest "anti-terrorist" operations in recent years in the restive south-east against Kurdish militants.
(AFP, 3/6/17)
2017 Mar 6, Ukraine’s deputy foreign minister accused Russia of financing terrorism by shipping arms, ammunition and funds to separatist rebels in eastern Ukraine and of discriminating against non-Russians in the annexed Crimean Peninsula.
(SFC, 3/7/17, p.A2)
2017 Mar 6, In Yemen the United States carried out at least one new air strike on al Qaeda overnight. Two boys were killed in a drone strike while walking on a road in al-Bayda province used by al Qaeda militants who have been subject to repeated strikes by US forces in recent days. Three suspected al Qaeda militants were killed in a separate strike in Qifa in the same province.
(Reuters, 3/6/17)(Reuters, 3/7/17)
2017 Mar 6, In Zambia eight people died and 28 were injured in a stampede during food handouts at a youth center in the capital, Lusaka.
(AP, 3/6/17)
2017 Mar 6, Zimbabwe's government agreed to pay outstanding cash bonuses, bringing an end to a brief sit-in protest by public workers.
(Reuters, 3/6/17)
2017 Mar 7, The US Justice Department said the Chinese firm ZTE Corp. has agreed to plead guilty and pay the United States $892 million for violating sanctions against Iran. ZTE Corp. had illegally shipped sensitive US-made equipment to Iran.
(AP, 3/7/17)
2017 Mar 7, WikiLeaks published thousands of documents purportedly taken from the Central Intelligence Agency's Center for Cyber Intelligence, a dramatic release that appears to expose intimate details of America's cyberespionage toolkit.
(AP, 3/7/17)
2017 Mar 7, In Mississippi a freight train hit a tour bus in Biloxi killing at least four people.
(SFC, 3/8/17, p.A5)
2017 Mar 7, Texas executed Rolando Ruiz was executed for the 1992 contract killing of Theresa Rodriguez (29) orchestrated by her husband and brother-in-law.
(SFC, 3/8/17, p.A5)
2017 Mar 7, Thousands of stranded Afghans and Pakistanis returned home as Pakistan temporarily reopened two main crossings that had been closed last month after a wave of militant attacks.
(AP, 3/7/17)
2017 Mar 7, In Argentina thousands of banner-waving trade unionists marched through Buenos Aires to protest job losses and inflation.
(Econ, 3/18/17, p.32)
2017 Mar 7, British PM Theresa May sacked Michael Heseltine (83), a senior figure in her Conservative Party, from various advisory roles for rebelling against the government in a Brexit vote in the House of Lords.
(AFP, 3/8/17)
2017 Mar 7, Cambodia’s drug czar said authorities have arrested more than 4,800 people in a two-month-old campaign against drugs and that number could more than double.
(Reuters, 3/7/17)
2017 Mar 7, Europe’s top court ruled that EU member states are not obliged to grant humanitarian visas to people who want to enter their territory to apply for asylum.
(SFC, 3/8/17, p.A3)
2017 Mar 7, A European Union court struck down a 2013 decision by EU regulators to block a planned takeover of Dutch-based package delivery company TNT Express by United Parcel Services Inc.
(AP, 3/7/17)
2017 Mar 7, In France poachers broke into the Thoiry Zoo overnight and shot a 5-year-old rhinoceros named Vince three times in the head. They used a chain saw to remove the animal's ivory horn.
(AP, 3/7/17)
2017 Mar 7, Hungary's parliament approved the systematic detention of all asylum-seekers in container camps, in a move that PM Viktor Orban said will make all of Europe safer from terror attacks.
(AFP, 3/7/17)
2017 Mar 7, An Indian court sentenced university professor G.N. Saibaba and four others to life imprisonment on charges of belonging to a banned communist rebel group and recruiting others to join them. Saibaba, arrested in 2014, is paralyzed from the waist down and uses a wheelchair. He has denied the charges.
(AP, 3/7/17)
2017 Mar 7, Iraqi government forces fighting to drive Islamic State from western Mosul recaptured the main government building, the central bank branch and the museum where three years ago the militants had smashed statues and artifacts.
(Reuters, 3/7/17)
2017 Mar 7, The Kenyan government ordered striking medical staff to go back to work and said it had withdrawn an offer of a 50 percent pay hike after the workers' union became inflexible in their negotiations.
(Reuters, 3/7/17)
2017 Mar 7, National Olympic Committee of Kenya (NOCK) executives, led by two-time Olympic champion Kip Keino, defied the IOC at a meeting and refused to make changes to their constitution.
(AP, 3/9/17)
2017 Mar 7, Kosovo's Pres. Hashim Thaci asked parliament to transform the country's lightly armed security forces into a regular army, a move immediately denounced by Serbian leaders who refuse to recognize Kosovo's independence.
(AP, 3/7/17)
2017 Mar 7, Lesotho's deputy prime minister said the king has dissolved parliament and will shortly set an election date, days after PM Pakalitha Mosisili lost a confidence vote in the assembly.
(Reuters, 3/7/17)
2017 Mar 7, Libya's eastern parliament voted to withdraw its support for a UN peace deal and Government of National Accord. The body voted to annul its previous acceptance of a presidential council and the UN-backed government currently led by PM Fayez al-Serraj in Tripoli. East Libyan forces carried out a fifth day of air strikes against a rival faction that overran the major oil ports of Es Sider and Ras Lanuf.
(AP, 3/7/17)(Reuters, 3/7/17)
2017 Mar 7, The International Organization for Migration said fighting between rival people-smuggling gangs on Libya's Mediterranean coast has killed 22 people.
(Reuters, 3/7/17)
2017 Mar 7, In Macedonia vandals damaged a museum dedicated to the Albanian alphabet, amid increasing political tension over the official status of the Albanian language in the country. Three parties of the Albanian minority, a quarter of Macedonia's population, demanded that Albanian should become Macedonia's second official language as their price to join in any coalition.
(AP, 3/7/17)
2017 Mar 7, Cyclone Enawo slammed into Madagascar. The Indian Ocean tropical storm packed winds up to 300 kph (185 mph). At least 38 people were killed and some 50,000 people driven from their homes.
(Reuters, 3/8/17)(SSFC, 3/12/17, p.A4)
2017 Mar 7, Myanmar's government urged ethnic rebel groups to join talks to achieve a nationwide peace agreement even after one of the groups raided a government-controlled town in an attack a day earlier that killed five policemen and five civilians, including a schoolteacher.
(AP, 3/7/17)
2017 Mar 7, North Korea closed its borders to Malaysians who want to leave the country, spurring Malaysia to issue a retaliatory order and drawing hundreds of ordinary people into an increasingly bitter diplomatic battle over the killing of an exiled member of North Korea's ruling family. 11 Malaysian citizens were prevented from flying home.
(AP, 3/7/17)(Econ, 3/11/17, p.40)
2017 Mar 7, Russia’s Culture Ministry said children under age 16 won't be able to go to the new Disney film "Beauty and the Beast" in Russia because it includes a gay character.
(AP, 3/7/17)
2017 Mar 7, Senegalese authorities arrested Khalifa Sall, the mayor of the capital Dakar, a potential rival to President Macky Sall (no relation) in elections expected in 2019, on suspicion of embezzling 1.8 billion CFA francs ($2.87 million).
(Reuters, 3/8/17)
2017 Mar 7, In Turkey the top generals of the Turkish, Russian and US military met in Antalya in a bid to step up coordination in Syria and avoid clashes between rival forces in the fight against IS.
(AFP, 3/7/17)
2017 Mar 7, A Ukraine judge ordered Roman Nasirov, the country’s top tax official, to be jailed or pay a hefty bail pending his trial for suspected embezzlement.
(Reuters, 3/7/17)
2017 Mar 7, UN Sec.-Gen. Antonio Guterres urged int’l. support to alleviate Somalia’s worsening hunger crisis.
(SFC, 3/8/17, p.A4)
2017 Mar 7, The United Nations said South Africa's withdrawal from the International Criminal Court has been revoked, stalling what would have been the first-ever departure from the tribunal that pursues the world's worst atrocities.
(AP, 3/8/17)
2017 Mar 7, A new United Nations report described South Sudan as teetering on the edge of genocide and experiencing ethnic cleansing, a stark portrayal of a nation whose crises now include famine.
(AP, 3/7/17)
2017 Mar 8, US federal prosecutors said a Massachusetts fishing magnate known as "The Codfather" has agreed to plead guilty to federal charges of evading fishing quotas and smuggling money to Portugal.
(AP, 3/9/17)
2017 Mar 8, Wildfires in Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas left 6 people dead along with some 2,500 adult cattle and 1,000 calves.
(SFC, 3/9/17, p.A7)
2017 Mar 8, Some one million Michigan homes and other buildings were without power after high winds caused what is believed to be the biggest outage in the state's history.
(Reuters, 3/9/17)
2017 Mar 8, RadioShack filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection for the second time in just over two years, putting the future of the nearly 100-year-old electronics retailer in doubt.
(AP, 3/9/17)
2017 Mar 8, US-based Mercy Corps, one of the largest humanitarian organizations delivering aid to Syria, said Turkey has ordered it to immediately shut down its Turkish operations.
(Reuters, 3/8/17)
2017 Mar 8, In Afghanistan gunmen wearing white lab coats stormed a military hospital in Kabul, killing at least 31 people and wounding dozens in an attack claimed by the Islamic State group. A day later the death was raised to 49.
(AFP, 3/8/17)(AP, 3/9/17)(Reuters, 3/9/17)
2017 Mar 8, Britain’s Chancellor Philip Hammond in his budget announced an increase in tax for the self-employed, who self-employed make up around 15% of the UK’s workers.
(Econ, 3/11/17, p.56)
2017 Mar 8, Britain's BBC announced it is ending its shortwave transmissions from Thailand after 20 years of operation because it failed to reach agreement with Thailand's military government on a renewal of its operating permit.
(AP, 3/8/17)
2017 Mar 8, China's foreign minister said that North Korea could suspend its nuclear and missile activities in exchange for a halt in joint US-South Korea military drills, in an unusually public proposal that analysts said showed Beijing's growing alarm over the tensions.
(AP, 3/8/17)
2017 Mar 8, China approved 38 trademarks for President Donald Trump, saying it followed the law in processing the applications at a pace that some experts view as unusually quick.
(AP, 3/9/17)
2017 Mar 8, Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein, the top UN rights official, said three mass graves have been discovered in central Democratic Republic of Congo, where hundreds have been killed since July in clashes between security forces and a local militia.
(Reuters, 3/8/17)
2017 Mar 8, The UN warned that fighting in Colombia in recent weeks has displaced some 913 families in areas formerly dominated by leftist rebels in four provinces along the Pacific Ocean.
(SFC, 3/9/17, p.A2)
2017 Mar 8, The leaders of Cyprus' Christian and Muslim faithful banded together in a pledge to work with authorities and help end violence against women and girls on the ethnically divided island.
(AP, 3/8/17)
2017 Mar 8, The European Anti-Fraud Office said that from 2013 to 2016, criminals evaded customs duties with false invoices and wrong declarations upon arrival in the UK The textiles and shoes shipped from China were in fact destined for black market sales on the European mainland.
(AP, 3/8/17)
2017 Mar 8, The European Union's police agency said an international operation has dismantled a crime network smuggling live eels to China, describing it as the EU's biggest success in recent years against trafficking in endangered species.
(AP, 3/8/17)
2017 Mar 8, The European Union said it has fined six makers of car air conditioning and engine-cooling components a total 155 million euros ($163 million) for their involvement in supply cartels.
(AP, 3/8/17)
2017 Mar 8, Bavaria's state office of criminal investigation said Germany’s police have raided over 120 apartments and business premises across the country in an investigation into a suspected online crime ring.
(Reuters, 3/8/17)
2017 Mar 8, In Guatemala a fire ripped through an overcrowded home for abused children following an escape attempt from government-run Hogar Seguro (Safe Home) Virgen de Asuncion home for youths. 19 people died at the scene, mostly girls, and another 20 died later in local hospitals.
(Reuters, 3/9/17)(AP, 3/11/17)(AP, 3/12/17)
2017 Mar 8, Iceland on International Women's Day said it will be the first country in the world to make employers prove they offer equal pay regardless of gender, ethnicity, sexuality or nationality. Iceland wants to eradicate the gender pay gap by 2022.
(AP, 3/8/17)
2017 Mar 8, Iraqi forces saw off an overnight Islamic State counter-attack near Mosul's main government buildings and took full control of the last major road leading west to the militant-held town of Tal Afar.
(Reuters, 3/8/17)
2017 Mar 8, Kenya's state sector doctors, who have been on strike for three months, said they would not resume work after a government order the day before, and would wait for the conclusion of court-supervised resolution of the dispute. Authorities said they would hire foreign doctors to get public hospitals running again after talks failed to end a strike that has crippled healthcare for 94 days.
(Reuters, 3/8/17)(AFP, 3/8/17)
2017 Mar 8, Lebanese security forces raided several money transfer shops in the country's capital on suspicion they funneled money to the Islamic State group.
(AP, 3/8/17)
2017 Mar 8, Nigeria's capital was cut off by air, as Abuja airport closed for at least six weeks for repairs, forcing flights to divert and lengthening travel times for passengers.
(AFP, 3/8/17)
2017 Mar 8, Kim Han Sol (21), a man claiming to be the son of the slain, estranged half-brother of North Korea's leader, said he was lying low with his mother and sister, in a video posted online by a group that said it helped rescue them following the murder a month ago. His location was not disclosed.
(Reuters, 3/8/17)
2017 Mar 8, In Pakistan more than 2,000 students from Islamic seminaries rallied in Islamabad, urging the government to take stern action against all those people who are posting blasphemous content on social media.
(AP, 3/8/17)
2017 Mar 8, Pakistani authorities hanged five "hardcore terrorists" after they were found guilty of carrying out attacks in the country. The convicts belonged to the Pakistani Taliban, or Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan.
(AP, 3/8/17)
2017 Mar 8, Poland cautioned other European Union countries that extending Donald Tusk's mandate as chairman of EU leaders against Warsaw's will would undermine the bloc's traditions.
(Reuters, 3/8/17)
2017 Mar 8, Spain’s Interior ministry said police have found a large stash of explosives near the town of Irun, which they suspect belong to the Basque separatist group ETA.
(AFP, 3/8/17)
2017 Mar 8, Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir pardoned 259 rebels captured in fighting with government forces, including dozens who had been sentenced to death. His order came three days after a prominent insurgent group freed dozens of prisoners, mostly soldiers, it had captured in fighting with government forces.
(AFP, 3/8/17)
2017 Mar 8, In Syria warplanes bombed a rebel-held area east of Damascus where Russia declared a ceasefire until March 20 less than 24 hours earlier.
(Reuters, 3/8/17)
2017 Mar 8, The UN nuclear agency's 35-nation Board of Governors backed the agency's chief, Yukiya Amano (69), for a third term as director general after he ran unopposed on a platform of continuity in dealing with issues like Iran's nuclear program.
(Reuters, 3/8/17)
2017 Mar 9, US Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly said Illegal border crossings declined 40 percent from January to February, crediting executive actions by President Trump for the reduction.
(CSM, 3/9/17
2017 Mar 9, Wikileaks said it will turn over all the details it has on the CIA’s alleged hacking arsenal so that tech companies can patch holes and fix vulnerabilities in their technology before the activist group makes the code publicly available online.
(SFC, 3/10/17, p.C1)
2017 Mar 9, Former New Jersey Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer Arnoldo Echevarria was convicted of accepting cash bribes and sex from immigrants in exchange for employment authorization documents.
(SFC, 3/11/17, p.A6)
2017 Mar 9, Scientists said they have developed a vaccine to shield endangered chimpanzees and gorillas against Ebola, which has wiped out tens of thousands of the wild apes in three decades.
(AFP, 3/9/17)
2017 Mar 9, Belarus Pres. Alexander Lukashenko suspended collection of a fee from the unemployed which had sparked an unusual wave of protests throughout the authoritarian country.
(AP, 3/9/17)
2017 Mar 9, European Union leaders confirmed Donald Tusk for a second term as council president, overcoming weeks of strong opposition from his native Poland.
(AP, 3/9/17)
2017 Mar 9, The Ile de France region passed a new rule obliging laborers on public building sites to use French, copying action taken elsewhere in France to squeeze out foreign workers.
(AP, 3/10/17)
2017 Mar 9, In Germany an axe-wielding attacker, Fatmir H. (37), wounded nine people in a bloody rampage at a railway station. The Kosovan national had been diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic with a history of high anxiety and self-harm. In September he was committed to a psychiatric ward.
(AFP, 3/10/17)(AFP, 9/22/17)
2017 Mar 9, In Germany Marcel Hesse (19) gave himself up to police late today in Herne. He admitted to killing a child (9) and a 22-year-old acquaintance, citing frustration over a rejected bid to join the German army and the recent loss of his internet connection. Hesse had stabbed the boy 52 times with a folding knife and allegedly boasted about the murder in a video clip he published on the darknet.
(AP, 3/10/17)(AP, 9/8/17)
2017 Mar 9, Guam lawmakers unanimously passed the measure raising the legal age to use or purchase tobacco products from 18 to 21 stating Jan. 1, 2018. Within weeks the measure lapsed into law after the governor took no action.
(AP, 3/24/17)
2017 Mar 9, In Italy an overpass collapsed onto the A14, the main Adriatic coast highway, crushing a car and reportedly killing two people inside.
(AP, 3/9/17)
2017 Mar 9, Mexican authorities said three police investigators have been found dead after being abducted in the municipality of Maltrata, Veracruz state, a region plagued by drug violence.
(AFP, 3/10/17)
2017 Mar 9, Moldova's parliament accused Russia's intelligence service of intimidating politicians, following an investigation into alleged money laundering by Russian officials.
(AP, 3/9/17)
2017 Mar 9, North Korea guaranteed the safety of Malaysians banned from leaving the country, as two Malaysian UN employees left the isolated state in a possible sign that diplomatic tensions had begun to settle. Nine other Malaysians were believed to still be stuck there after the two countries' diplomatic relations broke down over the Feb 13 killing in Malaysia of the estranged sibling of North Korea's leader.
(Reuters, 3/9/17)(AP, 3/9/17)
2017 Mar 9, Pakistan shut its porous border with landlocked Afghanistan after opening it for two days, saying the measure was necessary to save Pakistanis from attacks from militants operating inside Afghanistan.
(AP, 3/9/17)
2017 Mar 9, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte pleaded for help from mayors in Muslim parts of the south to deal with Islamist militants, and threatened to impose martial law there if the problem is not tackled.
(Reuters, 3/9/17)
2017 Mar 9, Top Puerto Rico legislators said they will provide some financial relief to islanders who invested in government bonds and face deep losses amid an economic crisis and ongoing defaults.
(AP, 3/9/17)
2017 Mar 9, It was reported that Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has dismissed 10 senior law enforcement officers.
(AP, 3/9/17)
2017 Mar 9, Spain's National Court found German Cardona Soler (46), dubbed the "mini-Madoff" in reference to jailed US conman Bernard L. Madoff, guilty of fraud, money laundering, document falsification and criminal association. Soler was sentenced to more than 13 years in jail for running a pyramid scheme that swindled 350 million euros ($372 million) from over 180,000 investors in Europe, the United States and Latin America.
(AFP, 3/10/17)
2017 Mar 9, In Syria air strikes, believed to belong to the US-led coalition against the Islamic State militants, killed 23 civilians, including eight children, in countryside around the northern city of Raqqa.
(Reuters, 3/9/17)
2017 Mar 9, Thai transport officials said that services using private vehicles to transport passengers, such as Uber or Southeast Asia's GrabCar, are illegal because the vehicles aren't registered for public transport. The government said it plans to introduce its own cellphone app, TAXI OK, for passengers to call government-endorsed taxis featuring GPS tracking systems and closed-circuit cameras
(AP, 3/9/17)
2017 Mar 10, President Donald Trump's revamped travel ban faced its first major legal setback, after a federal judge halted enforcement of the directive that would deny US entry to the wife and child of a Syrian refugee already granted asylum.
(AFP, 3/11/17)
2017 Mar 10, Acting US deputy attorney general Dana Boente called the 46 remaining US attorneys who had been appointed under President Obama and requested their resignations, effective immediately.
(CSM, 3/11/17)
2017 Mar 10, The Pentagon faced a burgeoning scandal as more pictures of naked female service members apparently shared without their consent by male colleagues have turned up on secret social media sites.
(AFP, 3/11/17)
2017 Mar 10, The US 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta ruled 2-1 that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 doesn’t protect against workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation.
(SFC, 3/14/17, p.A8)
2017 Mar 10, A panel of federal judges in the Western District of Texas ruled 2-1 that three Congressional districts must be redrawn. The two judges who sided with the plaintiffs found that the way in which these three districts were drawn amounted to an unconstitutional dilution of the Hispanic vote.
(CSM, 3/11/17)
2017 Mar 10, Robert James Waller (77), author of “The Bridges of Madison County" (1992), died at his home in Fredericksburg, Texas. The book was turned into a movie in 1995 with Meryl Streep and Clint Eastwood and grossed $182 million worldwide.
(SSFC, 3/12/17, p.A11)
2017 Mar 10, In southern Afghanistan eight local policemen were killed by their colleagues late today after they were poisoned in their base in Zabul province, in the latest so-called "insider attack". The Taliban claimed responsibility for the incident.
(AFP, 3/11/17)
2017 Mar 10, In Austria four planned Turkish political meetings were canceled in the latest signs of unease across Europe over a series of campaign events to rally support among expatriate Turks for President Tayyip Erdogan.
(Reuters, 3/11/17)
2017 Mar 10, Prominent Bahraini Dr. Ali al-Ekry, jailed for five years in connection with the 2011 Arab Spring uprising for democracy, was released from prison.
(Reuters, 3/10/17)
2017 Mar 10, A Congolese court in Beni sentenced to death nine rebels of the Allied Democratic Forces, for crimes against humanity. Two others were acquitted.
(SFC, 3/11/17, p.A2)
2017 Mar 10, Iraqi special forces battling the Islamic State group pushed deeper into west Mosul, where a commander said jihadist resistance is showing signs of weakening under repeated assaults. The Islamic State released dozens of prisoners held in jails in the districts of the northern Iraqi city of Mosul that remained under its control.
(AFP, 3/10/17)(Reuters, 3/11/17)
2017 Mar 10, Fugitive Italian mobster Giulio Perrone, who had been living in Mexico under a false identity, was jailed in Rome after being extradited from Mexico. He had been tracked down by Italian police on Facebook.
(AFP, 3/11/17)
2017 Mar 10, Japan’s PM Shinzo Abe announced that Japan is ending its peacekeeping mission in troubled South Sudan after five years. Abe said Japan would not renew the mission after the current rotation returns in May.
(AP, 3/10/17)
2017 Mar 10, The International Olympic Committee said it has frozen all cash funding for sport in Kenya as it battles the national Olympic body over its governance.
(AP, 3/10/17)
2017 Mar 10, Kosovo police arrested two people after finding counterfeit currency valued at about 2 million euros.
(AP, 3/10/17)
2017 Mar 10, Mexican officials said authorities have found more than 250 human skulls in hidden graves in the eastern state of Veracruz. They had been discovered by mothers searching for their missing children. The bodies were found over a six-month period, with the first discovered in August near the city of Veracruz by the volunteer collective known as El Solecito, formed by relatives of those who have disappeared.
(AFP, 3/11/17)(SFC, 3/15/17, p.A3)
2017 Mar 10, Mexican prosecutors said six bodies were found this week around the twin resorts of Cabo san Lucas and San Jose del Cabo at the southern tip of the Baja California peninsula.
(SFC, 3/11/17, p.A2)
2017 Mar 10, Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari returned home after nearly two months' medical leave in Britain but did little to quell fears about the state of his health by saying he would not start work again immediately.
(AFP, 3/10/17)
2017 Mar 10, Romania's health minister said thousands of people have caught measles in an ongoing outbreak in the country, which has claimed 17 lives. Around 3,400 people had contracted the disease since the outbreak began in September 2016.
(AP, 3/10/17)
2017 Mar 10, Saudi police said Mustafa Ali Abdullah al-Madad, wanted by security forces for his involvement in a number of terror crimes against the citizens and security personnel, has been killed in the governorate of Qatif.
(Reuters, 3/10/17)
2017 Mar 10, South Korea's Constitutional Court removed impeached President Park Geun-hye from office in a unanimous ruling over a corruption scandal that has plunged the country into political turmoil and worsened an already-serious national divide. About 30 protesters and police officers were injured in the violent clashes near the court.
(AP, 3/10/17)
2017 Mar 10, South Korea-based LG Electronics launched its new G6 smartphone.
(Econ, 3/18/17, p.19)
2017 Mar 10, South Sudan's President Salva Kiir said he had pardoned two senior government officials and promised to release other political prisoners, as his rule faces surging resistance, warfare and famine.
(Reuters, 3/10/17)
2017 Mar 10, Spain reported a case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), commonly called mad cow disease, on a farm near the city of Salamanca.
(AP, 3/11/17)
2017 Mar 10, A court in Thailand sentenced Jumpol Manmai, a former high-ranking police officer and aide to the country's king, to three years in prison for dereliction of duty and land encroachment.
(AP, 3/10/17)
2017 Mar 10, In Turkey seven people were killed including four Russians when a privately-owned helicopter crashed in Istanbul after hitting a television tower.
(AFP, 3/10/17)
2017 Mar 10, The UN accused Turkish security forces of committing serious abuses during operations against Kurdish militants in the southeast after a ceasefire collapsed in July 2015.
(AFP, 3/10/17)
2017 Mar 10, The UN warned that the world is facing its worst humanitarian crisis since the end of World War II, with more than 20 million people facing starvation and famine in four countries (northeastern Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan and Yemen).
(AFP, 3/11/17)
2017 Mar 10, A Vatican spokeswoman said in a statement that Pope Francis has sent 100,000 euros ($106,090) to the poor in the ravaged Syrian city of Aleppo.
(Reuters, 3/10/17)
2017 Mar 10, A naval mine suspected to have been planted by rebels hit a Yemeni coast guard vessel in the Red Sea, killing two sailors.
(AP, 3/10/17)
2017 Mar 10, In Yemen an airstrike by the US-backed, Saudi-led coalition on the Khokha market in the western province of Hodeida killed 22 civilians.
(AP, 3/11/17)
2017 Mar 11, In the SF Bay Area David Brian Stubblefield of San Bruno shot and killed his neighbor, Benjamin Roybal (77), following an argument over the cost of a space heater. Stubblefield then used a chainsaw to dismember Roybal. In 2018 Stubblefield (51) pleaded no contest and faced a 40-year to life sentence.
(http://tinyurl.com/ycuwf8z4)(SFC, 3/27/18, p.C1)
2017 Mar 11, In eastern Afghanistan gunmen attacked a military air base in Khost province. One was killed, while two others were still holding out. The interior ministry said that over the past 25 hours, security forces had killed 51 armed militants in counter-terrorism operations across the country.
(Reuters, 3/11/17)
2017 Mar 11, In Brazil Watila Santos (38) died from yellow fever in Casimiro de Abreu, 93 miles (150 km) from Rio de Janeiro. Around 30,000 of the city's 42,000 people were soon vaccinated.
(AP, 3/18/17)
2017 Mar 11, In Ethiopia at least 30 people were killed and dozens more hurt in a giant landslide at the Koshe landfill, country’s largest rubbish dump, on the outskirts of Addis Ababa. The death toll soon climbed to 72.
(AFP, 3/12/17)(AFP, 3/14/17)
2017 Mar 11, Narendra Modi's party won a landslide victory in Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous state, in a massive vote of confidence for the prime minister halfway into his first term. The BJP won 311 of the total 403 seats.
(AP, 3/11/17)
2017 Mar 11, In eastern India Maoist rebels ambushed a paramilitary patrol in Chhattisgarh state, killing 11 policemen.
(Reuters, 3/11/17)
2017 Mar 11, Iraqi paramilitary forces announced that they had discovered a mass grave at Badush prison near Mosul containing the remains of hundreds of people executed by the Islamic State group in 2014.
(AP, 3/11/17)
2017 Mar 11, Italian riot police moved in to quell violent protests in Naples sparked by the first major rally in the southern city by the anti-immigrant Northern League leader.
(AP, 3/11/17)
2017 Mar 11, The Netherlands barred Turkey's foreign minister from landing in Rotterdam in a row over Ankara's political campaigning among Turkish emigres, and President Tayyip Erdogan retaliated, branding his NATO partner a "Nazi remnant". Turkey's state-run Anadolu news agency said family minister Fatma Betul Sayan Kaya will travel to the Dutch city of Rotterdam by land. Dutch authorities expelled Kaya for seeking to woo the vote of expatriate Turks for a key referendum at home.
(Reuters, 3/11/17)(AFP, 3/12/17)
2017 Mar 11, Saudi teenager Waleed Talal Ali al-Areed was shot dead during a security raid in the predominantly Shiite village of al-Awamiya. The Interior Ministry said he was wanted by police and was killed in a shootout with security forces.
(AP, 3/12/17)
2017 Mar 11, In South Korea opponents of ousted leader Park Geun-hye (35) rallied in Seoul to demand that she be arrested, a day after she was thrown out of office over a corruption scandal involving the country's conglomerates.
(Reuters, 3/11/17)
2017 Mar 11, Spanish police said they have freed a 16-year-old girl who was being advertised by an alleged prostitution ring as a virgin and have made seven arrests. The ring was based in the southern resort town of Marbella.
(AP, 3/11/17)
2017 Mar 11, In Syria twin blasts hit the center of Damascus killing at least 40 people. Two suicide bombers carried out the attack. The next day the death toll was soon raised to 74. The Levant Liberation Committee said it was responsible for the two suicide attacks. The former Al-Qaeda affiliate Fateh al-Sham Front also claimed responsibility.
(Reuters, 3/11/17)(AFP, 3/12/17)(SFC, 3/13/17, p.A2)
2017 Mar 11, The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 300 families of Islamic State group fighters have fled the jihadists' self-proclaimed capital of Raqa over the last 24 hours, as rival forces advance on the city.
(AFP, 3/11/17)
2017 Mar 11, Turkish journalists and opposition lawmakers protested in Istanbul against the detention of reporters, as a crackdown on the media has accelerated after the failed coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
(AFP, 3/11/17)
2017 Mar 11, Ukraine's army reported two soldiers killed in clashes with Russian-backed rebels in eastern Ukraine over the last 24 hours. A rebel spokesman in the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic said that one of its fighters had been killed.
(AFP, 3/11/17)
2017 Mar 12, In eastern CongoDRC UN officials Michael Sharp of the United States and Zaida Catalan, a dual national of Chile and Sweden, disappeared along with four Congolese citizens while traveling in the Kasai region. On March 27 the bodies of Sharp, Catalan and a Congolese were found in the region. They had been investigating an armed conflict in the region between government forces and the Kamuina Nsapu militia. Jose Tshibuabua (1964-2019) was charged with murder after Reuters and Radio France Internationale (RFI) revealed in December 2017 that he had been working as an intelligence service informant at the same time he and several family with ties to the militia met the investigators to help them plan their fatal trip.
(SFC, 3/16/17, p.A4)(AP, 3/28/17)(AFP, 3/29/17)(Reuters, 10/22/19)
2017 Mar 12, In Georgia at least 21 people, including 11 police officers, were left injured during a night of rioting in Batumi, the country’s second-largest city. The confrontation reportedly started after police ticketed a motorist the previous day for a traffic violation, sparking an argument that attracted people nearby.
(AP, 3/12/17)
2017 Mar 12, In Haiti a bus plowed into a crowd in Gonaives early today killing at least 34 people.
(SFC, 3/13/17, p.A2)
2017 Mar 12, An Iraqi commander of the elite Counter Terrorism Service (CTS) said government forces have retaken around 30 percent of west Mosul from Islamic State militants.
(Reuters, 3/12/17)
2017 Mar 12, In Iraq two investigators for Sallyport Global were fired abruptly and flown out of Iraq. They had been looking into timesheet fraud allegations and were set to interview company managers, whom they considered suspects. The company was paid nearly $700 million to secure an Iraqi base for F-16 fighter jets, but turned a blind eye to alcohol smuggling, theft, security violations, and allegations of sex trafficking and terminated the investigators who uncovered the wrongdoing.
(AP, 5/3/17)
2017 Mar 12, Moroccan authorities arrested Kassim Tajideen, deemed by Washington a top financier of the Lebanese Hezbollah movement, and planned to extradite him to the United States.
(Reuters, 3/21/17)
2017 Mar 12, In New Zealand a powerful storm caused flooding, landslides and blackouts, leaving thousands of homes in Auckland without power.
(Reuters, 3/12/17)
2017 Mar 12, Officials said the Philippine government and communist rebels have agreed to resume peace talks and restore separate cease-fires after an escalation of deadly clashes.
(AP, 3/12/17)
2017 Mar 12, South Africa's ruling ANC published a policy paper calling for an end to corruption and division within the party as it battles to reverse declining popularity.
(AFP, 3/12/17)
2017 Mar 12, In southwest Tunisia Islamist militants attacked a checkpoint in Kebili, killing a policeman and wounding three others. Two militants were also killed in an exchange of fire during the attack.
(Reuters, 3/12/17)
2017 Mar 12, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called on international organizations to "raise their voices" against the Netherlands after it escorted a minister out of the country and prevented another one from landing in the country.
(AP, 3/12/17)
2017 Mar 13, The US Congressional Budget Office concluded that 14 million more Americans will be uninsured in 2018 compared with current law under the health plan proposed by House Republicans.
(Econ, 3/18/17, p.30)
2017 Mar 13, Two former Penn State administrators pleaded guilty to mishandling child-sex allegations against Jerry Sandusky, more than five years after the scandal rocked the university and led to the downfall of football coach Joe Paterno.
(SFC, 3/14/17, p.A7)
2017 Mar 13, Intel said it will buy Israeli car tech firm Mobileye for $15.3 billion, in a deal signaling the US computer chip giant's commitment to technology for self-driving vehicles.
(AFP, 3/13/17)(Econ, 3/18/17, p.65)
2017 Mar 13, In Afghanistan a roadside bomb struck a bus in downtown Kabul during rush hour. At least one woman was killed and 19 others wounded. Two Afghan policemen were shot and killed on the outskirts of Kabul while warming themselves around a fire. Taliban extremists cut off the hand and foot of Ghulam Farooq, a suspected thief, in public in Herat province.
(AFP, 3/13/17)(AP, 3/14/17)
2017 Mar 13, In northern Bangladesh unknown assailants shot and hacked to death a Sufi spiritual leader and his adopted daughter.
(AP, 3/14/17)
2017 Mar 13, Burundi’s health minister said about 700 people have died from malaria in Burundi so far this year. He said authorities have registered 1.8 million infections in a rising epidemic.
(AFP, 3/14/17)
2017 Mar 13, Egypt's President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi pardoned more than 200 people convicted and jailed for their participation in illegal protests. Former Pres. Hosni Mubarek was ordered free from detention.
(AP, 3/13/17)(SFC, 3/14/17, p.A2)
2017 Mar 13, In Ethiopia gunmen from South Sudan killed 28 people and kidnapped 43 in Gambella's Gog and Jor areas.
(Reuters, 3/15/17)
2017 Mar 13, The EU said it has prolonged for six months until Sept. 15 a blacklist of Russian and Crimean individuals and firms accused of undermining Ukraine's integrity and independence.
(Reuters, 3/13/17)
2017 Mar 13, Hungarian lawmakers re-elected President Janos Ader to his largely ceremonial post, ensuring another five-year term for a supporter of populist PM Viktor Orban's government.
(AP, 3/13/17)
2017 Mar 13, In Hungary nearly 100 migrants began a hunger strike at a detention center, demanding that they be allowed to leave the Bekescsaba camp on the Romanian border.
(Reuters, 3/13/17)
2017 Mar 13, Iraqi forces said that they have taken more territory from jihadists and were searching for militants and bombs on the edge of the Old City as they press an offensive in west Mosul. An airstrike hit a residential area in Mosul. Scores of residents were later reported killed.
(AFP, 3/13/17)(AP, 3/24/17)
2017 Mar 13, Several hundred Palestinians marched in an anti-government protest, calling for the resignation of President Mahmoud Abbas and criticizing his security coordination with Israel. Separately, Palestinian journalists staged a sit-in nearby to protest the violent dispersal of an anti-government protest by Palestinian riot police a day earlier.
(AP, 3/13/17)
2017 Mar 13, President Rodrigo Duterte said he has told the military to assert Philippine ownership of a large ocean region off the country's northeastern coast where Chinese survey ships were spotted last year.
(AP, 3/13/17)
2017 Mar 13, A prosecutor said Poland will seek the arrest and extradition of Michael Karkoc (98) from Minneapolis, Minnesota, after confirming he was a Nazi unit commander suspected of ordering the killing of 44 Poles during World War II.
(AP, 3/13/17)
2017 Mar 13, Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon demanded a new independence referendum in late 2018 or early 2019, once the terms of Britain's exit from the European Union have become clearer. Britain’s PM Theresa May chided Sturgeon for demanding an independence referendum, saying the Scottish National Party (SNP) had "tunnel vision" on breaking away from the United Kingdom.
(Reuters, 3/13/17)
2017 Mar 13, Slovakia’s PM Robert Fico said he would revoke an amnesty law passed by former PM Vladimir Meciar.
(Econ, 4/1/17, p.45)
2017 Mar 13, In Somalia a suicide car bomber detonated near a hotel in Mogadishu, killing at least six people and injuring four others. The al-Qaida-linked Islamic extremist group al-Shabab claimed responsibility.
(AP, 3/13/17)
2017 Mar 13, Pirates operating off the coast of Somalia hijacked the Aris 13 oil tanker, marking the first time since 2012 that a commercial vessel has been captured by Somali pirates. Eight Sri Lankan crew members were taken captive.
(AP, 3/15/17)
2017 Mar 13, South Africa and Nigeria said they would launch a jointly run "early warning" system to track and deter xenophobic attacks against Nigerian migrants.
(AFP, 3/13/17)
2017 Mar 13, A South Sudanese military spokesman said rebels have kidnapped eight locals working for a US charity and are demanding aid deliveries as ransom.
(Reuters, 3/13/17)
2017 Mar 13, In Spain a court in Barcelona ruled that former Catalonia regional government chief Artur Mas is to be banned for two years from holding public office for going ahead with a vote on the region's independence despite a ruling against it.
(AP, 3/13/17)
2017 Mar 13, A Syrian official said opposition fighters will be allowed to leave the last rebel-held neighborhood in the city of Homs under a Russia-backed deal signed today. The deal is to be carried out within six to eight weeks.
(AP, 3/13/17)
2017 Mar 13, The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said it had documented the deaths of more than 321,000 people since the start of the war six years ago and more than 145,000 others had been reported as missing.
(Reuters, 3/13/17)
2017 Mar 14, US President Donald Trump and Saudi Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman discussed opportunities for new economic programs and investments between the two countries during a meeting.
(AP, 3/15/17)
2017 Mar 14, Two pages of Pres. Donald Trump’s tax return from 2005 were made public and showed he paid $38 million in federal taxes on income of $150 million.
(SFC, 3/15/17, p.A5)
2017 Mar 14, US Navy Adm. Bruce Loveless was among nine high-ranking military officers arrested across the country in a burgeoning bribery scandal involving a Malaysian defense contractor nicknamed “Fat Leonard.
(SFC, 3/15/17, p.A5)
2017 Mar 14, The US federal government revoked the tax-exempt status of the National Policy Institute, a group run by Richard Spencer, because it failed to file tax returns for three consecutive years. Spencer popularized the term “alt-right" and is a leading figure in the fringe movement.
(SFC, 3/15/17, p.A5)
2017 Mar 14, Hundreds of Twitter accounts were hijacked amid the ongoing diplomatic feud between Turkey and two European nations, Germany and the Netherlands. Most if not all high-profile accounts soon returned to normal.
(AP, 3/15/17)
2017 Mar 14, Winter Storm Stella dumped snow and sleet across the northeastern United States, forcing airlines to ground flights and schools to cancel classes. Airlines canceled about 5,700 flights across the United States. Airports in New York, Boston, Baltimore, Washington and Philadelphia were hit the hardest.
(AP, 3/14/17)(AFP, 3/14/17)
2017 Mar 14, John Van de Kamp (81), former California Attorney General (1983-1991) died at his home in Pasadena.
(SFC, 3/16/17, p.A7)
2017 Mar 14, In the SF Bay Area two Fremont police detectives shot at a moving car in Hayward killing pregnant passenger Elena Mondragon (16). Police had been tracking her boyfriend, an armed robbery suspect, who was driving the car. In 2018 her family filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the Fremont police department.
(SFC, 3/15/18, p.D1)
2017 Mar 14, Texas executed James Bigby (61) for the 1987 killing of a father and his infant son.
(SFC, 3/15/17, p.A5)
2017 Mar 14, In Afghanistan a suspected NATO airstrike on the funeral of a Taliban commander killed 29 insurgents in the eastern Paktika province.
(AP, 3/14/17)
2017 Mar 14, Canada's Pearson International Airport canceled more than a hundred flights as a late winter storm brought more snow to southern Ontario, forcing several colleges to suspend classes.
(Reuters, 3/14/17)
2017 Mar 14, The former campaign manager for Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos acknowledged for the first time that Odebrecht, a scandal-tarred Brazilian construction company, illegally paid costs related to Santos’ 2010 campaign.
(AP, 3/14/17)
2017 Mar 14, The European Union's top court ruled that companies may bar staff from wearing Islamic headscarves and other visible religious symbols under certain conditions, setting off a storm of complaint from rights groups and religious leaders.
(Reuters, 3/14/17)
2017 Mar 14, The European Parliament suspended Polish lawmaker Janusz Korwin-Mikke for 10 days after he said during a March 1 debate that women should earn less than men because they are weaker, smaller and less intelligent.
(AP, 3/14/17)
2017 Mar 14, EU lawmakers backed more ambitious recycling targets, setting Europe on track to drastically reduce reliance on landfill sites to dispose of waste after 2030.
(Reuters, 3/14/17)
2017 Mar 14, EU lawmakers voted to toughen the bloc’s gun laws and close loopholes exploited by attackers in France.
(SFC, 3/15/17, p.A2)
2017 Mar 14, French presidential candidate Francois Fillon was put under formal investigation by magistrates on suspicion of embezzling state funds.
(AP, 3/14/17)
2017 Mar 14, The small western German state of Saarland said it is banning political campaigning by foreign politicians saying internal Turkish conflicts have no place in Germany.
(Reuters, 3/14/17)
2017 Mar 14, German authorities banned the German-speaking Islam Group Hildesheim, known by its German acronym DIK. It had long been on authorities' radar as a magnet for radicals.
(AP, 3/14/17)
2017 Mar 14, Berlin's airports remained paralyzed after ground staff extended a strike, stepping up pressure in a dispute over pay that has already caused the cancellation of more than 1,000 flights since March 10.
(Reuters, 3/14/17)
2017 Mar 14, In India the body of an Irish woman (28) was found by a farmer on an isolated beach near Canacona village in the western beach state of Goa. She had been raped and strangled. A local criminal was arrested the next day and faced rape and murder charges.
(AP, 3/16/17)
2017 Mar 14, Iraqi forces said they have recaptured Mosul train station, once one of the country's main rail hubs and the latest in a series of key sites retaken from jihadists.
(AFP, 3/14/17)
2017 Mar 14, The Irish Coast Guard said one person died and three were missing after a Sikorsky S-92 helicopter crashed off the coast of Ireland during a rescue operation.
(Reuters, 3/14/17)
2017 Mar 14, Israel ordered the closure of an office in Arab East Jerusalem as it was suspected of being funded by the Palestinian Authority and involved with monitoring the sale of Palestinian property to Jews.
(Reuters, 3/14/17)
2017 Mar 14, In northern Israel a fireworks warehouse went up in flames, killing two people, injuring at least two more and setting off a series of loud explosions in a village near Netanya.
(AFP, 3/14/17)
2017 Mar 14, In Israel an elderly man burnt nurse Tova Kararo (56) at a clinic after apparently being dissatisfied by the treatment he had received in Holon. Kararo died after the man poured flammable fluid on the nurse taking care of him.
(AP, 3/14/17)
2017 Mar 14, In Kenya thousands of public hospital doctors agreed to end a 100-day strike after the government and union members signed a deal in Nairobi to address pay and other issues in dispute.
(SFC, 3/15/17, p.A2)
2017 Mar 14, A Libyan military spokesman says hundreds of forces loyal to Field Marshal Khalifa Hifter have seized major oil facilities at Ras Lanuf and al-Sidra from Islamist-allied militias.
(AFP, 3/14/17)
2017 Mar 14, Malaysia said that the body of Kim Jong Nam, the brother of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un killed last month, has been embalmed and that about 50 North Koreans whose work permits have expired will be deported.
(SFC, 3/15/17, p.A3)
2017 Mar 14, Montenegro's former PM Milo Djukanovic called on the European Union to stop Russia's "destructive" influence in the Balkans.
(AP, 3/14/17)
2017 Mar 14, RIA news agency reported that President Vladimir Putin has approved a decree allowing some troops from Georgia's breakaway region of South Ossetia to be incorporated into the Russian army.
(Reuters, 3/14/17)
2017 Mar 14, Russian-led peace talks on Syria were derailed as rebels backed by Turkey boycotted a third round of meetings in Kazakhstan and the Kremlin indicated there were international divisions over the process.
(Reuters, 3/14/17)
2017 Mar 14, In Saudi Arabia gunfire broke out this evening when police tried to stop a suspicious car near the central hospital in Qatif. Someone in the car started shooting, mortally wounding one of the officers. The suspects escaped.
(AFP, 3/15/17)
2017 Mar 14, In South Sudan gunmen killed two people and wounded three when they attacked a humanitarian convoy in the center of the country.
(Reuters, 3/16/17)
2017 Mar 14, The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Syria said Syria's air force deliberately bombed water sources in December, a war crime that cut off water for 5.5 million people in and around the capital Damascus. The UN investigative commission also said it believes government forces deliberately bombed a school complex in the country's northern countryside in October, killing 21 children.
(Reuters, 3/14/17)(AP, 3/14/17)
2017 Mar 15, United States charged two Russian intelligence agents and two hackers with masterminding the 2014 theft of 500 million Yahoo accounts, the first time the U.S. government has criminally charged Russian spies for cyber offences. The indictment named the FSB officers involved as Dmitry Dokuchaev and his superior, Igor Sushchin, who are both in Russia. The alleged criminals involved included Alexsey Belan and Karim Baratov, who was arrested in Canada a day earlier. Belan was arrested in Europe in June 2013 but escaped to Russia before he could be extradited to the US.
(Reuters, 3/16/17)
2017 Mar 15, The US Federal Reserve raised its benchmark interest rate for the 2nd time in three months. The short-term rate was raised by a quarter point to a range of 0.75% to 1%.
(SFC, 3/16/17, p.C1)
2017 Mar 15, A federal jury in Chicago convicted South Korean CEO Heon Seok Lee of defrauding municipal governments into using federal money on wastewater-treatment equipment they were falsely told was made in America.
(AP, 3/17/17)
2017 Mar 15, US District Judge Derrick Watson of Hawaii issued a ruling granting a temporary restraining order on Pres. Trump’s travel ban.
(SFC, 3/16/17, p.A1)
2017 Mar 15, A group of 17 Republicans in Congress signed a resolution vowing to seek "economically viable" ways to stave off global warming, possibly putting them on a collision course with President Donald Trump who has called climate change a hoax.
(Reuters, 3/15/17)
2017 Mar 15, Former Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca (74) was convicted of obstructing an FBI investigation into corrupt and violent guards.
(SFC, 3/16/17, p.A5)
2017 Mar 15, In Louisiana three people were found shot to death and a fourth fatally stabbed at an apartment complex in Matairie, a suburb of New Orleans.
(SFC, 3/16/17, p.A5)
2017 Mar 15, In western Austria three people were killed when their ski touring group was swept away by an avalanche in the Tyrol region. A fourth person was missing.
(AP, 3/15/17)
2017 Mar 15, Brazilian civil servants, rural workers and labor confederations staged nationwide demonstrations against President Michel Temer's pension reform plan, with hundreds of protesters occupying the premises of the finance ministry in Brasilia.
(Reuters, 3/15/17)
2017 Mar 15, In Cambodia Sok An (66), a deputy prime minister who was one of PM Hun Sen's closest political and personal allies, died.
(AP, 3/15/17)
2017 Mar 15, Cameroon said regional forces had rescued the hostages, who were held in villages by the jihadist group, in an operation along the Nigeria-Cameroon border. On March 17 a man purporting to be Abubakar Shekau, the leader of Nigerian Islamist militant group Boko Haram, denied in a posted video that 5,000 people held by the group had been freed by West African forces earlier in the week.
(Reuters, 3/17/17)
2017 Mar 15, China wrapped up its annual National People’s Congress. On its final day it passed legislation titled the General Principles of Civil Law.
(Econ, 3/18/17, p.42)
2017 Mar 15, The European Union gave its blessing to AT&T's proposed $85 billion purchase of Time Warner, saying that it raises no competition concerns in Europe. The deal still needs approval from US regulators.
(AP, 3/15/17)
2017 Mar 15, In Germany three men and a woman were sentenced to prison terms between three and five years for forming the so-called Oldschool Society in August 2014, a far-right terrorist group with a plan to bomb refugee homes as a tactic to scare migrants into leaving the country.
(AP, 3/15/17)
2017 Mar 15, Indonesia's government said that a British-owned cruise ship must pay compensation for the destruction of coral reefs in a popular tourist area known for its extensive marine biodiversity. The 4,200-ton cruise ship M.V. Caledonian Sky ran aground in the waters of Raja Ampat in West Papua province last week, causing extensive damage to the coral reefs.
(AP, 3/15/17)
2017 Mar 15, Kenya announced that it will ban all plastic bags, becoming the 2nd African country to do so after Rwanda. Earlier efforts by Kenya in 2007 and 2011 failed.
(Econ, 3/25/17, p.41)
2017 Mar 15, Forces loyal to Libya's UN-backed unity government seized the headquarters of a rival militia in a third day of intense fighting for control of Tripoli.
(AP, 3/15/17)
2017 Mar 15, Millions of Dutch flocked to the polls in a test of the "patriotic revolution" promised by far-right MP Geert Wilders. PM Mark Rutte's conservative VVD party won the elections with 33 seats. Wilders increased his bloc from 15 in 2012 to 20. The Denk party, catering to Dutch Muslims, won three seats.
(AFP, 3/15/17)(AP, 3/16/17)(Econ, 3/18/17, p.59)
2017 Mar 15, New Zealand approved a law that declared the Whanganui River to be a legal person, in the sense that it can own property, incur debts and petition the courts. Days later an Indian court declared the Ganges and Yamuna rivers to be people too.
(Econ, 3/25/17, p.34)
2017 Mar 15, Pakistan launched a national census, the country's first in 19 years.
(AP, 3/15/17)
2017 Mar 15, Eleven Philippine legislators who voted against a bill to re-introduce capital punishment lost key posts in the country's Congress, in an apparent follow through of a threat by the house speaker to purge obstacles to the draft.
(Reuters, 3/15/17)
2017 Mar 15, Romanian authorities extradited Chilean fugitive Rafael Garay. He was accused of embezzling almost a billion dollars.
(Reuters, 3/15/17)
2017 Mar 15, In Sierra Leone a 709-carat diamond was presented to President Ernest Bai Koroma. Pastor Emmanuel Momoh found the diamond in Yakadu village in the country's diamond-rich eastern Kono District. It was among the 20 largest diamonds ever found. In October the stone was taken by a sales team from the National Minerals Agency to Antwerp, Belgium, to meet sales agents, auction houses and potential buyers.
(AP, 3/16/17)(AP, 10/3/17)
2017 Mar 15, In Syria two suicide bomb attacks killed at least 31 people and wounded dozens more in Damascus, in the second such spate of bombings in the Syrian capital in five days. Sixteen lawyers were among the dozens killed in the suicide attack that struck the main judicial building in Damascus.
(Reuters, 3/15/17)(AP, 3/16/17)
2017 Mar 15, Turkey said its red meat association has ordered a consignment of prize Dutch cattle to be sent back to the Netherlands, saying it no longer wants to farm the cows due to the diplomatic crisis between the countries.
(AFP, 3/15/17)
2017 Mar 15, Human Rights Watch said 155 people, including 15 children, were killed in fierce fighting that erupted last Nov 26 in western Uganda between security forces and a tribal king's palace guards.
(AFP, 3/15/17)
2017 Mar 15, Ukraine's Security and Defence Council approved the suspension of all cargo traffic with separatist-held territory.
(Reuters, 3/15/17)
2017 Mar 16, Pres. Donald Trump’s preliminary budget was released. It included 18% cuts to federal funding for the National Institutes of Health and the elimination of the Community Development Block Grant Program, which helps fund the Meals on Wheels program. It also cut funding to the State Dept. and spending on foreign aid by 28%.
(SFC, 3/18/17, p.A1)(SSFC, 3/19/17, p.A6)(Econ, 3/25/17, p.52)
2017 Mar 16, US District Judge Theodore Chuang of Maryland granted a preliminary injunction in a lawsuit against Pres. Trump’s travel ban from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the National Immigration Law Center.
(SFC, 3/18/17, p.A8)
2017 Mar 16, Philip Choy, an expert on the history of Chinese in America, died at his home in San Francisco. His books included “The Architecture of San Francisco Chinatown."
(SSFC, 3/19/17, p.C3)
2017 Mar 16, James Cotton (b.1935), pioneering harmonica player, died in Austin, Texas. He helped established the harmonica as an integral part of modern blues.
(SFC, 3/18/17, p.A7)
2017 Mar 16, British PM Theresa May rejected a call for a referendum on Scottish independence before Britain leaves the European Union — a move condemned as a "democratic outrage" by Scotland's nationalist leader.
(AP, 3/16/17)
\2017 Mar 16, A bill authorizing Britain to start its exit from the EU received royal assent and became law.
(SFC, 3/17/17, p.A2)
2017 Mar 16, Scientists at Britain's Newcastle University received a license to create babies using DNA from three people to prevent women from passing on potentially fatal genetic diseases to their children — the first time such approval has been granted.
(AP, 3/16/17)
2017 Mar 16, In China Saudi Arabia's King Salman oversaw the signing of deals worth as much as $65 billion on the first day of a visit to Beijing.
(Reuters, 3/16/17)
2017 Mar 16, Ethiopia's military rescued six children kidnapped by South Sudanese raiders in a cross-border attack, but dozens of others remain missing and soldiers are pursuing the gunmen to recover them.
(Reuters, 3/17/17)
2017 Mar 16, The European Union called for the United Nations to send an international fact-finding mission urgently to Myanmar to investigate allegations of torture, rapes and executions by the military against the Rohingya Muslim minority.
(Reuters, 3/16/17)
2017 Mar 16, The European Parliament rejected a call to ban Arctic oil and gas exploration, in a symbolic vote seen as a barometer for future moves by Brussels to regulate to protect the region.
(Reuters, 3/16/17)
2017 Mar 16, The European Parliament overwhelmingly approved a law requiring firms to ensure they do not use so-called conflict minerals from Africa and other areas that end up funding warlords.
(AFP, 3/16/17)
2017 Mar 16, European security watchdog OSCE prolonged its monitoring mission to Ukraine by one year until March 2018. The unarmed, civilian mission with more than 700 international observers seeks to reduce tensions and report on the situation on the ground.
(AP, 3/16/17)
2017 Mar 16, The European Commission agreed to send Ukraine 600 million euros ($643.20 million) to help its finances, ending months of delays over EU conditions linked to the loan.
(Reuters, 3/16/17)
2017 Mar 16, In Paris, France, a female employee of the International Monetary Fund suffered injuries to her face and arms when a letter bomb addressed to the world lender's European representative blew up as she opened it.
(Reuters, 3/16/17)
2017 Mar 16, In southern France Killian Barbey (16) was arrested with a cache of weapons after a shooting at the Alexis de Tocqueville high school in Grasse that left eight people injured including the head teacher.
(AFP, 3/16/17)(AP, 3/17/17)(SFC, 3/17/17, p.A2)
2017 Mar 16, The militant Greek group Conspiracy of Fire Cells claimed responsibility for a parcel bomb mailed to German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble. The parcel had been intercepted by the German finance ministry's mail department. On March 20 Greek counterterrorism officers uncovered eight more similar parcel bombs.
(Reuters, 3/16/17)(SFC, 3/22/17, p.A2)
2017 Mar 16, In India Farook Hameed (31) was murdered in Coimbatore, allegedly by members of a Muslim radical group, for having repudiated Islam and declaring himself an atheist. Six people were soon arrested in the case.
(http://tinyurl.com/n22lnau)(Econ 7/22/17, SR p.11)
2017 Mar 16, An Indonesian court sentenced people-smuggling kingpin Abraham Louhenapessy, known as Captain Bram, to six years in jail for organizing a trip for migrants to New Zealand in early 2015.
(AP, 3/16/17)
2017 Mar 16, Iraqi government forces besieged Islamic State militants around Mosul's Old City, edging closer to the historic mosque from where the group's leader declared a caliphate nearly three years ago.
(Reuters, 3/16/17)
2017 Mar 16, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu said he would honor his commitment to build a new settlement in the occupied West Bank, the first in two decades.
(Reuters, 3/16/17)
2017 Mar 16, It was reported that a group of Cuban migrants detained in the southern Mexican city of Tapachula have accused authorities of beating and mistreating them after they staged a hunger strike to demand their release.
(SFC, 3/16/17, p.A2)
2017 Mar 16, In Pakistan Umer Tanveer killed his newlywed bride three days after their wedding in Lahore by suffocating her with a pillow. Tanveer had married his paternal cousin under family pressure but was interested in another woman who lived in Dubai. Tanveer initially denied killing Hira but then confessed to the crime.
(AP, 3/19/17)
2017 Mar 16, In the Philippines Rep. Gary Alejano filed an impeachment complaint against Pres. Rodrigo Duterte alleging violations of the constitution, bribery and corruption, And the betrayal of the public trust with actions that included extra judicial killings and his failure to declare huge bank deposits as required by law.
(SFC, 3/17/17, p.A4)
2017 Mar 16, Qatar said a new government body set up to handle complaints from migrant workers seeking bosses' permission to leave the Gulf nation received hundreds of claims over two months and rejected more than a quarter of requests.
(AP, 3/16/17)
2017 Mar 16, In Romania some 1,000 police officers protested in Bucharest to demand higher salaries, saying tens of thousands of officers are earning the minimum wage or less.
(AP, 3/16/17)
2017 Mar 16, Somali pirates, who had seized an oil tanker, opened fire on naval troops from the semiautonomous state of Puntland sparking clashes between the two sides. The pirates were continuing to receive reinforcements while regional forces mobilized nearby. The pirates released the ship and its crew late today.
(AP, 3/16/17)(SFC, 3/17/17, p.A2)
2017 Mar 16, A military vessel and a helicopter attacked a boat packed with Somali refugees late today killing at least 42 people including women and children in the Red Sea off the coast of Yemen. The refugees, carrying official UNHCR documents, were on their way from Yemen to Sudan. 80 survivors were brought to hospitals in Hodeidah. Shiite rebels accused the Saudi-led air coalition of carrying out the attack. A confidential UN report later said the attack was most likely carried out by the Saudi-led coalition.
(Reuters, 3/17/17)(AP, 3/17/17)(SFC, 3/18/17, p.A4)(AFP, 5/8/18)
2017 Mar 16, South Korea-based Hyundai said it is recalling nearly 978,000 cars in the US because the front seat belts could detach in a crash and fail to hold people.
(AP, 3/16/17)
2017 Mar 16, In Spain taxi drivers in Barcelona and Madrid went on strike to urge authorities to protect their regulated service against companies like Uber and Cabify, which offer cheaper services.
(AP, 3/16/17)
2017 Mar 16, In Syria a suspected US airstrike late today struck the Omar Ibn al-Khattab Mosque in the Jeeneh district in Aleppo province, killing at least 38-49 people and wounded many others. On June 7 the US military said an investigation has found that the strike was legal and caused only one civilian casualty.
(AP, 3/17/17)(SFC, 6/8/17, p.A2)
2017 Mar 16, Turkish police detained two suspected members of the Islamic State group who were allegedly planning a "sensational attack" similar to the massacre at an Istanbul nightclub on New Year's night.
(AFP, 3/16/17)
2017 Mar 16, The United Arab Emirates said one of its soldiers has been killed while serving in the Saudi-led war in Yemen.
(AP, 3/16/17)
2017 Mar 17, US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson directed US diplomatic missions to identify "populations warranting increased scrutiny" and toughen screening for visa applicants in those groups. In cables dated March 10 and March 15, Tillerson had issued detailed instructions to consular officials for implementing Trump's travel order, which was due to take effect on March 16.
(Reuters, 3/23/17)
2017 Mar 17, In San Francisco George Martinez (44) was killed as he celebrated his birthday in the Mission District. In 2019 two members of the MS-13 street gang were convicted of executing Martinez. The gang members mistook Martinez for a rival gang member.
(SFC, 12/21/19, p.C1)
2017 Mar 17, Results were published of a $1 billion study on Repatha, a cholesterol drug made by Amgen, that indicated the drug can make cholesterol tumble and cut the risk of heart attack and stroke. The list price for the drug was $14,523 a year.
(SFC, 3/18/17, p.A6)
2017 Mar 17, In Afghanistan a suicide truck bomber struck a military checkpoint, killing one soldier and wounding 10 in Khost province. Another suicide bomber elsewhere in the country killed the brother of a local religious leader he had targeted for assassination.
(AP, 3/17/17)
2017 Mar 17, An avalanche in Austria's western region of Tyrol killed two people.
(Reuters, 3/17/17)
2017 Mar 17, In Bangladesh two policemen were wounded in the apparently botched attack when a man blew himself up at an elite forces camp near Dhaka's international airport. The Islamic State Group soon claimed responsibility.
(AFP, 3/18/17)
2017 Mar 17, Brazilian federal police raided dozens of meatpacker offices, including industry giants JBS SA and BRF SA, following a two-year investigation into alleged bribery of regulators to subvert inspections of their plants. "Operation Weak Flesh" had already uncovered about 40 cases of meatpackers who had bribed inspectors and politicians to overlook unsanitary practices.
(Reuters, 3/17/17)
2017 Mar 17, Former British Treasury chief George Osborne was appointed editor of the Evening Standard newspaper, touching off a torrent of criticism about whether a sitting lawmaker should be able to run a London-based daily.
(AP, 3/17/17)
2017 Mar 17, Security forces in Congo Republic said they have killed around 15 rebel fighters during a military operation in the restive Pool region.
(Reuters, 3/18/17)
2017 Mar 17, The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) said governments need to do more to create growth that benefits everyone, and the US should spend more on roads, highways, bridges and airports.
(AP, 3/17/17)
2017 Mar 17, Txetx Etcheverry, a prominent figure in the French Basque community, said the Basque separatist group ETA will complete its disarmament by April 8.
(AP, 3/17/17)
2017 Mar 17, Brazilian federal police raided dozens of meatpacker offices, including industry giants JBS SA and BRF SA, following a two-year investigation into alleged bribery of regulators to subvert inspections of their plants. "Operation Weak Flesh" had already uncovered about 40 cases of meatpackers who had bribed inspectors and politicians to overlook unsanitary practices.
(Reuters, 3/17/17)
2017 Mar 17, In China poultry trading in Hunan’s provincial capital of Changsha went into effect. An outbreak of H7N9 bird flu virus originated from a farm with about 29,760 infected birds. Over 170,000 birds were culled as a result. At least 162 deaths have been reported since last October.
(Reuters, 4/2/17)
2017 Mar 17, The European Union re-imposed a fine on 11 air cargo companies totaling $835 million after the original decision was thrown out by a high court on a procedural issue.
(AP, 3/17/17)
2017 Mar 17, A visit of Segolene Royal, the French minister of ecology, to French Guiana was cut short after masked demonstrators from the collective stormed into a regional conference on biodiversity she was attending in the department's capital city of Cayenne.
(AP, 3/25/17)
2017 Mar 17, In Germany a G20 official said opposition from the United States, Saudi Arabia and others has forced Germany to drop a reference to financing programs to combat climate change from the draft communique at a G20 finance and central bankers meeting.
(AP, 3/17/17)
2017 Mar 17, In Iraq an airstrike hit the residential area in Mosul for the 2nd time in four days. Many residents were later reported killed. US officials acknowledged the airstrike on March 25 that witnesses said killed at least 100 people. On May 25 the US military acknowledged the bombing saying it set off explosive materials that militants had planted inside causing the structure to collapse.
(AP, 3/24/17)(SSFC, 3/26/17, p.A6)(SFC, 5/26/17, p.A2)
2017 Mar 17, Israeli warplanes struck several targets in Syria overnight, prompting retaliatory missile launches, in the most serious incident between the two countries since the Syrian civil war began six years ago.
(AFP, 3/17/17)
2017 Mar 17, Japan’s Maebashi district court held the government and the Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) liable for neglecting tsunami safety measures at the Fukushima nuclear plant and ordered them to pay more money to dozens out of the thousands of people who fled radiation released during the March 2011 disaster.
(AP, 3/17/17)
2017 Mar 17, Kenya's President Uhuru Kenyatta ordered the military to deploy to the volatile counties of Baringo and Laikipia in the Rift Valley to calm deadly violence fueled by drought that affects roughly half the country.
(AP, 3/17/17)
2017 Mar 17, In Libya gunmen opened fire at demonstrators protesting against militias in Tripoli.
(AFP, 3/18/17)
2017 Mar 17, Morocco’s MAP state news said King Mohammed VI has named Saad Eddine El Othmani of the Islamist Justice and Development Party (PJD) as the country's new prime minister and asked him to form a government.
(Reuters, 3/17/17)
2017 Mar 17, SWIFT, a messaging network for cross-border payments, suspended services for four remaining North Korean banks. Earlier this month SWIFT was obliged to exclude three North Korean banks that were under UN sanctions.
(Econ, 3/25/17, p.63)
2017 Mar 17, In Peru El Nino-fueled flash floods and landslides hit parts of Lima, leaving some communities cut off from roads. This year's El Nino shut down northern Peru's sugar-cane business.
(AFP, 3/18/17)(Econ., 10/10/20, p.72)
2017 Mar 17, The Philippines said it would strengthen its military facilities on islands and shoals in the disputed South China Sea and announced initial plans to build a new port and pave an existing rough airstrip.
(Reuters, 3/17/17)
2017 Mar 17, Portugal's attorney general granted investigators another extension to conclude their 2 1/2-year investigation into former PM Jose Socrates (59), who is suspected of corruption, money laundering and tax fraud. Socrates was the center-left Socialist prime minister from 2005 to 2011.
(AP, 3/17/17)
2017 Mar 17, South Africa's Constitutional Court ordered the government to pay social grants on April 1 via its current service provider, seeking to end a fiasco that had threatened the payment of benefits to 17 million people.
(Reuters, 3/17/17)
2017 Mar 17, In South Korea US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said US policy of strategic patience with North Korea's nuclear and missile programs has ended, warning that military action would be "on the table" if Pyongyang elevated the threat level.
(Reuters, 3/17/17)
2017 Mar 17, In St. Lucia Derek Walcott (87), a Nobel-prize winning poet, died. He was known for capturing the essence of his native Caribbean and became the region's most internationally famous writer.
(AP, 3/17/17)(Econ, 4/1/17, p.82)
2017 Mar 17, In Tanzania Dar es Salaam regional commissioner Paul Makonda stormed into the offices of the Clouds FM Media Group with six armed men to demand the airing of a muckraking video aimed at undermining a popular local pastor with whom Makonda has a dispute.
(AFP, 3/23/17)
2017 Mar 17, In Uganda senior police official Andrew Felix Kaweesi was shot and killed in his car along with two other officers as he left his home in Kampala. President Yoweri Museveni condemned the killing and directed the immediate installation of cameras in all major towns of Uganda and along the highways.
(AFP, 3/17/17)(Reuters, 5/12/17)
2017 Mar 17, In Yemen 22 people were killed in an attack on a mosque during prayers inside a military base in Marib province.
(AP, 3/17/17)
2017 Mar 18, Rock 'n' roll legend Chuck Berry (b.1926) died at his home in the St. Louis area. His 1958 hit "Johnny B. Goode" was so influential and recognizable that the US space program chose it to represent rock music for potential extraterrestrial listeners on the Voyager spacecraft.
(AFP, 3/18/17)(SSFC, 3/19/17, p.A9)
2017 Mar 18, In Angola about 200 demonstrators protested under heavy police surveillance in Luanda against a draft law criminalizing all abortions.
(AFP, 3/18/17)
2017 Mar 18, Bangladesh police in Dhaka shot dead a suspected militant on a motorbike carrying a bag with improvised explosive devices.
(AP, 3/18/17)
2017 Mar 18, CongoDRC’s UN mission said government forces have targeted civilians, including women and children, resulting in numerous deaths in central Congo this week and are restricting United Nations peacekeepers' access to the area.
(Reuters, 3/18/17)
2017 Mar 18, In Egypt Salem Salmy al-Hamadeen (aka Abu Anas al-Ansari), a leader in Islamic State's Egyptian affiliate, was killed in an air raid.
(Reuters, 4/2/17)
2017 Mar 18, Meeting in Cairo representatives of the United Nations, European Union, Arab League and African Union supported efforts by Libya's unity government to assert control over Tripoli after days of fighting with rival militias.
(AFP, 3/18/17)
2017 Mar 18, In France a man was shot to death after attempting to seize a soldier's weapon at the Orly Airport. He was soon identified as Ziyed Ben Belgacem, a 39-year-old born in France. Judicial sources said he became a radicalized Muslim when he served a prison term several years ago for drug-trafficking.
(AP, 3/18/17)(Reuters, 3/19/17)
2017 Mar 18, In Germany finance chiefs of the world's top 20 economies (G20) pledged to finalize new banking regulations, easing concerns that the new US administration would pull out of a long-delayed global accord known as Basel III. The G20 dropped a pledge to fully oppose trade protectionism, amid pushback from the government of US President Donald Trump.
(Reuters, 3/18/17)(AP, 3/18/17)
2017 Mar 18, In Germany around 9,000 Kurdish supporters demonstrated in Frankfurt against Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan and an April referendum that would give him sweeping new powers.
(Reuters, 3/18/17)
2017 Mar 18, India’s PM Narendra Modi picked Hindu hardliner Yogi Adityanath to lead Uttar Pradesh, the country’s most populous state, after his party won a landslide victory last week. Adityanath has been accused of inciting violence against India's Muslim minority.
(Reuters, 3/18/17)
2017 Mar 18, In Iran the Fars semi-official news agency reported that Faezeh Hashemi, the outspoken daughter of Iran's late President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, has been sentenced to six months in prison for "spreading lies against the judiciary".
(AP, 3/18/17)
2017 Mar 18, Elite Iraqi forces said they were battling house by house in the Old City of Mosul, inching towards the mosque where the Islamic State group proclaimed its "caliphate" in 2014.
(AFP, 3/18/17)
2017 Mar 18, The Israeli military carried out the airstrikes early today against two Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip in retaliation for a projectile that landed in an open field. No militant group has claimed responsibility for the firing.
(AP, 3/18/17)
2017 Mar 18, In Nigeria three suicide bombers suspected to be members of Boko Haram detonated explosive devices strapped on their bodies late today, killing at least four people in Maiduguri.
(AP, 3/19/17)
2017 Mar 18, In Poland hundreds of people, braving the winter cold and rain, protested in Warsaw against plans by the conservative government to curb the power of local governments and to subject the judiciary to the ruling party's control.
(AP, 3/18/17)
2017 Mar 18, Russian authorities said Vladimir Evdokimov (56), a former top space agency official, has been found dead with two stab wounds in a prison where he was being held on charges of embezzlement. He had been jailed in December on charges of embezzling 200 million rubles ($3.1 million) from the MiG aerospace company.
(AP, 3/18/17)
2017 Mar 18, In South Africa burglars targeted Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng's offices early today, stealing 15 computers containing sensitive information about 250 judges. His court had severely criticized the ANC government.
(AFP, 3/19/17)
2017 Mar 18, South Sudanese rebels kidnapped four oil workers including a Pakistani national, in a bid to force their Chinese and Malaysian consortium to leave the country.
(Reuters, 3/20/17)
2017 Mar 18, In Syria nearly 1,500 people, mostly civilians, left the last opposition-held district of Homs under a controversial Russian-supervised deal to bring the city under full government control.
(AFP, 3/18/17)
2017 Mar 18, Thai police uncovered a plot to assassinate the country's prime minister after seizing a weapons cache at a house belonging to red shirt leader Wuthipong Kochathamakun, who has been on the run since the military coup.
(Reuters, 3/19/17)
2017 Mar 18, Turkish media said authorities have detained 740 people for suspected links to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) over the last three days.
(Reuters, 3/18/17)
2017 Mar 18, Rima Khalaf, a UN undersecretary-general, resigned after refusing to withdraw her report for the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia. She had authored a recent report that accused Israel of establishing an "apartheid regime." Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas soon informed Rima Khalaf by phone that she would receive the Palestine Medal of the Highest Honor in recognition of her "courage and support" for the Palestinian people.
(AP, 3/19/17)
2017 Mar 19, The SpaceX Dragon cargo ship returned from the ISS and parachuted into the Pacific with some 5,000 pounds of completed experiments and used equipment.
(SFC, 3/20/17, p.A4)
2017 Mar 19, Uber Pres. Jeff Jones stepped down after six months on the job. At least six key executive and high ranking employees have left the world’s most valuable startup in the past nine weeks.
(Econ, 3/25/17, p.55)
2017 Mar 19, In Chicago a girl (15) went missing. She was found two days later and taken to a children's hospital for treatment. Her alleged gang rape had been broadcast on Facebook Live. On April 1 police arrested a 14-year-old boy in connection with the gang rape.
(AFP, 4/2/17)
2017 Mar 19, Jimmy Breslin (b.1928), NYC columnist and best-selling author, died at his home in Manhattan. His books included “The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight" (1969), based on the life of gangster Joey Gallo. In 1971 it was adopted into a movie.
(SFC, 3/20/17, p.A10)
2017 Mar 19, A US drone airstrike in Afghanistan killed Qari Yasin, a Pakistani militant and al-Qaida leader, accused of involvement in a deadly attack on a bus carrying Sri Lanka's cricket team in 2009.
(Reuters, 3/21/17)(AP, 3/25/17)
2017 Mar 19, An Afghan soldier opened fire inside a base in the southern Helmand province, wounding three US soldiers before being shot dead. Taliban insurgents attacked a district headquarters in the Kandahar province using a suicide car bomb. Six police were reported killed and five others were wounded in the assault. In Zabul province an army operation killed 13 Taliban and wounded 11 others. Two Afghan soldiers were killed and three others were wounded by a roadside bomb during the operation. Two Taliban commanders were killed in an apparent US drone strike in the Barmal district of the eastern Paktika province. Another 10 insurgents were killed in a separate drone strike in the Dand-e Patan district of neighboring Paktia province.
(AP, 3/19/17)
2017 Mar 19, Canadian teacher Maggie MacDonell was awarded the annual Global Teacher Prize during a ceremony in Dubai.
(SFC, 3/20/17, p.A2)
2017 Mar 19, It was reported that a Chinese court has sentenced the police boss of Guta district of Jinzhou City, Liaoning province, to 17 years in prison for his part in a bribes-for-projects scandal, proceeds from which were used to buy two homes in Australia, according to court documents.
(Reuters, 3/19/17)
2017 Mar 19, In Ghana 20 people were killed when a large tree fell into the pool they were swimming in at the base of a waterfall near Kintampo, crushing and drowning people enjoying a day out at a popular beauty spot.
(Reuters, 3/20/17)(AFP, 3/21/17)
2017 Mar 19, In Guatemala jailed Barrio 18 gang members rioted and took several guards hostage to demand the return of 250 of the gang's members who had been recently transferred to another juvenile detention center.
(Reuters, 3/21/17)
2017 Mar 19, In India Yogi Adityanath (44), hard-line Hindu religious leader, took the oath of office as the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh state.
(AP, 3/19/17)
2017 Mar 19, Iraqi forces backed by helicopter strikes engaged in heavy fighting with jihadists on the outskirts of the Old City as they pressed an offensive to recapture west Mosul.
(AFP, 3/19/17)fs
2017 Mar 19, Israel's PM Benjamin Netanyahu backed out of an agreement to establish a new broadcasting authority, creating a coalition crisis with one of his key partners that could lead to early elections.
(AP, 3/19/17)
2017 Mar 19, In Lebanon demonstrators in central Beirut hurled empty water bottles at PM Saad al-Hariri when he tried to calm hundreds of people protesting against proposed tax hikes.
(Reuters, 3/19/17)
2017 Mar 19, Lebanon's main Druze leader, Walid Jumblatt, handed his political authority to his son Taymour, extending the tradition of dynastic politics that plays a big part in the country's sectarian government. The event marked the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Walid Jumblatt's father, Kamal Jumblatt.
(Reuters, 3/19/17)
2017 Mar 19, In Myanmar hundreds of hard-line Buddhists in Rakhine state protested against the government's plan to give citizenship to some members of the persecuted Rohingya Muslim minority community. Rakhine, one of the poorest states in Myanmar, is home to more than 1 million stateless Rohingya.
(AP, 3/19/17)
2017 Mar 19, A Hamas military court sentenced two Palestinians to death for drug smuggling in the Gaza Strip, in the first punishment of its kind in the enclave. A third suspect was sentenced to hard labor.
(AFP, 3/19/17)
2017 Mar 19, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte welcomed the prospect of the International Criminal Court (ICC) putting him on trial over his bloody war on drugs, saying he would not be intimidated and his campaign would be unrelenting and brutal.
(Reuters, 3/19/17)
2017 Mar 19, Russia concluded an agreement with the Syrian Kurdish YPG militia to set up a military base in northwestern Syria. Russia will be training YPG fighters, who control the area, as part of the fight against terrorism.
(Reuters, 3/20/17)
2017 Mar 19, In Spain a few thousand people rallied in Barcelona to protest the regional Catalan government's push to break away from the rest of the country.
(AP, 3/19/17)
2017 Mar 19, In Syria fierce clashes broke out in Damascus after insurgents infiltrated government-held parts of the eastern side of the city through tunnels overnight.
(AP, 3/19/17)
2017 Mar 19, The IMF and Ukrainian authorities said the International Monetary Fund has postponed a decision to disburse more aid to Ukraine in order to assess the impact of an economic blockade Kiev imposed on separatist-held territory.
(Reuters, 3/19/17)
2017 Mar 20, The United States criticized the UN Human Rights Council, saying addressing the human rights situation in Palestine and other occupied Arab territories as part of its agenda exhibited the group's "long-standing bias against Israel."
(Reuters, 3/20/17)
2017 Mar 20, FBI Director James Comey confirmed that the bureau is investigating possible links and coordination between Russia and associates of President Donald Trump as part of a broader probe of Russian interference in last year's presidential election.
(AP, 3/20/17)
2017 Mar 20, US Pres. Donald Trump asked Daniel Coats, the director of national intelligence, and Adm. Michael Rogers, director of the national Security Agency, to help him push back against an FBI investigation into possible coordination between his campaign and the Russian government. Coats and Rogers refused to comply.
(SFC, 5/23/17, p.A8)
2017 Mar 20, The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency issued the first of planned weekly reports tallying each time local officials declined to hold foreigners eligible for removal long enough to be picked up by federal agents.
(Econ, 3/25/17, p.27)
2017 Mar 20, In New York City James Jackson (28), a white supremacist, fatally stabbed Timothy Caughman (66) with a sword after stalking a number of black men. Authorities later said Jackson had intended to incite a race war. In 2019 Jackson pleaded guilty to six counts including murder a hate crime charge.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stabbing_of_Timothy_Caughman)(SFC, 1/24/19, p.A6)
2017 Mar 20, Chuck Barris (b.1929), a popular game show creator and producer, died at his home in Palisades, NY. His creations included “the Dating Game" (1965-1973) and “The Gong Show" (1976-1978). He penned the song “Palisades Park," which was turned into a 1962 hit by Freddie Canon. He also wrote included “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind," a spy comedy that was tuned into a film (1962).
(SFC, 3/24/17, p.D4)
2017 Mar 20, David Rockefeller (101), US banker and philanthropist, died. He headed Chase Manhattan Bank from 1969 to 1981.
(Econ, 4/8/17, p.82)
2017 Mar 20, In Afghanistan a suicide car bomb late today targeted a checkpoint in southern Helmand province, killing at least six members of an intelligence unit near Lashkar Gah. Seven other were wounded.
(AP, 3/21/17)(SFC, 3/22/17, p.A2)
2017 Mar 20, Belarus Pres. Alexander Lukashenko said Western intelligence agencies are using a "fifth column" to cause unrest and threaten the stability of his regime.
(AP, 3/20/17)
2017 Mar 20, British mobile phone giant Vodafone said it will merge its Indian unit with Idea Cellular to create India's largest telecoms operator, to help fend off the Mukesh Ambani-backed Reliance Jio, whose recent arrival has shaken up India's ultra-competitive mobile network market.
(AFP, 3/20/17)
2017 Mar 20, A Czech zoo started sawing off the horns of its 21 rhinos to protect them from poaching after the killing of a rhinoceros in France earlier this month.
(Reuters, 3/21/17)
2017 Mar 20, East Timor held elections. Former guerrilla leader Francisco Guterres and Antonio da Conceicao, the minister of education and social affairs were the front runners. Francisco "Lu-Olo" Guterres received 57 percent of the vote. His main rival, Antonio da Conceicao, got 32 percent.
(SFC, 3/21/17, p.A4)(AP, 3/25/17)
2017 Mar 20, The European Union said it is slapping sanctions on four high-ranking military officials in Syria over the use of chemical weapons in the war-torn country.
(AP, 3/20/17)
2017 Mar 20, French Pres. Francois Hollande said world donors pledged more than $75 million to an historic UNESCO-backed alliance to protect cultural heritage sites threatened by war and the wave of ideological-driven destruction carried out by Islamic State group militants.
(AP, 3/20/17)
2017 Mar 20, In French Guiana demonstrations started when workers from Endel-Engie, an engineering firm, and EDF, the local utility, blocked roads outside Kourou to prevent the launch of a rocket from the Guiana Space Center as they protested high living costs and neglect from Paris.
(Econ, 4/22/17, p.44)
2017 Mar 20, In Guatemala three policemen were killed late today and seven officers wounded in attacks on police across the country, hours after a bloody gang riot in a juvenile detention center was put down in Guatemala City.
(AP, 3/21/17)
2017 Mar 20, Hungary's defense minister inaugurated a small military base on the country's southern border for soldiers patrolling to prevent the entry of migrants.
(AP, 3/20/17)
2017 Mar 20, Iraqi forces battled Islamic State group fighters to push into Mosul's Old City where thousands of civilians remained trapped under jihadist rule. A car bombing in Baghdad killed 27 people.
(AFP, 3/20/17)(SFC, 3/22/17, p.A2)
2017 Mar 20, Japan and Russia agreed to step up work toward resolving a longstanding territorial dispute through cooperation in a range of areas.
(AP, 3/20/17)
2017 Mar 20, Japan-based Softbank bought a $300 million stake in WeWork, a trendy office-rental firm.
(Econ, 4/1/17, p.58)
2017 Mar 20, Norway jumped to top spot in the World Happiness Report despite the plummeting price of oil. Denmark fell to second, followed by Iceland, Switzerland and Finland.
(AP, 3/20/17)
2017 Mar 20, Pakistan's PM Nawaz Sharif ordered the reopening of the country's border with Afghanistan, ending a protracted closure that has cost businesses on both sides millions of dollars and deepened tensions between the two neighbors.
(AP, 3/20/17)
2017 Mar 20, A Polish court has convicted a lawyer, identified only as Stanislaw Sz., of spying for Russia and handed him a four-year prison term.
(AP, 3/20/17)
2017 Mar 20, A Russian group of reporters said they have uncovered details of a complex system in which $21 billion were allegedly transferred illegally out of the country through a network of banks. The reporters in Moscow had obtained bank records that show that funds were transferred worldwide via 112 bank accounts in Eastern Europe.
(AP, 3/21/17)
2017 Mar 20, Serbian police said they have seized over a ton of marijuana and arrested six suspected traffickers. Police said the marijuana was packed in Kosovo and was bound for western Europe.
(AP, 3/20/17)
2017 Mar 20, Sri Lanka’s Criminal Investigations Department (CID) told the Mount Lavinia magistrate's court that Gotabhaya Rajapakse, who was the country’s defence secretary during his brother's rule, directed a secret unit which is accused of assassinating former Sunday Leader editor Lasantha Wickrematunga in January 2009.
(AFP, 3/20/17)
2017 Mar 20, Uruguay's Pres. Tabare Vazquez said his country is pulling its soldiers out of a UN peacekeeping mission in Haiti, where they have served since 2004. The mission will end this month and the roughly 250 soldiers will return home in early April.
(AP, 3/20/17)
2017 Mar 20, Pope Francis met with Rwandan President Paul Kagame. Francis begged forgiveness for the "sins and failings of the church and its members" during Rwanda's 1994 genocide, and told Rwanda's president that he hoped his apology would help the country heal.
(AP, 3/20/17)
2017 Mar 20, Some 60 Venezuelan soldiers crossed the border into Colombia and raised their national flag in a camp they set up. They withdrew on March 23 after Pres. Juan Manuel Santos called his Venezuelan counterpart Nicolas Maduro to protest.
(AP, 3/24/17)
2017 Mar 21, Pres. Donald Trump signed a bill authorizing $19.5 billion for NASA and updates the agency’s mission to add the exploration of Mars.
(SFC, 3/22/17, p.A6)
2017 Mar 21, The United States imposed restrictions on carry-on electronic devices bigger than cellphones on planes coming from 10 airports eight in Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East and North Africa, in response to unspecified security threats. Britain soon followed with similar measures to become effective on March 25.
(Reuters, 3/21/17)(AP, 3/22/17)
2017 Mar 21, The family of former FBI agent Robert Levinson, who went missing in Iran a decade ago on an unauthorized CIA assignment, filed a lawsuit against the Islamic Republic, accusing it of using "cold, cynical and false denials" to torture his loved ones.
(AP, 3/26/17)
2017 Mar 21, Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson signed legislation ending the state’s practice of commemorating Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee on the same holiday as slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King. Jr.
(SFC, 3/22/17, p.A6)
2017 Mar 21, Bosnia and Russia signed an agreement to settle Moscow's $125 million Soviet-era debt to the Balkan country. In 2003, Russia took over the responsibility for the Soviet Union's debt to the former Yugoslavia estimated at $1.3 billion.
(AP, 3/21/17)
2017 Mar 21, Brazil's federal police raided the offices of people close to several prominent senators in the latest phase of a sweeping, three-year corruption probe.
(Reuters, 3/21/17)
2017 Mar 21, Brazil’s agriculture ministry said Hong Kong has banned all meat imports from Brazil, another blow from a police investigation into corruption among health inspectors and the alleged selling of rotten products by some meatpackers.
(Reuters, 3/21/17)
2017 Mar 21, A legal officer at Cambodia's Customs Department said Cambodia has suspended the export of human breast milk by Utah-based Ambrosia Labs Ltd., a business pioneered last year by former Mormon missionary Ryan Newell. On March 28 the ban was made permanent.
(AP, 3/21/17)(AP, 3/28/17)
2017 Mar 21, Canada-based Ivanhoe said it plans to develop the Kamoa-Kakula copper deposit in Congo DRC, calling it the biggest copper discovery ever.
(http://tinyurl.com/u77c2w6)(Econ, 3/11/17, p.62)
2017 Mar 21, EgyptAir said it has received instructions from US transport authorities imposing restrictions on electronic devices carried by incoming travelers and will bring them into effect on March 24.
(Reuters, 3/21/17)
2017 Mar 21, A German court convicted three 17-year-olds of participating last April 16 in a bomb attack on a Sikh temple that was motivated by hatred of other religions. They were given prison sentences ranging between six and seven years.
(AP, 3/21/17)
2017 Mar 21, In Germany the G20's outreach organizations for business (B20), think tanks (T20) and civil society groups (C20) urged the Group of 20 leading economies in a joint statement to take fast and fundamental action to counter rising temperatures.
(Reuters, 3/21/17)
2017 Mar 21, Haiti’s Chamber of Deputies voted to approve Dr. Jack Guy Lafontant as prime minister.
(AP, 3/21/17)
2017 Mar 21, Israel's Shin Bet security agency said that it had arrested Muhammad Murtaja, a Palestinian employee of a humanitarian program run by the Turkish government, on suspicion of diverting funds to militants.
(AP, 3/21/17)
2017 Mar 21, In Italy Don Luigi Ciotti, an anti-mafia priest campaigner, kicked off a day of national protest against organized crime, urging Italians to resist the mob and denouncing recent threats against him as cowardly.
(AP, 3/21/17)
2017 Mar 21, Martin McGuinness (66), the Irish Republican Army commander who laid down his arms to become a key architect of Northern Ireland's peace, died, prompting tributes from allies and former enemies alike.
(Reuters, 3/21/17)(Econ, 3/25/17, p.82)
2017 Mar 21, In Somalia a car bomb exploded at a military checkpoint near the presidential palace, killing at least six people. Al-Shabab claimed responsibility.
(AP, 3/24/17)
2017 Mar 21, Syrian rebels stormed a government-held area in northeastern Damascus for the second time in three days, the opposition's first such large scale foray in over four years inside the capital.
(Reuters, 3/21/17)
2017 Mar 21, In Syria a US airstrike leveled a school near the IS-held city of Raqqa, where some 50 displaced families had sought refuge. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 33 bodies had been pulled from the rubble.
(AP, 3/22/17)
2017 Mar 21, In Turkey tens of thousands of people celebrated the New Year festival of Newroz in the overwhelmingly Kurdish city of Diyarbakir, even as police killed a man who claimed to be carrying a bomb.
(AFP, 3/21/17)
2017 Mar 21, The UN said more than 2,600 Nigerians who fled into northern Cameroon to escape Boko Haram jihadists have been forced to go home since the start of the year.
(AFP, 3/21/17)
2017 Mar 22, The US White House acknowledged that Paul Manafort, Pres. Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, had worked for a Russian billionaire to advance the interests of Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin. Manafort had signed a $10 million contract in 2006 with Oleg Deripaska, a close Putin ally, in a business relationship that lasted to at least 2009.
(SFC, 3/23/17, p.A8)
2017 Mar 22, The US FDA said it has received reports of nine deaths and more than 350 cases of a rare blood cancer linked to breast implants.
(SFC, 3/23/17, p.A6)
2017 Mar 22, Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson signed a gun rights measure into law that will allow concealed weapons at state colleges, some bars, government buildings, and even the state Capitol effective September 1.
(SFC, 3/22/17, p.A6)
2017 Mar 22, In Oakland, Ca., Redwood City-based Impossible Foods held a ceremony to open its 67,000 square-foot factory for the production of vegetarian burgers.
(SFC, 3/23/17, p.A1)
2017 Mar 22, An estimated 17,000 AT&T workers in California and Nevada went on strike to protest the handling of work assignments. Technicians and call center workers returned to work the next day following an agreement on work assignments.
(SFC, 3/23/17, p.C1)(SFC, 3/24/17, p.C1)
2017 Mar 22, Joanne Kyger (82), a leading poet of the San Francisco Beat generation, died in Bolinas, Ca. Her almost 30 collections of poetry began with “The Tapestry and the Web" (1965).
(SFC, 3/24/17, p.D3)
2017 Mar 22, A federal judge blocked a Louisiana law that prevents people without birth certificates from marrying.
(SFC, 3/23/17, p.A6)
2017 Mar 22, In Massachusetts Barry Cadden (50), former head of the New England Compounding Center, was convicted of racketeering, conspiracy and fraud over a 2012 meningitis outbreak that killed 76 people across the country and was traced to fungus-contaminated drugs. On June 26 Cadden was sentenced to nine years in prison.
(SFC, 3/23/17, p.A8)(SFC, 6/27/17, p.A6)
2017 Mar 22, In northern Wisconsin a domestic dispute at a bank escalated into shootings at three locations. A police officer and two bank employees and an attorney were shot and killed. Suspect Nengmy Vang was in custody. Attorney Sarah Quirt Sann was his wife’s divorce lawyer. On April 1 Vang died of his wounds.
(SFC, 3/23/17, p.A8)(SFC, 3/24/17, p.A8)(SFC, 3/25/17, p.A5)(SSFC, 4/2/17, p.A5)
2017 Mar 22, Save the Children said more than 400,000 Afghan children are expected to drop out of school this year due to growing instability and the forcible return of Afghan refugees from Pakistan.
(SFC, 3/23/17, p.A2)
2017 Mar 22, Austria's interior minister doubled the payment for some migrants who voluntarily return to their home countries to 1,000 euros ($1,080).
(AP, 3/22/17)
2017 Mar 22, British police shot and killed Khalid Masood (52) outside the Houses of Parliament in London after an officer was stabbed in what police said was a "terrorist" incident. Masood had just driven an SUV into a crowd of pedestrians on Westminster Bridge, killing two people and injuring approximately 40. Investigators soon carried out at least six raids on addresses in London, Birmingham, and elsewhere. 12 people were arrested over the next few days. Police on April 1 said all 12 have been released. On April 7 police said a 4th victim in the attack had died. Andreea Cristea (31) of Romania was knocked into the river when Masood drove his rented SUV into pedestrians. She died two weeks later, making her the 5th victim of the attack.
(AFP, 3/22/17)(Reuters, 3/23/17)(AP, 3/24/17)(Reuters, 4/1/17)(SFC, 4/8/17, p.A2)(AP, 5/13/17)
2017 Mar 22, Thames Water, one of Britain's biggest water companies, was handed a record 20 million pound ($25 million) fine for pumping sewage into the River Thames, killing wildlife and spreading sickness among livestock and people.
(Reuters, 3/22/17)
2017 Mar 22, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang arrived in the Australian capital, Canberra, on a mission to expand bilateral ties.
(AP, 3/22/17)
2017 Mar 22, China's largest real estate developers launched a green index to manage their cement, steel and iron suppliers as the world's second-largest economy steps up its fight against climate change.
(Reuters, 3/22/17)
2017 Mar 22, In central China two students died and more than 20 others were injured in a stampede during a morning bathroom break at an elementary school in Puyang county, Henan province.
(AP, 3/22/17)
2017 Mar 22, The France-based World Water Council said nearly a third of people from sub-Saharan Africa do not have access to safe drinking water. It said clean drinking water is available to less than 50% of the people in Angola, Equatorial Guinea and Papua New Guinea.
(SFC, 3/23/17, p.A2)
2017 Mar 22, In Germany thousands of gay men prosecuted and jailed under an arcane 19th century law were due to get compensation after the government passed a draft bill to quash their convictions. Germany decriminalized homosexuality in 1969.
(Reuters, 3/22/17)
2017 Mar 22, An Indian court sentenced two Hindu hard-liners to life in prison for triggering an explosion in Ajmer, a Muslim pilgrimage center in Rajasthan, that killed three people and injured more than a dozen in 2007.
(AP, 3/22/17)
2017 Mar 22, In Syria US aircraft ferried Syrian Kurdish fighters and allied forces behind Islamic State lines to spearhead an assault on a strategic town belonging to the extremist group outside its de facto capital, Raqqa.
(AP, 3/22/17)
2017 Mar 22, British police shot a suspected attacker outside the Houses of Parliament in London after an officer was stabbed in what police said was a "terrorist" incident.
(AFP, 3/22/17)
2017 Mar 22, In Iraq Islamic State militants shelled areas recaptured by government forces in western Mosul, hitting civilians fleeing the fighting. Heavy mortar fire killed at least five civilians and wounded more than 20 in Mosul Jadida and Rifak districts.
(Reuters, 3/22/17)
2017 Mar 22, In southern Italy police in Calabria detained Santo Vottari (45), a fugitive mobster, who authorities say is the boss of an 'ndrangheta crime clan involved in a feud that culminated in a 2007 gangland-style massacre in Germany.
(AP, 3/22/17)
2017 Mar 22, It was reported that villagers in northern Kenya have begun to burn piles of animal carcasses, hoping to head off an outbreak of disease as their livestock starve to death in the region's worst drought in five years.
(Reuters, 3/22/17)
2017 Mar 22, At the Hague International Criminal Court judges sentenced former Congolese VP Jean-Pierre Bemba to a year in jail and fined him 300,000 euros for bribing witnesses during his war crimes trial in an unprecedented case before the ICC.
(AFP, 3/22/17)
2017 Mar 22, In northeastern Nigeria at least four suicide blasts rocked a camp for migrants fleeing Boko Haram insurgents, killing at least three people and wounding 20.
(AFP, 3/22/17)
2017 Mar 22, The International Red Cross appealed for $400 million to help some 20 million people facing famine or the risk of it in four conflict-ridden countries: Somalia, Yemen, South Sudan and Nigeria.
(AP, 3/22/17)(Econ, 4/1/17, p.39)
2017 Mar 22, North Korea's latest missile launch ended in failure.
(AP, 3/22/17)
2017 Mar 22, Norway granted political asylum to a group of Turkish military officers based in Norway who had refused to return home after the failed July 15 coup attempt.
(AP, 3/22/17)
2017 Mar 22, Pakistani troops clashed with militants during a raid in a tribal region near the Afghan border, with two soldiers and five "terrorists" killed. A local Pakistani Taliban commander was among those reported killed in the Orakzai tribal region.
(AP, 3/22/17)
2017 Mar 22, Romanian rail workers staged a walk-out after unions and management failed to agree about wage hikes. More than 150 trains were affected by the strike.
(AP, 3/22/17)
2017 Mar 22, Tensions between Russia and Ukraine spread to the May Eurovision Song Contest after Kiev banned Russian contestant Yuliya Samoilova (27) from entering the country over a past performance in Moscow-annexed Crimea.
(AFP, 3/22/17)
2017 Mar 22, The Syrian army sent reinforcements to face a major rebel offensive in Hama province, as insurgents pressed an attack in a western area critically important to President Bashar al-Assad.
(Reuters, 3/22/17)
2017 Mar 22, Turkey fired into Kurdish-controlled Syria after saying one of its soldiers was killed in Hatay province by a sniper from across the border in Afrin.
(Reuters, 3/22/17)
2017 Mar 23, California air quality officials approved rigorous curbs on methane emissions at oil and gas production plants.
(SFC, 3/24/17, p.A1)
2017 Mar 23, Police in Sacramento, Ca., found the bodies of two children and two adults at a house on the 1100 block of 35th Ave. A suspect was arrested in San Francisco.
(SFC, 3/24/17, p.D4)
2017 Mar 23, Utah’s Rep. Gov. Gary Herbert said he plans to approve a measure lowering the state’s blood alcohol limit to .05% from .08%.
(SFC, 3/24/17, p.A6)
2017 Mar 23, In Afghanistan Taliban fighters captured the strategic district of Sangin in the southern province of Helmand after security forces pulled out, leaving the district center to the insurgents. In Kunduz province an Afghan officer turned his rifle on sleeping colleagues, killing nine policemen.
(Reuters, 3/23/17)(AP, 3/23/17)
2017 Mar 23, In Argentina a judge ordered former president Cristina Kirchner (64) to stand trial on charges of financial mismanagement.
(AFP, 3/23/17)
2017 Mar 23, A Bahraini court sentenced three Shi'ite Muslim men to death after they were convicted on charges of terrorism and involvement in 2014 bomb attacks that injured a number of police officers.
(Reuters, 3/23/17)
2017 Mar 23, Bosnian and Croatian police said they had arrested 13 people suspected of smuggling at least 100 migrants from Turkey into the European Union.
(Reuters, 3/23/17)
2017 Mar 23, In Chad Frenchman Thierry Frezier was kidnapped in a remote region near the border with Sudan's Darfur region early today.
(Reuters, 3/23/17)(Reuters, 5/7/17)
2017 Mar 23, In Egypt Islamic extremists killed 10 government soldiers in fighting in a central part of the restive Sinai Peninsula during an army raid on a militant hideout. Troops killed 15 extremists and took seven prisoners in the raid.
(AP, 3/23/17)
2017 Mar 23, An Egyptian court ordered a renewed corruption probe into ousted president Hosni Mubarak, who has been cleared for release after almost six years in detention.
(AFP, 3/23/17)
2017 Mar 23, German authorities detained Afghan migrant Abdullah P. in the southern state of Bavaria. He was believed to have taken part in an attack on a military convoy about a decade ago in which at least 16 US and Afghan soldiers were killed.
(Reuters, 3/28/17)
2017 Mar 23, Indonesian police killed a suspected radical and detained three during a counter-terrorism operation in an industrial area just hours away from Jakarta.
(Reuters, 3/23/17)
2017 Mar 23, Israeli police arrested a 19-year-old Israeli Jewish man as the primary suspect in a string of bomb threats targeting Jewish community centers and other institutions in the US, marking a potential breakthrough in the case after an international manhunt with the FBI.
(AP, 3/23/17)
2017 Mar 23, Kenya, a pioneer in mobile money, began selling the first ever government bonds via mobile phone, allowing anyone from teachers to shop owners to invest and fund infrastructure projects.
(AFP, 3/23/17)
2017 Mar 23, In Mexico Miroslava Breach Velducea (54), a journalist for the national newspaper Le Jornada, was gunned down outside her home in Chihuahua.
(SFC, 3/24/17, p.A5)(SSFC, 5/21/17, p.E7)
2017 Mar 23, In the Philippines suspected Abu Sayyaf militants took captive two Filipino cargo ship crewmen from a cargo ship off Basilan province.
(Reuters, 3/25/17)
2017 Mar 23, Rwandan prosecutors charged a dual Rwandan-British citizen of treason, accusing her of forming an armed group and conspiring to unseat the president. Violette Uwamahoro, the wife of an opposition party youth organizer, was arrested in Kigali on February 14, days after arriving from Britain to attend a family funeral.
(Reuters, 3/23/17)
2017 Mar 23, A 6,800-ton South Korean ferry was hoisted to the surface nearly three years after it capsized and sank in violent seas off the country's southwestern coast. More than 300 people died when the Sewol sank on April 16, 2014.
(AP, 3/23/17)
2017 Mar 23, Spain’s Proactiva Open Arms group found five bodies near two capsized boats. A day later the group said it feared hundreds of migrants may have died off Libya's coast as it recovered one more body in the area.
(AP, 3/24/17)
2017 Mar 23, Syrian government forces besieged Deir Hafer, the last Islamic State stronghold in the northern province of Aleppo, weeks after launching an offensive to retake the entire province.
(AP, 3/23/17)
2017 Mar 23, Tanzania's information Minister Nape Nnauye was fired after he criticized an ally of Pres. John Magufuli who had stormed into a television station on March 17 accompanied by armed men.
(AFP, 3/23/17)
2017 Mar 23, In Ukraine former Russian parliamentarian Denis Voronenkov (45) was killed by an assailant who was armed with a pistol and later died in hospital after being shot in the chest and head by Voronenkov's bodyguard. Voronenkov was key witness in a treason case against former leader Viktor Yanukovich. Ukraine soon identified the assailant as Pavel Parshov (28) and said he had been trained in Russia by Russian security services.
(Reuters, 3/23/17)(AP, 3/24/17)
2017 Mar 23, In Ukraine fire and explosions caused the detonation of ammunition in several sites at a military base at in Balaklia in the Kharkiv region. One woman was found dead in a home that was hit by a shell. Ukraine suspected the Russian military or its separatist rebel proxies were responsible and cited a possible drone attack.
(AP, 3/23/17)(AP, 3/24/17)
2017 Mar 23, Pope Francis signed canonization decrees making five more child saints: two Portuguese shepherd children who said the Virgin Mary appeared to them in Fatima 100 years ago and three Mexican adolescents who were killed for their faith in the 16th century.
(AP, 3/23/17)
2017 Mar 24, US President Donald Trump's administration approved TransCanada Corp's Keystone XL pipeline, cheering the oil industry and angering environmentalists who had sought for years to block it.
(Reuters, 3/24/17)
2017 Mar 24, US President Donald Trump put his reputation as a dealmaker on the line in a high-risk vote on an embattled Republican health care plan. Trump faced the biggest blow yet to his young presidency as his bid to repeal Obamacare went down in flames at the hands of rebel Republican lawmakers.
(AFP, 3/24/17)(AP, 3/24/17)
2017 Mar 24, The United States State Department said it has imposed sanctions on 30 foreign companies or individuals for transferring sensitive technology to Iran for its missile program or for violating export controls on Iran, North Korea and Syria.
(Reuters, 3/24/17)
2017 Mar 24, The US government to issue a travel warning for French Guiana in South America. Large protests have spread throughout the territory, blocking roads to neighboring Brazil and Suriname.
(AP, 3/25/17)
2017 Mar 24, A US immigration judge in Chicago granted asylum to Singaporean blogger Amos Yee (18), saying he was persecuted for his political opinions in the Southeast Asian city-state. On September 26 Yee was released from custody after his bid for asylum was upheld.
(Reuters, 3/25/17)(Econ, 4/1/17, p.33)(SFC, 9/27/17, p.A6)
2017 Mar 24, US federal prosecutors said the American University of Beirut, a recipient of US government aid, has agreed to pay $700,000 to settle a civil lawsuit over accusations that it assisted three organizations linked to the militant group Hezbollah.
(Reuters, 3/24/17)
2017 Mar 24, Kentucky’s Gov. Matt Bevin signed SB17, a “religious liberty bill" into law. The measure allows student organizations at high schools and colleges, under the guise of expressing religious viewpoints, to discriminate against LGBT students..
(http://tinyurl.com/y7anya9b)(Econ 7/8/17, p.26)
2017 Mar 24, New York-based Transparentem said hazardous, heavily polluting tanneries in Bangladesh, with workers as young as 14, supplied leather to companies that make shoes and handbags for a host of Western brands. A British Medical Journal study, published this week, found that Bangladeshi tannery workers as young as 8 frequently have untreated rashes and infections, as well as asthma and other lung problems.
(AP, 3/24/17)
2017 Mar 24, Former Penn State Pres. Graham Spanier (68) was convicted of hushing up complaints in 2001 of child sex abuse by assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky.
(SFC, 3/25/17, p.A5)
2017 Mar 24, The World Health Organization said 116 million children are to receive polio vaccines in 13 countries in west and central Africa as part of efforts to eradicate the disease on the continent.
(AFP, 3/24/17)
2017 Mar 24, In Bangladesh a suicide bomber blew himself up at a security checkpoint near the international airport in Dhaka, the second such incident in a week.
(Reuters, 3/24/17)
2017 Mar 24, In Bosnia Efeta Veseli (56), a woman wanted for war crimes she allegedly committed against Serb civilians during the country's 1992-95 war, was extradited from Switzerland and handed over to authorities at Sarajevo's airport.
(AP, 3/24/17)
2017 Mar 24, Bulgarian nationalists blocked for several hours the three main crossing points with Turkey to prevent coaches bringing in thousands of Turks with Bulgarian passports to vote in March 26 elections. Later in the afternoon police put an end to the protests after caretaker PM Ognyan Gerdzhikov called for the blockade to be lifted.
(AFP, 3/24/17)
2017 Mar 24, In Chechnya six Russian soldiers were killed after successfully repelling an assault on a military facility at Naurskaya. The Islamic State militant group claimed responsibility.
(Reuters, 3/24/17)
2017 Mar 24, Chinese Internet giant Tencent paid $1.8 billion for a 5% stake in the US-based Tesla car company.
(Econ, 4/8/17, p.59)
2017 Mar 24, In central China accidents at two neighboring gold mines in Henan province killed 11 people.
(Reuters, 3/25/17)
2017 Mar 24, In CongoDRC Kamuina Nsapu militants decapitated 42 police officers after an ambush in Kasai province. The fighters spared the lives of six police officers because they spoke the local Tshiluba language.
(Reuters, 3/25/17)(SSFC, 3/26/17, p.A6)
2017 Mar 24, In Egypt Hosni Mubarak (88), the former autocrat toppled during the 2011 Arab Spring, was freed from the military hospital where he spent much of the past six years in detention.
(AFP, 3/24/17)
2017 Mar 24, In Japan Le Thi Nhat Linh (9) disappeared on her way to school. Her naked body was found two days later. Autopsy results showed that the Vietnamese girl had been choked to death. On April 14 police arrested real estate salesman Yasumasa Shibuya (46) on suspicion he abandoned the girl's body in Aiko City. He headed a neighborhood initiative to watch over children walking to and from school.
(AP, 4/14/17)
2017 Mar 24, The International Criminal Court at The Hague awarded $250 dollars as "symbolic" damages to each victim of former Congolese warlord Germain Katanga, a sum swiftly dismissed as meaningless by those who lost homes and loved ones in a militia attack on their village 14 years ago.
(AFP, 3/24/17)
2017 Mar 24, A court in Niger freed fifteen civilians accused of complicity in an attempted putsch against President Mahamadou Issoufou in December 2015.
(Reuters, 3/25/17)
2017 Mar 24, Hamas official Mazen Faqha (38) was shot dead by an unknown gunman at his home in the Gaza Strip. Israeli media said Faqha was responsible for cells of Hamas's military wing, the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. On May 11 Hamas said it has apprehended the killer of Mazen Fuqaha and that he carried out the assassination on Israel's orders.
(AFP, 3/25/17)(Reuters, 5/11/17)(Econ, 4/22/17, p.42)
2017 Mar 24, In southern Poland 14 men and women in their twenties slaughtered a sheep and took their clothes off at the former Nazi German death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. The group, including six Poles, four Belarusians and one German, staged an "artistic performance" at Auschwitz aimed at protesting the wars in Ukraine and Syria. The individuals used a drone to film the incident. Police detained all those involved. In 2019 the man who killed the sheep, Adam Bialiatski, was sentenced to a year in prison for animal cruelty and desecrating a site of memory, while a second man, Mikita Valadzko, was given eight months. Nine other participants were ordered to pay fines.
(AP, 3/24/17)(AP, 5/28/19)
2017 Mar 24, Puntland police said pirates have seized control of a Somali fishing boat to use as a base from which to attack larger ships.
(Reuters, 3/24/17)
2017 Mar 24, President Vladimir Putin granted an audience to French far-right party leader Marine Le Pen in the Kremlin, bestowing a level of international recognition that has so far eluded her in the countdown to France's presidential election.
(Reuters, 3/24/17)
2017 Mar 24, In Syria US-backed local forces fighting Islamic State reached one side of the Tabqa dam, about 40 km (25 miles) west of Raqqa, one of the top prizes in their campaign to drive the jihadist group from Raqqa city.
(Reuters, 3/24/17)
2017 Mar 24, In Syria an air attack late today struck a prison run by militants, killing at least 16 people including prisoners and prison staff in Idlib city. Some people were killed by gunfire as prison guards chased detainees who tried to flee after the attack.
(AP, 3/25/17)
2017 Mar 24, In 2018 the OPCW said sarin was likely used as a chemical weapon in an attack in Syria at Ltamenah, Hama province.
(SFC, 6/14/18, p.A2)
2017 Mar 24, Tanzania's President John Magufuli warned the country's journalists that there were limits to their press freedom.
(Reuters, 3/24/17)
2017 Mar 24, Five children were among 11 Syrians killed after their plastic boat sank off Turkey's Aegean coast.
(Reuters, 3/24/17)
2017 Mar 24, The United Nations human rights office said an average of 100 civilians a month are dying in Yemen's war which enters its third year this weekend, most killed by the Saudi-led coalition's air strikes and shelling.
(Reuters, 3/24/17)
2017 Mar 25, In the SF Bay Area the first day of full service opened at the new Warm Springs BART station in Fremont.
(SSFC, 3/26/17, p.C1)
2017 Mar 25, In Nevada a gunman, later identified as Rolando Cardenas (55), opened fire on a double-decker bus on the Las Vegas Strip, killing one person and wounding another before finally surrendering.
(AFP, 3/26/17)(SSFC, 3/26/17, p.A8)(SFC, 3/27/17, p.A4)
2017 Mar 25, Sydney's Opera House and Harbour Bridge plunged into darkness to mark Earth Hour, as global landmarks began dimming their lights to draw attention to climate change. Conservation group WWF started Earth Hour in 2007.
(AFP, 3/25/17)
2017 Mar 25, In eastern Bangladesh six people, including two policemen, were killed in explosions near a building in Sylhet. The Islamic State claimed responsibility.
(AP, 3/26/17)(Econ, 4/1/17, p.32)
2017 Mar 25, Belarus authorities detained some 400 people during an attempt to hold a street protest in the capital Minsk, amid rising public anger over falling living standards and an unpopular tax on the unemployed.
(Reuters, 3/25/17)(AP, 3/26/17)
2017 Mar 25, Thousands of people marched through London to protest against Britain leaving the European Union, just four days before PM Theresa May launches the start of the formal divorce process from the bloc it joined 44 years ago.
(Reuters, 3/25/17)
2017 Mar 25, Bulgarian nationalists kept up their protests at the Turkish border against Bulgarian citizens living permanently in Turkey who are coming in to vote in Bulgaria's election.
(AP, 3/25/17)
2017 Mar 25, China’s official Xinhua news agency reported that China has captured 2,566 fugitives who had fled to more than 90 countries and regions and recovered 8.6 billion yuan ($1.25 billion) of illicit funds from 2014 to 2016.
(Reuters, 3/25/17)
2017 Mar 25, China prevented Feng Chongyi, an associate professor at the University of Technology Sydney, from returning to Sydney because he's suspected of endangering national security. Feng had been wrapping up a three-week trip researching human rights lawyers. Chinese authorities have staged a wide-reaching crackdown on human rights lawyers across the country since July 2015. On April 1 Feng Chongyi was allowed to return to Australia.
(AP, 3/26/17)(AP, 4/2/17)
2017 Mar 25, In southern China an operation platform collapsed at a power plant under construction in Guangzhou, Guangdong province, killing nine people.
(Reuters, 3/25/17)
2017 Mar 25, Three Egyptian soldiers were killed in an explosion that hit their armored vehicle in the northern Sinai peninsula. Another officer managing a checkpoint was killed by sniper fire.
(Reuters, 3/25/17)(SSFC, 3/26/17, p.A4)
2017 Mar 25, On the 60th anniversary of the founding of the EU, 27 European leaders signed a document in Rome enshrining a pledge to give member nations more freedom to form partial alliances and set policy when unanimity is out of reach.
(AP, 3/25/17)
2017 Mar 25, Hong Kong pro-democracy activists and hundreds of supporters marched ahead of a vote for the city's next leader which they reject as a sham.
(AFP, 3/25/17)
2017 Mar 25, In India one person was killed and about 14 injured when violence erupted following a scuffle between Muslim and Hindu school students in PM Narendra Modi's home state of Gujarat.
(Reuters, 3/26/17)
2017 Mar 25, In Italy a woman's body was found stuffed in a suitcase that was floating at a marina in the Adriatic port of Rimini.
(AP, 3/27/17)
2017 Mar 25, In Japan a Vietnamese man held in an immigration detention center died, drawing fresh attention to conditions in the country's detention system. Van Huan Nguyen (aka Nguyen The Hung) was one of more than 11,000 refugees that the country took in over the three decades to 2005 in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. Nguyen had complained of pain throughout his detention for a week before his death. The death was the 13th in Japan's detention system since 2006.
(Reuters, 3/26/17)(Reuters, 3/28/17)
2017 Mar 25, In Kyrgyzstan about 250 people had gathered in Bishkek to demand the release of Sadyr Japarov, who was arrested when trying to enter the country earlier in the day. Supporters tried to break through a police cordon outside the national security agency's headquarters, but police turned them back with flash grenades. Dozens were arrested. Japarov had lived the past few years in Cyprus after serving a prison sentence for organizing a 2013 protest that turned violent.
(AP, 3/25/17)
2017 Mar 25, Maldives’ former President Mohamed Nasheed said that he has signed an agreement with his one-time archrival and former strongman to try to restore democracy in the archipelago state.
(AP, 3/25/17)
2017 Mar 25, Mali's main Tuareg separatist factions said they would boycott talks with the government next week on implementing a nearly 2-year-old peace accord that has been riven by quarrelling.
(Reuters, 3/25/17)
2017 Mar 25, In Mexico about 100 journalists and free-speech supporters demonstrated to protest the March 23 killing of reporter Miroslava Breach gunned down in the northern state of Chihuahua.
(AP, 3/25/17)
2017 Mar 25, Pakistan said it has started building a fence along the Afghan border in areas where it says militants have launched cross-border attacks.
(AP, 3/26/17)
2017 Mar 25, Philippine soldiers rescued one of two Filipino cargo ship crewmen taken captive just two days ago by suspected Abu Sayyaf militants. Aurelio Agacac, the ship captain, was freed in the remote village of Basakan, Basilan province.
(Reuters, 3/25/17)
2017 Mar 25, In the southern Philippines at least four people were killed and 23 others wounded in a grenade attack that appeared to be unrelated to terrorism. The attacker was arrested following the blast in Busbus village near the domestic airport in Sulu province's Jolo town.
(AP, 3/26/17)
2017 Mar 25, In South Sudan six aid workers working for the Grass Roots Empowerment for Development Organization (GREDO), were killed in an ambush while traveling from the capital Juba towards the town of Pibor. The death toll soon rose to seven after the driver, David Kim Choop, also died.
(Reuters, 3/27/17)(AFP, 3/27/17)(SFC, 3/28/17, p.A2)
2017 Mar 25, In Syria airstrikes hit a main street in the Damascus suburb of Hamouriyeh killing at least 16 people and wounded more than 50. Airstrikes in Idlib province hit several towns and villages as well as the provincial capital the carries the same name. Syria's army and its allies retook a village near Hama, as the government tried to turn back a major insurgent offensive.
(AP, 3/25/17)(Reuters, 3/25/17)
2017 Mar 25, In 2018 the OPCW said chlorine was likely used as a chemical weapon in an attack in Syria at and near Ltamenah Hospital, Hama province.
(SFC, 6/14/18, p.A2)
2017 Mar 25, In Yemen 16 rebels were killed and 24 wounded over the last 24 hours in air raids by a Saudi-led coalition targeting the insurgents on an air base and arms depot in the east of the rebel-held Hodeida province.
(AFP, 3/25/17)
2017 Mar 26, Joe Harris (89), American commercial illustrator, died at his home in Stamford, Conn. He created a cartoon rabbit to help sell the Trix cereal in 1959. He later designed cartoon characters for the Rocky & Bullwinkle show.
(SFC, 4/6/17, p.D3)
2017 Mar 26, In Ohio one person was killed and 16 others wounded early today in a shooting at the packed Cameo nightclub in Cincinnati. One hospitalized man faced murder charges. On March 30 police arrested Cornell Beckley (27) on murder charges.
(AFP, 3/26/17)(SFC, 4/1/17, p.A7)
2017 Mar 26, In eastern Bangladesh two suspected militants were killed in an ongoing military raid on a building in Sylhet where armed militants were holed up.
(AP, 3/26/17)
2017 Mar 26, Belarus police arrested about 30 demonstrators in Minsk who were demanding to know the whereabouts of friends and relatives detained in the breakup of a mass protest.
(AP, 3/26/17)
2017 Mar 26, Bulgarians voted for the third time in four years in an early election. The strongly pro-EU GERB was seen taking 96 of parliament's 240 seats, leaving it short of a majority and certain to seek a deal with the third-placed United Patriots, an alliance of three nationalist parties expected to take 27 seats. GERN leader Boyko Borisov faced an uphill battle to build a stable coalition government.
(AP, 3/26/17)(Reuters, 3/27/17)
2017 Mar 26, China's Premier Li Keqiang arrived in New Zealand for high-level talks at a time that both countries are pushing to expand free trade.
(AP, 3/26/17)
2017 Mar 26, An Egyptian court sentenced 56 people to prison terms of up to 14 years over the capsizing of a boat that killed over 200 people last September 21.
(Reuters, 3/26/17)
2017 Mar 26, In France Shaoyo Liu (56), a Chinese man, was shot and killed in his home by a plainclothes police officer. The killing prompted angry demonstrations the next day from the Asian community in Paris' multicultural northeast where the killing occurred. Liu’s daughter said her father was cooking dinner when she heard a loud knocking and that police broke down their door and shot him as he held scissors.
(AP, 3/28/17)(AP, 3/29/17)
2017 Mar 26, Carrie Lam, a Beijing-backed civil servant, was chosen to be Hong Kong's next leader, replacing Leung Chun-ying. She was chosen from among several candidates by a 1,200-person "election committee" stacked with pro-Beijing and pro-establishment loyalists.
(Reuters, 3/26/17)(Econ, 3/4/17, p.32)
2017 Mar 26, Indonesian farmer Akbar (25) failed to return home from a trip to the family's plantation on Sulawesi Island. His body was found the next day inside the belly of a giant python.
(AFP, 3/29/17)
2017 Mar 26, Iran sanctioned what it described as 15 American companies, alleging they support terrorism, repression and Israel's occupation of land Palestinians want for a future state, likely in retaliation for sanctions earlier announced by the US. The list included ITT Corp., missile-maker Raytheon Co., United Technologies Corp. Denver's Re/Max Holdings Inc., a real estate company and truck maker Oshkosh.
(AP, 3/26/17)
2017 Mar 26, Iran's central bank said it will appeal Luxembourg's decision to freeze $1.6 billion of its assets, which the US is claiming as compensation for victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks.
(AFP, 3/26/17)
2017 Mar 26, Iraq's military said that 61 bodies were recovered from a collapsed building that Islamic State had booby-trapped in west Mosul, but there was no sign the building had been hit by a coalition air strike. Witnesses and local officials that said as many as 200 bodies were pulled from the building after a March 17 coalition strike targeted IS militants and equipment in the Jadida district.
(Reuters, 3/26/17)
2017 Mar 26, Kenyan troops in Somalia killed 31 Islamist al Shabaab militants in a raid on two of their bases in the southern Somali region of Jubbaland.
(Reuters, 3/27/17)
2017 Mar 26, Hamas shut the crossing between the Gaza Strip and Israel after blaming the Jewish state for the assassination of one of its officials in the Palestinian enclave.
(AFP, 3/26/17)
2017 Mar 26, Russian police detained dozens of protesters across the country, including opposition leader Alexei Navalny, after thousands took to the streets to demonstrate against corruption and demand the resignation of PM Dmitry Medvedev. Riot police arrested more than 1,000 people in Moscow alone.
(Reuters, 3/26/17)(Econ, 4/1/17, p.43)
2017 Mar 26, In Syria the Islamic State group ordered residents to evacuate the city of Raqqa following reports that a dam contested by US-backed forces upstream on the Euphrates River could collapse.
(AP, 3/26/17)
2017 Mar 26, In Syria a Kurdish and Arab Syrian militia backed by the United States said it has captured the town of Karama and the capture of the Tabqa air base, 28 miles west of Raqqa. They planned an assault on the Islamic State stronghold of Raqqa in early April.
(Reuters, 3/26/17)(SFC, 3/27/17, p.A3)
2017 Mar 26, Tens of thousands of Yemenis protested in the capital Sanaa against the Saudi-led military intervention as it marked its second anniversary.
(AP, 3/26/17)
2017 Mar 27, The White House confirmed that Jared Kushner, president Donald Trump's son-in-law has, volunteered to answer questions before the Senate Intelligence Committee about arranging meetings with the Russian ambassador and other officials.
(AP, 3/27/17)
2017 Mar 27, The United States, Britain and France were among almost 40 countries that did not join talks on a nuclear weapons ban treaty starting at the UN.
(Reuters, 3/27/17)
2017 Mar 27, In Oakland, Ca. an early morning fire killed three people at a large transitional housing building at 2551 San Pablo Ave. One person remained missing.
(SFC, 3/28/17, p.A1)
2017 Mar 27, National Football League (NFL) owners voted 37-1 to approve the Oakland Raiders’ move to Las Vegas.
(SFC, 3/28/17, p.A1)
2017 Mar 27, Michigan and the city of Flint agreed to replace thousands of home water lines to settle a lawsuit by residents over lead-contaminated water.
(SFC, 3/28/17, p.A7)
2017 Mar 27, In Bangladesh a special anti-terrorism unit managed to kill the last four Islamic militants in Sylhet. Police had cordoned off the area on March 24.
(Econ, 4/1/17, p.32)
2017 Mar 27, French energy company Total announced the launching a multi-billion-dollar petrochemical joint venture in Texas as it tries to profit from the "business-friendly environment" under the current US administration.
(AP, 3/27/17)
2017 Mar 27, French Guiana faced a nationwide strike over crime and economic difficulties, amid protests that have paralyzed the French territory in South America, halted flights and a rocket launch and prompted a US travel warning.
(AP, 3/27/17)
2017 Mar 27, In Germany thieves broke into Berlin’s Bode Museum before dawn and made off with a massive 100-kilogram (221-pound) gold coin worth millions of dollars. In 2018 prosecutors indicted four young men for the theft of the "Big Maple Leaf" coin.
(AP, 3/27/17)(SFC, 10/18/18, p.A2)
2017 Mar 27, Fraport Greece said the European Union is clearing a 280 million euro loan from the European Investment Bank to the company, which won the tender to upgrade and operate 14 regional Greek airports.
(AP, 3/28/17)
2017 Mar 27, Lufthansa announced a code-sharing deal with Hong Kong-based Cathay Pacific under which the German airline and its Swiss and Austrian Airlines units will offer new connections to Australia and New Zealand.
(AP, 3/27/17)
2017 Mar 27, Hong Kong police launched a fresh round of arrests of student leaders and other prominent figures involved with the huge 2014 "Umbrella Movement" pro-democracy protests.
(AP, 3/27/17)
2017 Mar 27, Israeli police arrested more than 20 Jewish ultra-Orthodox suspected sex offenders whose alleged crimes were known to their insular communities but concealed from the authorities.
(AFP, 3/27/17)
2017 Mar 27, In central Japan an avalanche killed seven high school students and a teacher who were among a group of almost 50 on mountain climbing training.
(Reuters, 3/27/17)
2017 Mar 27, In Mali former rebels and opposition parties boycotted a national summit enshrined in the country's 2015 peace deal, laying bare divisions with the government and armed groups it relies on for security.
(AFP, 3/27/17)
2017 Mar 27, In Mexico a priest was shot to death in the Pacific coast state of Nayarit.
(AP, 3/30/17)
2017 Mar 27, In the northern Netherlands two people were killed when a train hit a car at a rail crossing near Harlingen.
(AP, 3/27/17)
2017 Mar 27, The foreign minister of Nigeria visited Poland an effort to develop economic, military and security ties with the fast-growing economy in central Europe.
(AP, 3/27/17)
2017 Mar 27, In Pakistan a special 3-day anti-polio drive was launched in Islamabad after traces of the virus were found in the city's sewage system.
(AP, 3/28/17)
2017 Mar 27, Hamas authorities partially reopened the crossing between the Gaza Strip and Israel, after a one-day closure following the assassination of one of the group's leaders.
(AFP, 3/27/17)
2017 Mar 27, Qatar PM Sheikh Abdullah bin Nasser bin Khalifa al-Thani said his country will invest £5 billion in Britain within five years in a boost for the post-Brexit economy.
(AFP, 3/27/17)
2017 Mar 27, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was sentenced to 15 days behind bars and fined after staging the biggest anti-corruption protests in years, an act branded a "provocation" by the Kremlin.
(AFP, 3/27/17)
2017 Mar 27, Saudi Arabia cut taxes on oil companies in a major move that could attract investments in its energy giant Aramco, expected to be offered to investors in 2018.
(AFP, 3/27/17)
2017 Mar 27, In Syria hundreds of rebels left their last bastion in Homs city, resuming an evacuation expected to be among the largest of its kind under a Russian-backed deal with the government.
(Reuters, 3/27/17)
2017 Mar 27, Thailand's broadcast regulator ordered television channel Voice TV to suspend its over-the-air broadcasting for a week for what it called biased reports affecting national security. The station is controlled by the family of former PM Thaksin Shinawatra, who was ousted by a 2006 army coup and is in exile to avoid a prison term for corruption.
(AP, 3/27/17)
2017 Mar 28, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order to undo a slew of Obama-era climate change regulations that his administration says is hobbling oil drillers and coal miners, a move environmental groups have vowed to take to court. Trump signed an executive order to review and revise Obama’s flagship energy policy, the Clean Power Plan, which has never been implemented.
(Reuters, 3/28/17)(Econ, 4/1/17, p.22)
2017 Mar 28, The US Supreme Court voted 5-3 to reverse a Texas appeals court ruling that said Death Row inmate Bobby James Moore was not intellectually disabled in the 1980 murder of a Houston grocery store clerk.
(SFC, 3/29/17, p.A4)
2017 Mar 28, The US FDA approved Dupixent, developed by Sanofi of Paris and Regeneron Pharmaceuticals of New York, for moderate or severe eczema. The initial price was listed at $37,000 per year. The FDA also approved Genentech’s Ocrevus, the first drug for an aggressive kind of multiple schlerosis.
(SFC, 3/29/17, p.C2)(SFC, 3/30/17, p.A6)
2017 Mar 28, Tech giant Amazon expanded its global reach with the announcement of a deal to buy Dubai-based Souq.com, the Middle East's largest online retailer.
(AFP, 3/28/17)
2017 Mar 28, Wells Fargo said it has agreed to pay $110 million to settle a class-action lawsuit over up to two million accounts that its employees opened for customers without getting their permission.
(SFC, 3/29/17, p.C1)
2017 Mar 28, In Australia Tropical Cyclone Debbie hit the far north of Queensland as a category 4 storm. It was soon downgraded to category 2.
(Reuters, 3/28/17)
2017 Mar 28, In Bangladesh at least four people died and several remain missing after a ferry carrying about 80 passengers capsized the Panguchi River. At least 18 people remained missing.
(Reuters, 3/28/17)
2017 Mar 28, Britain's new 12-sided £1 coin with the symbols of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland goes into circulation on the eve of the launch of a Brexit process that has put national unity in doubt.
(AFP, 3/28/17)
2017 Mar 28, London and Paris signed a business agreement, to be launched in 2018, to cooperate in attracting visitors and companies.
(AP, 3/28/17)
2017 Mar 28, Canada’s prestigious Gairdner Award went to UCSF researcher David Julius for his work on how pain is perceived by receptors in human nerve endings.
(SFC, 3/28/17, p.A1)
2017 Mar 28, The Danish branch of the ride-sharing service Uber said it is shutting down its services in Denmark due to a proposed law that toughens standards for cabs.
(AP, 3/28/17)
2017 Mar 28, The central European Visegrad Group (Czech Rep., Hungary, Poland and Slovakia) rejected a European Union policy that calls for all member states to receive migrants, protesting suggestions that the level of their compliance could be linked to the availability of EU funds to them.
(AP, 3/28/17)
2017 Mar 28, A French court sent Carlos the Jackal, once one of the world's most wanted criminals, back to jail for his third life sentence after convicting him of a grenade attack 42 years ago on a Paris shop that killed two people.
(Reuters, 3/28/17)
2017 Mar 28, A Gambian boy (16) was rescued by a Spanish frigate after a rubber boat packed with 147 migrants sank in the Mediterranean shortly after leaving Libya a few days earlier. The sole survivor was transferred to an Italian Coast Guard ship. 140 others disembarked at a different port March 30 and several identified the boy as having been on the same boat. Aid groups said this reduced the death toll to five.
(Reuters, 3/29/17)(Reuters, 3/31/17)
2017 Mar 28, German prosecutors announced an investigation into claims that Turkish agents are spying on alleged followers of exiled preacher Fethullah Gulen in Germany.
(AFP, 3/28/17)
2017 Mar 28, Iceland became the first country to introduce legislation requiring employers to prove they are paying men and women equally.
(SFC, 3/31/17, p.C2)
2017 Mar 28, In Kashmir three civilians were killed and 28 other people were injured in anti-India protests that erupted following a gunbattle between rebels and government forces that killed a rebel.
(AP, 3/28/17)
2017 Mar 28, Former rebels in Mali reversed a decision to boycott a national reconciliation conference after receiving assurances from the government.
(AFP, 3/28/17)
2017 Mar 28, In northern Mexico inmates rioted at a psychiatric block in a prison, broke into a prison pharmacy and took drugs that caused the deaths of two of them in Cadereyta, Nuevo Leon state. Disturbances had begun earlier this week as inmates protested a new program to inspect visitors with a type of X-ray machine to prevent contraband being smuggled into the facility.
(AP, 3/29/17)
2017 Mar 28, In Mexico Rev. Oscar Lopez Navarro was abducted late today outside his residence by people who had been following him in the city of Tampico.
(AP, 3/30/17)
2017 Mar 28, Montenegro became set to become NATO's 29th member following the US Senate's overwhelming ratification.
(AP, 3/29/17)
2017 Mar 28, Air Koryo, North Korea's national carrier, connected Pyongyang with the northeastern Chinese city of Dandong on a twice-weekly inaugural flight.
(Reuters, 3/28/17)
2017 Mar 28, Thousands of students at the Univ. of Puerto Rico went on a one-week strike to protest multimillion-dollar cuts prompted by an economic crisis.
(AP, 3/28/17)
2017 Mar 28, Romania’s former tourism minister Elena Udrea was handed a six-year sentence for bribery and abuse of office connected to a boxing gala that she organized in 2011. Former chairman of Romania's Boxing Federation Rudel Obreja received a five-year sentence for tax evasion. Udrea's assistant received three years for complicity to bribery.
(AP, 3/28/17)
2017 Mar 28, In South Africa celebrated anti-apartheid activist Ahmed Kathrada (87), a Robben Island prisoner and one of Nelson Mandela's closest colleagues in the struggle against white rule, died in Johannesburg.
(AFP, 3/28/17)
2017 Mar 28, In Syria the Islamic State group launched a counter-attack to fend off a US-backed advance around the Tabqa airbase near the jihadists' stronghold Raqa. The SDF held back the attack and managed to seize some ammunition and rocket stores.
(AFP, 3/28/17)
2017 Mar 28, Thailand authorities escalated their effort to collect taxes they say are due from ousted PM Thaksin Shinawatra, posting a bill for 17.6 billion baht ($503 million) at the house where he lived before fleeing into exile in 2008 to avoid a prison term for conflict of interest. A lawyer for Thaksin contended that under the law in existence at the time of the 2006 sale, the shares were exempt from tax.
(AP, 3/28/17)
2017 Mar 28, Yemeni troops captured a senior leader of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) during an early morning raid in the southeastern Hadramawt region. They detained three others and killed two more.
(Reuters, 3/28/17)
2017 Mar 29, Pres. Donald Trump signed a directive declaring parts of Somalia an “area of active hostilities," where warzone targeting rules will apply for at least 180 days.
(SFC, 3/30/17, p.A4)
2017 Mar 29, Melania Trump helped present the Sec. of State’s Int’l. Women of Courage awards to 13 women from around the world.
(SFC, 3/30/17, p.A6)
2017 Mar 29, In Hawaii US District Judge Derrick Watson issued a 24-page order blocking the government from suspending new visas for travelers from six Muslim-majority countries and from halting the U.S. refugee program. He had temporarily blocked Pres. Donald Trump's revised travel ban hours before it was set to take effect.
(AP, 3/30/17)
2017 Mar 29, In San Francisco the homeowner’s association of the sinking Millennium Tower sued the public agency building the Transbay Transit Center next door and others for more than $200 million in damages. The structure has sunk 16 inches and tilted two inches since it was completed in 2009.
(SFC, 3/30/17, p.D6)
2017 Mar 29, Alexei Abrikosov 88), Russian-born physicist and Nobel Prize winner (2003), died in Sunnyvale, Ca.
(SFC, 4/5/17, p.D6)
2017 Mar 29, In Oklahoma and Texas six people were killed and nearly 200,000 customers were without electric power after overnight storms brought tornadoes, torrential rain and hail to large parts of the states.
(Reuters, 3/29/17)(SFC, 3/30/17, p.A12)
2017 Mar 29, In southwestern Texas a small shuttle bus carrying church members home from a retreat collided with a pickup truck killing 13 people in Uvalde County. The pickup driver, Jack Dillon Young (20), said he had been texting while driving.
(SFC, 3/30/17, p.A12)(SFC, 4/1/17, p.A7)
2017 Mar 29, Westinghouse Electric Co. the US nuclear unit of Japan’s Toshiba Corp., filed for bankruptcy protection in NYC.
(SFC, 3/30/17, p.C6)
2017 Mar 29, A Bahrain court sentenced two people to death over a 2015 bomb attack that killed two police officers and wounded six others. The court handed down lengthy sentences to 11 others, including former lawmaker Hassan Isa, a senior member of the main Shiite opposition Al-Wefaq group, which was dissolved last year. He and ten others received sentences ranging from 10 years to life imprisonment.
(AP, 3/29/17)(Reuters, 3/29/17)
2017 Mar 29, In Bangladesh as many as eight militants blew themselves up with a grenade north of Dhaka rather than surrender to officers who had cornered them in their hideout in Nasirpur.
(Reuters, 3/30/17)
2017 Mar 29, Theresa May sent a six-page document to the EU summit chair to trigger a two-year countdown to withdrawal from the EU.
(Reuters, 3/29/17)
2017 Mar 29, A privately-owned Twin Squirrel chopper failed to arrive in Dublin as scheduled after taking off from Luton airport near London. Mountain rescuers the next day found five bodies with the wreckage of a helicopter in north Wales.
(AP, 3/30/17)
2017 Mar 29, The mayors of Paris and London announced a new scheme for monitoring emissions from vehicles, aimed at improving air quality in the two capitals.
(Reuters, 3/29/17)
2017 Mar 29, In China a French national was assaulted in Shanghai with a knife days after police in Paris shot a Chinese man dead in his home, triggering protests in parts of the French capital and demands by Beijing for an explanation.
(Reuters, 3/31/17)
2017 Mar 29, Indonesian residents in a neighborhood of Banda Aceh, reported two men, aged 23 and 20, to police for having gay sex. If found guilty, the men will be the first to be caned for gay sex under a new code implemented two years ago.
(AP, 4/8/17)
2017 Mar 29, Italy's parliament gave final approval to a law outlining comprehensive standards of care for unaccompanied migrant children arriving in Italy, including a strict prohibition of turning them away at the border.
(AP, 3/29/17)
2017 Mar 29, A court in Ivory Coast acquitted former First Lady Simone Gbagbo of crimes against humanity and war crimes charges linked to her role in a 2011 civil war that killed about 3,000 people. She had already been tried and convicted in March 2015 of offences against the state and sentenced to 20 years in prison.
(Reuters, 3/29/17)
2017 Mar 29, In Jordan the 22-member Arab League looked to overcome divisions and "foreign interference" on regional crises including the devastating wars in Syria and Yemen as they met for an annual summit in Sweimeh. Arab leaders re-launched a peace plan that offers Israel full ties in exchange for Palestinian statehood.
(AFP, 3/29/17)(SFC, 3/30/17, p.A2)
2017 Mar 29, Israeli paramilitary police officers shot and killed a Palestinian woman who tried to attack them with a knife outside Jerusalem's walled Old City.
(Reuters, 3/29/17)
2017 Mar 29, Luxembourg claimed the legal right to host the London-based European Banking Authority after Brexit. PM Xavier Bettel made his case in a letter to EU Council President Donald Tusk and European Commission head Jean-Claude Juncker.
(AFP, 3/30/17)
2017 Mar 29, Malian security forces said two soldiers and a civilian were killed. A new jihadist alliance, the "Group to Support Islam and Muslims" (GSIM), led by Iyad Ag Ghaly of Islamist organization Ansar Dine, soon claimed responsibility.
(AFP, 4/1/17)
2017 Mar 29, South Korea-based Samsung introduced the Galaxy S8, its first major smartphone release since some of its Note7 smartphones spontaneously caught fire.
(SFC, 3/30/17, p.C3)
2017 Mar 29, In Syria a bomb blast hit a passenger bus in the government-held city of Homs at noon, killing five people and wounding six.
(Reuters, 3/29/17)
2017 Mar 29, In southern Thailand a gunbattle at a police checkpoint resulted in the deaths of two gunmen in Narathiwat province.
(AP, 3/30/17)
2017 Mar 29, Tunisia's former PM Mehdi Jomaa launched a new political party which he said would be non-ideological and could "restore hope for Tunisians" frustrated by the country's transition.
(Reuters, 3/29/17)
2017 Mar 29, Ukraine's National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) searched the offices of the central bank as part of an investigation into allegations that central bank officials abused their position to benefit third parties.
(Reuters, 3/29/17)
2017 Mar 29, The UN said a malaria outbreak has killed more than 4,000 people in Burundi this year, a significant increase over the 700 cited by the country’s health ministry on March 13.
(SFC, 3/30/17, p.A2)
2017 Mar 29, Venezuela's Supreme Court ruled that it can take over responsibilities assigned to Congress. Earlier this week, the high court also moved to place limits on lawmakers' immunity from prosecution. Opponents of President Nicolas Maduro said it's part of an attempt to install a dictatorship in the South American nation.
(AP, 3/30/17)
2017 Mar 30, SpaceX launched its first recycled rocket. The Falcon 9 hoisted a broadcasting satellite into the sky from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
(SFC, 3/31/17, p.C2)
2017 Mar 30, In Chicago five people were killed in separate shootings in the South Shore area. A drive-by shooting in the same area killed another two people.
(SFC, 4/1/17, p.A7)
2017 Mar 30, In Atlanta, Ga., a fire caused a portion of I-85 to collapse. Basil Eleby was arrested the next day in connection with the fire.
(SSFC, 4/2/17, p.A5)
2017 Mar 30, North Carolina’s Gov. Roy Cooper signed a bill rolling back the state’s “bathroom bill" to end a yearlong backlash over transgender rights that has cost the state dearly in various business projects, conventions and sport tournaments.
(SFC, 3/30/17, p.A12)
2017 Mar 30, In Argentina port workers in Greater Rosario suspended plans for a 24-hour strike after a truck driver ran over and killed a protester.
(Reuters, 3/30/17)
2017 Mar 30, Ethiopia's parliament approved a four month extension of a state of emergency that was first imposed in October to quell nearly a year of anti-government protests.
(AFP, 3/30/17)
2017 Mar 30, The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) accused Greece of failing to protect migrant workers who had been subject to "forced labor" and shot at by security guards when they protested over unpaid wages. It ordered Athens to pay 16,000 euros each to the workers whose case had triggered outrage across the country.
(Reuters, 3/30/17)
2017 Mar 30, Volkswagen AG said it has agreed to pay $157.45 million to settle environmental claims from 10 US states over its excess diesel emissions, as the world's largest automaker looks to move past the scandal.
(Reuters, 3/30/17)
2017 Mar 30, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s Security Cabinet approved a plan to create Israel's first new settlement in the occupied West Bank in more than 20 years despite international concern over the issue. Netanyahu also ordered limitations on settlement expansion in territory Palestinians claim for a state.
(AFP, 3/30/17)(AP, 3/31/17)(SFC, 3/30/17, p.A2)
2017 Mar 30, Italian police arrested three Kosovans in the lagoon city of Venice after one was caught on a phone intercept proposing they bomb the famed Rialto bridge while others lauded the recent attack in London. A minor was also detained.
(AP, 3/30/17)
2017 Mar 30, A Lithuanian university says a scholar has discovered a missing copy of the country's 1918 Independence Act in the archives of Germany's foreign ministry in Berlin. The document was apparently sent in 1918 to inform Germany it could no longer control the territory that was occupied by German Empire troops. The original was kept in Kaunas but disappeared in 1940 when Soviet Russia occupied the country.
(AP, 3/30/17)
2017 Mar 30, Malaysia said it has agreed to release the body of Kim Jong Nam to North Korea in exchange for the return of nine Malaysians held in the North's capital.
(AP, 3/30/17)
2017 Mar 30, In Nigeria Boko Haram jihadists raided the village of Pulka near border with Cameroon and kidnapped 18 girls. Jihadists outside Dumba killed a herdsman who had tried to escape after refusing to pay protection money. They shot dead 50 of his cattle and took four women from his family along with the rest of his herd.
(AFP, 4/1/17)
2017 Mar 30, In Pakistan a suspected militant killed Saleem Latif, a lawyer from the country's minority Ahmadi sect, over blasphemy allegations. Security forces arrested the attacker following the killing in eastern Punjab province.
(AP, 3/30/17)
2017 Mar 30, In Paraguay the annual meeting of the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) opened in Asuncion.
(Econ, 4/8/17, p.30)
2017 Mar 30, Philippine Pres. Rodrigo Duterte unleashed an expletive-laden tirade against the country's leading newspaper and TV network and threatened to humiliate them and their owners, whom he accused of distorting news of his anti-drug crackdown.
(AP, 3/30/17)
2017 Mar 30, Visa requirement between Russia and South Africa were scrapped allowing up to 90 days of trouble-free travel.
(Econ, 3/18/17, p.53)
2017 Mar 30, South Africa’s President Jacob Zuma late today fired the Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan in a Cabinet reshuffle, intensifying a rift in the party that took power after the 1994 end of white minority rule as well as concerns about corruption at top levels of government.
(AP, 3/31/17)
2017 Mar 30, In Syria Russian warplanes pounded rebel-held areas north of the city of Hama in an escalation of air strikes, as government forces fought to reverse the insurgents' biggest assault in months.
(Reuters, 3/30/17)
2017 Mar 30, In southern Thailand an army ranger was found shot dead. Five gunmen opened fire at a police station in Narathiwat province, killing a policeman and wounding three others in the latest killings in a region troubled by violent Muslim separatism.
(AP, 3/30/17)
2017 Mar 30, Uganda’s military said Michael Omona, a key aide to warlord Joseph Kony has, surrendered to Ugandan forces. A day earlier the US indicated it was pulling out of the international manhunt for one of Africa's most notorious fugitives.
(AP, 3/30/17)
2017 Mar 30, The UN refugee agency said the number of Syrians who have fled their country after six years of civil war has surpassed the 5-million mark.
(AP, 3/30/17)
2017 Mar 30, Venezuela's Supreme Court took over legislative powers from the opposition-majority National Assembly, a dramatic tightening of leftist President Nicolas Maduro and his allies' grip amid a devastating economic crisis.
(AFP, 3/30/17)
2017 Mar 30, Zambia’s Pres. Edgar Lungu said a Chinese bank will help finance the construction of 2,000 homes for local military personnel who face a critical shortage of housing.
(Reuters, 3/30/17)
2017 Mar 31, A US federal judge approved an agreement for Pres. Donald Trump to pay $25 million to settle lawsuits over his now defunct Trump University ending nearly seven years of legal battles. In 2018 a federal appeals court in San Francisco upheld the settlement.
(SFC, 4/1/17, p.A9)(SFC, 2/7/18, p.D2)
2017 Mar 31, Richard N. Bolles (b.1927), author of “What Color Is Your Parachute" (1970), died in Danville, Ca. The former Harvard physics major and Episcopal priest wrote the book as a guide to help readers understand themselves.
(SFC, 4/4/17, p.D1)
2017 Mar 31, NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio vowed to begin a ten-year process to shut down the Rikers Island jail.
(Econ, 4/15/17, p.26)
2017 Mar 31, Pop artist James Rosenquist (83) died in NYC. “F-111" his best known work was made in 1964-1965 as a protest against US militarism.
(SSFC, 4/2/17, p.C11)
2017 Mar 31, Belarus police searched the offices of a Polish satellite TV channel that has given extensive coverage to a recent wave of anti-government protests.
(AP, 3/31/17)
2017 Mar 31, Tens of thousands of Brazilians returned to the streets to protest reforms backed by President Michel Temer's conservative government.
(AFP, 3/31/17)
2017 Mar 31, In southern Colombia mudslides late today claimed at least 16 lives and injured some 65 people following recent torrential rains. The mudslides were caused by the rise of the Mocoa River and three tributaries. On April 7 Colombian officials formally abandoned the search for survivors as the death toll stood at 314.
(AFP, 4/1/17)(AP, 4/2/17)(AFP, 4/5/17)(AP, 4/8/17)
2017 Mar 31, In France hemmed in and closely watched by police, hundreds of Muslims unrolled rugs and mats and prayed outdoors in the busy streets of a Paris suburb to protest the closure of their prayer hall.
(AP, 3/31/17)
2017 Mar 31, A German court convicted a Moroccan-born man, identified only as Souhayl M. (19), of raping a 90-year-old woman and sentenced him to 5 ½ years in prison. The victim was attacked last October just after she visited a church.
(AP, 3/31/17)
2017 Mar 31, Hungarian PM Viktor Orban said the Central European University (CEU) in Budapest, founded by financier George Soros, had "cheated" in awarding its diplomas and violated Hungarian laws. Hungarian scholars and teaching organizations have come out in support of CEU, saying it was one of the preeminent centers of thought in the country and deserved to be saved.
(Reuters, 3/31/17)
2017 Mar 31, Japan's whaling fleet returned home after killing 333 whales in the Antarctic, achieving its goal for the second year under a revised research whaling program.
(AP, 3/31/17)
2017 Mar 31, Hundreds of Mongolians protested in Ulaanbaatar over the alleged theft of government funds deposited in offshore accounts. Opposition politicians and activists demanded the return of what some said is $17 billion in funds plundered by ruling party politicians and their influential friends.
(AP, 3/31/17)
2017 Mar 31, In Pakistan a powerful car bomb exploded near a minority Shiite Muslim place of worship in the northwest town of Parachinar, killing at least 24 people and wounding over 70 others. Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, a breakaway faction of Pakistani Taliban militants, claimed responsibility.
(AP, 3/31/17)
2017 Mar 31, Palestinian Hatem al-Maghari returned overnight to his family in Gaza after 17 years in an Israeli jail. He had been arrested and convicted of murder after the brutal lynching of two Israeli soldiers in 2000, but was released this week after new evidence emerged. He was still found guilty of aggression against a soldier and not preventing an offence and sentenced to 11 and a half years in prison, but with time already served was released immediately.
(AFP, 3/31/17)
2017 Mar 31, In Paraguay protesters stormed and set fire to the Congress after the Senate secretly voted for a constitutional amendment that would allow President Horacio Cartes to run for re-election.
(Reuters, 4/1/17)
2017 Mar 31, Teachers across Poland staged a strike to protest a sweeping overhaul of the education system by the populist government that will see middle schools eliminated this fall.
(AP, 3/31/17)
2017 Mar 31, Russian prosecutors moved to block calls on social networks for more street protests in Moscow and other Russian cities following a wave of rallies that have cast a new challenge to the Kremlin.
(AP, 3/31/17)
2017 Mar 31, The Scottish government formally asked British PM Theresa May for a second referendum on independence, deepening a constitutional crisis sparked by the Brexit vote.
(AFP, 3/31/17)
2017 Mar 31, Somali pirates seized an Indian cargo ship and 11 crew members. The "Al Kausar" is the third vessel to be hijacked in less than a month off Somalia’s coast.
(AFP, 4/3/17)
2017 Mar 31, South Korea's embattled former President Park Geun-hye was jailed in a scandal that has set off a political firestorm and led to the arrests and indictments of dozens of high-profile figures.
(AP, 3/31/17)
2017 Mar 31, The Stella Daisy cargo ship being used by a South Korean shipping company went missing in seas near Uruguay with 16 Filipino and 8 South Korean crew members. Two Filipino sailors were rescued on April 1.
(AP, 4/1/17)(AFP, 4/2/17)
2017 Mar 31, Swedish prosecutors investigating a suspected gang rape and its broadcast via Facebook Live said they had received a copy of the footage from the US social media company.
(Reuters, 3/31/17)
2017 Mar 31, Credit Suisse issued a brief statement saying that local authorities had made "visits" to its offices in Amsterdam, Paris and London in connection with unspecified client tax issues. The European Union judicial agency Eurojust said it had helped coordinate cross-border investigations in a major tax evasion investigation involving millions of euros and spanning several European countries and Australia.
(AP, 3/31/17)(Reuters, 3/31/17)
2017 Mar 31, In Turkey a court in Istanbul released singer Atilla Tas and 20 others from jail pending an outcome of their trial on terrorism charges. Five of them will remain in prison while two of the defendants are at large and being tried in absentia.
(AP, 3/31/17)
2017 Mar 31, In Turkey Selahattin Demirtas, the jailed leader the pro-Kurdish People's Democratic Party (HDP), said he has begun a hunger strike to protest prison conditions.
(AP, 3/31/17)
2017 Mar 31, Leaders of Turkmenistan and Belarus attended the launch of a huge potash fertilizer plant worth more than $1 billion. The plant in Garlyk, built near huge potash deposits, was built by Belarus.
(AP, 3/31/17)
2017 Mar 31, Venezuelan security forces violently repressed small protests that broke out in Caracas after the government-stacked Supreme Court gutted congress of its last vestiges of power, drawing widespread condemnation from foreign countries and even from the government's top prosecutor.
(AP, 3/31/17)
2017 Mar, Ransomware software dubbed Wanna Cry was leaked on to the Internet. The method it used had been discovered years ago by the US National Security Agency (NSA). Only after the theft did the NSA inform Microsoft of the flaw, leading the firm to rush out a fix.
(Econ 5/20/17, p.13)
2017 Mar, Eric Conn (56), a Kentucky lawyer, pleaded guilty to stealing from the federal government and bribing a judge of $550 million in federal disability benefits. Conn, once one of the country's top disability lawyers, was given a 12-year prison term. On June 2 Conn cut off his electronic monitor and escaped to Mexico. In October it was reported that Conn had help in carrying out the escape plot hatched a year before fleeing.
(AP, 10/17/17)(Econ 6/24/17, p.24)
2017 Mar, A Pennsylvania judge ruled that Allentown-based, long-term care insurer Penn Treaty American Corp. was insolvent. This left health insurers across the country on the hook for the company’s losses. Analysts estimated the company’s long-term liabilities near $4 billion, but assets at only about $700 million.
(SFC, 8/14/17, p.D1)
2017 Mar, Brazil’s environmental agency, IBAMA, ordered the suspension of two JBS meat packing plants and 13 others in southwest Pará state for buying cattle raised on pastures cleared by slashing and burning the forest. It fined the company 24 million reais ($7.7 million). JBS denied purchasing livestock from ranchers on land blacklisted by IBAMA and won an injunction from a federal judge allowing its plants to continue buying cattle. The agency appealed the ruling.
(Reuters, 4/2/17)
2017 Mar, In Brazil the howler-monkey population in Espirito Santo and Minas Gerais states was reported to be crashing. Doctors suspected this was due to yellow fever. Since December 371 human cases have been reported, a third of them fatal.
(Econ, 3/18/17, pp.)
2017 Mar, China’s government, under pressure from the US and the UN, agreed to make four variants of fentanyl, a synthetic opioid, illegal. Illicit fentanyl first started to appear in the 1980s.
(Econ 5/20/17, p.13)
2017 Mar, The Chinese TV show “In the Name of the People," a 55-part series about China’s battle against corruption, began broadcasting.
(Econ 5/13/17, p.68)
2017 Mar, Chi-Med, a biotech firm in Shanghai, received positive results in a late-stage trial of Fruquintinib, its drug for colorectal cancer.
(Econ, 3/18/17, p.68)
2017 Mar, China was now the 11th biggest donor to the Int’l. Development Association (IDA), the arm of the World Bank that helps the world’s poorest countries.
(Econ, 3/25/17, pp.)
2017 Mar, In Europe some 62,000 asylum seekers were stranded in Greece. Another 7,000 were stranded in Serbia.
(Econ, 3/18/17, p.57)
2017 Mar, Iceland lifted remaining controls on capital outflows, set up during the financial crisis of 2007-2008, allowing pension and investment funds to invest their money abroad. Controls on inflows were tightened.
(Econ, 3/18/17, p.77)
2017 Mar, India slipped a new rule into the annual budget bill that frees taxmen to raid or seize any property at any time with no need to explain why.
(Econ, 4/8/17, p.34)
2017 Mar, In Iran masked goons arrested 12 administrators of popular social-media news channels.
(Econ, 4/15/17, p.41)
2017 Mar, In Iraq American officers estimated that as few as 500 Islamic State fighters remained in Mosul.
(Econ, 3/11/17, p.45)
2017 Mar, In Japan a man (23) died of suicide while working at Tokyo’s new Olympic stadium. In October Japan’s labor standard office ruled that his death stemmed from overwork (karoshi) and that his family was eligible for government compensation. The man had recorded 190 hours of overtime in the month before killing himself.
(SFC, 10/11/17, p.A2)
2017 Mar, In Lithuania Evaldas Rimasauskas (48) was arrested at the request of US authorities, who accuse the man of wire fraud, money laundering and aggravated identity theft and conning Google and Facebook out of over $100 million. The companies say they recovered most of the money.
(AP, 5/18/17)
2017 Mar, Russia’s Ministry of Justice asked the Supreme Court to outlaw the Jehovah’s Witnesses Christian denomination. Members in Russia numbered about 170,000.
(SFC, 4/5/17, p.A5)
2017 Mar, Tanzania’s Pres. John Magufuli imposed a ban on the export of gold and copper concentrates.
(Econ 6/17/17, p.61)
2017 Mar, In Thailand Vivat Yodprasit, dubbed the "Popcorn Gunman," received a 37-year, 4-month sentence for murder, attempted murder and illegal possession of weapons, halved from the original term because of his confession to police for opening fire with an assault rifle concealed in a sack during a political confrontation in February 2014. However, he recanted his confession in court, claiming he had been tortured. On June 27 a court ruled that there was not enough evidence to convict Yodprasit in the shootings.
(AP, 6/27/17)
2017 Mar, United Nations satellite images showed at least 18,000 structures have been destroyed in the Yei area of South Sudan, one of the most significant caches of evidence of widespread destruction in the country's civil war.
(AP, 4/7/17)
2017 Mar, The UN said 7 million of Yemen’s 27 million people are going hungry and that the country is the world’s largest humanitarian crisis.
(Econ, 3/25/17, p.40)
2017 Mar, In Venezuela former general Raul Baduel was charged with treason two days before completed a sentence for illicit enrichment.
(Econ, 3/11/17, p.36)
Go to April 2017
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Return to home
2017 Jan 1, In California new laws went into effect that included an increase in the minimum wage from $10 and hour to $10.50 an hour for businesses with 26 or more employees.
(SSFC, 1/1/17, p.A10)
2017 Jan 1, In Illinois a new law took effect that mandated an hour of training for stylists, barbers, cosmetologists, hair braiders and nail technicians for abuse training as part of their licensing process.
(SFC, 1/2/17, p.A4)
2017 Jan 1, In NYC three new subway stations opened to the public on the Second Avenue line.
(SFC, 1/2/17, p.A4)
2017 Jan 1, In Texas an accidental pesticide poisoning left four children dead. Phosphine gas was likely released when a father used a garden hose to wash away a pesticide under a mobile home.
(SFC, 1/4/17, p.A6)
2017 Jan 1, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation brought into force a policy on research that it supports calling for the research, when published, to be freely available to all. On March 23 the foundation announced that it will pay the cost of putting such research in one particular repository of freely available papers.
(Econ, 3/25/17, p.69)
2017 Jan 1, In Bahrain a prison break led to the death of a police officer and the escape of ten inmates convicted on terrorism charges, setting off a manhunt across the tiny island nation.
(AP, 1/1/17)(Econ, 1/21/17, p.40)
2017 Jan 1, In Brazil a rebellion began late today at the Anisio Jobim prison complex in Manaus. By the next day 57 people were killed in the riot sparked by a war between rival drug gangs. Many of those slain were beheaded or dismembered. An estimated 225 inmates escaped and only 48 were recaptured. Officials later said members of the FDN, Familia do Norte (Family of the North), organized the massacre seeking to wipe out the Sao Paulo-based rival Comando da Capital (PCC).
(Reuters, 1/2/17)(AP, 1/3/17)(AP, 2/22/17)(Econ, 1/7/17, p.26)
2017 Jan 1, British economist Anthony Atkinson (b.1944)) died. His 40 books included: “Inequality: What Can Be Done" (2015).
(Econ, 1/7/17, p.57)
2017 Jan 1, In Burundi a gunman killed Emmanuel Niyonkuru (54), the country’s environment and water minister early today, the first senior government figure to be murdered in nearly two years of political violence.
(Reuters, 1/1/17)
2017 Jan 1, In China new regulations went into effect regarding the country’s salt industry, easing a monopoly that has existed in some form for more than 2,000 years.
(AP, 1/3/17)
2017 Jan 1, In northern China heavy smog caused hundreds of flights to be canceled and highways to shut, disrupting the first day of the New Year holiday.
(Reuters, 1/1/17)
2017 Jan 1, China’s state news agency Xinhua reported that a court in the eastern province of Anhui has handed out sentences of up to 20 years in jail for 67 people involved in a mafia-style gang that engaged in gambling, extortion and violence.
(Reuters, 1/1/17)
2017 Jan 1, In Congo DRC rival groups agreed a deal for hauling the country out of a perilous political crisis. Under a landmark accord, the country's contested president, Joseph Kabila, who under the constitution should have left office on December 20, will stay in power until elections are held at the end of 2017. During this period a so-called National Transition Council will be set up, headed by opposition leader Etienne Tshisekedi, and a prime minister will be named from opposition ranks.
(AFP, 1/1/17)
2017 Jan 1, Denmark police arrested Chung Yoo-ra (20), an equestrian competitor and the daughter of Choi Soon-sil, a central figure in a South Korean influence-peddling scandal that led to President Park Geun-hye's impeachment. She will face extradition proceedings following her arrest on an Interpol request from Seoul.
(Reuters, 1/2/17)
2017 Jan 1, Gambian security agents closed three private radio stations near the capital, Banjul, amid an escalating political crisis triggered by President Yahya Jammeh's refusal to accept his election defeat.
(Reuters, 1/2/17)
2017 Jan 1, In Hong Kong nearly 5,000 people marched in a New Year's Day protest against an attempt by the semi-autonomous Chinese city's government to disqualify four pro-democracy lawmakers.
(AP, 1/1/17)
2017 Jan 1, In Indonesia a massive fire erupted in a boat carrying hundreds of local tourists to an island north of Jakarta, leaving at least 23 dead and 17 injured. Another 17 people were missing and 194 were rescued following the blaze on the Zahro Express.
(AFP, 1/1/17)
2017 Jan 1, A top commander said Iraqi forces have retaken more than 60 percent of eastern Mosul from the Islamic State group since the battle for the city began in mid-October.
(AFP, 1/1/17)
2017 Jan 1, The Israeli government ruled that it would not release to their families the bodies of Hamas militants killed during attacks on Israelis but would instead bury them.
(AFP, 1/1/17)
2017 Jan 1, In Italy a bomb squad officer in Florence lost an eye and had to have a hand amputated after a suspicious package he was examining exploded before dawn.
(AP, 1/1/17)
2017 Jan 1, Malta took up the rotating presidency of the EU Council of Ministers.
(Econ, 1/14/17, p.49)
2017 Jan 1, Hundreds of irate Mexicans marched in Mexico City to protest a steep rise in gasoline prices. The protests erupted into looting in several parts of the country.
(AFP, 1/2/17)(SFC, 1/5/17, p.A2)
2017 Jan 1, In Mexico at least five people were killed over the New year’s weekend in Acapulco including three men found decapitated.
(SFC, 1/3/17, p.A2)
2017 Jan 1, In Morocco more than 1,000 migrants tried to jump a high double fence between Morocco and the Spanish enclave of Ceuta in a violent assault that saw one officer lose an eye. Two managed to get through, but were badly injured.
(AFP, 1/1/17)
2017 Jan 1, In Poland new legislation went into effect that removed previous requirements for private landowners who want to cut down trees to apply for permission, pay compensation and plant new trees. The legislation reportedly led to a massacre of trees across the country.
(SSFC, 4/16/17, p.C14)
2017 Jan 1, In Slovakia train and railway station patrols set up by a far-right parliamentary party became illegal as of today. The People's Party Our Slovakia had launched the unarmed patrols in April following a violent incident on a passenger train, claiming the state was unable to keep people safe.
(AP, 1/1/17)
2017 Jan 1, South Korea's impeached Pres. Park Geun-hye broke a month-long silence over her alleged role in a corruption scandal, publicly denying charges of wrongdoing and saying that the accusations against her were "fabrication and falsehood."
(Reuters, 1/1/17)
2017 Jan 1, Syrian government warplanes resumed their bombardment of the rebel-held Wadi Barada valley northwest of Damascus after nearly 24 hours with no air raids. A monitoring group and rebels said Russian- and Turkish-backed ceasefire largely held in other areas on its third day.
(Reuters, 1/1/17)
2017 Jan 1, In northwestern Syria an air raid late today struck several cars killing at least eight people, including al-Qaida-linked fighters and a senior commander with a Chinese Islamic militant faction. The dead included a senior al-Qaida commander known as Khattab al-Qahtani, who was from the Gulf region and fought for the group in Afghanistan. Abu Omar al-Turkistani, a top commander with the Turkistan Islamic Party, and a Syrian al-Qaida commander known as Abu Muatasem al-Deiri, were also killed.
(AP, 1/2/17)
2017 Jan 1, In Turkey 39 people were killed and dozens wounded when a gunman stormed the popular Reina nightclub in Istanbul and sprayed bullets at revelers celebrating the New Year. The gunman was later identified as an Uzbek jihadist with the IS code name of Ebu Muhammed Horasani. In 2020 Albulkadir Masharipov of Uzbekistan was sentenced to life in prison.
(AFP, 1/1/17)(AFP, 1/8/17)(SFC, 9/8/20, p.A2)
2017 Jan 1, In Yemen an air strike hit a house in Marib, killing five members of the same family. Four civilians, including three children, were killed in rebel bombing that targeted residential areas in the southwestern city of Taez.
(AFP, 1/2/17)
2017 Jan 2, US House Republicans voted 119-74 in a secret caucus meeting to eviscerate the Office of Congressional Ethics, the independent body created in 2008 to investigate allegations of misconduct by lawmakers following several bribery and corruption scandals.
(SFC, 1/3/17, p.A5)(SFC, 1/4/17, p.A1)
2017 Jan 2, A powerful storm across the US south left four people dead when a tree fell on their mobile home in Rehobeth, Alabama. A woman in Georgia and a man in Florida were also killed.
(SFC, 1/3/17, p.A4)(SFC, 1/4/17, p.A12)
2017 Jan 2, In the SF Bay Area electric bus maker Proterra of Burlingame raised $140 million in its latest funding round. The company said it has sold more than 300 buses to transit agencies across North America.
(SFC, 1/3/17, pad)
2017 Jan 2, In Maine Sister Frances Carr, the last lifelong Shaker, died in Sabbathday Lake. The offshoot of Quakers had begun in England in the 1740s.
(Econ, 1/14/17, pp.)
2017 Jan 2, Afghan Pres. Ashraf Ghani suspended Abdul Razaq Wahidi, his minister for telecommunications and information technology, while he is investigated over a levy on mobile telephone charges. At least one police officer was killed by a roadside bomb in Logar province. A Taliban ambush in the northeastern Badakhshan province killed at least four police. In Takhar province a Taliban fighter was killed while planting a mine.
(Reuters, 1/2/17)(AP, 1/2/17)(AP, 1/3/17)
2017 Jan 2, Britain's government announced plans to build 17 new towns and villages across the English countryside in a bid to ease a chronic housing shortage.
(Reuters, 1/2/17)
2017 Jan 2, British police shot and killed Mohammed Yassar Yaqub of Huddersfield (27) during an operation in which five other people were arrested.
(AP, 1/3/17)
2017 Jan 2, John Berger (b.1926), influential British art critic and prize-winning author, died in France. The self-declared revolutionary had controversially backed the far-left Black Panthers. He won the 1972 Booker Prize for Fiction for his experimental novel "G.", set in pre-World War I Europe. His “Ways of Seeing" (1972) spawned a BBC series and ushered in a political perspective to art criticism.
(AFP, 1/3/17)(SFC, 1/3/17, pp.)
2017 Jan 2, In Chile a large fire burned 150 homes in the historic port city of Valparaiso.
(AFP, 1/3/17)
2017 Jan 2, Beijing and other cities across northern and central China were shrouded in thick smog, prompting authorities to delay dozens of flights and close highways.
(AP, 1/2/17)
2017 Jan 2, In Congo DRC a regional official said at least six people have been hacked to death in the troubled northeast in two attacks last week in Irumu territory blamed on Ugandan rebels. A civil society leader in Ituri, reported that 14 people were killed in the attacks, which took place in the villages of Saboko and Bialee.
(AFP, 1/2/17)
2017 Jan 2, In Croatia around 50 migrants staged a protest in Zagreb claiming they have suffered attacks by unknown assailants.
(AFP, 1/2/17)
2017 Jan 2, A senior Egyptian judge arrested on corruption charges was found dead in his cell having hanged himself. Wael Shalaby, a deputy chief justice in the country's administrative courts system, resigned Dec 31 shortly before he was arrested and was charged the following day with taking a bribe.
(Reuters, 1/2/17)
2017 Jan 2, India's top court prohibited politicians from using religion and caste to garner votes, a verdict that could force political parties to change their strategy in upcoming elections.
(Reuters, 1/2/17)
2017 Jan 2, India and Sri Lanka agreed to release fishermen in each others' custody, a move that is likely to ease tensions between the countries which have held fishermen captive for crossing territorial waters.
(Reuters, 1/2/17)
2017 Jan 2, Iranian state TV reported the country's coast guard has detained 21 fishermen and their three boats from neighboring Arab nations for straying into its territorial waters and fishing rare species.
(AP, 1/2/17)
2017 Jan 2, In Iraq a suicide bomber driving a pickup loaded with explosives struck a bustling market in Baghdad, killing at least 36 people in an attack claimed by the Islamic State group. Three smaller bombings elsewhere in the city killed another seven civilians and wounded at least 30.
(AP, 1/2/17)
2017 Jan 2, A court in Kuwait sentenced father Salem Buhan (26) and mother Amira Hussein (23) to death after finding them guilty of torturing their three-year-old daughter until she died. They were arrested in May and accused of beating and torturing the girl until she died and then keeping her body in a freezer for a week. The ministry said the couple were drug addicts.
(AFP, 1/2/17)
2017 Jan 2, In Somalia a suicide bomber detonated an explosives-laden vehicle at a security checkpoint near Mogadishu's international airport, killing at least three people.
(AP, 1/2/17)
2017 Jan 2, Syria's army advanced as it battled to capture a rebel region that is key to the capital's water supply, launching strikes and artillery fire threatening a fragile nationwide truce.
(AFP, 1/2/17)
2017 Jan 2, Ten Syrian rebel factions suspended talks on new peace negotiations, accusing President Bashar al-Assad's regime of violating a four-day-old ceasefire with attacks near Damascus.
(AFP, 1/3/17)(SFC, 1/4/17, p.A2)
2017 Jan 2, In eastern Thailand a van and a pickup collided and caught fire on a highway, killing 25 people in Chonburi province.
(AP, 1/2/17)
2017 Jan 2, Ukraine reported a one-third drop in its use of natural gas and general energy savings that will be cheered by its financial backers from the IMF.
(AFP, 1/2/17)
2017 Jan 2, In Yemen an air strike by the pro-government Saudi-led coalition killed five Shiite rebels when it targeted a convoy of three vehicles in Marees, in the southern province of Daleh. Six other insurgents were killed in a similar raid on two vehicles in Al-Makhdara, in the central province of Marib. Shelling by government forces killed three more rebels in the same area of Marib. Air strikes across several regions killed two civilians in the western province of Hodeida.
(AFP, 1/2/17)
2017 Jan 3, President-elect Donald Trump announced he has nominated Reagan-era lawyer Robert Lighthizer, described as an advocate of greater protectionism, as US trade representative.
(AFP, 1/3/17)
2017 Jan 3, US House Republicans scrapped their plan eviscerate the Office of Congressional Ethics, after the move drew a public backlash and a Twitter scolding from Pres.-elect Donald Trump.
(SFC, 1/3/17, p.A5)
2017 Jan 3, Ford Motor Co. said that it is canceling plans to build a $1.6 billion car plant in Mexico and will instead invest $700 million to increase production in Michigan.
(SFC, 1/4/17, p.C1)
2017 Jan 3, In Minnesota a federal appeals court ruled that a program for keeping sex offenders confined after they complete their prison sentences is constitutional.
(SFC, 1/4/17, p.A6)
2017 Jan 3, Toyota began moving hundreds of jobs out of its northern Kentucky headquarters as part of a nationwide consolidation of the company's operations.
(AP, 1/3/17)
2017 Jan 3, Albania suspended the reopening of schools after the New Year's break because of frigid weather and concern about the spread of flu.
(AP, 1/3/17)
2017 Jan 3, Haitian officials said an electoral tribunal has rejected claims that massive voter fraud marred the November presidential election victory of first-time candidate Jovenel Moise.
(AP, 1/3/17)
2017 Jan 3, Imprisoned Iranian human rights activist Arash Sadeghi ended a 71-day hunger strike as his detained wife won a temporary release from prison, a day after his case sparked a rare unauthorized protest in Tehran.
(AP, 1/3/17)
2017 Jan 3, In Iran two pipelines were reportedly bombed in Khuzestan province. The next day the Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahwaz claimed responsibility. Iranian Interior Ministry spokesman Salman Samani denied the claim.
(AP, 1/4/17)
2017 Jan 3, Moldova's new Pres. Igor Dodon stripped the ex-president of Romania of his recently-acquired Moldovan citizenship, saying he obtained it illegally. Traian Basescu and his wife Maria were awarded citizenship of the troubled ex-Soviet republic, formerly part of Romania. Dodon favors closer relations with Russia, while Basescu has called for the reunification of Romania and Moldova.
(AP, 1/3/17)
2017 Jan 3, Mozambique's Renamo opposition party said it had extended a ceasefire by two months to allow talks with President Filipe Nyusi's government, raising hopes for a nascent peace process.
(Reuters, 1/3/17)
2017 Jan 3, Nigerian anti-drug officers said they found 9.15 kg (20 pounds) of cocaine worth $4.7 million "factory-packed" inside a new pair of shoes that arrived at Abuja airport on a flight from Brazil.
(Reuters, 1/3/17)
2017 Jan 3, In Romania Sevil Shhaideh, poised to become the country's first female and Muslim prime minister, was offered a job as deputy premier after the country's president declined to nominate her for the top government job.
(AP, 1/3/17)
2017 Jan 3, Taiwan strongly objected to the deportation from Vietnam to China of four Taiwanese nationals suspected of telecommunications fraud, saying the move was carried out under pressure from Beijing.
(Reuters, 1/3/17)
2017 Jan 3, Turkmenistan said that it has restricted natural gas deliveries to Iran over unpaid debts. Iranian state media have put the figure demanded by Turkmenistan at around $2 billion.
(AP, 1/3/17)
2017 Jan 3, In southern Yemen pro-government forces attacked al-Qaida militants, killing 15 jihadis but losing 11 of their own troops.
(AP, 1/3/17)
2017 Jan 3, In southern Yemen at least three soldiers were killed in clashes with al Qaeda militants in Shuqra in an operation launched by the internationally recognized government of President Abd-Rabu Mansour Hadi.
(Reuters, 1/4/17)
2017 Jan 4, Pres.-elect Donald Trump chose Jay Clayton, a Wall Street attorney, as his nominee to head the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
(SFC, 1/5/17, p.A5)
2017 Jan 4, In Chicago a federal jury convicted Hobos gang boss Gregory “Bowlegs" Chester, alleged hit man Paris Poe and four others for racketeering conspiracy.
(SFC, 1/5/17, pea)
2017 Jan 4, In Kentucky former LaRue County High School principal Stephen Kyle Goodlett (36) was indicted in Louisville on federal charges of possessing and transporting child pornography. He had admitted to investigators that he has a pornography addiction and downloaded images from phones confiscated from students.
(AP, 1/5/17)
2017 Jan 4, In Massachusetts about $20 million in cash was found hidden inside a box spring in a Westborough apartment. It was seized as part of a wide-ranging investigation into the TelexFree internet telecom company that authorities say was actually a massive international pyramid scheme. Cleber Rene Rizerio Rocha was charged with conspiring to commit money laundering. TelexFree filed for bankruptcy in 2014, its assets frozen, and its two principals were indicted on federal charges of wire fraud and conspiracy.
(AP, 1/6/17)(SFC, 1/7/17, pea)
2017 Jan 4, In Nevada Faraday Future’s FF91 was unveiled during a press event for CES17 in las Vegas. The company was backed by Chinese billionaire Jia Yueting. Production was scheduled to start in Nevada this year with first deliveries in 2018.
(SFC, 1/5/17, pp.)
2017 Jan 4, Macy’s said it will move forward with 68 store closures and eliminate more than 10,000 jobs following a disappointing holiday shopping season.
(SFC, 1/5/17, pp.)
2017 Jan 4, In China Chen Zhongshu, the land and resources chief of Panzhihua city in Sichuan province, allegedly shot and injured two leaders of the city as the pair held a meeting in a conference center, and later killed himself.
(AP, 1/4/17)
2017 Jan 4, In southern China a man armed with a kitchen knife stabbed 11 children at a kindergarten in Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, seriously wounding three, the latest such attack in recent years.
(AFP, 1/4/17)
2017 Jan 4, Czech authorities said they had detected highly-contagious bird flu at two small poultry farms and in dead swans in the first such cases in a decade.
(AFP, 1/4/17)
2017 Jan 4, Egypt released political activist Ahmed Maher (36), a leading figure in the 2011 revolt that toppled the government, after he completed his jail term. Maher was the founder and spokesman of the April 6 protest movement, one of the main groups that campaigned for more freedom under longtime ruler Hosni Mubarak.
(AFP, 1/5/17)
2017 Jan 4, In France former Kosovar PM Ramush Haradinaj was arrested at Basel Mulhouse Freiburg airport on a Serbian warrant. He faced possible extradition to Serbia to face war crimes charges.
(AP, 1/5/17)
2017 Jan 4, French customs officials intercepted 70 kg of Captagon, dubbed the "jihadists' drug", at Paris's Charles de Gaulle airport, a first for France. Another 67 kg of the drug were found at the airport in February. Captagon, a type of amphetamine, is one of the most commonly used drugs among fighters in the Syrian war.
(AFP, 5/30/17)
2017 Jan 4, The Gambia's army chief reaffirmed his loyalty to Pres. Yahya Jammeh despite the threat of a regional military intervention if the strongman refuses to step down.
(AFP, 1/4/17)
2017 Jan 4, Indian officials said police have rescued nearly 200 children, most of them under the age of 14, who had been found working in a brick kiln in the southern state of Telangana in one of the biggest operations in the region.
(Reuters, 1/4/17)
2017 Jan 4, In India a 24-year-old housemaid died in hospital, two weeks after she was admitted with multiple fractures and injuries. She had said she was abused by her New Delhi employers after being lured to the city with the promise of a job.
(Reuters, 1/6/17)
2017 Jan 4, The UN said more than 2,000 Iraqis a day are fleeing Mosul, several hundred more each day than before U.S.-led coalition forces began a new phase of their battle to retake the city from Islamic State.
(Reuters, 1/4/17)
2017 Jan 4, The Israeli government said China has agreed for thousands of migrant construction laborers to work in Israel in a bid to alleviate a housing crisis.
(AFP, 1/4/17)
2017 Jan 4, Israel released billionaire businessman Beny Steinmetz from house arrest without charge, following his detention over bribery allegations involving BSGR in Africa.
(Reuters, 1/4/17)
2017 Jan 4, Israeli Sergeant Elor Azaria, who shot dead a Palestinian assailant lying wounded and motionless on the ground in the occupied West Bank last March 24, was convicted of manslaughter in one of the most polarizing cases in Israel's history.
(Reuters, 1/4/17)
2017 Jan 4, Italy vowed to increase deportations of migrants whose asylum requests have been rejected, after a riot in a reception center sparked by the death of a young woman.
(AFP, 1/4/17)
2017 Jan 4, Niger said around 20 more members of the jihadist group Boko Haram have surrendered. About 50 Boko Haram fighters have now given themselves up since December 27.
(AFP, 1/5/17)
2017 Jan 4, Pakistan's Supreme Court asked the police to look into allegations that a 10-year-old girl working as a maid was tortured by her employers, an influential judge and his wife, after disturbing photographs of the girl, purporting to show her badly beaten and bruised, circulated on social media. A day earlier the girl's parents announced they have "forgiven" the judge and his wife, apparently after reaching a financial settlement.
(AP, 1/4/17)
2017 Jan 4, In Pakistan four campaigners of the Civil Progressive Alliance of Pakistan (CPAP) activist group went missing.
(Reuters, 1/19/17)
2017 Jan 4, Palestinian fisherman Mohammed Al-Hissi (33) disappeared after colliding with an Israeli navy ship off the Gaza coast.
(AP, 1/7/17)
2017 Jan 4, In the southern Philippines more than 100 suspected Muslim rebels stormed a jail before dawn allowing 158 inmates to escape. Six inmates were killed in firefights with police and eight others were caught and returned to prison.
(SFC, 1/5/17, pea)
2017 Jan 4, Romania's Parliament approved a left-leaning government led by Sorin Grindeanu, who vowed to stop thousands of Romanians emigrating, build highways and encourage the consumption of local produce.
(AP, 1/4/17)
2017 Jan 5, US Pres.-elect Donald Trump selected former Indiana Sen. Dan Coats to lead the office of the Director of National Intelligence.
(SFC, 1/6/17, p.A5)
2017 Jan 5, America's top intelligence official said that Russia undoubtedly interfered in the US 2016 presidential election but stopped short of using the explosive description "an act of war," telling lawmakers such a call isn't within the purview of the US intelligence community. Senior US officials said the CIA has identified Russian officials who fed material hacked from the Democratic National Committee and party leaders to WikiLeaks at the direction of Russian President Vladimir Putin through third parties.
(AP, 1/5/17)(Reuters, 1/6/17)
2017 Jan 5, The US State and Treasury department said Hamza bin Laden, a son of Osama bin Laden, and Ibrahim al-Banna, a leader of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), have been added to the US counter-terrorism blacklist, a move to keep them from using the US financial system.
(Reuters, 1/5/17)
2017 Jan 5, In Chicago four people were charged with hate crimes in connection with a video broadcast live on Facebook that showed a mentally disabled white man (18) being beaten and taunted, threatened with a knife and forced to drink from a toilet.
(SFC, 1/6/17, pea)(SFC, 1/7/17, pea)
2017 Jan 5, Mercedes-Benz said it is recalling nearly 48,000 SUVs in the US to fix a sensor problem that could stop the front passenger air bag from inflating in a crash.
(AP, 1/5/17)
2017 Jan 5, Argentine firefighters struggled to control a series of wildfires that have devastated nearly one million hectares (2.5 million acres) of the country's famous pampas. The largest was started by a lightning strike on New Year's weekend and was now 10 km across.
(AFP, 1/5/17)
2017 Jan 5, Bahrain announced that it has restored the power of its domestic spy service to make some arrests, reversing a key reform recommended in the wake of the crackdown that followed the country's 2011 Arab Spring protests.
(AP, 1/5/17)
2017 Jan 5, Bahrain's prosecution extended by two weeks the detention of Shiite opposition leader Nabil Rajab over spreading "false information" about the Sunni-ruled kingdom.
(AFP, 1/5/17)
2017 Jan 5, Brazilian President Michel Temer said the country will build new prisons in every state to relieve overcrowding after a "horrific" riot that left 56 inmates dead.
(AFP, 1/5/17)
2017 Jan 5, The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said women in the Lake Chad basin, where the borders of Chad, Cameroon, Niger and Nigeria meet, have been forced to sell sex to survive due to an insurgency by Boko Haram fighters that has driven millions from their homes and left children to starve.
(Reuters, 1/5/17)
2017 Jan 5, Cyprus' biggest bank said it has fully repaid 11.4 billion euros ($11.9 billion) of emergency cash it received to stay afloat during a 2013 banking crisis that forced the island to need a multibillion euro rescue deal from its eurozone partners.
(AP, 1/5/17)
2017 Jan 5, Egypt’s Interior Ministry said one suspect was killed and three others arrested in a police raid in connection with a bomb attack that killed six policemen in Cairo on December 9. Those arrested in the raid on the outskirts of Cairo belonged to a militant group called the Hasm Movement, which claimed responsibility for the attack.
(Reuters, 1/5/17)
2017 Jan 5, French authorities started slaughtering ducks in the main foie gras-producing region to try to contain a dangerous form of bird flu.
(AP, 1/5/17)
2017 Jan 5, Guyana narrowly passed a bill late today that allows officials to raid the commercial bank accounts of business owners who owe a large amount of unpaid taxes.
(AP, 1/6/17)
2017 Jan 5, In Haiti Guy Philippe (48) a key figure in the 2004 ouster of then-President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and later ran for president himself, was arrested. He had been indicted in 2005 on US cocaine trafficking charges but managed to elude capture.
(AP, 1/6/17)
2017 Jan 5, An Indonesian government minister clarified that the country was suspending only part of its military cooperation with Australia, as that country promised its investigation of an alleged insult of Indonesian beliefs was nearly complete. Australian Defense Minister Marise Payne said the issue began in November, after an Indonesian military officer raised concerns about teaching materials and remarks made at an army language-training facility in western Australia.
(AP, 1/5/17)
2017 Jan 5, Iraqi forces launched an offensive against the Islamic State group near the Syrian border, piling further pressure on the jihadists' crumbling "caliphate".
(AFP, 1/5/17)
2017 Jan 5, In Iraq several attacks in and around Baghdad killed at least 27 people including a suicide car bombing in a commercial area in central Baghdad that killed at least 11 civilians.
(AP, 1/5/17)(SFC, 1/6/17, p.A3)
2017 Jan 5, Israeli police questioned PM Benjamin Netanyahu for a second time as part of a probe into whether he illegally accepted gifts from wealthy supporters.
(AFP, 1/5/17)
2017 Jan 5, Namibian plaintiffs, including some from New York, sued Germany over a genocide carried out by German colonial troops in the early 1900s, in which more than 100,000 people were killed. They sued under the Alien Tort Statute, a 1789 US law often invoked in human rights cases.
(AP, 1/6/17)
2017 Jan 5, Nigerian soldiers found one of the Chibok schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram nearly three years ago wandering in the bush with her baby near the Islamic extremist group's forest stronghold. More than 200 of the girls remain missing.
(AP, 1/5/17)(SFC, 1/6/17, p.A2)
2017 Jan 5, A Nigerian official said three teenage girls suspected of planning a triple suicide bomb attack in a town frequently targeted by Boko Haram have been shot dead. The girls were intercepted at Bakin Dutse village, some five km from Madagali.
(AFP, 1/5/17)
2017 Jan 5, Philippines’s police chief Ronald dela Rosa said security forces had effectively broken the backbone of Ansar Al-Khilafah Philippines (AKP) with the killing of its leader, Mohammad Jaafar Maguid, and the arrest of his three AKP colleagues.
(Reuters, 1/7/17)
2017 Jan 5, In Sri Lanka hundreds of opposition supporters and farmers protested the government's plan to lease a southern seaport to a Chinese-controlled joint venture in exchange for the heavy loans to build the port.
(AP, 1/5/17)
2017 Jan 5, A Swiss insurance agency ruled that an Uber driver is an employee for whom the company must pay social security contributions, dealing a blow to the US ride-hailing platform that says drivers are independent contractors.
(Reuters, 1/5/17)
2017 Jan 5, In Syria at least ten people were killed in a car blast in the coastal province of Latakia where two Russian bases are located.
(Reuters, 1/5/17)
2017 Jan 5, In Syria the Jabar citadel on the banks of Lake Assad was taken by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) alliance.
(Reuters, 1/6/17)
2017 Jan 5, Thailand’s Interior Ministry said flooding in the south has killed at least five people, disrupted transportation and spoiled tourists' holidays at one of the country's most popular resort islands.
(AP, 1/5/17)
2017 Jan 5, Two senior Turkish military officers were jailed for life for involvement in July's failed coup attempt that killed almost 250 people, marking the first conviction related to the putsch.
(Reuters, 1/5/17)
2017 Jan 5, In western Turkey a car bombing outside a courthouse in Izmir killed two people. The Kurdish PKK militant group was suspected. Turkish police shot dead two assailants. A day later police detained 18 people in connection to the attack.
(Reuters, 1/5/17)(SFC, 1/7/17, p.A2)
2017 Jan 5, Zimbabwe's wildlife agency said it has sold 35 elephants to China to ease overpopulation and raise funds for conservation, amid criticism from animal welfare activists that such sales are unethical.
(AP, 1/5/17)
2017 Jan 6, Attorneys confirmed that Shilo Heavenly Quine (57), a California inmate, had become the first US inmate to receive state-funded sex-reassignment surgery. In 1980 Quine and an accomplice had shot and killed Shahid Ali Baig, a father of three, stealing his car and $80 during a drug and alcohol rampage in Los Angeles.
(SFC, 1/9/17, p.D2)
2017 Jan 6, In Florida US Army National Guard veteran Esteban Santiago (26) of Anchorage, Alaska, shot and killed five people and wounded six at the Fort Lauderdale airport. He opened fire with a 9mm semiautomatic handgun that he appears to have legally checked on a flight from Alaska. In May, 2018, Santiago pleaded guilty to 11 of 22 counts. Santiago avoided a death penalty and was sentenced to life in prison.
(AP, 1/7/17)(SFC, 5/23/18, p.A6)(SFC, 8/18/18, p.A7)
2017 Jan 6, In southern Texas three duck hunters went missing. Their bodies were recovered the next day near Matagorda Bay.
(SFC, 1/9/17, p.A5)
2017 Jan 6, In Afghanistan unidentified gunmen killed eight members of the Hazara minority who were working as miners in the northern province of Baghlan.
(Reuters, 1/6/17)
2017 Jan 6, In Bangladesh Nurul Islam Marzan was one of two people killed in a shootout early today in Dhaka. Marzan was suspected of being one of the leaders of the July 1, 2015, attack on a popular cafe in Dhaka that left 20 people dead. Saddam Hossain, an accomplice of Marzan, was also killed.
(AP, 1/6/17)(SFC, 1/7/17, p.A2)
2017 Jan 6, Brazil was hit by its second explosion of grisly prison violence this week, as inmates beheaded and mutilated their rivals at the Monte Cristo Farm Penitentiary (PAMC) in Roraima state, leaving 31 inmates dead.
(AFP, 1/6/17)(SFC, 1/7/17, p.A6)
2017 Jan 6, In Bulgaria snowstorms paralyzed traffic and cut electricity to hundreds of thousands of people. In Romania atomic energy producer Nuclearelectrica was forced to shut down its No. 1 reactor.
(Reuters, 1/6/17)
2017 Jan 6, Canada posted its first trade surplus in more than two years, driven by record exports to countries other than the United States.
(AFP, 1/6/17)
2017 Jan 6, Blizzards swept parts of Europe, causing at least nine deaths, closing roads and resulting in traffic accidents, travel delays and medical evacuations. In Poland, the cold was blamed for five deaths in 24 hours. Ukraine officials reported that four people had died from effects of the cold in the Lviv region near the Polish border.
(AP, 1/6/17)
2017 Jan 6, In southwestern France workers wearing masks and protective clothes gassed thousands of ducks, in a massive cull that was ordered in an attempt to prevent a spread of the H5N8 bird flu virus.
(Reuters, 1/6/17)
2017 Jan 6, In Ivory Coast disgruntled soldiers demanding salary increases and the payment of bonuses seized control of Bouake city and launched mutinies in Daloa and Korhogo.
(Reuters, 1/6/17)(AP, 1/6/17)
2017 Jan 6, Lebanese group Hezbollah said a temporary ceasefire has been agreed in a rebel-held area near Damascus which Syrian government forces and their allies are trying to recapture from insurgents.
(Reuters, 1/6/17)
2017 Jan 6, In Libya the captured spokesman of the Revolutionary Shura Council of Benghazi, a coalition of armed groups controlling two remaining militia strongholds in Libya's second largest city, confirmed during videotaped interrogations the killing of Wissam Ben Hamid, leader of militia groups in the eastern city of Benghazi, in an air strike nearly a month ago.
(AP, 1/7/17)
2017 Jan 6, In Mexico a gunman shot and wounded an official from the US consulate in the western city of Guadalajara. On Jan 8 prosecutors said the alleged gunman, a US citizen, has been arrested.
(AFP, 1/8/17)(SFC, 1/9/17, p.A4)
2017 Jan 6, Mexican police confirmed that two people in Hidalgo have died following confrontations with police over gasoline price hikes. This raised the death toll in the protests to six.
(SFC, 1/7/17, p.A2)
2017 Jan 6, In Mexico two men were shot to death on a beach in the once-glamorous Pacific coast resort of Acapulco.
(AP, 1/7/17)
2017 Jan 6, Russia's military said it has begun scaling down its deployment to Syria, as the regime intensified its bombardment of a rebel-held district home to the capital's main water source.
(AFP, 1/6/17)
2017 Jan 6, In Syria an air strike killed Sheikh Younes Shoueib, a member of Jabhat Fateh al-Sham group and its shura council, and his son. The group accused the US-led coalition of carrying out the strike.
(Reuters, 1/6/17)
2017 Jan 6, Thai authorities warned of flash floods across the south as torrential rains lashed the region leaving at least eight people dead, delaying flights and disrupting holidays during peak tourist season.
(AFP, 1/6/17)
2017 Jan 7, US Pres.-elect Donald Trump called for a closer relationship between the US and Russia.
(SSFC, 1/8/17, p.A7)
2017 Jan 7, Oliver Schmidt, a former Volkswagen US executive and champion of "clean diesel," was arrested in Florida. He headed VW's US Energy and Environmental Office in 2014 and 2015 before returning to live in Germany. He was charged with defrauding the United States in the cover up cheating of US emissions tests.
(Reuters, 1/9/17)
2017 Jan 7, Beijing announced that China's foreign exchange reserves fell by $320 billion last year, as authorities sought to support the yuan against a soaring dollar which is encouraging capital outflows.
(AFP, 1/7/17)
2017 Jan 7, Heavy snowfall and below-freezing temperatures continued to sweep across the European continent causing more than a dozen deaths. In Poland two men died of cold, bringing the nation's death toll from winter weather to 55 since Nov 1.
(AP, 1/7/17)(AP, 1/8/17)
2017 Jan 7, Ghana's new President Nana Akufo-Addo (72) pledged to cut taxes to boost the economy at his swearing in ceremony, whilst also promising to protect the public purse by getting value for money on services.
(Reuters, 1/7/17)
2017 Jan 7, Iraqi government troops made fresh progress in their push against IS inside the northern city of Mosul, dislodging militants from new areas and for the first time reaching the nearest point to Tigris river that divides the city since the operation began in mid-October.
(AP, 1/7/17)
2017 Jan 7, In Ivory Coast gunfire broke out at a military base in Abidjan, as unrest triggered by soldiers demanding wage increases and bonuses appeared to spread.
(Reuters, 1/7/17)
2017 Jan 7, In Pakistan Samar Abbas, president of the Civil Progressive Alliance of Pakistan (CPAP), an anti-extremism activist group, went missing. This was days after four other campaigners disappeared in a way that has alarmed supporters of free speech.
(Reuters, 1/11/17)
2017 Jan 7, Philippine security forces a foreign national and his female companion who were suspected of being connected to a militant group supporting Islamic State. The foreigner, believed to be Pakistani, was identified as Abu Naila.
(Reuters, 1/7/17)
2017 Jan 7, Mario Soares (92), Portugal's former president (1986-1996), died in Lisbon.
(AFP, 1/7/17)
2017 Jan 7, In Saudi Arabia Taie bin Salem bin Yaslam al-Saya'ari died alongside another extremist in a shootout with officers in Riyadh, wearing a suicide bomb vest and clutching a machine gun.
(AP, 1/8/17)
2017 Jan 7, In South Korea hundreds of thousands of protesters returned to the streets of Seoul demanding impeached Pres. Park Geun-Hye's immediate removal and the salvaging of the April 16, 2014, sunken Sewol ferry which left more than 300 dead.
(AFP, 1/7/17)
2017 Jan 7, A South Korean Buddhist monk (64) set himself on fire to protest the country’s settlement with Japan on compensation for wartime sex slaves. The monk suffered third-degree burns.
(SFC, 1/9/17, p.A2)
2017 Jan 7, In Sri Lanka at least 21 people were injured in violent clashes between government supporters and villagers marching against what they say is a plan to take over private land for an industrial zone in which China will have a major stake.
(AP, 1/7/17)
2017 Jan 7, In Syria at least 48 people were killed when a tanker truck bomb ripped through the center of a busy commercial district of Azaz, a rebel-held town along the Turkish border.
(AFP, 1/7/17)
2017 Jan 7, Turkey ordered the dismissal of almost 8,400 civil servants and the closure of over 80 associations, including sports clubs, in the latest round of purges after the July failed coup.
(AFP, 1/7/17)
2017 Jan 7, Turkish PM Binali Yildirim commenced a two-day visit to Iraq, the first since the two governments quarreled over the presence of unauthorized Turkish troops in northern Iraq.
(AP, 1/7/17)
2017 Jan 7, In Turkey a heavy snowstorm paralyzed life in Istanbul, with hundreds of flights cancelled and the Bosporus closed to shipping traffic.
(AFP, 1/7/17)
2017 Jan 7, Yemeni government forces launched operation "Golden Spear," to drive Huthi rebels from all of Yemen's Red Sea coast. At least 55 Huthis were killed in fighting and 72 others wounded. Clashes over the next 24 hours also killed 13 loyalist forces.
(AFP, 1/8/17)(AFP, 1/9/17)
2017 Jan 8, The US military vowed to increase the scope and complexity of its European training exercises to deter Russian aggression, as more US tanks, trucks and other equipment arrived in Germany for a big buildup on NATO's eastern flank.
(Reuters, 1/8/17)
2017 Jan 8, A US Navy destroyer fired three warning shots at four Iranian fast-attack vessels after they closed in at a high rate of speed near the Strait of Hormuz.
(Reuters, 1/9/17)
2017 Jan 8, SeaWorld in San Diego hosted its last killer whale performance, the culmination of its promise to phase out the decades-old show after criticism of its treatment of the captive marine mammals.
(Reuters, 1/8/17)
2017 Jan 8, In California the Pioneer Cabin Tree in Calaveras Big Tree State Park fell due to rain and soggy ground. A hole in the base of the giant sequoia had been enlarged in 1881 and cars began passing through in 1920. The 32-foot diameter tree was about two thousand years old.
(SFC, 1/10/17, p.A10)
2017 Jan 8, In the northeastern US a snowstorm dumped more than a foot of snow in areas of southern New England. 19.5 inches fell on East Bridgewater, Mass.
(SFC, 1/9/17, p.A5)
2017 Jan 8, Brazilian authorities confirmed that four more inmates have died in a penitentiary rebellion in the city of Manaus, as the overall death toll from a week of bloodshed in Brazilian prisons approached 100.
(AP, 1/8/17)
2017 Jan 8, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani (82), former Iranian president (1989-1997) died in hospital in Tehran after suffering a heart attack. In 2003 Forbes magazine put his personal wealth at over $1 billion.
(Reuters, 1/8/17)(Econ, 1/14/17, p.82)
2017 Jan 8, In parts of Europe blizzards and dangerously low temperatures persisted, prompting Pope Francis to draw attention to the homeless suffering in freezing weather.
(AP, 1/8/17)
2017 Jan 8, In eastern France a bus skidded off a slippery stretch of Route 79, killing four Portuguese passengers and leaving more than a dozen injured.
(AP, 1/8/17)
2017 Jan 8, In Haiti 11 people died at the scene of a bus and truck crash outside of the northwestern town of Port-de-Paix. Another nine people were declared dead after being transported to hospitals in Gros Morne and Gonaives.
(AP, 1/9/17)
2017 Jan 8, Iraqi special forces battling Islamic State reached the eastern bank of the Tigris river in Mosul for the first time in a three-month, US-backed offensive to capture the city from the militants. In Baghdad, a suicide attacker killed 9 people when he drove an explosives-rigged car into vegetable market in the mainly Shi'ite Muslim eastern Jamila district. A few hours later, a suicide bomber wearing an explosive vest blew himself up at a market in another mostly Shi'ite district, Baladiyat, killing seven. Three additional bombings around Baghdad killed seven more people.
(Reuters, 1/8/17)(SFC, 1/9/17, p.A2)
2017 Jan 8, Ivory Coast soldiers ended a two-day mutiny in the second city Bouake and other key areas after reaching a deal on their demands for pay rises, housing and faster promotion.
(AFP, 1/8/17)
2017 Jan 8, In Mexico police in Sonora state fought a pitched three-hour battle to free a border rail crossing at Nogales that had been blocked by people protesting a 20% gasoline price increase.
(AP, 1/9/17)
2017 Jan 8, In Nigeria five suicide bombers trying to infiltrate the northeastern city of Maiduguri and died in explosions that killed at least three civilians.
(AP, 1/9/17)
2017 Jan 8, Pakistani media said the country’s recently retired army chief Raheel Sharif has been appointed to lead a new Saudi-military alliance to fight terrorism.
(Reuters, 1/8/17)
2017 Jan 8, Pakistani police said 13 people have been killed in a head-on collision between a car and a passenger van in the eastern province of Punjab.
(AP, 1/8/17)
2017 Jan 8, A Palestinian rammed a truck into a group of Israeli soldiers visiting a popular tourist spot in Jerusalem, killing four and wounding at least 15 people. The driver was killed. An Israeli soldier fired on the attacker and distributed video of him saying he shot after realizing it was not an accident.
(AFP, 1/8/17)
2017 Jan 8, In Syria a car bomb exploded in a government-held area outside Damascus, killing at least five people and wounding 15. The al-Qaida-linked Fatah al-Sham Front claimed the attack.
(AP, 1/8/17)
2017 Jan 9, In Florida Orlando police Master Sgt. Debra Clayton (42) was killed after approaching suspect Markeith Lloyd (41), wanted in the December killing of his pregnant ex-girlfriend Sade Dixon (24). Officer Norman Lewis was killed in a motorcycle crash during a massive manhunt for Lloyd, who was captured on Jan 17.
(SFC, 1/10/17, p.A7)(SFC, 1/18/17, p.A5)(SSFC, 1/29/17, p.A8)
2017 Jan 9, In Kentucky Garry Morrison (51) killed his mother and his girlfriend inside his rural home near Morehead. He then set his home on fire and died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound as deputies responded.
(SFC, 1/10/17, p.A6)
2017 Jan 9, Angolan health officials said they had recorded the country's first two cases of the Zika virus, a French tourist (two months ago) and a resident in the capital Luanda (last week).
(AFP, 1/9/17)
2017 Jan 9, Bosnian Serbs celebrated a controversial holiday in defiance of the country's other ethnic groups, its constitutional court and the international community. On Jan 9, 1992, Bosnian Serbs declared the creation of their own state in Bosnia.
(AP, 1/9/17)
2017 Jan 9, In England a 24-hour strike by London Underground station staff shut down much of the city’s subway network.
(SFC, 1/10/17, p.A2)
2017 Jan 9, The Czech Republic said it has approved a plan for Czech and Slovak air forces to cooperate in protecting air spaces over the two neighboring countries that once formed Czechoslovakia. Slovakia's government had already approved the deal.
(AP, 1/9/17)
2017 Jan 9, In Egypt militants attacked a police checkpoint in the northern Sinai Peninsula using a stolen garbage truck packed with explosives, killing at least eight people and setting off clashes with security forces. The Islamic State’s local affiliate soon claimed responsibility.
(AP, 1/9/17)(SFC, 1/11/17, p.A2)
2017 Jan 9, French police arrested 17 people in relation to the robbery last Oct 3 in Paris of more than $10 million in jewels from Kim Kardashian West.
(SFC, 1/10/17, p.A2)
2017 Jan 9, A Gambian foreign ministry source said President Yahya Jammeh has fired 12 ambassadors after they called for him to step aside and allow opposition leader Adama Barrow to take power.
(AFP, 1/9/17)
2017 Jan 9, Iraqi special forces made further advances against Islamic State in Mosul, pushing militants from another eastern district and edging closer to army units nearby.
(Reuters, 1/9/17)
2017 Jan 9, Israeli authorities charged two Palestinians, arrested last month, with helping to smuggle hundreds of cameras to the Gaza Strip for the Islamic militant group Hamas and others.
(AP, 1/9/17)
2017 Jan 9, Italy's anti-establishment 5-Star Movement voted to cut its ties with the anti-EU UK Independence Party (UKIP) and to hook up instead with the Liberals in the European Parliament. The liberal group rejected the request, ending a short-lived courtship.
(Reuters, 1/9/17)(AP, 1/9/17)
2017 Jan 9, Ivory Coast's PM Daniel Kablan Duncan resigned along with his government, a day after the end of a short-lived army mutiny that raised security fears in the world's top cocoa producer. The resignation was standard procedure as it follows legislative elections in December. Ivorian state employees meanwhile began a five-day strike to protest against pension cuts ranging from 30 to 50 percent and a plan to raise the retirement age from 55 to 60.
(AFP, 1/9/17)
2017 Jan 9, Japanese drugmaker Takeda Pharmaceutical said it will buy US cancer drug developer Ariad Pharmaceuticals in a $5.2 billion deal that the companies expect to close by the end of February.
(AP, 1/9/17)
2017 Jan 9, Northern Ireland's power-sharing government was on the brink of collapse after Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness, the leader of Sinn Fein, announced he was resigning. The announcement ramped up pressure on First Minister Arlene Foster, leader of the Democratic Unionist Party, to step down over her handling of a botched renewable energy scheme that wasted public funds.
(AFP, 1/9/17)
2017 Jan 9, In North Korea seven miners were initially trapped after the collapse at the Unryul mine, a leading iron ore producer in the country's southwest. One miner was rescued 10 days later but six others were found dead.
(AP, 3/20/17)
2017 Jan 9, Pakistan's military says it has successfully test-fired a submarine-launched cruise missile for the first time, giving it a "credible second strike capability."
(AP, 1/9/17)
2017 Jan 9, Pakistani opposition lawmakers called for an investigation into the disappearance of four social activists last week, including a prominent university professor who often spoke out over disappearances of fellow campaigners.
(Reuters, 1/9/17)
2017 Jan 9, Turkish Airlines canceled 277 domestic and international flights to and from Istanbul's two airports due to heavy snow.
(AP, 1/9/17)
2017 Jan 9, UAE media reported that the United Arab Emirates has ordered the removal from a textbook of the term "Persian Gulf" for the waterway that is the subject of a bitter naming dispute with Iran.
(AFP, 1/9/17)
2017 Jan 10, President Obama bid farewell to the nation in a wide-ranging speech that urged Americans not to abandon a sense of unified purpose and defended many of his presidency’s accomplishments.
(CSM, 1/11/17)
2017 Jan 10, The board of directors of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art announced that their new museum would be built in the Exposition Park of Los Angeles.
(SFC, 1/11/17, p.A1)
2017 Jan 10, The Archdiocese of Boston and the New England Historic Genealogical Society announced that they were teaming up to create an online database of hundreds of thousands of Roman Catholic Church documents to help people trace their family histories.
(SFC, 1/11/17, p.A6)
2017 Jan 10, In North Carolina Dylann Roof was sentenced to death for the June 17, 2015, killing of nine black church members during Bible study in Charleston.
(SFC, 1/11/17, p.A7)
2017 Jan 10, The United States blacklisted British Ghanaian jihadist Alexanda Amon Kotey, a surviving member of the notorious Islamic State kidnapping cell popularly known as "The Beatles," as a global terrorist threat. Kotey is still thought to be at large somewhere in or near the IS stronghold of Raqa, in eastern Syria.
(AFP, 1/10/17)
2017 Jan 10, In Afghanistan two large bombings near government offices in Kabul killed at least 38 people, including civilians and military personnel. Earlier in the day, a suicide bomber on foot struck in the southern Helmand province, killing at least seven people. In Kandahar province five UAE officials were among 12 people killed when explosives hidden in a sofa detonated inside the governor's compound. The spate of attacks killed a total of 57 people.
(AP, 1/10/17)(AFP, 1/11/17)(AFP, 2/15/17)
2017 Jan 10, In Albania three men in their 50s froze to death, and municipal authorities took several hundred homeless people to heated shelters.
(Reuters, 1/10/17)
2017 Jan 10, Argentina said it has struck a deal with labor unions and energy companies aimed at attracting investment to the Vaca Muerta shale deposit in southwestern Neuquen province, one of the world's biggest unconventional hydrocarbons deposits.
(AP, 1/10/17)
2017 Jan 10, In Bosnia three people in remote parts of the country froze to death, while nearly 50,000 in the central town of Zenica lost their home heating due to a malfunction in a boiler at the ArcelorMittal steel mill, which provides thermal power to households.
(Reuters, 1/10/17)
2017 Jan 10, British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn told the BBC that "I would like to see some kind of high-earnings cap" to reduce inequality. He said that it should kick in at a level "somewhat higher" than his own 138,000 pound ($167,000) annual salary.
(AP, 1/10/17)
2017 Jan 10, UKIP founder Nigel Farage said Farage said that all differences with 5-Star had been resolved and that Italy's anti-establishment 5-Star Movement has backtracked from plans to quit the UKIP grouping in the European Parliament.
(Reuters, 1/10/17)
2017 Jan 10, Cameroon’s government said its troops have in recent weeks killed some 100 Boko Haram fighters and freed "hundreds of hostages" held by the group.
(AFP, 1/11/17)
2017 Jan 10, China's top economic planner pledged to continue cutting steel and coal production, which have been a source of trade friction with many countries.
(AP, 1/10/17)
2017 Jan 10, A Congolese police source said opposition leader Okombi Salissa (55), who unsuccessfully challenged President Denis Sassou Nguesso (73) at the polls, has been arrested. Salissa has sought to stop Nguesso from returning to power in March.
(AFP, 1/10/17)
2017 Jan 10, Rival Cypriot leaders returned to the negotiating table in Geneva to press on with an ambitious bid to end decades of conflict, with talks centered on the island's future system of government.
(AFP, 1/10/17)
2017 Jan 10, In Czech Rep. the wife of former Czech PM Petr Necas was convicted of leaking a classified document and received an 18-month suspended sentence. Jana Necasova — Jana Nagyova at the time — leaked the content of a 2012 report by the country's BIS spy agency to Ivo Rittig, a lobbyist.
(AP, 1/10/17)
2017 Jan 10, EU anti-trust regulators cleared the French government's massive restructuring of troubled state-owned nuclear reactor builder Areva.
(AFP, 1/10/17)
2017 Jan 10, A European court rejected an appeal by a Turkish-born couple who were fined in Switzerland for keeping their daughters out of mixed-gender, mandatory public school swimming lessons for reasons linked to their Muslim faith.
(AP, 1/10/17)
2017 Jan 10, Former German President Roman Herzog (82) died. He served as chief justice of Germany's highest court before winning the presidency in 1994.
(AP, 1/24/17)
2017 Jan 10, In Hong Kong Clare Hollingworth (b.1911), a British war correspondent, died. She was the first to report the Nazi invasion of Poland that marked the beginning of World War II.
(AP, 1/10/17)(Econ, 1/21/17, p.78)
2017 Jan 10, In Iceland new center-right coalition announced it had agreed to make conservative Independence Party leader Bjarni Benediktsson the country's next prime minister, 10 weeks after a snap election. The Independence Party formed a coalition with the smaller Reform and Bright Future parties holding 32 of 63 seats in Parliament.
(AFP, 1/10/17)(SFC, 1/12/17, p.A2)
2017 Jan 10, Iraqi forces pushed Islamic State fighters back further in Mosul in a renewed effort to seize the northern city and deal a decisive blow to the militant group, though progress was slow in some districts.
(Reuters, 1/10/17)
2017 Jan 10, Israeli troops in the occupied West Bank shot dead a Palestinian who attacked them during an overnight operation to arrest suspected militants at the Al-Fara refugee camp. A Palestinian rights group said the man was shot in his home at point blank range.
(AFP, 1/10/17)
2017 Jan 10, Italian police announced the arrest of a London-resident nuclear engineer and his sister on suspicion of running a cyber snooping operation targeting politicians, public bodies and companies. Media cited charge sheets which identified them as Giulio Occhionero (45) and his sister Francesca Maria Occhionero.
(AFP, 1/10/17)
2017 Jan 10, Kazakhstan’s National Anticorruption Bureau said former economy minister Kuandyk Bishimbayev (36) has been arrested on suspicion of bribery. He was dismissed from his ministerial post by President Nursultan Nazarbayev in late 2016 after just a few months in office.
(Reuters, 1/10/17)
2017 Jan 10, Morocco faced an unprecedented political deadlock after the Islamist PM Abdelilah Benkirane broke off talks on forming a coalition government following three months of fruitless effort.
(AFP, 1/10/17)
2017 Jan 10, Palestinian leaders called for prayers at mosques across the Middle East this week to protest plans by President-elect Donald Trump to move the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.
(AFP, 1/10/17)
2017 Jan 10, In Poland six people died over a 24-hour period as temperatures plunged across Europe, bringing the toll of hypothermia deaths in the country to 71 since November.
(AFP, 1/10/17)
2017 Jan 10, Romania announced six more deaths in recent days as temperatures plunged across Europe.
(AFP, 1/10/17)
2017 Jan 10, Gunmen in Syria abducted Shiraaz Mohamed, a South African freelance photographer who was traveling with aid workers to the border with Turkey.
(AP, 1/14/17)
2017 Jan 10, In Tanzania at least 12 people drowned when a boat capsized near a coastal town. At least 27 others were rescued.
(Reuters, 1/10/17)
2017 Jan 10, In Turkey a man suspected of trying to force his way into a police station in Gaziantep, a city near the Syrian border, was shot dead.
(AFP, 1/10/17)
2017 Jan 10, The United Arab Emirates announced plans to invest 600 billion dirhams ($163 billion) in projects to generate almost half the country's power needs from renewables.
(AFP, 1/10/17)
2017 Jan 10, Zimbabwe wildlife park rangers killed two poachers in Hwange National Park.
(SFC, 1/13/17, p.A2)
2017 Jan 11, The US and five other world powers approved Iran importing as much as 130 tons of uranium.
(AP, 1/13/17)
2017 Jan 11, President-elect Donald Trump angrily denounced the publishing of claims he had been caught in a compromising position in Russia and attacked US intelligence agencies over the leak of the information. President Vladimir Putin's spokesman said the Kremlin has not collected compromising information about Trump.
(Reuters, 1/11/17)
2017 Jan 11, In Illinois Corey Walgren (16), an honors student at Naperville North High School, jumped to his death from a five-story parking deck after being interviewed by school officials about a video he had made of having sex with a classmate. In 2019 the city of Naperville approved a $125,000 settlement to the Walgren family.
(SFC, 9/13/17 p.A8)(SFC, 9/2/19, p.A6)
2017 Jan 11, Texas executed inmate Christopher Wilkins (48) for the killing of two men in 2005 over a drug deal.
(SFC, 1/12/17, p.A6)
2017 Jan 11, Thirteen funds and five firms managing over 2 trillion pounds ($2.4 trillion) launched an online tool at the London Stock Exchange called the Transition Pathway Initiative. It allows asset managers to check what companies have done to prepare for a low-carbon economy.
(AP, 1/11/17)
2017 Jan 11, Aid agencies said dozens of migrants are at risk of freezing to death in Europe after heavy snowfall and bitterly cold temperatures hit Greece and the Balkans. The UN Missing Migrants Project has recorded 11 migrant deaths in the Mediterranean since the start of the year. The recent cold snap was blamed for at least 73 deaths.
(AP, 1/11/17)(SFC, 1/12/17, p.A2)
2017 Jan 11, In Cameroon four young suicide bombers were killed in the restive Far North province, located just across the border from the epicenter of Boko Haram's insurgency in Nigeria.
(AFP, 1/11/17)
2017 Jan 11, Arthur Manuel (b.1951), a leader of Canada’s indigenous “First Nations," died.
(Econ, 1/28/17, p.78)
2017 Jan 11, An Egyptian court upheld an earlier ruling to freeze the assets of Mozn Hassan and her group, Nazra for Feminist Studies, as well as Mohammed Zaraa and Atef Hafez, both of the Arab Organization for Criminal Reform.
(AP, 1/11/17)
2017 Jan 11, In Germany the spectacular new Elbphilharmonie concert hall in Hamburg, begun in 2007, hosted its first concert, several years behind schedule and far over the original budget. The cost to taxpayers climbed from an initially planned 77 million euros in 2003 to 789 million euros ($835 million).
(AP, 1/11/17)(Econ, 1/21/17, p.71)
2017 Jan 11, The Israeli military said the Palestinian militant group Hamas has chatted up dozens of Israeli soldiers online using photos of young women and Hebrew slang to gain control of their phone cameras and microphones.
(Reuters, 1/11/17)
2017 Jan 11, Kazakhstan's veteran leader Nursultan Nazarbayev (76) gave the green light for constitutional reforms that could dilute the sweeping powers he has amassed as president and force his eventual successor to share power with other institutions.
(Reuters, 1/11/17)
2017 Jan 11, Eastern Libyan military commander Khalifa Haftar was given a tour of a Russian aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean, a show of Kremlin support for the faction leader who opposes Libya's UN-backed government.
(Reuters, 1/11/17)
2017 Jan 11, Norway began shutting off FM radio signals and planned to have all of its radio networks only on Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) by the end of the year.
(SFC, 1/11/17, p.A4)
2017 Jan 11, Hamas detained Gaza comedian Adel al-Mashwakhi (32), just hours after he posted the one-minute clip with the title, "Hamas, it's enough!"
(AP, 1/12/17)
2017 Jan 11, Officials said Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has ordered government agencies to ensure free access to contraceptives for 6 million women who cannot obtain them, in a move expected to be opposed by the Roman Catholic church.
(AP, 1/11/17)
2017 Jan 11, Poland's parliament was paralyzed as liberal opposition MPs refused to end an unprecedented protest against what they say are anti-democratic actions by the government.
(AFP, 1/11/17)
2017 Jan 11, Puerto Rico's newly elected governor signed his first law — one aimed at boosting the US territory's economy via public-private partnerships.
(AP, 1/12/17)
2017 Jan 11, In northern Syria airstrikes in Idlib province killed at least 10 suspected al-Qaida-linked militants. Airstrikes resumed on a Damascus suburb despite the cease-fire, killing at least one woman and injuring several others.
(AP, 1/11/17)
2017 Jan 11, In Venezuela Tareck El Aissami (42), Pres. Maduro's new hardline vice-president, announced the arrest of opposition lawmaker Gilber Caro saying he was caught with a rifle and explosives.
(AFP, 1/12/17)(Econ, 2/18/17, p.30)
2017 Jan 11, In southern Yemen a car bombing claimed by Al-Qaeda seriously wounded a senior security official and killed one of his guards in Loder, Abyan province. Heavy fighting continued to rage near the strategic Red Sea strait of Bab al-Mandab in western Yemen, leaving dozens dead and wounded.
(AFP, 1/11/17)(AP, 1/11/17)
2017 Jan 11, Zimbabwe wildlife park rangers killed one poacher in the Hurungwe safari area.
(SFC, 1/13/17, p.A2)
2017 Jan 12, Pres. Obama awarded Vice-Pres. Joe Biden the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.
(SFC, 1/13/17, p.A5)
2017 Jan 12, The Obama administration repealed a measure granting automatic residency to virtually every Cuban who arrived in the United States, whether or not they had visas, ending a longstanding exception to US immigration policy. This also stopped Cuban doctors who defect from a third country from getting fast-track entry to the US.
(Reuters, 1/13/17)(Econ, 1/21/17, p.28)
2017 Jan 12, Pres. Obama added roughly 6,000 acres to the California Coastal national Monument.
(SFC, 1/13/17, p.D1)
2017 Jan 12, The United States blacklisted 18 senior Syrian officials it said were connected to the country's weapons of mass destruction program, after an international investigation found Syrian government forces were responsible for chlorine gas attacks against civilians.
(Reuters, 1/12/17)
2017 Jan 12, The US government EPA accused Fiat Chrysler of failing to disclose software in some of its pickups and SUVs with diesel engines that allows them to emit more pollution than allowed under the Clean Air Act. Fiat Chrysler quickly issued a statement denying any wrongdoing.
(AP, 1/12/17)(Econ, 1/21/17, p.10)
2017 Jan 12, US troops and tanks began streaming into Poland as part of one of the largest deployments of US forces in Europe since the Cold War. The Atlantic Resolve mission will see more than 3,000 American soldiers and heavy equipment deployed in Poland and nearby NATO partners Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary on a rotational basis.
(AFP, 1/12/17)
2017 Jan 12, US Senate Republicans took the first major step toward repealing the Affordable Care Act, approving a budget blueprint that would allow them to gut health care without the threat of a Democratic filibuster.
(SFC, 1/13/17, p.A5)
2017 Jan 12, The US federal government’s Drought Monitor pronounced 42% of California drought free.
(SFC, 1/13/17, p.A1)
2017 Jan 12, James Mattis, President-elect Donald Trump's pick for US defense secretary, accused Russia of trying to break up NATO and said China was destroying trust with its neighbors.
(AFP, 1/12/17)
2017 Jan 12, Human Rights Watch on issued a sharp warning that the rise of populist politicians in the United States and Europe threatened modern rights movements and potentially even Western democracy.
(AFP, 1/12/17)
2017 Jan 12, UCSF announced a $500 million donation from the Helen Diller Foundation, the biggest gift in campus history, to recruit students and faculty for “High risk, high-reward" research.
(SFC, 1/12/17, p.A7)
2017 Jan 12, In Baltimore a huge house fire killed six children.
(SFC, 1/13/17, p.A5)
2017 Jan 12, Novelist and filmmaker William Peter Blatty (89) died in Maryland. His books included “The Exorcist" (1971).
(SFC, 1/14/17, p.A5)
2017 Jan 12, Albania’s Serious Crime Court sentenced former Peshkopi mayor Shukri Xhelili to 32 months in jail after he was found guilty of having fondled and kissed a 20-year-old woman in his office while she resisted, then taken her to a hotel room in Tirana and promised a pay rise in exchange for sexual favors.
(AP, 1/12/17)
2017 Jan 12, Dozens of flights at London's Heathrow Airport were canceled amid forecasts of snow and strong winds in Britain.
(AP, 1/12/17)
2017 Jan 12, Human Rights Watch said in a report that Egypt has banned public criticism and peaceful opposition, and that security forces routinely torture detainees and forcibly disappeared hundreds last year.
(AP, 1/12/17)
2017 Jan 12, Iraqi forces joined flanks in northern Mosul and drove back Islamic State militants in the southeast in a renewed push that has brought them closer to controlling the eastern half of the city.
(Reuters, 1/12/17)
2017 Jan 12, In Libya self-declared PM Khalifa Ghwell said his forces have seized at least three ministries in the capital and is declaring a return of his government after what he described as a yearlong failure of PM Fayez Serraj, the current UN-backed premier.
(AP, 1/12/17)
2017 Jan 12, In Pakistan journalist Muhammad Jan (37) was shot and killed while returning home by unidentified assailants. He had worked for the Urdu-language daily Qudrat and was teaching at a school.
(AP, 1/14/17)
2017 Jan 12, Thousands of Palestinians participated in a demonstration in the Gaza Strip to protest chronic power cuts during the cold winter season.
(AP, 1/12/17)
2017 Jan 12, Poland's main opposition party ended its weekslong blockade of parliament, stepping back in what had been a bitter standoff with the populist ruling party.
(AP, 1/12/17)
2017 Jan 12, In Romania two tigers were among a number of animals that died when a fire broke out at an animal shelter which houses animals retired from the circus.
(AP, 1/12/17)
2017 Jan 12, Turkish lawmakers brawled and threw chairs as parliament approved three more articles in a hugely controversial bill bolstering the powers of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
(AFP, 1/12/17)
2017 Jan 12, Human Rights Watch in an annual report accused the Ukrainian government and Russian-backed separatists of holding dozens of civilians in arbitrary detention in Ukraine's industrial east, where fighting has killed more than 9,600 people since 2014.
(AP, 1/12/17)
2017 Jan 12, In Venezuela the son of Raul Baduel, a retired general turned critic of Pres. Maduro, said authorities had revoked the parole of his father who served six years in jail for corruption.
(AFP, 1/12/17)
2017 Jan 13, The Obama administration moved to lift the trade embargo against Sudan in response to the east African nation's recent cooperation in helping to tackle terrorism. The lifting of the sanctions slapped on Sudan by the Clinton administration will however be delayed by 180 days to encourage Sudan to do more to fight terrorism and improve its record on human rights.
(Reuters, 1/13/17)
2017 Jan 13, US Environmental Protection Agency chief Gina McCarthy finalized a determination that the landmark fuel efficiency rules instituted by President Barack Obama should be locked in through 2025, a bid to maintain a key part of his administration's climate legacy.
(Reuters, 1/13/17)
2017 Jan 13, The US Environmental Protection Agency denied $1.2 billion in claims for economic losses stemming from a 2015 toxic wastewater spill accidentally triggered by the agency at a defunct Colorado mine, that fouled waterways in Colorado, New Mexico and Utah.
(AP, 1/13/17)
2017 Jan 13, The US Justice Dept. announced Chicago police have violated the constitutional rights of residents for years following a yearlong investigation.
(SFC, 1/14/17, p.A5)
2017 Jan 13, The US attorney’s office in Detroit announced that Japan-based Takata has agreed to plead guilty to a single criminal charge and will pay $1 billion in fines and restitution for a years-long scheme to conceal a deadly defect in its automotive bag inflators.
(SFC, 1/14/17, p.D1)
2017 Jan 13, It was announced that Moody’s Corp. of NYC has agreed to pay almost $864 million to settle federal and state claims that it gave inflated ratings to risky mortgage investments in the years leading up to the financial crises.
(SSFC, 1/15/17, p.A5)
2017 Jan 13, Former Jerusalem Post chief editor Ari Rath (92), who advocated the peaceful coexistence of Israelis and Palestinians, died in Vienna.
(AP, 1/13/17)
2017 Jan 13, Lord Snowdon (b.1930), born as Antony Armstrong-Jones, the society photographer and filmmaker who married Britain's Princess Margaret and continued to mix in royal circles even after their divorce, died.
(AP, 1/13/17)
2017 Jan 13, Canada must "phase out" Alberta's oil sands and end the country's dependence on hydrocarbons, PM Justin Trudeau said.
(AFP, 1/13/17)
2017 Jan 13, In Ecuador at least 19 people were killed and more than a dozen injured when a long distance passenger bus collided with an off-duty school bus along a highway near the Pacific coastline.
(AP, 1/14/17)
2017 Jan 13, Egyptian police reportedly killed 10 Islamic militants in a shootout in al-Arish. However, the residents said six of those killed had been in police custody since October.
(AP, 1/15/17)
2017 Jan 13, Hungary's right-wing PM Viktor Orban said he has defied Brussels by reintroducing the systematic detention of migrants arriving in the country in response to recent "terror" attacks in Europe.
(AFP, 1/13/17)
2017 Jan 13, Ivory Coast's government and rebel troops reached a final deal at talks in Bouake, at the close of a tense day which saw outbreaks of gunfire at barracks across the country.
(AFP, 1/14/17)
2017 Jan 13, A Mexican federal judge ordered a drug lord convicted in the 1985 killings of a US Drug Enforcement Administration agent and a Mexican government pilot to pay relatives of the victims nearly $1 million in compensation. The order was directed at Ernesto "Don Neto" Fonseca Carrillo, co-founder of the Guadalajara cartel, for the case of the kidnapping, torture and killing of DEA agent Enrique "Kiki" Camarena.
(AP, 1/14/17)
2017 Jan 13, In northeastern Nigeria three female suicide bombers killed at least six people and injured 14 in a crowded market in the town of Madagali. Gunmen kidnapped five students and two staff, including a Turkish national, from an international school in the southern state of Ogun.
(Reuters, 1/13/17)(Reuters, 1/14/17)(SFC, 1/14/17, p.A2)
2017 Jan 13, Peru’s Pres. Pedro Pablo Kuczynski said ten treatment plants will be constructed on rivers emptying into Lake Titicaca to cleanup uncontrolled pollution.
(SSFC, 1/15/17, p.A3)
2017 Jan 13, Saudi Arabia's highest-ranking cleric warned of the "depravity" of cinemas and music concerts, saying they would corrupt morals if allowed in the ultra-conservative kingdom.
(AFP, 1/13/17)
2017 Jan 13, Sweden pledged to end a surge of gang violence in the southern town of Malmo as the latest in a string of shootings left a 16-year old boy dead. Over the past two weeks alone, the town has seen five shootings, of which two were fatal.
(Reuters, 1/13/17)
2017 Jan 13, Syria's army and its allies advanced near Damascus. The region's governor said rebels had let engineers enter a damaged pumping station that supplies most of the capital's water.
(Reuters, 1/13/17)
2017 Jan 13, In Yemen at least 12 Houthi fighters died in fresh clashes in Dhubab.
(AFP, 1/14/17)
2017 Jan 14, A SpaceX Falcon 9 successfully blasted off from California carrying a payload for Iridium Communications Inc. The rocket’s first stage soon landed upright on a droneship south of Vandenberg Air Force Base.
(SSFC, 1/15/17, p.A7)
2017 Jan 14, Feld Entertainment, the owner of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, said it will close forever in May after 146 years of circus operations.
(SSFC, 1/15/17, p.A7)
2017 Jan 14, California historian Kevin Starr (b.1940) died. He was best known for his mammoth series of history books: Americans and the California Dream."
(SFC, 1/16/17, p.A1)
2017 Jan 14, The leaders of Australia and Japan agreed to boost cooperation between their militaries, as Japan tries to shore up security ties throughout the Asia-Pacific region amid concern over China's growing military might.
(AP, 1/14/17)
2017 Jan 14, Unilever, a British-based consumer goods maker, said all of its plastic packaging would be fully reusable, recyclable or compostable by 2025.
(Reuters, 1/14/17)
2017 Jan 14, In China Beijing's Mayor Cai Qi said the air quality target for 2017 is to keep PM2.5 at an annual average of around 60 micrograms per cubic meter, more than double the acceptable standard set by the World Health Organization (WHO).
(Reuters, 1/14/17)
2017 Jan 14, In China linguist Zhou Youguang (b.1906) died. He is considered the father of modern China's Pinyin Romanization system.
(AP, 1/14/17)(Econ, 1/21/17, p.72)
2017 Jan 14, In Iceland Birna Brjansdottir (20) went missing after a night out with friends. Her body was found in Selvogsviti, 58 km (36 miles) from the capital on the other side of the country after a weeklong search. She was reportedly strangled before being thrown into the ocean where she drowned.
(AP, 1/25/17)(AFP, 2/7/17)
2017 Jan 14, In India Sunil Rastogi (38), a tailor, was arrested by police investigating sexual assaults on three girls aged between nine and ten in eastern Delhi in January and December. Rastogi confessed to abducting "hundreds" of girls since 2004 -- luring them with new clothes, and taking them to secluded places such as derelict buildings, where he would sexually assault and rape them.
(Reuters, 1/17/17)
2017 Jan 14, In eastern India at least 19 people drowned and others were missing after their overcrowded boat capsized in a river near Patna, Bihar state. The next day five more bodies were recovered from the Ganges river after as rescuers ended search operations.
(AP, 1/14/17)(Reuters, 1/15/17)
2017 Jan 14, Iraqi government troops retook the eastern edge of a third bridge in Mosul and a cluster of buildings inside Mosul university.
(AP, 1/14/17)
2017 Jan 14, Only four people survived the sinking of a migrant ship carrying around 100 people that went down 30 miles (49 kilometers) off the Libyan coast. Around 180 people were presumed to have died in the first major migrant boat disaster of 2017 in the Mediterranean following interviews with a handful of survivors.
(AP, 1/15/17)(AFP, 1/17/17)
2017 Jan 14, Malawi’s agriculture minister said armyworms have destroyed 2,000 hectares of crops in Malawi, spreading to nine of its 28 districts in the last few weeks.
(Reuters, 1/14/17)
2017 Jan 14, In the Philippines Islamist militants allied with Islamic State freed a South Korean cargo ship captain and a Filipino member of his crew held captive for more than three months on a southern island.
(Reuters, 1/14/17)
2017 Jan 14, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte said he has ordered his troops to bomb extremists who flee with their captives in a bid to stop a wave of kidnappings at sea, calling the loss of civilian lives in such an attack "collateral damage."
(AP, 1/15/17)
2017 Jan 14, A Saudi Arabia soldier was killed by cross-border fire from Yemen amid the kingdom's campaign against Shiite rebels there.
(AP, 1/15/17)
2017 Jan 14, Serbia launched provocative train service to Kosovo's Serbian north. Because the central Kosovo government has no real control over the predominantly ethnic Serb north and that region's borders with Serbia, it has appealed to the European Union to "stop this illegal train".
(AFP, 1/14/17)
2017 Jan 14, In Syria the Islamic State group launched one of its fiercest assaults yet on the besieged city of Deir Ezzor, leaving more than 30 regime fighters and jihadists dead.
(AFP, 1/14/17)
2017 Jan 14, A Thai air force pilot died when his fighter jet crashed at an air show during the country's Children's Day.
(AP, 1/14/17)
2017 Jan 14, Ukrainian government forces and the pro-Russian separatist rebels fighting in eastern Ukraine accused each other of disrupting a fragile truce declared late December.
(AFP, 1/14/17)
2017 Jan 14, In Yemen an overnight air strike by a pro-government Arab coalition on a rebel assembly in Zaydiya, in Hodeida province, left nine Huthis dead. Five pro-government fighters were killed in overnight clashes around Dhubab and 14 others wounded.
(AFP, 1/14/17)
2017 Jan 15, US resident Senad Cejvan (31) was reported extradited to the Dutch Caribbean island of Saba to face charges in the April 2015 killing of Kavya Guda (24) an American medical student.
(AP, 1/16/17)
2017 Jan 15, An Afghan official says that at least six Afghan civilians were killed when their vehicle was hit by a roadside bomb in eastern Nangarhar province.
(AP, 1/15/17)
2017 Jan 15, Bahrain executed three Shi'ite Muslim men convicted of killing three policemen in a 2014 bomb attack, the first such executions in over two decades, drawing condemnation from foreign officials including Shi'ite power Iran.
(Reuters, 1/15/17)
2017 Jan 15, Brazilian police entered the Alcaçuz prison in the northeastern state of Rio Grande do Norte where authorities expect the death toll from a riot to rise from the current 10. Members of rival drug gangs apparently started the clash a day earlier.
(Reuters, 1/15/17)
2017 Jan 15, Prince Charles, long a critic of man-made climate change, published the book "Climate Change" with Tony Juniper, a former Friends of the Earth director, and Emily A, a Cambridge University climate scientist.
(AP, 1/15/17)
2017 Jan 15, Ramzan Kadyrov, the hardline pro-Moscow head of Russia's Northern Caucasus Republic of Chechnya, said that more than 50 suspected militants were detained in the biggest sting operation of recent years.
(Reuters, 1/15/17)
2017 Jan 15, Armed Congolese rebels crossed back overnight into the country from their longtime refuge in Uganda. At least 200 former members of M23, an ethnic Tutsi group defeated by the Congolese army three years ago, took over a village in North Kivu province.
(AFP, 1/15/17)
2017 Jan 15, Egypt said it will make further "significant" cuts to energy subsidies, raise taxes and seek more international financing as it pursues economic reforms this year.
(AFP, 1/15/17)
2017 Jan 15, In France representatives from 70 countries met in Paris to try to revive stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts. Neither Israel nor the Palestinians attended the conference.
(AFP, 1/15/17)
2017 Jan 15, In eastern India at least six people were killed in a stampede during a Hindu religious festival.
(AP, 1/15/17)
2017 Jan 15, Indonesia and Japan said they have agreed to step up maritime security and start discussions on a major railway project to link the Southeast Asian nation's capital and second-biggest city.
(Reuters, 1/15/17)
2017 Jan 15, Iraqi special forces swept through the campus of Mosul University to clear it of any remaining Islamic State militants after taking full control of the area.
(Reuters, 1/15/17)
2017 Jan 15, Jordan's King Abdullah reshuffled his cabinet but retained Hani Mulki as prime minister, granting him more scope to tackle the threat of Islamist militants and to press ahead with unpopular IMF-mandated reforms to cut spiraling public debt.
(Reuters, 1/15/17)
2017 Jan 15, South Sudan’s Minister of Information Michael Makuei said that Dec. 15th was the expiration date for the deployment of peacekeepers to bolster the existing 12,000 UN troops. He said a new resolution is needed for the additional troops. Makuei also announced that President Salva Kiir has created four new states in South Sudan bringing the total number to 32.
(AP, 1/15/17)
2017 Jan 15, Sudan extended a ceasefire for six months in the war-torn regions of Darfur, Blue Nile and South Kordofan.
(AFP, 1/15/17)
2017 Jan 15, Syrian government forces shelled a village in a rebel-controlled area near Damascus, killing at least 12 civilians and injuring several others who were taking shelter in a banquet hall. In eastern Syria, Islamic State group militants kept up their offensive on government-held areas of the contested city of Deir el-Zour, attacking a military air base from several fronts.
(AP, 1/15/17)
2017 Jan 15, Turkey's state-run news agency said nine Turkish colonels have been detained in northern Cyprus as part of the investigation into the movement allegedly responsible for a failed coup in July.
(AP, 1/15/17)
2017 Jan 16, US motor giant Ford announced the recall of 4,500 1.6-litre Kuga cars in South Africa after nearly 40 incidents in which vehicles were reported to have burst into flames.
(AFP, 1/16/17)
2017 Jan 16, In Florida three men working on a Key Largo road project collapsed and died after trying to rescue a man stuck while working in a drainage manhole.
(SFC, 1/17/17, p.A4)
2017 Jan 16, US astronaut Eugene Cernan (b.1934), the last man to walk on the moon, died in Houston, Texas. Cernan, James Lovell and John Young were the only three astronauts to voyage twice to the moon.
(Reuters, 1/17/17)(SFC, 1/17/17, p.A5)
2017 Jan 16, A Bangladesh court sentenced 26 people, including a politician and three officials of an elite security battalion, to death in the grisly, politically motivated killings of seven people in 2014. Nur Hossain, the main suspect, was found guilty of hiring members of his Rapid Action Battalion to kill his rival to establish supremacy in local politics and business.
(AP, 1/16/17)(SFC, 1/17/17, p.A2)
2017 Jan 16, Brazilian authorities said a new uprising has broken out at the Alcaçuz prison where 26 inmates were killed by a rival gang faction over the weekend.
(Reuters, 1/16/17)
2017 Jan 16, British company Rolls Royce, in a deal with American, British and Brazilian regulators, agreed to pay £671 million to settle allegations that it had in the past secured sales with bribery of officials in six countries in schemes that lasted more than a decade.
(Econ, 1/21/17, p.54)(Reuters, 5/8/20)
2017 Jan 16, An Egyptian court ruled against the government's attempt to transfer two Red Sea islands to Saudi Arabia, an embarrassment for President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi that could deepen tensions with his onetime Gulf patron.
(AP, 1/16/17)
2017 Jan 16, India's election commission backed Uttar Pradesh chief minister Akhilesh Yadav, in his battle with his father, Mulayam Singh Yadav, for control of their party, a feud PM Narendra Modi wants to exploit in a crucial election.
(Reuters, 1/16/17)
2017 Jan 16, In southern India police arrested an American man (42) in Hyderabad on suspicion of circulating child pornography on the internet.
(Reuters, 1/19/17)
2017 Jan 16, Iraqi forces battling the Islamic State group in Mosul retook the Nabi Yunus area where the jihadists levelled one of the city's most well-known shrines in 2014. Two other neighborhoods in eastern Mosul were also retaken from the IS.
(AFP, 1/16/17)
2017 Jan 16, Israeli border police shot dead a 17-year-old Palestinian youth as violence erupted near the town of Bethlehem between a crowd of stone-throwing Palestinians and Israeli troops.
(Reuters, 1/16/17)
2017 Jan 16, It was announced the Italy’s Luxottica, a maker of fancy specs, will merge with Essilor, a French producer of eye lenses.
(www.essilor.com/en/investors/essilor-and-luxottica/)(Econ, 1/21/17, p.54)
2017 Jan 16, Japan's PM Shinzo Abe promised Vietnam six new patrol boats during a visit to the Southeast Asian country, which is locked in a dispute with China over the busy South China Sea.
(Reuters, 1/16/17)
2017 Jan 16, In Libya forces loyal to Marshal Khalifa Haftar retook a district in Benghazi from jihadists after fighting that killed nine soldiers in two days.
(AFP, 1/16/17)
2017 Jan 16, Lithuania said it plans to use EU funds to build a fence on the border with Russia's highly militarized Kaliningrad exclave to boost security and prevent smuggling.
(AFP, 1/16/17)
2017 Jan 16, In Mexico at least five people, including four foreigners, were killed and 15 were wounded early today when a shooter opened fire at a nightclub in the Playa del Carmen resort during the BPM electronic music festival in Quintana Roo state.
(Reuters, 1/16/17)
2017 Jan 16, Mozambique, caught between a scandal over hidden debt that has prompted an aid cut-off and a commodity price slump, said it would miss a $60 million interest payment.
(AFP, 1/16/17)
2017 Jan 16, In Nigeria three suicide bombers, including a child, exploded at dawn at the northeastern University of Maiduguri, killing a university professor and another child. The bombers also died.
(AP, 1/16/17)
2017 Jan 16, Oman said it has accepted 10 detainees from the US prison at Guantanamo Bay ahead of President Barack Obama leaving office, part of his efforts to shrink the facility he promised to close.
(AP, 1/16/17)
2017 Jan 16, A court in Pakistan sentenced a mother to death for burning her daughter alive as punishment for marrying without the family's consent. Zeenat Rafiq (18) married Hassan Khan and eloped to live with his family a week before she was killed last June 8.
(Reuters, 1/16/17)
2017 Jan 16, Fuel from Qatar arrived in the Gaza Strip, helping ease a crippling power shortage that has sparked rare demonstrations against the territory's Hamas rulers who responded with a crackdown on protesters.
(AP, 1/16/17)
2017 Jan 16, Low-cost Saudi carrier flynas signed an $8.6-billion deal with European plane manufacturer Airbus to purchase 80 A320neo single-aisle jets.
(AFP, 1/16/17)
2017 Jan 16, In South Korea special prosecutors accused Lee Jae-yong, the only son of Samsung’s chairman Lee Kun-hee, of bribery, embezzlement and perjury. Three days later a court rejected a request for his arrest.
(Econ, 1/21/17, p.53)
2017 Jan 16, In Syria the Islamic State continued its fiercest assault in a year against a besieged government enclave in the city of Deir al-Zor, trying to cut it off from a nearby military air base. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that at least 82 people had been killed.
(Reuters, 1/16/17)
2017 Jan 16, In Turkey Abdulkadir Masharipov, the Uzbek gunman who carried out the New Year’s attack on Istanbul’s Reina nightclub, was detained in Istanbul.
(AP, 1/17/17)
2017 Jan 16, In southeastern Turkey a roadside bomb in a pre-dominantly Kurdish city killed three policemen and wounded three others.
(AP, 1/16/17)
2017 Jan 16, A Turkish cargo jet crashed near Kyrgyzstan's Manas airport, killing at least 37 people including 4 crew members. Most of the dead were residents of a village struck by the Boeing 747 as it tried to land in dense fog. 23 of 43 houses in the village were destroyed.
(Reuters, 1/16/17)(SFC, 1/17/17, p.A3)
2017 Jan 16, The UN humanitarian aid official in Yemen said that the civilian death toll in the nearly two-year conflict has reached 10,000, with 40,000 others wounded.
(AP, 1/16/17)
2017 Jan 16, Lawyers at a UN court urged Turkey to release Judge Aydin Sedaf Akay, who is being held in connection with July's coup attempt, saying his detention was delaying a Rwandan politician's conviction for genocide.
(Reuters, 1/17/17)
2017 Jan 16, Former Yugoslav army general Vlado Trifunovic (78) died in Serbia. His treason conviction by Serbia's wartime nationalist leadership became a symbol of the senselessness of the 1990s' Balkan conflict.
(AP, 1/17/17)
2017 Jan 17, Pres. Obama commuted the prison sentence of Chelsea Manning (29), who has served seven years of a 35-year sentence for disclosing hundreds of thousands of classified documents on US military and foreign policy. Manning was set to go free on May 17.
(SFC, 1/18/17, p.A1)
2017 Jan 17, Pres. Obama announced over 270 grants of clemency. Those pardoned included baseball sluggers Willie McCovey (79) and Duke Snyder (d.2011), who both pleaded guilty on July 20, 1995, to tax fraud.
(SFC, 1/18/17, p.A9)
2017 Jan 17, The US Office of Foreign Asset Control imposed sanctions against Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik, blocking access to his assets and banning any US national from doing business with him.
(Reuters, 1/18/17)
2017 Jan 17, In San Francisco the Golden State Warriors held a ground-breaking ceremony for their new Mission Bay $1 billion Chase Arena.
(SFC, 1/18/17, p.A1)
2017 Jan 17, In the SF Bay Area Gin Lu Shwe (70), a former Cupertino school board member, was reported missing. His body was found on Jan 25 in the foothills of Tulare County. Christopher Ellebracht (38), a one-time handyman for Shwe, was arrested on Jan 22.
(SFC, 1/31/17, p.C2)
2017 Jan 17, Brazilian police used rubber bullets and tear gas to break up a renewed clash between drug gangs in the Alcaçuz prison where 26 inmates were butchered by rivals in recent days.
(Reuters, 1/17/17)
2017 Jan 17, Britain will quit the European Union's single market when it exits the bloc, PM Theresa May said, in a decisive speech that quashed speculation she would seek a compromise deal to stay inside the world's biggest trading bloc.
(Reuters, 1/17/17)
2017 Jan 17, British American Tobacco announced that will take over Reynolds American Inc. for $49 billion to create the world's largest publicly traded tobacco company. It would seek to capitalize on growing demand for electronic cigarettes in the US and traditional ones in developing countries. BAT already owned 42% of Reynolds.
(AP, 1/17/17)(Econ, 1/21/17, p.51)
2017 Jan 17, The European Court of Human Rights ruled that Russia's policy of refusing to allow Americans to adopt Russian children was discriminatory, a decision Moscow said it would appeal.
(AFP, 1/17/17)
2017 Jan 17, The EU said Lithuania can use EU funds to install surveillance systems on its border with Russia's militarized Kaliningrad exclave but not to build a fence.
(AFP, 1/17/17)
2017 Jan 17, Gambian Pres. Jammeh declared a state of emergency, after refusing to hand power to opposition leader Adama Barrow who won an election on Dec. 1.
(Reuters, 1/17/17)
2017 Jan 17, An Indian court sentenced 39 people to 10 years in prison each for buying and selling girls in Karnataka state, signaling a rare victory for prosecutors in a country where fewer than two in five trafficking cases ends in a conviction.
(Reuters, 1/18/17)
2017 Jan 17, In Iran five memorandums of understanding were signed at a ceremony attended by Syrian PM Emad Khamis and Iranian VP Eshaq Jahangiri in Tehran. Iran will be granted a license to become a mobile service operator in Syria under agreements to expand economic ties between the countries.
(Reuters, 1/17/17)
2017 Jan 17, In Iraq a car bomb blast in southern Baghdad killed at least seven people and wounded 20.
(Reuters, 1/17/17)
2017 Jan 17, Israeli troops shot dead a Palestinian who had tried to stab a soldier at a checkpoint in the occupied West Bank.
(Reuters, 1/17/17)
2017 Jan 17, In Ivory Coast a mutinous soldier was killed in Yamoussoukro, as fresh trouble erupted after troops took to the streets, firing shots in the air and terrifying residents.
(AP, 1/17/17)
2017 Jan 17, Lithuania signed an agreement with the United States formalizing the presence of US troops in the small Baltic country bordering Russia and Belarus.
(AP, 1/17/17)
2017 Jan 17, Malaysian, Australian and Chinese authorities ended today the deep-sea search for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 without any trace being found of the plane that vanished in 2014 with 239 people on board.
(Reuters, 1/17/17)
2017 Jan 17, In Mexico gunmen attacked the state prosecutor’s office in Cancun killing four people.
(SFC, 1/18/17, p.A2)
2017 Jan 17, Moldova's new Pres. Igor Dodon, who is visiting Russia on his first trip abroad, voiced hope for rebuilding "strategic" ties with Moscow and hinted that the ex-Soviet nation could eventually shelve a trade pact with the European Union.
(AP, 1/17/17)
2017 Jan 17, It was reported that Morocco has offered Gambia's President Yahya Jammeh asylum in return for accepting election defeat and stepping down.
(AFP, 1/17/17)
2017 Jan 17, A Nigerian Air Force fighter jet on a mission against Boko Haram extremists mistakenly bombed a refugee camp, killing at least 76 refugees and wounding more than 100 in northeast Rann. Estimates later rose to as many as 236 people killed in the botched air strike.
(AP, 1/17/17)(Reuters, 1/18/17)(AFP, 1/21/17)
2017 Jan 17, Senior Romanian intelligence official Florin Coldea announced his retirement after a businessman indicted on wide-ranging corruption charges claimed he had a close relationship with the officer.
(AP, 1/17/17)
2017 Jan 17, In in Davos, Switzerland, the annual World Economic Forum opened. Chinese President Xi Jinping gave the opening address urging the world to "say no to protectionism" and warning that "no one will emerge as a winner in a trade war.
(AP, 1/17/17)
2017 Jan 17, In Syria Russian warplanes carried out air strikes on Islamic State targets south of al-Bab in coordination with Turkey.
(Reuters, 1/18/17)
2017 Jan 17, Thailand's Eastern Special Development Zone (ESDZ), a special economic zone, was setup for three provinces in eastern Thailand. Collectively, these provinces occupy an area of 13,266 square km (5,122 sq mi).
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Economic_Corridor)
2017 Jan 17, Ukraine said it has filed a case against Russia at the United Nations' highest court, accusing Moscow of illegally annexing Crimea and illicitly funding separatist rebel groups in eastern Ukraine. Kiev also is seeking compensation for deadly incidents including the 2014 shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17.
(AP, 1/17/17)
2017 Jan 17, The UN said Somalia risks slipping back into famine, as worsening drought has left millions without food, water or healthcare in a country crippled by decades of war.
(Reuters, 1/17/17)
2017 Jan 17, The Vatican demanded that the leaders of the Knights of Malta, a worldwide Catholic chivalric and charity group, cooperate with an inquiry into alleged irregularities ordered by Pope Francis.
(Reuters, 1/17/17)
2017 Jan 17, In Yemen a rocket fired by Houthi rebels killed six civilians, including women and children, when it hit an area in southern Taiz province.
(AP, 1/17/17)
2017 Jan 18, The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that 2016 was the hottest of modern times -- the third year in a row to break records.
(AFP, 1/18/17)
2017 Jan 18, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, President-elect Donald Trump's choice to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, said he would honor the Congressional intent and timetables of the U.S. Renewable Fuel Standard.
(Reuters, 1/18/17)
2017 Jan 18, In northern Afghanistan Taliban bomb maker Kamal Khan inadvertently killed himself and his four sons overnight, while building a cache of roadside bombs in Sar-i-Pul province.
(AP, 1/18/17)
2017 Jan 18, Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik said he was proud of being blacklisted by the United States for obstructing a 1995 peace agreement and called on Bosnian authorities to declare the US ambassador persona non grata in retaliation.
(Reuters, 1/18/17)
2017 Jan 18, In Brazil a heavily armed military police force entered the Alcacuz prison without violence. Authorities said they were transferring 220 inmates to other prisons to avoid more clashes.
(AP, 1/19/17)
2017 Jan 18, The first direct freight train service from China to Britain arrived in London, another leg in Beijing's plans for closer trade ties with Europe along a modern-day Silk Road.
(AP, 1/18/17)
2017 Jan 18, The International Monetary Fund said that Egypt is making progress with its economic reform program, although it will still take time to improve living standards in a poor country beset with rocketing inflation.
(AP, 1/18/17)
2017 Jan 18, A court in southwest France gave the go-ahead for the extradition of Stephen Carruthers (43), a suspected pedophile arrested on Jan 8, who is one of Britain's most wanted fugitives.
(AFP, 1/18/17)
2017 Jan 18, Gambia's parliament has passed a resolution to allow President Yahya Jammeh to stay in office for another three months, as the veteran leader showed no sign of preparing to hand over power and Senegal moved soldiers towards the border.
(Reuters, 1/18/17)
2017 Jan 18, Iraqi commanders said their forces have retaken control of east Mosul from the Islamic State group, three months after a huge offensive against the jihadist bastion was launched.
(AFP, 1/18/17)
2017 Jan 18, In Israel demolitions in the Arab Israeli village of in Umm al-Heiran, that activists say has been targeted by racist policies, sparked violence in which a policeman and his alleged attacker were killed.
(AFP, 1/18/17)
2017 Jan 18, Israeli nuclear whistle-blower Mordechai Vanunu was convicted of violating the terms of his release, more than a decade after completing an 18-year jail term. Vanunu was convicted of meeting with two US nationals in Jerusalem in 2013 without having permission to do so, and will be sentenced in two months.
(AP, 1/23/17)
2017 Jan 18, In Italy four powerful earthquakes, magnitude 5.1-5.7, reverberated through the Amatrice area still recovering from deadly tremors last year. More than 130,000 homes were without electricity.
(AFP, 1/18/17)
2017 Jan 18, In Italy the four-star spa Hotel Rigopiano in the central Abruzzo region was struck by an avalanche following earthquakes in the region. At least 30 people were missing, including at least two children. By Jan 21 rescuers found 11 survivors, but 24 people remained missing. By Jan 26 the final death toll reached 29 as all remaining bodies were pulled from the rubble.
(AP, 1/19/17)(AFP, 1/20/17)(Reuters, 1/22/17)(SFC, 1/27/17, p.A2)
2017 Jan 18, Ivory Coast's main port of Abidjan, was shut down when angry security forces began firing into the air during protests by mutinous troops.
(AFP, 1/18/17)
2017 Jan 18, In Libya US B-2 bombers carried out air strikes against Islamic State camps outside of Sirte. More than 80 Islamic State fighters were reported killed.
(Reuters, 1/19/17)
2017 Jan 18, It was reported that nearly a million people are hungry and in urgent need of food aid in the Madagascar area, according to the World Food Program (WFP).
(AFP, 1/18/17)
2017 Jan 18, In Mali at least 60 people including five suicide bombers were killed when a vehicle packed with explosives detonated inside a military camp in Gao.
(Reuters, 1/18/17)(SFC, 1/19/17, p.A2)
2017 Jan 18, A new Mexican poll by Grupo Reforma showed President Enrique Pena Nieto's approval rating has fallen to a historic low of 12 percent.
(AP, 1/18/17)
2017 Jan 18, In northern Mexico a teenage student (15) suffering from depression opened fire at an American school in Nuevo Leon state, injuring three students and a teacher then shooting himself in the chin in what state officials called an unprecedented attack that was caught on video. The shooter died at a hospital.
(Reuters, 1/18/17)(SFC, 1/19/17, p.A2)
2017 Jan 18, In Morocco Sheikh Sidi Hamza al-Qadiri al-Boutchichi (95), head of one of the country’s biggest Sufi orders, died in Oujda.
(AFP, 1/18/17)
2017 Jan 18, Puerto Rico police Chief Michelle Hernandez ordered police to stop releasing information including the location of a crime, a suspect's criminal background and the amount of drugs seized or money stolen in certain cases.
(AP, 1/19/17)
2017 Jan 18, Russian authorities said they have extended US intelligence leaker Edward Snowden's Russian residency permit by three years.
(AFP, 1/18/17)
2017 Jan 18, Senegal presented a draft resolution to the UN Security Council seeking support for ECOWAS efforts to press Gambian leader Yahya Jammeh to step down. At least 26,000 people have fled Gambia into Senegal fearing President Yahya Jammeh's decision to stay in power.
(AFP, 1/18/17)(AP, 1/18/17)
2017 Jan 18, Syria and Russia signed an agreement allowing Russia to significantly expand its naval facility in the Mediterranean port of Tartus and keep using it for 49 years.
(AP, 1/20/17)
2017 Jan 18, Turkey's parliament embarked on a second round of voting on a contentious package of constitutional amendments that would give President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's office new executive powers.
(AP, 1/18/17)
2017 Jan 18, In Venezuela Eliannys Vivas (9) died of diphtheria. Her death and a wider outbreak of diphtheria, showed how vulnerable the country is to health risks amid a major economic crisis that has sparked shortages of basic medicines and vaccines.
(Reuters, 2/10/17)
2017 Jan 19, The Obama administration passed the Organic Livestock and Poultry Practices rule that required an increase in the amount of space required for livestock and poultry, provide more access to the outdoors and outlaw the use of subtherapeutic antibiotics. On Dec. 15 the Trump administration scrapped the rule.
(SSFC, 12/24/17, p.L9)
2017 Jan 19, It was revealed that Steven Mnuchin, Pres.-elect Donald Trump’s pick to be Treasury secretary, failed to disclose nearly $100 million of his assets on Senate Finance Committee disclosure documents and failed to mention his role as a director of an investment fund located in a tax haven.
(SFC, 1/20/17, p.A7)
2017 Jan 19, The documentary film “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power" premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. It was directed by Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk and starred Al Gore, Barack Obama and Donald Trump.
(http://tinyurl.com/mwd79dv)(Econ, 1/28/17, p.74)
2017 Jan 19, Miguel Ferrer (b.1955), film and TV star, died at his home in Santa Monica. His films included “Robocop" (1987). He was currently playing Assistant Director Owen Granger on the CBS series “NCIS: Los Angeles." Miguel was the son of Academy Award winner Jose Ferrer (1912-1992).
(SSFC, 1/22/17, p.C15)
2017 Jan 19, In Hawaii four men and two women moved into a man-made dome for the next eight months as part of a human behavior study that could help NASA plan for sending astronauts on a mission to Mars.
(SFC, 1/20/17, p.A7)
2017 Jan 19, Belgian media said a local court has handed out prison sentences of up to eight years for a group of 14 people convicted of falsifying documents used by Islamist militants in attacks in Paris and Brussels.
(Reuters, 1/19/17)
2017 Jan 19, In Brazil images on Globo television showed prisoners at the Alcacuz Penitentiary in the yard, throwing rocks at each other and setting up barriers. Injured inmates could be seen being carried away.
(AP, 1/19/17)
2017 Jan 19, In Brazil a plane crash killed Supreme Court Justice Teori Zavascki just weeks before he was scheduled to issue a ruling that could have revealed accusations against politicians in several Latin American countries. Four others were also killed. The crash was likely to delay, though not derail, the "Car Wash" investigation, the largest corruption investigation in Brazil's history.
(AP, 1/20/17)(Econ, 1/28/17, p.30)
2017 Jan 19, In Bulgaria Rumen Radev took his oath of office as president, preparing the way for him to formally take over the post from Rosen Plevneliev on Jan 22.
(AP, 1/19/17)
2017 Jan 19, The European Union said it has given Zambia about $69 million to expand electricity supply in the continent's second biggest copper producer, which faces a power deficit that has hit mining and agriculture.
(Reuters, 1/19/17)
2017 Jan 19, In France it was announced that aircraft-engine company Safran has agreed to buy seat and cabin manufacturer Zodiac Aerospace in a deal worth 8.5 billion euros ($9.1 billion).
(AP, 1/19/17)
2017 Jan 19, Gambian president-elect Adama Barrow was sworn in at the country's embassy in Senegal, as African troops massed at the border to force incumbent Yahya Jammeh to quit after his election defeat.
(AFP, 1/19/17)
2017 Jan 19, German lawmakers legalized cannabis use for medical purposes for people with serious diseases such as certain cancers and multiple sclerosis.
(AFP, 1/19/17)
2017 Jan 19, In northern India a truck loaded with sand collided with a school bus early today, killing at least 24 young children in Uttar Pradesh state.
(AP, 1/19/17)
2017 Jan 19, In Iran at least 20 firefighters were reported killed when the 17-storey Plasco building, Tehran’s oldest high-rise, collapsed following a fire. Altogether at least 30 people were killed. Habibollah Elghanian, a prominent Iranian-Jewish businessman, had built the structure. He was arrested for ties to Israel and sentenced to death and executed after the 1979 Islamic revolution. On Jan 27 the final death toll was put at 26 including 16 firefighters.
(AFP, 1/19/17)(Reuters, 1/20/17)(SFC, 1/20/17, p.A6)(SSFC, 1/22/17, p.A4)(AP, 1/27/17)
2017 Jan 19, University lecturers in Kenya began a strike over pay, joining doctors who walked out in early December, crippling the country's healthcare.
(AFP, 1/19/17)
2017 Jan 19, A Kosovo court sentenced seven Albanian citizens on charges of terror, participating in terror groups and recruiting for Islamic terror groups in Syria. The defendants received prison sentences ranging from 2 ½ to 4 ½ years.
(AP, 1/19/17)
2017 Jan 19, Mexican drug kingpin Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman was extradited to the US on charges he ran the world's largest drug-trafficking organization during a decades-long criminal career.
(Reuters, 1/20/17)
2017 Jan 19, Police in southern Mexico found the dismembered bodies of a 2-year-old toddler and a woman in plastic bags in Chilpancingo, Guerrero state. Earlier this week the severed heads of six men were found in a plastic bag on the roof of a sport utility vehicle in Chilpancingo, with six headless bodies inside.
(AP, 1/20/17)
2017 Jan 19, In Pakistan hardline religious protesters of Tehreek Labaik Ya Rasool Allah threw stones at supporters of five missing activists in Karachi, and demanded that police charge the missing men under a blasphemy law that carries a mandatory death sentence.
(Reuters, 1/19/17)
2017 Jan 19, International aid workers opened a new desalination plant in the Gaza Strip, bringing some relief to a territory where 97 percent of the water is undrinkable. The plant will initially produce 6,000 cubic meters of water a day. In all, the population uses 150,000 cubic meters a day, most of it from a depleted coastal aquifer.
(AP, 1/19/17)
2017 Jan 19, Poland's interior minister defended a decision to post photos of some anti-government protesters to illustrate the country's "zero tolerance for breaches of the law," but opposition lawmakers called it an act of "political revenge" intended to intimidate government critics.
(AP, 1/19/17)
2017 Jan 19, Puerto Rico's governor reversed an order by the US territory's police chief that sought to greatly limit the release of public information about criminal cases.
(AP, 1/19/17)
2017 Jan 19, In Saudi Arabia six British nationals were reported killed and several more injured in a road crash as they traveled to Medina.
(AFP, 1/19/17)
2017 Jan 19, Slovenia said it will allow hunters to kill 93 brown bears and up to 8 wolves this year in order to keep those animal populations from growing. Last year hunters killed 83 bears and 4 wolves.
(AP, 1/19/17)
2017 Jan 19, At Davos, Switzerland, PM Theresa May unveiled her vision for Britain after Brexit, describing its future role as a defender of free trade and globalization in a speech intended to ease concerns among the global business elite.
(Reuters, 1/19/17)
2017 Jan 19, In Syria shells slammed into the city of Aleppo, killing two people as thousands of government supporters gathered in a main square nearby to celebrate last month's capture of the city's eastern neighborhoods from rebels. The Islamic State killed 12 people in Palmyra by shooting and beheading them.
(AP, 1/19/17)(SFC, 1/20/17, p.A2)
2017 Jan 19, In Syria US warplanes bombed an al-Qaida training camp killing more than 100 militants in Idlib province.
(SFC, 1/21/17, p.A6)
2017 Jan 19, Turkey’s government extended emergency for another three months.
(Econ, 1/21/17, p.41)
2017 Jan 20, President Obama signed his final bill. It codified the Presidential Innovation Fellows Program. The program, which he created in 2012. Its mandate: bring top tech talent to Washington to address a range of issues facing federal government programs, from transparency to technology education.
(CSM, 1/21/17)
2017 Jan 20, Donald Trump was sworn in as the 45th president of the United States, ushering in a new political era that has been cheered and feared in equal measure. Washington DC was rocked by violent protests against the businessman-turned-politician, with black-clad anti-establishment activists smashing windows, setting vehicles on fire and fighting with riot police who responded with stun grenades.
(AFP, 1/20/17)(Reuters, 1/21/17)
2017 Jan 20, In Washington, DC, at least six journalists were charged with felony rioting after they were arrested while covering violent protests that took place just blocks from the inauguration parade of Pres. Trump. The journalists were among 230 people detained in the anti-Trump protests.
(SFC, 1/26/17, p.A6)
2017 Jan 20, As Pres. Trump delivered his inauguration speech Michael Flynn, Trump’s national security advisor, sent a text to a business partner that a joint plan between Russia and Flynn’s business allies to build nuclear power plants in the Middle East was “good to go."
(SFC, 12/7/17, p.A5)
2017 Jan 20, John Albers (17) was shot and killed by police as he backed a minivan out of his family's garage. Officers were responding to a report that he was making suicidal comments on social media. Albers was shot 13 times. In 2019 his mother reached a $2.3 million settlement with the city of Overland Park.
(http://tinyurl.com/ybsrqdh7)(SFC, 1/16/19, p.A5)
2017 Jan 20, In Louisiana Sylvester Holt shot and killed Simone Veal (32) and police Officer Michael Louviere (26), who had tried to intervene. Holt then shot and killed himself following an hours-long standoff on a New Orleans bridge. Holt had been romantically involved with Veal.
(SFC, 1/21/17, p.A17)(SSFC, 1/22/17, p.A10)
2017 Jan 20, The Michigan School Reform Office said that 38 state schools are failing and subject to closure.
(SFC, 1/21/17, p.A7)
2017 Jan 20, Montana reached a $25 million settlement with more than 1,000 victims of asbestos-related disease over claims that health officials failed to bring attention to the hazards of a contaminated mine in Libby. The mine was closed in 1999.
(SFC, 1/21/17, p.A7)
2017 Jan 20, Sheldon Adelson’s Las Vegas Sands Corp. agreed to pay $6.96 million to US authorities to end a more than five year corrupt practices investigation of the firms’ former relationship with a consultant in China and Macao. This was in addition to a $9 million payment made in April to settle a US SEC investigation that found some payments to the consultant were not properly authorized or documented.
(SFC, 1/21/17, p.A8)
2017 Jan 20, In northern Afghanistan two people, including a police commander, were killed in an explosion after a sticky bomb was attached to the commander's car in Balkh province. Taliban insurgents stormed a police checkpoint in the northeastern province of Kapisa, killing three policemen. A day later Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid, in a text to journalists, accused government forces of killing six civilians in a January 20 attack in Kapisa.
(AP, 1/20/17)(AP, 1/21/17)
2017 Jan 20, In Australia a man (26) deliberately drove into pedestrians, killing four and injuring more than 20, in the center Melbourne. Police eventually rammed the car and shot the driver in the arm, before dragging him from the vehicle and arresting him. Police said the incident was not terrorism-related.
(Reuters, 1/20/17)
2017 Jan 20, In central China at least 12 people were killed after a hotel was buried in a landslide in Nanzhang county, Hunan province.
(AP, 1/20/17)(SFC, 1/23/17, p.A2)
2017 Jan 20, Gambia's army chief General Ousman Badjie said that he recognized new President Adama Barrow as the new commander-and-chief and would not fight a regional force poised to depose Yahya Jammeh, who has refused to step down.
(Reuters, 1/20/17)
2017 Jan 20, Germany said its diplomats have helped broker a ceasefire between the Syrian government and rebel forces in a mountainous valley near Damascus, a deal designed to restore water supplies to the capital.
(Reuters, 1/20/17)
2017 Jan 20, In Iraq the Islamic State blew up a landmark hotel in western Mosul in an apparent attempt to prevent advancing Iraqi forces from using it as a base in their offensive to capture the city.
(Reuters, 1/22/17)
2017 Jan 20, In northern Italy a bus carrying Hungarian students home from a school ski trip to France slammed into a highway barrier and burst into flames just before midnight, killing at least 16 people. 39 others survived, but some were seriously injured.
(AP, 1/21/17)
2017 Jan 20, Kosovo’s Deputy PM Hajredin Kuci said that the government wanted to modernize its property system and foster greater equality and prosperity in the Balkan country. This will, for the first time, clearly define formal ownership and encourage women to inherit and own land in their own right.
(Reuters, 1/20/17)
2017 Jan 20, Mexico’s national Immigration Institute said it put 91 Cubans on a federal police airplane and flew them back to Cuba after the Cuban government accepted their return.
(SFC, 1/21/17, p.A2)
2017 Jan 20, Police in Peru arrested former transport official Edwn Luyo as part of a massive graft scandal implicating Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht and several regional governments. Luyo headed the committee that awarded Odebrecht a contract in 2009 to build Lima's elevated metro.
(AP, 1/21/17)
2017 Jan 20, A South Korean court said that the government had broken the law during the 1960s and 1970s by detaining prostitutes who catered to US soldiers and by forcing them to undergo treatment for venereal diseases. The court ordered the government to pay 57 plaintiffs $4,240 each in compensation for physical and psychological damage.
(SFC, 1/21/17, p.A4)
2017 Jan 20, The Syrian government and experts said Islamic State militants have destroyed parts of the second-century Roman amphitheater and an iconic monument known as the Tetrapylon in the historic town of Palmyra.
(AP, 1/20/17)
2017 Jan 20, In northern Syria the Islamic State group killed five Turkish soldiers and wounded nine others in a car bomb attack in the village of Sulfaniyeh, near Al-Bab.
(AP, 1/20/17)
2017 Jan 20, In Turkey rocket attacks hit the Istanbul police headquarters and the offices of the ruling AK Party. There were no reports of casualties.
(Reuters, 1/22/17)
2017 Jan 20, UN human rights envoy Yanghee Lee ended a 12-day visit to Myanmar with a bleak evaluation of the government's ability to deal with the problems facing the country's ethnic minorities. She said the situation there was deteriorating.
(AP, 1/20/17)
2017 Jan 20, In Yemen a suspected US drone strike killed a local military instructor for Al-Qaeda in southern al-Bayda province.
(AFP, 1/22/17)
2017 Jan 21, Large crowds of women, many wearing bright pink knit hats, poured into downtown Washington to march in opposition to US President Donald Trump. Legions of women flooded parks, streets and city squares from Sydney to Paris to Philadelphia, marching in solidarity as a show of empowerment and a stand against Donald Trump.
(Reuters, 1/21/17)(AP, 1/21/17)
2017 Jan 21, William Norris (89), a retired judge of the Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals (1980-1997), died in Los Angeles. His 1988 ruling on gays in the military paved the way for gay rights.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Albert_Norris)(SFC, 2/2/17, p.D2)
2017 Jan 21, In Mississippi four people were killed when a tornado hit the Hattiesburg area.
(SSFC, 1/22/17, p.A7)
2017 Jan 21, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said that he is requiring health insurance companies to cover medically necessary abortions and most forms of contraception at no cost to women.
(SSFC, 1/22/17, p.A7)
2017 Jan 21, In northeastern Brazil military police took control of Alcacuz prison after fighting between rival gangs had left 26 inmates dead, the latest in a spate of violence in the country's penitentiaries.
(AP, 1/21/17)
2017 Jan 21, Representatives of Libya's neighbors meeting in Cairo warned the North African nation's main rival factions against seeking to settle their differences through military force, as Egypt announced that efforts were underway to bring their leaders together to chart a "joint vision" for the country. The representatives came from Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Algeria, Chad, Niger and Tunisia as well as the UN envoy to Libya.
(AP, 1/21/17)
2017 Jan 21, In Egypt eight people were killed after a shell landed on a house in southern Rafah, in the north of Sinai.
(Reuters, 1/21/17)
2017 Jan 21, Gambia’s defeated leader Yahya Jammeh announced that he has decided to relinquish power.
(SFC, 1/21/17, p.A4)
2017 Jan 21, In India a train crash late today killed 39 passengers in Andhra Pradesh state.
(AFP, 1/22/17)
2017 Jan 21, Authorities in the Netherlands and Spain arrested five male and two female suspects, all Dutch nationals, over the last 245 hours over the robbery of $72 million in jewelry, one the world's biggest ever heists, from Amsterdam's airport in 2005.
(AFP, 1/21/17)
2017 Jan 21, In Pakistan a bomb exploded in a market in Parachinar, the capital of the Kurram tribal region, killing at least 24 people and wounding at least 50. The Taliban claimed responsibility.
(AP, 1/21/17)(AFP, 1/22/17)
2017 Jan 21, A group of Russian hackers claimed to have shut down the website of the African Cup of Nations soccer tournament in a protest at organizers holding it in Gabon, where Pres. Ali Bongo Ondimba retained power in disputed elections last year.
(AP, 1/21/17)
2017 Jan 21, Russian security forces in Dagestan tracked down and killed two suspected militants in the village of Vperyod, Kizlyar region.
(AP, 1/21/17)
2017 Jan 21, Two Saudi men blew themselves up during a gunbattle with security forces in Jeddah. One man was later identified as Khaled al-Serwani, linked to an attack in 2015 that killed a worshipper at a Shi'ite mosque in Najan. The 2nd man, Nadi al-Medhiani, had served time in prison after fighting abroad and had ties to a militant suspected of involvement in attacks claimed by Islamic State.
(Reuters, 1/24/17)
2017 Jan 21, South Korean prosecutors arrested President Park Geun-hye's culture minister and her former top presidential adviser over allegations that they blacklisted artists critical of the government. Culture Minister Cho Yoon-sun and ex-presidential chief of staff Kim Ki-choon had allegedly drawn up a list of some 9,500 artists and cultural figures to be excluded from government funding programs.
(AP, 1/21/17)(Econ, 1/28/17, p.34)
2017 Jan 21, Spanish police said they have arrested 16 people, including Dutch, Spanish, Colombian, Brazilian, Belgian, Chilean and Moroccan citizens, on suspicion of forming a criminal organization, and trafficking in arms and drugs.
(AP, 1/21/17)
2017 Jan 21, In Syria a car bomb blast killed at least seven civilians at the Rukban camp for displaced Syrians by the border with Jordan.
(AFP, 1/21/17)(SSFC, 1/22/17, p.A4)
2017 Jan 21, In Syria six Russian warplanes carried out airstrikes on Islamic State targets in Syrian province of Deir ez-Zor.
(Reuters, 1/21/17)
2017 Jan 21, Turkey parliament adopted a block of constitutional amendments intended to cement Pres. Erdogan’s grip over the country.
(Econ, 2/4/17, p.46)
2017 Jan 21, Turkish broadcaster Haberturk said prosecutors have issued arrest warrants for more than 400 people, including soldiers and security officers, in 48 provinces across the country following July's failed coup. Zulfukar Sukru Kanberoglu of the TMSF fund was one of 367 people dismissed from state institutions under the latest four decrees, which also reinstated 124 civil servants.
(Reuters, 1/21/17)(Reuters, 1/23/17)
2017 Jan 21, In Yemen two suspected US drone strikes in the al-Soumaa district of killed Abu Anis al-Abi, an al-Qaida area field commander, and two others, who were riding a motorcycle.
(AFP, 1/22/17)(SFC, 1/23/17, p.A2)
2017 Jan 22, In Florida Mark Baumer (33) was killed on Highway 90 while walking barefoot across the US to raise awareness about climate change.
(SFC, 1/24/17, p.A5)
2017 Jan 22, James Stephen Boggs (b.1955), artist and trickster, died in Tampa, Fla. He is best known for his hand-drawn depictions of banknotes.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._S._G._Boggs)(Econ, 2/4/17, p.78)
2017 Jan 22, In Georgia (US) 14 people died in weekend tornadoes and thunderstorms, with seven dying in Cook County in the southern part of the state.
(Reuters, 1/23/17)
2017 Jan 22, The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey police said they have arrested Alesandel Rodriguez of New Jersey for avoiding tolls nearly 900 times owing unpaid fees of more than $56,000. An investigation found some 888 violations.
(SFC, 1/23/17, p.A5)
2017 Jan 22, In Texas one person was killed and five others injured after two men robbed a jewelry store in San Antonio. One robber was wounded and the 2nd was arrested later that night.
(SFC, 1/23/17, p.A5)
2017 Jan 22, The documentary film “Plastic China" premiered at the Utah Sundance Film Festival. Director Jiu-liang Wang captured a Chinese countryside covered almost entirely in imported plastic.
(http://tinyurl.com/yc93w8of)
2017 Jan 22, China’s state planner ordered the closure of 111 golf courses, after a multi-year campaign to tackle illegal development in the sector. A further 18 golf courses have been ordered to return illegally occupied land, and 47 have been told to stop construction.
(Reuters, 1/22/17)
2017 Jan 22, Equatorial Guinea's opposition denounced the government's decision to welcome exiled Gambian President Yahya Jammeh, who flew to the Central African nation over the weekend after 22 years in power. A special adviser to Gambia’s Pres. Barrow accused Jammeh of plundering state coffers for $11 million and shipping out luxury vehicles by cargo plane prior to his departure.
(AP, 1/23/17)(Econ, 1/28/17, p.41)
2017 Jan 22, Egypt's National Defense Council extended the military's participation in a Saudi-led operation in Yemen. It did not specify how long the extension would be for.
(Reuters, 1/22/17)
2017 Jan 22, French left-wing voters cast ballots in a nationwide presidential primary aimed at producing a Socialist candidate strong enough to confront formidable conservative and nationalist rivals in the April-May general election.
(AP, 1/22/17)
2017 Jan 22, In Gambia West African troops were seen approaching the capital, Banjul, as they sought to secure the country and allow new President Adama Barrow to take office. Dictator Yahya Jammeh fled Gambia overnight en route to Equatorial Guinea as the regional force was poised to remove him.
(Reuters, 1/22/17)(Econ, 1/28/17, p.41)
2017 Jan 22, In Germany the agriculture ministers of the G20 leading economies said greater global efforts should be taken to safeguard precious world water supplies to secure food production.
(Reuters, 1/22/17)
2017 Jan 22, In India lawmakers in Tamil Nadu state passed an emergency order allowing bull-taming festivals (Jallikattu) to resume after a court ban on the traditional events led to mass protests. The Supreme Court had banned Jallikattu in 2014 and upheld the ban earlier this month.
(Reuters, 1/23/17)(Econ, 1/28/17, p.36)
2017 Jan 22, In northeastern India rebels ambushed a patrol vehicle in Assam state, killing two paramilitary soldiers. An ongoing government counterattack has killed several rebels. Rebels participating in the attack included the United Liberation Front of Assam and groups from neighboring Manipur state.
(AP, 1/22/17)
2017 Jan 22, An Iranian appeals court confirmed a five-year jail sentence for British-Iranian aid worker Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe on security charges. She works for the Thomson Reuters Foundation, a London-based charity that is independent of Thomson Reuters and operates independently of Reuters News.
(Reuters, 1/22/17)
2017 Jan 22, Iraqi forces retook two areas from the Islamic State group in Mosul, sealing their control of the east bank three months into an offensive to reclaim the city. Army Col. Sabhan Hasan al-Jubouri died in fighting on the eastern bank.
(AFP, 1/22/17)(Reuters, 1/22/17)
2017 Jan 22, In Israel the municipality of Jerusalem granted final approval for the construction of hundreds of new homes in east Jerusalem, while a hard-line Cabinet minister pushed the government to annex a major West Bank settlement as emboldened Israeli nationalists welcomed the presidency of Donald Trump.
(AP, 1/22/17)
2017 Jan 22, Masaya Nakamura (91), the "Father of Pac-Man," died in Japan. He founded Namco, part of Bandai Namco, the Japanese video game company behind the hit creature-gobbling game in 1955. Pac-Man, designed by Namco engineer and video game maker Toru Iwatani, went on sale in 1980, at a time when there were few rival games, such as Space Invaders.
(AP, 1/30/17)
2017 Jan 22, In Romania thousands marched through Bucharest and other cities to protest a government proposal to pardon thousands of prisoners which critics say could reverse the anti-corruption fight.
(AP, 1/22/17)
2017 Jan 22, Police in Spain said that 75 people have been arrested and more than 3,500 stolen artifacts and pieces of art seized in a joint operation with 17 other European countries that dismantled an int’l. cultural goods trafficking ring.
(SFC, 1/23/17, p.A2)
2017 Jan 22, In Sweden teenager and two men in their 20s were arrested in the city of Uppsala, after police received tips about a rape and live streaming in a closed Facebook group from users.
(AP, 1/24/17)
2017 Jan 22, In Syria US-led coalition jets conducted 14 air strikes near Deir al-Zour.
(Reuters, 1/23/17)
2017 Jan 22, In Taiwan thousands of military personnel, teachers, police and civil servants protested a plan to reform the pension system outside of the Presidential Office in Taipei, as a national conference to discuss reform was held in the Office. Pensions for the armed forces wee expected to go bust in 2020; for private sector workers in 2027; for teachers in 2030; and for civil servants in 2021.
(Reuters, 1/22/17)(Econ 5/20/17, p.34) ,
2017 Jan 22, Turkish authorities said they have captured two men believed to be among those responsible for rocket attacks on the Istanbul police headquarters and the offices of the ruling AK Party on Jan 20. One of the assailants was captured by police early today, while the other was shot dead later in the day in the northwestern province of Tekirdag. Police identified them as a members of the outlawed Revolutionary People's Liberation Army-Front (DHKP-C).
(Reuters, 1/22/17)
2017 Jan 22, In Yemen three suspected members of al Qaeda were killed by what local officials said they believed were two separate US drone strikes in the al-Soumaa district of southern al-Bayda province. Clashes killed at least 66 people over the last 24 hours, as pro-government forces pushed to oust rebels from a key stretch of coastline.
(Reuters, 1/22/17)(AFP, 1/22/17)
2017 Jan 23, US President Donald Trump withdrew the US from the Trans Pacific partnership.
(Reuters, 1/24/17)(SFC, 1/24/17, p.A5)
2017 Jan 23, US President Donald Trump's administration asked the Environmental Protection Agency to temporarily halt all contracts, grants and interagency agreements pending a review. Trump also signed an executive order temporarily halting all government hiring outside the military.
(Reuters, 1/24/17)
2017 Jan 23, President Donald Trump signed an executive action reinstating the so-called Mexico City Policy, which bars international non-governmental organizations that perform or promote abortions from receiving US government funding.
(www.cnn.com/2017/01/23/politics/trump-mexico-city-policy/index.html)
2017 Jan 23, Bobby Freeman (b.1940), San Francisco’s first rock ’n’ roll teen star, died at his home in Daly City. His 1958 song “Do You Want to Dance" reached No. 5 on the Billboard singles chart. The song became known as “Do You Wanna Dance" and was performed by a number of other musicians including the Beach Boys.
(SFC, 2/15/17, p.D4)
2017 Jan 23, South Dakota Rep. Mathew Wollman (R) resigned after admitting that he had sexual contact with two interns. He said both interns were over 21 and that the sex was consensual.
(SFC, 1/24/17, p.A5)
2017 Jan 23, London's mayor issued a "very high" air pollution alert for the first time, as cold, windless weather allowed emissions across the whole of southeast England to build up over the weekend.
(AP, 1/23/17)
2017 Jan 23, US-based Liberty Media, controlled by billionaire John Malone, closed its $8 billion deal to acquire Formula One. Former boss Bernie Ecclestone was named “chairman emeritus."
(Econ, 1/28/17, p.54)
2017 Jan 23, In China Xu Xiang, an investor who pumped up stocks, was found guilty of market manipulation. He was sentenced to five-and-a-half years in jail and fined $1.6 billion, a record in China for economic crimes.
(Econ, 2/18/17, p.38)
2017 Jan 23, The bodies of 10 people believed to be Indonesian migrants were found washed ashore in Malaysia not far from a capsized boat. 2 Indonesians were rescued.
(AP, 1/23/17)
2017 Jan 23, Iraq's PM Haider al-Abadi ordered an investigation into violations of human rights and other abuses purportedly committed by government troops and paramilitary forces battling the Islamic State group to retake the city of Mosul.
(AP, 1/23/17)
2017 Jan 23, In Kazakhstan indirect 2-day talks began in Astana between the Syrian government and rebels. The talks were hosted by Russia, Turkey and Iran.
(Reuters, 1/23/17)(Econ, 1/28/17, p.39)
2017 Jan 23, In Northern Ireland Sinn Fein named Michelle O'Neill to succeed Martin McGuinness and lead the Irish nationalist party into elections in March, marking a shift towards a generation not directly involved in decades of conflict.
(Reuters, 1/23/17)
2017 Jan 23, Lawmakers in the Krakow region of Poland, considered the area with the dirtiest air in the country, approved an anti-smog plan that calls for replacing the most polluting heating stoves by 2023.
(AFP, 1/24/17)
2017 Jan 23, Spanish police said a pan-European crackdown on illegal arms trafficking has resulted in 664 guns being seized and 245 people with arrests in Belgium, Britain, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Finland, Greece, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania and Sweden.
(AP, 1/23/17)
2017 Jan 23, In Syria Russian jets pounded Islamic State in the eastern province of Deir al-Zor, seeking to thwart a full-blown assault by the militants against the last district in the region still held by the Damascus government.
(Reuters, 1/23/17)
2017 Jan 23, In Tanzania Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan asked Pres. John Magufuli to take action against the network of an exiled cleric he blames for last year's failed coup.
(AFP, 1/23/17)
2017 Jan 23, Uganda said it had returned dozens of former combatants of a Democratic Republic of Congo rebel group to a military camp after they tried to sneak back to their own country in disguise last week.
(Reuters, 1/23/17)
2017 Jan 23, Pope Francis blasted the "money stained with blood" and "evil power" wielded by Italian organized crime as he met the heads of the country's anti-mafia squad.
(AFP, 1/23/17)
2017 Jan 23, Venezuela's opposition parties launched a new round of protests aimed at forcing President Nicolas Maduro from power and ending 18 years of socialist rule, but they fell well short of the massive demonstrations of the past.
(Reuters, 1/23/17)
2017 Jan 23, In Yemen forces allied with the internationally-recognized government seized control of Mokha, a strategic Red Sea port after waging an assault against Shiite rebels. Emirati-led troops marched into Mokha port and set their sights on Hodeidah.
(AP, 1/23/17)(Econ, 4/8/17, p.42)
2017 Jan 24, Pres. Trump signed executive actions to accelerate the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipeline projects and to decree that American steel should be used for pipelines built in the United States. Trump invited Keystone builder TransCanada to resubmit its application to the State Department for a presidential permit to construct and operate the pipeline.
(Reuters, 1/24/17)(SFC, 1/25/17, p.A5)
2017 Jan 24, FBI Director James Comey said the Pres. Trump has asked him to stay on as head of the law enforcement agency.
(SFC, 1/25/17, p.A5)
2017 Jan 24, An unknown author wrote an FBI note about the bureau's investigation of National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, questioning whether the goal was "Truth/Admission" or "to get him to lie." This was the same day of Flynn's White House FBI interview. The note was only made public in late April, 2020.
(CBS News, 4/30/20)
2017 Jan 24, Michigan state environmental officials said Flint’s water system no longer has levels of lead exceeding the federal limit.
(SFC, 1/25/17, p.A5)
2017 Jan 24, Afghanistan’s attorney general ordered the arrest of nine employees of VP Rashid Dostum in connection with allegations of kidnapping and torturing a former ally.
(SFC, 1/25/17, p.A2)
2017 Jan 24, A top Bangladesh official said his country has begun planting one million palm trees nationwide to help prevent hundreds of people being killed by lightning strikes every year.
(AFP, 1/24/17)
2017 Jan 24, The UK Supreme Court ruled that PM Theresa May must give parliament a vote before she can formally start Britain's exit from the European Union, giving lawmakers who oppose her Brexit plans a shot at amending them.
(Reuters, 1/24/17)
2017 Jan 24, An Estonian defense official said his country is experimenting with the idea of cyberconscription, a move that gives draftees with tech skills the chance to work shoring up their military's electronic infrastructure.
(AP, 1/24/17)
2017 Jan 24, EU security commissioner Julian King says Europe faces a growing threat of cyber-attacks from criminals and those plotting to destabilize the 28-nation bloc politically.
(AFP, 1/24/17)
2017 Jan 24, Heavy pollution enveloping much of Europe prompted emergency measures across the continent.
(AFP, 1/24/17)
2017 Jan 24, French Interior Minister Bruno Le Roux said that his government has requested blocks for 834 websites and that 1,929 more be pulled from search engines' results as part of the fight against "child pornographic and terrorist content". He also said French authorities ordered the blockage or removal of more than 2,700 websites in 2016.
(AP, 1/24/17)
2017 Jan 24, The board of state-run Electricite de France voted to start the process of closing the two reactors at the 39-year-old Fessenheim plant, near the German border.
(AP, 1/24/17)
2017 Jan 24, Gambia's parliament revoked a state of emergency imposed last week by former President Yahya Jammeh shortly before he fled into exile, as the tiny West African country slowly recovered from its political crisis.
(Reuters, 1/24/17)
2017 Jan 24, At least 15 Haitian migrants drowned in the Turks & Caicos Islands after their small and crowded boat capsized near the British Caribbean territory. 69 people were on the boat.
(AP, 1/25/17)(AP, 1/27/17)
2017 Jan 24, Hong Kong said it would release the nine Singaporean armored vehicles it seized in November on their way home from military exercises in Taiwan, easing tensions between China and Singapore.
(Reuters, 1/24/17)
2017 Jan 24, Israel announced plans for 2,500 more settlement homes in the occupied West Bank, the second such declaration since US President Donald Trump took office signaling he would be less critical of such projects than his predecessor.
(Reuters, 1/24/17)
2017 Jan 24, A Jerusalem court reached a plea bargain with a former chief rabbi of Israel that will have him serve time for corruption. Yona Metzger will serve 3.5 years in prison and pay a $1.3 million fine.
(AP, 1/25/17)
2017 Jan 24, In central Italy a helicopter ferrying an injured skier off the slopes crashed into a mountainside and killed all six people aboard in the Abruzzo area.
(AP, 1/24/17)
2017 Jan 24, Japan successfully launched its first military communications satellite. The Kirameki-2 is designed to upgrade its network in the face of China's increasingly assertive maritime activity and North Korea's missile threat.
(AP, 1/24/17)
2017 Jan 24, In Kazakhstan Russia, Turkey and Iran backed a shaky truce between Syria's warring parties and agreed to monitor its compliance. On the ground rebels faced continued fighting on two fronts, which could undermine the deal.
(Reuters, 1/24/17)
2017 Jan 24, In Mozambique Turkish Pres. Recep Tayyip Erdogan called on leader Filipe Nyusi to take action against the exiled cleric he blames for last year's failed coup.
(AFP, 1/24/17)
2017 Jan 24, Pakistan successfully tested a new nuclear capable surface-to-surface missile that is able to deliver multiple warheads and evade radar detection.
(Reuters, 1/24/17)
2017 Jan 24, The Russian military says its bombers have struck Islamic State positions in the province of Deir el-Zour in the third such raid in four days.
(AP, 1/24/17)
2017 Jan 24, Saudi Arabia warned that the Shamoon computer virus, first reported in 2012, has returned with at least one major petrochemical company apparently affected. The original infection was blamed on Iran.
(SFC, 1/25/17, p.A2)
2017 Jan 24, In Somalia at least four soldiers were killed and five wounded when a roadside bomb that Islamist militant group al Shabaab said it planted exploded outside a military camp in Afgoye near Mogadishu.
(Reuters, 1/24/17)
2017 Jan 24, In northwest Syria heavy fighting erupted between the jihadist group Jabhat Fateh al-Sham and Free Syrian Army factions who were represented at the Astana talks.
(Reuters, 1/24/17)
2017 Jan 24, In Thailand Briton Tony Kenway was the victim of a gangland-style slaying in the resort town of Pattaya.
(AP, 9/28/17)
2017 Jan 24, Turkey said it would not hand over al-Bab to Syrian forces after driving out Islamic State. The Turkish-backed rebels are closer to doing so than the Syrian army, having already reached the town's outskirts.
(Reuters, 1/25/17)
2017 Jan 24, Uzbekistan’s Supreme Court said it has granted a mass amnesty to 39,748 convicted prisoners and detainees awaiting trial. The amnesty was passed by parliament last October and entered force this month.
(AFP, 1/24/17)
2017 Jan 24, Pope Francis demanded the obedience of the Grand Master of the Knights of Malta and his resignation. The next day Vatican said that it is taking over the embattled Knights of Malta after its leader Mathew Festing (67) defied Pope Francis in a dispute over condoms.
(SFC, 1/26/17, p.A2)(Econ, 3/18/17, p.63)
2017 Jan 25, President Donald Trump announced he would seek a probe into what he calls widespread voter fraud in the election that brought him to power, hammering away at allegations widely dismissed as baseless. Trump also ordered the Dept. of Homeland Security to allocate funds for building a wall along the Mexican border.
(AFP, 1/25/17)(SFC, 1/26/17, p.A1)
2017 Jan 25, It was reported that the Trump administration is mandating that any studies or data from scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) undergo review by political appointees before they can be released to the public.
(SFC, 1/26/17, p.A4)
2017 Jan 25, Mary Tyler Moore (80), star of 1970s sitcom "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," died at her home in Greenwich, Conn.
(SFC, 1/26/17, p.A1)
2017 Jan 25, The San Francisco Board of Education voted to remove Columbus Day from the academic calendar and replace it with Indigenous People’s Day.
(SFC, 1/27/17, p.D2)
2017 Jan 25, The Dow Jones Industrial Average passed 20,000 for the first time.
(Econ, 1/28/17, p.61)
2017 Jan 25, Britain’s PM Theresa May announced that the government would publish a white paper setting out its approach to Brexit.
(Econ, 1/28/17, p.49)
2017 Jan 25, The EU's executive arm said Bulgaria and Romania must do more to meet European Union standards on crime, corruption and judicial reform.
(AFP, 1/25/17)
2017 Jan 25, The EU unveiled plans to increase training for the Libyan coast guard as part of new measures to stop African migrants leaving for Europe in a feared spring surge.
(AFP, 1/25/17)
2017 Jan 25, French investigators launched a preliminary probe into claims the wife of presidential candidate Francois Fillon earned 500,000 euros ($538,000) for a suspected fake job as his parliamentary aide.
(AFP, 1/25/17)
2017 Jan 25, German police carried out dawn raids against far-right suspects accused of plotting attacks on refugees, Jews and police officers, and detained two suspects.
(AFP, 1/25/17)
2017 Jan 25, In Iraq local residents said Islamic State fighters have taken up sniper positions in buildings on the west bank of the Tigris river ahead of an expected government offensive into that side the city. Iraqi forces estimated the number of militants inside Mosul at 5,000-6,000 at the start of the battle, and have said 3,300 have been killed in the fighting.
(Reuters, 1/25/17)
2017 Jan 25, Hundreds of Italians whose homes were devastated in a series of deadly earthquakes protested in Rome at the slow pace of government aid as the death toll from the Jan 18 avalanche-hit hotel rose to 24.
(AFP, 1/25/17)
2017 Jan 25, Jamaica’s Usain Bolt lost one of his nine Olympic gold medals when the International Olympic Committee stripped Jamaica of their 4x100m relay win at the 2008 Beijing Games after relay teammate Nesta Carter, who ran the first leg of the race, was found to have tested positive for banned substance Methylhexanamine.
(AFP, 1/25/17)
2017 Jan 25, Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev said he will delegate some of his sweeping powers to the Central Asian nation's parliament and cabinet, a move that could facilitate an eventual political transition.
(Reuters, 1/25/17)
2017 Jan 25, Kuwait hanged seven prisoners in a mass execution that included a royal family member.
(SFC, 1/26/17, p.A3)
2017 Jan 25, Libyan troops routed Islamic militants from a key area they controlled in Benghazi. The two-year campaign to push militants out of Benghazi was led by Khalifa Hifter, who is not recognized by the UN-backed government in Tripoli.
(AP, 1/25/17)
2017 Jan 25, Philippine troops launched airstrikes and ground assaults that reportedly wounded one of Southeast Asia's most-wanted militant suspects who is trying to establish a new base for an alliance backing the Islamic State group. Isnilon Hapilon managed to flee from a camp in Butig town in southern Lanao del Sur province. Two days of airstrikes killed 15 Muslim militants linked to the Islamic State group.
(AP, 1/27/17)(AP, 1/29/17)
2017 Jan 25, In Poland hundreds of students are gathering in downtown Warsaw and other cities to protest the country's populist government, with a range of demands that includes better ties with the European Union and protecting the environment.
(AP, 1/25/17)
2017 Jan 25, Poland's state-run defense firm PGZ said it has signed a memorandum of understanding with French military shipbuilder DCNS that could allow them to work together on building submarines in Poland.
(Reuters, 1/25/17)
2017 Jan 25, In Somalia 28 people were killed when Al-Shabaab fighters attacked the popular Dayah in Mogadishu, setting off two car bombs and opening fire on security guards. 4 al-Shabab attackers were also killed.
(AFP, 1/25/17)(SFC, 1/26/17, p.A3)
2017 Jan 25, Syrian government forces and their allies drove Islamic State militants out of several villages northeast of Aleppo over the last 24 hours. One Turkish soldier was killed and five were wounded in a clash with Islamic State militants near al-Bab.
(Reuters, 1/25/17)
2017 Jan 25, In Syria six long-range Russian bombers struck Islamic State targets in Deir al-Zor province.
(Reuters, 1/25/17)
2017 Jan 26, Steve Bannon, Pres. Trump’s chief White House strategist, said the media is the “opposition party" and “should keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while."
(http://tinyurl.com/j64qmxa)(SFC, 1/27/17, p.A6)
2017 Jan 26, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists warned that comments by US President Donald Trump on nuclear weapons and climate change have helped make the world less safe, moving its symbolic "Doomsday Clock" 30 seconds closer to midnight.
(AFP, 1/26/17)
2017 Jan 26, It was reported that employees from more than a dozen US government agencies have established a network of unofficial "rogue" Twitter feeds in defiance of what they see as attempts by President Donald Trump to muzzle federal climate change research and other science.
(Reuters, 1/26/17)
2017 Jan 26, Scientists said they have grown human cells inside pig embryos, a very early step toward the goal of growing livers and other human organs in animals to transplant into people.
(AP, 1/26/17)
2017 Jan 26, Johnson & Johnson said it will buy Swiss drugmaker Actelion in a $30 billion deal that both secures promising research and bolsters the product portfolio controlled by the US health care giant.
(AP, 1/26/17)
2017 Jan 26, Mike Connors (b.1925), TV and film actor, died in in Los Angeles. He starred as a hard-hitting private eye on the TV series “Mannix" (1967-1975).
(SFC, 1/27/17, p.A6)
2017 Jan 26, In Ohio Gabriel Taye (8) hanged himself in his bedroom with a necktie. It was later reported that school surveillance video showed a bully knocking Taye unconscious two days before his suicide.
(SFC, 5/13/17, p.A5)
2017 Jan 26, In Texas Terry Edwards (43) was executed for a fatal 2002 robbery in in Dallas that left two Subway employees dead.
(SFC, 1/27/17, p.A6)
2017 Jan 26, Austria's new Pres. Alexander Van der Bellen called for a tolerant and diverse nation free of ideological and racial hatred in an inauguration speech that embraced the ideal of a united Europe.
(AP, 1/26/17)
2017 Jan 26, In Austria 14 people were arrested as some 800 police investigating possible members of the Islamic State jihadist group carried out raids in Vienna and Graz in the south. the raids reportedly focused on the network of Ebu Tejma, a Muslim preacher from Bosnia jailed for 20 years last July in Graz for recruiting young IS fighters.
(AFP, 1/26/17)
2017 Jan 26, Brazilian police issued an arrest warrant for businessman Eike Batista, famous for amassing and then losing a multi-billion-dollar fortune.
(AP, 1/26/17)
2017 Jan 26, Britain’s Conservative government introduced a long-awaited bill to start the country's exit from the European Union and gave the House of Commons less than two weeks to consider it.
(AP, 1/26/17)
2017 Jan 26, Britain’s High Court ruled that Royal Dutch Shell cannot be sued in London over oil spills in Nigeria, in a setback to attempts to hold British multinationals liable at home for their subsidiaries' actions abroad. The court also said the claimants should be able to use Nigerian courts.
(Reuters, 1/26/17)
2017 Jan 26, German geologist Kay Holtzmann, contracted by the Dutch-British multinational Royal Dutch Shell's Nigeria subsidiary, wrote a letter to the Bodo Mediation Initiative saying the company "fiercely opposed" environmental testing and is concealing data showing thousands of Nigerians are exposed to health hazards from a stalled cleanup of the worst oil spills in the West African nation's history.
(AP, 3/24/17)
2017 Jan 26, Chile’s government said forest fires in the central regions of O'Higgins and El Maule have killed 9 people over the past week, displaced thousands and destroyed entire villages. A state of emergency was in effect and by early February the death toll reached 11.
(AP, 1/26/17)(SSFC, 2/5/17, p.A6)
2017 Jan 26, China released a new list of items banned for export to North Korea, ranging from wind tunnels to plutonium, following a new round of United Nations sanctions and complaints from US President Donald Trump that Beijing was not doing enough to pressure its communist neighbor.
(AP, 1/26/17)
2017 Jan 26, French skipper Francis Joyon smashed the record for the fastest sail around the world by more than four days and he won the Jules Verne Trophy.
(AP, 1/26/17)
2017 Jan 26, An aircraft carrying Gambian President Adama Barrow arrived in the capital Banjul, days after his predecessor Yahya Jammeh fled into exile under pressure from regional forces.
(Reuters, 1/26/17)
2017 Jan 26, Germany's Parliament extended the country's training mission in northern Iraq for another year.
(AP, 1/26/17)
2017 Jan 26, In Germany more than 15,000 turkeys were being culled after the new bird flu subtype H5N5 was confirmed on a north German farm.
(Reuters, 1/26/17)
2017 Jan 26, Greece's Supreme Court ruled against the extradition of eight Turkish soldiers who fled to Greece in July after a failed coup attempt in Turkey, a decision which angered Ankara and further strained relations between the two neighbors. Turkey issued an arrest warrant for the eight former army officers.
(Reuters, 1/26/17)(AFP, 1/26/17)
2017 Jan 26, In Indonesia a deputy chairwoman of the independent Corruption Eradication Commission, Basaria Panjaitan, announced that Constitutional Court Judge Patrialis Akbar and 10 other people were caught "red-handed" in an anti-graft sting.
(AP, 1/26/17)
2017 Jan 26, Israeli officials gave final approval to 153 east Jerusalem settler homes, adding to a sharp increase in such projects since US Pres. Donald Trump took office.
(AFP, 1/26/17)
2017 Jan 26, In Kashmir two separate avalanches buried a military post and swept away a patrol in Gurez, burying a total of 21 Indian soldiers. Seven soldiers were rescued. Over the next two days the remaining 14 bodies were recovered. Five of the rescued soldiers died on Jan 30.
(AP, 1/27/17)(SFC, 1/28/17, p.A2)(AP, 1/30/17)
2017 Jan 26, In Libya Yousuf Mubarak Welayti, an Emirati national detained since 2015 on spying charges, was found dead after militiamen stormed the detention center where he was being held and killed him.
(AP, 1/26/17)
2017 Jan 26, Lithuania and Poland said they would not allow the United States to locate new secret prisons on their soil if President Donald Trump chooses to reinstate an old CIA program that detained and interrogated terrorism suspects abroad.
(Reuters, 1/26/17)
2017 Jan 26, Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto said he had scrapped plans to meet Donald Trump next week after the US president tweeted Mexico should cancel the meeting if it was not prepared to pay for his proposed border wall.
(Reuters, 1/26/17)
2017 Jan 26, Pakistan's television regulator banned well-known talk show host Aamir Liaquat Hussain for hate speech, after he hosted shows accusing liberal activists and others of blasphemy, an inflammatory allegation that could put their lives at risk.
(Reuters, 1/26/17)
2017 Jan 26, Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte apologized to South Korea after policemen last October killed, one of its citizens, then said he wanted to hang rogue police and send their heads to Seoul. The police accused of kidnapping and killing Jee Ick-joo were anti-narcotics officers.
(Reuters, 1/26/17)
2017 Jan 26, Puerto Rico's new governor signed a labor reform bill that targets the private sector and aims to stimulate the island's economy amid concerns that it infringes on workers' rights.
(AP, 1/26/17)
2017 Jan 26, Romania’s High Court of Cassation and Justice gave Alina Bica, the former chief prosecutor for the agency that investigates organized crime and terrorism, a 3 ½-year sentence for aiding a wrongdoer. The former head of the tax authority, Serban Pop, received five years for influence trafficking. Businessman Horia Simu received a 4-year term for buying influence.
(AP, 1/26/17)
2017 Jan 26, Sudanese opposition leader and ex-prime minister Sadiq al-Mahdi (81) returned to the country more than two years after he fled abroad.
(AFP, 1/26/17)
2017 Jan 26, Syrian Islamist rebel group Ahrar al-Sham said six other rebel factions had joined its ranks in northwestern Syria in order to fend off a major assault by a powerful jihadist group. Fateh al-Sham, once allied with al Qaeda and formerly known as the Nusra Front clashed with fighters from Ahrar al-Sham and Suqour al-Sham in the northern rebel stronghold of Idlib province.
(Reuters, 1/26/17)
2017 Jan 26, In northeastern Tanzania a massive mound of earth collapsed early today at a Chinese-owned gold mine in Nyarugusu village, burying at least 13 workers, including a Chinese national.
(AP, 1/26/17)
2017 Jan 26, The UN Security Council voted unanimously to keep the UN peacekeeping force in Cyprus for another six months and urged Greek and Turkish Cypriots "to grasp the current opportunity" to reunite the divided Mediterranean island.
(AP, 1/26/17)
2017 Jan 27, President Donald Trump made his debut as a statesman, welcoming British PM Theresa May as the first foreign leader to visit his White House. In their news conference Trump said that his defense secretary’s opposition to torture will override his own belief that enhanced interrogation does work.
(AFP, 1/27/17)(SFC, 1/28/17, p.A6)
2017 Jan 27, President Donald Trump signed an executive order banning refugees from Muslim-majority countries. A US federal law enforcement official said any non-U.S. citizen from Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia or Yemen is now barred from entering the United States.
(AP, 1/28/17)
2017 Jan 27, President Donald Trump called and pressured Mexico’s Pres. Enrique Pena Nieto to stop saying publicly that his government would never pay for a wall along the southern US border. Pena agreed to stop talking about the wall.
(SFC, 8/4/17, p.A4)
2017 Jan 27, The SEC said Joseph Meli (42) and Matthew Harriton (52) persuaded at least 125 investors in 13 states to contribute a total of $81 million towards their ticket re-selling business. Almost $2 million was diverted for personal expenses and at least $48 million of incoming funds was used to pay make Ponzi payments to earlier investors. In a parallel action by the US attorney’s office in the Southern District of New York Meli and Steven Simmons (48) of Connecticut were arrested on charges of conspiracy, securities fraud and wire fraud for participating in an alleged Ponzi scheme in a hedge fund.
(SSFC, 1/29/17, p.A9)
2017 Jan 27, In Washington state King County police detectives shot and killed Mi'Chance Dunlap-Gittens (17) in sting operation in a Seattle suburb. Chance was hit at least 8 times before a fatal shot to the back of his head. Dunlap-Gittens and a 16-year-old companion, DaJohntae Richard, had been deceived by sheriff’s detectives into believing the van contained a teenage prostitute and her pimp who wanted to buy several bottles of illicit alcohol. An internal revue later cleared the officers of wrongdoing. In 2020 King County agreed to a $2.5 million settlement with the boy's family.
(https://tinyurl.com/y9rzccd5)(SFC, 5/6/20, p.A10)
2017 Jan 27, Oscar-nominated British actor John Hurt (77), known for his roles in "Elephant Man" and "Harry Potter", died in Norfolk after a battle with pancreatic cancer.
(AFP, 1/28/17)(SSFC, 1/29/17, p.A6)
2017 Jan 27, Two Iraqi men with visas to enter the United States were detained at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport, hours after Pres. Trump's executive order put a four-month hold on allowing refugees into the United States and temporarily barred travelers from Syria and six other Muslim-majority countries.
(Reuters, 1/28/17)
2017 Jan 27, It was reported that Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada, leader of the Afghan Taliban, recently replaced "shadow" governors in 16 of the country's 34 provinces. A list named another eight provincial-level officials, including one whose job will be to offer technical support for major attacks on urban areas.
(Reuters, 1/27/17)
2017 Jan 27, It was reported that Belgium has sealed an agreement with France and the Netherlands to draw up passenger lists and introduce passport checks on Thalys and Eurostar international rail services.
(AP, 1/27/17)
2017 Jan 27, Brazilian construction company Odebrecht said it was willing to sell off its remaining projects and businesses in Peru as it faces a massive graft inquiry and calls from the government to leave the Andean country.
(Reuters, 1/27/17)
2017 Jan 27, Britain's biggest retailer Tesco agreed to buy wholesaler Booker for £3.7 billion in a surprise play to become the nation's top food business, slash costs and take on German-owned discounters.
(AFP, 1/27/17)
2017 Jan 27, Xiao Jianhua vanished after crossing the Hong Kong border to China. In 2016 The Hurun Report, a China rich list founded in 1999 by Rupert Hoogewerf in Britain, named Xiao Jianhua as China’s 32nd wealthiest man with a fortune of $6 billion.
(Econ, 2/4/17, p.38)(Econ, 2/18/17, p.38)
2017 Jan 27, Colombian rebel leader Pastor Alape warned that criminal gangs are attempting to take over coca-growing regions being abandoned by the guerrillas to expand cultivation of the plant used to make cocaine.
(AP, 1/27/17)
2017 Jan 27, Croatia's Jewish community boycotted the official Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony after authorities failed to remove a plaque bearing a World War II Croatian pro-Nazi salute from the town of Jasenovac, where tens of thousands of Jews, Serbs and Roma perished in a wartime death camp.
(AP, 1/27/17)
2017 Jan 27, The European Commission imposed anti-dumping duties on steel products from China and Taiwan to stop them flooding Europe's struggling steel market.
(AP, 1/27/17)
2017 Jan 27, The European Union prolonged for a year sanctions against dozens of Tunisians, including ousted president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, accused of illegally using state funds.
(AP, 1/27/17)
2017 Jan 27, Moroccan authorities said they had arrested seven suspected militants linked to Islamic State and seized weapons and explosive belts.
(Reuters, 1/27/17)
2017 Jan 27, In Nigeria armed jihadists from the Islamic State-supported Al-Barnawi faction of Boko Haram launched a midnight attack on troops in the village of Kamuya. At least three Nigerian soldiers were killed. Boko Haram claimed it killed five soldiers.
(AFP, 1/28/17)
2017 Jan 27, The World Food Program said around 1.8 million people are at risk of starvation in northeast Nigeria, victims of an Islamist insurgency that is undermining efforts by the WFP.
(Reuters, 1/27/17)
2017 Jan 27, Pakistani police said they filed a criminal case against the parents of slain social media celebrity Qandeel Baloch, alleging they were bribed to change their testimony to protect one of two sons facing trial in her suspected 'honor killing'.
(Reuters, 1/27/17)
2017 Jan 27, Senior Hamas leader Ismail Haniya returned to Gaza after five months abroad. Haniya had left in September to perform the Muslim hajj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia, returning via Gulf countries and Egypt, where he sought to mend frayed relations.
(AFP, 1/27/17)
2017 Jan 27, In Somalia the al-Shabab extremist group attacked a Kenyan military base early today. Kenya's military said nine soldiers were killed and that more than 70 al-Shabab extremists were killed. Al-Shabab said 51 Kenyan soldiers were killed.
(AP, 1/27/17)(SFC, 1/28/17, p.A4)
2017 Jan 27, Spanish rescuers pulled nearly 300 people from two rubber boats in waters off the Libyan coast and were looking for 100 more believed to be on another boat missing since Jan 22.
(AP, 1/27/17)
2017 Jan 27, Thai police said they have arrested a gang of wedding crashers led by a Buddhist monk who scammed couples by pretending to be officials with royal links and demanding money for their prestigious presence at nuptials.
(AP, 1/27/17)
2017 Jan 27, A Thai military court halved the sentence for Burin Intin from an original 22 years, 8 months for two offenses because he pleaded guilty to the lese majeste charge as well as to violating the Computer Crime Act by posting illegal content.
(AP, 1/27/17)
2017 Jan 27, Turkey's top diplomat threatened punitive measures against Greece, including scrapping an agreement on the return of migrants, after the Greek Supreme Court ruled against extraditing eight Turkish officers who escaped from their country by helicopter after the failed coup attempt.
(AP, 1/27/17)
2017 Jan 28, US Pres. Donald Trump elevated his chief strategist Steven Bannon to full membership in the National Security Council and downgraded the director of the national intelligence and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
(SFC, 1/30/17, p.A5)
2017 Jan 28, President Donald Trump told Japan's PM Shinzo Abe that the United States is committed to ensuring Japan's security.
(Reuters, 1/28/17)
2017 Jan 28, Pres. Trump had an hour-long discussion with Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin. The White House said it was a significant start to improving relations between the US and Russia.
(SSFC, 1/29/17, p.A7)
2017 Jan 28, Immigration lawyers sued to block Pres. Donald Trump's order halting the entry of refugees and foreign nationals from seven predominantly Muslim countries to the United States, saying numerous people have already been unlawfully detained. A Department of Homeland security spokeswoman said people holding so-called green cards, making them legal permanent US residents, are included in President Donald Trump's executive action.
(Reuters, 1/28/17)
2017 Jan 28, NY federal judge Ann Donnelly granted a stay to prevent deportations of people with valid visas detained on entry to the US following President Trump’s executive order barring refugees.
(http://tinyurl.com/hvm7wwa)(SFC, 1/30/17, p.A1)
2017 Jan 28, Bharati Mukherjee (76), Indian-American writer, died at NY Univ. Hospital. Her books included “The Tiger’s Daughter" (1972).
(SFC, 2/3/17, p.D3)
2017 Jan 28, PM Theresa May said Britain did not agree with US President Donald Trump's curbs on immigration after coming under criticism from lawmakers in her own party for not condemning his executive order when initially questioned.
(Reuters, 1/29/17)
2017 Jan 28, China marked that start of the lunar Year of the Rooster as families reunited for festivities, fireworks and food.
(AP, 1/28/17)
2017 Jan 28, France and Germany expressed mounting alarm at key decisions by US Pres. Donald Trump in his first week in office, saying they raised many issues of concern.
(AFP, 1/28/17)
2017 Jan 28, Gambian President Adama Barrow said that every aspect of his tiny west African state would need an overhaul after ex-leader Yahya Jammeh's 22-year rule, but that its dread secret police would remain.
(AFP, 1/28/17)
2017 Jan 28, Germany confirmed that high-ranking Turkish soldiers, who worked at NATO facilities in Germany but were suspended after the failed coup in Turkey in July, have requested asylum. Der Spiegel and broadcaster ARD reported that about 40, mostly high-ranking Turkish soldiers, have requested asylum.
(Reuters, 1/28/17)
2017 Jan 28, Iraqi special forces Brig. Gen. Haider Fadhil said French officials tested a chemical from Mosul this week and confirmed it was a mustard agent. It was found alongside a cache of Russian surface-to-surface missiles.
(AP, 1/28/17)
2017 Jan 28, In India the BW Maple, with a total capacity of 82,000 cubic meters of liquefied petroleum gas, was half full when it collided near Chennai with the Indian ship Dawn Kanchipuram. Days later port authorities impounded the two ships and detained their crews after the collision caused an oil spill affecting marine life and local fishing.
(Reuters, 2/3/17)
2017 Jan 28, In Madagascar at least 47 people, including 10 children and a newly-wed couple, were killed when a truck carrying a wedding party and guests veered off the road and plunged into the Mananara river.
(AFP, 1/29/17)
2017 Jan 28, Thousands of Mongolians stood in frigid weather for the second time this winter to protest the government response to smog that routinely blankets their capital.
(AP, 1/28/17)
2017 Jan 28, It was reported that heavily-armed police are guarding the streets of Podgorica, the capital of Montenegro, after a spike in gangland violence rattled the Balkan country, which is on the brink of joining NATO.
(AFP, 1/28/17)
2017 Jan 28, The Dutch government announced that it is putting 10 million euros into an int’l. fund to finance access to birth control, abortion and sex education for women in developing nations after Pres. Trump cut US funding for such services.
(SSFC, 1/29/17, p.A4)
2017 Jan 28, In Nigeria gunmen believed to be Boko Haram Islamic extremists attacked a convoy of motorists along a recently secured highway. At least 15 trucks laden with food were seized when the Islamists struck at the Korowaso forest. More than 20 people were feared dead.
(AP, 1/29/17)(AFP, 1/30/17)
2017 Jan 28, In Russia over 2,000 people rallied in St. Petersburg to protest plans by the city authorities to give the landmark St. Isaac's Cathedral to the Russian Orthodox Church amid an increasingly passionate debate over the relationship between the church and state.
(AP, 1/28/17)
2017 Jan 28, In Spain hundreds of protesters rallied in Barcelona over what they considered an out-of-control tourism boom that has damaged their ability to live and work in the northeastern Spanish city. A soaring tourism business has fueled higher prices for rent and property sales, leaving many of the city's 1.6 million residents priced out of the city center.
(AP, 1/28/17)
2017 Jan 28, Swedish photographer Lennart Nilsson (94) died. His pictures of fetuses developing in the womb illustrated a 1965 book was translated into several languages.
(AP, 1/28/17)
2017 Jan 28, Syria's army entered Ain al-Fijeh, a key water pumping station outside the capital, for the first time in four years after a deal with rebels.
(AFP, 1/28/17)
2017 Jan 28, Several Syrian Islamist factions including al Qaeda's former branch in the country said they were joining forces, as clashes between jihadists and more moderate rebels raged on in northwestern areas.
(Reuters, 1/28/17)
2017 Jan 28, In Turkey British PM Theresa May signed a $125 million defense equipment deal with Turkey and promised to push for more trade between the NATO allies, but cautioned Ankara on human rights following last year's failed coup.
(Reuters, 1/28/17)
2017 Jan 28, UAE state news agency WAM reported that the air force of the United Arab Emirates has shot down an Iranian-made drone in Yemen.
(Reuters, 1/28/17)
2017 Jan 28, UN sanctions monitors reported to the world body's Security Council that the Saudi Arabia-led military coalition has carried out attacks in Yemen that "may amount to war crimes".
(Reuters, 1/29/17)
2017 Jan 28, A military official said Yemeni government forces have advanced into the Red Sea town of Mokha but Shiite Huthi rebels are still putting up fierce resistance. At least 19 rebels were reported killed and 23 wounded over the last 24 hours.
(AFP, 1/28/17)
2017 Jan 29, President Trump and Saudi Arabia's King Salman came to an agreement to support safe zones in Syria and Yemen while strengthening efforts to fight the spread of Islamic terrorism.
(CSM, 1/30/17)
2017 Jan 29, A global backlash against US President Donald Trump's immigration curbs gathered strength as several countries including long-standing American allies criticized the measures as discriminatory and divisive.
(Reuters, 1/29/17)
2017 Jan 29, An American Airlines flight arrived in Miami from Bogota, Colombia. It was flagged for maintenance and sent to Tulsa where seven bricks of cocaine were found in the nose gear.
(SFC, 1/31/17, p.A5)
2017 Jan 29, In Bahrain an off-duty policeman was shot dead in what the interior ministry called a "terrorist act".
(Reuters, 1/29/17)
2017 Jan 29, In Canada a shooting at a Quebec City mosque killed six people. Alexandre Bissonnette and Mohamed el Khadir were soon identified as suspects. One was arrested at the scene of the attack and the second called 911 from his car, saying he was armed but wanted to cooperate with police. PM Justin Trudeau called it an act of terrorism.
(AP, 1/30/17)
2017 Jan 29, China’s Xinhua news agency reported that the national audit office found that 17.6 billion yuan ($2.56 billion) earmarked for water pollution prevention work in 2016 was not effectively used.
(AP, 1/29/17)
2017 Jan 29, In Dagestan Russian security forces killed three suspected militants during a firefight in the town of Khasavyurt.
(AP, 1/29/17)
2017 Jan 29, In Egypt Hazem Salah Abu Ismail, an Islamist former presidential hopeful, was sentenced to five years in prison for inciting his supporters to "besiege" a Cairo court in December 2012. Five other defendants received the same jail terms, while another 13 were sentenced to 10 years in prison in absentia.
(AFP, 1/29/17)
2017 Jan 29, In France more than 1.3 million voters took part in the runoff vote organized by Socialists to pick their candidate for the presidential election, a higher turnout than at the same time in last week’s first round. Benoit Hamon (49) won the party nomination with almost 59% of the vote.
(Reuters, 1/29/17)(SFC, 1/30/17, p.A2)
2017 Jan 29, In Germany the bodies of six teenagers were found dead in a garden house following a Saturday night party near the southern city of Wuerzburg. Investigators later said they all died of carbon monoxide poisoning.
(AP, 1/29/17)(AP, 1/31/17)
2017 Jan 29, Haiti held a final round of legislative contests that close a repeatedly derailed election cycle that started in 2015.
(AP, 1/29/17)
2017 Jan 29, Iran test-launched a medium-range ballistic missile that exploded after 630 miles (1,010 km).
(Reuters, 1/31/17)
2017 Jan 29, Iraqi parliamentarians said they will lobby against new travel limits to the United States by Iraqis, arguing both countries need to uphold their fight against Islamic State (IS).
(Reuters, 1/29/17)
2017 Jan 29, Twenty-two people, mostly Chinese tourists, wore life vests and formed a human chain at sea to drift more than 10 hours before they could be rescued off Malaysia's coast after their boat sank in turbulent waters. Three bodies were recovered, and six other people from the boat were missing.
(AP, 1/29/17)
2017 Jan 29, In Myanmar a gunman killed a legal adviser for the ruling National League for Democracy, shooting the lawyer in the head at close range as he walked out of the Yangon airport. The gunman was arrested after he killed Ko Ni, a prominent member of Myanmar's Muslim minority, and wounded a taxi driver who tried to stop him from fleeing. The suspect was identified as Kyi Linn (53) from Mandalay. A second suspect, Aung Win Zaw (46), was detained in Kayin State on January 30. On Feb 25 a senior security officials said the assassination was the result of a personal political grudge and not part of a bigger conspiracy by the military.
(AP, 1/29/17)(AFP, 2/4/17)(AP, 2/25/17)
2017 Jan 29, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte accused the United States of risking regional stability by building permanent arms depots in his country, and threatened to respond by scrapping a security treaty between them.
(Reuters, 1/29/17)
2017 Jan 29, Philippine military Chief of Staff Gen. Eduardo Ano said the body of the suspected Indonesian militant, known by his nom de guerre Mohisen, was recovered by troops along with three dead Filipino followers of militant leader Isnilon Hapilon, who was seriously wounded in the hilly outskirts of Butig town in Lanao del Sur province.
(AP, 1/29/17)
2017 Jan 29, In Romania thousands of people marched through Bucharest and other cities to protest a government proposal to pardon thousands of prisoners.
(AP, 1/29/17)
2017 Jan 29, In Rwanda 30 individuals, claiming to be members of the M23 Congolese militia group, were apprehended saying they sought refuge and were fleeing a Congo army offensive.
(AFP, 1/30/17)
2017 Jan 29, Syrian state-controlled TV said rebels have begun to evacuate Barada Valley as part of an agreement to surrender the capital region's primary water source to government control.
(AP, 1/29/17)
2017 Jan 29, In northern Syria a Turkish soldier was killed in clashes with Islamic State militants near al-Bab.
(Reuters, 1/29/17)
2017 Jan 29, Dmitry Markelov died from shrapnel and bullet wounds while on a clandestine mission in Syria for the Russian state. In 2019 his wife decided to go public because she and her daughter were unable to access state benefits they would be entitled to as dependents of someone killed in combat.
(Reuters, 2/15/19)
2017 Jan 29, Three Ukrainian servicemen were killed when pro-Russian rebels attacked government positions in Avdiyivka, cutting off power supplies to the eastern frontline town.
(Reuters, 1/29/17)
2017 Jan 29, Yemeni medical and military sources said the bodies of at least 90 Huthi rebels were taken to a hospital in the Red Sea city of Hodeida, which is controlled by the insurgents, while 19 dead soldiers were taken to the southern port city of Aden following clashes over the last 24 hours.
(AFP, 1/29/17)
2017 Jan 29, In central Yemen elite US forces launched a dawn raid against Al-Qaeda in Bayda province, killing at least 14 suspected jihadists in an operation in which an American soldier also died. Nearly 30 others, including women and children, were also killed.
(AFP, 1/29/17)(AP, 1/29/17)
2017 Jan 30, US President Donald Trump fired top federal government lawyer Sally Yates after she took the extraordinarily rare step of defying the White House and refused to defend new travel restrictions targeting seven Muslim-majority nations.
(Reuters, 1/30/17)
2017 Jan 30, Pres. Trump signed an executive action aimed at cutting regulations for small businesses. White House officials called the directive a "one in, two out" plan, requiring government agencies requesting a new regulation to identify two others they will cut. Trump also denied his recent immigration order was to blame for the chaos at the nation's airports over the weekend.
(AP, 1/30/17)
2017 Jan 30, Researchers said nearly one in four US children suffers from chronic bullying at school, a problem that may lead to poor academic performance and low confidence over time.
(AFP, 1/30/17)
2017 Jan 30, In Los Angeles County bicyclist Agustin Rodriguez (46) was killed in a hit and run that dragged him several hundred feet. Suspect Andrea Dorothy Chan Reyes fled the scene and the country. She was arrested in Australia in 2018 and in 2020 was returned to the US to face trial.
(https://tinyurl.com/y5jjxocp)(SSFC, 11/1/20, p.A9)
2017 Jan 30, Harold Rosen (90), a driving force in the development of modern satellite communications, died at his home in Los Angeles County.
(SSFC, 2/5/17, p.C13)
2017 Jan 30, General Motors Co (GM) and Honda Motor Co Ltd said they will jointly produce hydrogen fuel cell power systems in the United States from around 2020, to cut costs and ramp up output in the hope of increasing take-up of the zero-emission cars.
(Reuters, 1/30/17)
2017 Jan 30, Argentina changed its immigration law to make it easier to deport foreigners who commit crimes and to prohibit individuals with criminal records from entering the country.
(Reuters, 1/30/17)
2017 Jan 30, Austria's coalition government promised to ban Muslim face-covering veils and to restrict eastern European workers' access to the labor market, in a package of policies aimed at countering the rise of the far-right Freedom Party.
(Reuters, 1/30/17)
2017 Jan 30, Bosnia indicted Visnja Acimovic (44), known as 'Beba', a Bosnian Serb woman for taking part in the killing of 37 Muslim Bosniak prisoners of war in the eastern town of Vlasenica in June 1992. The bodies were found in a mass grave in 2000.
(http://tinyurl.com/zjqaeq6)(Reuters, 1/30/17)
2017 Jan 30, The head of Brazil's Supreme Court validated 77 plea bargains with officials from a construction giant targeted by a major corruption probe, a step that is likely to significantly widen investigations into top politicians and businessmen.
(AP, 1/30/17)
2017 Jan 30, In Brazil fallen tycoon Eike Batista (60) was arrested at Rio de Janeiro's airport after returning to face corruption charges. He personified Brazil's economic boom and once boasted he'd become the world's richest man.
(AFP, 1/30/17)
2017 Jan 30, Chad's foreign minister Moussa Faki Mahamat was named as the new AU Commission chairperson, beating four others to succeed South Africa's Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma.
(AFP, 1/30/17)
2017 Jan 30, In Greece a migrant was found dead in his tent on Lesbos island, the third death there in a week, raising alarm about the grim living conditions in Greek camps.
(Reuters, 1/30/17)
2017 Jan 30, Iraq's lawmakers backed a non-binding "reciprocity measure" that would bar Americans from entering Iraq in retaliation for Pres. Donald Trump's banning of Iraqis and citizens of six other majority-Muslim countries from traveling to the US.
(AP, 1/30/17)
2017 Jan 30, Former Israeli chief rabbi, Yona Metzger, was found guilty of taking bribes on multiple occasions, as well as fraud and obstructing justice. He faced three-and-a-half years in prison and a fine $1.3 million. Metzger stepped down in July 2013 after 10 years in office.
(AFP, 1/30/17)
2017 Jan 30, Italian police said they had dismantled a major people smuggling network responsible for trafficking hundreds of people across Europe.
(AFP, 1/30/17)
2017 Jan 30, Mexico’s medical oversight agency reported the seizure of almost 47,000 Chinese-made HIV testing kits in Veracruz that it said could give false negative results.
(AP, 2/1/17)
2017 Jan 30, Myanmar police arrested Myint Swe in southeastern Karen state. Police alleged he hired the suspected gunman, Kyi Lin, who was arrested right after he shot Ko Ni in the head at close range at the Yangon airport on Sunday and tried to flee.
(AP, 2/2/17)
2017 Jan 30, Norway's Lutheran Church voted in favor of new ceremonial language that will allow its pastors to conduct same-sex marriages, bringing it into line with several other mainstream Protestant denominations abroad.
(Reuters, 1/30/17)
2017 Jan 30, The Philippine police chief stopped the use of the national police force in anti-drug operations and disbanded all police anti-narcotics units after the president's brutal crackdown was used as a cover by rogue officers to kidnap and kill a South Korean man for money.
(AP, 1/30/17)
2017 Jan 30, In the Philippines Iris Mittenaere (23), a dental student from Lille city, France, won the Miss Universe crown in a pageant, saying her triumph will make the beauty contest more popular in Europe and help her efforts to put more underprivileged children in school.
(AP, 1/30/17)
2017 Jan 30, It was reported that historians in Poland have put online what they say is the most complete list of Nazi SS commanders and guards at the Auschwitz concentration camp in hopes some of them can still be brought to justice.
(AP, 1/30/17)
2017 Jan 30, Puerto Rico's governor signed a fiscal emergency law that in part aims to pay some of the US territory's nearly $70 billion public debt.
(AP, 1/30/17)
2017 Jan 30, Syria warned of safe zones for civilians that US President Donald Trump has expressed interest in creating, saying it would have to come in coordination with the Syrian government, otherwise it would be unsafe and violate the Arab nation's sovereignty.
(AP, 1/30/17)
2017 Jan 30, In Syria six long-range Russian bombers launched an air strike against Islamic State positions in Deir al-Zor province, destroying two command points and several arms storehouses.
(Reuters, 1/30/17)
2017 Jan 30, In Ukraine a sudden surge in clashes between government forces and Russian-backed rebels killed at least six people despite a tattered truce in Ukraine's war-scarred east.
(AFP, 1/30/17)
2017 Jan 30, In central Yemen a suspected US drone strike killed two al-Qaida militants in Shabwa province.
(AP, 1/30/17)
2017 Jan 30, Yemeni rebel "suicide" boats attacked a Saudi warship on patrol in the Red Sea, killing two sailors in what the Saudi-led coalition called an escalation of the nearly two-year-old war.
(AFP, 1/31/17)
2017 Jan 31, President Donald Trump nominated Neil Gorsuch (49) for a lifetime job on the US Supreme Court, picking the federal appeals court judge to restore the court's conservative majority and help shape rulings on divisive issues such as abortion, gun control, the death penalty and religious rights.
(Reuters, 2/1/17)
2017 Jan 31, US Republicans delayed indefinitely planned Senate committee votes on President Donald Trump's picks to be Health and Treasury secretaries after Democrats boycotted the session and demanded more information on the two nominees' past financial behavior.
(AP, 1/31/17)
2017 Jan 31, A US official confirmed that the United States has provided Syrian fighters battling the Islamic State group with armored vehicles for the first time. A US-backed alliance of Syrian militias said it saw signs of increased US support for their campaign against Islamic State with President Donald Trump in office, a shift that would heighten Turkish worries over Kurdish power in Syria.
(AFP, 1/31/17)(Reuters, 1/31/17)
2017 Jan 31, Peter Navarro, Pres. Trump’s senior trade advisor, declared the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), a half-negotiated trade pact between the EU and America, to be dead.
(Econ, 2/4/17, p.21)
2017 Jan 31, US federal energy regulators approved construction of Energy Transfer Partners LP's Rover natural gas pipeline from Pennsylvania to Ontario.
(Reuters, 2/3/17)
2017 Jan 31, A group of professional cheerleaders in the SF Bay Area sued the NFL demanding higher wages and fair labor practices.
(SFC, 2/2/17, p.D1)
2017 Jan 31, Missouri executed Mark Christeson (37) for his role in the murder of Susan Brouk and her two children in 1998.
(SFC, 2/1/17, p.A6)
2017 Jan 31, In Pennsylvania Daniel Dimitri (50) was killed in Philadelphia by a speeding police officer. Adam Soto was soon fired and in 2019 he was ordered to serve three to twelve months in county jail for killing Dimitri while drag racing with another officer.
(SSFC, 1/13/19, p.A8)
2017 Jan 31, Afghan forces said they were holding off a Taliban offensive in Helmand province, as reinforcements and air support arrived. Both sides reported heavy fighting as Taliban militants attacked government positions in Sangin district. In the northeast the Taliban shot and killed Amir Begum, a woman accused of adultery in the Yumgan district.
(Reuters, 1/31/17)(AP, 2/1/17)
2017 Jan 31, The African Union readmitted Morocco after a 33-year absence, deferring the issue of Western Sahara for another day.
(AFP, 1/31/17)
2017 Jan 31, An Austrian court sentenced three Afghan asylum seekers to prison over the gang-rape of a woman at a train station last April.
(Reuters, 1/31/17)
2017 Jan 31, The management of Romantik Seehotel Jaegerwirt, in the Austrian Alps, said that they've been repeatedly targeted by cybercriminals. One recent infection with ransom software — on Dec. 6 — resulted in a complete shutdown of hotel computers.
(AP, 1/31/17)
2017 Jan 31, Brazil said unemployment hit a record 12 percent between October and December, even as the economy is forecast to slowly exit deep recession.
(AFP, 1/31/17)
2017 Jan 31, Britain passed a law that posthumously pardoned thousands of men convicted under now-abolished anti-homosexuality laws, and many more still alive can now apply to have their criminal convictions wiped out.
(AP, 1/31/17)
2017 Jan 31, In Cameroon an armed group attacked a UN technical team working along the border between Nigeria and Cameroon, killing five people and wounding several near the border town of Kontcha.
(Reuters, 2/1/17)
2017 Jan 31, Colombian FARC rebels gathered in demobilization zones to start a historic disarmament process to end Latin America's last major armed conflict.
(AFP, 1/31/17)
2017 Jan 31, The Congolese army said armed fighters belonging to the former M23 rebel group had captured four crew members of a military helicopter which crashed in eastern Congo DRC last week, and that three died after being tortured.
(Reuters, 1/31/17)
2017 Jan 31, Czech Foreign Minister Lubomir Zaoralek said hackers have breached dozens of email accounts at the Foreign Ministry in an attack resembling one against the US Democratic Party that the former Obama administration blamed on Russia.
(Reuters, 1/31/17)
2017 Jan 31, The Islamic State group in Egypt claimed that its fighters killed and wounded 20 Egyptian soldiers in four days of clashes in northern Sinai.
(AP, 1/31/17)
2017 Jan 31, The Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies (CIHRS), a non-government organization, published a 95-page report saying Law 10 of 1914, or the Assembly Law was repealed by parliament in 1928.
(Reuters, 2/5/17)
2017 Jan 31, Germany began sending tanks and other equipment to Lithuania as part of a NATO mission to beef up the defense of eastern Europe and send a signal of resolve to Russia, which has denounced the build-up as an act of aggression.
(Reuters, 1/31/17)
2017 Jan 31, Iran said it would never use its ballistic missiles to attack another country and defended its missile tests, saying they are neither part of a nuclear accord with world powers nor a UN Security Council resolution endorsing the pact.
(Reuters, 1/31/17)
2017 Jan 31, Israeli authorities said that nine Venezuelan Jewish converts will be allowed to move to Israel in light of the humanitarian crisis in Venezuela, reversing an earlier decision to keep them out.
(AP, 1/31/17)
2017 Jan 31, Italian police arrested three citizens on suspicion of smuggling helicopters and surface-to-air missiles into Libya and Iran between 2011 and 2015 in violation of international embargoes.
(Reuters, 1/31/17)
2017 Jan 31, Kenya extradited Baktash and Ibrahim Akasha to the US. They had been arrested by Kenyan police over two years ago after allegedly handing over 99kg of heroin and 1kg of methamphetamine to people working for America’s Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA).
(Econ, 2/11/17, p.45)
2017 Jan 31, Pakistani supporters of Islamist leader Hafiz Saeed staged small protests and condemned the United States, after police detained the accused architect of an attack on the Indian city of Mumbai that killed 166 people in 2008.
(Reuters, 1/31/17)
2017 Jan 31, The Philippine Supreme Court prohibited a group of police officers from entering a slum community to prevent them from threatening villagers who have accused them of ruthlessly killing four residents in an anti-drug raid.
(AP, 1/31/17)
2017 Jan 31, Poland's government-affiliated history institute said it had new evidence that Lech Walesa, who led protests and strikes that shook communist rule in the 1980s, had been a paid informant for the secret police in the 1970s.
(Reuters, 1/31/17)
2017 Jan 31, Portugal's Supreme Court ruled that missing British girl Madeleine McCann's parents can't sue for libel a former detective Goncalo Amaral, who published a book, “The Truth of the Lie" (2008), alleging they were involved in their daughter's disappearance in May 2007.
(AP, 1/31/17)
2017 Jan 31, Romania’s government passed an emergency decree that in effect decriminalized official misconduct resulting in financial damage of less than $200,000. Within an hour more than 10,000 protesters were on the streets. The decree was rescinded on Feb 5.
(Econ, 2/11/17, p.39)
2017 Jan 31, Russia sources said Sergei Mikhailov and Dmitry Dokuchaev, who worked for the cyber wing of Russia's FSB domestic intelligence service until their arrests in December, are accused of cooperating with the CIA. Ruslan Stoyanov, head of the investigation unit at Moscow-based cybersecurity giant Kaspersky, was also reported detained.
(AP, 1/31/17)(AFP, 2/1/17)
2017 Jan 31, In Sierra Leone human rights defender Abdul Fatoma appeared on a radio show in which he challenged the government and the anti-corruption commission to do more to make authorities accountable, in a system that he says answers only to itself. He was later arrested, bailed without charge, and summoned twice to parliament to answer questions, yet denied an audience when he showed up.
(AFP, 3/7/17)
2017 Jan 31, Slovenia’s national Statistics Bureau said that the number of overnight stays by American tourists has jumped by 10 percent in 2016 when compared to 2015. The tourism boom was partly because it is the native country of US first lady Melania Trump.
(AP, 1/31/17)
2017 Jan 31, In South Sudan fresh clashes broke out around Malakal, the latest turn in the struggle for the capital of the oil-producing Upper Nile region.
(Reuters, 1/31/17)
2017 Jan 31, Switzerland said it would lift its 40-year ban on gay and bisexual men giving blood but will still prohibit donations from those who have had sex in the last year.
(AFP, 1/31/17)
2017 Jan 31, Turkey arrested two MPs from the main pro-Kurdish party, including its chief spokesman, the latest move in a crackdown on the group ahead of a vote on changing the constitution.
(AFP, 1/31/17)
2017 Jan 31, Ukrainian forces and Russian-backed rebels were locked in fighting for a third straight day at a flashpoint town that left thousands shivering without power and sparked renewed EU concern about security in its backyard.
(AFP, 1/31/17)
2017 Jan 31, The UN children's agency (UNICEF) launched an appeal for $3.3 billion to help 48 million children caught up in crises worldwide amid fears of a funding cut from top donor the United States.
(AFP, 1/31/17)
2017 Jan, Pres. Donald Trump created the Victim Of Immigration Crime Engagement Office, known by its acronym VOICE, by executive order during his first week in office.
(AP, 6/11/21)
2017 Jan, The US approved marabu, an artisanal charcoal made from the marabu weed, as the first legal import from Cuba in more than 50 years.
(Econ 6/3/17, p.30)
2017 Jan, According to the Oxfam charity the world’s eight richest men owned as much wealth ($426 billion) as half the world’s population combined ($409 billion).
(Econ, 1/21/17, p.63)
2017 Jan, News broke that Peter Thiel, an Internet billionaire and advisor to Pres. Donald Trump, had a New Zealand citizenship and a $10m-lakeside estate there.
(Econ, 3/11/17, p.71)
2017 Jan, Bahrain held some 2,600 political prisoners, many of them children.
(Econ, 1/21/17, p.39)
2017 Jan, Bangladesh revived a much-criticized 2015 plan to move new and old refugees from Myanmar to the island of Thengar Char - which floods at high tide - surprising aid groups who were not consulted and consider the relocation impracticable.
(Reuters, 2/1/17)
2017 Jan, In Brazil Joao Doria, the new mayor of Sao Paulo, helped paint over 70 panels of street art along Avenida 23 de Maio dating back to 2015. The move sparked a protest and the mayor promised a museum of street art to showcase authorized, privately funded murals by artists chosen by an independent committee.
(SFC, 3/25/17, p.A4)
2017 Jan, China’s government admitted that Liaoning province had faked its fiscal data from 2011 to 2014. About half of the province’s legislators have been removed for obtaining their positions through fraud.
(Econ, 1/28/17, p.63)
2017 Jan, China expelled 32 South Korean Christian missionaries this month. Some 1000 South Korean missionaries worked in China.
(AP, 2/11/17)
2017 Jan, China’s city of Shenzhen and Hong Kong agreed to develop the Lok Ma Chau Loop as an innovation and technology park.
(Econ, 4/8/17, SR p.12)
2017 Jan, In Haiti overcrowding, malnutrition and infectious diseases that flourish in jammed quarters have led to an upsurge of inmate deaths, including 21 at the Port-au-Prince penitentiary just this month.
(AP, 2/20/17)
2017 Jan, In Jordan retired Maj. Gen. Mohammed Otoom (63) was detained for protesting on social media against the government’s planned price hikes and its purported failure to go after corrupt officials.
(SFC, 2/2/17, p.A3)
2017 Jan, In Kenya Aggrey Idri Ezibon, a member of a South Sudanese opposition group, and Dong Samuel Luak, a human rights lawyer disappeared in Nairobi. In 2019 a report by the UN Security Council panel of experts said multiple credible sources suggested that the two men were likely killed by South Sudanese National Security Service (NSS) officers on Jan. 30, 2017, on a farm owned by President Salva Kiir.
(Reuters, 5/1/19)
2017 Jan, Nigeria seized OPL 245 oil block, labelling it the proceeds of a crime. In 2011 Eni and Shell had paid $1.3 billion for the block. Prosecutors alleged that over $500 million ended up in front companies for former Pres. Goodluck Jonathan.
(Econ, 3/4/17, p.54)
2017 Jan, In South Africa poachers cut through fences at an animal park and decapitated and chopped the paws off three male lions, possibly for use in traditional healing rituals.
(AP, 6/4/17)
2017 Jan – 2017 Feb, In China some 140 people died of avian influenza. Officials later said a tiny genetic change in the H7N9 strain has allowed the virus to more easily infect humans.
(SSFC, 3/26/17, p.C14)
2017 Feb 1, The Trump administration condemned Iran for its recent test of a ballistic missile saying it was putting Tehran “on notice" and threatening reprisals.
(SFC, 2/2/17, p.A3)
2017 Feb 1, President Donald Trump warned in a phone call with his Mexican counterpart that he was ready to send US troops to stop "bad hombres down there" unless the Mexican military does more to control them.
(AP, 2/2/17)
2017 Feb 1, The US Army Corp of Engineers said it had taken initial steps to review requests to approve the final permit to finish the controversial Dakota Access pipeline, which has been the focus of protests for months.
(Reuters, 2/1/17)
2017 Feb 1, San Francisco police announced a suspension of collaboration with FBI counterterrorism efforts. The city’s two-officer Joint Terrorism Task Force had been established in 2007.
(SFC, 2/2/17, p.A12)
2017 Feb 1, In Colorado Joshua Cummings (37) walked up to Denver transit Officer Scott Von Lanken (56) and shot him from behind in the neck. Von Lanken was killed and Cummings was taken into custody.
(SFC, 2/2/17, p.A4)
2017 Feb 1, Texas Rep. Gov. Greg Abbott blocked funding for the first time over sanctuary cities after Austin’s Sheriff Sally Hernandez said she would stop honoring all immigration holds in her jails following Pres. Trump’s inauguration.
(SFC, 2/2/17, p.A4)
2017 Feb 1, It was reported that Volkswagen has agreed to pay at least $1.22 billion to fix or buy back nearly 80,000 polluting diesel cars in the United States, the latest move in its attempt to draw a line under its diesel emissions scandal.
(Reuters, 2/1/17)
2017 Feb 1, In southern Afghanistan an insurgent rocket attack killed a civilian in Lashkar Gah, Helmand province. In eastern Khost province, five policemen and three small children were wounded when a police vehicle hit a remotely detonated roadside bomb. In eastern Nangarhar province six civilians and a border police officer were wounded when a sticky bomb attached to a police vehicle went off in the provincial capital of Jalalabad.
(AP, 2/1/17)
2017 Feb 1, British MPs voted 498 to 114 to honor the Brexit referendum and invoke Article 50. The Scottish National Party and Liberal Democrats opposed the bill.
(Econ, 2/4/17, p.49)
2017 Feb 1, In Egypt the price of two key staples, sugar and cooking oil, were modestly increased for ration card holders as TV talk shows and newspapers went abuzz after reports emerged that the country's parliament's speaker and his two deputies are using state funds to buy cars worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
(AP, 2/1/17)
2017 Feb 1, The EU and Mexico said they would accelerate free trade talks amid a wave of protectionist threats by US President Donald Trump.
(AFP, 2/1/17)
2017 Feb 1, Embattled French presidential candidate Francois Fillon said he would run in France's upcoming election despite fake job allegations targeting his wife that have put his campaign on the rocks.
(Reuters, 2/1/17)
2017 Feb 1, A German court ordered German-Turkish author Akif Pirincci to pay a fine of 11,700 euros ($12,490) for incitement over a speech he gave at an anti-Islam rally. Pirincci was a speaker at a rally staged in Dresden in October 2015 by a group called the Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West, or PEGIDA. He described asylum-seekers as "invaders" and lamented that the Nazi's concentration camps had been closed.
(AP, 2/7/17)
2017 Feb 1, Germany's government approved the use of ankle bracelets to monitor extremists considered potentially dangerous as it moves to get tough on suspected jihadists after the Berlin truck attack.
(AFP, 2/1/17)
2017 Feb 1, Germany arrested Tunisian asylum-seeker Haikel S. (36) on suspicion of planning an Islamist attack. He was also wanted in his homeland over a deadly 2015 assault on a Tunis museum favored by Western tourists.
(Reuters, 2/1/17)
2017 Feb 1, Guyana said it has secured nearly $80 million from Britain to pave part of a 350-mile (560-km) jungle highway that is expected to increase trade with Brazil.
(AP, 2/1/17)
2017 Feb 1, Hungary’s PM Viktor Orban granted 2.4 billion forints ($9 million) in the budget to the renovating and building of Russian Orthodox churches, the day before he received Russia’s Pres. Putin in Budapest.
(Reuters, 9/29/17)
2017 Feb 1, In northern India a six-story tannery building under construction collapsed, killing at least five workers and possibly trapping up to 50 others in Kanpur city, Uttar Pradesh state.
(AP, 2/1/17)
2017 Feb 1, In Israel rightist protesters scuffled with Israeli police carrying out a court order to evict settlers from the illegal Amona outpost in the occupied West Bank, hours after the government announced more construction in larger settlements.
(Reuters, 2/1/17)
2017 Feb 1, Italy launched a new fund to help African countries control their borders, in the latest of a slew of measures pushed by the European Union to stop migrants reaching Europe.
(Reuters, 2/1/17)
2017 Feb 1, Libyan sources said around 70 soldiers from the forces of commander Khalifa Haftar have been sent to Russia for treatment, in one of the first overt signs of cooperation between Moscow and one of Libya's armed factions.
(Reuters, 2/1/17)
2017 Feb 1, In Mexico the body of Juan Ontiveros, a human rights activist and member of the Tarahumara indigenous group, was found in Guadalupe y Calvo. His brother escaped the attack and later told authorities it arose from a conflict between members of two families.
(AP, 2/3/17)
2017 Feb 1, In the Netherlands a major computer malfunction crippled traffic at Amsterdam's Schiphol airport for hours, causing delays or cancellations of more than 100 flights at one of Europe's largest transportation hubs. The outage was caused by faulty hardware.
(Reuters, 2/1/17)
2017 Feb 1, In the Philippines Communist rebels said they were ending a six-month cease-fire effective Feb 10 accusing the armed forces of encroaching on rebel territory and reneging on a promise to release jailed comrades. According to the army three unarmed soldiers were waylaid and murdered by Communist guerrillas.
(SFC, 2/2/17, p.A2)(Econ, 2/11/17, p.31)
2017 Feb 1, Romania’s top judicial watchdog announced a court challenge on to a government decree decriminalizing some graft offences in what critics say is the biggest retreat on reforms since the country joined the European Union a decade ago.
(Reuters, 2/1/17)
2017 Feb 1, Serbia introduced a lockdown for migrants in their refugee center outside Belgrade after an alleged attack against a woman walking with her children.
(AP, 2/1/17)
2017 Feb 1, Slovakia’s PM Robert Fico Slovakia introduced a new police unit to fight terrorism and far-right extremism.
(AP, 2/1/17)
2017 Feb 1, A South African government investigation revealed that at least 94 mentally ill patients died after authorities moved them last year from hospital to unlicensed health facilities that were compared to "concentration camps".
(AFP, 2/1/17)
2017 Feb 1, In South Africa workers and managers in the chicken industry marched to the office of the EU delegation in Pretoria, alleging their livelihoods are in jeopardy because of allegedly illegal dumping of EU chicken meat in the local market.
(AP, 2/1/17)
2017 Feb 1, In Syria air strikes hit Red Crescent offices in the northwestern city of Idlib after midnight, injuring several staff and causing extensive damage.
(Reuters, 2/1/17)
2017 Feb 1, Ukraine government forces and Russian-backed separatists exchanged mortar and rocket fire for a 4th day around the flashpoint eastern town of Avdiivka that sits just north of the rebels' de facto capital Donetsk. The Ukrainian military said three of its soldiers had died overnight while the rebels said as many civilians had been killed. The bodies of seven soldiers killed in the fighting were brought to Kiev.
(AFP, 2/1/17)(Econ, 2/4/17, p.44)
2017 Feb 1, Zimbabwe started levying a 15 percent value-added tax on basic foodstuffs, dealing a further blow to cash-strapped consumers already battling to survive in an ailing economy.
(AFP, 2/1/17)
2017 Feb 1, Zimbabwean pastor Evan Mawarire was arrested at Harare airport as he returned to the country after several months abroad. He had led a surge of protests last year against President Robert Mugabe's authoritarian government.
(AFP, 2/1/17)
2017 Feb 2, US ties with ally Australia were strained over a reported acrimonious phone call between their two leaders. Australia's PM Malcolm Turnbull insisted that a deal struck with the Obama administration that would allow mostly Muslim refugees rejected by Australia to be resettled in the United States was still on, despite President Donald Trump dubbing the agreement "dumb" and vowing to review it.
(Reuters, 2/2/17)(AP, 2/2/17)
2017 Feb 2, The US Treasury Department said it will allow companies to do some transactions with Russia's Security Service (FSB), despite cyber-sanctions put in place by former President Barack Obama.
(Reuters, 2/2/17)
2017 Feb 2, The US military said 11 civilians were killed in four separate air strikes by the US-led coalition fighting Islamic State in Iraq and Syria between Oct. 25 and Dec. 9.
(Reuters, 2/2/17)
2017 Feb 2, Delaware authorities ended a nearly 24-hour hostage standoff at the 2,500-prisoner James T. Vaughn Correctional Center after guard, Sgt. Steven Floyd (47), was killed. Floyd was one of four staff members taken hostage. One inmate said they were demanding better education and rehabilitation programs.
(SFC, 2/3/17, p.A6)
2017 Feb 2, In Pennsylvania the Punxsutawney Phil groundhog saw his shadow and predicted six more weeks of winter.
(SFC, 2/3/17, p.A6)
2017 Feb 2, Belarus said it suspected Russia was trying to restore a formal border zone between the two countries, a move it said flouted agreements on freedom of movement and trade and raised questions about Moscow's real intent.
(Reuters, 2/2/17)
2017 Feb 2, Bolivian President Evo Morales inaugurated the $7 million Museum of the Democratic and Cultural Revolution in his native village of Orinoca.
(AP, 2/3/17)
2017 Feb 2, Brazil's Supreme Court named Justice Edson Fachin to oversee cases against politicians caught in a giant corruption probe after the previous judicial pointman Teori Zavascki was killed in an air crash.
(AFP, 2/2/17)
2017 Feb 2, British PM Theresa May's government published its blueprint for Brexit after winning a first parliamentary vote on a bill that would empower her to start pulling Britain out of the EU.
(AFP, 2/2/17)
2017 Feb 2, In eastern China 9 people were buried in the collapse of a group of homes. Four homes, each between four and five stories tall, tumbled in the city of Wenzhou, Zhejiang province.
(AP, 2/2/17)
2017 Feb 2, Congo DRC’s opposition leader Etienne Tshisekedi (84) died in Brussels, where he had been flown for medical treatment January 24 just as talks were scheduled to end the nation's months-long political crisis.
(AFP, 2/2/17)
2017 Feb 2, American Airlines formally opened an office in Havana, and an executive said the company will move ahead with its plans for Cuba despite uncertainty over what President Donald Trump's administration will bring.
(AP, 2/2/17)
2017 Feb 2, European Union lawmakers sealed an agreement to allow Georgian citizens into Europe's passport-free area without visas for short stays.
(AP, 2/2/17)
2017 Feb 2, The European Court of Human Rights ruled that Russia violated the rights of opposition politician and anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny by breaking up demonstrations and detaining him on seven occasions between 2012 and 2014.
(Reuters, 2/2/17)
2017 Feb 2, In France an identity check degenerated in the Paris suburb of Aulnay-sous-Bois. A man (22) was severely injured after allegedly being sodomized with a police baton. One police officer was soon charged with rape and three others with assault.
(AP, 2/6/17)
2017 Feb 2, Guyana sentenced to death two men for a 2008 massacre in which nine civilians and three police officers were killed. Prosecutors said Dennis Williams and Royden Williams were part of a group that went to the jungle community of Bartica to steal from gold miners and wound up killing the 12 people.
(AP, 2/3/17)
2017 Feb 2, In northeastern India hundreds of protesters marched in the Nagaland state capital after setting ablaze half a dozen government buildings to protest a court decision. The protesters opposed a court ruling that would reserve 33 percent of seats for women in local municipal elections.
(AP, 2/2/17)
2017 Feb 2, Israeli police forced hardline Jewish settlers from the barricaded synagogue of the wildcat Amona outpost in the occupied West Bank, completing an emotive battle to evict residents.
(AFP, 2/2/17)
2017 Feb 2, Residents in northern Kenya said armed cattle herders have been flooding onto farms and wildlife conservancies in their drought-ravaged area, leading to violence in which at least 11 people have been killed and a tourist lodge torched.
(Reuters, 2/2/17)
2017 Feb 2, Nigeria’s government said it will soon pay all the overdue cash stipends it owes former militants who signed up for an amnesty in 2009 in the Niger Delta oil hub.
(Reuters, 2/2/17)
2017 Feb 2, Warsaw's mayor harshly denounced a government plan to enlarge the Polish capital to incorporate 32 neighboring municipalities, describing it as the type of power grab one expects in an authoritarian state like Belarus or Russia.
(AP, 2/2/17)
2017 Feb 2, Romania's PM Sorin Grindeanu insisted that the government will press ahead with decrees decriminalizing certain corruption offences, defying the country's biggest protests since the end of communism.
(AFP, 2/2/17)
2017 Feb 2, Kremlin critic Vladimir Kara-Murza (35) was hospitalized after collapsing in Moscow. On Feb 7 his wife said he suffered from "acute poisoning" by an unknown substance, two years after a suspected poisoning nearly killed him.
(AFP, 2/7/17)
2017 Feb 2, In Sudan Mudawi Ibrahim Adam (58), a prominent human rights activist and engineering professor at the University of Khartoum, started an indefinite hunger strike. He was arrested in December by security forces as part of a crackdown on opposition leaders and activists.
(AFP, 2/11/17)
2017 Feb 2, Syria's military said it had captured a string of towns and part of a key highway from the Islamic State group in the northern province of Aleppo.
(AFP, 2/2/17)
2017 Feb 2, Thai media organizations protested a bill that would require journalists to be licensed and would establish a council that can penalize news outlets for violating professional standards. The bill was submitted today to a military-appointed body tasked with reforming the Thai government.
(AP, 2/2/17)
2017 Feb 2, Wildlife anti-trafficking organization Freeland said that almost three tons of scales from endangered African pangolins, hidden in sacks, were seized last December at Bangkok's main airport. The haul was worth more than $1 million dollars on the illegal market, and represented as many as 6,000 dead animals. The scales were sent from Kinshasa in Congo, via Turkey with a final destination listed as Vientiane, Laos.
(AP, 2/2/17)
2017 Feb 2, In Turkey German Chancellor Angela Merkel urged Turkey to uphold democracy as the country heads toward a critical referendum on boosting the powers of the presidency, while Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan took offense at her reference to "Islamist terror," saying the words cannot be placed together.
(AP, 2/2/17)
2017 Feb 2, Ukraine's Pres. Petro Poroshenko appealed for more global pressure against Russia on as Moscow-backed rebels and government forces clashed around a frontline town for a fifth day in a surge of fighting that has claimed a reported 21 lives.
(AFP, 2/2/17)
2017 Feb 2, The United Nations' highest court ruled that it has the authority to adjudicate in a maritime boundary dispute between Kenya and Somalia over stretches of the Indian Ocean potentially rich in oil and gas.
(Reuters, 2/2/17)
2017 Feb 2, In southern Yemen suspected Al-Qaeda militants killed six policemen and their jihadist group was targeted in a raid likely carried out by the US Navy.
(AFP, 2/2/17)
2017 Feb 3, US stock market shares climbed as Pres. Donald Trump signed an executive order asking the Treasury to conduct a 120-day review of America’s financial regulations. Trump’s eighth executive order listed seven core principles for regulating America’s financial system.
(Econ, 2/11/17, p.11)(Econ, 2/11/17, p.57)
2017 Feb 3, US President Donald Trump's defense secretary warned North Korea of an "effective and overwhelming" response if it chose to use nuclear weapons, as he reassured South Korea of steadfast US support.
(Reuters, 2/3/17)
2017 Feb 3, Seattle-based US District Judge James Robart issued a court ruling that blocked Pres. Donald Trump’s ban on travelers from seven Muslim countries.
(AFP, 2/4/17)
2017 Feb 3, The United States said it has moved a Navy destroyer to off the coast of Yemen to protect waterways from Houthi militia aligned with Iran, amid heightened tension between Washington and Tehran.
(Reuters, 2/3/17)
2017 Feb 3, The US Treasury sanctioned 13 individuals and 12 entities under its Iran sanctions authority, days after the White House put Tehran "on notice" over a ballistic missile test and other activities. Trump administration officials said sanctions were only the initial steps in response to Iranian provocative behavior.
(Reuters, 2/3/17)(SFC, 2/4/17, p.A6)
2017 Feb 3, In northern Afghanistan eight police officers, all members of the same family, were killed after a colleague working with the Taliban drugged and shot them at a checkpoint in Faryab province.
(AFP, 2/3/17)
2017 Feb 3, Veteran Angolan President Jose Eduardo dos Santos announced he will not run in August elections, signaling the end to 37 years in power and naming his defense minister as the candidate to succeed him.
(AFP, 2/3/17)
2017 Feb 3, Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko said a Russian move to create border zones near his country's frontier looked like a political attack and that Moscow had threatened to halve oil supplies to Minsk.
(Reuters, 2/3/17)
2017 Feb 3, China’s central bank raised a series of short-term interest rates.
(Econ, 2/11/17, p.63)
2017 Feb 3, Police in southwestern Democratic Republic of Congo killed at least eight members of Bundu dia Kongo (BDK), a separatist religious sect, escalating tensions in a normally peaceful part of a conflict-ravaged country.
(Reuters, 2/3/17)
2017 Feb 3, Ethiopian officials said nine Yemenis deported from the United States in the wake of US President Donald Trump's travel ban were flown to Ethiopia, then taken to neighboring Djibouti.
(Reuters, 2/3/17)
2017 Feb 3, EU leaders met in Malta to discuss how to slow migration and recommit to their union following Britain’s decision to leave and a perceived threat to the bloc from US Pres. Donald Trump.
(SFC, 2/4/17, p.A3)
2017 Feb 3, A French soldier shot and wounded a man armed with a machete and carrying two bags on his back as he tried to enter the Paris Louvre museum in what the government said appeared to have been a terrorist attack. The attacker was shot four times after slightly injuring a soldier patrolling the nearby underground mall. An Egyptian Interior Ministry official confirmed the next day that the attacker is Egyptian-born Abdullah Reda Refaie al-Hamahmy (28).
(Reuters, 2/3/17)(AP, 2/4/17)
2017 Feb 3, Iran said it had barred a US wrestling team from the Freestyle World Cup competition in retaliation for an executive order by President Donald Trump banning visas for Iranians.
(Reuters, 2/3/17)
2017 Feb 3, Malaysia’s PM Najib Razak dispatched a ship with thousands of tons of food and emergency supplies for Myanmar's Rohingya Muslims, but it was unclear where the bulk of the aid would be delivered.
(Reuters, 2/3/17)
2017 Feb 3, Mexico began a 90-day consultation on what its NAFTA negotiating position should be.
(Econ, 2/11/17, p.27)
2017 Feb 3, Mexico's health ministry confirmed the first case of a Zika-related severe birth defect known as microcephaly.
(AP, 2/4/17)
2017 Feb 3, The Norwegian security service said nine personal civil-servant email accounts have been targeted by hackers in "spear-phishing" attacks believed to be associated with Russian intelligence. No classified information was taken.
(AP, 2/3/17)
2017 Feb 3, Pakistani PM Nawaz Sharif inaugurated one of the first highway sections of his government's planned $11.5 billion spending plan on roads intended to expand trade and speed up economic growth.
(Reuters, 2/3/17)
2017 Feb 3, A lawyer said Pakistan has denied identity cards to the family of Shakeel Afridi, the jailed doctor believed to have helped the CIA hunt down Osama bin Laden in 2011, blocking college enrolment for his children.
(Reuters, 2/3/17)
2017 Feb 3, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte said that he has scrapped a six-month cease-fire with communist rebels and asked several rebel leaders who were freed for the negotiations to return to prison or face arrests abroad.
(AP, 2/4/17)(SFC, 2/4/17, p.A2)
2017 Feb 3, In the Philippines environment secretary Gina Lopez ordered 23 of the country’s 41 mines to close permanently and another five to suspend operations indefinitely for alleged environmental violations.
(Econ, 2/25/17, p.33)
2017 Feb 3, Polish police raided the Monitoring Center on Racist and Xenophobic Behavior and the private homes of some of its board members, seizing computers. the group has exposed ties between local officials, prosecutors and right-wing groups in Bialystok.
(AP, 2/3/17)
2017 Feb 3, Rwanda's government approved the dismissal of 200 police officers implicated in corruption.
(AP, 2/6/17)
2017 Feb 3, Serbia blamed Kosovo for the collapse of European Union-mediated talks as tensions escalated in the Balkans amid reports of troop movements and war rhetoric.
(AP, 2/3/17)
2017 Feb 3, South Africa's department of agriculture said that scientific tests have confirmed the presence of the invasive fall armyworm in the country's maize belt.
(Reuters, 2/3/17)
2017 Feb 3, In northwestern Syria unidentified air strikes killed at least 12 Islamist rebel fighters in Idlib province.
(Reuters, 2/3/17)
2017 Feb 3, Clashes between Ukrainian forces and Moscow-backed rebels left two more dead in the flashpoint town of Avdiivka and five others elsewhere in bloodshed that has prompted the US to condemn Russia's "aggressive" stance.
(AFP, 2/3/17)
2017 Feb 3, The United Nations removed the name of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a former Afghan warlord, from its Islamic State group and al-Qaida sanctions list.
(AP, 2/4/17)
2017 Feb 3, The UN human rights office said Myanmar's security forces have committed mass killings and gang rapes of Rohingya Muslims and burned their villages since October in a campaign that probably amounts to crimes against humanity and possibly "ethnic cleansing".
(Reuters, 2/3/17)
2017 Feb 3, Zimbabwean protest leader Evan Mawarire was remanded in custody by a court in Harare on Friday after police arrested him on charges of subverting the government and inciting public violence.
(AFP, 2/3/17)
2017 Feb 4, President Donald Trump said he respects Vladimir Putin, and when an interviewer called the Russian leader "a killer," Trump said the United States has many of them.
(AP, 2/5/17)
2017 Feb 4, US authorities suspended President Donald Trump's controversial ban on travelers from seven Muslim countries, following a court ruling that blocked its enforcement.
(AFP, 2/4/17)
2017 Feb 4, It was reported that Louis Marinelli, leader of the “Yes California" campaign to make California its own country, has partnered and received financial support from the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia, a Kremlin-supported political group. Marinelli was reported to be living and teaching in Russia.
(SFC, 2/4/17, p.A1)
2017 Feb 4, Damien Chazelle (32) won the top honor at the Directors Guild of America awards for his work on “La La Land."
(SFC, 2/6/17, p.A4)
2017 Feb 4, Penn State student Timothy Piazza (19) died two days after falling several times with toxic levels of alcohol following a Feb 2 Beta Theta Pi fraternity pledge ceremony. Friends failed to summon immediate help. 18 fraternity members faced criminal charges. On Sep 1, 2017, a judge threw out involuntary manslaughter charges and felony assault counts and ordered 12 fraternity members to stand trial on lesser counts. Piazza had been given at least 18 drinks in less than 90 minutes. In 2019 three former Penn. State fraternity members were issued minimum jail sentences of one to three months.
(SFC, 5/6/17, p.A6)(SFC, 9/2/17, p.A9)(SFC, 11/14/17, p.A7)(SFC, 4/4/19, p.A6)
2017 Feb 4, In northern Albania a hydrogen gas explosion at chromium mine in Bulqiza killed three Chinese miners.
(AP, 2/10/17)
2017 Feb 4, In Brazil police in Espirito Santo state went on strike. During the ten day strike 143 people were murdered as all hell broke out in Vitoria, the state capital.
(Econ, 2/25/17, p.30)
2017 Feb 4, In Britain several thousand people demonstrated outside the US embassy in London against President Donald Trump and his temporary ban on refugees and nationals from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States. Thousands marched in London demanding that the British government withdraw its invitation to Trump for a state visit.
(Reuters, 2/4/17)(SSFC, 2/5/17, p.A4)
2017 Feb 4, China issued its first strategic plan for territory development and preservation, outlining the protection of arable land reserves and islands. The plan demanded the retention of 1.825 billion mu of arable land by 2030, an area equivalent to about the size of South Africa.
(Reuters, 2/4/17)
2017 Feb 4, France's far-right National Front detailed 144 proposals for party leader Marine Le Pen's election bid, including leaving the euro and a vote on EU membership.
(Reuters, 2/4/17)
2017 Feb 4, German weekly magazine Der Spiegel sparked controversy at home and abroad with a front cover illustration of US President Donald Trump beheading the Statue of Liberty.
(Reuters, 2/4/17)
2017 Feb 4, The Guyanese government said it has lifted a 19-month ban on scrap metal exports while it drafts new operating regulations after complaints about buyers raiding everything from tombs to security grill work and manhole covers. A black market in scrap metal emerged since the trade was banned in June 2015.
(AP, 2/4/17)
2017 Feb 4, In Italy dozens of the illegal fliers appeared mysteriously around Rome picturing a stern-looking Pope Francis, a list of accusations against him, and the words "Where's your mercy?".
(AFP, 2/6/17)
2017 Feb 4, James Ibori, who as governor of oil-rich Delta State became one of Nigeria's richest and most powerful men, returned to the country after serving a sentence for corruption in Britain. Ibori served half his 13-year sentence after pleading guilty in 2012 to 10 counts of fraud and money-laundering.
(Reuters, 2/4/17)
2017 Feb 4, In northern Pakistan at least 13 people were killed in an avalanche that buried five homes following heavy snowfall in the town of Chitral.
(AP, 2/5/17)
2017 Feb 4, The Philippines' Catholic Church assailed President Rodrigo Duterte's war on drugs for creating a "reign of terror" among the poor, in sermons read out at services that will be repeated to congregations across the country on Feb 5.
(Reuters, 2/4/17)
2017 Feb 4, The leaders of Romania's coalition government suggested it could back down on its emergency decree to decriminalize official misconduct as thousands of citizens took to the streets in protest for the fifth consecutive day.
(AP, 2/4/17)
2017 Feb 4, Alexei Navalny, Russia's most prominent opposition figure, opened his first regional office for a presidential bid, despite an imminent court verdict that could bar him from running.
(AP, 2/4/17)
2017 Feb 4, In Syria an alliance of US-backed Kurdish-led militias started a new phase of its campaign against the Islamic State-held city of Raqqa, aiming to complete its encirclement and sever the road to militant strongholds in Deir al-Zor province.
(Reuters, 2/4/17)(SSFC, 2/5/17, p.A4)
2017 Feb 4, In Taiwan a bill banning the euthanizing animals in shelters came into effect. This followed the tragic suicide last year of Chien Chih-cheng, a vet burdened with the task of putting down animals.
(AFP, 2/5/17)
2017 Feb 4, The Turkish military said it has hit 59 Islamic State targets and killed 51 militants in northern Syria as part of its ongoing incursion.
(Reuters, 2/4/17)
2017 Feb 4, In Ukraine Lugansk People's Militia commander Oleg Anashchenko died when his automobile exploded. Militia spokesman Andrei Marochko accused Ukrainian special services of causing the explosion.
(AP, 2/4/17)
2017 Feb 4, Pope Francis named a top Vatican archbishop as his new envoy to the troubled Knights of Malta and gave him "all necessary powers" to help the religious order reform its constitutions and elect a new leader.
(AP, 2/4/17)
2017 Feb 4, Polisario Front chief Brahim Ghali said "all options are open" for Western Sahara's independence struggle and voiced hope for renewed talks with Morocco after its readmission to the African Union.
(AFP, 2/5/17)
2017 Feb 4, The leader of al-Qaida's affiliate in Yemen released an audio recording in which he describes President Donald Trump as the "White House's new fool" and said a Jan 29 US raid against the group killed 25 people, including 11 women and children.
(AP, 2/5/17)
2017 Feb 5, President Donald Trump drew fire from Republicans and Democrats alike, after he defended a softer stance on Russia, playing down political assassinations and Moscow's invasion of Ukraine.
(AFP, 2/5/17)
2017 Feb 5, The 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco denied the Justice Department's request for an immediate reinstatement of President Donald Trump's ban on accepting certain travelers and all refugees.
(AP, 2/5/17)
2017 Feb 5, In Texas Tom Brady led the New England Patriots on five straight scoring drives that equaled 31 straight points. The last touchdown wrapped up a 34-28 victory over the Atlanta Falcons in the first-ever overtime in the Super Bowl's 51-year history.
(AP, 2/6/17)
2017 Feb 5, Afghan officials said more than a 100 people have been killed in a series of avalanches triggered by days of heavy snowfall around the country, including 50 in one village, warning the death toll could rise still further.
(AFP, 2/5/17)
2017 Feb 5, The website of Austria's parliament was brought down for 20 minutes. A Turkish hackers' group, Aslan Neferler Tim (ANT), or Lion Soldiers Team, whose website says it defends the homeland, Islam, the nation and flag, without any party political links, claimed the attack.
(Reuters, 2/7/17)
2017 Feb 5, China’s state news agency Xinhua cited mayor Cai Qi as saying Beijing will intensify its battle against choking air pollution this year and aims to cut coal use by 30 percent.
(Reuters, 2/5/17)
2017 Feb 5, In eastern China a fire at the Zuxintang foot massage parlor killed 18 people and injured two others in Tiantai county, Zhejiang province.
(AP, 2/5/17)
2017 Feb 5, Egypt's top Islamic authority rejected the president's suggestion for legislation that would invalidate the practice of men verbally divorcing their wives.
(AP, 2/5/17)
2017 Feb 5, Iran lifted a ban on US wrestlers, allowing them to take part in the Freestyle World Cup later this month in the Iranian city of Kermanshah. Media said the ban was lifted after the "discriminative restrictions" on Iranian nationals traveling to the US was suspended by a US federal judge.
(AP, 2/5/17)
2017 Feb 5, Israel's Supreme Court gave a small group of settlers in the occupied West Bank a brief respite from a demolition order, giving them until March 5 to leave.
(AFP, 2/5/17)
2017 Feb 5, Italy's premier emphasized the significance of NATO and outlined a new agreement between Italy and Libya to fight human trafficking during a phone call with U.S. President Donald Trump.
(AP, 2/5/17)
2017 Feb 5, In Japan about 200 protesters marched through the streets of Tokyo's Shinjuku district carrying banners to protest a hotel chain under fire for books its president wrote denying the Nanjing Massacre in wartime China ever happened. APA group founder and president, Toshio Motoya, has placed books of his revisionist views on history in every room of the company's 400-plus APA Hotels.
(Reuters, 2/5/17)
2017 Feb 5, A 50-meter concrete wall in the northern Kosovo city of Mitrovica was pulled down following an agreement between the government and the country's ethnic Serb minority. The Serbs, who do not recognize Kosovo as a state, started constructing the wall in December, saying it was to protect against a landslip.
(AP, 2/5/17)(Reuters, 2/5/17)
2017 Feb 5, Morocco’s Deputy Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita said his country will "never recognize" Western Sahara's independence despite rejoining the African Union after a decades-long dispute over the territory.
(AFP, 2/5/17)
2017 Feb 5, Myanmar police arrested a Buddhist monk in northern Rakhine state after finding 400,000 pills of methamphetamine in his car. A search of his monastery turned up 4.2 million pills along with a grenade and ammunition.
(SFC, 2/8/17, p.A2)
2017 Feb 5, The Philippine government derided Catholic bishops as "out of touch" after they used weekend sermons to attack a war on drugs they said had created a "reign of terror" for the poor.
(Reuters, 2/5/17)
2017 Feb 5, Romania's government repealed an emergency decree that decriminalizes some official misconduct following massive demonstrations and condemnation from abroad. Protests still raged on for a sixth straight day.
(AP, 2/5/17)(AFP, 2/5/17)
2017 Feb 5, Somalia's al-Shabab extremist group killed four men accused of spying for the CIA and the Kenya and Somali governments. The killings were carried out in a public square in Jamame, Lower Jubba region.
(AP, 2/6/17)
2017 Feb 5, Turkish police detained 448 suspected Islamic State group members in nationwide raids just over a month after an attack on an Istanbul nightclub claimed by the jihadists.
(AFP, 2/5/17)
2017 Feb 5, Ukraine's military says two soldiers were wounded in fighting with rebels in the separatist east, but that artillery attacks were significantly lower after a week in which fighting surged.
(AP, 2/5/17)
2017 Feb 6, San Francisco’s Mayor Ed Lee and Supervisor Jane Kim announced a deal to make City College of San Francisco free of charge to all city residents.
(SFC, 2/7/17, p.C1)
2017 Feb 6, In Florida ex-convict Joseph Schreiber (32) pleaded no contest to torching the Islamic Center of Fort Pierce last Sep 11. He was sentenced to 30 years in prison.
(SFC, 2/7/17, p.A6)
2017 Feb 6, In Mississippi four people were shot and killed following an argument at a nightclub in Yazoo City. Briddell Barber (27) was soon arrested and charged with four counts of first-degree murder.
(SFC, 2/7/17, p.A5)
2017 Feb 6, Missouri Rep. Gov. Eric Greitens signed a bill making his state the 28th right-to-work state banning union fees and dues.
(SFC, 2/7/17, p.A5)
2017 Feb 6, Fadi Yassine (42) of Lebanon made a court appearance in Brooklyn, New York and will be transferred to Cedar Rapids, Iowa to face charges of conspiring to violate the Arms Export Control act. He was arrested in connection with a scheme to smuggle guns purchased in Iowa to his country.
(AP, 2/7/17)
2017 Feb 6, The indigenous Sami people of Europe's Arctic north, formerly nomadic reindeer herders in Lapland, celebrated their national day with hundreds of events across the Nordic lands. The Sami settled with their reindeer herds 9,000 years ago in Europe's Arctic and now number 70,000 people spread across Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia.
(AP, 2/6/17)
2017 Feb 6, Australian church data showed that seven percent of Catholic priests working in Australia between 1950 and 2010 were accused of child sex crimes but few were pursued, as hearings began over allegations dating back decades.
(Reuters, 2/6/17)
2017 Feb 6, Queen Elizabeth II, the world's longest reigning sovereign, set a new record as the first British monarch to reach her sapphire jubilee, with 65 years on the throne.
(AFP, 2/6/17)
2017 Feb 6, Cambodian police said they arrested a Japanese man and two Cambodians last week suspected of tricking Cambodian women into working in the sex trade in Japan.
(AP, 2/6/17)
2017 Feb 6, The EU’s top diplomats vowed to uphold sanctions against Russia for destabilizing conflict-torn Ukraine.
(SFC, 2/7/17, p.A2)
2017 Feb 6, French presidential candidate Francois Fillon apologized for the "error" he made in hiring his wife as a parliamentary aide and denied she was paid for a fake job.
(AFP, 2/6/17)
2017 Feb 6, In India Cyrus Mistry, the boss of Tata until last October, was finally booted out of the company. Natarajan Chandrasekaran, the boss of Tata Consultancy Services, took over as chairman on Feb 21. Mistry’s family held an 18% stake in Tata Sons, the main holding company.
(Econ, 2/11/17, p.54)
2017 Feb 6, Israel’s parliament passed a new law legalizing dozens of Jewish outposts built on private Palestinian land.
(AFP, 2/7/17)
2017 Feb 6, The World Bank approved $200 million for repairing Lebanon's unsafe roads.
(AP, 2/7/17)
2017 Feb 6, A Myanmar patrol boat opened fire on Bangladeshi fishermen. Nurul Amin (26) was killed, one fisherman was wounded and another went overboard but swam to safety when a Myanmar navy vessel approached their boat at speed in the Naf river which forms the border in that area.
(Reuters, 2/8/17)
2017 Feb 6, Hundreds of Nigerians marched to protest poverty and corruption as President Muhammadu Buhari's prolonged absence abroad for medical tests raised political and economic tensions.
(AP, 2/6/17)
2017 Feb 6, In Pakistan Afghan diplomat Mohammad Zaki Abdu was shot and killed by his security guard inside the consulate in the port city of Karachi.
(AP, 2/6/17)
2017 Feb 6, A Palestinian rocket launched from Gaza struck Israel, causing no casualties or damage, in a rare attack that drew Israeli air strikes against Palestinian militant targets.
(Reuters, 2/6/17)
2017 Feb 6, Peruvian prosecutors opened a formal investigation into suspicions that former president Alejandro Toledo took $20 million in bribes from Brazilian construction firm Odebrecht, which is at the heart of a regional scandal.
(AP, 2/7/17)
2017 Feb 6, South Sudan’s Pres. Salva Kiir said that soldiers who rape civilians should be shot, trying to mollify citizens outraged by abuses by security forces and quell growing international anger over attacks.
(Reuters, 2/6/17)
2017 Feb 6, Syrian government forces advanced on the northern Islamic State-held city of al-Bab, cutting off the last supply route that connects it to militant strongholds further east towards Iraq.
(Reuters, 2/6/17)
2017 Feb 6, Tanzania’s President John Magufuli told security forces to crack down on the drugs trade and said no one should be spared, even if they are top politicians or their relatives.
(Reuters, 2/6/17)
2017 Feb 6, Turkey said it has now detained nearly 750 suspects in a police operation against the Islamic State group.
(AP, 2/6/17)
2017 Feb 6, Yemen's Shiite rebels said they have "successfully" fired a ballistic missile at Riyadh for the first time, vowing more attacks on the Saudi capital.
(AP, 2/6/17)
2017 Feb 7, VP Thomas Pence cast his vote to confirm charter school advocate Betsy DeVos as US education secretary breaking a 50-50 Senate tie.
(SFC, 2/8/17, p.A4)
2017 Feb 7, US federal prosecutors said Jermine Prosper (39), native of Guyana, was sentenced last week to five years in federal prison after pleading guilty to smuggling dozens of guns. He had legally purchased about 50 guns in the Atlanta and smuggled them in shipping barrels to Guyana, where they were sold on the streets.
(AP, 2/7/17)
2017 Feb 7, The US Army said that it will allow the $3.8 billion Dakota Access oil pipeline to cross under a Mississippi River reservoir in North Dakota.
(SFC, 2/8/17, p.A6)
2017 Feb 7, In northern California the Dept. of Water Resources discovered a large amount of debris coming out of the concrete-lined spillway of the Oroville Dam. Release of water was stopped and engineers found a massive crater in the spillway.
(SSFC, 2/19/17, p.A19)
2017 Feb 7, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D) was rebuked by the Senate for a reading a 1986 letter by Coretta Scott King that dated to Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions’ failed judicial nomination. The Senate was debating Sessions’ nomination for attorney general.
(SFC, 2/8/17, p.A5)
2017 Feb 7, Richard Hatch (b.1945), former star of the TV series “Battleship Galactica" (1978-1979), died in Los Angeles.
(SFC, 2/9/17, p.D3)
2017 Feb 7, In Afghanistan 22 people were killed in a bomb blast outside the Supreme Court in the center of Kabul, in what appeared to be the latest in a series of attacks on the judiciary. The Islamic State soon claimed responsibility.
(Reuters, 2/7/17)(Reuters, 2/8/17)
2017 Feb 7, Brazilian federal troops began to reestablish control over the state of Espirito Santo, where scores of people are reported to have been killed since the police went on strike. Police stopped patrolling on Feb 4 and criminals quickly ran amok.
(AFP, 2/7/17)
2017 Feb 7, Brexit Minister David Jones told the House of Commons that Parliament would get to approve the deal "before it is concluded" and before the European Parliament votes on it.
(AP, 2/7/17)
2017 Feb 7, Colombia opens peace talks with its last active rebel group, the ELN, seeking to replicate its historic accord with the FARC guerrillas and deliver "complete peace" after 53 years of war.
(AFP, 2/7/17)
2017 Feb 7, The European Union appointed 19 international judges to a special court that will prosecute ethnic Albanian rebels for crimes during and immediately after Kosovo's war for independence (1998-2000). The Kosovo Specialist Chambers judges come from 12 EU countries and the United States and Canada.
(AP, 2/7/17)
2017 Feb 7, Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy was ordered to stand trial in an inquiry into alleged campaign finance fraud during his failed 2012 re-election bid.
(AP, 2/7/17)
2017 Feb 7, Gangs of French youths torched cars and bins in a showdown with police in a north Paris suburb overnight in a grim reminder of the simmering tension that sparked weeks of more serious rioting in the area a decade ago. It was the third night of tension since four police officers were suspended pending an inquiry into accusations they had used excessive force on Feb 2 while arresting a 22-year-old man there, including shoving a baton into his anus.
(Reuters, 2/7/17)
2017 Feb 7, Jovenel Moise (48) was sworn as Haiti's 58th president, ending a protracted electoral crisis that had created a vacuum of power in the impoverished, disaster-prone Caribbean nation.
(AFP, 2/7/17)
2017 Feb 7, Ivory Coast special forces troops fired in the air in towns in the north and south of the country, weeks after soldiers and security forces mutinied over pay in the west African nation. They appeared to be angling for a deal with the government along the lines of one struck with mutinous soldiers in January that offered some of them large one-off lump sum payments.
(AFP, 2/7/17)
2017 Feb 7, US superstar Madonna adopted twin girls in Malawi, raising to four the total number of children she has adopted from the southern African nation.
(AFP, 2/7/17)
2017 Feb 7, Nigerian troops saved the life of a young woman strapped with explosives and killed another suicide bomber, apparently primed by Boko Haram Islamic extremists to attack the northeastern city of Maiduguri.
(AP, 2/7/17)
2017 Feb 7, Palestinian Pres. Mahmud Abbas called a new Israeli law legalizing dozens of Jewish outposts built on private Palestinian land an "attack against our people".
(AFP, 2/7/17)
2017 Feb 7, Peru's attorney general announced he would seek the arrest of former President Alejandro Toledo (2001-2006) on charges of laundering of assets and influence trafficking.
(AP, 2/7/17)
2017 Feb 7, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte berated 228 policemen accused of a variety of offenses, threatening on national television that he would send them to a southern island to fight militants dreaded for beheading captives.
(AP, 2/7/17)
2017 Feb 7, Romania's President Klaus Iohannis told lawmakers the country is in a "fully-fledged" political crisis, after hundreds of thousands demonstrated against a government measure that would weaken the country's anti-corruption drive.
(AP, 2/7/17)
2017 Feb 7, In Syria air strikes on Al-Qaeda's former affiliate killed 26 people including 16 civilians in Idlib city. The headquarters of Fateh al-Sham Front and the surrounding neighborhood were battered by at least 10 strikes at dawn.
(AFP, 2/7/17)
2017 Feb 7, Amnesty International accused Syria's government of hanging up to 13,000 people at a notorious prison over five years in a "policy of extermination", between 2011 and 2015. The damning report was titled "Human Slaughterhouse: Mass hanging and extermination at Saydnaya prison".
(AFP, 2/7/17)
2017 Feb 7, Tanzania’s deputy minister of health said he has ordered the arrest of three men accused of promoting homosexuality.
(SFC, 2/8/17, p.A2)
2017 Feb 7, Thailand’s PM Prayuth Chan-ocha said that Somdej Phra Maha Muniwong (89) has been appointed by King Vajiralongkorn Bodindradebayavarangkun as the 20th supreme patriarch of the Buddhist order. His predecessor died in 2013 at age 100.
(AP, 2/7/17)
2017 Feb 7, Thailand's cabinet approved measures worth $1 billion to help farmers in its flood-hit south.
(Reuters, 2/7/17)
2017 Feb 7, A Thai court sentenced Australian Antonio Bagnato (28) to death for the murder of a countryman who was an alleged confederate in a drug smuggling gang. He was found guilty of killing former Hells Angels member Wayne Schneider in November 2015 after he and accomplices beat and kidnapped the victim from his luxury villa in the Pattaya resort area.
(AP, 2/7/17)
2017 Feb 8, Rep. Sen. Jeff Sessions was confirmed as Pres. Donald Trump’s attorney general.
(SFC, 2/9/17, p.A4)
2017 Feb 8, Former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman (70) was released from a federal prison where he was serving a six-year sentence for bribery and obstruction of justice. He will serve the remainder of his sentence on house arrest.
(SFC, 2/9/17, p.A4)
2017 Feb 8, In Louisiana some 31 people were reported injured after six tornadoes tore through New Orleans and other parts of the state, pounding across highways and streets and leaving trees, power lines and homes leveled.
(Reuters, 2/8/17)
2017 Feb 8, Maine indicted Ronald Paquin (74), a former Roman Catholic priest, on 29 counts of sexual misconduct dating to the 1980s. Paquin had spent more than a decade in a Massachusetts prison for raping an altar boy.
(SFC, 2/9/17, p.A4)
2017 Feb 8, In North Carolina a 3-judge panel temporarily blocked a new law requiring state Senate confirmation for Gov. Roy Cooper’s Cabinet members. The law was passed in the waning days of Rep. Gov. Pat McCrory.
(SFC, 2/9/17, p.A6)
2017 Feb 8, In Ohio Reagan Tokes (21), an Ohio State Univ. student, was last seen leaving work at a Columbus restaurant. Her nude body was found the next day near a park entrance in Grove City. On February 11 DNA evidence led police to arrest convicted sex offender Brian Golsby (29).
(SSFC, 2/12/17, p.A8)
2017 Feb 8, In Afghanistan at least six Afghan employees of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) were killed as they carried supplies to areas in Jowzjan province hit by deadly snow storms. Islamic State gunmen were suspected. Two Red Cross staff members were kidnapped. On Sep 5, 2017, the Red Cross said the two kidnapped staff members have been released.
(Reuters, 2/8/17)(Reuters, 9/5/17)
2017 Feb 8, A Brazilian zoologist said an outbreak of yellow fever has claimed the lives of more than 600 monkeys and dozens of humans in the Atlantic rainforest region, threatening the survival of rare South American primates.
(Reuters, 2/8/17)
2017 Feb 8, Colombia's chief prosecutor said that suspicions of illegal campaign contributions to President Juan Manuel Santos are based on testimony of a rancher Otto Bula, connected to the leader's opponents, who has been jailed for allegedly channeling bribes on behalf of the Brazilian Odebrecht construction firm.
(AP, 2/8/17)
2017 Feb 8, The head of Estonia's foreign intelligence service said that Russia was "the greatest source of a threat" to Estonia in cyberspace because Estonia is a member of both the EU and NATO. He also said Estonia has teamed up with the US Secret Service ahead of its first EU presidency to train local officials to handle cyber threats.
(AP, 2/8/17)
2017 Feb 8, In Austria interior and defense ministers from 15 European countries agreed to come up with new measures to ensure that the overland route from Greece remains shut for migrants seeking new lives in other EU nations and those trying to bring them in illegally.
(AP, 2/8/17)
2017 Feb 8, The Czech government said it has decided to double its quota for Ukrainian workers, due to an acute labor shortage as the economy continues to grow strongly.
(Reuters, 2/8/17)
2017 Feb 8, In Greece hundreds of firefighters in uniform took to the streets of Athens, saying roughly one third of their jobs are at risk due to hiring restrictions placed on the public sector by Greece's international bailout conditions.
(AP, 2/8/17)
2017 Feb 8, In Iraq hundreds of supporters of Iraqi cleric Moqtada al-Sadr demonstrated in Baghdad to demand electoral reform ahead of a planned provincial vote in September.
(AFP, 2/8/17)
2017 Feb 8, Israeli and Palestinian rights groups petitioned the Supreme Court asking it to strike down a new law allowing expropriation of private Palestinian land for Jewish settlers.
(AFP, 2/8/17)
2017 Feb 8, Mexican electoral authorities annulled the results of town council elections in San Juan Achiutla, Oaxaca, because married women had been prevented from voting. Achiutla officials had argued that married women don't perform community work and thus can't vote.
(AP, 2/9/17)
2017 Feb 8, In the Philippines as many as 15,000 people were left homeless after a huge fire engulfed an overcrowded slum in Manila, destroying thousands of homes and sending residents fleeing with their few possessions.
(AFP, 2/8/17)
2017 Feb 8, Romania's defiant PM Sorin Grindeanu easily survived a no-confidence vote even as his government continued to face nationwide protests over its efforts to weaken anti-corruption laws.
(AFP, 2/8/17)
2017 Feb 8, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny accused the Kremlin of trying to block him from running in next year's presidential election after a court found him guilty of embezzlement. A court in Kirov found Navalny guilty of embezzlement in relation to a timber firm called Kirovles, and gave him a five-year suspended prison sentence.
(Reuters, 2/8/17)
2017 Feb 8, The Russian embassy in Nigeria said seven Russian sailors and a Ukrainian have been kidnapped in Nigerian waters from the BBC Caribbean, a cargo vessel flagged in Antigua and Barbuda.
(AP, 2/8/17)
2017 Feb 8, In Somalia members of the upper and lower houses of parliament elected former PM Mohamed Abdullahi Farmajo as president.
(SFC, 2/9/17, p.A2)
2017 Feb 8, Syrian government jets bombed a rebel-held district of Homs city in the west of the country, killing at least nine people.
(Reuters, 2/8/17)(AP, 2/8/17)
2017 Feb 8, Turkey said Syrian rebels backed by the Turkish military have captured the outskirts of the Islamic State-held city of al-Bab in northern Syria.
(Reuters, 2/8/17)
2017 Feb 8, Turkish presidency sources said President Tayyip Erdogan and US President Donald Trump agreed in an overnight phone call on joint action against Islamic State in the Syrian towns of Raqqa and al-Bab, both held by the militants.
(Reuters, 2/8/17)
2017 Feb 8, In eastern Ukraine Mikhail Tolstykh (36), the military chief of a self-proclaimed Russian-backed Donetsk republic, was blown up with a grenade launcher. Rebels blamed Ukrainian security services.
(AFP, 2/8/17)(Econ, 2/11/17, p.38)
2017 Feb 8, Senior UN officials said more than 1,000 Rohingya Muslims may have been killed in a Myanmar army crackdown, suggesting the death toll has been a far greater than previously reported.
(Reuters, 2/8/17)
2017 Feb 8, The UN appealed for $2.1 billion to provide desperately needed aid to millions of people in war-ravaged Yemen this year, warning the country could soon face famine.
(AFP, 2/8/17)
2017 Feb 8, Pope Francis issued a stinging criticism of atrocities against Myanmar's Rohingya minority, saying they had been tortured and killed simply because they wanted to live their culture and Muslim faith.
(Reuters, 2/8/17)
2017 Feb 8, Zimbabwe's Constitutional Court dismissed a case against President Robert Mugabe (92) lodged by an activist who accused the aging leader of violating the southern African country's supreme law during protests last year.
(Reuters, 2/8/17)
2017 Feb 8, Zimbabwean protest leader Evan Mawarire was released on bail by a court in Harare after police arrested him on charges of subverting the government and inciting public violence.
(AFP, 2/8/17)
2017 Feb 9, President Donald Trump reaffirmed Washington's long-standing "one China" policy in a call with Beijing's leader.
(AP, 2/10/17)
2017 Feb 9, The Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals refused to reinstate a temporary travel ban on refugees and citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries, but the government planned to fight back on multiple legal fronts.
(Reuters, 2/10/17)
2017 Feb 9, Alabama’s attorney general Luther Strange was sworn in as the new interim Republican senator and will serve until November 2018, when a special election will be held to fill the seat for the remainder of Jeff Sessions’ term, which ends in January of 2020.
(SFC, 2/10/17, p.A6)
2017 Feb 9, In Arizona the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deported Guadalupe Garcia de Rayos, an immigrant mother in Phoenix, to Mexico. Seven protesters were arrested.
(SFC, 2/10/17, p.A8)
2017 Feb 9, In Louisiana an explosion and fire at a Phillips 66 pipeline station in Paradis left two employees hospitalized and one missing.
(SFC, 2/11/17, p.A6)
2017 Feb 9, In Missouri Frank Ancona (51), the leader of a Ku Klux Klan group, was fatally shot. His wife Melissa (44) and stepson Paul Edward Jinkerson (24) were soon charged with his murder. On April 19, 2019, Malissa Ancona was sentenced to life in prison following a deal in which she pleaded guilty to 2nd-degree murder and abandonment of a corpse.
(SFC, 2/22/17, p.A4)(SSFC, 4/21/19, p.A6)
2017 Feb 9, The Federal Aviation Administration canceled all inbound and outbound flights at John F. Kennedy Airport amid a winter storm that barreled its way through the northeastern United States. More than 3,500 flights were canceled across the region.
(Reuters, 2/9/17)(SFC, 2/10/17, p.A9)
2017 Feb 9, In Washington state an electrical failure at the 32-acre West Point Treatment Plant, next to Seattle’s largest park, resulted in catastrophic flooding and damaged an underground network of equipment. This led to a raw sewage flow into the Puget Sound that continued to Feb 16. Damages were estimated at $25 million.
(SFC, 3/27/17, p.A5)
2017 Feb 9, In southern Afghanistan 22 civilians, mostly women and children, were killed during a joint operation against Taliban insurgents carried out by US and Afghan forces in the Sangin district of Helmand province.
(AP, 2/12/17)
2017 Feb 9, The top US commander in Afghanistan said he needs several thousand more international troops in order to break a stalemate in the long war with Taliban insurgents, signaling the matter may soon be put before President Donald Trump.
(Reuters, 2/9/17)
2017 Feb 9, The Native American Standing Rock Sioux Tribe filed a last-ditch legal challenge to block the $3.8 billion Dakota Access oil pipeline project after the company constructing it won federal permission to tunnel under the Missouri River.
(Reuters, 2/9/17)
2017 Feb 9, In Brazil more than 100 people have been reported killed, with schools and businesses closed and public transportation at a standstill, as a six-day strike by police in the state of Espirito Santo showed no signs of abating.
(Reuters, 2/9/17)
2017 Feb 9, A British immigration tribunal upheld a government decision to strip four men of citizenship. They had been convicted of grooming girls for sex in a case that fueled racial tensions. They now faced deportation to Pakistan.
(AP, 2/9/17)
2017 Feb 9, The World Health Organization (WHO) said that China has taken steps to end its once-widespread practice of harvesting organs from executed prisoners but that it's impossible to know what is happening across the entire country.
(AP, 2/9/17)
2017 Feb 9, Egyptian police closed down the Al-Nadeem Center for Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence, an organization that treats victims of torture and trauma.
(AP, 2/9/17)
2017 Feb 9, The European Union announced aid worth 225 million euros ($240 million) for Gambia as President Adama Barrow warned that the nation was "virtually bankrupt" due to economic mismanagement by the former regime.
(AFP, 2/9/17)
2017 Feb 9, A French court threw out a complaint by a federation of Catholic families that dating site Gleeden's business model is illegal and anti-social because it encourages extramarital affairs.
(AP, 2/9/17)
2017 Feb 9, French carmaker PSA Group, maker of Peugeot and Citroen vehicles, said it has been referred to prosecutors over its diesel emissions.
(Reuters, 2/9/17)
2017 Feb 9, Germany reported the world’s largest current-account surplus of about €270 billion ($300 billion).
(Econ, 2/11/17, p.40)
2017 Feb 9, Some 450 German special commandos made 12 coordinated raids and arrested two men suspected of planning an imminent Islamist attack in Goettingen.
(Reuters, 2/9/17)
2017 Feb 9, German neo-Nazi Maik Schneider (29) was sentenced to eight years jail for the August 2015 arson in the high school sports hall in Nauen that had been designated to house refugees. He received an additional term of one year and six months for other xenophobic crimes.
(AFP, 2/9/17)
2017 Feb 8, Ljubisa Beara (77), a Bosnian Serb commander convicted of war crimes over the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, died in a German prison.
(AP, 2/10/17)
2017 Feb 9, Hungary said it plans to hold migrants in border camps made up of shipping containers while their asylum requests are settled.
(AP, 2/9/17)
2017 Feb 9, In central Israel a Palestinian (18) opened fire and stabbed shoppers with a screwdriver near a busy open air market wounding at least six people in Petah Tikva.
(AP, 2/9/17)
2017 Feb 9, Kenya's High Court blocked the government's decision to close the Dadaab refugee camp -- the world's largest -- and force Somali refugees to return home.
(AFP, 2/9/17)
2017 Feb 9, A study by Mexico’s government and independent experts was released indicating the number of monarch butterflies wintering in Mexico dropped by 27 percent this year, reversing last year's recovery from historically low numbers.
(AP, 2/9/17)
2017 Feb 9, In Myanmar production at Hangzhou Hundred-Tex Garment Company in Yangon was halted. Workers had demanded a better performance review system and healthcare coverage. Later in the month hundreds of workers stormed the Chinese-owned factory making clothes for Swedish fashion retailer Hennes & Mauritz. They damaged facilities including textile machinery, computers and surveillance cameras.
(Reuters, 3/7/17)
2017 Feb 9, NATO alliance deputy head Rose Gottemoeller said all 28 member allies fully support Ukraine as it faces the worst upsurge in fighting against pro-Russian rebels in two years.
(AFP, 2/9/17)
2017 Feb 9, In Nigeria more than 700 people took to the streets in Abuja to protest against the government's economic policy in a sign of mounting public anger in the oil producer grappling with recession.
(Reuters, 2/9/17)
2017 Feb 9, In northern Nigeria Boko Haram killed one person and abducted a seven-year-old boy from the village of Kaumutaiyahi near Chibok.
(AFP, 2/10/17)
2017 Feb 9, Panamanian prosecutors took law firm partners Ramon Fonseca Mora and Jurgen Mossack into custody and searched their offices. The Mossack-Fonseca firm has been accused of setting up offshore accounts that allowed the Brazilian construction firm Odebrecht to funnel bribes to multiple countries. On April 21 Mora and Mossack were released on bail.
(SSFC, 2/12/17, p.A4)(SSFC, 4/23/17, p.A4)
2017 Feb 9, A Serbian court rejected an extradition request by Montenegro for Nemanja Ristic, a suspect in an alleged pro-Russia plot to overthrow the small Balkan country's government.
(AP, 2/10/17)
2017 Feb 9, In northern Syria a Russian warplane "accidentally" hit a building on with Turkish soldiers inside, killing at least three troops and wounding 11 near al-Bab. Russia intervened to halt a clash between Syrian government forces and Turkey-backed Syrian rebels, the first confrontation between them as both sides fight Islamic State in the area.
(AP, 2/9/17)(Reuters, 2/10/17)
2017 Feb 9, Turkish officials said police have detained four Islamic State group suspects who were allegedly planning to carry out a "sensational" attack and seized 24 suicide attack belts during an anti-terror operation in Gaziantep.
(AP, 2/9/17)
2017 Feb 10, President Donald Trump and PM Shinzo Abe opened two days of talks looking to cement a decades-old alliance between Japan and the United States that has been under strain because of the Republican's positions on trade and security.
(Reuters, 2/10/17)
2017 Feb 10, White Tennessee police Officer Josh Lippert (32) fatally shot Jocques Clemmons (31), a black man who was carrying a gun, following a traffic stop in East Nashville. Witnesses later said Clemmons was shot in the back while running away. No charges were filed against Lippert.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Jocques_Clemmons)(SFC, 8/5/17, p.A6)
2017 Feb 10, In Virginia Mohamed Jalloh (27) was sentenced to 11 years in prison for attempting to provide material support to a terrorist group. He had admitted traveling to Africa to join the Islamic State group and had pleaded guilty last October.
(SFC, 2/11/17, p.A6)
2017 Feb 10, Ford Motor CEO Mark Fields said Ford will invest $1 billion over the next five years in Argo AI, a months-old company specializing in machine learning by former leaders of self-driving teams at Google and Uber.
(SFC, 2/11/17, p.D1)
2017 Feb 10, US investment firm Blackstone said it is buying London-based Aon's technology-enabled benefits and human resources assets in a deal valued at up to $4.8 billion.
(AP, 2/10/17)
2017 Feb 10, In Angola a stadium stampede killed at least 17 and injured scores during a domestic soccer league match between host side Santa Rita de Cassia and Recreativo de Libolo in the northern town of Uige. The host team blamed the stampeded on police error. The death toll soon climbed to 22.
(AFP, 2/11/17)
2017 Feb 10, In Brazil Public Safety Director Andre Garcia said 703 military police officers in Espirito Santo have been charged with the crime of revolt. Military police patrol Brazil’s cities and are barred by law from going on strike.
(SFC, 2/11/17, p.A2)
2017 Feb 10, British police said 794 pounds (360 kg) of cocaine with a street value of up to 50 million pounds ($62 million) have washed up on beaches in eastern England.
(AP, 2/10/17)
2017 Feb 10, In Canada the Manitoba Criminal Code Review Board announced it has given Will Baker, formerly known as Vince Li, an absolute discharge, meaning he is no longer subject to monitoring. Baker, a diagnosed schizophrenic, killed Tim McLean (22), a carnival worker who was a complete stranger to Baker, in 2008. A year later he was found not criminally responsible due to mental illness.
(AP, 2/11/17)
2017 Feb 10, The Islamic State group in Egypt claimed to have executed five men it accuses of spying for the army, which is battling the jihadists in the Sinai Peninsula.
(AFP, 2/11/17)
2017 Feb 10, French anti-terrorist police arrested four people in Montpellier, including a girl (16), suspected of preparing an "imminent" attack.
(AFP, 2/10/17)
2017 Feb 10, Hong Kong police arrested a man, surnamed Cheung (60), for arson after a fire engulfed a subway train, injuring 17 people and triggering the evacuation of the Tsim Sha Tsui station during rush hour.
(AFP, 2/10/17)
2017 Feb 10, In Iraq at least five people were killed and 19 wounded in two suicide bombings that hit an army position and a restaurant in eastern Mosul.
(Reuters, 2/10/17)
2017 Feb 10, Italy adopted measures to accelerate the asylum process, easing pressure on shelters and speeding deportations of those whose appeals are rejected.
(Reuters, 2/10/17)
2017 Feb 10, Libyan security officials said Islamic State militants have shifted to desert valleys and inland hills southeast of Tripoli as they seek to exploit Libya's political divisions after defeat in their former stronghold of Sirte.
(Reuters, 2/10/17)
2017 Feb 10, East Libyan forces lost a Mi-35 combat helicopter near the central town of Zalla. Two crew members were killed. It was not clear if the helicopter had been shot down or crashed because of a technical fault.
(Reuters, 2/11/17)
2017 Feb 10, The head of Lithuania's state tourism agency resigned after admitting her agency promoted the Baltic country in an international social media campaign by using landscape photos taken in other countries.
(AP, 2/10/17)
2017 Feb 10, Amnesty International urged Myanmar's government to suspend operations at the Letpadaung mine copper mine, jointly owned by its army and a Chinese state enterprise, until its impact on human rights and the environment is properly addressed.
(AP, 2/10/17)
2017 Feb 10, In northern Nigeria at least eight soldiers were killed in a Boko Haram ambush in the Mafa area east of Maiduguri.
(AFP, 2/10/17)
2017 Feb 10, Seven Pakistani fishermen, who remained jailed in Yemen for over a decade, returned home following efforts by the ICRC and Pakistan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
(AP, 2/11/17)
2017 Feb 10, Peruvian police launched a manhunt for ex-president Alejandro Toledo, once hailed as an anti-corruption champion, after a judge ordered his arrest over accusations he took $20 million in bribes.
(AFP, 2/10/17)
2017 Feb 10, A Philippines court granted protection to families of five people killed or wounded by police and the right to access police case reports, in the first successful legal challenge to President Rodrigo Duterte's deadly crackdown on drugs.
(Reuters, 2/10/17)
2017 Feb 10, In the southern Philippines a magnitude 6.7 nighttime earthquake killed eight people and injured more than 120 in Surigao del Norte province. The number of people killed was later reduced to four.
(AP, 2/11/17)(AP, 2/12/17)(AP, 3/5/17)
2017 Feb 10, South Africa’s Pres. Zuma said state utility Eskom would sign new renewable energy contracts, angering coal transport workers who say such contracts will lead to 30,000 job losses in the coal industry.
(AP, 3/1/17)
2017 Feb 10, Swedish banking group SEB issued its first green bond, raising 500 million euros ($532 million) for loans to low-carbon projects.
(Reuters, 2/13/17)
2017 Feb 10, In southern Thailand Sama-ae Doloh, a sub-district chief in Pattani province, was fatally shot by heavily armed men who stopped him on his way to work. In neighboring Narathiwat province, two people were fatally shot by five masked men at a rubber trading store.
(AP, 2/10/17)
2017 Feb 10, In Turkey police used tear gas to disperse protesters trying to enter Ankara University to denounce a government decree that dismissed 330 academics. At least five protesters were detained.
(AP, 2/10/17)
2017 Feb 10, The United Nations received a notice from Gambia's reversing its withdrawal from the International Criminal Court.
(AP, 2/14/17)
2017 Feb 10, Yemeni government forces took full control of the Red Sea coastal town of Mokha after weeks of deadly fighting with Shiite rebels and their allies. UNHCR spokesman William Spindler said that 34,000 people have fled their homes in Yemen after fierce fighting erupted in the port towns of Mokha and Dhubab on the Red Sea.
(AFP, 2/10/17)(AP, 2/10/17)
2017 Feb 11, In Connecticut the Yale Univ. Pres. Peter Salovey said a residential college in New Haven commemorating John Calhoun, the 19th century white supremacist statesman from South Carolina, will be renamed for Grace Murray Hopper, a computer scientist and Navy rear admiral.
(SSFC, 2/12/17, p.A8)
2017 Feb 11, In Afghanistan a suicide bomber killed seven people and wounded 20 others outside a bank in Lashkar Gah, Helmand province. A local official said that an American military air strike killed a number of civilians in a recent bombing in Sangin district north of Lashkar Gah.
(Reuters, 2/11/17)
2017 Feb 11, In Brazil military police in the southeastern state of Espirito Santo rejected a return-to-work agreement aimed at ending a strike that has paralyzed several cities and led to an outburst of violence in which more than 130 people have reportedly died. More than 3,000 federal troops now patrolled the streets.
(AP, 2/11/17)
2017 Feb 11, London's Sotheby's auction house opened the "Erotica: Passion & Desire" show of over 150 titillating items to explore the varied attitudes to nudity and sex across eras and continents ahead of an auction for the next week.
(AFP, 2/10/17)
2017 Feb 11, Sam Rainsy, the self-exiled leader of Cambodia's opposition party, he would resign his post, a shock blow to a movement struggling to unseat the country's authoritarian premier. Rainsy has led the Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP) since its creation in 2012 and has spent over a year in France to avoid several lawsuits.
(AFP, 2/11/17)
2017 Feb 11, In China EHang, a drone-making startup, performed a 1000 UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) formation light show named “Meteor Sky" at the Guangzhou city center on the sky of the famous Canton Tower.
(http://www.ehang.com/news/249.html)(Econ, 3/11/17, p.64)
2017 Feb 11, In France some 15,000 people marched in the eastern city of Strasbourg demanding that Turkey release Kurdish separatist leader Abdullah Ocalan, as Europe's Kurds held their biggest annual gathering.
(AFP, 2/11/17)
2017 Feb 11, In France 37 people were arrested in the Paris suburbs when clashes erupted after a protest over the Feb 2 assault of a young black man allegedly sodomized with a police truncheon.
(AFP, 2/12/17)
2017 Feb 11, Millions of voters in Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous state, cast their ballots in a contest seen as a key test for Narendra Modi halfway through his first term as prime minister.
(AFP, 2/11/17)
2017 Feb 11, In Indonesia tens of thousands gathered at the national mosque in Jakarta for mass prayers urging people to vote for a Muslim governor of the city as the country prepares for regional elections next week.
(AP, 2/11/17)
2017 Feb 11, Indonesian officials said up to 40,000 people were caught in severe flooding following days of torrential rain in West Nusa Tenggara province. The death toll from landslides on Bali resort island rose to 13.
(AP, 2/11/17)
2017 Feb 11, In Iraq six demonstrators and one policeman were killed in clashes between security forces and protesters loyal to prominent Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr who had gathered in Baghdad to demand political reforms.
(AFP, 2/11/17)(AP, 2/12/17)
2017 Feb 11, The Iraqi air force carried out a strike on a house where Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was thought to be meeting other commanders. It published the names of 13 Islamic State commanders it said had been killed in the air strike, but the list did not include Baghdadi. Three other Islamic State positions in western Iraq were targeted in the same wave of air strikes, killing 64 fighters.
(Reuters, 2/13/17)
2017 Feb 11, In New Zealand a new pod of 240 whales swam aground at a remote beach just hours after weary volunteers managed to refloat a different group of whales following an earlier mass stranding. In total, more than 650 pilot whales have beached themselves over two days on Farewell Spit at the tip of the South Island. About 350 of the whales were dead, 100 were refloated by volunteers and more than 200 managed to swim away unassisted.
(AP, 2/11/17)(SSFC, 2/12/17, p.A4)
2017 Feb 11, North Korea launched a missile from an area called Panghyon in its western region just before 8 a.m. (2300 GMT Saturday). It flew about 500 km (300 miles). Japan’s PM Shinzo Abe called the launch "absolutely intolerable" and said North Korea must comply with UN Security Council resolutions. Pres. Trump speaking alongside Abe said that the USA is behind Japan, our great ally, 100 percent.
(Reuters, 2/12/17)
2017 Feb 11, A top Philippine official said police have sacked nearly 100 policemen since the start of the year because they were found to be drug users.
(AP, 2/11/17)
2017 Feb 11, In Poland hundreds of protesters with flags and banners marched in downtown Warsaw against the ruling party's plan to enlarge the capital by incorporating 32 neighboring municipalities.
(AP, 2/11/17)
2017 Feb 11, Police in Sicily confiscated four olive companies, farmland, villas and other property that anti-Mafia prosecutors contend belong to the business empire of Italy's top Mafia boss, who has been on the run for more than 20 years.
(AP, 2/11/17)
2017 Feb 11, South Sudanese Lt. Gen. Thomas Cirillo Swaka resigned while telling President Salva Kiir "you have disgraced yourself" by subjecting the conflict-torn country to ethnic bias and "unacceptable cycles of violence."
(AP, 2/11/17)
2017 Feb 11, Spain’s PM Mariano Rajoy was reelected as the leader of the conservative Popular Party for a 4th term.
(SFC, 2/13/17, p.A2)
2017 Feb 11, In northern Syria Turkish troops and Syrian rebels entered the Islamic State-held town of Al-Bab, as government forces moved closer to the jihadist bastion. one Turkish soldier was killed and another wounded in clashes with IS fighters.
(AFP, 2/11/17)
2017 Feb 12, British singer-songwriter Adele won five Grammys at the 59th annual Grammy Awards ceremony in Los Angeles.
(SFC, 2/13/17, p.C1)
2017 Feb 12, Singer Al Jarreau (b.1940), winner of seven Grammy Awards, died in Los Angeles.
(SFC, 2/13/17, p.D4)
2017 Feb 12, In northern California authorities ordered at least 188,000 people living below Lake Oroville to evacuate, shortly after engineers spotted a hole in the spillway that was eroding back toward the top.
(CSM, 2/13/17)
2017 Feb 12, In Florida a small plane carrying three people went missing late today seven miles south of Cedar Key.
(SFC, 2/14/17, p.A5)
2017 Feb 12, Brazil’s state's Department of Public Safety said in a statement that nearly 900 military police officers are on duty in Espirito Santo. On a normal day, around 2,000 officers would be patrolling. Families and friends of the police officers continued their protest outside barracks, demanding higher pay for the officers.
(AP, 2/12/17)
2017 Feb 12, Hollywood musical "La La Land" picked up five British Bafta movie awards, at a glitzy London ceremony charged with filmmakers' political messages.
(AFP, 2/13/17)
2017 Feb 12, Cambodia's main opposition party named Kem Sokha as its acting president after exiled leader Sam Rainsy resigned unexpectedly in the face of a possible ban ahead of elections.
(Reuters, 2/12/17)
2017 Feb 12, Germany’s parliamentary assembly elected former foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier (61) as the new head of state. He vowed to stand up to simplistic populist rhetoric.
(AFP, 2/12/17)(SSFC, 2/12/17, p.A4)
2017 Feb 12, Greek soldiers successfully defused a World War II bomb in Thessaloniki, after evacuating tens of thousands of people from the area.
(AFP, 2/12/17)
2017 Feb 12, Iraqi forces thwarted an attempt by around 200 jihadist fighters to flee their bastion of Tal Afar towards Syria, west of the city of Mosul.
(AFP, 2/13/17)
2017 Feb 12, An Israeli court ordered Haifa Chemicals to shut down the country's largest ammonia tank, which has been a point of contention for years, with residents and environmental groups warning it is a major health hazard.
(Reuters, 2/12/17)
2017 Feb 12, In Kashmir a protester was killed and dozens of others wounded as government forces fired at demonstrators demanding an end to Indian rule following a gunbattle that killed four suspected rebels, two soldiers and a civilian.
(AP, 2/12/17)
2017 Feb 12, The chairman of Pakistan's senate says the body will not welcome any US delegation, member of Congress or dignitary in Islamabad after the US failed to issue a visa to the senate's deputy chairman, a member of the right-wing Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam political party, to attend a meeting at the United Nations.
(AP, 2/12/17)
2017 Feb 12, Peru’s Pres. Pedro Pablo Kuczynski asked US Pres. Donald Trump to extradite former Peruvian Pres. Alejandro Toledo on suspicion of taking bribes from the Brazilian construction company Odebrecht.
(SFC, 2/13/17, p.A4)
2017 Feb 12, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte said he would not stand in the way of his minister's decision to close several mines in the southern Philippines after he saw the damage they had done to the environment.
(Reuters, 2/12/17)
2017 Feb 12, Somaliland said the United Arab Emirates can establish a military base in its territory. The UAE government in January submitted a formal application seeking permission from the Somaliland government to open a military base in the port town of Berbera. Ethiopia and Djibouti opposed the plan.
(AP, 2/12/17)
2017 Feb 12, Supporters of Spain's Podemos party handed Pablo Iglesias a clear victory in a battle for the far-left party's direction, re-electing him as leader and backing his call to return to the streets as a protest movement.
(AFP, 2/12/17)
2017 Feb 12, Swiss voters approved a measure to make it easier for third-generation immigrants to become citizens, crushing rightwing nationalists who had stoked fears about granting nationality to more Muslims.
(AFP, 2/12/17)
2017 Feb 12, Syria's opposition announced its 21-member delegation, including 10 rebel representatives, for a new round of UN-sponsored peace talks in Geneva scheduled for February 20.
(AFP, 2/12/17)
2017 Feb 12, Turkey's president said his troops and allied Syrian fighters have reached the heart of the Islamic State stronghold of al-Bab in northern Syria and will eventually march on the extremists' de facto capital, Raqqa.
(AP, 2/12/17)
2017 Feb 12, Turkmenistan voted with a massive announced turnout in a presidential vote expected to tighten strongman Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov's hold over the gas-rich Central Asian country. Berdymukhamedov won with 98% of the vote.
(AFP, 2/12/17)(Econ, 2/18/17, p.33)
2017 Feb 12, Yemeni security officials said inter-militia fighting has flared up at the airport in the southern coastal city of Aden, with a government-allied helicopter gunship firing on fighters in the area, killing three.
(AP, 2/12/17)
2017 Feb 13, Former banker Steven Mnuchin was sworn in as US Treasury secretary, following a Senate vote deeply divided along party lines.
(CSM, 2/14/17)
2017 Feb 13, Michael Flynn resigned from his position as President Trump's national security adviser after weeks of confusion and speculation over reports that he misled Vice President Mike Pence and other officials about his contacts with Russia.
(AP, 2/14/17)
2017 Feb 13, The US Department of Treasury labeled Venezuela’s VP El Aissami a drug "kingpin," accusing him of facilitating shipments by air and sea, and having links to drug gangs in Mexico and Colombia. The United States also sanctioned Samark Lopez, a man it termed El Aissami's frontman. Aissami’s assets reportedly included three lavish apartments in the Four Season complex of Miami and a Gulfstream jet.
(Reuters, 2/14/17)(Econ, 2/18/17, p.30)
2017 Feb 13, In northern California emergency crews prepared loads of rock to be dropped by helicopters to seal the crumbling Oroville Dam spillway that threatens to inundate communities along the Feather River.
(Reuters, 2/13/17)
2017 Feb 13, Aileen Clarke Hernandez (b.1926), civil rights activist and the 2nd leader of NOW (1970-1971), died in Orange County, Ca.
(SFC, 3/2/17, p.D1)
2017 Feb 13, In New England some 675 US flights were canceled, scores of vehicle crashes reported and schools and government offices shuttered as the third winter storm in five days slammed the area.
(Reuters, 2/13/17)
2017 Feb 13, DuPont and Chemours Co said they had agreed to pay about $671 million in cash to settle several lawsuits related to the leak of a toxic chemical in Parkersburg, West Virginia. Perfluorooctanoic acid, also known as PFOA or C-8, used to make Teflon, has been linked to cancer and other diseases.
(Reuters, 2/13/17)
2017 Feb 13, Scientists said shrimp-like creatures living in the deepest parts of the oceans contain high levels of man-made toxins.
(Reuters, 2/13/17)
2017 Feb 13, Canada’s PM Justin Trudeau met with US Pres. Trump at the White House ahead of a roundtable discussion about women in the workplace. Ivanka Trump, the president's daughter, was involved in recruiting participants and setting the agenda for the roundtable.
(AP, 2/13/17)
2017 Feb 13, In CongoDRC more than 100 people were killed in clashes between Congolese soldiers and militia fighters mainly armed with machetes and spears in clashes that began Feb 9 in the Dibaya area of Kasai-Central province.
(AP, 2/14/17)
2017 Feb 13, Mostafa el-Abbadi (88), Egyptian scholar, died. He was the man behind the recreation of the Great Library of Alexandria, which opened in 2002.
(Econ, 3/11/17, p.86)
2017 Feb 13, In the French Alps at least four skiers were killed in an avalanche near the resort of Tignes. Rescuers said they are trying to dig out five others from the snow with shovels.
(AP, 2/13/17)
2017 Feb 13, Georgia's Orthodox Church was rocked after police announced the arrest of a priest over a suspected poisoning plot targeting a high-ranking Church figure. Prosecutors said they caught archpriest Giorgi Mamaladze with sodium cyanide on February 10 as he boarded a plane to Berlin, where Patriarch Ilia II (83) was awaiting a gallbladder operation.
(AFP, 2/13/17)
2017 Feb 13, Seijun Suzuki (93), Japanese B-movie director, died. His prolific output from gangster films to fantasies influenced international filmmakers including Quentin Tarantino.
(AFP, 2/22/17)
2017 Feb 13, A Kenyan court jailed seven union officials for a month over a doctors strike that has crippled public hospitals for 10 weeks. The seven doctors were released on Feb 15 in an effort to encourage negotiations to end the strike.
(AFP, 2/13/17)(AP, 2/15/17)
2017 Feb 13, In Malaysia Kim Jong Nam (46), the half-brother of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, was assassinated at an airport in Kuala Lumpur, telling medical workers before he died en route to a hospital that he had been attacked with a chemical spray, later identified as the VX nerve agent. South Korean media said North Korean female agents killed him using poisoned needles. Jong-Nam had reportedly travelled using a fake passport under the name of Kim Chol.
(AP, 2/14/17)(AFP, 2/14/17)(Econ, 3/4/17, p.29)
2017 Feb 13, A Pakistani judge banned Valentine's Day celebrations in the country's capital, saying they are against Islamic teachings.
(AP, 2/13/17)
2017 Feb 13, In eastern Pakistan a suicide bomber plowed a motorcycle into a group of police escorting a protest rally in Lahore, killing 15 people and wounding nearly 60. Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, a breakaway Taliban faction, claimed the attack.
(AP, 2/13/17)(Econ, 2/25/17, p.32)
2017 Feb 13, Hamas elected in secret Yahya Sinwar, a hardline member of the Palestinian Islamist movement's armed wing, as its new Gaza leader, indicating a tougher stand against longtime adversary Israel.
(AP, 2/13/17)
2017 Feb 13, Former Panamanian Vice-President Ricardo Arias Calderon (83) died. He had served under President Guillermo Endara after President Manuel Noriega was ousted in a 1989 military invasion.
(AP, 2/14/17)
2017 Feb 13, Romania's Parliament agreed to hold a referendum on public support for fighting official corruption.
(AP, 2/13/17)
2017 Feb 13, Syrian jihadists seen as close to Islamic State battled a rival hardline Islamist faction in northwestern Syria.
(Reuters, 2/13/17)
2017 Feb 13, In Taiwan a bus carrying tourists on a trip to view cherry blossoms flipped over on an expressway ramp in Taipei, killing 32 people and injuring many others.
(AP, 2/13/17)
2017 Feb 13, A Tanzanian court sentenced a married couple to 20 years in jail each for illegal possession of 210 pieces of ivory from 93 poached elephants. Peter and Leonida Loi Kabi had pleaded not guilty.
(Reuters, 2/14/17)
2017 Feb 13, The UN said more than 1.5 million South Sudanese have become refugees and their humanitarian needs are overwhelming aid efforts during the country's civil war.
(AP, 2/13/17)
2017 Jan 14, Pres. Donald Trump asked FBI Director James Comey to shut down the federal investigation into former national security advisor Michael T. Flynn, the day after Flynn resigned.
(SFC, 5/17/17, p.A6)
2017 Feb 14, Pres. Donald Trump issued major disaster declarations to enable federal funding for California to aid spillway damage on the Oroville Dam and help the with widespread effects of January’s storms.
(SFC, 2/15/17, p.A10)
2017 Feb 14, US ambassador Deborah Malac said the United States will give over $25 million in humanitarian aid to Uganda, to help the nation cope with a huge influx of refugees fleeing conflict in east Africa.
(AFP, 2/14/17)
2017 Feb 14, In Texas storms packing heavy rains, lashing winds and tornadoes hit the Houston metropolitan area, ripping roofs off homes, blowing windows out of frames and leaving tens of thousands of people without power.
(Reuters, 2/14/17)
2017 Feb 14, Mazda said it is recalling about 174,000 small cars in the US because the seats can change angles suddenly, making the vehicles hard to drive.
(AP, 2/14/17)
2017 Feb 14, Brazilian President Michel Temer issued a decree to deploy 9,000 soldiers in Rio de Janeiro's metropolitan area until Feb. 22, one week before Carnaval ends. The soldiers are to help out amid police officers' strike threats and riots led by anarchists during state legislature votes on austerity measures as the annual Carnaval celebrations take off.
(AP, 2/14/17)
2017 Feb 14, The government of China awarded Pres. Trump valuable rights to his own name in the form of a 10-year trademark for construction services.
(SFC, 2/16/17, p.A2)
2017 Feb 14, In China residents in an oil town near the border with Russia protested against a planned aluminum plant over pollution fears.
(AP, 2/14/17)
2017 Feb 14, In central China a gas explosion at the Zubao Coal Mine in Hunan province killed at least nine people. The official death toll climbed to 10 after investigators found a miner who had been listed as "injured".
(AP, 2/18/17)
2017 Feb 14, In China three attackers with knives killed five people and injured another five before being shot dead by police in a remote oasis town in Xinjiang province.
(Econ, 2/25/17, p.38)(Econ 5/6/17, p.42)
2017 Feb 14, Congo police made a pre-dawn raid on a separatist group in Kinshasa, killing four people but failing to arrest Ne Muanda Nsemi, a self-styled religious prophet and leader of Bundu dia Kongo (BDK).
(Reuters, 2/14/17)
2017 Feb 14, In the Dominican Republic two journalists were shot dead during a live 103.5 FM radio broadcast in San Pedro de Macoris.
(AFP, 2/15/17)
2017 Feb 14, Human Rights Watch said the huge newly-built Ethiopian Gibe III dam is cutting off the supply of water to Lake Turkana in northern Kenya.
(AFP, 2/14/17)
2017 Feb 14, Seven Hong Kong police officers were convicted of a lesser charge in the assault of pro-democracy activist Ken Tsang, whose videotaped beating during the height of 2014 pro-democracy protests sparked outrage.
(AP, 2/14/17)
2017 Feb 14, India's top court upheld the corruption conviction of Sasikala Natarajan, the head of the ruling party in Tamil Nadu state, ending her chances of becoming the southern state's next chief minister.
(AP, 2/14/17)
2017 Feb 14, An Italian court convicted a Moroccan-born man and his wife on charges of international terrorism in connection with an Islamic State plot to carry out attacks in Rome during the Holy Year in 2016. Abderrahim Moutaharrik, and his wife, Salma Bencharki were sentenced to six years and five years in jail, respectively.
(AP, 2/14/17)
2017 Feb 14, In Japan Toshiba Corp.'s chairman resigned after the company logged such massive losses in its nuclear business that it must sell its lucrative computer-chip business to avoid going belly-up.
(AP, 2/14/17)
2017 Feb 14, In northern Kashmir four Indian soldiers and four militants were killed in gunbattles in Bandipora district, in the second outbreak of violence between security forces and separatists in three days.
(Reuters, 2/14/17)
2017 Feb 14, In Luxembourg a passenger train and a freight train collided, killing one person and injuring several more.
(AFP, 2/14/17)
2017 Feb 14, Malian television said hundreds had fled villages close to the city of Macina after clashes between Fulani herders and Bambara farmers over the weekend. The death toll from the armed confrontation had risen to 20 from 13.
(AFP, 2/15/17)
2017 Feb 14, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas met secretly with the CIA chief in the West Bank, as they expressed concern over the Trump administration's suggestion that a two-state solution to the conflict with Israel is optional.
(AP, 2/15/17)
2017 Feb 14, In the Philippines environment secretary Gina Lopez cancelled 75 mining projects on the grounds that they would harm ecologically sensitive areas.
(Econ, 2/25/17, p.33)
2017 Feb 14, In northwestern Syria two days of fighting left 69 fighters dead, including 39 from the Levant Liberation Committee and 30 dead from Jund al-Aqsa, including four suicide attackers who blew up vehicles that they were driving.
(AP, 2/14/17)
2017 Feb 14, Turkish PM Binali Yildirim said Turkey-backed rebels have largely taken control of Syria's al-Bab from Islamic State militants, but a war monitoring group said the jihadists still controlled most of the town.
(Reuters, 2/14/17)
2017 Feb 14, Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan met Saudi Arabia's top leadership during a visit to further strengthen ties as part of a Gulf tour ahead of Syria peace talks.
(AFP, 2/14/17)
2017 Feb 14, Venezuela's powerful vice president called his blacklisting by the United States on drug charges an "imperialist aggression" in the first bilateral flare-up under new US President Donald Trump.
(Reuters, 2/14/17)
2017 Feb 14, Police in Vietnam stopped hundreds of protesters from marching to present compensation claims against a steel plant over a toxic spill last year.
(Reuters, 2/14/17)
2017 Feb 15, President Donald Trump and PM Benjamin Netanyahu renewed the US-Israel partnership in defiance of international pressure for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Shortly before Trump was to welcome Netanyahu to the White House, a senior US official briefed reporters that Washington would no longer insist that any peace deal lead to a recognized Palestinian state.
(AFP, 2/15/17)
2017 Feb 15, US President Donald Trump's defense secretary warned NATO allies that they must honor military spending pledges to ensure the United States does not "moderate" support for the alliance.
(Reuters, 2/15/17)
2017 Feb 15, White House chief of staff Reince Priebus asked FBI Director James Comey and deputy director Andrew McCabe to dispute media reports that Donald Trump's campaign advisers were frequently in touch with Russian intelligence agents during the election. This request became public on Feb 24.
(AP, 2/24/17)
2017 Feb 15, The US Justice Dept. sided with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to provide a narrower definition of who is a fugitive from justice, saying the term should only apply if those people had fled a state to avoid prosecution. This cleared the way for some people with outstanding arrest warrants to purchase guns.
(SFC, 10/12/17, p.A5)
2017 Feb 15, US fast-food executive Andrew Puzder withdrew his nomination for labor secretary under Pres. Donald Trump.
(SFC, 2/16/17, p.A6)
2017 Feb 15, Algeria's military forces killed 5 suspected extremists in an operation around Bouira, one of the country's last Islamic militant holdouts.
(AP, 2/17/17)
2017 Feb 15, Gay rights campaigners protested outside the Church of England's General Synod in London as Anglican bishops from around the world prepared to vote on a report ruling out accepting gay marriage.
(AFP, 2/15/17)
2017 Feb 15, US troops deployed in Bulgaria and armored vehicles and heavy equipment are to arrive by the end of the week under a planned NATO operation to support its Eastern European allies.
(Reuters, 2/15/17)
2017 Feb 15, The European Parliament backed a contested EU-Canada free trade deal, facing down protests by activists and Donald Trump-inspired calls for protectionism. It also voted for a plan to raise the cost for firms to produce carbon.
(AFP, 2/15/17)(Econ, 2/18/17, p.62)
2017 Feb 15, German airline Lufthansa said it has struck a deal to solve a bitter labor dispute with pilots that over five years has cost it an estimated half a billion dollars and more than a dozen strikes.
(AP, 2/15/17)
2017 Feb 15, India launched the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle, built by the Indian Space Research Organization, carrying a record 104 satellites, 88 of which were made by Planet, a San Francisco-based company founded in 2010.
(Econ, 2/18/17, p.57)
2017 Feb 15, Indonesia held local elections. In Jakarta Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, a Christian of Chinese descent also known as Ahok, won with 43% of the vote, forcing him into a runoff against Anies Baswedan on April 19.
(Econ, 2/18/17, p.33)
2017 Feb 15, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani visited Oman and Kuwait for talks to improve relations with Gulf neighbors, strained by the conflicts in Syria and Yemen.
(AFP, 2/15/17)
2017 Feb 15, In Iraq a suicide bomber detonated an explosives-laden vehicle in a Shiite majority neighborhood of Baghdad, killing at least 15 people.
(Reuters, 2/15/17)
2017 Feb 15, Malaysian police arrested a woman in the apparent assassination of Kim Jong Nam, the North Korean leader's exiled half-brother who South Korean spies say once begged his sibling to spare his life. The woman had checked into local hotels under the Vietnamese name of Doan Thi Huong.
(AP, 2/15/17)(Reuters, 2/17/17)
2017 Feb 15, Moldova's intelligence agency said it has broken up a suspected extremist Islamic group that was spreading propaganda online and whose members had illegal weapons.
(AP, 2/15/17)
2017 Feb 15, Montenegro's parliament voted to strip two pro-Russian opposition MPs of their immunity over alleged involvement in a foiled coup last October, but a prosecutor ruled the pair would not be arrested.
(AFP, 2/15/17)
2017 Feb 15, Tropical storm Dineo hit the coastline of Mozambique. At least two people were killed and in and further casualties were expected.
(Reuters, 2/16/17)
2017 Feb 15, North Korean officials spent hours trying to talk Malaysia out of conducting an autopsy on Kim Jong Un's estranged half-brother, who was murdered at Kuala Lumpur airport on Feb 13.
(Reuters, 2/15/17)
2017 Feb 15, In northwestern Pakistan two suicide bombings killed at least six people in Peshawar following an almost three-month-long lull in the volatile region.
(AP, 2/15/17)(AFP, 2/17/17)
2017 Feb 15, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte supported his environment minister's decision to cancel nearly a third of contracts for undeveloped mines, saying it was based on law.
(Reuters, 2/15/17)
2017 Feb 15, In Serbia several thousand people joined renewed protests in Belgrade over the shady demolition last year in an area marked for a United Arab Emirates-financed real estate project.
(AP, 2/15/17)
2017 Feb 15, UAE state media said Juma Mohammed Abdullah Al Kaabi, its ambassador to Afghanistan, has died of wounds sustained in a January 10 bombing in Kandahar that also killed five other UAE officials.
(AFP, 2/15/17)
2017 Feb 15, The UN children's agency launched a $110 million appeal to help two million acutely malnourished children across Sudan, including hundreds of thousands living in conflict areas.
(AFP, 2/15/17)
2017 Feb 15, Pope Francis insisted that indigenous groups must give prior consent to any economic activity affecting their ancestral lands, a view that conflicts with the Trump administration, which is pushing to build a $3.8 billion oil pipeline over opposition from American Indians.
(AP, 2/15/17)
2017 Feb 15, Venezuela suspended CNN in Spanish after a report by the network alleging government workers sold passports to members of a Middle East terror group.
(SFC, 2/16/17, p.A2)
2017 Feb 15, In Yemen at least one Saudi-led airstrike in Arhab, 25 miles from the rebel-held capital of Sanaa, killed at least five people.
(AP, 2/15/17)
2017 Feb 16, A number of US cities held “A Day Without Immigrants" actions in response to Pres. Trump’s policy on immigration.
(SFC, 2/16/17, p.A7)
2017 Feb 16, A jury convicted former Georgia National Guard sergeant of fatally shooting an off-duty police officer outside a restaurant in Griffin nearly three years ago. Michael Bowman faced a possible death sentence following the Troup County jury's verdict in the May 31, 2014, killing of Griffin police officer Kevin Jordan.
(AP, 2/17/17)
2017 Feb 16, Parts of Maine and New Hampshire received more than a foot of wet, heavy snow. Eastport, Maine, recorded 69 inches of snow over a 10-day period. Andover, Maine, had 79 inches of snow on the ground, the 2nd highest level recorded in the state.
(SFC, 2/17/17, p.A5)
2017 Feb 16, In Texas Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg announced that Houston would decriminalize possession of less than 4 ounces of marijuana, beginning March 1.
(CSM, 2/18/17)
2017 Feb 16, In Afghanistan at least 12 civilians were killed and three others wounded when their vehicle struck a roadside bomb in the eastern Paktika province. The Islamic State group launched an attack on security posts killing 17 soldiers in the Dih Bala district in eastern Nangarhar province. Soldiers reportedly killed 21 IS fighters.
(AP, 2/16/17)(AP, 2/17/17)
2017 Feb 16, Albanian police said they have arrested a man who allegedly had 1.25 metric tons (1.38 tons) of dried cannabis hidden under his house. Police say the drugs were going to be smuggled into Italy.
(AP, 2/16/17)
2017 Feb 16, In Benin four Christian priests from an anti-voodoo cult were arrested and charged for their suspected role in five deaths during prayers held last month in anticipation of the end of the world.
(Reuters, 2/17/17)
2017 Feb 16, In southeastern Brazil two passenger buses collided head-on, killing at least nine people and injuring 46 near the city of Teodoro Sampaio west of Sao Paulo.
(AP, 2/16/17)
2017 Feb 16, China's Ministry of Public Security said it is banning carfentanil and three similar drugs as of March 1, closing a major regulatory loophole in the fight to end America's opioid epidemic.
(AP, 2/16/17)
2017 Feb 16, A feud over Cyprus' troubled history led to the abrupt halt of reunification talks between the ethnically split island's rival leaders, with confusion and much finger pointing over who walked out on whom.
(AP, 2/16/17)
2017 Feb 16, Egypt swore in nine new ministers to the cabinet of PM Sherif Ismail, along with five new governors, including the country's first female governor.
(AP, 2/16/17)
2017 Feb 16, France's parliament approved a bill criminalizing websites that carry purposely false information with the aim of dissuading women from having abortions.
(AP, 2/16/17)
2017 Feb 16, In France the Troadec family -- Pascal and Brigitte, both aged around 50, their son Sebastien (21) and his sister Charlotte (18) – were last seen in Nantes. Bloodstains found in the house in a suburb of Nantes later matched the DNA of three of the four missing persons. On March 5 the sister and brother-in-law of Pascal Troadec were remanded in custody.
(AFP, 2/28/17)(AFP, 3/5/17)
2017 Feb 16, In Germany foreign ministers from 20 of the world's leading nations (G20) met in Bonn to discuss current conflicts and ways to prevent future crises against a backdrop of uncertainty among allies and adversaries over the direction of US foreign policy.
(AP, 2/16/17)
2017 Feb 16, In Germany a union representing ground staff has called on its members to go on strike at Berlin's two airports, leading to the cancelation of some 210 flights.
(AP, 2/16/17)
2017 Feb 16, Greek authorities seized 1.3 tons of marijuana in a truck crossing into the country from Albania, a major illegal drugs producer.
(AP, 2/17/17)
2017 Feb 16, In Iraq a car packed with explosives blew up in southern Baghdad, killing at least 55 people and wounding more than 60, in the deadliest such attack in Iraq this year.
(Reuters, 2/16/17)(SFC, 2/17/17, p.A2)
2017 Feb 16, In Italy taxi drivers in Rome, Milan and Turin staged wildcat strikes to protest proposed legislation they say will favor Uber and other car-sharing services.
(AP, 2/16/17)
2017 Feb 16, In Kazakhstan Syrian government officials sat face-to-face with rebels for the second time in three weeks, as diplomats stepped up efforts to lay the groundwork for UN-brokered peace talks next week.
(AP, 2/16/17)
2017 Feb 16, Malaysian authorities announced two more arrests in the Feb 13 death of Kim Jong Nam, the North Korean leader's half-brother. Siti Aisyah (25) of Indonesia and her boyfriend were arrested as suspects in Nam’s death.
(AP, 2/16/17)
2017 Feb 16, Myanmar's government said the military has ended its four-month counterinsurgency operation in troubled Rakhine state, where it had been accused of rape, torture and other abuses against Muslim Rohingya minority residents.
(AP, 2/16/17)
2017 Feb 16, NATO said it had received a new and detailed request from Libya's UN-backed government to train and develop its military, depleted by years of conflict and facing an Islamist militant threat as well as division among Libyan militias.
(Reuters, 2/16/17)
2017 Feb 16, Dutch artist and illustrator Dick Bruna (89), creator of beloved children's character Miffy the white rabbit, died in Utrecht. Miffy, the white bunny with two dots for eyes and a cross for her mouth, was inspired by a rabbit seen hopping around the garden during a family seaside holiday in 1955.
(AFP, 2/17/17)
2017 Feb 16, In southern Pakistan 88 people were killed when a suicide bomber detonated explosives at the Sufi Lal Shahbaz Qalandar shrine in the town of Sehwan Sharif. The Islamic State claimed responsibility.
(Reuters, 2/16/17)(AFP, 2/17/17)
2017 Feb 16, Portugal's attorney general's office said prosecutors are bringing charges of corruption, money-laundering and forgery against Angolan Vice President Manuel Vicente as part of an investigation in Lisbon. Vicente is suspected of bribing a Portuguese magistrate to favor him in two investigations.
(AP, 2/16/17)
2017 Feb 16, The Saudi Arabian Interior Ministry said authorities have arrested 18 suspects belonging to the Islamic State group, including bomb makers.
(AP, 2/16/17)
2017 Feb 16, In Saudi Arabia a three-day Comic-Con event opened in the Red Sea city of Jeddah. The festival of anime, pop art, video gaming and film-related events attracted a largely youthful crowd of thousands. On Feb 23 the government's General Authority for Entertainment said organizers of the event would be penalized for an unspecified violation.
(AFP, 2/24/17)
2017 Feb 16, In Somalia two civilians were killed in an al-Shabab mortar attack outside the presidential palace during a handover ceremony for the country's new leader, President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed, also known as Farmajo.
(AP, 2/16/17)
2017 Feb 16, In Syria four Russian servicemen were killed when they their vehicle was struck by a roadside in the center of the country. The loss raised the total Russian combat casualties so far in Syria's war to 27.
(AP, 2/20/17)
2017 Feb 16, A Swedish court sentenced Haisam Omar Sakhanh (46), a Syrian refugee, to life imprisonment for participation in the 2012 mass execution of seven government troops in Syria.
(AP, 2/16/17)
2017 Feb 16, The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said Zimbabwe is likely to be the country hardest hit by an outbreak of armyworms that is destroying crops and threatening food security in southern Africa.
(Reuters, 2/16/17)
2017 Feb 17, The US Senate approved former Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Pruitt, a climate change skeptic, has been an ardent critic of the agency for years.
(SFC, 2/18/17, p.A7)
2017 Feb 17, Craig Deare, whom Pres. Donald Trump appointed a month ago to head the National Security Council's Western Hemisphere division, was escorted out of the Executive Office Building, where he worked in Washington. A day earlier Deare had slammed the Trump administration for its policies on Latin America, specifically its rocky start to relations with Mexico.
(AP, 2/19/17)
2017 Feb 17, A powerful Pacific storm blew into southern California killing at least two people.
(SFC, 2/18/17, p.A9)
2017 Feb 17, Prof. Theodore Lowi (b.1931), Cornell political science scholar, died in Ithaca, NY. His books included “The End of Liberalism: The Second Republic of the United States" (1969), “The Politics of Disorder" (1971) and “American Government: Incomplete Conquest" (1976).
(SSFC, 2/26/17, pp.)
2017 Feb 17, In Afghanistan Taliban forces stormed several Afghan security posts in eastern Kunar province, killing five police officers. Taliban attacks on security posts in Nangarhar province 17 soldiers. 21 militant fighters were also killed.
(AP, 2/17/17)(SFC, 2/18/17, p.A2)
2017 Feb 17, Algeria's military forces killed 9 more suspected extremists in an ongoing operation around Bouira, one of the country's last Islamic militant holdouts.
(AP, 2/17/17)
2017 Feb 17, Bosnia's prosecution office brought charges against Kemal Causevi, a former head of the country's tax authority, over accepting close to 1 million euros ($1.1 million) in bribes to defraud the state of customs revenue. Two men who owned several trade companies were also charged.
(AP, 2/17/17)
2017 Feb 17, Mayor Sadiq Khan said motorists in London who own old polluting vehicles are to be hit with a new charge from October, two days after the EU ordered Britain to cut air pollution.
(AFP, 2/17/17)
2017 Feb 17, In Egypt at least five soldiers were killed and two injured by a roadside bomb in the restive Northern Sinai.
(Reuters, 2/17/17)
2017 Feb 17, Finnish lawmakers rejected a petition from more than 100,000 people demanding the repeal of a law allowing same-sex marriage effective on March 1.
(AP, 2/17/17)
2017 Feb 17, Donald Tsang (72), a former leader of Hong Kong (2005-2012), was convicted of corruption over a luxury apartment in mainland China intended for his retirement.
(AP, 2/17/17)
2017 Feb 17, Indonesia's national police chief said Siti Aisyah, the Indonesian woman arrested for suspected involvement in the killing of the North Korean leader's half-brother in Malaysia, was duped into thinking she was part of a comedy show prank.
(AP, 2/17/17)
2017 Feb 17, In Iraq the Islamic State group attacked a battalion of state-sponsored militia southeast of Tikrit, killing at least eight militia members.
(AP, 2/17/17)
2017 Feb 17, In Iraq US-led military coalition forces destroyed a building in the main medical complex of western Mosul that was suspected of housing an Islamic State command center. The IS soon disputed the assertion, saying in an online statement that the strike killed 18 people, mostly women and children, and wounded 47 others.
(Reuters, 2/18/17)
2017 Feb 17, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu said he would shelve his additional role as communication minister after police questioned him over allegations he negotiated a deal for good press coverage with a newspaper owner.
(Reuters, 2/17/17)
2017 Feb 17, In Kazakhstan seven army soldiers died in an avalanche in the ex-Soviet republic's southern mountains. Rescuers saved 16 other soldiers who had been trapped by the avalanche.
(AP, 2/17/17)
2017 Feb 17, Malaysian police arrested a North Korean man, identified as Ri Jong Chol (b.1970), in connection with the murder of Kim Jong Nam, the estranged half-brother of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Malaysia performed a second autopsy on Nam after the first proved inconclusive and a diplomatic spat over his body escalated.
(Reuters, 2/18/17)(SFC, 2/18/17, p.A2)
2017 Feb 17, In northern Mexico five suspects and a taxi driver were killed in two shootouts between drug cartel gunmen and marines in the border city of Reynosa.
(AP, 2/18/17)
2017 Feb 17, In Montenegro dozens of women who braved cold weather to spend a night outside government headquarters to protest cuts in state aid for mothers of three or more children dispersed and agreed to meet a government delegation next week.
(AP, 2/17/17)
2017 Feb 17, In Morocco hundreds of migrants stormed the border between Morocco and Spain at Ceuta, days after Morocco warned the EU of fresh migrant trouble following a row over a trade deal.
(AFP, 2/17/17)
2017 Feb 17, Mozambique disaster officials said Cyclone Dineo has killed seven people, injured 55 and affected hundreds of thousands across southern Mozambique.
(AFP, 2/17/17)
2017 Feb 17, Nigerian troops and civilian self-defense fighters repelled multiple suicide bombers in Maiduguri. Nine bombers and two civilians were reported killed.
(SFC, 2/18/17, p.A2)
2017 Feb 17, North Korea said it would "categorically reject" the post mortem conducted by Malaysia on one of its citizens who died in Kuala Lumpur this week, and demanded that the body of Kim Jong Nam be released immediately.
(Reuters, 2/17/17)
2017 Feb 17, Pakistani forces said they had killed more than 100 "terrorists" after 88 people died in an attack claimed by the Islamic State group on a Sufi shrine which stoked fears of a fresh surge in militancy.
(AFP, 2/17/17)
2017 Feb 17, In Peru a gunman killed five people and injured nine at a shopping center in Lima.
(Econ, 2/25/17, p.30)
2017 Feb 17, The Philippines' former justice secretary, a senator and prominent critic of President Rodrigo Duterte's deadly anti-drug crackdown, was charged by prosecutors accusing her of receiving bribes from detained drug lords. Sen. Leila de Lima denied the charges. When she was a top human rights official, de Lima tried unsuccessfully to have Duterte prosecuted when he was still a city mayor for unlawful deaths occurring during his deadly anti-drug crackdown.
(AP, 2/17/17)
2017 Feb 17, Polish environmental groups filed a complaint with the European Union against national and local authorities for failing to fight lethal levels of smog. Antiquated coal-fired power plants generate nearly all of Poland's electricity, giving it some of the most toxic air in the 28-member EU. Energy Minister Krzysztof Tchorzewski said pollution does not shorten people's lives.
(AFP, 2/17/17)(Reuters, 2/17/17)
2017 Feb 17, South Korean authorities arrested Lee Jae-yong (48) a vice-chairman at Samsung Electronics, for alleged bribes worth $36 million to win government support for a smooth company leadership transition and a contentious merger of two Samsung companies.
(SFC, 2/18/17, p.A2)
2017 Feb 17, South Sudan's labor minister Gabriel Duop Lam resigned and declared allegiance to rebel leader Riek Machar, making him the second top official to quit in the war-torn country this week.
(AFP, 2/17/17)
2017 Feb 17, In South Sudan Khalid Ono Loki, the former head of military courts, resigned alleging corruption and a military fractured along ethnic lines. It is the third top official in a week to leave while criticizing the government of President Salva Kiir.
(AP, 2/18/17)
2017 Feb 17, The Spanish government said it had approved the extradition of 269 "Chinese citizens" as part of a year-long investigation into an Internet fraud ring operated from several Spanish cities, including Madrid and Barcelona.
(Reuters, 2/18/17)
2017 Feb 17, Spain‘s Princess Cristina was found not guilty of being an accessory to fraud but her husband was convicted and sentenced to more than six years in prison.
(AP, 2/17/17)
2017 Feb 17, Thailand’s PM Prayuth Chan-ocha announced that a government committee has approved construction of an 800-megawatt coal power plant near pristine beaches on the Andaman Sea.
(SFC, 2/18/17, p.A2)
2017 Feb 17, Turkey's military said it was close to taking Syria's al-Bab from Islamic State, but a war monitor said the jihadists still controlled 90 percent of the town itself and that shelling and air strikes had killed dozens of civilians in recent days. Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Turkish shelling and air strikes had killed 45 civilians, including 18 children, during the past 48 hours.
(Reuters, 2/17/17)
2017 Feb 17, In Turkey publishers closed down Girgir magazine, established in 1972 and a once top-selling satirical magazine, following a Moses cartoon that was deemed to be offensive to Jews and Muslims.
(AP, 2/17/17)
2017 Feb 17, In Turkey a car bomb exploded near the lodgings of judges and prosecutors in the mainly Kurdish town of Viransehir in Sanliurfa province. 26 people were soon detained following the attack.
(AP, 2/18/17)
2017 Feb 17, Uganda warned that its resources are strained by the more than 400,000 refugees who have poured into the country in recent months from South Sudan's civil war.
(AP, 2/17/17)
2017 Feb 17, The UN World Meteorological Organization said the extent of sea ice in the Arctic and Antarctic last month was the lowest on record for January, while concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere hit a January record.
(Reuters, 2/17/17)
2017 Feb 18, Omar Abdel Rahman (b.1938), the Egyptian jihadist spiritual leader linked to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, died at the Federal correction Complex in Butner, N.C., While serving a life sentence.
(AFP, 2/18/17)(SSFC, 2/19/17, p.A10)
2017 Feb 18, Clyde Stubblefield (73), a former drummer for James Brown, died in Madison, Wis. His short solo on Brown’s 1970 single “Funky Drummer" was sampled on more than 1,000 songs and served as the backbeat on for countless hip-hop tracks.
(SFC, 2/20/17, pp.)
2017 Feb 18, In Argentina a passenger bus has flipped over on an Andean highway, killing 19 of the 42 people aboard.
(AP, 2/18/17)
2017 Feb 18, In Belgium one person died and 27 were injured, three seriously, when a train derailed shortly after leaving a station east of Brussels.
(AFP, 2/18/17)
2017 Feb 18, China announced that it will temporarily stop its imports of coal from North Korea for the rest of this year (including coal for which customs applications have been made but not yet processed). China will suspend all imports of coal from North Korea starting Feb. 19 as part of its efforts to implement UN sanctions against the country.
(AFP, 2/18/17)(Reuters, 2/19/17)
2017 Feb 18, Thousands of Gambians gathered at Independence Stadium to witness the official inauguration of President Adama Barrow and celebrate the country’s independence anniversary. Barrow said orders have already been given for all those detained without trial to be released.
(AP, 2/19/17)
2017 Feb 18, In western Guatemala an 83-year-old woman and her disabled son were murdered in Flores Costa Cuca, prompting calls for the army to patrol the streets.
(Econ, 2/25/17, p.30)
2017 Feb 18, Kenyan officials said police have arrested two Kenyans who were deported from Turkey on suspicion of training with the Islamic State organization in neighboring Syria.
(AP, 2/18/17)
2017 Feb 18, Tens of thousands of Malaysians rallied in Kuala Lumpur to support the adoption of a strict Islamic penal code, a proposal religious minorities fear could infringe their rights.
(Reuters, 2/18/17)
2017 Feb 18, Pakistani authorities shut down a second key border crossing into Afghanistan, halting trade supplies to the neighboring landlocked country and increasing tensions between the two nations in the wake of a bloody suicide bombing at a beloved shrine in Pakistan.
(AP, 2/18/17)
2017 Feb 18, In the Philippines thousands of Catholic faithful gathered in Manila for a "show of force" in the biggest rally yet to stop extrajudicial killings in President Rodrigo Duterte's drug war.
(AFP, 2/18/17)
2017 Feb 18, The Kremlin announced that Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed an order for Russia to recognize passports and other documents issued by separatist rebel authorities in eastern Ukraine. Russian lawmaker, Vladimir Dzhabarov, said the measure does not formally recognize the rebel authorities as legitimate.
(AP, 2/18/17)
2017 Feb 18, Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said after meeting with his Ukrainian, German and French counterparts in Munich that a Feb. 20 ceasefire between Ukraine and Russian-backed separatists has been agreed.
(Reuters, 2/18/17)
2017 Feb 18, In Saudi Arabia one person was killed and three others injured as a result of an Aramco oil pipeline leak in the east of the kingdom.
(AP, 2/19/17)
2017 Feb 18, South African President Jacob Zuma (74) said that the state's anti-graft agency, the Special Investigating Unit (SIU), was owed almost 390 million rand ($30 million) by government departments and called on them to repay the debt.
(Reuters, 2/18/17)
2017 Feb 18, In Spain thousands of protesters marched in Barcelona to demand that Spain's conservative-led government increase its efforts to take in refugees from war-torn countries like Syria. Spain has taken in just 1,100 refugees of the over 17,000 it has pledged to accept.
(AP, 2/18/17)
2017 Feb 18, Sri Lankan police arrested an army officer and two soldiers over the alleged abduction, assault and illegal detention of journalist Keith Noyahr in 2008, during the war against separatist rebels.
(Reuters, 2/18/17)
2017 Feb 18, Syrian warplanes bombarded a besieged rebel-held district of Homs, killing at least two people and raising the death toll from nearly two weeks of air strikes there to more than 20. Warplanes also hit insurgent-controlled areas in Deraa in southern Syria during a series of heavy raids over the last day.
(Reuters, 2/18/17)
2017 Feb 18, In northern Syria a US-backed predominantly Kurdish force captured the village of Jawees in an ongoing move to close in on the Islamic State de facto capital of Raqqa.
(SSFC, 2/19/17, p.A2)
2017 Feb 18, Taiwan said it "deeply regrets" a Feb 17 decision by the Spanish government to deport to China around 200 Taiwanese nationals suspected of telecom fraud.
(Reuters, 2/18/17)
2017 Feb 18, Hundreds of Venezuelans marched to demand the release of opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez, the annual demonstration taking on added urgency after President Donald Trump met with the activist's wife and his administration slapped drug sanctions on the country's vice president.
(AP, 2/18/17)
2017 Feb 19, In Florida a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket successfully launched space station supplies from NASA’s launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center.
(SFC, 2/20/17, p.A7)
2017 Feb 19, In Massachusetts hundreds scientists, environmental activists and their supporters rallied in Boston to protest what they see as increasing threats to science and research in the US.
(SFC, 2/20/17, p.A6)
2017 Feb 19, In Abu Dhabi Australia's Defence Industry Minister Christopher Pyne and Sheikh Mohammed, who is also Deputy Supreme Commander of the UAE Armed Forces, met on the sidelines of the biennial International Defence Exhibition and Conference (IDEX). The two agreed to consider a 10-year defense plan that could include more than 1 billion Australian dollars ($767 million) in sales to the UAE.
(Reuters, 2/19/17)
2017 Feb 19, In Colombia a bombing in Bogota killed a police officer and seriously wounded several others. ELN rebels later claimed responsibility.
(AP, 2/27/17)
2017 Feb 19, Ecuador held elections choosing between a candidate who vowed to continue President Rafael Correa's populist platform or one of several more conservative contenders who pledge to attack corruption and cut taxes to stimulate the Andean nation's flagging economy. Ruling party leftist Lenin Moreno was just shy of a first-round victory and faced ex-banker Guillermo Lasso in a runoff on April 2.
(AP, 2/19/17)(SFC, 2/22/17, p.A2)
2017 Feb 19, French activists demonstrated in Paris and other cities against corruption amid a presidential campaign marked by a fake jobs investigation and other legal scandals.
(AP, 2/19/17)
2017 Feb 19, Gambian police arrested 51 people in a former stronghold of ex-president Yahya Jammeh for harassing followers of new leader Adama Barrow, amid lingering tensions following Jammeh's flight into exile.
(Reuters, 2/20/17)
2017 Feb 19, Thousands of Georgians rallied in the capital in support of Rustavi-2, the country's opposition-minded television station, that they suspect is about to be transferred to a more government-friendly owner.
(AP, 2/19/17)
2017 Feb 19, In Iraq US-backed Iraqi forces launched a ground offensive to dislodge Islamic State militants from their remaining stronghold in western Mosul. Save the Children warned that around 350,000 children are trapped in western Mosul.
(Reuters, 2/19/17)(AFP, 2/19/17)
2017 Feb 19, Italy's ex-prime minister Matteo Renzi resigned as head of the center-left Democratic Party (PD), triggering a leadership battle as the country's ruling party grapples with the threat of a split.
(AFP, 2/19/17)
2017 Feb 19, Kuwait's supreme court sentenced a top bureaucrat to 10 years in jail for joining and fighting with the Islamic State jihadist group in Syria and Iraq.
(AP, 2/19/17)
2017 Feb 19, Malaysian police said four North Korean suspects in the murder of Kim Jong Nam, the estranged half-brother of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, fled Malaysia on the day he was attacked at Kuala Lumpur airport and apparently killed by a fast-acting poison.
(Reuters, 2/19/17)
2017 Feb 19, The Mongolian government and envoys from the International Monetary Fund said that they and other partners have agreed on terms for a more than $5 billion loan package to the north Asian country to help get its economy back on track. The IMF agreed to lend Mongolia $440 million over three years to help it avoid default and rebuild its reserves.
(AP, 2/19/17)(Econ, 2/25/17, p.32)
2017 Feb 19, Hamas military courts in Gaza sentenced three Palestinians to death for allegedly spying for Israel and upheld the sentences of three others.
(AP, 2/19/17)
2017 Feb 19, The Philippines' Bureau of Immigration arrested Cody Dean Turner. The convicted American pedophile, wanted by US authorities for a string of crimes, will be deported for being an undocumented and undesirable alien.
(AP, 2/22/17)
2017 Feb 19, In Somalia a car bomb ripped through a market in Mogadishu, killing 39 people and injuring around 50.
(Reuters, 2/19/17)
2017 Feb 19, In Sri Lanka at least 11 people were killed and 24 others rescued after the boat they were traveling in capsized off of the southwestern coast.
(AP, 2/19/17)
2017 Feb 19, Syrian government forces fired rockets at a rebel-held area on Damascus's outskirts, pressing an attack that began the day before and has killed up to 16 people.
(Reuters, 2/19/17)
2017 Feb 19, The United Arab Emirates (UAE) awarded 4.5 billion dirhams ($1.2 billion) in military procurement deals, part of a total of 20 billion dirhams worth of purchases it expects to make at an arms fair this week.
(Reuters, 2/19/17)
2017 Feb 19, The United Arab Emirates' main state oil company said it has signed a deal giving China National Petroleum Company an 8 percent stake in a major onshore oil project. The Abu Dhabi National Oil Company said CNPC will pay an initial $1.77 billion for the concession operated by the Abu Dhabi Company for Onshore Petroleum Operations, also known as ADCO.
(AP, 2/19/17)
2017 Feb 20, US Pres. Donald Trump appointed Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster as his new national security advisor to succeed the disgraced Mike Flynn.
(SFC, 2/21/17, p.A4)(Econ, 2/18/17, p.22)
2017 Feb 20, Angola's likely next president Joao Lourenco declared war on graft in the notoriously corrupt country, as he starts to shape his public image ahead of elections due in August.
(AFP, 2/20/17)
2017 Feb 20, Bangladesh's foreign minister called on the international community on to address Myanmar's treatment of its Rohingya Muslim minority, tens of thousands of whom have fled in recent months to Bangladesh from its mainly Buddhist neighbor.
(Reuters, 2/20/17)
2017 Feb 20, In France Vjeran Tomic (49), a criminal known as "Spiderman," was jailed for eight years for stealing five paintings in 2010 worth 100 million euros ($106 million) from a Paris museum.
(AP, 2/20/17)
2017 Feb 20, Greece agreed to compromise on new bailout reforms in a bid to break a deadlock with its EU-IMF creditors that has sparked fears of a new Grexit crisis. Greece agreed to legislate new reforms to come into effect in 2019. In return, Greece's creditors agreed to send their bailout inspectors back to Athens next week for further talks to complete a long overdue review of Greece's progress in its bailout program.
(AFP, 2/20/17)(AP, 2/24/17)
2017 Feb 20, Police in Guinea fired tear gas as hundreds of students armed with stones and sticks demonstrated in Conakry over strikes by teachers that have blocked them from going to classes for weeks. The government late today signed an agreement with the country's two largest teachers' unions, ending strikes that closed schools since the beginning of the month. Teachers would have to wait until September for salary increases.
(AP, 2/20/17)(AP, 2/21/17)
2017 Feb 20, Iraqi forces backed by jets and helicopters battled their way towards southern Mosul and prepared to take on the Islamic State group's stronghold in the city's west bank.
(AFP, 2/20/17)
2017 Feb 20, Jamal al-Harith (50), a former Guantanamo Bay detainee released in 2004, died in a suicide bomb attack on Iraqi-led coalition forces near Mosul. He was a Muslim convert from Manchester, England, born as Ronald Fiddler.
(http://tinyurl.com/zjw8622)(SFC, 2/23/17, p.A3)
2017 Feb 20, At least 74 bodies of African migrants washed ashore in western Libya, the latest tragedy at sea along a perilous but increasingly popular trafficking route to Europe.
(AP, 2/21/17)
2017 Feb 20, In Libya 13 African migrants suffocated inside a shipping container while being transported over four days from the central town of Bani Walid to Khoms. The dead were among 69 migrants, many from Mali, who were packed into the container.
(AP, 2/23/17)
2017 Feb 20, In Morocco more than 350 migrants stormed the Spanish border at Ceuta, days after one of the largest rush of arrivals over the frontier in more than a decade.
(AP, 2/20/17)
2017 Feb 20, Norway said it has joined an international initiative to raise millions of dollars to replace shortfalls left by US President Donald Trump's ban on US-funded groups worldwide providing information on abortion.
(Reuters, 2/20/17)
2017 Feb 20, Pakistani airstrikes killed "dozens" of militants in the Wucha Bibi area of North Waziristan along the Afghan border.
(AP, 2/20/17)
2017 Feb 20, Philippine retired policeman, Arturo Lascanas, said that Pres. Rodrigo Duterte had operated a "Davao death squad".
(Reuters, 2/21/17)
2017 Feb 20, Portugal's government says it has paid back to the IMF half the money it received from the institution as part of a bailout in 2011.
(AP, 2/20/17)
2017 Feb 20, A Portuguese court ordered police to extradite former CIA agent Sabrina de Sousa to Italy, where she is due to serve a four-year prison sentence. De Sousa was among 26 Americans convicted for kidnapping suspect Osama Moustafa Hassan Nas, also known as Abu Omar, from a Milan street on Feb. 17, 2003.
(AP, 2/21/17)
2017 Feb 20, Vitaly Churkin, Russia's envoy to the United Nations, died suddenly in New York, one day before turning 65.
(AFP, 2/20/17)
2017 Feb 20, South Sudan declared famine in some parts of the country, with more than three years of war leaving nearly five million hungry in what aid groups called a "man-made" tragedy.
(AFP, 2/20/17)
2017 Feb 20, Syrian government forces escalated their bombing campaign around Damascus, raining shells down on rebel territory and sending out a "bloody message" just days before renewed peace talks in Geneva. At least 7 people were reported killed.
(AFP, 2/20/17)
2017 Feb 20, In northern Syria 11 members of the same family were killed on as Turkey-backed Syrian rebels advanced on the town of Al-Bab held by Islamic State jihadists.
(AFP, 2/20/17)
2017 Feb 20, Turkey dismissed 227 more judges and prosecutors as part of investigations into last July's failed coup, meaning close to 4,000 members of the judiciary have now been purged.
(Reuters, 2/20/17)
2017 Feb 20, In Uganda the African Gold Refiner, primarily owned by a Belgian investor, was launched amid concerns about the source of its minerals.
(AP, 2/20/17)
2017 Feb 20, Ukraine's military accused pro-Moscow rebels of breaking a new ceasefire deal barely hours after it came into effect, as Western powers warned Russia over its actions in the former Soviet state. One soldier was killed and another wounded in fighting in the country's separatist east despite the new truce that started at midnight.
(AFP, 2/20/17)
2017 Feb 21, The Washington-based Syria Institute accused the Syrian government of depopulating Sunni-majority areas in Homs as it fights to consolidate its power.
(AP, 2/21/17)
2017 Feb 21, In California former Kenneth Arrow (95), a former Stanford professor and Nobel prize winner in economics (1972), died at his home in Palo Alto.
(SFC, 2/22/17, p.A12)
2017 Feb 21, A federal judge ruled that Texas cannot cut off Medicaid dollars to Planned Parenthood over secretly recorded videos taken by antiabortion activists in 2015.
(SFC, 2/22/17, p.A4)
2017 Feb 21, Restaurant Brands, created by the 2014 merger of Burger King and Tim Horton, said it is buying fried chicken chain Popeyes for $1.8 billion.
(SFC, 2/22/17, p.C2)
2017 Feb 21, Yahoo announced a $350 million hit on its previously announced $4.8 billion sale to Verizon in a concession for security lapses that exposed personal information stored in more than 1 billion Yahoo user accounts.
(AP, 2/21/17)
2017 Feb 21, Kenneth Arrow (b.1921), 1972 Nobel Prize winning American economist, died.
(Econ, 3/4/17, p.62)
2017 Feb 21, In Australia a light plane crashed into a shopping mall shortly after takeoff in the city of Melbourne. The Australian pilot and four American tourists were killed including Russell Munsch, a founding Texas law firm partner who had litigated some of the most prominent bankruptcy cases in the US.
(AP, 2/21/17)
2017 Feb 21, An Austrian court approved a US extradition request for Ukrainian oligarch Dymitro Firtash, suspected of paying millions of dollars in bribes to Indian officials.
(AP, 2/21/17)
2017 Feb 21, Azerbaijan's Pres. Ilham Aliyev (55) appointed his wife Mehriban (52) as the first vice president of the, the person next in line in the nation's power hierarchy.
(AP, 2/21/17)
2017 Feb 21, Bahraini lawmakers voted to change the constitution to allow civilians to be tried in military courts. Between February 9 and February 19, police arrested 20 residents of Shiite villages, aged between 20 and 65 and including four women, in what the government described as a crackdown on "terror cells".
(AP, 2/21/17)(AFP, 2/22/17)
2017 Feb 21, Chinese police and media reports said a prefecture in restive Xinjiang region has ordered all vehicles to be equipped with GPS-like tracking software. An official said the policy was needed so that drivers "can be tracked wherever they go" and residents had until June 30 to comply.
(AFP, 2/21/17)
2017 Feb 21, Authorities in southwest Germany authorized a ban on older diesel cars from driving in the city of Stuttgart starting next year.
(AP, 2/21/17)
2017 Feb 21, Ghana's President Nana Akufo-Addo said that he inherited an economy reeling from huge fiscal deficits, rising inflation and high unemployment despite an IMF program designed to stimulate growth.
(AFP, 2/21/17)
2017 Feb 21, Israeli Sergeant Elor Azaria, who killed a wounded and incapacitated Palestinian assailant on March 24, 2016, was sentenced to 18 months' imprisonment, in a show of leniency that drew Palestinian outrage after one of the most divisive trials in Israel's history.
(Reuters, 2/21/17)
2017 Feb 21, Investigating magistrates in Italy froze millions of euros worth of assets belonging to prominent banker Giampietro Nattino, who they believe used the Vatican bank and another Holy See financial department for market manipulation.
(Reuters, 2/21/17)
2017 Feb 21, Thousands of Italian taxi drivers protesting legislation they say will favor Uber clashed with riot police, intensifying a weeklong cab strike that has crippled transportation in Rome, Milan and Turin.
(AP, 2/21/17)
2017 Feb 21, The Mexican Institute of Industrial Property, or IMPI for its initials in Spanish, approved three Trump trademarks. A fourth was granted last Oct. 6, about a month before the US election. The new approvals, valid through 2026, list the trademark owner as the company DTTM Operations LLC, with an address in the Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in New York.
(AP, 3/12/17)
2017 Feb 21, Dutch lawmakers voted in favor of tolerating the cultivation of cannabis, a move that could bring to an end a key paradox of the relaxed Dutch policy on marijuana and hashish.
(AP, 2/21/17)
2017 Feb 21, In northwestern Pakistan a group of suicide bombers with grenades and assault rifles struck outside a courthouse, killing six people in the town of Tangi in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. The attack was claimed by a Taliban splinter group.
(AP, 2/21/17)
2017 Feb 21, Philippine Senator Leila de Lima, a staunch critic of Pres. Rodrigo Duterte, urged the Cabinet to declare the president unfit to rule, describing him as a "sociopathic serial killer" because of his war on drugs and allegations he once ran a hit squad.
(Reuters, 2/21/17)
2017 Feb 21, Romanian MPs voted to definitively shelve a controversial decree that had sought to water down anti-corruption legislation but ended up unleashing the nation's biggest protests in a quarter-century.
(AFP, 2/21/17)
2017 Feb 21, In South Africa Susan Howarth died, two days after an attack at her farm. Her British husband, Robert Lynn, survived and has said he was burned with a blowtorch and slashed with a knife by assailants demanding money. Three suspects were being held without bail. Their next court appearance was set for March 10.
(AP, 2/28/17)
2017 Feb 21, Swedish police began investigating a riot that broke out overnight in a predominantly immigrant suburb in Stockholm after officers arrested a suspect on drug charges.
(AP, 2/21/17)
2017 Feb 21, In Turkey Figen Yuksekdag, the co-chair of the opposition pro-Kurdish party, lost her seat in parliament after an appeals court confirmed her conviction on terrorism-related charges. The party has appealed to the European Court of Human Rights seeking the lawmakers' release, so that they may be allowed to campaign ahead of a referendum on expanding President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's powers.
(AP, 2/21/17)
2017 Feb 21, Ukraine's Pres. Petro Poroshenko called for new sanctions against Russia over its decision to recognize passports issued by separatist authorities in eastern Ukraine, while the Kremlin accused Ukraine of denying vital documents to people in the rebel regions.
(AP, 2/21/17)
2017 Feb 21, UNICEF said nearly 1.4 million children are at "imminent risk" of death in famines in Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan and Yemen.
(Reuters, 2/21/17)
2017 Feb 22, The US Supreme Court sided with California-based Life Technologies Corp. in a patent infringement case that limits the international reach of US patent laws. The justices ruled unanimously that the company's shipment of a single part of a patented invention for assembly in another country did not violate patent laws.
(AP, 2/22/17)
2017 Feb 22, More than 6,000 e-mails were made public that showed close ties between Scott Pruitt, the new administrator of the EPA, with major oil and gas producers, electric utilities and political groups tied to the Koch brothers and their efforts to roll back environmental regulations during Pruitt’s tenure as attorney general of Oklahoma.
(SFC, 2/23/17, p.A4)
2017 Feb 22, In Kansas a racially motivated shooting at a crowded suburban Kansas City bar left Srinivas Kuchibhotla of India dead and two other men hospitalized. Adam Purinton (51) used "racial slurs" before he opened fire as patrons of Austins Bar and Grill in Olathe watched the University of Kansas-TCU basketball game on television. Ian Grillot (24) ran at the gunman to stop him from fleeing and was shot in the hand and chest. On June 9 a federal grand jury indicted Purinton on hate crime charges. On August 8, 2018, Purinton was sentenced to three consecutive life terms.
(AP, 2/24/17)(SFC, 3/29/17, p.A4)(SSFC, 6/11/17, p.A11)(SFC, 8/8/18, p.A4)
2017 Feb 22, In North Dakota opponents of the Dakota Access pipeline burned structures in their camp near Cannon Ball as part of a leaving ceremony ahead of a government deadline to get off of federal property.
(SFC, 2/23/17, p.A4)
2017 Feb 22, A navigation error forced SpaceX to delay its shipment to the International Space Station (ISS), following an otherwise smooth flight from NASA's historic moon pad. The delivery was completed the next day.
(AP, 2/22/17)(SFC, 2/24/17, p.A12)
2017 Feb 22, Amnesty Int’l. released a 408-page annual report of rights abuses and named US Pres. Donald Trump, Hungarian PM Viktor Orban, Turkish Pres. Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Philippines Pres. Rodrigo Duterte among leaders “wielding a toxic agenda" that dehumanizes entire groups of people.
(SFC, 2/23/17, p.A3)
2017 Feb 22, The British government announced that Cressida Dick (56) is to be commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, making her the first woman to serve as Britain's most senior police officer.
(AFP, 2/22/17)
2017 Feb 22, Ian Stewart, the partner of British children's author Helen Bailey, was convicted of killing her and dumping her body in a cesspool in a financially motivated murder. The body of Bailey (51) was found last July in a cesspool under the garage of the home she shared with Stewart. The next day Stewart was sentenced to at least 34 years in prison.
(AP, 2/22/17)(AP, 2/23/17)
2017 Feb 22, A British national was arrested at a London airport on suspicion of staging a cyber-attack on Deutsche Telekom last November that knocked around a million German households offline.
(AFP, 2/23/17)
2017 Feb 22, China announced plans to have 50,000 football academies by 2025 as part of an ambitious blueprint to grow into a soccer superpower.
(AP, 2/22/17)
2017 Feb 22, The government of CongoDRC said that it was opening an investigation after video this month showed soldiers massacring civilians in central Kasai province.
(SFC, 2/23/17, p.A2)
2017 Feb 22, In Egypt militants killed a Coptic Christian man and burned his son alive, then dumped their bodies on a roadside in el-Arish. Three other Christians in Sinai were killed earlier, either in drive-by shootings or with militants storming their homes and shops.
(AP, 2/24/17)
2017 Feb 22, France and Germany won backing from the European Union's executive for proposals to tighten security across Europe, which include giving more powers to governments to monitor frontiers with other EU states.
(Reuters, 2/22/17)
2017 Feb 22, Haiti’s President Jovenel Moise and two legislative leaders agreed upon the nomination of Dr. Jack Guy Lafontant as prime minister.
(AP, 2/23/17)
2017 Feb 22, Iraq's government-sanctioned paramilitary forces, made up mainly of Shiite militiamen, launched a new push to capture villages west of the city of Mosul from Islamic State militants.
(AP, 2/22/17)
2017 Feb 22, In Niger at least 15 soldiers were killed in an attack by Islamic extremists near the village of Interzawane close to the border with Mali.
(SFC, 2/24/17, p.A2)
2017 Feb 22, In northeastern Nigeria at least seven soldiers were killed in a Boko Haram attack on military positions in the town of Gajiram.
(AFP, 2/24/17)
2017 Feb 22, Pakistan said it will send paramilitary forces to crack down on Islamic militants in the Punjab province, a move that the ruling party of PM Nawaz Sharif had long rejected because of opposition among its Islamist supporters.
(AP, 2/22/17)
2017 Feb 22, In Puerto Rico thousands of public university students went on strike to protest looming budget cuts amid a deep economic crisis.
(AP, 2/22/17)
2017 Feb 22, Federal officials in Puerto Rico indicted three doctors and the owner of a medical equipment company in a $1.3 million Medicare fraud scheme.
(AP, 2/22/17)
2017 Feb 22, Russia's highest court overturned the conviction of Ildar Dadin, a jailed opposition activist, and ordered him released more than a year after he was sent to prison. In December 2015 became the first person to be convicted of breaking a new law against protesters.
(AP, 2/22/17)
2017 Feb 22, Russia successfully launched a cargo ship to the International Space Station (ISS) from Kazakhstan.
(AP, 2/22/17)
2017 Feb 22, Somalia's new Pres. Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed was inaugurated, promising his people that the era of al Shabaab and other Islamist militant groups was over. He called on al Shabaab's thousands of fighters to surrender, promising them "a good life" if they did.
(Reuters, 2/22/17)
2017 Feb 22, A South African court ruled that the government's decision to withdraw from the International Criminal Court (ICC) without parliament's approval was unconstitutional.
(AP, 2/22/17)
2017 Feb 22, The Syrian army and its allies took a small district on the outskirts of Aleppo from rebels.
(Reuters, 2/22/17)
2017 Feb 22, Turkey’s defense ministry officials said they will allow female soldiers to wear a headscarf with their uniforms, marking a symbolic shift for a military that has traditionally seen itself as a guardian of state secularism.
(Reuters, 2/22/17)
2017 Feb 22, In Geneva WTO Director-General Roberto Azevedo said that the required two-thirds of member states have ratified the first multilateral trade agreement reached under the World Trade Organization since it was created over a generation ago.
(AP, 2/22/17)
2017 Feb 22, Yemen's President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi said that Saudi Arabia has earmarked $10 billion in aid for the reconstruction of provinces retaken from Shiite Huthi rebels.
(AFP, 2/22/17)
2017 Feb 22, In Yemen Major General Ahmed Saif al-Yafei, second-in-command of Yemen’s army, was killed outside the strategic the Red Sea coast city of al-Mokha when a missile fired by the Iran-aligned Houthi movement hit an army camp.
(Reuters, 2/22/17)
2017 Feb 23, President Donald Trump said he wants to ensure the US nuclear arsenal is at the "top of the pack," saying the United States has fallen behind in its weapons capacity.
(Reuters, 2/24/17)
2017 Feb 23, It was reported that agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) in southern Virginia had used shadowy cigarette sales to funnel millions of dollars into a secret bank account to finance undercover investigations and pay informants in an effort to catch cigarette smugglers.
(SFC, 2/23/17, p.A12)
2017 Feb 23, Albania's main opposition Democratic party boycotted parliament in their street protest calling for free and fair elections, saying they don't trust the left-wing government to hold the June 18 parliamentary elections fairly and want a caretaker cabinet instead.
(AP, 2/23/17)
2017 Feb 23, Albanian police said they have launched a nationwide operation to try to prevent the planting of cannabis.
(AP, 2/23/17)
2017 Feb 23, Australia's highest-paid public servant announced his resignation, two weeks after the revelation that he made 5.6 million Australian dollars ($4.3 million) last year sparked a public furor and created a political headache for the government. Lebanese-born former banker Ahmed Fahour said he was leaving because Australia Post had transformed from a traditional mail service to a parcel and e-commerce business during his seven years at the helm.
(AP, 2/23/17)
2017 Feb 23, Storm Doris slammed into the British Isles causing flight disruptions at Europe's busiest air hub and train cancellations. One person was reported killed.
(AFP, 2/23/17)
2017 Feb 23, A Cambodian court sentenced prominent land rights activist Tep Vanny to 2 1/2 years in prison on charges of committing violence at a protest she helped lead outside of Prime Minister Hun Sen's residence in March 2013. Vanny said all the protesters in the incident were women, and were so weakened by a long walk to the prime minister's house that they were in no shape to beat up government security forces, and in fact were beaten by them.
(AP, 2/23/17)
2017 Feb 23, Congo's army said has killed at least 16 former members of a rebel group after they re-entered the country's east. Fighting near Rutshuru began a day earlier and by today the army had captured 68 former M23 rebels and 39 others surrendered.
(AP, 2/23/17)
2017 Feb 23, In Egypt suspected Islamic militants gunned down a Coptic Christian man and stabbed his daughter to death inside his home in el-Arish, northern Sinai, the seventh such killing in a month's time in the restive region.
(AP, 2/24/17)
2017 Feb 23, Hundreds of French high-school students staged an unauthorized anti-police rally, blocking the entrances to a dozen schools in Paris in the latest in a series of protests over the Feb 2 alleged rape of a young black man with a police baton.
(Reuters, 2/23/17)
2017 Feb 23, Iraqi forces thrust into Mosul airport on the southern edge of the jihadist stronghold for the first time since the Islamic State group overran the region in 2014.
(AFP, 2/23/17)
2017 Feb 23, An Israeli court ordered Nael Barghouti, a senior Hamas member, to complete his life sentence, after the man was freed in a 2011 swap of hundreds of inmates for an Israeli soldier held by Hamas.
(AP, 2/23/17)
2017 Feb 23, An Israeli fighter jet shot down a drone belonging to the Islamist group Hamas that had taken off from the Gaza Strip.
(Reuters, 2/23/17)
2017 Feb 23, In the disputed region of Kashmir three Indian soldiers and a woman were killed when rebels ambushed soldiers in the southern Shopian area.
(AP, 2/23/17)
2017 Feb 23, In Libya fighting erupted between two rival armed groups in eastern Tripoli after one accused the other of kidnapping four of its members.
(AFP, 2/25/17)
2017 Feb 23, The Mexican government made clear to visiting US emissaries that it will not accept deportees from third countries under any circumstances.
(AP, 2/24/17)
2017 Feb 23, The International Boundary and Water Commission notified the Tijuana State Public Service Commission of a sewage spill from Mexico's Tijuana River. US officials believed it had started at least two weeks earlier and dumped roughly 143 million gallons (541 million liters) of sewage into the Pacific Ocean. The spill polluted 20 miles (32 km) of coastland from the areas of Rosarito in Mexico to Coronado in California.
(Reuters, 3/3/17)
2017 Feb 23, In Pakistan an explosion in a building under construction ripped through a market in an upscale neighborhood in Lahore, killing ten people. Officials later said it was most probably an accident caused by a gas leak, not a bomb.
(AP, 2/23/17)(Reuters, 2/24/17)
2017 Feb 23, In the Philippines an arrest warrant was issued for Senator Leila de Lima (57), but she dodged police and sought refuge in the Senate. She has spent nearly a decade trying to link Duterte to death squads that have allegedly killed thousands of people.
(AFP, 2/23/17)
2017 Feb 23, The South African government called for calm after a wave of xenophobic violence in which dozens of shops and houses owned by immigrants have been torched and looted.
(AFP, 2/23/17)
2017 Feb 23, Spain's National Court has sentenced Rodrigo Rato, a former head of the International Monetary Fund, to 4 ½ years in prison for misusing a Spanish bank's corporate credit card during his 2010-12 leadership of Bankia.
(AP, 2/23/17)
2017 Feb 23, Syrian jets bombed rebel-held areas of Aleppo, Deraa and Hama provinces and insurgents fired rockets at government targets, just as peace talks were set to resume in Geneva.
(Reuters, 2/23/17)
2017 Feb 23, The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said IS fighters were still present in parts of Al-Bab and that rebels were in control of less than half of it. Turkish-backed Syrian rebels said they had fully captured the town of Al-Bab from the Islamic State group, marking a key defeat for the jihadists after weeks of heavy fighting.
(AFP, 2/23/17)
2017 Feb 23, Syrian peace talks under the auspices of the United Nations resumed in Geneva, 10 months after falling apart over escalating bloodshed in the war-torn country. The UN's Syria envoy met rival negotiators, but even getting them into the same room appeared uncertain as hopes remained slim for a breakthrough.
(AP, 2/23/17)(AFP, 2/23/17)
2017 Feb 23, UN aid agencies and donor countries gathered in Oslo for a two-day meeting to raise emergency aid for millions of people threatened by famine in the Lake Chad region, which comprises northeast Nigeria, northern Cameroon, western Chad and southeast Niger.
(AFP, 2/23/17)
2017 Feb 24, In Afghanistan at least 10 police officers and the wife of a police commander were killed in an ambush by Islamic States group militants in northern Zawzjan province.
(AP, 2/25/17)
2017 Feb 24, In Bangladesh thousands of people marched in Dhaka to demand a Lady Justice statue, installed last December, be removed from the Supreme Court complex. Islamists oppose idol worship and consider the Lady Justice statue anti-Islamic.
(AP, 2/24/17)
2017 Feb 24, Revelers across Brazil began Carnival celebrations, taking to the streets to dance, drink beer and spirits, and blow off steam at a time of economic angst and fury with politicians over a sprawling corruption scandal.
(AP, 2/25/17)
2017 Feb 24, Egyptian airport officials said that authorities are more than doubling the cost of entry visas for foreign visitors starting next week. It was reported that inflation reached almost 30 percent in January, up five percent over the previous month, driven by the floatation of the Egyptian pound and slashing of fuel subsidies enacted by President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi in November.
(AP, 2/24/17)
2017 Feb 24, France's centrist presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron (39) gave the first clear outlines of his economic program, promising a mix of public spending cuts and fresh investment to stimulate sluggish growth.
(AFP, 2/24/17)
2017 Feb 24, Guatemala's immigration office ordered the expulsion of a ship run by a Dutch nonprofit organization that performs free abortions onboard in international waters. The ship, operated by Women on Waves, travels the globe offering abortion services to women in countries where the procedure is illegal.
(AP, 2/25/17)
2017 Feb 24, Guyana said it is investigating allegations that the Chinese embassy has been using its diplomatic status to bring in tax-free goods from China and distribute them to local merchants.
(AP, 2/24/17)
2017 Feb 24, Iraq's PM Haider al-Abbadi said he had ordered the Iraqi air force to strike Islamic State positions inside Syria in retaliation for recent bomb attacks in Baghdad.
(Reuters, 2/24/17)
2017 Feb 24, Iraqi forces entered west Mosul neighborhoods, a key stronghold in the shrinking "caliphate" of the Islamic State group, which replied with deadly suicide attacks in Iraq and Syria.
(AFP, 2/24/17)
2017 Feb 24, Italian police said nearly 100 staff at the Loreto Mare hospital in Naples have been questioned in connection with a widespread absenteeism scandal, including a doctor who skived off to play tennis.
(AFP, 2/24/17)
2017 Feb 24, Malaysian police said sometime in the hours after poisoning Kim Jong Nam, the half-brother of North Korea's leader, one of his two attackers began to vomit. It was apparently an early indication of the immensely powerful toxin that was used in the killing: the chemical warfare agent VX.
(AP, 2/24/17)
2017 Feb 24, In Norway fourteen donor countries, with the US conspicuously absent, pledged $672 million in emergency aid for people threatened by famine after eight years of Boko Haram violence in the Lake Chad region, but the sum is just a fraction of what the UN says is needed.
(AFP, 2/24/17)
2017 Feb 24, A Pakistani court acquitted Mohammad Ishaq, an Islamic preacher who was sentenced to death four years ago on charges of blasphemy. In 2013 a citizen had accused him of claiming in conversation to actually be God.
(AP, 2/28/17)
2017 Feb 24, Hundreds of Palestinian protesters clashed with Israeli soldiers in the West Bank city of Hebron on the anniversary of a 1994 massacre carried out by a far-right Jewish settler.
(AFP, 2/24/17)
2017 Feb 24, Leila de Lima, Philippine senator and staunch critic of President Rodrigo Duterte's war on drugs, was in police custody following her high-profile arrest for drugs offences that she described as a vendetta that would fail to silence her.
(Reuters, 2/24/17)
2017 Feb 24, Slovenia introduced a law on same-sex partnership that grants legal rights to gay unions but does not allow them to adopt or undergo in-vitro fertilization.
(AP, 2/24/17)
2017 Feb 24, South African police fired stun grenades, rubber bullets and water cannon Friday as the latest wave of anti-immigrant protests broke out in Pretoria, while President Jacob Zuma condemned anti-foreigner violence and appealed for calm. Police said 136 people had been arrested in the past 24 hours.
(AP, 2/24/17)
2017 Feb 24, In Syria an Islamic State car bomb killed 51 people in the village of Sousian held by rebels. A second blast took place 2 km south of Sousian later today.
(Reuters, 2/24/17)(AFP, 2/24/17)
2017 Feb 24, Two Turkish soldiers were killed while clearing mines in the town of Tadef south of al-Bab, Syria.
(Reuters, 2/24/17)
2017 Feb 24, In Yemen a suicide bomber killed eight people at the entrance to the Najda Army Camp in Zinjibar, Abyan province. Twenty rebels and six tribal fighters were killed in heavy fighting near Walad Rabi district, Baida province. Nine other rebels died when tribal fighters ambushed their convoy in the Sawmaa region.
(AFP, 2/24/17)
2017 Feb 25, Donald Trump announced he will skip the annual White House correspondents' dinner on April 29, the first US president to do so in 36 years. The tradition began in 1921 in which journalists invite the US president for a light-hearted roast. Richard Nixon, who despised the media, skipped the event in 1972. Ronald Reagan missed the event in 1981 when he was recovering after being shot in an assassination attempt.
(AFP, 2/26/17)(SSFC, 2/26/17, p.A10)
2017 Feb 25, In Atlanta the Democratic Party’s 447 National Committee members elected former Obama labor secretary Tom Perez to be their new party chair. Perez became the first Latino to hold the post. Perez tapped runner-up Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) as deputy chair.
(SSFC, 2/26/17, p.A11)
2017 Feb 25, In Louisiana Neilson Rizzuto (25) was arrested after he plowed into a crowd at a Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans while intoxicated. 21 people were hospitalized.
(SFC, 2/26/17, p.A4)
2017 Feb 25, In Texas Air Force Tech. Sgt. Anthony Lizana (35) was sentenced to three months of confinement, one month of hard labor and given a dishonorable discharge following his conviction of misconduct with eight women.
(SFC, 2/27/17, p.A4)
2017 Feb 25, The Afghan Interior Ministry said 38 militants, including 23 IS fighters, were killed in separate operations conducted by Afghan security forces in Nangarhar and Helmand provinces over the past two days. Two students were reported killed when a mortar struck a school's classroom in Laghman province.
(AP, 2/25/17)
2017 Feb 25, Albanian police sued the leader of the country's opposition Democratic Party for allegedly inciting calls for violence. A day earlier Democratic Party leader Lulzim Basha urged "citizens to violently react against state institutions," a crime that, if proven, carries up to a three-year jail sentence.
(AP, 2/25/17)
2017 Feb 25, Five Azerbaijani soldiers were killed during fighting in the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region. Azerbaijan and neighboring Armenia traded blame for the outbreak of violence.
(AP, 2/25/17)(Reuters, 2/27/17)
2017 Feb 25, Britain’s tallest man Neil Fingleton (36), a 7-foot 7-inch actor who played the giant Mag the Mighty in "Game of Thrones," died of heart failure.
(AP, 2/27/17)
2017 Feb 25, Egyptian state news said a Cairo has court acquitted one of deposed President Hosni Mubarak's closest aides in a retrial in a corruption case. Zakaria Azmi, Mubarak's former chief of staff, had been sentenced to seven years in prison in 2012 and fined 36.4 million Egyptian pounds ($6 million) on charges of making illegal gains.
(Reuters, 2/25/17)
2017 Feb 25, France said it will send a contingent of counterterror forces to help the army in Niger after militants ambushed a military patrol on Feb 22 killing 16.
(AFP, 2/26/17)
2017 Feb 25, In Germany a student (35) rammed his car into a group of pedestrians, killing one person and injuring two others in Heidelberg. The accused was shot and wounded by police after fleeing the scene on foot while wielding a knife.
(AFP, 2/26/17)
2017 Feb 25, Iran announced plans to buy 950 tons of uranium ore from Kazakhstan over three years and said it expects to get Russian help in producing nuclear fuel.
(Reuters, 2/25/17)
2017 Feb 25, Iraqi forces backed by jets and helicopters battled jihadists inside west Mosul. Shifa Gardi, a female reporter working for Iraqi Kurdish channel Rudaw, was killed by the explosion of a roadside bomb during the fighting in Mosul. Four bombs went off near a minor pipeline from an oilfield close to the northern city of Kirkuk. One member of the Kurdish security forces was killed.
(AFP, 2/25/17)(Reuters, 2/25/17)
2017 Feb 25, Israel's military fired tear gas across the border into Lebanon, breaking up a small Lebanese protest against cameras installed there.
(AP, 2/25/17)
2017 Feb 25, In Libya a ceasefire went into force in Tripoli after two days of fighting between rival gunmen injured nine people and forced residents to cower indoors.
(AP, 2/25/17)
2017 Feb 25, Palestinian authorities recovered the bodies of three workers who had inhaled toxic gas in a smuggling tunnel beneath Gaza's border with Egypt.
(AP, 2/25/17)
2017 Feb 25, In southern Romania thousands of people turned out for a pro-government rally in the town of Targoviste, hoping to boost the popularity of the center-left government following massive anti-corruption protests.
(AP, 2/25/17)
2017 Feb 25, In Syria a suicide assault on two security service bases in of Homs killing at least 32 people, including General Hassan Daabul, a top intelligence chief.
(AFP, 2/25/17)(SSFC, 2/26/17, p.A8)
2017 Feb 25, Thailand's military junta removed the chief of the department responsible for overseeing Buddhist affairs and replaced him with a police officer, amid a stand-off between officials and monks at the country's largest temple.
(Reuters, 2/25/17)
2017 Feb 26, The United States called on Russia to "immediately" observe the ceasefire in Ukraine, accusing combined Russian and separatist forces of targeting international monitors.
(AFP, 2/26/17)
2017 Feb 26, The 89th Academy Awards were held in Hollywood. Actors Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty wrongly announced the top Oscar went to "La La Land," instead of "Moonlight," after they were handed the wrong envelope. Moonlight was based on a semi-autobiographical play by Tarell Alvin McCraney.
(AP, 2/27/17)(Econ, 3/4/17, p.70)
2017 Feb 26, At the Hollywood 89th Academy Awards the film "The White Helmets," a focus on the Syrian Civil Defense, won the best documentary award.
(AP, 2/27/17)
2017 Feb 26, In California Evin Olsen Yadegar (46) of Modesto was shot and killed in Ripon as she attempted to evade police officers after a low-speed chase following a battery report. In 2018 Deputy Justin Wall was charged with felony manslaughter.
(http://tinyurl.com/yavdzdo6)(SFC, 7/18/18, p.D1)
2017 Feb 26, In Philadelphia a visitor to the Jewish Mount Carmel Cemetery discovered more than 100 headstones vandalized. This came less than a week after a Jewish cemetery in suburban St. Louis reported more than 150 headstones vandalized.
(SFC, 2/27/17, p.A4)
2017 Feb 26, Bill Paxton (61), TV and film actor, died from complications due to surgery. His films included “Apollo 13" (1995) and “Titanic" (1997).
(SFC, 2/27/17, p.D3)
2017 Feb 26, Joseph Wapner, the California judge who presided over the TV hit “The people’s Court" (1981-1993) died at his home in Los Angeles.
(SFC, 2/27/17, p.D3)
2017 Feb 26, In Afghanistan Taliban leader Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada issued a statement calling on Afghans to plant more trees. The Afghan Public Health Ministry has said up to 4000 citizens die each year in Kabul due to illnesses brought on or exacerbated by air pollution.
(AP, 2/26/17)
2017 Feb 26, In eastern Algeria a suicide bomb attack hit a police station in the city of Constantine. Police said two officers were injured. The Islamic State jihadist group soon claimed responsibility.
(AFP, 2/27/17)
2017 Feb 26, Australia and Indonesia said that full military ties between the two countries had been restored, after Indonesia’s military suspended cooperation in January because of "insulting" teaching material found at an Australian base.
(Reuters, 2/26/17)
2017 Feb 26, In Belarus about 3,000 people demonstrated across the country against an unpopular new labor law that targets the unemployed. Many people were unhappy with a so-called "anti-sponging" law that forces citizens to pay the equivalent of $250 if they work less than half the year and do not register with nation's labor exchanges.
(AP, 2/26/17)
2017 Feb 26, Gerald Kaufman (86), the longest-serving lawmaker in Britain's House of Commons, died.
(AP, 2/27/17)
2017 Feb 26, Cambodian cabinet spokesman Phay Siphan posted remarks on Facebook this weekend saying US President Donald Trump's attacks on the media are an inspiration to his own country to observe limits on freedom of expression.
(AP, 2/27/17)
2017 Feb 26, China’s police ministry said more than 800 people have been arrested in a crackdown on unlicensed banking operations as Beijing tries to stem outflows of money from the country.
(AP, 2/27/17)
2017 Feb 26, Egyptian Christians fearing attacks by Islamic State group militants fled the volatile northern part of the Sinai Peninsula for a fourth day, after a string of sectarian killings there sent hundreds packing and raised accusations the government is failing to protect the minority.
(AP, 2/26/17)
2017 Feb 26, In Germany the bodies of a woman (76) and a man (81) were discovered dead at a house in Koenigsdorf, about 30 km (19 miles) south of Munich. On March 120 police said they have arrested a Polish national woman (49) and were seeking her brother, Robert Pludowsk (43), in connection with the killing.
(AP, 3/10/17)
2017 Feb 26, In northeastern India at least 16 people were killed and 50 injured when a truck taking them to a church service overturned after hitting a concrete barricade on a highway in Meghalaya state.
(AP, 2/26/17)
2017 Feb 26, Iraqi forces battled jihadists in west Mosul, aiming to build a floating bridge across the Tigris to establish an important supply route linked to the recaptured east bank.
(AFP, 2/26/17)
2017 Feb 26, In Kyrgyzstan hundreds of people protested after authorities detained a prominent opposition leader on fraud and corruption charges that his supporters say are politically motivated. Omurbek Tekebayev was arrested early today after arriving at the main airport outside the capital Bishkek on a flight from Vienna.
(AP, 2/26/17)
2017 Feb 26, In Pakistan the show, "Pakistan First with President Musharraf", debuted on Bol TV, a channel that recently ran afoul of government regulators when one of its hosts was accused of hate speech. Musharraf now lived in Dubai and faced several criminal cases at home.
(AP, 2/28/17)
2017 Feb 26, In the Philippines 13 people facing drug charges escaped from a police detention facility in Manila after sawing through iron bars.
(Reuters, 2/26/17)
2017 Feb 26, Thousands of Russians marched through Moscow shouting slogans such as "Russia will be free!" and "Putin is war!" to mark two years since opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was gunned down outside the Kremlin.
(AP, 2/26/17)
2017 Feb 26, Russian opposition activist Ildar Dadin was released from his jail in the remote Altai region in southern Siberia after Russia's Supreme Court annulled his 2½-year sentence last week because of procedural violations.
(AP, 2/26/17)
2017 Feb 26, Saudi King Salman arrived in Malaysia to kick off a multi-nation tour aimed at boosting economic ties with Asia.
(AP, 2/26/17)
2017 Feb 26, Saudi Arabia launched a parallel equity market designed to boost small and medium enterprises. It closed up 20 percent, the maximum allowed in a single day.
(AFP, 2/26/17)
2017 Feb 26, In Spain Chinese telecoms giant ZTE unveiled what it said is the world's first smartphone compatible with the lightening-fast 5G mobile internet service on the eve of the start of the Mobile World Congress. Networks expect to have 5G up and running by 2020.
(AFP, 2/26/17)
2017 Feb 26, Shamael al-Nur (36), a Sudanese female journalist and critic of government policies, said that she is under fire from hardliners who have accused her of "insulting Islam" in one of her columns. Nur has written that Islamic regimes were increasingly busy with "matters of virtue and women's dress rather than health and education issues".
(AFP, 2/26/17)
2017 Feb 26, The Syrian army and its allies made a sudden advance into areas held by Islamic State in northwest Syria, as the jihadist group retreated after losing the city of al-Bab to Turkey-backed rebels. Government warplanes pounded a rebel-held neighborhood in the central city of Homs, killing at least three and wounding dozens. A top al-Qaeda official was reportedly killed in an airstrike in Idlib province.
(Reuters, 2/26/17)(AP, 2/26/17)(AP, 2/27/17)
2017 Feb 26, Syrian activists called for the Assad government to engage in serious talks on political transition and for the United Nations to strengthen the fragile ceasefire as violence engulfed parts of the country.
(Reuters, 2/26/17)
2017 Feb 26, In northwestern Syrian a Hellfire missile fired by a CIA drone killed senior al-Qaeda leader Abu al-Khayr al-Masri (59), a son-in-law of Osama bin Laden, while he was riding in a car near Idlib.
(Reuters, 2/3/17)(Econ, 3/18/17, p.24)
2017 Feb 26, Pope Francis became the first pontiff to visit an Anglican church in Rome.
(AP, 2/26/17)
2017 Feb 27, In southern California former teacher Robert Ruben Ornelas was sentenced to 190 years in federal prison for traveling to the Philippines to have sex with young girls and videotaping the encounters.
(AP, 2/28/17)
2017 Feb 27, In southern California a small plane heading to San Jose crashed shortly after taking off from Riverside Municipal Airport killing three of five people onboard. Two homes were destroyed in the crash.
(SFC, 2/28/17, p.A6)
2017 Feb 27, In Detroit, Mi., Japanese auto parts maker Takata pleaded guilty to fraud and agreed to pay $1 billion in penalties for concealing an air bag defect blamed for at least 16 deaths, most of them in the US.
(SFC, 2/28/17, p.D3)
2017 Feb 27, It was reported that laboratory mice exposed to Enterovirus D68 often developed sudden –onset paralysis in one or more limbs. The virus has hit more than 200 US children with polio-like paralysis since 2014.
(SFC, 2/27/17, p.A1)
2017 Feb 27, An Afghan policeman turned his rifle on his colleagues at a checkpoint in southern Helmand province killing 11 of them before fleeing.
(SFC, 3/1/17, p.A2)
2017 Feb 27, China’s latest combat drone flew for the first time. The Wing Loong II can carry up to 1,058 pounds of bombs and missiles. State media said it was expected to become a leading export.
(SFC, 3/2/17, p.A2)
2017 Feb 27, Egyptian police arrested 22 people after hundreds went on a rampage in the coastal city of Port Said to protest death sentences for 10 residents for their part in a deadly 2012 soccer riot.
(AP, 2/28/17)
2017 Feb 27, The EU extended its arms embargo and some targeted sanctions against Belarus for another year after it saw insufficient progress to end them.
(AP, 2/27/17)
2017 Feb 27, EU member states approved visa-free travel for Georgia, after agreeing safeguards to prevent any upsurge in arrivals from the former Soviet satellite.
(AFP, 2/27/17)
2017 Feb 27, Germany's Interior Ministry said a new report showing more than 3,500 attacks in 2016 on migrants and their homes is "alarmingly high and cause for concern." Interior Ministry spokesman Johannes Dimroth said authorities are prosecuting the crimes aggressively and the numbers are now falling.
(AP, 2/27/17)
2017 Feb 27, A German court convicted two illegal street racers who caused a deadly high-speed car crash of murder and handed them life prison terms in a landmark ruling. Hamdi H. and Marvin N. were each sentenced to maximum jail terms for the Feb 1 tragedy near Berlin's landmark KaDeWe shopping center.
(AFP, 2/27/17)
2017 Feb 27, Hungary said it has begun building a second fence on its border with Serbia to stop migrants from freely entering the country.
(AP, 2/27/17)
2017 Feb 27, Iraqi forces pushed deeper into western Mosul, gaining control of a neighborhood along the Tigris River and the foot of one of the city's five bridges amid intense clashes with Islamic State militants.
(AP, 2/27/17)
2017 Feb 27, Israeli aircraft carried out a series of strikes in Gaza, wounding at least four people, after a rocket fired from the Palestinian territory hit an empty area in southern Israel.
(Reuters, 2/27/17)
2017 Feb 27, Malaysian PM Najib Razak said that oil major Saudi Aramco will invest $7 billion in a mammoth oil processing hub in Malaysia, making it the single largest investor in the Southeast Asian country.
(AP, 2/27/17)
2017 Feb 27, In the Philippines four senators, who supported a staunch critic of leader Rodrigo Duterte's war on drugs, lost important positions in the Senate.
(Reuters, 2/27/17)
2017 Feb 27, In the Philippines Abu Sayyaf militants posted a video of the killing of Jurgen Kantner (70), an elderly German captive, after a deadline for a $600,000 ransom passed. Kantner and a companion were taken captive in November while sailing on a 53-footer yacht near Sabah.
(Reuters, 2/27/17)
2017 Feb 27, The Somali government warned of a looming famine. The UN humanitarian office said five million Somalis, out of a population of ten million, need humanitarian assistance.
(SFC, 2/28/17, p.A2)
2017 Feb 27, In Somalia a huge overnight fire engulfed Mogadishu’s main market, killing at least two people.
(AP, 2/27/17)
2017 Feb 27, South Africa deported 97 Nigerians for various offences following a series of raids, amid heightened bilateral tensions over anti-immigrant violence in South Africa.
(AP, 3/1/17)
2017 Feb 27, South Korean police said four of the eight North Koreans, identified as suspects in the Feb 13 assassination of Kim Jong Nam in Malaysia, were agents from North Korea’s Ministry of State Security.
(SFC, 2/28/17, p.A3)
2017 Feb 27, In northwestern Spain some 120 guests ate, drank, danced and even set off fireworks. But when desserts arrived, they drove away in the blink of an eye, leaving behind unpaid bills amounting to thousands of euros. On March 7 authorities said one man from Romania has been detained as police investigated a trail of similar incidents.
(AP, 3/7/17)
2017 Feb 27, In Sri Lanka gunmen opened fire on a prison bus near Colombo, killing five prisoners and two warders on their way to court in what was believed to be a gangland dispute.
(Reuters, 2/27/17)
2017 Feb 27, Syrian government or Russian airstrikes on the rebel-held Idlib province killed at least 11 people. Government forces seized territory from the Islamic State group on several fronts in the country's north.
(AP, 2/27/17)(AFP, 2/27/17)
2017 Feb 27, The United Nations refugee agency said more than 31,000 South Sudanese refugees - mostly women and children - have crossed the border into Sudan this year, fleeing famine and conflict.
(Reuters, 2/27/17)
2017 Feb 27, The UN World Health Organization (WHO) issued a list of the top dozen bacteria most dangerous to humans, warning that doctors are fast running out of treatment options. They included Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Staphylococcus aureus.
(AP, 2/27/17)(Econ, 3/4/17, p.65)
2017 Feb 28, President Donald Trump addressed Congress for the first time, selling his policies and laying out the case for a $54 billion boost in military spending and cuts in domestic programs and foreign aid. “Above all we will keep out promises to the American people." Trump called for repealing the Affordable Care Act and slashing regulations at the FDA. He also called for dramatic changes in immigration, education and health care. Trump also signed an executive order mandating a review of “Waters of the United States" (WOTUS), a rule aimed at protecting small streams and wetland ds from development and pollution.
(AFP, 2/28/17)(SFC, 3/1/17, p.A1)(SFC, 3/1/17, p.A5)(Econ, 3/4/17, p.24)
2017 Feb 28, US VP Mike Pence administered the oath of office to Wilbur Ross (79), a day after the Senate voted to confirm him as commerce secretary.
(SFC, 3/1/17, p.A5)
2017 Feb 28, Tornadoes and storms killed at least three people and destroyed homes in Illinois and Missouri. Tornado spotters reported at least 23 twisters in Illinois, Missouri, Iowa, Tennessee and Indiana.
(Reuters, 3/1/17)(SFC, 3/2/17, p.A6)
2017 Feb 28, Austria's intelligence services confirmed a news report that they have tracked down a US-based Turkish hacker who attacked several government websites. A Turkish activist, identified as Arslan A., directed the attacks from his home in Bowling Green, Kentucky.
(AP, 2/28/17)
2017 Feb 28, In Canada Pres. Donald Trump’s two eldest sons attended the grand opening of their company’s new hotel and condominium tower in Vancouver where they were greeted by protests.
(SFC, 3/1/17, p.A4)
2017 Feb 28, Chinese authorities said that Ismael Arciniegas (72), a retired Colombian journalist, was killed by lethal injection after a last-ditch diplomatic effort by Colombia to save his life failed. He was arrested in 2010 trying to smuggle four kg of cocaine into China in exchange for $5,000.
(AP, 2/28/17)
2017 Feb 28, China and Russia vetoed a UN Security Council resolution that would have imposed new sanctions on Syria for using chemical weapons against its own citizens.
(SFC, 3/1/17, p.A3)
2017 Feb 28, In Egypt top Muslim and Christian clerics from the Middle East gathered in Cairo for a two-day conference on promoting co-existence, as sectarian conflict continues to ravage the region. The leading religious authority in Sunni Islam lashed out at supporters of abortion rights, sexual reassignment and globalization, saying they aim to "annihilate all Abrahamic religions."
(AFP, 2/28/17)(AP, 3/1/17)
2017 Feb 28, In Germany a man (24) killed his grandmother in Muellrose, then ran over and killed two police officers as he fled from them in Brandenburg state. The man was arrested short time later.
(AP, 2/28/17)
2017 Feb 28, In Iraq hundreds of civilians fled through the desert to escape fighting and privation in Mosul, joining thousands of others who left their homes amid dire conditions in the city's west.
(AFP, 2/28/17)
2017 Feb 28, The Italian foreign ministry said in a statement that an inspection had found "irregularities" in granting visas at its consulate in the Iraqi city of Irbil and that the head of the visa section has been replaced. Visa-seekers, including Syrians, Arab and Kurdish Iraqis, had allegedly paid as much as 10,000 euros ($10,600) for visas instead of the actual 90-euro ($96) fee.
(AP, 2/28/17)
2017 Feb 28, In Lebanon a civilian was killed and four wounded in fierce clashes that rocked Ain al-Hilweh, the country’s largest Palestinian refugee camp for the sixth day.
(AFP, 2/28/17)
2017 Feb 28, A Lithuanian court jailed a Russian citizen and one of its own nationals for spying for Moscow. The former Lithuanian captain pleaded guilty and was handed a five-year sentence. The Russian citizen, who pleaded innocent, was sentenced to 10 years and six months.
(AFP, 2/28/17)
2017 Feb 28, In Malaysia oil giant Saudi Aramco signed a $7 billion deal to take a 50 percent stake in a mega Malaysian oil refinery project, in a pact expected to help Saudi Arabia increase trade in Southeast Asia.
(AP, 2/28/17)
2017 Feb 28, The Philippines' main antinarcotics agency signed an agreement with the military to harness troops in President Rodrigo Duterte's deadly anti-drug crackdown after he barred the national police force from carrying out the campaign to cleanse its ranks of rogue personnel.
(AP, 2/28/17)
2017 Feb 28, Somalia's new President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed declared a national disaster for a drought that threatens millions of people and is creating fears of a full-blown famine.
(AP, 2/28/17)
2017 Feb 28, South Korean special prosecutors indicted Samsung's de facto chief on bribery, embezzlement and other charges linked to a political scandal that has toppled President Park Geun-hye. Yonhap news said Samsung would scrap its Future Strategy Office and devolve power to individual affiliates as part of broad reforms.
(AP, 2/28/17)(Econ, 3/4/17, p.52)
2017 Feb 28, South Korea’s Lotte Mart supermarket chain signed a deal allowing America to build the THAAD anti-missile system on land owned by the company. The company’s businesses in China were adversely affected with sudden tax and safety inspections and a scarcity of buyers.
(Econ, 3/18/17, p.41)
2017 Feb 28, Syrian government forces and their allies from the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah reached the outskirts of Palmyra in their push to drive Islamic State militants from the ancient town.
(AP, 2/28/17)
2017 Feb 28, The UN said nearly 1,500 children have been recruited by Yemen's warring parties, mostly the Shiite Huthi rebels, since March 2015.
(AFP, 2/28/17)
2017 Feb, The US Dept. of Homeland Security set up the fake Univ. of Farmington in Farmington Hills, Mi., in a sting operation to expose immigration fraud. In 2019 authorities charged eight recruiters of enlisting at least 600 people to enroll in the school to maintain student visa status and remain in the US.
(SFC, 2/1/19, p.A9)
2017 Feb, Maryland’s highest court ruled that people can’t be held in jail because they can’t afford bail.
(Econ, 4/15/17, p.26)
2017 Feb, Two aides of Pres. Donald Trump staged a raid on the Manhattan office of Dr. Harold N. Bornstein, who had served as Trump's personal doctor of 36 ears. This followed an interview with the NY Times in which Bornstein said that Trump took a drug to promote hair growth. All of Trump's medical files, including handwritten records and printed lab results, were removed.
(SFC, 5/2/18, p.A6)
2017 Feb, In North Carolina officers fired at and killed Kenneth Lee Bailey (24) after he ran from a house where officers had come to arrest him. Bailey had violated terms of his pre-trial release on armed-robbery charges. State criminal investigators found empty bullet shells and a handgun near where Bailey fell. In September a prosecutor said no charges would be filed because the officers were afraid for their lives.
(http://tinyurl.com/y77h9lzx)(SFC, 9/27/17, p.A6)
2017 Feb, In Wyoming a new supercomputer began critical climate change research at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Cheyenne. About 70 percent of its costs came from the National Science Foundation.
(SFC, 2/18/17, p.A11)
2017 Feb, Scientists reported that the deepest ocean trenches are loaded with pollutants. Amphilopods, a type of crustacean, captured in the Mariana trench off Guam and the Kermadec trench off New Zealand had levels of polychlorinated biphenyls, once widely used in electrical equipment, that were almost off the scale.
(Econ, 2/18/17, p.67)
2017 Feb, Amazon, the fifth most valuable firm in the world, reported higher profits but lower revenues. 92% of its value was due to profits expected after 2020.
(Econ, 3/25/17, p.18)
2017 Feb, The Afghan government announced that its forces have killed Qari Saifullah Akhtar, a Taliban leader repeatedly captured and released by Pakistan.
(Econ, 2/25/17, p.33)
2017 Feb, Brazil’s only aircraft carrier, never battle-ready, was mothballed.
(Econ 7/8/17, p.31)
2017 Feb, Parks Canada reintroduced a herd of plains bison to the country's oldest national park in Banff, Alberta.
(Reuters, 2/13/17)
2017 Feb, A sophisticated hacking group that pursues Chinese government interests broke into the website of a private US trade group. The hackers left a malicious link on web pages where members of the National Foreign Trade Council (NFTC) register for upcoming meetings, according to researchers at Fidelis Cybersecurity and a person familiar with the trade group.
(Reuters, 4/6/17)
2017 Feb, Authorities in Democratic Republic of Congo expelled a filmmaker and researcher working for Greenpeace following a trip to forest communities affected by industrial logging.
(Reuters, 3/1/17)
2017 Feb, Egypt opened the Rafah border crossing to the Gaza strip to commercial traffic.
(Econ, 4/22/17, p.42)
2017 Feb, Unemployment in Japan fell to 2.8%, the lowest rate since 1994.
(Econ, 4/8/17, p.63)
2017 Feb, In Malaysia Pastor Raymond Koh, who ran a charity that helped the underprivileged, was kidnapped by masked men in Kuala Lumpur. In 2019 the country's human rights commission said he was probably abducted by agents of Special Branch, a police intelligence unit.
(Reuters, 4/3/19)
2017 Feb, In Mali Gloria Cecilia Narvaez, a Colombian nun, was kidnapped by the al Qaeda-linked Macina Liberation Front, near the border with Burkina Faso. She was freed in 2021.
(Reuters, 10/10/21)
2017 Feb, Russia’s state-owned Rosneft signed a cooperation agreement with Libya’s National Oil Corp.
(Econ, 3/18/17, p.53)
2017 Feb, Singapore’s Supreme Court upheld the conviction and fining of three activists who took part in a protest about the management of the Central Provident Fund, a compulsory savings scheme administered by the government.
(Econ, 3/11/17, p.40)
2017 Feb, Trinidadian state security officials launched intensive surveillance and monitoring of the country's homegrown Islamist movements. Security officials and terrorism experts believed that as many as 125 fighters and their relatives have traveled from Trinidad and Tobago to Turkey and on to IS-controlled areas over the last four years, making the country of 1.3 million people the largest per-capita source of IS recruits in the Western Hemisphere.
(AP, 2/16/17)
2017 Feb, Turkish authorities arrested Deniz Yucel, a journalist for Germany’s Die Welt newspaper, on charges of propaganda in support of a terrorist organization and inciting the public to violence. Yucel, a dual Turkish and German national, was initially detained after he reported on emails that a leftist hacker collective had purportedly obtained from the private account of Berat Albayrak, Turkey's energy minister and Erdogan's son-in-law.
(Reuters, 3/19/17)
2017 Feb, In Ukraine a small group of irregulars and volunteers blocked railway traffic across the line of control halting freight between separatist territories and the rest of Ukraine. Pres. Poroshenko opposed the blockade but support for it soared and the government joined them imposing a trade and energy blockade on the occupied territories. separatists responded by seizing control of all the coal mines and steel and chemical plants owned by Rinat Akhmetov, Ukraine richest oligarch.
(Econ 5/27/17, p.46)
2017 Feb, Uzbekistan released Muhammad Bekjanov (63), editor of the opposition newspaper Erk, following 18 years in prison. Bekjanov later said he was subjected to such harsh torture that he forgot the names of his daughters, but was kept alive by the support of human rights groups.
(Reuters, 3/3/17)
2017 Feb, Vatican-based Cardinal Raymond Burke, the most outspoken critic of Pope Francis, spent two days in Guam presiding over the trial of Archbishop Anthony Apuron, who was accused of molesting altar boys.
(Econ, 3/18/17, p.62)
2017 Feb, In Yemen Saudi and Emirati-backed forces fought each other over control of Aden’s airport.
(Econ, 4/8/17, p.42)
2017 Feb, Zimbabwe appealed to international donors for $100 million to help those affected by recent floods. Since December, southern floods have killed 246 people, injured 128 and left nearly 2,000 homeless.
(AP, 3/5/17)
2017 Mar 1, The Washington Post reported that Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a former US senator, received Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak in his office in September. A 2nd encounter was in July at a Heritage Foundation event that was attended by about 50 ambassadors, during the Republican National Convention. During sworn testimony at his Senate confirmation hearing in January, Sessions responded to a question from Democratic Senator Al Franken that he did not "have communications with the Russians" during the course of the presidential campaign.
(Reuters, 3/2/17)
2017 Mar 1, Former Montana Rep. Ryan Zinke was sworn in as US interior secretary.
(SFC, 3/2/17, p.A6)
2017 Mar 1, US federal prosecutors announced racketeering charges against seven Baltimore police officers alleging illegal stops, thefts and fake reports.
(SFC, 3/3/17, p.A7)
2017 Mar 1, Tom Pritzker, chairman and president of the Chicago-based Hyatt Foundation, announced that Catalonia-based architects Rafael Aranda, Carme Pigem and Ramon Vilalta have won the 2017 Pritzker Architecture Prize.
(AP, 3/1/17)
2017 Mar 1, In Oregon a house fire in the small town of Riddle left four children dead.
(SFC, 3/2/17, p.A5)
2017 Mar 1, The DJIA rose above 21,000 for the first time and closed at a record 21,115.55. All four major US stock exchanges reached record highs.
(SFC, 3/2/17, p.C2)
2017 Mar 1, US salmonella illnesses linked to turtles began to infect people. According to the US Centers for Disease Control some 37 people across 13 states were diagnosed with salmonella until August 3.
(SFC, 8/30/17, p.A5)
2017 Mar 1, In Afghanistan a pair of near-simultaneous Taliban suicide bombings struck Kabul, targeting a sprawling police compound and offices of the country's intelligence agency and killing 16 people.
(AP, 3/1/17)
2017 Mar 1, The UN's World Meteorological Organization published the highest temperatures on record in three Antarctic zones, setting a benchmark for studying how climate change is affecting this crucial region.
(AFP, 3/1/17)
2017 Mar 1, Austrians became eligible to receiving up to 4,000 euros ($4,300) in rebates to help offset the higher price of an electric vehicle. Neighboring Germany introduced a comparable premium last year.
(Reuters, 3/20/17)
2017 Mar 1, British Land said Chinese property magnate Cheung Chung Kiu has agreed to buy its London's distinctive "Cheesegrater" skyscraper for £1.15-billion.
(AFP, 3/1/17)
2017 Mar 1, Gustav Metzger, Germany-born British inventor of auto-destruct art, died in London.
(Econ, 3/18/17, p.90)
2017 Mar 1, In Cambodia migrant worker Oeut Ang said he fired shots that killed Kem Ley last July because he was upset over the $3,000 he was owed. Kem Ley's relatives believe the suspect isn't telling the whole truth and that the government may have masterminded the killing.
(AP, 3/1/17)
2017 Mar 1, The World Health Organization (WHO) said it has noticed changes in the bird flu virus now spreading in China, but says the risk of the disease spreading easily between people remains low. It also said scientists have identified genetic changes suggesting the viruses are resistant to Tamiflu, the recommended treatment for the illness, in about 7 percent of recent cases.
(AP, 3/1/17)
2017 Mar 1, Colombia's FARC rebels begin disarming under a historic peace deal, beginning the delicate transition from guerrilla army to political party after more than half a century at war.
(AFP, 3/1/17)
2017 Mar 1, In CongoDRC Congolese, Tanzanian and French workers were abducted from Canada’s Banro Mining Corp.'s Namoya gold mine. Rebels of the Rahiya Mutomboki group demanded $1 million in ransom for the five workers. The Tanzanian was soon released. The French man and three Congolese were released on May 27.
(AP, 3/2/17)(AP, 5/28/17)
2017 Mar 1, It was reported that a network of schools in Ethiopia linked to Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, accused by Turkey of masterminding a failed coup attempt last year, is changing ownership to a group of educators from Germany.
(AP, 3/1/17)
2017 Mar 1, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia signed agreements in areas ranging from trade to aviation as the kingdom's monarch visited the world's most populous Muslim-majority country for the first time in almost half a century.
(AFP, 3/1/17)
2017 Mar 1, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and Turkey's President Tayyip Erdogan agreed to improve ties, including in the fight against terrorism, on the sidelines of an economic cooperation summit in the Pakistani capital Islamabad.
(Reuters, 3/1/17)
2017 Mar 1, Macedonian President Gjeorge Ivanov said he cannot give a mandate to form a government to the leader of the Social Democrats who won a parliamentary majority by getting the support of ethnic Albanian parties.
(Reuters, 3/1/17)
2017 Mar 1, A Malaysian court charged two young women, accused of smearing VX nerve agent on the estranged half-brother of North Korea's leader, with murder.
(AP, 3/1/17)
2017 Mar 1, Nepal said it has forced 2,500 old vehicles off roads in Kathmandu, part of a fight against alarming air pollution levels that have hit nine times World Health Organization (WHO) limits.
(Reuters, 3/1/17)
2017 Mar 1, A Norway appeals court ruled that Norway did not violate the human rights of mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik by isolating him in jail, overturning a lower court ruling from last year.
(AP, 3/1/17)
2017 Mar 1, A Palestinian broke into a home in a West Bank settlement near Hebron and stabbed an Israeli, who then shot and killed the intruder.
(AP, 3/1/17)
2017 Mar 1, Polish European Parliament lawmaker Janusz Korwin-Mikke told the European parliament that "women must earn less than men because they are weaker, they are smaller, they are less intelligent." Two days later in Warsaw he said it is a "20th-century stereotype that women have the same intellectual potential as men," and that the stereotype "must be destroyed because it is not true."
(AP, 3/3/17)
2017 Mar 1, Human Rights Watch said that Poland is endangering asylum-seekers fleeing persecution in the Russian province of Chechnya and elsewhere by returning them summarily to Belarus.
(AP, 3/1/17)
2017 Mar 1, In Portugal American ex-CIA agent Sabrina de Sousa won a last-minute reprieve from a Lisbon court and will no longer be extradited from Portugal to Italy, where a court convicted her of taking part in the kidnapping of a Muslim cleric. The court ruled that Sabrina de Sousa must be released immediately since Italy had cancelled its detention and extradition request for her.
(AP, 3/1/17)
2017 Mar 1, Puerto Rico's Gov. Ricardo Rossello submitted a fiscal plan that rejects austerity measures sought by a federal control board and instead proposes alternative ways to boost revenue and cut spending amid an economic recession.
(AP, 3/1/17)
2017 Mar 1, In Somaliland DP World, a Dubai-based port operator, began working from Berbera’s beachside hotel. Three weeks later the UAE revealed plans for 25-year lease of air and naval bases alongside.
(Econ, 4/8/17, p.42)
2017 Mar 1, In South Africa thousands of coal truck drivers descended on Pretoria to protest against the country's renewable energy program, after President Jacob Zuma expressed support for the sector last month.
(Reuters, 3/1/17)
2017 Mar 1, Prosecutors in Madrid launched an "urgent" investigation into a conservative association that chartered a bus displaying a large, anti-transgender message to tour Spain, drawing widespread condemnation.
(AFP, 3/1/17)
2017 Mar 1, In northern Syria the Turkish army and allied Syrian rebels attacked villages held by US-allied militias near the city of Manbij. Russian-backed Syrian government forces and their allies recaptured the historic Palmyra citadel, on the city's western outskirts, from Islamic State fighters.
(Reuters, 3/1/17)
2017 Mar 1, In Ukraine a fifth of a million phone users in the rebel-controlled eastern city of Donetsk were cut off from the rest of the country. Russian-backed rebels in eastern Ukraine said they are taking over 40 factories and coal mines. They include those owned by tycoon Rinat Akhmetov, whose foundation has been the largest provider of humanitarian aid to a war-battered population.
(Reuters, 3/1/17)(AP, 3/1/17)
2017 Mar 1, UN investigators said both sides in the battle for Aleppo committed war crimes, including Syrian government aircraft that "deliberately" bombed and strafed a humanitarian convoy, killing 14 aid workers and halting relief operations. Their report said Syrian and Russian forces conducted daily air strikes on rebel-held eastern Aleppo between July and its fall on December 22, killing hundreds and destroying hospitals.
(Reuters, 3/1/17)
2017 Mar 1, Marie Collins, a leading member of a group advising Pope Francis on how to root out sex abuse in the Catholic Church, quit in frustration, citing "shameful" resistance within the Vatican.
(Reuters, 3/1/17)
2017 Mar 1, A UN official said fighting around Yemen's port of Mokha has forced some 45,000 people from their homes, with many facing continued uncertainty and the threat of further displacement.
(AP, 3/1/17)
2017 Mar 2, Several congressional Republicans called on Attorney General Jeff Sessions to recuse himself from investigations into alleged Russian meddling in the US presidential election after it emerged he met last year with Russia's ambassador but did not disclose the contacts in Senate testimony. Sessions became the second high-ranking member of the Trump administration to take a hit over conversations with Russia's envoy to the US, recusing himself from any probe that examines communications between Trump aides and Moscow.
(Reuters, 3/2/17)(AP, 3/3/17)
2017 Mar 2, US VP Mike Pence swore in retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson as secretary of housing and former Texas Gov. Mike Perry as energy secretary.
(SFC, 3/3/17, p.A6)
2017 Mar 2, The Kansas Supreme Court ruled that the state’s spending on public education was unconstitutionally low.
(SFC, 3/3/17, p.A6)
2017 Mar 2, US federal prosecutors announced they have captured members of the MS-13 street gang who killed three Long Island high school students last year with a machete and baseball bats.
(SFC, 3/3/17, p.A6)
2017 Mar 2, In Nebraska a prison riot at the Tecumseh State Correctional Institution left two inmates dead. About 40 inmates refused to return to their cells after staff members reported a fire to one of the housing units.
(SFC, 3/4/17, p.A6)
2017 Mar 2, Snap, the parent company of social media Snapchat, closed at $24.48, a 44% jump over its IPO price of $17. The company had started in 2011 as Picaboo. The securities sold had no voting power so all the power stayed with co-founders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy.
(SFC, 3/3/17, p.C1)(Econ, 2/4/17, p.53)(Econ, 2/11/17, p.56)
2017 Mar 2, In Afghanistan a suspected US drone strike killed Qari Abdullah, a top commander of the militant Haqqani network. He was the man who in 2014 accompanied US Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl when he was handed over to US authorities.
(AP, 3/3/17)
2017 Mar 2, An Austrian court found eight Iraqi nationals guilty of gang-raping a German tourist on New Year's Eve, 2015, and sentenced them to prison terms of between nine and 13 years.
(AP, 3/2/17)
2017 Mar 2, Nations and philanthropists pledged close to $200 million for family planning at an international conference in Brussels that aimed to make up for the gap left by President Donald Trump's ban on US funding to groups linked to abortion.
(AP, 3/2/17)
2017 Mar 2, Canada adopted a military doctrine that explicitly acknowledges soldiers’ right to use force to protect themselves, even when the threat comes from children.
(Econ, 4/1/17, p.28)
2017 Mar 2, Croatia's conservative government formed a council to deal with the country's previous pro-Nazi and Communist regimes in a bid to overcome the deep divisions that still exist over the Balkan nation's past.
(AP, 3/2/17)
2017 Mar 2, The Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia urged the European Union to boost the role of national parliaments under a planned overhaul of the bloc's decision-making process.
(Reuters, 3/2/17)
2017 Mar 2, In Egypt German Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi held talks on ways of slowing migration to Europe, including tightening control over borders.
(AP, 3/2/17)
2017 Mar 2, Egypt's top appeals court found Hosni Mubarak innocent of involvement in the killing of protesters during the 2011 uprising that ended his 30-year rule, in a final ruling that could see the former president walk free.
(Reuters, 3/2/17)
2017 Mar 2, In Italy three skiers were killed in an avalanche in the northern Alps. Another five people were injured at Plan de la Gabba.
(AP, 3/2/17)
2017 Mar 2, In southern Italy two African workers were killed late today after fire broke out at a camp housing hundreds of migrants who pick fruit and vegetables near Foggia.
(Reuters, 3/3/17)(AP, 3/3/17)
2017 Mar 2, Northern Ireland began voting in snap elections to resolve a political crisis fuelled by bad blood and Brexit. The DUP and Ulster Unionists won only 38 seats in the 90-member Assembly The pro-British Democratic Unionist Party narrowly remained the largest party following the closest-ever election for the provincial assembly. If the conservative and pro-British Democratic Unionist Party and the socialist and pro-Irish republican Sinn Fein cannot resolve their differences within three weeks of the vote, the assembly's executive could be suspended and the province fully governed from London.
(AFP, 3/2/17)(Reuters, 3/4/17)(Econ, 3/11/17, p.56)
2017 Mar 2, Kurdish forces seized an oil facility in Kirkuk to send a message to the Iraqi government to build a refinery.
(Reuters, 3/2/17)
2017 Mar 2, Mexican journalist Cecilio Pineda Birto was shot dead in Ciudad Altamirano while in a hammock at a car wash waiting for his car to be serviced.
(AP, 3/3/17)
2017 Mar 2, Nigeria filed criminal charges of corruption against oil multinationals Royal Dutch Shell and Eni over the $1.1 billion sale of one of Africa's richest oil blocks. Malabu Oil, secretly set up by former Oil Minister Dan Etete, was awarded OPL 245 while he was oil minister. Nigeria's government got only $210 million from the deal.
(AP, 3/4/17)
2017 Mar 2, Nusrat al-Islam, officially known as Jama'a Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin', was formed in Mali as an umbrella coalition of four al-Qaida-aligned groups.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jama%27at_Nasr_al-Islam_wal_Muslimin)(Econ., 6/20/20, p.77)
2017 Mar 2, Pakistan announced plans to bring its militancy-wracked tribal areas into the mainstream political fold by ending a de facto system of direct rule that critics said suppressed development and fuelled extremism.
(AFP, 3/2/17)
2017 Mar 2, Pakistan said it will conduct its first census in 19 years. The 70-day data-gathering campaign will start March 15.
(Reuters, 3/2/17)
2017 Mar 2, In Pakistan a suspected US drone strike killed two men on a motorcycle in a village near the Afghanistan border.
(Reuters, 3/2/17)
2017 Mar 2, It was reported that the shores of Peru’s Lake Titicaca, South America's largest lake, are littered with dead frogs, discarded paint buckets and bags of soggy trash and that the water itself contains toxic levels of lead and mercury. Untreated sewage water drains from two dozen nearby cities and illegal gold mines high in the Andes dump up to 15 tons of mercury a year into a river leading to the lake.
(AP, 3/2/17)
2017 Mar 2, Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny accused PM Dmitry Medvedev of controlling a property empire including mansions, yachts and vineyards financed by oligarchs through a network of shadowy non-profit organizations.
(AFP, 3/2/17)
2017 Mar 2, In Somalia at least 57 al-Shabab members were killed after African Union troops from Kenya and Somali forces attacked one of its camps outside Afmadhow.
(AP, 3/2/17)
2017 Mar 2, In South Africa emergency workers dug through rubble in Johannesburg after part of the Charlotte Maxeke hospital's roof collapsed, reportedly trapping several patients.
(AFP, 3/2/17)
2017 Mar 2, South Sudan announced it would increase work permit fees for foreign workers from the $100-$300 range to between $1,000 and $10,000 per year, depending on the qualifications of the worker. International aid agencies on March 10 warned this would worsen a humanitarian crisis in the famine-hit country. In early April South Sudan suspended the plans to charge foreign workers a $10,000 work permit fee, after criticism that it would create a huge expense for aid organizations.
(AFP, 3/11/17)(AP, 4/3/17)
2017 Mar 2, A Madrid judge banned a bright orange bus emblazoned with an anti-transgender message from driving through the Spanish capital on the grounds that it was discriminatory and could provoke hate crimes.
(Reuters, 3/2/17)
2017 Mar 2, In Sudan Bakri Hassan Saleh, a former army general and top aide to President Omar al-Bashir, was sworn in as the country’s first prime minister since the post was scrapped in a 1989 Islamist-backed coup.
(AFP, 3/2/17)
2017 Mar 2, Sweden reintroduced compulsory military service, seven years after abandoning it, to respond to global security challenges including Russia's assertive behavior in the Baltic Sea region.
(AFP, 3/2/17)(SFC, 3/3/17, p.A4)
2017 Mar 2, Syrian troops backed by Russian jets completed the recapture of the historic city of Palmyra from the Islamic State group. Fighters of the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) announced they would cede several villages to the government as part of a deal brokered by Russia to avoid conflict with Turkey.
(AFP, 3/2/17)
2017 Mar 2, Syrian warplanes carried out eight air strikes in a rebel-held district of the mostly government-controlled city of Homs. The air strikes killed two civilians and wounded more than 24 people in al-Waer, as UN-sponsored peace talks continued in Geneva.
(Reuters, 3/2/17)
2017 Mar 2, In western Ukraine eight miners died when a methane gas explosion tore through a pit in the western Lviv region.
(AFP, 3/2/17)
2017 Mar 2, The United States carried out 25 air strikes in Yemen targeting al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in al-Maraqisha, a rugged mountainous area where al Qaeda militants took refuge last year.
(Reuters, 3/2/17)(Econ, 3/18/17, p.24)
2017 Mar 3, In Florida Circuit Judge Milton Hirsch ruled that Miami-Dade County violated the US Constitution when it agreed to jail people slated for deportation. Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez allowed county jails to hold immigrants awaiting deportation after Pres. Trump threatened to cut federal funding from sanctuary cities that did not cooperate with federal immigration authorities.
(SFC, 3/4/17, p.A6)
2017 Mar 3, A DC federal appeals court ruled that wolves in Wyoming should be stripped of Endangered Species Act protections and management given to the state rather than the US government, a decision that opens the door for hunting of the animals.
(Reuters, 3/3/17)
2017 Mar 3, California Gov. Jerry Brown's finance department decided that the state's $64 billion high-speed rail project is ready to lay some track.
(AP, 3/4/17)
2017 Mar 3, In Afghanistan at least eight civilians, including four children, were killed in an attack late today in western Farah province. Family members said they were hit by an airstrike.
(AP, 3/4/17)
2017 Mar 3, Colombia’s human rights watchdog said a total of 120 civil leaders have been killed in Colombia in the past 14 months.
(AFP, 3/3/17)
2017 Mar 3, The 28-nation EU's executive Commission said that it and the US Food and Drug Administration have endorsed an accord that updates a 1998 agreement on manufacturing practices. It means that EU and US regulators will be able to rely on each other's information on premises that make medicines or their ingredients.
(AP, 3/3/17)
2017 Mar 3, In France charities expressed outrage as the mayor of the port Calais, which has symbolized Europe's refugee crisis, signed a ban a day earlier on gatherings that could stop aid groups distributing meals to migrants and refugees.
(Reuters, 3/3/17)
2017 Mar 3, Chancellor Angela Merkel said Tunisia had agreed to take back 1,500 rejected Tunisian migrants from Germany, after an attack by a Tunisian on a Christmas market in Berlin which killed 12 people.
(Reuters, 3/3/17)
2017 Mar 3, German carmaker Mercedes said it is recalling about 1 million cars and SUVs worldwide because a starter part can overheat and cause fires.
(AP, 3/3/17)
2017 Mar 3, Former Haitian Pres. Rene Preval (b.1943) died. He was the only leader of the country to win and complete two terms (1996-2001 and 2006-2011).
(SFC, 3/4/17, p.A2)
2017 Mar 3, Hungary’s Opimus Group, a major print and online media company, said Lorinc Meszaros, a close ally of PM Viktor Orban, has acquired an ownership stake in the company, adding weight to suspicions that the company's closure of the largest opposition newspaper last year was politically motivated.
(AP, 3/3/17)
2017 Mar 3, In Iraq thousands of civilians fled Mosul overnight as government forces advanced north of a sprawling military base near the city's airport. Seven people, among them five children, were reported hospitalized over the past two days near Mosul with injuries from chemical weapons.
(AP, 3/3/17)(AFP, 3/3/17)
2017 Mar 3, In Iraq rival Kurdish groups clashed in the northwestern Sinjar region. The YBS, a local affiliate of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), said the fighting began when the Peshmerga Rojava tried to seize its positions in Khanasor. The YBS accused Turkey of instigating the violence.
(Reuters, 3/3/17)
2017 Mar 3, In Ireland government-appointed investigators announced the finding of a mass grave containing the remains of babies and young children from the 1950s at a former Catholic orphanage. Excavations since November at the site of the former Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, County Galway, had found an underground structure divided into 20 chambers containing "significant quantities of human remains." 800 children had died as residents of the facility, which closed in 1961.
(AP, 3/3/17)
2017 Mar 3, East Libyan forces said they carried out air strikes and clashed with rival factions close to major oil terminals as they sought to fend off the latest challenge to their control of the ports. Libya's National Oil Corporation (NOC) held an urgent meeting to review crude loading schedules and emergency measures to protect oil facilities after clashes around the major terminals of Es Sider and Ras Lanuf.
(Reuters, 3/3/17)(Reuters, 3/4/17)
2017 Mar 3, The Libyan Coast guard rescued 115 refugees and reported that 25 others have gone missing.
(SFC, 3/4/17, p.A2)
2017 Mar 3, Malaysian officials said they have deported Ri Jong Chol, a North Korean man, who was released from custody after police found insufficient evidence to charge him in the Feb 13 murder of Kim Jong Nam, the half-brother of North Korea's leader.
(AP, 3/3/17)
2017 Mar 3, Pakistani police said about 1,300 suspected militants have been arrested in a sweep of hideouts in Punjab province. Another 36 militants died in shootouts with police and in paramilitary operations since the two-week sweep began last month.
(AP, 3/3/17)
2017 Mar 3, Lazar Stojanovic (73), a Serbian film director and an anti-war activist during the 1990s, died in Belgrade. His film "Plastic Jesus" was banned in the 1970s because of its criticism of totalitarian regimes. Stojanovic was sentenced to three years in prison, while the film was released in 1990s.
(AP, 3/4/17)
2017 Mar 3, South Sudan said it has arrested four soldiers after residents accused the army of beating and raping civilians in a small village near the capital last month.
(Reuters, 3/3/17)
2017 Mar 3, Tanzanian President John Magufuli ordered the confiscation of passports belonging to foreign employees of an Indian infrastructure company. The 29 billion shilling ($13 million) water project in the southern town of Lindi was expected to be finished in March 2015 but was still incomplete.
(Reuters, 3/3/17)
2017 Mar 3, In Thailand former Air Vice Marshal Chitpong Thongkum, a former palace medical adviser, was jailed for five and a half years for insulting the monarchy and other charges, a day after another disgraced aide to the new king was charged in a separate case.
(Reuters, 3/3/17)
2017 Mar 3, Turkey accused Germany of scandalous behavior in cancelling rallies of Turkish citizens in two German towns due to be addressed by Turkish ministers and said Berlin provided a "shelter" for people committing crimes against his country.
(Reuters, 3/3/17)
2017 Mar 3, Ukrainian state agencies sought to detain Roman Nasirov, the head of the tax and customs service, over the alleged embezzlement of around $75 million - a potentially landmark case after patchy anti-graft efforts from the Western-backed authorities. Television footage from the previous evening showed an apparently unconscious Roman Nasirov being stretchered into an ambulance and taken to Kiev's Feofania hospital.
(Reuters, 3/3/17)
2017 Mar 3, In Ukraine dozens of sex workers and human rights campaigners gathered in Kiev demanding the legalization of prostitution in the post-Soviet state.
(AFP, 3/3/17)
2017 Mar 3, The UN said Sri Lankan security and police forces are reportedly still committing rape and torture, and the country must investigate and prosecute those involved as well as those implicated in past wartime atrocities.
(Reuters, 3/3/17)
2017 Mar 3, Yemeni officials said US jets carried out dozens of airstrikes on al-Qaida targets in Yemen overnight and in the past 48 hours in one of the lengthiest, sustained operations inside this conflict-torn Arab country.
(AP, 3/3/17)
2017 Mar 3, Two Zimbabwean journalists were arrested over a newspaper report that described President Robert Mugabe as "in bad shape" when he flew to Singapore for what officials called a scheduled medical check-up.
(AFP, 3/3/17)
2017 Mar 4, Pres. Donald Trump claimed that Barack Obama had tapped his phones and that it was up to Congress to investigate the matter.
(Econ, 3/11/17, p.27)
2017 Mar 4, It was reported that about 62,000 people, who were held at Colorado’s Aurora Detention Facility, have joined together in a lawsuit saying they were required to work for as little as $1 a day.
(SFC, 3/4/17, p.A4)
2017 Mar 4, In New York a man in Schenectady threw gasoline on his wife and set her on fire. Elizabeth Gonzales died the next day. Antonio Bargallo (69) was taken into custody.
(SFC, 3/7/17, p.A6)
2017 Mar 4, US Customs officers arrested Juan Carlos Luperon as he carried 10 pounds of cocaine taped to his legs at NYC’s Kennedy Airport following his arrival from the Dominican Republic.
(SSFC, 3/12/17, p.A9)
2017 Mar 4, Bahrain said it has arrested 25 suspected members of a terror group allegedly backed by Iran on the island nation.
(AP, 3/4/17)
2017 Mar 4, China said it will raise its defense budget by about 7 percent this year, continuing a trend of lowered growth amid a slowing economy despite regional tensions over the South China Sea and other issues.
(AP, 3/4/17)
2017 Mar 4, Senior Chinese government adviser Luo Fuhe warned that the country's internet censorship is hampering scientific research and economic development, in a rare public criticism of a sensitive policy that the government has vigorously defended.
(AP, 3/4/17)
2017 Mar 4, Iran said the six-year prison term of Ahmad Montazeri, son of Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, has been suspended after approval by the country's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei following a request by a top cleric.
(AP, 3/4/17)
2017 Mar 4, Jordan hanged 15 death row prisoners including 10 convicted prisoners with ties to Islamic extremism who carried out five shootings and a bombing since 2003. It was the largest round of executions in the kingdom in at least a decade.
(AFP, 3/4/17)
2017 Mar 4, East Libyan forces carried out air strikes around major oil ports as they sought to regain control of the area from a rival faction. Strongman Khalifa Haftar conceded the loss of Ras Lanuf's main airfield to forces led by Islamists of the Benghazi Defence Brigades.
(Reuters, 3/4/17)(AFP, 3/4/17)
2017 Mar 4, Malaysia expelled North Korea's ambassador for refusing to apologize for his strong accusations over Malaysia's handling of the investigation into the killing of the North Korean leader's half-brother.
(AP, 3/4/17)
2017 Mar 4, In Pakistan unidentified gunmen killed attorney Mohammed Jan Gigyani in northwestern Shabqadar town. Gigyani was a prominent lawyer affiliated with the secular Qaumi Watan political party. Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, a breakaway faction of Pakistani Taliban militants claimed responsibility for the killing.
(AP, 3/4/17)
2017 Mar 4, Somalia's PM Hassan Ali Khaire announced that 110 people have died from hunger in the past 48 hours in a single region as a severe drought threatens millions of people across the country.
(AP, 3/4/17)
2017 Mar 4, Spanish police arrested 24 members of a Colombian drug ring seeking to establish a network for the wholesale distribution of cocaine.
(AP, 3/4/17)
2017 Mar 4, Syrian government forces supported by Russian air power and artillery seizing eight more northern villages today and around 90 villages since mid-January. Tens of thousands of Syrian civilians have fled the ferocious fighting against Islamic State group jihadists over the past week. At least 11 civilians were killed and dozens more wounded in air strikes on the village of Oqayrabat village, Hama province, that a monitor said were likely carried out by Russia.
(AFP, 3/4/17)
2017 Mar 4, A Syrian military jet crashed in Turkey’s southern border province of Hatay. The pilot was rescued after a nine hour search and had "a few" broken bones and was receiving treatment at a local hospital, but wasn't in critical condition.
(AP, 3/5/17)
2017 Mar 4, The United Nations announced aid worth $5 million (4.7 million euros) to help people affected by the humanitarian crisis in the violence-wracked Kasai region of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
(AFP, 3/4/17)
2017 Mar 4, The annual report by a UN panel of experts on North Korea said North Korean weapons barred by UN sanctions have ended up in the hands of UN peacekeepers in Africa.
(AP, 3/4/17)
2017 Mar 5, US agriculture officials said that tens of thousands of chickens have been destroyed at a Tennessee chicken farm due to a bird flu outbreak. 30 other farms within a six-mile radius were being quarantined.
(AP, 3/6/17)(SFC, 3/6/17, p.A4)
2017 Mar 5, It was reported that US federal authorities have approved a plan to move nearly 1,500 desert tortoises from California’s Marine base at Twentynine Palms so that the marine Corps can use the area for training with tanks and live ammunition.
(SSFC, 3/5/17, p.A11)
2017 Mar 5, Gladys Hansen (1925), San Francisco historian, died. Her books included “Denial of Disaster" (1989) in which she showed that the 1906 San Francisco earthquake left 3,000 – 4,000 people dead as opposed to the official count of 478.
(SSFC, 3/12/17, p.C12)
2017 Mar 5, In Afghanistan at least five members of the Afghan security forces were killed early today when their checkpoint came under an insurgent attack in northeastern Kunduz province. 18 insurgents were killed by airstrikes in the Imam Sahib district of Kunduz province.
(AP, 3/5/17)
2017 Mar 5, Azerbaijan and Iran agreed to work towards completing their portion of a planned freight railway route from Europe to South Asia.
(Reuters, 3/5/17)
2017 Mar 5, Bahrain's parliament approved a constitutional change allowing military courts to try civilians.
(AP, 3/5/17)
2017 Mar 5, Britain agreed to arrange 10 billion pounds ($12.3 billion) in loans to finance infrastructure projects in Iraq over a 10 year period, in a program that would only benefit British companies.
(Reuters, 3/5/17)
2017 Mar 5, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang pledged to make the country's smoggy skies blue again and "work faster" to address pollution caused by the burning of coal for heat and electricity at the opening of the annual National People's Congress.
(AP, 3/5/17)
2017 Mar 5, China's top economic official trimmed the country's growth target and warned of dangers from global pressure for trade controls as Beijing tries to build a consumer-driven economy and reduce reliance on exports and investment.
(AP, 3/5/17)
2017 Mar 5, Anti-India protests erupted in Indian-controlled Kashmir following a fierce gunbattle in which two rebels and a counterinsurgency policeman were killed.
(AP, 3/5/17)
2017 Mar 5, The Iranian judiciary said on authorities have arrested an Iranian-American on charges of defrauding people seeking US residence of $2.6 million.
(Reuters, 3/5/17)
2017 Mar 5, Iraqi forces battled the Islamic State group in hours of heavy clashes in west Mosul. The number of people who fled fighting in the area topped 45,000. At least six suicide car bombs dispatched by militants were destroyed before reaching troops.
(AFP, 3/5/17)(SFC, 3/6/17, p.A2)
2017 Mar 5, Japan's ruling party approved a change in party rules that could pave the way for Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to become the country's longest-serving leader in the post-World War II era.
(AP, 3/5/17)
2017 Mar 5, In central Japan a helicopter conducting a mountain rescue exercise crashed with nine local officials aboard. At least three people were feared dead.
(AFP, 3/5/17)
2017 Mar 5, In Panama a bus carrying farmworkers went off a highway in Anton killing 18 people and injuring 37 others.
(SFC, 3/6/17, p.A2)
2017 Mar 5, A Sudanese court sentenced three human rights activists to a year each in jail after convicting them of publishing fake reports or spying. Khalafalla Al-Afif, Midhat Hamdan and Mustafa Adam were arrested on May 23 last year after security agents raided their office in Khartoum.
(AFP, 3/5/17)
2017 Mar 5, The UN said tens of thousands of civilians have fled offensives against the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria, where the jihadists are battling to keep what remains of their territory.
(AFP, 3/5/17)
2017 Mar 5, In Yemen the United States launched a new wave of air raids against Al-Qaeda, as jihadists fled from towns being targeted to mountainous areas. Suspected al Qaeda militants opened fired on a military checkpoint in the southern province of Abyan, killing six troops and a civilian.
(AFP, 3/5/17)(Reuters, 3/5/17)
2017 Mar 5, Zimbabwean junior doctors called off a three-week strike saying the government had partially met their demands, a day before a one-day walkout by other public sector workers.
(Reuters, 3/5/17)
2017 Mar 6, US Pres. Donald Trump signed a revised executive order temporarily banning people from six Muslim-majority countries (Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen). The revision would become effective on March 16.
(SFC, 3/7/17, p.A1)(Econ, 3/11/17, p.29)
2017 Mar 6, US House Republicans unveiled the American Health Care Act (AHCA) to overhaul Obamacare and Pres. Trump endorsed it.
(Econ, 3/11/17, p.28)
2017 Mar 6, Researchers said 11 of 27 species of Hawaii’s reef fish are experiencing some level of overfishing.
(SFC, 3/7/17, p.A6)
2017 Mar 6, In North Carolina Oliver Funes Machada (18), reportedly an illegal immigrant from Honduras, beheaded his mother (35). In 2018 he was judged not guilty by reason of insanity.
(http://tinyurl.com/ybx4eysy)(SFC, 10/23/18, p.A7)
2017 Mar 6, CSX appointed E. Hunter Harrison (72), a veteran railway executive, as CEO. Harrison had announced his departure from Canadian National (CN) on Jan 18.
(Econ, 3/11/17, p.63)
2017 Mar 6, IBM released the first commercial program for universal quantum computers. Various startups have released their own quantum software.
(Econ, 3/11/17, TQ p.10)
2017 Mar 6, Afghan officials said they have ordered the Afghan Turk CAG Educational NGO (ATCE), a network of schools regarded with suspicion by the Turkish government, to be transferred to a foundation approved by Ankara.
(Reuters, 3/6/17)
2017 Mar 6, Bahrain's government filed a lawsuit to dissolve the secular Waad political party, the second-such organization it has targeted in the last year as part of an intense crackdown on opposition in the island nation.
(AP, 3/6/17)
2017 Mar 6, The European Union approved plans for a military headquarters to coordinate overseas security operations. The facility will initially run three operations: civil-military training missions in Mali, the Central African Republic and Somalia.
(AFP, 3/6/17)
2017 Mar 6, The European Union said it has cleared Hungary to build two nuclear reactors with Russian help after Budapest made commitments to safeguard competition in the energy sector.
(AP, 3/6/17)
2017 Mar 6, French carmaker PSA announced the acquisition of General Motors' European subsidiary, which includes the Opel and Vauxhall brands, for 1.3 billion euros ($1.38 billion).
(AFP, 3/6/17)
2017 Mar 6, The French-made Peugeot 3008 was voted European car of the year on the eve of the opening of the Geneva motor show.
(Econ, 3/11/17, p.63)
2017 Mar 6, Greek authorities said they have seized more than half a million illegally made amphetamine pills, their largest haul to date and thought to be destined for the Middle East.
(Reuters, 3/6/17)
2017 Mar 6, Israeli police questioned PM Benjamin Netanyahu for a fourth time in a corruption investigation that has prompted political rivals to start looking to a "post-Bibi" Israel.
(Reuters, 3/6/17)
2017 Mar 6, In Kenya the body of rancher Tristan Voorspuy was found 190 km (118 miles) north of Nairobi. He was shot dead while inspecting some of his lodges, which had been burned by attackers. 379 pastoralist herders were soon arrested for invading ranches that led to the killing of the British farmer. Samson Lokayi (25), suspected of involvement in the death of Voorspuy, was arrested on March 12.
(AP, 3/6/17)(AFP, 3/14/17)
2017 Mar 6, In Kenya one of Africa's oldest and largest elephants was killed by poachers in Tsavo National Park. Two poachers believed to be responsible for the killing were soon apprehended.
(AFP, 3/6/17)
2017 Mar 6, In Myanmar some 30 people died in clashes between ethnic rebels and security forces after fighters from the predominantly ethnic Chinese Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA) launched a pre-dawn attack on police posts in the capital of the northeastern Kokang region, Laukkai.
(Reuters, 3/6/17)
2017 Mar 6, Nepali police shot and killed at least three ethnic Madhesis in the country's restive southern plains as they tried to disrupt an opposition rally organized by the Communist Unified Marxist-Leninist (UML) party that opposes any change to the country’s post-monarchy charter.
(Reuters, 3/6/17)
2017 Mar 6, Nigeria’s former Adamawa state governor James Bala Ngilari was jailed for five years after being found guilty of corruption related to procurement of cars while in office.
(Reuters, 3/6/17)
2017 Mar 6, North Korea fired four banned ballistic missiles that flew about 1,000 km (620 miles) on average, with three of them landing in waters that Japan claims as its exclusive economic zone. The EU condemned North Korea for firing four banned ballistic missiles and said it would consult with Japan and international partners on how to react.
(AP, 3/6/17)
2017 Mar 6, North Korea said it has ordered Malaysia's ambassador out of the country in a tit-for-tat after Malaysia expelled North Korea's envoy over the death of Kim Jong Nam at Kuala Lumpur's airport.
(AP, 3/6/17)
2017 Mar 6, Palestinian militant Basil al-Araj (31) was killed in a shootout with Israeli forces in the West Bank. Police said he headed a group planning attacks against Israeli targets and collected weapons for the group.
(AP, 3/6/17)
2017 Mar 6, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte signed an executive order creating a joint command to mobilize 21 state agencies behind his bloody war on drugs, prioritizing "high-value" targets and going after all levels of the illicit trade. The order was published on March 10.
(Reuters, 3/10/17)
2017 Mar 6, Retired Philippine police officer Arturo Lascanas testified that President Rodrigo Duterte and his men were linked to nearly 200 killings that the officer and a "death squad" carried out when Duterte was mayor of Davao City.
(AP, 3/6/17)
2017 Mar 6, Russian and South African communications officials pledged to work on collaborative media activities.
(Econ, 3/18/17, p.53)
2017 Mar 6, South Korea received the first components of THAAD, an American anti-missile system.
(Econ, 3/18/17, p.41)
2017 Mar 6, In Syria US-backed militias cut the last main road out of Islamic State-held Raqqa, severing the highway between the group's de facto capital and its stronghold of Deir al-Zor province.
(Reuters, 3/6/17)
2017 Mar 6, In Thailand a statement from the Royal Palace said King Vajiralongkorn Bodindradebayavarangkun has approved stripping the honorary title from Phra Dhammajayo (72), head of the Dhammakaya sect, because of the criminal charges against him.
(AP, 3/6/17)
2017 Mar 6, Turkish security forces launched one of their largest "anti-terrorist" operations in recent years in the restive south-east against Kurdish militants.
(AFP, 3/6/17)
2017 Mar 6, Ukraine’s deputy foreign minister accused Russia of financing terrorism by shipping arms, ammunition and funds to separatist rebels in eastern Ukraine and of discriminating against non-Russians in the annexed Crimean Peninsula.
(SFC, 3/7/17, p.A2)
2017 Mar 6, In Yemen the United States carried out at least one new air strike on al Qaeda overnight. Two boys were killed in a drone strike while walking on a road in al-Bayda province used by al Qaeda militants who have been subject to repeated strikes by US forces in recent days. Three suspected al Qaeda militants were killed in a separate strike in Qifa in the same province.
(Reuters, 3/6/17)(Reuters, 3/7/17)
2017 Mar 6, In Zambia eight people died and 28 were injured in a stampede during food handouts at a youth center in the capital, Lusaka.
(AP, 3/6/17)
2017 Mar 6, Zimbabwe's government agreed to pay outstanding cash bonuses, bringing an end to a brief sit-in protest by public workers.
(Reuters, 3/6/17)
2017 Mar 7, The US Justice Department said the Chinese firm ZTE Corp. has agreed to plead guilty and pay the United States $892 million for violating sanctions against Iran. ZTE Corp. had illegally shipped sensitive US-made equipment to Iran.
(AP, 3/7/17)
2017 Mar 7, WikiLeaks published thousands of documents purportedly taken from the Central Intelligence Agency's Center for Cyber Intelligence, a dramatic release that appears to expose intimate details of America's cyberespionage toolkit.
(AP, 3/7/17)
2017 Mar 7, In Mississippi a freight train hit a tour bus in Biloxi killing at least four people.
(SFC, 3/8/17, p.A5)
2017 Mar 7, Texas executed Rolando Ruiz was executed for the 1992 contract killing of Theresa Rodriguez (29) orchestrated by her husband and brother-in-law.
(SFC, 3/8/17, p.A5)
2017 Mar 7, Thousands of stranded Afghans and Pakistanis returned home as Pakistan temporarily reopened two main crossings that had been closed last month after a wave of militant attacks.
(AP, 3/7/17)
2017 Mar 7, In Argentina thousands of banner-waving trade unionists marched through Buenos Aires to protest job losses and inflation.
(Econ, 3/18/17, p.32)
2017 Mar 7, British PM Theresa May sacked Michael Heseltine (83), a senior figure in her Conservative Party, from various advisory roles for rebelling against the government in a Brexit vote in the House of Lords.
(AFP, 3/8/17)
2017 Mar 7, Cambodia’s drug czar said authorities have arrested more than 4,800 people in a two-month-old campaign against drugs and that number could more than double.
(Reuters, 3/7/17)
2017 Mar 7, Europe’s top court ruled that EU member states are not obliged to grant humanitarian visas to people who want to enter their territory to apply for asylum.
(SFC, 3/8/17, p.A3)
2017 Mar 7, A European Union court struck down a 2013 decision by EU regulators to block a planned takeover of Dutch-based package delivery company TNT Express by United Parcel Services Inc.
(AP, 3/7/17)
2017 Mar 7, In France poachers broke into the Thoiry Zoo overnight and shot a 5-year-old rhinoceros named Vince three times in the head. They used a chain saw to remove the animal's ivory horn.
(AP, 3/7/17)
2017 Mar 7, Hungary's parliament approved the systematic detention of all asylum-seekers in container camps, in a move that PM Viktor Orban said will make all of Europe safer from terror attacks.
(AFP, 3/7/17)
2017 Mar 7, An Indian court sentenced university professor G.N. Saibaba and four others to life imprisonment on charges of belonging to a banned communist rebel group and recruiting others to join them. Saibaba, arrested in 2014, is paralyzed from the waist down and uses a wheelchair. He has denied the charges.
(AP, 3/7/17)
2017 Mar 7, Iraqi government forces fighting to drive Islamic State from western Mosul recaptured the main government building, the central bank branch and the museum where three years ago the militants had smashed statues and artifacts.
(Reuters, 3/7/17)
2017 Mar 7, The Kenyan government ordered striking medical staff to go back to work and said it had withdrawn an offer of a 50 percent pay hike after the workers' union became inflexible in their negotiations.
(Reuters, 3/7/17)
2017 Mar 7, National Olympic Committee of Kenya (NOCK) executives, led by two-time Olympic champion Kip Keino, defied the IOC at a meeting and refused to make changes to their constitution.
(AP, 3/9/17)
2017 Mar 7, Kosovo's Pres. Hashim Thaci asked parliament to transform the country's lightly armed security forces into a regular army, a move immediately denounced by Serbian leaders who refuse to recognize Kosovo's independence.
(AP, 3/7/17)
2017 Mar 7, Lesotho's deputy prime minister said the king has dissolved parliament and will shortly set an election date, days after PM Pakalitha Mosisili lost a confidence vote in the assembly.
(Reuters, 3/7/17)
2017 Mar 7, Libya's eastern parliament voted to withdraw its support for a UN peace deal and Government of National Accord. The body voted to annul its previous acceptance of a presidential council and the UN-backed government currently led by PM Fayez al-Serraj in Tripoli. East Libyan forces carried out a fifth day of air strikes against a rival faction that overran the major oil ports of Es Sider and Ras Lanuf.
(AP, 3/7/17)(Reuters, 3/7/17)
2017 Mar 7, The International Organization for Migration said fighting between rival people-smuggling gangs on Libya's Mediterranean coast has killed 22 people.
(Reuters, 3/7/17)
2017 Mar 7, In Macedonia vandals damaged a museum dedicated to the Albanian alphabet, amid increasing political tension over the official status of the Albanian language in the country. Three parties of the Albanian minority, a quarter of Macedonia's population, demanded that Albanian should become Macedonia's second official language as their price to join in any coalition.
(AP, 3/7/17)
2017 Mar 7, Cyclone Enawo slammed into Madagascar. The Indian Ocean tropical storm packed winds up to 300 kph (185 mph). At least 38 people were killed and some 50,000 people driven from their homes.
(Reuters, 3/8/17)(SSFC, 3/12/17, p.A4)
2017 Mar 7, Myanmar's government urged ethnic rebel groups to join talks to achieve a nationwide peace agreement even after one of the groups raided a government-controlled town in an attack a day earlier that killed five policemen and five civilians, including a schoolteacher.
(AP, 3/7/17)
2017 Mar 7, North Korea closed its borders to Malaysians who want to leave the country, spurring Malaysia to issue a retaliatory order and drawing hundreds of ordinary people into an increasingly bitter diplomatic battle over the killing of an exiled member of North Korea's ruling family. 11 Malaysian citizens were prevented from flying home.
(AP, 3/7/17)(Econ, 3/11/17, p.40)
2017 Mar 7, Russia’s Culture Ministry said children under age 16 won't be able to go to the new Disney film "Beauty and the Beast" in Russia because it includes a gay character.
(AP, 3/7/17)
2017 Mar 7, Senegalese authorities arrested Khalifa Sall, the mayor of the capital Dakar, a potential rival to President Macky Sall (no relation) in elections expected in 2019, on suspicion of embezzling 1.8 billion CFA francs ($2.87 million).
(Reuters, 3/8/17)
2017 Mar 7, In Turkey the top generals of the Turkish, Russian and US military met in Antalya in a bid to step up coordination in Syria and avoid clashes between rival forces in the fight against IS.
(AFP, 3/7/17)
2017 Mar 7, A Ukraine judge ordered Roman Nasirov, the country’s top tax official, to be jailed or pay a hefty bail pending his trial for suspected embezzlement.
(Reuters, 3/7/17)
2017 Mar 7, UN Sec.-Gen. Antonio Guterres urged int’l. support to alleviate Somalia’s worsening hunger crisis.
(SFC, 3/8/17, p.A4)
2017 Mar 7, The United Nations said South Africa's withdrawal from the International Criminal Court has been revoked, stalling what would have been the first-ever departure from the tribunal that pursues the world's worst atrocities.
(AP, 3/8/17)
2017 Mar 7, A new United Nations report described South Sudan as teetering on the edge of genocide and experiencing ethnic cleansing, a stark portrayal of a nation whose crises now include famine.
(AP, 3/7/17)
2017 Mar 8, US federal prosecutors said a Massachusetts fishing magnate known as "The Codfather" has agreed to plead guilty to federal charges of evading fishing quotas and smuggling money to Portugal.
(AP, 3/9/17)
2017 Mar 8, Wildfires in Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas left 6 people dead along with some 2,500 adult cattle and 1,000 calves.
(SFC, 3/9/17, p.A7)
2017 Mar 8, Some one million Michigan homes and other buildings were without power after high winds caused what is believed to be the biggest outage in the state's history.
(Reuters, 3/9/17)
2017 Mar 8, RadioShack filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection for the second time in just over two years, putting the future of the nearly 100-year-old electronics retailer in doubt.
(AP, 3/9/17)
2017 Mar 8, US-based Mercy Corps, one of the largest humanitarian organizations delivering aid to Syria, said Turkey has ordered it to immediately shut down its Turkish operations.
(Reuters, 3/8/17)
2017 Mar 8, In Afghanistan gunmen wearing white lab coats stormed a military hospital in Kabul, killing at least 31 people and wounding dozens in an attack claimed by the Islamic State group. A day later the death was raised to 49.
(AFP, 3/8/17)(AP, 3/9/17)(Reuters, 3/9/17)
2017 Mar 8, Britain’s Chancellor Philip Hammond in his budget announced an increase in tax for the self-employed, who self-employed make up around 15% of the UK’s workers.
(Econ, 3/11/17, p.56)
2017 Mar 8, Britain's BBC announced it is ending its shortwave transmissions from Thailand after 20 years of operation because it failed to reach agreement with Thailand's military government on a renewal of its operating permit.
(AP, 3/8/17)
2017 Mar 8, China's foreign minister said that North Korea could suspend its nuclear and missile activities in exchange for a halt in joint US-South Korea military drills, in an unusually public proposal that analysts said showed Beijing's growing alarm over the tensions.
(AP, 3/8/17)
2017 Mar 8, China approved 38 trademarks for President Donald Trump, saying it followed the law in processing the applications at a pace that some experts view as unusually quick.
(AP, 3/9/17)
2017 Mar 8, Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein, the top UN rights official, said three mass graves have been discovered in central Democratic Republic of Congo, where hundreds have been killed since July in clashes between security forces and a local militia.
(Reuters, 3/8/17)
2017 Mar 8, The UN warned that fighting in Colombia in recent weeks has displaced some 913 families in areas formerly dominated by leftist rebels in four provinces along the Pacific Ocean.
(SFC, 3/9/17, p.A2)
2017 Mar 8, The leaders of Cyprus' Christian and Muslim faithful banded together in a pledge to work with authorities and help end violence against women and girls on the ethnically divided island.
(AP, 3/8/17)
2017 Mar 8, The European Anti-Fraud Office said that from 2013 to 2016, criminals evaded customs duties with false invoices and wrong declarations upon arrival in the UK The textiles and shoes shipped from China were in fact destined for black market sales on the European mainland.
(AP, 3/8/17)
2017 Mar 8, The European Union's police agency said an international operation has dismantled a crime network smuggling live eels to China, describing it as the EU's biggest success in recent years against trafficking in endangered species.
(AP, 3/8/17)
2017 Mar 8, The European Union said it has fined six makers of car air conditioning and engine-cooling components a total 155 million euros ($163 million) for their involvement in supply cartels.
(AP, 3/8/17)
2017 Mar 8, Bavaria's state office of criminal investigation said Germany’s police have raided over 120 apartments and business premises across the country in an investigation into a suspected online crime ring.
(Reuters, 3/8/17)
2017 Mar 8, In Guatemala a fire ripped through an overcrowded home for abused children following an escape attempt from government-run Hogar Seguro (Safe Home) Virgen de Asuncion home for youths. 19 people died at the scene, mostly girls, and another 20 died later in local hospitals.
(Reuters, 3/9/17)(AP, 3/11/17)(AP, 3/12/17)
2017 Mar 8, Iceland on International Women's Day said it will be the first country in the world to make employers prove they offer equal pay regardless of gender, ethnicity, sexuality or nationality. Iceland wants to eradicate the gender pay gap by 2022.
(AP, 3/8/17)
2017 Mar 8, Iraqi forces saw off an overnight Islamic State counter-attack near Mosul's main government buildings and took full control of the last major road leading west to the militant-held town of Tal Afar.
(Reuters, 3/8/17)
2017 Mar 8, Kenya's state sector doctors, who have been on strike for three months, said they would not resume work after a government order the day before, and would wait for the conclusion of court-supervised resolution of the dispute. Authorities said they would hire foreign doctors to get public hospitals running again after talks failed to end a strike that has crippled healthcare for 94 days.
(Reuters, 3/8/17)(AFP, 3/8/17)
2017 Mar 8, Lebanese security forces raided several money transfer shops in the country's capital on suspicion they funneled money to the Islamic State group.
(AP, 3/8/17)
2017 Mar 8, Nigeria's capital was cut off by air, as Abuja airport closed for at least six weeks for repairs, forcing flights to divert and lengthening travel times for passengers.
(AFP, 3/8/17)
2017 Mar 8, Kim Han Sol (21), a man claiming to be the son of the slain, estranged half-brother of North Korea's leader, said he was lying low with his mother and sister, in a video posted online by a group that said it helped rescue them following the murder a month ago. His location was not disclosed.
(Reuters, 3/8/17)
2017 Mar 8, In Pakistan more than 2,000 students from Islamic seminaries rallied in Islamabad, urging the government to take stern action against all those people who are posting blasphemous content on social media.
(AP, 3/8/17)
2017 Mar 8, Pakistani authorities hanged five "hardcore terrorists" after they were found guilty of carrying out attacks in the country. The convicts belonged to the Pakistani Taliban, or Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan.
(AP, 3/8/17)
2017 Mar 8, Poland cautioned other European Union countries that extending Donald Tusk's mandate as chairman of EU leaders against Warsaw's will would undermine the bloc's traditions.
(Reuters, 3/8/17)
2017 Mar 8, Spain’s Interior ministry said police have found a large stash of explosives near the town of Irun, which they suspect belong to the Basque separatist group ETA.
(AFP, 3/8/17)
2017 Mar 8, Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir pardoned 259 rebels captured in fighting with government forces, including dozens who had been sentenced to death. His order came three days after a prominent insurgent group freed dozens of prisoners, mostly soldiers, it had captured in fighting with government forces.
(AFP, 3/8/17)
2017 Mar 8, In Syria warplanes bombed a rebel-held area east of Damascus where Russia declared a ceasefire until March 20 less than 24 hours earlier.
(Reuters, 3/8/17)
2017 Mar 8, The UN nuclear agency's 35-nation Board of Governors backed the agency's chief, Yukiya Amano (69), for a third term as director general after he ran unopposed on a platform of continuity in dealing with issues like Iran's nuclear program.
(Reuters, 3/8/17)
2017 Mar 9, US Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly said Illegal border crossings declined 40 percent from January to February, crediting executive actions by President Trump for the reduction.
(CSM, 3/9/17
2017 Mar 9, Wikileaks said it will turn over all the details it has on the CIA’s alleged hacking arsenal so that tech companies can patch holes and fix vulnerabilities in their technology before the activist group makes the code publicly available online.
(SFC, 3/10/17, p.C1)
2017 Mar 9, Former New Jersey Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer Arnoldo Echevarria was convicted of accepting cash bribes and sex from immigrants in exchange for employment authorization documents.
(SFC, 3/11/17, p.A6)
2017 Mar 9, Scientists said they have developed a vaccine to shield endangered chimpanzees and gorillas against Ebola, which has wiped out tens of thousands of the wild apes in three decades.
(AFP, 3/9/17)
2017 Mar 9, Belarus Pres. Alexander Lukashenko suspended collection of a fee from the unemployed which had sparked an unusual wave of protests throughout the authoritarian country.
(AP, 3/9/17)
2017 Mar 9, European Union leaders confirmed Donald Tusk for a second term as council president, overcoming weeks of strong opposition from his native Poland.
(AP, 3/9/17)
2017 Mar 9, The Ile de France region passed a new rule obliging laborers on public building sites to use French, copying action taken elsewhere in France to squeeze out foreign workers.
(AP, 3/10/17)
2017 Mar 9, In Germany an axe-wielding attacker, Fatmir H. (37), wounded nine people in a bloody rampage at a railway station. The Kosovan national had been diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic with a history of high anxiety and self-harm. In September he was committed to a psychiatric ward.
(AFP, 3/10/17)(AFP, 9/22/17)
2017 Mar 9, In Germany Marcel Hesse (19) gave himself up to police late today in Herne. He admitted to killing a child (9) and a 22-year-old acquaintance, citing frustration over a rejected bid to join the German army and the recent loss of his internet connection. Hesse had stabbed the boy 52 times with a folding knife and allegedly boasted about the murder in a video clip he published on the darknet.
(AP, 3/10/17)(AP, 9/8/17)
2017 Mar 9, Guam lawmakers unanimously passed the measure raising the legal age to use or purchase tobacco products from 18 to 21 stating Jan. 1, 2018. Within weeks the measure lapsed into law after the governor took no action.
(AP, 3/24/17)
2017 Mar 9, In Italy an overpass collapsed onto the A14, the main Adriatic coast highway, crushing a car and reportedly killing two people inside.
(AP, 3/9/17)
2017 Mar 9, Mexican authorities said three police investigators have been found dead after being abducted in the municipality of Maltrata, Veracruz state, a region plagued by drug violence.
(AFP, 3/10/17)
2017 Mar 9, Moldova's parliament accused Russia's intelligence service of intimidating politicians, following an investigation into alleged money laundering by Russian officials.
(AP, 3/9/17)
2017 Mar 9, North Korea guaranteed the safety of Malaysians banned from leaving the country, as two Malaysian UN employees left the isolated state in a possible sign that diplomatic tensions had begun to settle. Nine other Malaysians were believed to still be stuck there after the two countries' diplomatic relations broke down over the Feb 13 killing in Malaysia of the estranged sibling of North Korea's leader.
(Reuters, 3/9/17)(AP, 3/9/17)
2017 Mar 9, Pakistan shut its porous border with landlocked Afghanistan after opening it for two days, saying the measure was necessary to save Pakistanis from attacks from militants operating inside Afghanistan.
(AP, 3/9/17)
2017 Mar 9, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte pleaded for help from mayors in Muslim parts of the south to deal with Islamist militants, and threatened to impose martial law there if the problem is not tackled.
(Reuters, 3/9/17)
2017 Mar 9, Top Puerto Rico legislators said they will provide some financial relief to islanders who invested in government bonds and face deep losses amid an economic crisis and ongoing defaults.
(AP, 3/9/17)
2017 Mar 9, It was reported that Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has dismissed 10 senior law enforcement officers.
(AP, 3/9/17)
2017 Mar 9, Spain's National Court found German Cardona Soler (46), dubbed the "mini-Madoff" in reference to jailed US conman Bernard L. Madoff, guilty of fraud, money laundering, document falsification and criminal association. Soler was sentenced to more than 13 years in jail for running a pyramid scheme that swindled 350 million euros ($372 million) from over 180,000 investors in Europe, the United States and Latin America.
(AFP, 3/10/17)
2017 Mar 9, In Syria air strikes, believed to belong to the US-led coalition against the Islamic State militants, killed 23 civilians, including eight children, in countryside around the northern city of Raqqa.
(Reuters, 3/9/17)
2017 Mar 9, Thai transport officials said that services using private vehicles to transport passengers, such as Uber or Southeast Asia's GrabCar, are illegal because the vehicles aren't registered for public transport. The government said it plans to introduce its own cellphone app, TAXI OK, for passengers to call government-endorsed taxis featuring GPS tracking systems and closed-circuit cameras
(AP, 3/9/17)
2017 Mar 10, President Donald Trump's revamped travel ban faced its first major legal setback, after a federal judge halted enforcement of the directive that would deny US entry to the wife and child of a Syrian refugee already granted asylum.
(AFP, 3/11/17)
2017 Mar 10, Acting US deputy attorney general Dana Boente called the 46 remaining US attorneys who had been appointed under President Obama and requested their resignations, effective immediately.
(CSM, 3/11/17)
2017 Mar 10, The Pentagon faced a burgeoning scandal as more pictures of naked female service members apparently shared without their consent by male colleagues have turned up on secret social media sites.
(AFP, 3/11/17)
2017 Mar 10, The US 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta ruled 2-1 that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 doesn’t protect against workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation.
(SFC, 3/14/17, p.A8)
2017 Mar 10, A panel of federal judges in the Western District of Texas ruled 2-1 that three Congressional districts must be redrawn. The two judges who sided with the plaintiffs found that the way in which these three districts were drawn amounted to an unconstitutional dilution of the Hispanic vote.
(CSM, 3/11/17)
2017 Mar 10, Robert James Waller (77), author of “The Bridges of Madison County" (1992), died at his home in Fredericksburg, Texas. The book was turned into a movie in 1995 with Meryl Streep and Clint Eastwood and grossed $182 million worldwide.
(SSFC, 3/12/17, p.A11)
2017 Mar 10, In southern Afghanistan eight local policemen were killed by their colleagues late today after they were poisoned in their base in Zabul province, in the latest so-called "insider attack". The Taliban claimed responsibility for the incident.
(AFP, 3/11/17)
2017 Mar 10, In Austria four planned Turkish political meetings were canceled in the latest signs of unease across Europe over a series of campaign events to rally support among expatriate Turks for President Tayyip Erdogan.
(Reuters, 3/11/17)
2017 Mar 10, Prominent Bahraini Dr. Ali al-Ekry, jailed for five years in connection with the 2011 Arab Spring uprising for democracy, was released from prison.
(Reuters, 3/10/17)
2017 Mar 10, A Congolese court in Beni sentenced to death nine rebels of the Allied Democratic Forces, for crimes against humanity. Two others were acquitted.
(SFC, 3/11/17, p.A2)
2017 Mar 10, Iraqi special forces battling the Islamic State group pushed deeper into west Mosul, where a commander said jihadist resistance is showing signs of weakening under repeated assaults. The Islamic State released dozens of prisoners held in jails in the districts of the northern Iraqi city of Mosul that remained under its control.
(AFP, 3/10/17)(Reuters, 3/11/17)
2017 Mar 10, Fugitive Italian mobster Giulio Perrone, who had been living in Mexico under a false identity, was jailed in Rome after being extradited from Mexico. He had been tracked down by Italian police on Facebook.
(AFP, 3/11/17)
2017 Mar 10, Japan’s PM Shinzo Abe announced that Japan is ending its peacekeeping mission in troubled South Sudan after five years. Abe said Japan would not renew the mission after the current rotation returns in May.
(AP, 3/10/17)
2017 Mar 10, The International Olympic Committee said it has frozen all cash funding for sport in Kenya as it battles the national Olympic body over its governance.
(AP, 3/10/17)
2017 Mar 10, Kosovo police arrested two people after finding counterfeit currency valued at about 2 million euros.
(AP, 3/10/17)
2017 Mar 10, Mexican officials said authorities have found more than 250 human skulls in hidden graves in the eastern state of Veracruz. They had been discovered by mothers searching for their missing children. The bodies were found over a six-month period, with the first discovered in August near the city of Veracruz by the volunteer collective known as El Solecito, formed by relatives of those who have disappeared.
(AFP, 3/11/17)(SFC, 3/15/17, p.A3)
2017 Mar 10, Mexican prosecutors said six bodies were found this week around the twin resorts of Cabo san Lucas and San Jose del Cabo at the southern tip of the Baja California peninsula.
(SFC, 3/11/17, p.A2)
2017 Mar 10, Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari returned home after nearly two months' medical leave in Britain but did little to quell fears about the state of his health by saying he would not start work again immediately.
(AFP, 3/10/17)
2017 Mar 10, Romania's health minister said thousands of people have caught measles in an ongoing outbreak in the country, which has claimed 17 lives. Around 3,400 people had contracted the disease since the outbreak began in September 2016.
(AP, 3/10/17)
2017 Mar 10, Saudi police said Mustafa Ali Abdullah al-Madad, wanted by security forces for his involvement in a number of terror crimes against the citizens and security personnel, has been killed in the governorate of Qatif.
(Reuters, 3/10/17)
2017 Mar 10, South Korea's Constitutional Court removed impeached President Park Geun-hye from office in a unanimous ruling over a corruption scandal that has plunged the country into political turmoil and worsened an already-serious national divide. About 30 protesters and police officers were injured in the violent clashes near the court.
(AP, 3/10/17)
2017 Mar 10, South Korea-based LG Electronics launched its new G6 smartphone.
(Econ, 3/18/17, p.19)
2017 Mar 10, South Sudan's President Salva Kiir said he had pardoned two senior government officials and promised to release other political prisoners, as his rule faces surging resistance, warfare and famine.
(Reuters, 3/10/17)
2017 Mar 10, Spain reported a case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), commonly called mad cow disease, on a farm near the city of Salamanca.
(AP, 3/11/17)
2017 Mar 10, A court in Thailand sentenced Jumpol Manmai, a former high-ranking police officer and aide to the country's king, to three years in prison for dereliction of duty and land encroachment.
(AP, 3/10/17)
2017 Mar 10, In Turkey seven people were killed including four Russians when a privately-owned helicopter crashed in Istanbul after hitting a television tower.
(AFP, 3/10/17)
2017 Mar 10, The UN accused Turkish security forces of committing serious abuses during operations against Kurdish militants in the southeast after a ceasefire collapsed in July 2015.
(AFP, 3/10/17)
2017 Mar 10, The UN warned that the world is facing its worst humanitarian crisis since the end of World War II, with more than 20 million people facing starvation and famine in four countries (northeastern Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan and Yemen).
(AFP, 3/11/17)
2017 Mar 10, A Vatican spokeswoman said in a statement that Pope Francis has sent 100,000 euros ($106,090) to the poor in the ravaged Syrian city of Aleppo.
(Reuters, 3/10/17)
2017 Mar 10, A naval mine suspected to have been planted by rebels hit a Yemeni coast guard vessel in the Red Sea, killing two sailors.
(AP, 3/10/17)
2017 Mar 10, In Yemen an airstrike by the US-backed, Saudi-led coalition on the Khokha market in the western province of Hodeida killed 22 civilians.
(AP, 3/11/17)
2017 Mar 11, In the SF Bay Area David Brian Stubblefield of San Bruno shot and killed his neighbor, Benjamin Roybal (77), following an argument over the cost of a space heater. Stubblefield then used a chainsaw to dismember Roybal. In 2018 Stubblefield (51) pleaded no contest and faced a 40-year to life sentence.
(http://tinyurl.com/ycuwf8z4)(SFC, 3/27/18, p.C1)
2017 Mar 11, In eastern Afghanistan gunmen attacked a military air base in Khost province. One was killed, while two others were still holding out. The interior ministry said that over the past 25 hours, security forces had killed 51 armed militants in counter-terrorism operations across the country.
(Reuters, 3/11/17)
2017 Mar 11, In Brazil Watila Santos (38) died from yellow fever in Casimiro de Abreu, 93 miles (150 km) from Rio de Janeiro. Around 30,000 of the city's 42,000 people were soon vaccinated.
(AP, 3/18/17)
2017 Mar 11, In Ethiopia at least 30 people were killed and dozens more hurt in a giant landslide at the Koshe landfill, country’s largest rubbish dump, on the outskirts of Addis Ababa. The death toll soon climbed to 72.
(AFP, 3/12/17)(AFP, 3/14/17)
2017 Mar 11, Narendra Modi's party won a landslide victory in Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous state, in a massive vote of confidence for the prime minister halfway into his first term. The BJP won 311 of the total 403 seats.
(AP, 3/11/17)
2017 Mar 11, In eastern India Maoist rebels ambushed a paramilitary patrol in Chhattisgarh state, killing 11 policemen.
(Reuters, 3/11/17)
2017 Mar 11, Iraqi paramilitary forces announced that they had discovered a mass grave at Badush prison near Mosul containing the remains of hundreds of people executed by the Islamic State group in 2014.
(AP, 3/11/17)
2017 Mar 11, Italian riot police moved in to quell violent protests in Naples sparked by the first major rally in the southern city by the anti-immigrant Northern League leader.
(AP, 3/11/17)
2017 Mar 11, The Netherlands barred Turkey's foreign minister from landing in Rotterdam in a row over Ankara's political campaigning among Turkish emigres, and President Tayyip Erdogan retaliated, branding his NATO partner a "Nazi remnant". Turkey's state-run Anadolu news agency said family minister Fatma Betul Sayan Kaya will travel to the Dutch city of Rotterdam by land. Dutch authorities expelled Kaya for seeking to woo the vote of expatriate Turks for a key referendum at home.
(Reuters, 3/11/17)(AFP, 3/12/17)
2017 Mar 11, Saudi teenager Waleed Talal Ali al-Areed was shot dead during a security raid in the predominantly Shiite village of al-Awamiya. The Interior Ministry said he was wanted by police and was killed in a shootout with security forces.
(AP, 3/12/17)
2017 Mar 11, In South Korea opponents of ousted leader Park Geun-hye (35) rallied in Seoul to demand that she be arrested, a day after she was thrown out of office over a corruption scandal involving the country's conglomerates.
(Reuters, 3/11/17)
2017 Mar 11, Spanish police said they have freed a 16-year-old girl who was being advertised by an alleged prostitution ring as a virgin and have made seven arrests. The ring was based in the southern resort town of Marbella.
(AP, 3/11/17)
2017 Mar 11, In Syria twin blasts hit the center of Damascus killing at least 40 people. Two suicide bombers carried out the attack. The next day the death toll was soon raised to 74. The Levant Liberation Committee said it was responsible for the two suicide attacks. The former Al-Qaeda affiliate Fateh al-Sham Front also claimed responsibility.
(Reuters, 3/11/17)(AFP, 3/12/17)(SFC, 3/13/17, p.A2)
2017 Mar 11, The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 300 families of Islamic State group fighters have fled the jihadists' self-proclaimed capital of Raqa over the last 24 hours, as rival forces advance on the city.
(AFP, 3/11/17)
2017 Mar 11, Turkish journalists and opposition lawmakers protested in Istanbul against the detention of reporters, as a crackdown on the media has accelerated after the failed coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
(AFP, 3/11/17)
2017 Mar 11, Ukraine's army reported two soldiers killed in clashes with Russian-backed rebels in eastern Ukraine over the last 24 hours. A rebel spokesman in the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic said that one of its fighters had been killed.
(AFP, 3/11/17)
2017 Mar 12, In eastern CongoDRC UN officials Michael Sharp of the United States and Zaida Catalan, a dual national of Chile and Sweden, disappeared along with four Congolese citizens while traveling in the Kasai region. On March 27 the bodies of Sharp, Catalan and a Congolese were found in the region. They had been investigating an armed conflict in the region between government forces and the Kamuina Nsapu militia. Jose Tshibuabua (1964-2019) was charged with murder after Reuters and Radio France Internationale (RFI) revealed in December 2017 that he had been working as an intelligence service informant at the same time he and several family with ties to the militia met the investigators to help them plan their fatal trip.
(SFC, 3/16/17, p.A4)(AP, 3/28/17)(AFP, 3/29/17)(Reuters, 10/22/19)
2017 Mar 12, In Georgia at least 21 people, including 11 police officers, were left injured during a night of rioting in Batumi, the country’s second-largest city. The confrontation reportedly started after police ticketed a motorist the previous day for a traffic violation, sparking an argument that attracted people nearby.
(AP, 3/12/17)
2017 Mar 12, In Haiti a bus plowed into a crowd in Gonaives early today killing at least 34 people.
(SFC, 3/13/17, p.A2)
2017 Mar 12, An Iraqi commander of the elite Counter Terrorism Service (CTS) said government forces have retaken around 30 percent of west Mosul from Islamic State militants.
(Reuters, 3/12/17)
2017 Mar 12, In Iraq two investigators for Sallyport Global were fired abruptly and flown out of Iraq. They had been looking into timesheet fraud allegations and were set to interview company managers, whom they considered suspects. The company was paid nearly $700 million to secure an Iraqi base for F-16 fighter jets, but turned a blind eye to alcohol smuggling, theft, security violations, and allegations of sex trafficking and terminated the investigators who uncovered the wrongdoing.
(AP, 5/3/17)
2017 Mar 12, Moroccan authorities arrested Kassim Tajideen, deemed by Washington a top financier of the Lebanese Hezbollah movement, and planned to extradite him to the United States.
(Reuters, 3/21/17)
2017 Mar 12, In New Zealand a powerful storm caused flooding, landslides and blackouts, leaving thousands of homes in Auckland without power.
(Reuters, 3/12/17)
2017 Mar 12, Officials said the Philippine government and communist rebels have agreed to resume peace talks and restore separate cease-fires after an escalation of deadly clashes.
(AP, 3/12/17)
2017 Mar 12, South Africa's ruling ANC published a policy paper calling for an end to corruption and division within the party as it battles to reverse declining popularity.
(AFP, 3/12/17)
2017 Mar 12, In southwest Tunisia Islamist militants attacked a checkpoint in Kebili, killing a policeman and wounding three others. Two militants were also killed in an exchange of fire during the attack.
(Reuters, 3/12/17)
2017 Mar 12, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called on international organizations to "raise their voices" against the Netherlands after it escorted a minister out of the country and prevented another one from landing in the country.
(AP, 3/12/17)
2017 Mar 13, The US Congressional Budget Office concluded that 14 million more Americans will be uninsured in 2018 compared with current law under the health plan proposed by House Republicans.
(Econ, 3/18/17, p.30)
2017 Mar 13, Two former Penn State administrators pleaded guilty to mishandling child-sex allegations against Jerry Sandusky, more than five years after the scandal rocked the university and led to the downfall of football coach Joe Paterno.
(SFC, 3/14/17, p.A7)
2017 Mar 13, Intel said it will buy Israeli car tech firm Mobileye for $15.3 billion, in a deal signaling the US computer chip giant's commitment to technology for self-driving vehicles.
(AFP, 3/13/17)(Econ, 3/18/17, p.65)
2017 Mar 13, In Afghanistan a roadside bomb struck a bus in downtown Kabul during rush hour. At least one woman was killed and 19 others wounded. Two Afghan policemen were shot and killed on the outskirts of Kabul while warming themselves around a fire. Taliban extremists cut off the hand and foot of Ghulam Farooq, a suspected thief, in public in Herat province.
(AFP, 3/13/17)(AP, 3/14/17)
2017 Mar 13, In northern Bangladesh unknown assailants shot and hacked to death a Sufi spiritual leader and his adopted daughter.
(AP, 3/14/17)
2017 Mar 13, Burundi’s health minister said about 700 people have died from malaria in Burundi so far this year. He said authorities have registered 1.8 million infections in a rising epidemic.
(AFP, 3/14/17)
2017 Mar 13, Egypt's President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi pardoned more than 200 people convicted and jailed for their participation in illegal protests. Former Pres. Hosni Mubarek was ordered free from detention.
(AP, 3/13/17)(SFC, 3/14/17, p.A2)
2017 Mar 13, In Ethiopia gunmen from South Sudan killed 28 people and kidnapped 43 in Gambella's Gog and Jor areas.
(Reuters, 3/15/17)
2017 Mar 13, The EU said it has prolonged for six months until Sept. 15 a blacklist of Russian and Crimean individuals and firms accused of undermining Ukraine's integrity and independence.
(Reuters, 3/13/17)
2017 Mar 13, Hungarian lawmakers re-elected President Janos Ader to his largely ceremonial post, ensuring another five-year term for a supporter of populist PM Viktor Orban's government.
(AP, 3/13/17)
2017 Mar 13, In Hungary nearly 100 migrants began a hunger strike at a detention center, demanding that they be allowed to leave the Bekescsaba camp on the Romanian border.
(Reuters, 3/13/17)
2017 Mar 13, Iraqi forces said that they have taken more territory from jihadists and were searching for militants and bombs on the edge of the Old City as they press an offensive in west Mosul. An airstrike hit a residential area in Mosul. Scores of residents were later reported killed.
(AFP, 3/13/17)(AP, 3/24/17)
2017 Mar 13, Several hundred Palestinians marched in an anti-government protest, calling for the resignation of President Mahmoud Abbas and criticizing his security coordination with Israel. Separately, Palestinian journalists staged a sit-in nearby to protest the violent dispersal of an anti-government protest by Palestinian riot police a day earlier.
(AP, 3/13/17)
2017 Mar 13, President Rodrigo Duterte said he has told the military to assert Philippine ownership of a large ocean region off the country's northeastern coast where Chinese survey ships were spotted last year.
(AP, 3/13/17)
2017 Mar 13, A prosecutor said Poland will seek the arrest and extradition of Michael Karkoc (98) from Minneapolis, Minnesota, after confirming he was a Nazi unit commander suspected of ordering the killing of 44 Poles during World War II.
(AP, 3/13/17)
2017 Mar 13, Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon demanded a new independence referendum in late 2018 or early 2019, once the terms of Britain's exit from the European Union have become clearer. Britain’s PM Theresa May chided Sturgeon for demanding an independence referendum, saying the Scottish National Party (SNP) had "tunnel vision" on breaking away from the United Kingdom.
(Reuters, 3/13/17)
2017 Mar 13, Slovakia’s PM Robert Fico said he would revoke an amnesty law passed by former PM Vladimir Meciar.
(Econ, 4/1/17, p.45)
2017 Mar 13, In Somalia a suicide car bomber detonated near a hotel in Mogadishu, killing at least six people and injuring four others. The al-Qaida-linked Islamic extremist group al-Shabab claimed responsibility.
(AP, 3/13/17)
2017 Mar 13, Pirates operating off the coast of Somalia hijacked the Aris 13 oil tanker, marking the first time since 2012 that a commercial vessel has been captured by Somali pirates. Eight Sri Lankan crew members were taken captive.
(AP, 3/15/17)
2017 Mar 13, South Africa and Nigeria said they would launch a jointly run "early warning" system to track and deter xenophobic attacks against Nigerian migrants.
(AFP, 3/13/17)
2017 Mar 13, A South Sudanese military spokesman said rebels have kidnapped eight locals working for a US charity and are demanding aid deliveries as ransom.
(Reuters, 3/13/17)
2017 Mar 13, In Spain a court in Barcelona ruled that former Catalonia regional government chief Artur Mas is to be banned for two years from holding public office for going ahead with a vote on the region's independence despite a ruling against it.
(AP, 3/13/17)
2017 Mar 13, A Syrian official said opposition fighters will be allowed to leave the last rebel-held neighborhood in the city of Homs under a Russia-backed deal signed today. The deal is to be carried out within six to eight weeks.
(AP, 3/13/17)
2017 Mar 13, The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said it had documented the deaths of more than 321,000 people since the start of the war six years ago and more than 145,000 others had been reported as missing.
(Reuters, 3/13/17)
2017 Mar 14, US President Donald Trump and Saudi Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman discussed opportunities for new economic programs and investments between the two countries during a meeting.
(AP, 3/15/17)
2017 Mar 14, Two pages of Pres. Donald Trump’s tax return from 2005 were made public and showed he paid $38 million in federal taxes on income of $150 million.
(SFC, 3/15/17, p.A5)
2017 Mar 14, US Navy Adm. Bruce Loveless was among nine high-ranking military officers arrested across the country in a burgeoning bribery scandal involving a Malaysian defense contractor nicknamed “Fat Leonard.
(SFC, 3/15/17, p.A5)
2017 Mar 14, The US federal government revoked the tax-exempt status of the National Policy Institute, a group run by Richard Spencer, because it failed to file tax returns for three consecutive years. Spencer popularized the term “alt-right" and is a leading figure in the fringe movement.
(SFC, 3/15/17, p.A5)
2017 Mar 14, Hundreds of Twitter accounts were hijacked amid the ongoing diplomatic feud between Turkey and two European nations, Germany and the Netherlands. Most if not all high-profile accounts soon returned to normal.
(AP, 3/15/17)
2017 Mar 14, Winter Storm Stella dumped snow and sleet across the northeastern United States, forcing airlines to ground flights and schools to cancel classes. Airlines canceled about 5,700 flights across the United States. Airports in New York, Boston, Baltimore, Washington and Philadelphia were hit the hardest.
(AP, 3/14/17)(AFP, 3/14/17)
2017 Mar 14, John Van de Kamp (81), former California Attorney General (1983-1991) died at his home in Pasadena.
(SFC, 3/16/17, p.A7)
2017 Mar 14, In the SF Bay Area two Fremont police detectives shot at a moving car in Hayward killing pregnant passenger Elena Mondragon (16). Police had been tracking her boyfriend, an armed robbery suspect, who was driving the car. In 2018 her family filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the Fremont police department.
(SFC, 3/15/18, p.D1)
2017 Mar 14, Texas executed James Bigby (61) for the 1987 killing of a father and his infant son.
(SFC, 3/15/17, p.A5)
2017 Mar 14, In Afghanistan a suspected NATO airstrike on the funeral of a Taliban commander killed 29 insurgents in the eastern Paktika province.
(AP, 3/14/17)
2017 Mar 14, Canada's Pearson International Airport canceled more than a hundred flights as a late winter storm brought more snow to southern Ontario, forcing several colleges to suspend classes.
(Reuters, 3/14/17)
2017 Mar 14, The former campaign manager for Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos acknowledged for the first time that Odebrecht, a scandal-tarred Brazilian construction company, illegally paid costs related to Santos’ 2010 campaign.
(AP, 3/14/17)
2017 Mar 14, The European Union's top court ruled that companies may bar staff from wearing Islamic headscarves and other visible religious symbols under certain conditions, setting off a storm of complaint from rights groups and religious leaders.
(Reuters, 3/14/17)
2017 Mar 14, The European Parliament suspended Polish lawmaker Janusz Korwin-Mikke for 10 days after he said during a March 1 debate that women should earn less than men because they are weaker, smaller and less intelligent.
(AP, 3/14/17)
2017 Mar 14, EU lawmakers backed more ambitious recycling targets, setting Europe on track to drastically reduce reliance on landfill sites to dispose of waste after 2030.
(Reuters, 3/14/17)
2017 Mar 14, EU lawmakers voted to toughen the bloc’s gun laws and close loopholes exploited by attackers in France.
(SFC, 3/15/17, p.A2)
2017 Mar 14, French presidential candidate Francois Fillon was put under formal investigation by magistrates on suspicion of embezzling state funds.
(AP, 3/14/17)
2017 Mar 14, The small western German state of Saarland said it is banning political campaigning by foreign politicians saying internal Turkish conflicts have no place in Germany.
(Reuters, 3/14/17)
2017 Mar 14, German authorities banned the German-speaking Islam Group Hildesheim, known by its German acronym DIK. It had long been on authorities' radar as a magnet for radicals.
(AP, 3/14/17)
2017 Mar 14, Berlin's airports remained paralyzed after ground staff extended a strike, stepping up pressure in a dispute over pay that has already caused the cancellation of more than 1,000 flights since March 10.
(Reuters, 3/14/17)
2017 Mar 14, In India the body of an Irish woman (28) was found by a farmer on an isolated beach near Canacona village in the western beach state of Goa. She had been raped and strangled. A local criminal was arrested the next day and faced rape and murder charges.
(AP, 3/16/17)
2017 Mar 14, Iraqi forces said they have recaptured Mosul train station, once one of the country's main rail hubs and the latest in a series of key sites retaken from jihadists.
(AFP, 3/14/17)
2017 Mar 14, The Irish Coast Guard said one person died and three were missing after a Sikorsky S-92 helicopter crashed off the coast of Ireland during a rescue operation.
(Reuters, 3/14/17)
2017 Mar 14, Israel ordered the closure of an office in Arab East Jerusalem as it was suspected of being funded by the Palestinian Authority and involved with monitoring the sale of Palestinian property to Jews.
(Reuters, 3/14/17)
2017 Mar 14, In northern Israel a fireworks warehouse went up in flames, killing two people, injuring at least two more and setting off a series of loud explosions in a village near Netanya.
(AFP, 3/14/17)
2017 Mar 14, In Israel an elderly man burnt nurse Tova Kararo (56) at a clinic after apparently being dissatisfied by the treatment he had received in Holon. Kararo died after the man poured flammable fluid on the nurse taking care of him.
(AP, 3/14/17)
2017 Mar 14, In Kenya thousands of public hospital doctors agreed to end a 100-day strike after the government and union members signed a deal in Nairobi to address pay and other issues in dispute.
(SFC, 3/15/17, p.A2)
2017 Mar 14, A Libyan military spokesman says hundreds of forces loyal to Field Marshal Khalifa Hifter have seized major oil facilities at Ras Lanuf and al-Sidra from Islamist-allied militias.
(AFP, 3/14/17)
2017 Mar 14, Malaysia said that the body of Kim Jong Nam, the brother of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un killed last month, has been embalmed and that about 50 North Koreans whose work permits have expired will be deported.
(SFC, 3/15/17, p.A3)
2017 Mar 14, Montenegro's former PM Milo Djukanovic called on the European Union to stop Russia's "destructive" influence in the Balkans.
(AP, 3/14/17)
2017 Mar 14, RIA news agency reported that President Vladimir Putin has approved a decree allowing some troops from Georgia's breakaway region of South Ossetia to be incorporated into the Russian army.
(Reuters, 3/14/17)
2017 Mar 14, Russian-led peace talks on Syria were derailed as rebels backed by Turkey boycotted a third round of meetings in Kazakhstan and the Kremlin indicated there were international divisions over the process.
(Reuters, 3/14/17)
2017 Mar 14, In Saudi Arabia gunfire broke out this evening when police tried to stop a suspicious car near the central hospital in Qatif. Someone in the car started shooting, mortally wounding one of the officers. The suspects escaped.
(AFP, 3/15/17)
2017 Mar 14, In South Sudan gunmen killed two people and wounded three when they attacked a humanitarian convoy in the center of the country.
(Reuters, 3/16/17)
2017 Mar 14, The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Syria said Syria's air force deliberately bombed water sources in December, a war crime that cut off water for 5.5 million people in and around the capital Damascus. The UN investigative commission also said it believes government forces deliberately bombed a school complex in the country's northern countryside in October, killing 21 children.
(Reuters, 3/14/17)(AP, 3/14/17)
2017 Mar 15, United States charged two Russian intelligence agents and two hackers with masterminding the 2014 theft of 500 million Yahoo accounts, the first time the U.S. government has criminally charged Russian spies for cyber offences. The indictment named the FSB officers involved as Dmitry Dokuchaev and his superior, Igor Sushchin, who are both in Russia. The alleged criminals involved included Alexsey Belan and Karim Baratov, who was arrested in Canada a day earlier. Belan was arrested in Europe in June 2013 but escaped to Russia before he could be extradited to the US.
(Reuters, 3/16/17)
2017 Mar 15, The US Federal Reserve raised its benchmark interest rate for the 2nd time in three months. The short-term rate was raised by a quarter point to a range of 0.75% to 1%.
(SFC, 3/16/17, p.C1)
2017 Mar 15, A federal jury in Chicago convicted South Korean CEO Heon Seok Lee of defrauding municipal governments into using federal money on wastewater-treatment equipment they were falsely told was made in America.
(AP, 3/17/17)
2017 Mar 15, US District Judge Derrick Watson of Hawaii issued a ruling granting a temporary restraining order on Pres. Trump’s travel ban.
(SFC, 3/16/17, p.A1)
2017 Mar 15, A group of 17 Republicans in Congress signed a resolution vowing to seek "economically viable" ways to stave off global warming, possibly putting them on a collision course with President Donald Trump who has called climate change a hoax.
(Reuters, 3/15/17)
2017 Mar 15, Former Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca (74) was convicted of obstructing an FBI investigation into corrupt and violent guards.
(SFC, 3/16/17, p.A5)
2017 Mar 15, In Louisiana three people were found shot to death and a fourth fatally stabbed at an apartment complex in Matairie, a suburb of New Orleans.
(SFC, 3/16/17, p.A5)
2017 Mar 15, In western Austria three people were killed when their ski touring group was swept away by an avalanche in the Tyrol region. A fourth person was missing.
(AP, 3/15/17)
2017 Mar 15, Brazilian civil servants, rural workers and labor confederations staged nationwide demonstrations against President Michel Temer's pension reform plan, with hundreds of protesters occupying the premises of the finance ministry in Brasilia.
(Reuters, 3/15/17)
2017 Mar 15, In Cambodia Sok An (66), a deputy prime minister who was one of PM Hun Sen's closest political and personal allies, died.
(AP, 3/15/17)
2017 Mar 15, Cameroon said regional forces had rescued the hostages, who were held in villages by the jihadist group, in an operation along the Nigeria-Cameroon border. On March 17 a man purporting to be Abubakar Shekau, the leader of Nigerian Islamist militant group Boko Haram, denied in a posted video that 5,000 people held by the group had been freed by West African forces earlier in the week.
(Reuters, 3/17/17)
2017 Mar 15, China wrapped up its annual National People’s Congress. On its final day it passed legislation titled the General Principles of Civil Law.
(Econ, 3/18/17, p.42)
2017 Mar 15, The European Union gave its blessing to AT&T's proposed $85 billion purchase of Time Warner, saying that it raises no competition concerns in Europe. The deal still needs approval from US regulators.
(AP, 3/15/17)
2017 Mar 15, In Germany three men and a woman were sentenced to prison terms between three and five years for forming the so-called Oldschool Society in August 2014, a far-right terrorist group with a plan to bomb refugee homes as a tactic to scare migrants into leaving the country.
(AP, 3/15/17)
2017 Mar 15, Indonesia's government said that a British-owned cruise ship must pay compensation for the destruction of coral reefs in a popular tourist area known for its extensive marine biodiversity. The 4,200-ton cruise ship M.V. Caledonian Sky ran aground in the waters of Raja Ampat in West Papua province last week, causing extensive damage to the coral reefs.
(AP, 3/15/17)
2017 Mar 15, Kenya announced that it will ban all plastic bags, becoming the 2nd African country to do so after Rwanda. Earlier efforts by Kenya in 2007 and 2011 failed.
(Econ, 3/25/17, p.41)
2017 Mar 15, Forces loyal to Libya's UN-backed unity government seized the headquarters of a rival militia in a third day of intense fighting for control of Tripoli.
(AP, 3/15/17)
2017 Mar 15, Millions of Dutch flocked to the polls in a test of the "patriotic revolution" promised by far-right MP Geert Wilders. PM Mark Rutte's conservative VVD party won the elections with 33 seats. Wilders increased his bloc from 15 in 2012 to 20. The Denk party, catering to Dutch Muslims, won three seats.
(AFP, 3/15/17)(AP, 3/16/17)(Econ, 3/18/17, p.59)
2017 Mar 15, New Zealand approved a law that declared the Whanganui River to be a legal person, in the sense that it can own property, incur debts and petition the courts. Days later an Indian court declared the Ganges and Yamuna rivers to be people too.
(Econ, 3/25/17, p.34)
2017 Mar 15, Pakistan launched a national census, the country's first in 19 years.
(AP, 3/15/17)
2017 Mar 15, Eleven Philippine legislators who voted against a bill to re-introduce capital punishment lost key posts in the country's Congress, in an apparent follow through of a threat by the house speaker to purge obstacles to the draft.
(Reuters, 3/15/17)
2017 Mar 15, Romanian authorities extradited Chilean fugitive Rafael Garay. He was accused of embezzling almost a billion dollars.
(Reuters, 3/15/17)
2017 Mar 15, In Sierra Leone a 709-carat diamond was presented to President Ernest Bai Koroma. Pastor Emmanuel Momoh found the diamond in Yakadu village in the country's diamond-rich eastern Kono District. It was among the 20 largest diamonds ever found. In October the stone was taken by a sales team from the National Minerals Agency to Antwerp, Belgium, to meet sales agents, auction houses and potential buyers.
(AP, 3/16/17)(AP, 10/3/17)
2017 Mar 15, In Syria two suicide bomb attacks killed at least 31 people and wounded dozens more in Damascus, in the second such spate of bombings in the Syrian capital in five days. Sixteen lawyers were among the dozens killed in the suicide attack that struck the main judicial building in Damascus.
(Reuters, 3/15/17)(AP, 3/16/17)
2017 Mar 15, Turkey said its red meat association has ordered a consignment of prize Dutch cattle to be sent back to the Netherlands, saying it no longer wants to farm the cows due to the diplomatic crisis between the countries.
(AFP, 3/15/17)
2017 Mar 15, Human Rights Watch said 155 people, including 15 children, were killed in fierce fighting that erupted last Nov 26 in western Uganda between security forces and a tribal king's palace guards.
(AFP, 3/15/17)
2017 Mar 15, Ukraine's Security and Defence Council approved the suspension of all cargo traffic with separatist-held territory.
(Reuters, 3/15/17)
2017 Mar 16, Pres. Donald Trump’s preliminary budget was released. It included 18% cuts to federal funding for the National Institutes of Health and the elimination of the Community Development Block Grant Program, which helps fund the Meals on Wheels program. It also cut funding to the State Dept. and spending on foreign aid by 28%.
(SFC, 3/18/17, p.A1)(SSFC, 3/19/17, p.A6)(Econ, 3/25/17, p.52)
2017 Mar 16, US District Judge Theodore Chuang of Maryland granted a preliminary injunction in a lawsuit against Pres. Trump’s travel ban from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the National Immigration Law Center.
(SFC, 3/18/17, p.A8)
2017 Mar 16, Philip Choy, an expert on the history of Chinese in America, died at his home in San Francisco. His books included “The Architecture of San Francisco Chinatown."
(SSFC, 3/19/17, p.C3)
2017 Mar 16, James Cotton (b.1935), pioneering harmonica player, died in Austin, Texas. He helped established the harmonica as an integral part of modern blues.
(SFC, 3/18/17, p.A7)
2017 Mar 16, British PM Theresa May rejected a call for a referendum on Scottish independence before Britain leaves the European Union — a move condemned as a "democratic outrage" by Scotland's nationalist leader.
(AP, 3/16/17)
\2017 Mar 16, A bill authorizing Britain to start its exit from the EU received royal assent and became law.
(SFC, 3/17/17, p.A2)
2017 Mar 16, Scientists at Britain's Newcastle University received a license to create babies using DNA from three people to prevent women from passing on potentially fatal genetic diseases to their children — the first time such approval has been granted.
(AP, 3/16/17)
2017 Mar 16, In China Saudi Arabia's King Salman oversaw the signing of deals worth as much as $65 billion on the first day of a visit to Beijing.
(Reuters, 3/16/17)
2017 Mar 16, Ethiopia's military rescued six children kidnapped by South Sudanese raiders in a cross-border attack, but dozens of others remain missing and soldiers are pursuing the gunmen to recover them.
(Reuters, 3/17/17)
2017 Mar 16, The European Union called for the United Nations to send an international fact-finding mission urgently to Myanmar to investigate allegations of torture, rapes and executions by the military against the Rohingya Muslim minority.
(Reuters, 3/16/17)
2017 Mar 16, The European Parliament rejected a call to ban Arctic oil and gas exploration, in a symbolic vote seen as a barometer for future moves by Brussels to regulate to protect the region.
(Reuters, 3/16/17)
2017 Mar 16, The European Parliament overwhelmingly approved a law requiring firms to ensure they do not use so-called conflict minerals from Africa and other areas that end up funding warlords.
(AFP, 3/16/17)
2017 Mar 16, European security watchdog OSCE prolonged its monitoring mission to Ukraine by one year until March 2018. The unarmed, civilian mission with more than 700 international observers seeks to reduce tensions and report on the situation on the ground.
(AP, 3/16/17)
2017 Mar 16, The European Commission agreed to send Ukraine 600 million euros ($643.20 million) to help its finances, ending months of delays over EU conditions linked to the loan.
(Reuters, 3/16/17)
2017 Mar 16, In Paris, France, a female employee of the International Monetary Fund suffered injuries to her face and arms when a letter bomb addressed to the world lender's European representative blew up as she opened it.
(Reuters, 3/16/17)
2017 Mar 16, In southern France Killian Barbey (16) was arrested with a cache of weapons after a shooting at the Alexis de Tocqueville high school in Grasse that left eight people injured including the head teacher.
(AFP, 3/16/17)(AP, 3/17/17)(SFC, 3/17/17, p.A2)
2017 Mar 16, The militant Greek group Conspiracy of Fire Cells claimed responsibility for a parcel bomb mailed to German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble. The parcel had been intercepted by the German finance ministry's mail department. On March 20 Greek counterterrorism officers uncovered eight more similar parcel bombs.
(Reuters, 3/16/17)(SFC, 3/22/17, p.A2)
2017 Mar 16, In India Farook Hameed (31) was murdered in Coimbatore, allegedly by members of a Muslim radical group, for having repudiated Islam and declaring himself an atheist. Six people were soon arrested in the case.
(http://tinyurl.com/n22lnau)(Econ 7/22/17, SR p.11)
2017 Mar 16, An Indonesian court sentenced people-smuggling kingpin Abraham Louhenapessy, known as Captain Bram, to six years in jail for organizing a trip for migrants to New Zealand in early 2015.
(AP, 3/16/17)
2017 Mar 16, Iraqi government forces besieged Islamic State militants around Mosul's Old City, edging closer to the historic mosque from where the group's leader declared a caliphate nearly three years ago.
(Reuters, 3/16/17)
2017 Mar 16, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu said he would honor his commitment to build a new settlement in the occupied West Bank, the first in two decades.
(Reuters, 3/16/17)
2017 Mar 16, It was reported that a group of Cuban migrants detained in the southern Mexican city of Tapachula have accused authorities of beating and mistreating them after they staged a hunger strike to demand their release.
(SFC, 3/16/17, p.A2)
2017 Mar 16, In Pakistan Umer Tanveer killed his newlywed bride three days after their wedding in Lahore by suffocating her with a pillow. Tanveer had married his paternal cousin under family pressure but was interested in another woman who lived in Dubai. Tanveer initially denied killing Hira but then confessed to the crime.
(AP, 3/19/17)
2017 Mar 16, In the Philippines Rep. Gary Alejano filed an impeachment complaint against Pres. Rodrigo Duterte alleging violations of the constitution, bribery and corruption, And the betrayal of the public trust with actions that included extra judicial killings and his failure to declare huge bank deposits as required by law.
(SFC, 3/17/17, p.A4)
2017 Mar 16, Qatar said a new government body set up to handle complaints from migrant workers seeking bosses' permission to leave the Gulf nation received hundreds of claims over two months and rejected more than a quarter of requests.
(AP, 3/16/17)
2017 Mar 16, In Romania some 1,000 police officers protested in Bucharest to demand higher salaries, saying tens of thousands of officers are earning the minimum wage or less.
(AP, 3/16/17)
2017 Mar 16, Somali pirates, who had seized an oil tanker, opened fire on naval troops from the semiautonomous state of Puntland sparking clashes between the two sides. The pirates were continuing to receive reinforcements while regional forces mobilized nearby. The pirates released the ship and its crew late today.
(AP, 3/16/17)(SFC, 3/17/17, p.A2)
2017 Mar 16, A military vessel and a helicopter attacked a boat packed with Somali refugees late today killing at least 42 people including women and children in the Red Sea off the coast of Yemen. The refugees, carrying official UNHCR documents, were on their way from Yemen to Sudan. 80 survivors were brought to hospitals in Hodeidah. Shiite rebels accused the Saudi-led air coalition of carrying out the attack. A confidential UN report later said the attack was most likely carried out by the Saudi-led coalition.
(Reuters, 3/17/17)(AP, 3/17/17)(SFC, 3/18/17, p.A4)(AFP, 5/8/18)
2017 Mar 16, South Korea-based Hyundai said it is recalling nearly 978,000 cars in the US because the front seat belts could detach in a crash and fail to hold people.
(AP, 3/16/17)
2017 Mar 16, In Spain taxi drivers in Barcelona and Madrid went on strike to urge authorities to protect their regulated service against companies like Uber and Cabify, which offer cheaper services.
(AP, 3/16/17)
2017 Mar 16, In Syria a suspected US airstrike late today struck the Omar Ibn al-Khattab Mosque in the Jeeneh district in Aleppo province, killing at least 38-49 people and wounded many others. On June 7 the US military said an investigation has found that the strike was legal and caused only one civilian casualty.
(AP, 3/17/17)(SFC, 6/8/17, p.A2)
2017 Mar 16, Turkish police detained two suspected members of the Islamic State group who were allegedly planning a "sensational attack" similar to the massacre at an Istanbul nightclub on New Year's night.
(AFP, 3/16/17)
2017 Mar 16, The United Arab Emirates said one of its soldiers has been killed while serving in the Saudi-led war in Yemen.
(AP, 3/16/17)
2017 Mar 17, US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson directed US diplomatic missions to identify "populations warranting increased scrutiny" and toughen screening for visa applicants in those groups. In cables dated March 10 and March 15, Tillerson had issued detailed instructions to consular officials for implementing Trump's travel order, which was due to take effect on March 16.
(Reuters, 3/23/17)
2017 Mar 17, In San Francisco George Martinez (44) was killed as he celebrated his birthday in the Mission District. In 2019 two members of the MS-13 street gang were convicted of executing Martinez. The gang members mistook Martinez for a rival gang member.
(SFC, 12/21/19, p.C1)
2017 Mar 17, Results were published of a $1 billion study on Repatha, a cholesterol drug made by Amgen, that indicated the drug can make cholesterol tumble and cut the risk of heart attack and stroke. The list price for the drug was $14,523 a year.
(SFC, 3/18/17, p.A6)
2017 Mar 17, In Afghanistan a suicide truck bomber struck a military checkpoint, killing one soldier and wounding 10 in Khost province. Another suicide bomber elsewhere in the country killed the brother of a local religious leader he had targeted for assassination.
(AP, 3/17/17)
2017 Mar 17, An avalanche in Austria's western region of Tyrol killed two people.
(Reuters, 3/17/17)
2017 Mar 17, In Bangladesh two policemen were wounded in the apparently botched attack when a man blew himself up at an elite forces camp near Dhaka's international airport. The Islamic State Group soon claimed responsibility.
(AFP, 3/18/17)
2017 Mar 17, Brazilian federal police raided dozens of meatpacker offices, including industry giants JBS SA and BRF SA, following a two-year investigation into alleged bribery of regulators to subvert inspections of their plants. "Operation Weak Flesh" had already uncovered about 40 cases of meatpackers who had bribed inspectors and politicians to overlook unsanitary practices.
(Reuters, 3/17/17)
2017 Mar 17, Former British Treasury chief George Osborne was appointed editor of the Evening Standard newspaper, touching off a torrent of criticism about whether a sitting lawmaker should be able to run a London-based daily.
(AP, 3/17/17)
2017 Mar 17, Security forces in Congo Republic said they have killed around 15 rebel fighters during a military operation in the restive Pool region.
(Reuters, 3/18/17)
2017 Mar 17, The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) said governments need to do more to create growth that benefits everyone, and the US should spend more on roads, highways, bridges and airports.
(AP, 3/17/17)
2017 Mar 17, Txetx Etcheverry, a prominent figure in the French Basque community, said the Basque separatist group ETA will complete its disarmament by April 8.
(AP, 3/17/17)
2017 Mar 17, Brazilian federal police raided dozens of meatpacker offices, including industry giants JBS SA and BRF SA, following a two-year investigation into alleged bribery of regulators to subvert inspections of their plants. "Operation Weak Flesh" had already uncovered about 40 cases of meatpackers who had bribed inspectors and politicians to overlook unsanitary practices.
(Reuters, 3/17/17)
2017 Mar 17, In China poultry trading in Hunan’s provincial capital of Changsha went into effect. An outbreak of H7N9 bird flu virus originated from a farm with about 29,760 infected birds. Over 170,000 birds were culled as a result. At least 162 deaths have been reported since last October.
(Reuters, 4/2/17)
2017 Mar 17, The European Union re-imposed a fine on 11 air cargo companies totaling $835 million after the original decision was thrown out by a high court on a procedural issue.
(AP, 3/17/17)
2017 Mar 17, A visit of Segolene Royal, the French minister of ecology, to French Guiana was cut short after masked demonstrators from the collective stormed into a regional conference on biodiversity she was attending in the department's capital city of Cayenne.
(AP, 3/25/17)
2017 Mar 17, In Germany a G20 official said opposition from the United States, Saudi Arabia and others has forced Germany to drop a reference to financing programs to combat climate change from the draft communique at a G20 finance and central bankers meeting.
(AP, 3/17/17)
2017 Mar 17, In Iraq an airstrike hit the residential area in Mosul for the 2nd time in four days. Many residents were later reported killed. US officials acknowledged the airstrike on March 25 that witnesses said killed at least 100 people. On May 25 the US military acknowledged the bombing saying it set off explosive materials that militants had planted inside causing the structure to collapse.
(AP, 3/24/17)(SSFC, 3/26/17, p.A6)(SFC, 5/26/17, p.A2)
2017 Mar 17, Israeli warplanes struck several targets in Syria overnight, prompting retaliatory missile launches, in the most serious incident between the two countries since the Syrian civil war began six years ago.
(AFP, 3/17/17)
2017 Mar 17, Japan’s Maebashi district court held the government and the Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) liable for neglecting tsunami safety measures at the Fukushima nuclear plant and ordered them to pay more money to dozens out of the thousands of people who fled radiation released during the March 2011 disaster.
(AP, 3/17/17)
2017 Mar 17, Kenya's President Uhuru Kenyatta ordered the military to deploy to the volatile counties of Baringo and Laikipia in the Rift Valley to calm deadly violence fueled by drought that affects roughly half the country.
(AP, 3/17/17)
2017 Mar 17, In Libya gunmen opened fire at demonstrators protesting against militias in Tripoli.
(AFP, 3/18/17)
2017 Mar 17, Morocco’s MAP state news said King Mohammed VI has named Saad Eddine El Othmani of the Islamist Justice and Development Party (PJD) as the country's new prime minister and asked him to form a government.
(Reuters, 3/17/17)
2017 Mar 17, SWIFT, a messaging network for cross-border payments, suspended services for four remaining North Korean banks. Earlier this month SWIFT was obliged to exclude three North Korean banks that were under UN sanctions.
(Econ, 3/25/17, p.63)
2017 Mar 17, In Peru El Nino-fueled flash floods and landslides hit parts of Lima, leaving some communities cut off from roads. This year's El Nino shut down northern Peru's sugar-cane business.
(AFP, 3/18/17)(Econ., 10/10/20, p.72)
2017 Mar 17, The Philippines said it would strengthen its military facilities on islands and shoals in the disputed South China Sea and announced initial plans to build a new port and pave an existing rough airstrip.
(Reuters, 3/17/17)
2017 Mar 17, Portugal's attorney general granted investigators another extension to conclude their 2 1/2-year investigation into former PM Jose Socrates (59), who is suspected of corruption, money laundering and tax fraud. Socrates was the center-left Socialist prime minister from 2005 to 2011.
(AP, 3/17/17)
2017 Mar 17, South Africa's Constitutional Court ordered the government to pay social grants on April 1 via its current service provider, seeking to end a fiasco that had threatened the payment of benefits to 17 million people.
(Reuters, 3/17/17)
2017 Mar 17, In South Korea US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said US policy of strategic patience with North Korea's nuclear and missile programs has ended, warning that military action would be "on the table" if Pyongyang elevated the threat level.
(Reuters, 3/17/17)
2017 Mar 17, In St. Lucia Derek Walcott (87), a Nobel-prize winning poet, died. He was known for capturing the essence of his native Caribbean and became the region's most internationally famous writer.
(AP, 3/17/17)(Econ, 4/1/17, p.82)
2017 Mar 17, In Tanzania Dar es Salaam regional commissioner Paul Makonda stormed into the offices of the Clouds FM Media Group with six armed men to demand the airing of a muckraking video aimed at undermining a popular local pastor with whom Makonda has a dispute.
(AFP, 3/23/17)
2017 Mar 17, In Uganda senior police official Andrew Felix Kaweesi was shot and killed in his car along with two other officers as he left his home in Kampala. President Yoweri Museveni condemned the killing and directed the immediate installation of cameras in all major towns of Uganda and along the highways.
(AFP, 3/17/17)(Reuters, 5/12/17)
2017 Mar 17, In Yemen 22 people were killed in an attack on a mosque during prayers inside a military base in Marib province.
(AP, 3/17/17)
2017 Mar 18, Rock 'n' roll legend Chuck Berry (b.1926) died at his home in the St. Louis area. His 1958 hit "Johnny B. Goode" was so influential and recognizable that the US space program chose it to represent rock music for potential extraterrestrial listeners on the Voyager spacecraft.
(AFP, 3/18/17)(SSFC, 3/19/17, p.A9)
2017 Mar 18, In Angola about 200 demonstrators protested under heavy police surveillance in Luanda against a draft law criminalizing all abortions.
(AFP, 3/18/17)
2017 Mar 18, Bangladesh police in Dhaka shot dead a suspected militant on a motorbike carrying a bag with improvised explosive devices.
(AP, 3/18/17)
2017 Mar 18, CongoDRC’s UN mission said government forces have targeted civilians, including women and children, resulting in numerous deaths in central Congo this week and are restricting United Nations peacekeepers' access to the area.
(Reuters, 3/18/17)
2017 Mar 18, In Egypt Salem Salmy al-Hamadeen (aka Abu Anas al-Ansari), a leader in Islamic State's Egyptian affiliate, was killed in an air raid.
(Reuters, 4/2/17)
2017 Mar 18, Meeting in Cairo representatives of the United Nations, European Union, Arab League and African Union supported efforts by Libya's unity government to assert control over Tripoli after days of fighting with rival militias.
(AFP, 3/18/17)
2017 Mar 18, In France a man was shot to death after attempting to seize a soldier's weapon at the Orly Airport. He was soon identified as Ziyed Ben Belgacem, a 39-year-old born in France. Judicial sources said he became a radicalized Muslim when he served a prison term several years ago for drug-trafficking.
(AP, 3/18/17)(Reuters, 3/19/17)
2017 Mar 18, In Germany finance chiefs of the world's top 20 economies (G20) pledged to finalize new banking regulations, easing concerns that the new US administration would pull out of a long-delayed global accord known as Basel III. The G20 dropped a pledge to fully oppose trade protectionism, amid pushback from the government of US President Donald Trump.
(Reuters, 3/18/17)(AP, 3/18/17)
2017 Mar 18, In Germany around 9,000 Kurdish supporters demonstrated in Frankfurt against Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan and an April referendum that would give him sweeping new powers.
(Reuters, 3/18/17)
2017 Mar 18, India’s PM Narendra Modi picked Hindu hardliner Yogi Adityanath to lead Uttar Pradesh, the country’s most populous state, after his party won a landslide victory last week. Adityanath has been accused of inciting violence against India's Muslim minority.
(Reuters, 3/18/17)
2017 Mar 18, In Iran the Fars semi-official news agency reported that Faezeh Hashemi, the outspoken daughter of Iran's late President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, has been sentenced to six months in prison for "spreading lies against the judiciary".
(AP, 3/18/17)
2017 Mar 18, Elite Iraqi forces said they were battling house by house in the Old City of Mosul, inching towards the mosque where the Islamic State group proclaimed its "caliphate" in 2014.
(AFP, 3/18/17)
2017 Mar 18, The Israeli military carried out the airstrikes early today against two Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip in retaliation for a projectile that landed in an open field. No militant group has claimed responsibility for the firing.
(AP, 3/18/17)
2017 Mar 18, In Nigeria three suicide bombers suspected to be members of Boko Haram detonated explosive devices strapped on their bodies late today, killing at least four people in Maiduguri.
(AP, 3/19/17)
2017 Mar 18, In Poland hundreds of people, braving the winter cold and rain, protested in Warsaw against plans by the conservative government to curb the power of local governments and to subject the judiciary to the ruling party's control.
(AP, 3/18/17)
2017 Mar 18, Russian authorities said Vladimir Evdokimov (56), a former top space agency official, has been found dead with two stab wounds in a prison where he was being held on charges of embezzlement. He had been jailed in December on charges of embezzling 200 million rubles ($3.1 million) from the MiG aerospace company.
(AP, 3/18/17)
2017 Mar 18, In South Africa burglars targeted Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng's offices early today, stealing 15 computers containing sensitive information about 250 judges. His court had severely criticized the ANC government.
(AFP, 3/19/17)
2017 Mar 18, South Sudanese rebels kidnapped four oil workers including a Pakistani national, in a bid to force their Chinese and Malaysian consortium to leave the country.
(Reuters, 3/20/17)
2017 Mar 18, In Syria nearly 1,500 people, mostly civilians, left the last opposition-held district of Homs under a controversial Russian-supervised deal to bring the city under full government control.
(AFP, 3/18/17)
2017 Mar 18, Thai police uncovered a plot to assassinate the country's prime minister after seizing a weapons cache at a house belonging to red shirt leader Wuthipong Kochathamakun, who has been on the run since the military coup.
(Reuters, 3/19/17)
2017 Mar 18, Turkish media said authorities have detained 740 people for suspected links to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) over the last three days.
(Reuters, 3/18/17)
2017 Mar 18, Rima Khalaf, a UN undersecretary-general, resigned after refusing to withdraw her report for the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia. She had authored a recent report that accused Israel of establishing an "apartheid regime." Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas soon informed Rima Khalaf by phone that she would receive the Palestine Medal of the Highest Honor in recognition of her "courage and support" for the Palestinian people.
(AP, 3/19/17)
2017 Mar 19, The SpaceX Dragon cargo ship returned from the ISS and parachuted into the Pacific with some 5,000 pounds of completed experiments and used equipment.
(SFC, 3/20/17, p.A4)
2017 Mar 19, Uber Pres. Jeff Jones stepped down after six months on the job. At least six key executive and high ranking employees have left the world’s most valuable startup in the past nine weeks.
(Econ, 3/25/17, p.55)
2017 Mar 19, In Chicago a girl (15) went missing. She was found two days later and taken to a children's hospital for treatment. Her alleged gang rape had been broadcast on Facebook Live. On April 1 police arrested a 14-year-old boy in connection with the gang rape.
(AFP, 4/2/17)
2017 Mar 19, Jimmy Breslin (b.1928), NYC columnist and best-selling author, died at his home in Manhattan. His books included “The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight" (1969), based on the life of gangster Joey Gallo. In 1971 it was adopted into a movie.
(SFC, 3/20/17, p.A10)
2017 Mar 19, A US drone airstrike in Afghanistan killed Qari Yasin, a Pakistani militant and al-Qaida leader, accused of involvement in a deadly attack on a bus carrying Sri Lanka's cricket team in 2009.
(Reuters, 3/21/17)(AP, 3/25/17)
2017 Mar 19, An Afghan soldier opened fire inside a base in the southern Helmand province, wounding three US soldiers before being shot dead. Taliban insurgents attacked a district headquarters in the Kandahar province using a suicide car bomb. Six police were reported killed and five others were wounded in the assault. In Zabul province an army operation killed 13 Taliban and wounded 11 others. Two Afghan soldiers were killed and three others were wounded by a roadside bomb during the operation. Two Taliban commanders were killed in an apparent US drone strike in the Barmal district of the eastern Paktika province. Another 10 insurgents were killed in a separate drone strike in the Dand-e Patan district of neighboring Paktia province.
(AP, 3/19/17)
2017 Mar 19, Canadian teacher Maggie MacDonell was awarded the annual Global Teacher Prize during a ceremony in Dubai.
(SFC, 3/20/17, p.A2)
2017 Mar 19, It was reported that a Chinese court has sentenced the police boss of Guta district of Jinzhou City, Liaoning province, to 17 years in prison for his part in a bribes-for-projects scandal, proceeds from which were used to buy two homes in Australia, according to court documents.
(Reuters, 3/19/17)
2017 Mar 19, In Ghana 20 people were killed when a large tree fell into the pool they were swimming in at the base of a waterfall near Kintampo, crushing and drowning people enjoying a day out at a popular beauty spot.
(Reuters, 3/20/17)(AFP, 3/21/17)
2017 Mar 19, In Guatemala jailed Barrio 18 gang members rioted and took several guards hostage to demand the return of 250 of the gang's members who had been recently transferred to another juvenile detention center.
(Reuters, 3/21/17)
2017 Mar 19, In India Yogi Adityanath (44), hard-line Hindu religious leader, took the oath of office as the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh state.
(AP, 3/19/17)
2017 Mar 19, Iraqi forces backed by helicopter strikes engaged in heavy fighting with jihadists on the outskirts of the Old City as they pressed an offensive to recapture west Mosul.
(AFP, 3/19/17)fs
2017 Mar 19, Israel's PM Benjamin Netanyahu backed out of an agreement to establish a new broadcasting authority, creating a coalition crisis with one of his key partners that could lead to early elections.
(AP, 3/19/17)
2017 Mar 19, In Lebanon demonstrators in central Beirut hurled empty water bottles at PM Saad al-Hariri when he tried to calm hundreds of people protesting against proposed tax hikes.
(Reuters, 3/19/17)
2017 Mar 19, Lebanon's main Druze leader, Walid Jumblatt, handed his political authority to his son Taymour, extending the tradition of dynastic politics that plays a big part in the country's sectarian government. The event marked the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Walid Jumblatt's father, Kamal Jumblatt.
(Reuters, 3/19/17)
2017 Mar 19, In Myanmar hundreds of hard-line Buddhists in Rakhine state protested against the government's plan to give citizenship to some members of the persecuted Rohingya Muslim minority community. Rakhine, one of the poorest states in Myanmar, is home to more than 1 million stateless Rohingya.
(AP, 3/19/17)
2017 Mar 19, A Hamas military court sentenced two Palestinians to death for drug smuggling in the Gaza Strip, in the first punishment of its kind in the enclave. A third suspect was sentenced to hard labor.
(AFP, 3/19/17)
2017 Mar 19, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte welcomed the prospect of the International Criminal Court (ICC) putting him on trial over his bloody war on drugs, saying he would not be intimidated and his campaign would be unrelenting and brutal.
(Reuters, 3/19/17)
2017 Mar 19, Russia concluded an agreement with the Syrian Kurdish YPG militia to set up a military base in northwestern Syria. Russia will be training YPG fighters, who control the area, as part of the fight against terrorism.
(Reuters, 3/20/17)
2017 Mar 19, In Spain a few thousand people rallied in Barcelona to protest the regional Catalan government's push to break away from the rest of the country.
(AP, 3/19/17)
2017 Mar 19, In Syria fierce clashes broke out in Damascus after insurgents infiltrated government-held parts of the eastern side of the city through tunnels overnight.
(AP, 3/19/17)
2017 Mar 19, The IMF and Ukrainian authorities said the International Monetary Fund has postponed a decision to disburse more aid to Ukraine in order to assess the impact of an economic blockade Kiev imposed on separatist-held territory.
(Reuters, 3/19/17)
2017 Mar 20, The United States criticized the UN Human Rights Council, saying addressing the human rights situation in Palestine and other occupied Arab territories as part of its agenda exhibited the group's "long-standing bias against Israel."
(Reuters, 3/20/17)
2017 Mar 20, FBI Director James Comey confirmed that the bureau is investigating possible links and coordination between Russia and associates of President Donald Trump as part of a broader probe of Russian interference in last year's presidential election.
(AP, 3/20/17)
2017 Mar 20, US Pres. Donald Trump asked Daniel Coats, the director of national intelligence, and Adm. Michael Rogers, director of the national Security Agency, to help him push back against an FBI investigation into possible coordination between his campaign and the Russian government. Coats and Rogers refused to comply.
(SFC, 5/23/17, p.A8)
2017 Mar 20, The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency issued the first of planned weekly reports tallying each time local officials declined to hold foreigners eligible for removal long enough to be picked up by federal agents.
(Econ, 3/25/17, p.27)
2017 Mar 20, In New York City James Jackson (28), a white supremacist, fatally stabbed Timothy Caughman (66) with a sword after stalking a number of black men. Authorities later said Jackson had intended to incite a race war. In 2019 Jackson pleaded guilty to six counts including murder a hate crime charge.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stabbing_of_Timothy_Caughman)(SFC, 1/24/19, p.A6)
2017 Mar 20, Chuck Barris (b.1929), a popular game show creator and producer, died at his home in Palisades, NY. His creations included “the Dating Game" (1965-1973) and “The Gong Show" (1976-1978). He penned the song “Palisades Park," which was turned into a 1962 hit by Freddie Canon. He also wrote included “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind," a spy comedy that was tuned into a film (1962).
(SFC, 3/24/17, p.D4)
2017 Mar 20, David Rockefeller (101), US banker and philanthropist, died. He headed Chase Manhattan Bank from 1969 to 1981.
(Econ, 4/8/17, p.82)
2017 Mar 20, In Afghanistan a suicide car bomb late today targeted a checkpoint in southern Helmand province, killing at least six members of an intelligence unit near Lashkar Gah. Seven other were wounded.
(AP, 3/21/17)(SFC, 3/22/17, p.A2)
2017 Mar 20, Belarus Pres. Alexander Lukashenko said Western intelligence agencies are using a "fifth column" to cause unrest and threaten the stability of his regime.
(AP, 3/20/17)
2017 Mar 20, British mobile phone giant Vodafone said it will merge its Indian unit with Idea Cellular to create India's largest telecoms operator, to help fend off the Mukesh Ambani-backed Reliance Jio, whose recent arrival has shaken up India's ultra-competitive mobile network market.
(AFP, 3/20/17)
2017 Mar 20, A Czech zoo started sawing off the horns of its 21 rhinos to protect them from poaching after the killing of a rhinoceros in France earlier this month.
(Reuters, 3/21/17)
2017 Mar 20, East Timor held elections. Former guerrilla leader Francisco Guterres and Antonio da Conceicao, the minister of education and social affairs were the front runners. Francisco "Lu-Olo" Guterres received 57 percent of the vote. His main rival, Antonio da Conceicao, got 32 percent.
(SFC, 3/21/17, p.A4)(AP, 3/25/17)
2017 Mar 20, The European Union said it is slapping sanctions on four high-ranking military officials in Syria over the use of chemical weapons in the war-torn country.
(AP, 3/20/17)
2017 Mar 20, French Pres. Francois Hollande said world donors pledged more than $75 million to an historic UNESCO-backed alliance to protect cultural heritage sites threatened by war and the wave of ideological-driven destruction carried out by Islamic State group militants.
(AP, 3/20/17)
2017 Mar 20, In French Guiana demonstrations started when workers from Endel-Engie, an engineering firm, and EDF, the local utility, blocked roads outside Kourou to prevent the launch of a rocket from the Guiana Space Center as they protested high living costs and neglect from Paris.
(Econ, 4/22/17, p.44)
2017 Mar 20, In Guatemala three policemen were killed late today and seven officers wounded in attacks on police across the country, hours after a bloody gang riot in a juvenile detention center was put down in Guatemala City.
(AP, 3/21/17)
2017 Mar 20, Hungary's defense minister inaugurated a small military base on the country's southern border for soldiers patrolling to prevent the entry of migrants.
(AP, 3/20/17)
2017 Mar 20, Iraqi forces battled Islamic State group fighters to push into Mosul's Old City where thousands of civilians remained trapped under jihadist rule. A car bombing in Baghdad killed 27 people.
(AFP, 3/20/17)(SFC, 3/22/17, p.A2)
2017 Mar 20, Japan and Russia agreed to step up work toward resolving a longstanding territorial dispute through cooperation in a range of areas.
(AP, 3/20/17)
2017 Mar 20, Japan-based Softbank bought a $300 million stake in WeWork, a trendy office-rental firm.
(Econ, 4/1/17, p.58)
2017 Mar 20, Norway jumped to top spot in the World Happiness Report despite the plummeting price of oil. Denmark fell to second, followed by Iceland, Switzerland and Finland.
(AP, 3/20/17)
2017 Mar 20, Pakistan's PM Nawaz Sharif ordered the reopening of the country's border with Afghanistan, ending a protracted closure that has cost businesses on both sides millions of dollars and deepened tensions between the two neighbors.
(AP, 3/20/17)
2017 Mar 20, A Polish court has convicted a lawyer, identified only as Stanislaw Sz., of spying for Russia and handed him a four-year prison term.
(AP, 3/20/17)
2017 Mar 20, A Russian group of reporters said they have uncovered details of a complex system in which $21 billion were allegedly transferred illegally out of the country through a network of banks. The reporters in Moscow had obtained bank records that show that funds were transferred worldwide via 112 bank accounts in Eastern Europe.
(AP, 3/21/17)
2017 Mar 20, Serbian police said they have seized over a ton of marijuana and arrested six suspected traffickers. Police said the marijuana was packed in Kosovo and was bound for western Europe.
(AP, 3/20/17)
2017 Mar 20, Sri Lanka’s Criminal Investigations Department (CID) told the Mount Lavinia magistrate's court that Gotabhaya Rajapakse, who was the country’s defence secretary during his brother's rule, directed a secret unit which is accused of assassinating former Sunday Leader editor Lasantha Wickrematunga in January 2009.
(AFP, 3/20/17)
2017 Mar 20, Uruguay's Pres. Tabare Vazquez said his country is pulling its soldiers out of a UN peacekeeping mission in Haiti, where they have served since 2004. The mission will end this month and the roughly 250 soldiers will return home in early April.
(AP, 3/20/17)
2017 Mar 20, Pope Francis met with Rwandan President Paul Kagame. Francis begged forgiveness for the "sins and failings of the church and its members" during Rwanda's 1994 genocide, and told Rwanda's president that he hoped his apology would help the country heal.
(AP, 3/20/17)
2017 Mar 20, Some 60 Venezuelan soldiers crossed the border into Colombia and raised their national flag in a camp they set up. They withdrew on March 23 after Pres. Juan Manuel Santos called his Venezuelan counterpart Nicolas Maduro to protest.
(AP, 3/24/17)
2017 Mar 21, Pres. Donald Trump signed a bill authorizing $19.5 billion for NASA and updates the agency’s mission to add the exploration of Mars.
(SFC, 3/22/17, p.A6)
2017 Mar 21, The United States imposed restrictions on carry-on electronic devices bigger than cellphones on planes coming from 10 airports eight in Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East and North Africa, in response to unspecified security threats. Britain soon followed with similar measures to become effective on March 25.
(Reuters, 3/21/17)(AP, 3/22/17)
2017 Mar 21, The family of former FBI agent Robert Levinson, who went missing in Iran a decade ago on an unauthorized CIA assignment, filed a lawsuit against the Islamic Republic, accusing it of using "cold, cynical and false denials" to torture his loved ones.
(AP, 3/26/17)
2017 Mar 21, Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson signed legislation ending the state’s practice of commemorating Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee on the same holiday as slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King. Jr.
(SFC, 3/22/17, p.A6)
2017 Mar 21, Bosnia and Russia signed an agreement to settle Moscow's $125 million Soviet-era debt to the Balkan country. In 2003, Russia took over the responsibility for the Soviet Union's debt to the former Yugoslavia estimated at $1.3 billion.
(AP, 3/21/17)
2017 Mar 21, Brazil's federal police raided the offices of people close to several prominent senators in the latest phase of a sweeping, three-year corruption probe.
(Reuters, 3/21/17)
2017 Mar 21, Brazil’s agriculture ministry said Hong Kong has banned all meat imports from Brazil, another blow from a police investigation into corruption among health inspectors and the alleged selling of rotten products by some meatpackers.
(Reuters, 3/21/17)
2017 Mar 21, A legal officer at Cambodia's Customs Department said Cambodia has suspended the export of human breast milk by Utah-based Ambrosia Labs Ltd., a business pioneered last year by former Mormon missionary Ryan Newell. On March 28 the ban was made permanent.
(AP, 3/21/17)(AP, 3/28/17)
2017 Mar 21, Canada-based Ivanhoe said it plans to develop the Kamoa-Kakula copper deposit in Congo DRC, calling it the biggest copper discovery ever.
(http://tinyurl.com/u77c2w6)(Econ, 3/11/17, p.62)
2017 Mar 21, EgyptAir said it has received instructions from US transport authorities imposing restrictions on electronic devices carried by incoming travelers and will bring them into effect on March 24.
(Reuters, 3/21/17)
2017 Mar 21, A German court convicted three 17-year-olds of participating last April 16 in a bomb attack on a Sikh temple that was motivated by hatred of other religions. They were given prison sentences ranging between six and seven years.
(AP, 3/21/17)
2017 Mar 21, In Germany the G20's outreach organizations for business (B20), think tanks (T20) and civil society groups (C20) urged the Group of 20 leading economies in a joint statement to take fast and fundamental action to counter rising temperatures.
(Reuters, 3/21/17)
2017 Mar 21, Haiti’s Chamber of Deputies voted to approve Dr. Jack Guy Lafontant as prime minister.
(AP, 3/21/17)
2017 Mar 21, Israel's Shin Bet security agency said that it had arrested Muhammad Murtaja, a Palestinian employee of a humanitarian program run by the Turkish government, on suspicion of diverting funds to militants.
(AP, 3/21/17)
2017 Mar 21, In Italy Don Luigi Ciotti, an anti-mafia priest campaigner, kicked off a day of national protest against organized crime, urging Italians to resist the mob and denouncing recent threats against him as cowardly.
(AP, 3/21/17)
2017 Mar 21, Martin McGuinness (66), the Irish Republican Army commander who laid down his arms to become a key architect of Northern Ireland's peace, died, prompting tributes from allies and former enemies alike.
(Reuters, 3/21/17)(Econ, 3/25/17, p.82)
2017 Mar 21, In Somalia a car bomb exploded at a military checkpoint near the presidential palace, killing at least six people. Al-Shabab claimed responsibility.
(AP, 3/24/17)
2017 Mar 21, Syrian rebels stormed a government-held area in northeastern Damascus for the second time in three days, the opposition's first such large scale foray in over four years inside the capital.
(Reuters, 3/21/17)
2017 Mar 21, In Syria a US airstrike leveled a school near the IS-held city of Raqqa, where some 50 displaced families had sought refuge. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 33 bodies had been pulled from the rubble.
(AP, 3/22/17)
2017 Mar 21, In Turkey tens of thousands of people celebrated the New Year festival of Newroz in the overwhelmingly Kurdish city of Diyarbakir, even as police killed a man who claimed to be carrying a bomb.
(AFP, 3/21/17)
2017 Mar 21, The UN said more than 2,600 Nigerians who fled into northern Cameroon to escape Boko Haram jihadists have been forced to go home since the start of the year.
(AFP, 3/21/17)
2017 Mar 22, The US White House acknowledged that Paul Manafort, Pres. Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, had worked for a Russian billionaire to advance the interests of Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin. Manafort had signed a $10 million contract in 2006 with Oleg Deripaska, a close Putin ally, in a business relationship that lasted to at least 2009.
(SFC, 3/23/17, p.A8)
2017 Mar 22, The US FDA said it has received reports of nine deaths and more than 350 cases of a rare blood cancer linked to breast implants.
(SFC, 3/23/17, p.A6)
2017 Mar 22, Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson signed a gun rights measure into law that will allow concealed weapons at state colleges, some bars, government buildings, and even the state Capitol effective September 1.
(SFC, 3/22/17, p.A6)
2017 Mar 22, In Oakland, Ca., Redwood City-based Impossible Foods held a ceremony to open its 67,000 square-foot factory for the production of vegetarian burgers.
(SFC, 3/23/17, p.A1)
2017 Mar 22, An estimated 17,000 AT&T workers in California and Nevada went on strike to protest the handling of work assignments. Technicians and call center workers returned to work the next day following an agreement on work assignments.
(SFC, 3/23/17, p.C1)(SFC, 3/24/17, p.C1)
2017 Mar 22, Joanne Kyger (82), a leading poet of the San Francisco Beat generation, died in Bolinas, Ca. Her almost 30 collections of poetry began with “The Tapestry and the Web" (1965).
(SFC, 3/24/17, p.D3)
2017 Mar 22, A federal judge blocked a Louisiana law that prevents people without birth certificates from marrying.
(SFC, 3/23/17, p.A6)
2017 Mar 22, In Massachusetts Barry Cadden (50), former head of the New England Compounding Center, was convicted of racketeering, conspiracy and fraud over a 2012 meningitis outbreak that killed 76 people across the country and was traced to fungus-contaminated drugs. On June 26 Cadden was sentenced to nine years in prison.
(SFC, 3/23/17, p.A8)(SFC, 6/27/17, p.A6)
2017 Mar 22, In northern Wisconsin a domestic dispute at a bank escalated into shootings at three locations. A police officer and two bank employees and an attorney were shot and killed. Suspect Nengmy Vang was in custody. Attorney Sarah Quirt Sann was his wife’s divorce lawyer. On April 1 Vang died of his wounds.
(SFC, 3/23/17, p.A8)(SFC, 3/24/17, p.A8)(SFC, 3/25/17, p.A5)(SSFC, 4/2/17, p.A5)
2017 Mar 22, Save the Children said more than 400,000 Afghan children are expected to drop out of school this year due to growing instability and the forcible return of Afghan refugees from Pakistan.
(SFC, 3/23/17, p.A2)
2017 Mar 22, Austria's interior minister doubled the payment for some migrants who voluntarily return to their home countries to 1,000 euros ($1,080).
(AP, 3/22/17)
2017 Mar 22, British police shot and killed Khalid Masood (52) outside the Houses of Parliament in London after an officer was stabbed in what police said was a "terrorist" incident. Masood had just driven an SUV into a crowd of pedestrians on Westminster Bridge, killing two people and injuring approximately 40. Investigators soon carried out at least six raids on addresses in London, Birmingham, and elsewhere. 12 people were arrested over the next few days. Police on April 1 said all 12 have been released. On April 7 police said a 4th victim in the attack had died. Andreea Cristea (31) of Romania was knocked into the river when Masood drove his rented SUV into pedestrians. She died two weeks later, making her the 5th victim of the attack.
(AFP, 3/22/17)(Reuters, 3/23/17)(AP, 3/24/17)(Reuters, 4/1/17)(SFC, 4/8/17, p.A2)(AP, 5/13/17)
2017 Mar 22, Thames Water, one of Britain's biggest water companies, was handed a record 20 million pound ($25 million) fine for pumping sewage into the River Thames, killing wildlife and spreading sickness among livestock and people.
(Reuters, 3/22/17)
2017 Mar 22, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang arrived in the Australian capital, Canberra, on a mission to expand bilateral ties.
(AP, 3/22/17)
2017 Mar 22, China's largest real estate developers launched a green index to manage their cement, steel and iron suppliers as the world's second-largest economy steps up its fight against climate change.
(Reuters, 3/22/17)
2017 Mar 22, In central China two students died and more than 20 others were injured in a stampede during a morning bathroom break at an elementary school in Puyang county, Henan province.
(AP, 3/22/17)
2017 Mar 22, The France-based World Water Council said nearly a third of people from sub-Saharan Africa do not have access to safe drinking water. It said clean drinking water is available to less than 50% of the people in Angola, Equatorial Guinea and Papua New Guinea.
(SFC, 3/23/17, p.A2)
2017 Mar 22, In Germany thousands of gay men prosecuted and jailed under an arcane 19th century law were due to get compensation after the government passed a draft bill to quash their convictions. Germany decriminalized homosexuality in 1969.
(Reuters, 3/22/17)
2017 Mar 22, An Indian court sentenced two Hindu hard-liners to life in prison for triggering an explosion in Ajmer, a Muslim pilgrimage center in Rajasthan, that killed three people and injured more than a dozen in 2007.
(AP, 3/22/17)
2017 Mar 22, In Syria US aircraft ferried Syrian Kurdish fighters and allied forces behind Islamic State lines to spearhead an assault on a strategic town belonging to the extremist group outside its de facto capital, Raqqa.
(AP, 3/22/17)
2017 Mar 22, British police shot a suspected attacker outside the Houses of Parliament in London after an officer was stabbed in what police said was a "terrorist" incident.
(AFP, 3/22/17)
2017 Mar 22, In Iraq Islamic State militants shelled areas recaptured by government forces in western Mosul, hitting civilians fleeing the fighting. Heavy mortar fire killed at least five civilians and wounded more than 20 in Mosul Jadida and Rifak districts.
(Reuters, 3/22/17)
2017 Mar 22, In southern Italy police in Calabria detained Santo Vottari (45), a fugitive mobster, who authorities say is the boss of an 'ndrangheta crime clan involved in a feud that culminated in a 2007 gangland-style massacre in Germany.
(AP, 3/22/17)
2017 Mar 22, It was reported that villagers in northern Kenya have begun to burn piles of animal carcasses, hoping to head off an outbreak of disease as their livestock starve to death in the region's worst drought in five years.
(Reuters, 3/22/17)
2017 Mar 22, At the Hague International Criminal Court judges sentenced former Congolese VP Jean-Pierre Bemba to a year in jail and fined him 300,000 euros for bribing witnesses during his war crimes trial in an unprecedented case before the ICC.
(AFP, 3/22/17)
2017 Mar 22, In northeastern Nigeria at least four suicide blasts rocked a camp for migrants fleeing Boko Haram insurgents, killing at least three people and wounding 20.
(AFP, 3/22/17)
2017 Mar 22, The International Red Cross appealed for $400 million to help some 20 million people facing famine or the risk of it in four conflict-ridden countries: Somalia, Yemen, South Sudan and Nigeria.
(AP, 3/22/17)(Econ, 4/1/17, p.39)
2017 Mar 22, North Korea's latest missile launch ended in failure.
(AP, 3/22/17)
2017 Mar 22, Norway granted political asylum to a group of Turkish military officers based in Norway who had refused to return home after the failed July 15 coup attempt.
(AP, 3/22/17)
2017 Mar 22, Pakistani troops clashed with militants during a raid in a tribal region near the Afghan border, with two soldiers and five "terrorists" killed. A local Pakistani Taliban commander was among those reported killed in the Orakzai tribal region.
(AP, 3/22/17)
2017 Mar 22, Romanian rail workers staged a walk-out after unions and management failed to agree about wage hikes. More than 150 trains were affected by the strike.
(AP, 3/22/17)
2017 Mar 22, Tensions between Russia and Ukraine spread to the May Eurovision Song Contest after Kiev banned Russian contestant Yuliya Samoilova (27) from entering the country over a past performance in Moscow-annexed Crimea.
(AFP, 3/22/17)
2017 Mar 22, The Syrian army sent reinforcements to face a major rebel offensive in Hama province, as insurgents pressed an attack in a western area critically important to President Bashar al-Assad.
(Reuters, 3/22/17)
2017 Mar 22, Turkey fired into Kurdish-controlled Syria after saying one of its soldiers was killed in Hatay province by a sniper from across the border in Afrin.
(Reuters, 3/22/17)
2017 Mar 23, California air quality officials approved rigorous curbs on methane emissions at oil and gas production plants.
(SFC, 3/24/17, p.A1)
2017 Mar 23, Police in Sacramento, Ca., found the bodies of two children and two adults at a house on the 1100 block of 35th Ave. A suspect was arrested in San Francisco.
(SFC, 3/24/17, p.D4)
2017 Mar 23, Utah’s Rep. Gov. Gary Herbert said he plans to approve a measure lowering the state’s blood alcohol limit to .05% from .08%.
(SFC, 3/24/17, p.A6)
2017 Mar 23, In Afghanistan Taliban fighters captured the strategic district of Sangin in the southern province of Helmand after security forces pulled out, leaving the district center to the insurgents. In Kunduz province an Afghan officer turned his rifle on sleeping colleagues, killing nine policemen.
(Reuters, 3/23/17)(AP, 3/23/17)
2017 Mar 23, In Argentina a judge ordered former president Cristina Kirchner (64) to stand trial on charges of financial mismanagement.
(AFP, 3/23/17)
2017 Mar 23, A Bahraini court sentenced three Shi'ite Muslim men to death after they were convicted on charges of terrorism and involvement in 2014 bomb attacks that injured a number of police officers.
(Reuters, 3/23/17)
2017 Mar 23, Bosnian and Croatian police said they had arrested 13 people suspected of smuggling at least 100 migrants from Turkey into the European Union.
(Reuters, 3/23/17)
2017 Mar 23, In Chad Frenchman Thierry Frezier was kidnapped in a remote region near the border with Sudan's Darfur region early today.
(Reuters, 3/23/17)(Reuters, 5/7/17)
2017 Mar 23, In Egypt Islamic extremists killed 10 government soldiers in fighting in a central part of the restive Sinai Peninsula during an army raid on a militant hideout. Troops killed 15 extremists and took seven prisoners in the raid.
(AP, 3/23/17)
2017 Mar 23, An Egyptian court ordered a renewed corruption probe into ousted president Hosni Mubarak, who has been cleared for release after almost six years in detention.
(AFP, 3/23/17)
2017 Mar 23, German authorities detained Afghan migrant Abdullah P. in the southern state of Bavaria. He was believed to have taken part in an attack on a military convoy about a decade ago in which at least 16 US and Afghan soldiers were killed.
(Reuters, 3/28/17)
2017 Mar 23, Indonesian police killed a suspected radical and detained three during a counter-terrorism operation in an industrial area just hours away from Jakarta.
(Reuters, 3/23/17)
2017 Mar 23, Israeli police arrested a 19-year-old Israeli Jewish man as the primary suspect in a string of bomb threats targeting Jewish community centers and other institutions in the US, marking a potential breakthrough in the case after an international manhunt with the FBI.
(AP, 3/23/17)
2017 Mar 23, Kenya, a pioneer in mobile money, began selling the first ever government bonds via mobile phone, allowing anyone from teachers to shop owners to invest and fund infrastructure projects.
(AFP, 3/23/17)
2017 Mar 23, In Mexico Miroslava Breach Velducea (54), a journalist for the national newspaper Le Jornada, was gunned down outside her home in Chihuahua.
(SFC, 3/24/17, p.A5)(SSFC, 5/21/17, p.E7)
2017 Mar 23, In the Philippines suspected Abu Sayyaf militants took captive two Filipino cargo ship crewmen from a cargo ship off Basilan province.
(Reuters, 3/25/17)
2017 Mar 23, Rwandan prosecutors charged a dual Rwandan-British citizen of treason, accusing her of forming an armed group and conspiring to unseat the president. Violette Uwamahoro, the wife of an opposition party youth organizer, was arrested in Kigali on February 14, days after arriving from Britain to attend a family funeral.
(Reuters, 3/23/17)
2017 Mar 23, A 6,800-ton South Korean ferry was hoisted to the surface nearly three years after it capsized and sank in violent seas off the country's southwestern coast. More than 300 people died when the Sewol sank on April 16, 2014.
(AP, 3/23/17)
2017 Mar 23, Spain’s Proactiva Open Arms group found five bodies near two capsized boats. A day later the group said it feared hundreds of migrants may have died off Libya's coast as it recovered one more body in the area.
(AP, 3/24/17)
2017 Mar 23, Syrian government forces besieged Deir Hafer, the last Islamic State stronghold in the northern province of Aleppo, weeks after launching an offensive to retake the entire province.
(AP, 3/23/17)
2017 Mar 23, Tanzania's information Minister Nape Nnauye was fired after he criticized an ally of Pres. John Magufuli who had stormed into a television station on March 17 accompanied by armed men.
(AFP, 3/23/17)
2017 Mar 23, In Ukraine former Russian parliamentarian Denis Voronenkov (45) was killed by an assailant who was armed with a pistol and later died in hospital after being shot in the chest and head by Voronenkov's bodyguard. Voronenkov was key witness in a treason case against former leader Viktor Yanukovich. Ukraine soon identified the assailant as Pavel Parshov (28) and said he had been trained in Russia by Russian security services.
(Reuters, 3/23/17)(AP, 3/24/17)
2017 Mar 23, In Ukraine fire and explosions caused the detonation of ammunition in several sites at a military base at in Balaklia in the Kharkiv region. One woman was found dead in a home that was hit by a shell. Ukraine suspected the Russian military or its separatist rebel proxies were responsible and cited a possible drone attack.
(AP, 3/23/17)(AP, 3/24/17)
2017 Mar 23, Pope Francis signed canonization decrees making five more child saints: two Portuguese shepherd children who said the Virgin Mary appeared to them in Fatima 100 years ago and three Mexican adolescents who were killed for their faith in the 16th century.
(AP, 3/23/17)
2017 Mar 24, US President Donald Trump's administration approved TransCanada Corp's Keystone XL pipeline, cheering the oil industry and angering environmentalists who had sought for years to block it.
(Reuters, 3/24/17)
2017 Mar 24, US President Donald Trump put his reputation as a dealmaker on the line in a high-risk vote on an embattled Republican health care plan. Trump faced the biggest blow yet to his young presidency as his bid to repeal Obamacare went down in flames at the hands of rebel Republican lawmakers.
(AFP, 3/24/17)(AP, 3/24/17)
2017 Mar 24, The United States State Department said it has imposed sanctions on 30 foreign companies or individuals for transferring sensitive technology to Iran for its missile program or for violating export controls on Iran, North Korea and Syria.
(Reuters, 3/24/17)
2017 Mar 24, The US government to issue a travel warning for French Guiana in South America. Large protests have spread throughout the territory, blocking roads to neighboring Brazil and Suriname.
(AP, 3/25/17)
2017 Mar 24, A US immigration judge in Chicago granted asylum to Singaporean blogger Amos Yee (18), saying he was persecuted for his political opinions in the Southeast Asian city-state. On September 26 Yee was released from custody after his bid for asylum was upheld.
(Reuters, 3/25/17)(Econ, 4/1/17, p.33)(SFC, 9/27/17, p.A6)
2017 Mar 24, US federal prosecutors said the American University of Beirut, a recipient of US government aid, has agreed to pay $700,000 to settle a civil lawsuit over accusations that it assisted three organizations linked to the militant group Hezbollah.
(Reuters, 3/24/17)
2017 Mar 24, Kentucky’s Gov. Matt Bevin signed SB17, a “religious liberty bill" into law. The measure allows student organizations at high schools and colleges, under the guise of expressing religious viewpoints, to discriminate against LGBT students..
(http://tinyurl.com/y7anya9b)(Econ 7/8/17, p.26)
2017 Mar 24, New York-based Transparentem said hazardous, heavily polluting tanneries in Bangladesh, with workers as young as 14, supplied leather to companies that make shoes and handbags for a host of Western brands. A British Medical Journal study, published this week, found that Bangladeshi tannery workers as young as 8 frequently have untreated rashes and infections, as well as asthma and other lung problems.
(AP, 3/24/17)
2017 Mar 24, Former Penn State Pres. Graham Spanier (68) was convicted of hushing up complaints in 2001 of child sex abuse by assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky.
(SFC, 3/25/17, p.A5)
2017 Mar 24, The World Health Organization said 116 million children are to receive polio vaccines in 13 countries in west and central Africa as part of efforts to eradicate the disease on the continent.
(AFP, 3/24/17)
2017 Mar 24, In Bangladesh a suicide bomber blew himself up at a security checkpoint near the international airport in Dhaka, the second such incident in a week.
(Reuters, 3/24/17)
2017 Mar 24, In Bosnia Efeta Veseli (56), a woman wanted for war crimes she allegedly committed against Serb civilians during the country's 1992-95 war, was extradited from Switzerland and handed over to authorities at Sarajevo's airport.
(AP, 3/24/17)
2017 Mar 24, Bulgarian nationalists blocked for several hours the three main crossing points with Turkey to prevent coaches bringing in thousands of Turks with Bulgarian passports to vote in March 26 elections. Later in the afternoon police put an end to the protests after caretaker PM Ognyan Gerdzhikov called for the blockade to be lifted.
(AFP, 3/24/17)
2017 Mar 24, In Chechnya six Russian soldiers were killed after successfully repelling an assault on a military facility at Naurskaya. The Islamic State militant group claimed responsibility.
(Reuters, 3/24/17)
2017 Mar 24, Chinese Internet giant Tencent paid $1.8 billion for a 5% stake in the US-based Tesla car company.
(Econ, 4/8/17, p.59)
2017 Mar 24, In central China accidents at two neighboring gold mines in Henan province killed 11 people.
(Reuters, 3/25/17)
2017 Mar 24, In CongoDRC Kamuina Nsapu militants decapitated 42 police officers after an ambush in Kasai province. The fighters spared the lives of six police officers because they spoke the local Tshiluba language.
(Reuters, 3/25/17)(SSFC, 3/26/17, p.A6)
2017 Mar 24, In Egypt Hosni Mubarak (88), the former autocrat toppled during the 2011 Arab Spring, was freed from the military hospital where he spent much of the past six years in detention.
(AFP, 3/24/17)
2017 Mar 24, In Japan Le Thi Nhat Linh (9) disappeared on her way to school. Her naked body was found two days later. Autopsy results showed that the Vietnamese girl had been choked to death. On April 14 police arrested real estate salesman Yasumasa Shibuya (46) on suspicion he abandoned the girl's body in Aiko City. He headed a neighborhood initiative to watch over children walking to and from school.
(AP, 4/14/17)
2017 Mar 24, The International Criminal Court at The Hague awarded $250 dollars as "symbolic" damages to each victim of former Congolese warlord Germain Katanga, a sum swiftly dismissed as meaningless by those who lost homes and loved ones in a militia attack on their village 14 years ago.
(AFP, 3/24/17)
2017 Mar 24, A court in Niger freed fifteen civilians accused of complicity in an attempted putsch against President Mahamadou Issoufou in December 2015.
(Reuters, 3/25/17)
2017 Mar 24, Hamas official Mazen Faqha (38) was shot dead by an unknown gunman at his home in the Gaza Strip. Israeli media said Faqha was responsible for cells of Hamas's military wing, the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. On May 11 Hamas said it has apprehended the killer of Mazen Fuqaha and that he carried out the assassination on Israel's orders.
(AFP, 3/25/17)(Reuters, 5/11/17)(Econ, 4/22/17, p.42)
2017 Mar 24, In southern Poland 14 men and women in their twenties slaughtered a sheep and took their clothes off at the former Nazi German death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. The group, including six Poles, four Belarusians and one German, staged an "artistic performance" at Auschwitz aimed at protesting the wars in Ukraine and Syria. The individuals used a drone to film the incident. Police detained all those involved. In 2019 the man who killed the sheep, Adam Bialiatski, was sentenced to a year in prison for animal cruelty and desecrating a site of memory, while a second man, Mikita Valadzko, was given eight months. Nine other participants were ordered to pay fines.
(AP, 3/24/17)(AP, 5/28/19)
2017 Mar 24, Puntland police said pirates have seized control of a Somali fishing boat to use as a base from which to attack larger ships.
(Reuters, 3/24/17)
2017 Mar 24, President Vladimir Putin granted an audience to French far-right party leader Marine Le Pen in the Kremlin, bestowing a level of international recognition that has so far eluded her in the countdown to France's presidential election.
(Reuters, 3/24/17)
2017 Mar 24, In Syria US-backed local forces fighting Islamic State reached one side of the Tabqa dam, about 40 km (25 miles) west of Raqqa, one of the top prizes in their campaign to drive the jihadist group from Raqqa city.
(Reuters, 3/24/17)
2017 Mar 24, In Syria an air attack late today struck a prison run by militants, killing at least 16 people including prisoners and prison staff in Idlib city. Some people were killed by gunfire as prison guards chased detainees who tried to flee after the attack.
(AP, 3/25/17)
2017 Mar 24, In 2018 the OPCW said sarin was likely used as a chemical weapon in an attack in Syria at Ltamenah, Hama province.
(SFC, 6/14/18, p.A2)
2017 Mar 24, Tanzania's President John Magufuli warned the country's journalists that there were limits to their press freedom.
(Reuters, 3/24/17)
2017 Mar 24, Five children were among 11 Syrians killed after their plastic boat sank off Turkey's Aegean coast.
(Reuters, 3/24/17)
2017 Mar 24, The United Nations human rights office said an average of 100 civilians a month are dying in Yemen's war which enters its third year this weekend, most killed by the Saudi-led coalition's air strikes and shelling.
(Reuters, 3/24/17)
2017 Mar 25, In the SF Bay Area the first day of full service opened at the new Warm Springs BART station in Fremont.
(SSFC, 3/26/17, p.C1)
2017 Mar 25, In Nevada a gunman, later identified as Rolando Cardenas (55), opened fire on a double-decker bus on the Las Vegas Strip, killing one person and wounding another before finally surrendering.
(AFP, 3/26/17)(SSFC, 3/26/17, p.A8)(SFC, 3/27/17, p.A4)
2017 Mar 25, Sydney's Opera House and Harbour Bridge plunged into darkness to mark Earth Hour, as global landmarks began dimming their lights to draw attention to climate change. Conservation group WWF started Earth Hour in 2007.
(AFP, 3/25/17)
2017 Mar 25, In eastern Bangladesh six people, including two policemen, were killed in explosions near a building in Sylhet. The Islamic State claimed responsibility.
(AP, 3/26/17)(Econ, 4/1/17, p.32)
2017 Mar 25, Belarus authorities detained some 400 people during an attempt to hold a street protest in the capital Minsk, amid rising public anger over falling living standards and an unpopular tax on the unemployed.
(Reuters, 3/25/17)(AP, 3/26/17)
2017 Mar 25, Thousands of people marched through London to protest against Britain leaving the European Union, just four days before PM Theresa May launches the start of the formal divorce process from the bloc it joined 44 years ago.
(Reuters, 3/25/17)
2017 Mar 25, Bulgarian nationalists kept up their protests at the Turkish border against Bulgarian citizens living permanently in Turkey who are coming in to vote in Bulgaria's election.
(AP, 3/25/17)
2017 Mar 25, China’s official Xinhua news agency reported that China has captured 2,566 fugitives who had fled to more than 90 countries and regions and recovered 8.6 billion yuan ($1.25 billion) of illicit funds from 2014 to 2016.
(Reuters, 3/25/17)
2017 Mar 25, China prevented Feng Chongyi, an associate professor at the University of Technology Sydney, from returning to Sydney because he's suspected of endangering national security. Feng had been wrapping up a three-week trip researching human rights lawyers. Chinese authorities have staged a wide-reaching crackdown on human rights lawyers across the country since July 2015. On April 1 Feng Chongyi was allowed to return to Australia.
(AP, 3/26/17)(AP, 4/2/17)
2017 Mar 25, In southern China an operation platform collapsed at a power plant under construction in Guangzhou, Guangdong province, killing nine people.
(Reuters, 3/25/17)
2017 Mar 25, Three Egyptian soldiers were killed in an explosion that hit their armored vehicle in the northern Sinai peninsula. Another officer managing a checkpoint was killed by sniper fire.
(Reuters, 3/25/17)(SSFC, 3/26/17, p.A4)
2017 Mar 25, On the 60th anniversary of the founding of the EU, 27 European leaders signed a document in Rome enshrining a pledge to give member nations more freedom to form partial alliances and set policy when unanimity is out of reach.
(AP, 3/25/17)
2017 Mar 25, Hong Kong pro-democracy activists and hundreds of supporters marched ahead of a vote for the city's next leader which they reject as a sham.
(AFP, 3/25/17)
2017 Mar 25, In India one person was killed and about 14 injured when violence erupted following a scuffle between Muslim and Hindu school students in PM Narendra Modi's home state of Gujarat.
(Reuters, 3/26/17)
2017 Mar 25, In Italy a woman's body was found stuffed in a suitcase that was floating at a marina in the Adriatic port of Rimini.
(AP, 3/27/17)
2017 Mar 25, In Japan a Vietnamese man held in an immigration detention center died, drawing fresh attention to conditions in the country's detention system. Van Huan Nguyen (aka Nguyen The Hung) was one of more than 11,000 refugees that the country took in over the three decades to 2005 in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. Nguyen had complained of pain throughout his detention for a week before his death. The death was the 13th in Japan's detention system since 2006.
(Reuters, 3/26/17)(Reuters, 3/28/17)
2017 Mar 25, In Kyrgyzstan about 250 people had gathered in Bishkek to demand the release of Sadyr Japarov, who was arrested when trying to enter the country earlier in the day. Supporters tried to break through a police cordon outside the national security agency's headquarters, but police turned them back with flash grenades. Dozens were arrested. Japarov had lived the past few years in Cyprus after serving a prison sentence for organizing a 2013 protest that turned violent.
(AP, 3/25/17)
2017 Mar 25, Maldives’ former President Mohamed Nasheed said that he has signed an agreement with his one-time archrival and former strongman to try to restore democracy in the archipelago state.
(AP, 3/25/17)
2017 Mar 25, Mali's main Tuareg separatist factions said they would boycott talks with the government next week on implementing a nearly 2-year-old peace accord that has been riven by quarrelling.
(Reuters, 3/25/17)
2017 Mar 25, In Mexico about 100 journalists and free-speech supporters demonstrated to protest the March 23 killing of reporter Miroslava Breach gunned down in the northern state of Chihuahua.
(AP, 3/25/17)
2017 Mar 25, Pakistan said it has started building a fence along the Afghan border in areas where it says militants have launched cross-border attacks.
(AP, 3/26/17)
2017 Mar 25, Philippine soldiers rescued one of two Filipino cargo ship crewmen taken captive just two days ago by suspected Abu Sayyaf militants. Aurelio Agacac, the ship captain, was freed in the remote village of Basakan, Basilan province.
(Reuters, 3/25/17)
2017 Mar 25, In the southern Philippines at least four people were killed and 23 others wounded in a grenade attack that appeared to be unrelated to terrorism. The attacker was arrested following the blast in Busbus village near the domestic airport in Sulu province's Jolo town.
(AP, 3/26/17)
2017 Mar 25, In South Sudan six aid workers working for the Grass Roots Empowerment for Development Organization (GREDO), were killed in an ambush while traveling from the capital Juba towards the town of Pibor. The death toll soon rose to seven after the driver, David Kim Choop, also died.
(Reuters, 3/27/17)(AFP, 3/27/17)(SFC, 3/28/17, p.A2)
2017 Mar 25, In Syria airstrikes hit a main street in the Damascus suburb of Hamouriyeh killing at least 16 people and wounded more than 50. Airstrikes in Idlib province hit several towns and villages as well as the provincial capital the carries the same name. Syria's army and its allies retook a village near Hama, as the government tried to turn back a major insurgent offensive.
(AP, 3/25/17)(Reuters, 3/25/17)
2017 Mar 25, In 2018 the OPCW said chlorine was likely used as a chemical weapon in an attack in Syria at and near Ltamenah Hospital, Hama province.
(SFC, 6/14/18, p.A2)
2017 Mar 25, In Yemen 16 rebels were killed and 24 wounded over the last 24 hours in air raids by a Saudi-led coalition targeting the insurgents on an air base and arms depot in the east of the rebel-held Hodeida province.
(AFP, 3/25/17)
2017 Mar 26, Joe Harris (89), American commercial illustrator, died at his home in Stamford, Conn. He created a cartoon rabbit to help sell the Trix cereal in 1959. He later designed cartoon characters for the Rocky & Bullwinkle show.
(SFC, 4/6/17, p.D3)
2017 Mar 26, In Ohio one person was killed and 16 others wounded early today in a shooting at the packed Cameo nightclub in Cincinnati. One hospitalized man faced murder charges. On March 30 police arrested Cornell Beckley (27) on murder charges.
(AFP, 3/26/17)(SFC, 4/1/17, p.A7)
2017 Mar 26, In eastern Bangladesh two suspected militants were killed in an ongoing military raid on a building in Sylhet where armed militants were holed up.
(AP, 3/26/17)
2017 Mar 26, Belarus police arrested about 30 demonstrators in Minsk who were demanding to know the whereabouts of friends and relatives detained in the breakup of a mass protest.
(AP, 3/26/17)
2017 Mar 26, Bulgarians voted for the third time in four years in an early election. The strongly pro-EU GERB was seen taking 96 of parliament's 240 seats, leaving it short of a majority and certain to seek a deal with the third-placed United Patriots, an alliance of three nationalist parties expected to take 27 seats. GERN leader Boyko Borisov faced an uphill battle to build a stable coalition government.
(AP, 3/26/17)(Reuters, 3/27/17)
2017 Mar 26, China's Premier Li Keqiang arrived in New Zealand for high-level talks at a time that both countries are pushing to expand free trade.
(AP, 3/26/17)
2017 Mar 26, An Egyptian court sentenced 56 people to prison terms of up to 14 years over the capsizing of a boat that killed over 200 people last September 21.
(Reuters, 3/26/17)
2017 Mar 26, In France Shaoyo Liu (56), a Chinese man, was shot and killed in his home by a plainclothes police officer. The killing prompted angry demonstrations the next day from the Asian community in Paris' multicultural northeast where the killing occurred. Liu’s daughter said her father was cooking dinner when she heard a loud knocking and that police broke down their door and shot him as he held scissors.
(AP, 3/28/17)(AP, 3/29/17)
2017 Mar 26, Carrie Lam, a Beijing-backed civil servant, was chosen to be Hong Kong's next leader, replacing Leung Chun-ying. She was chosen from among several candidates by a 1,200-person "election committee" stacked with pro-Beijing and pro-establishment loyalists.
(Reuters, 3/26/17)(Econ, 3/4/17, p.32)
2017 Mar 26, Indonesian farmer Akbar (25) failed to return home from a trip to the family's plantation on Sulawesi Island. His body was found the next day inside the belly of a giant python.
(AFP, 3/29/17)
2017 Mar 26, Iran sanctioned what it described as 15 American companies, alleging they support terrorism, repression and Israel's occupation of land Palestinians want for a future state, likely in retaliation for sanctions earlier announced by the US. The list included ITT Corp., missile-maker Raytheon Co., United Technologies Corp. Denver's Re/Max Holdings Inc., a real estate company and truck maker Oshkosh.
(AP, 3/26/17)
2017 Mar 26, Iran's central bank said it will appeal Luxembourg's decision to freeze $1.6 billion of its assets, which the US is claiming as compensation for victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks.
(AFP, 3/26/17)
2017 Mar 26, Iraq's military said that 61 bodies were recovered from a collapsed building that Islamic State had booby-trapped in west Mosul, but there was no sign the building had been hit by a coalition air strike. Witnesses and local officials that said as many as 200 bodies were pulled from the building after a March 17 coalition strike targeted IS militants and equipment in the Jadida district.
(Reuters, 3/26/17)
2017 Mar 26, Kenyan troops in Somalia killed 31 Islamist al Shabaab militants in a raid on two of their bases in the southern Somali region of Jubbaland.
(Reuters, 3/27/17)
2017 Mar 26, Hamas shut the crossing between the Gaza Strip and Israel after blaming the Jewish state for the assassination of one of its officials in the Palestinian enclave.
(AFP, 3/26/17)
2017 Mar 26, Russian police detained dozens of protesters across the country, including opposition leader Alexei Navalny, after thousands took to the streets to demonstrate against corruption and demand the resignation of PM Dmitry Medvedev. Riot police arrested more than 1,000 people in Moscow alone.
(Reuters, 3/26/17)(Econ, 4/1/17, p.43)
2017 Mar 26, In Syria the Islamic State group ordered residents to evacuate the city of Raqqa following reports that a dam contested by US-backed forces upstream on the Euphrates River could collapse.
(AP, 3/26/17)
2017 Mar 26, In Syria a Kurdish and Arab Syrian militia backed by the United States said it has captured the town of Karama and the capture of the Tabqa air base, 28 miles west of Raqqa. They planned an assault on the Islamic State stronghold of Raqqa in early April.
(Reuters, 3/26/17)(SFC, 3/27/17, p.A3)
2017 Mar 26, Tens of thousands of Yemenis protested in the capital Sanaa against the Saudi-led military intervention as it marked its second anniversary.
(AP, 3/26/17)
2017 Mar 27, The White House confirmed that Jared Kushner, president Donald Trump's son-in-law has, volunteered to answer questions before the Senate Intelligence Committee about arranging meetings with the Russian ambassador and other officials.
(AP, 3/27/17)
2017 Mar 27, The United States, Britain and France were among almost 40 countries that did not join talks on a nuclear weapons ban treaty starting at the UN.
(Reuters, 3/27/17)
2017 Mar 27, In Oakland, Ca. an early morning fire killed three people at a large transitional housing building at 2551 San Pablo Ave. One person remained missing.
(SFC, 3/28/17, p.A1)
2017 Mar 27, National Football League (NFL) owners voted 37-1 to approve the Oakland Raiders’ move to Las Vegas.
(SFC, 3/28/17, p.A1)
2017 Mar 27, Michigan and the city of Flint agreed to replace thousands of home water lines to settle a lawsuit by residents over lead-contaminated water.
(SFC, 3/28/17, p.A7)
2017 Mar 27, In Bangladesh a special anti-terrorism unit managed to kill the last four Islamic militants in Sylhet. Police had cordoned off the area on March 24.
(Econ, 4/1/17, p.32)
2017 Mar 27, French energy company Total announced the launching a multi-billion-dollar petrochemical joint venture in Texas as it tries to profit from the "business-friendly environment" under the current US administration.
(AP, 3/27/17)
2017 Mar 27, French Guiana faced a nationwide strike over crime and economic difficulties, amid protests that have paralyzed the French territory in South America, halted flights and a rocket launch and prompted a US travel warning.
(AP, 3/27/17)
2017 Mar 27, In Germany thieves broke into Berlin’s Bode Museum before dawn and made off with a massive 100-kilogram (221-pound) gold coin worth millions of dollars. In 2018 prosecutors indicted four young men for the theft of the "Big Maple Leaf" coin.
(AP, 3/27/17)(SFC, 10/18/18, p.A2)
2017 Mar 27, Fraport Greece said the European Union is clearing a 280 million euro loan from the European Investment Bank to the company, which won the tender to upgrade and operate 14 regional Greek airports.
(AP, 3/28/17)
2017 Mar 27, Lufthansa announced a code-sharing deal with Hong Kong-based Cathay Pacific under which the German airline and its Swiss and Austrian Airlines units will offer new connections to Australia and New Zealand.
(AP, 3/27/17)
2017 Mar 27, Hong Kong police launched a fresh round of arrests of student leaders and other prominent figures involved with the huge 2014 "Umbrella Movement" pro-democracy protests.
(AP, 3/27/17)
2017 Mar 27, Israeli police arrested more than 20 Jewish ultra-Orthodox suspected sex offenders whose alleged crimes were known to their insular communities but concealed from the authorities.
(AFP, 3/27/17)
2017 Mar 27, In central Japan an avalanche killed seven high school students and a teacher who were among a group of almost 50 on mountain climbing training.
(Reuters, 3/27/17)
2017 Mar 27, In Mali former rebels and opposition parties boycotted a national summit enshrined in the country's 2015 peace deal, laying bare divisions with the government and armed groups it relies on for security.
(AFP, 3/27/17)
2017 Mar 27, In Mexico a priest was shot to death in the Pacific coast state of Nayarit.
(AP, 3/30/17)
2017 Mar 27, In the northern Netherlands two people were killed when a train hit a car at a rail crossing near Harlingen.
(AP, 3/27/17)
2017 Mar 27, The foreign minister of Nigeria visited Poland an effort to develop economic, military and security ties with the fast-growing economy in central Europe.
(AP, 3/27/17)
2017 Mar 27, In Pakistan a special 3-day anti-polio drive was launched in Islamabad after traces of the virus were found in the city's sewage system.
(AP, 3/28/17)
2017 Mar 27, Hamas authorities partially reopened the crossing between the Gaza Strip and Israel, after a one-day closure following the assassination of one of the group's leaders.
(AFP, 3/27/17)
2017 Mar 27, Qatar PM Sheikh Abdullah bin Nasser bin Khalifa al-Thani said his country will invest £5 billion in Britain within five years in a boost for the post-Brexit economy.
(AFP, 3/27/17)
2017 Mar 27, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was sentenced to 15 days behind bars and fined after staging the biggest anti-corruption protests in years, an act branded a "provocation" by the Kremlin.
(AFP, 3/27/17)
2017 Mar 27, Saudi Arabia cut taxes on oil companies in a major move that could attract investments in its energy giant Aramco, expected to be offered to investors in 2018.
(AFP, 3/27/17)
2017 Mar 27, In Syria hundreds of rebels left their last bastion in Homs city, resuming an evacuation expected to be among the largest of its kind under a Russian-backed deal with the government.
(Reuters, 3/27/17)
2017 Mar 27, Thailand's broadcast regulator ordered television channel Voice TV to suspend its over-the-air broadcasting for a week for what it called biased reports affecting national security. The station is controlled by the family of former PM Thaksin Shinawatra, who was ousted by a 2006 army coup and is in exile to avoid a prison term for corruption.
(AP, 3/27/17)
2017 Mar 28, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order to undo a slew of Obama-era climate change regulations that his administration says is hobbling oil drillers and coal miners, a move environmental groups have vowed to take to court. Trump signed an executive order to review and revise Obama’s flagship energy policy, the Clean Power Plan, which has never been implemented.
(Reuters, 3/28/17)(Econ, 4/1/17, p.22)
2017 Mar 28, The US Supreme Court voted 5-3 to reverse a Texas appeals court ruling that said Death Row inmate Bobby James Moore was not intellectually disabled in the 1980 murder of a Houston grocery store clerk.
(SFC, 3/29/17, p.A4)
2017 Mar 28, The US FDA approved Dupixent, developed by Sanofi of Paris and Regeneron Pharmaceuticals of New York, for moderate or severe eczema. The initial price was listed at $37,000 per year. The FDA also approved Genentech’s Ocrevus, the first drug for an aggressive kind of multiple schlerosis.
(SFC, 3/29/17, p.C2)(SFC, 3/30/17, p.A6)
2017 Mar 28, Tech giant Amazon expanded its global reach with the announcement of a deal to buy Dubai-based Souq.com, the Middle East's largest online retailer.
(AFP, 3/28/17)
2017 Mar 28, Wells Fargo said it has agreed to pay $110 million to settle a class-action lawsuit over up to two million accounts that its employees opened for customers without getting their permission.
(SFC, 3/29/17, p.C1)
2017 Mar 28, In Australia Tropical Cyclone Debbie hit the far north of Queensland as a category 4 storm. It was soon downgraded to category 2.
(Reuters, 3/28/17)
2017 Mar 28, In Bangladesh at least four people died and several remain missing after a ferry carrying about 80 passengers capsized the Panguchi River. At least 18 people remained missing.
(Reuters, 3/28/17)
2017 Mar 28, Britain's new 12-sided £1 coin with the symbols of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland goes into circulation on the eve of the launch of a Brexit process that has put national unity in doubt.
(AFP, 3/28/17)
2017 Mar 28, London and Paris signed a business agreement, to be launched in 2018, to cooperate in attracting visitors and companies.
(AP, 3/28/17)
2017 Mar 28, Canada’s prestigious Gairdner Award went to UCSF researcher David Julius for his work on how pain is perceived by receptors in human nerve endings.
(SFC, 3/28/17, p.A1)
2017 Mar 28, The Danish branch of the ride-sharing service Uber said it is shutting down its services in Denmark due to a proposed law that toughens standards for cabs.
(AP, 3/28/17)
2017 Mar 28, The central European Visegrad Group (Czech Rep., Hungary, Poland and Slovakia) rejected a European Union policy that calls for all member states to receive migrants, protesting suggestions that the level of their compliance could be linked to the availability of EU funds to them.
(AP, 3/28/17)
2017 Mar 28, A French court sent Carlos the Jackal, once one of the world's most wanted criminals, back to jail for his third life sentence after convicting him of a grenade attack 42 years ago on a Paris shop that killed two people.
(Reuters, 3/28/17)
2017 Mar 28, A Gambian boy (16) was rescued by a Spanish frigate after a rubber boat packed with 147 migrants sank in the Mediterranean shortly after leaving Libya a few days earlier. The sole survivor was transferred to an Italian Coast Guard ship. 140 others disembarked at a different port March 30 and several identified the boy as having been on the same boat. Aid groups said this reduced the death toll to five.
(Reuters, 3/29/17)(Reuters, 3/31/17)
2017 Mar 28, German prosecutors announced an investigation into claims that Turkish agents are spying on alleged followers of exiled preacher Fethullah Gulen in Germany.
(AFP, 3/28/17)
2017 Mar 28, Iceland became the first country to introduce legislation requiring employers to prove they are paying men and women equally.
(SFC, 3/31/17, p.C2)
2017 Mar 28, In Kashmir three civilians were killed and 28 other people were injured in anti-India protests that erupted following a gunbattle between rebels and government forces that killed a rebel.
(AP, 3/28/17)
2017 Mar 28, Former rebels in Mali reversed a decision to boycott a national reconciliation conference after receiving assurances from the government.
(AFP, 3/28/17)
2017 Mar 28, In northern Mexico inmates rioted at a psychiatric block in a prison, broke into a prison pharmacy and took drugs that caused the deaths of two of them in Cadereyta, Nuevo Leon state. Disturbances had begun earlier this week as inmates protested a new program to inspect visitors with a type of X-ray machine to prevent contraband being smuggled into the facility.
(AP, 3/29/17)
2017 Mar 28, In Mexico Rev. Oscar Lopez Navarro was abducted late today outside his residence by people who had been following him in the city of Tampico.
(AP, 3/30/17)
2017 Mar 28, Montenegro became set to become NATO's 29th member following the US Senate's overwhelming ratification.
(AP, 3/29/17)
2017 Mar 28, Air Koryo, North Korea's national carrier, connected Pyongyang with the northeastern Chinese city of Dandong on a twice-weekly inaugural flight.
(Reuters, 3/28/17)
2017 Mar 28, Thousands of students at the Univ. of Puerto Rico went on a one-week strike to protest multimillion-dollar cuts prompted by an economic crisis.
(AP, 3/28/17)
2017 Mar 28, Romania’s former tourism minister Elena Udrea was handed a six-year sentence for bribery and abuse of office connected to a boxing gala that she organized in 2011. Former chairman of Romania's Boxing Federation Rudel Obreja received a five-year sentence for tax evasion. Udrea's assistant received three years for complicity to bribery.
(AP, 3/28/17)
2017 Mar 28, In South Africa celebrated anti-apartheid activist Ahmed Kathrada (87), a Robben Island prisoner and one of Nelson Mandela's closest colleagues in the struggle against white rule, died in Johannesburg.
(AFP, 3/28/17)
2017 Mar 28, In Syria the Islamic State group launched a counter-attack to fend off a US-backed advance around the Tabqa airbase near the jihadists' stronghold Raqa. The SDF held back the attack and managed to seize some ammunition and rocket stores.
(AFP, 3/28/17)
2017 Mar 28, Thailand authorities escalated their effort to collect taxes they say are due from ousted PM Thaksin Shinawatra, posting a bill for 17.6 billion baht ($503 million) at the house where he lived before fleeing into exile in 2008 to avoid a prison term for conflict of interest. A lawyer for Thaksin contended that under the law in existence at the time of the 2006 sale, the shares were exempt from tax.
(AP, 3/28/17)
2017 Mar 28, Yemeni troops captured a senior leader of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) during an early morning raid in the southeastern Hadramawt region. They detained three others and killed two more.
(Reuters, 3/28/17)
2017 Mar 29, Pres. Donald Trump signed a directive declaring parts of Somalia an “area of active hostilities," where warzone targeting rules will apply for at least 180 days.
(SFC, 3/30/17, p.A4)
2017 Mar 29, Melania Trump helped present the Sec. of State’s Int’l. Women of Courage awards to 13 women from around the world.
(SFC, 3/30/17, p.A6)
2017 Mar 29, In Hawaii US District Judge Derrick Watson issued a 24-page order blocking the government from suspending new visas for travelers from six Muslim-majority countries and from halting the U.S. refugee program. He had temporarily blocked Pres. Donald Trump's revised travel ban hours before it was set to take effect.
(AP, 3/30/17)
2017 Mar 29, In San Francisco the homeowner’s association of the sinking Millennium Tower sued the public agency building the Transbay Transit Center next door and others for more than $200 million in damages. The structure has sunk 16 inches and tilted two inches since it was completed in 2009.
(SFC, 3/30/17, p.D6)
2017 Mar 29, Alexei Abrikosov 88), Russian-born physicist and Nobel Prize winner (2003), died in Sunnyvale, Ca.
(SFC, 4/5/17, p.D6)
2017 Mar 29, In Oklahoma and Texas six people were killed and nearly 200,000 customers were without electric power after overnight storms brought tornadoes, torrential rain and hail to large parts of the states.
(Reuters, 3/29/17)(SFC, 3/30/17, p.A12)
2017 Mar 29, In southwestern Texas a small shuttle bus carrying church members home from a retreat collided with a pickup truck killing 13 people in Uvalde County. The pickup driver, Jack Dillon Young (20), said he had been texting while driving.
(SFC, 3/30/17, p.A12)(SFC, 4/1/17, p.A7)
2017 Mar 29, Westinghouse Electric Co. the US nuclear unit of Japan’s Toshiba Corp., filed for bankruptcy protection in NYC.
(SFC, 3/30/17, p.C6)
2017 Mar 29, A Bahrain court sentenced two people to death over a 2015 bomb attack that killed two police officers and wounded six others. The court handed down lengthy sentences to 11 others, including former lawmaker Hassan Isa, a senior member of the main Shiite opposition Al-Wefaq group, which was dissolved last year. He and ten others received sentences ranging from 10 years to life imprisonment.
(AP, 3/29/17)(Reuters, 3/29/17)
2017 Mar 29, In Bangladesh as many as eight militants blew themselves up with a grenade north of Dhaka rather than surrender to officers who had cornered them in their hideout in Nasirpur.
(Reuters, 3/30/17)
2017 Mar 29, Theresa May sent a six-page document to the EU summit chair to trigger a two-year countdown to withdrawal from the EU.
(Reuters, 3/29/17)
2017 Mar 29, A privately-owned Twin Squirrel chopper failed to arrive in Dublin as scheduled after taking off from Luton airport near London. Mountain rescuers the next day found five bodies with the wreckage of a helicopter in north Wales.
(AP, 3/30/17)
2017 Mar 29, The mayors of Paris and London announced a new scheme for monitoring emissions from vehicles, aimed at improving air quality in the two capitals.
(Reuters, 3/29/17)
2017 Mar 29, In China a French national was assaulted in Shanghai with a knife days after police in Paris shot a Chinese man dead in his home, triggering protests in parts of the French capital and demands by Beijing for an explanation.
(Reuters, 3/31/17)
2017 Mar 29, Indonesian residents in a neighborhood of Banda Aceh, reported two men, aged 23 and 20, to police for having gay sex. If found guilty, the men will be the first to be caned for gay sex under a new code implemented two years ago.
(AP, 4/8/17)
2017 Mar 29, Italy's parliament gave final approval to a law outlining comprehensive standards of care for unaccompanied migrant children arriving in Italy, including a strict prohibition of turning them away at the border.
(AP, 3/29/17)
2017 Mar 29, A court in Ivory Coast acquitted former First Lady Simone Gbagbo of crimes against humanity and war crimes charges linked to her role in a 2011 civil war that killed about 3,000 people. She had already been tried and convicted in March 2015 of offences against the state and sentenced to 20 years in prison.
(Reuters, 3/29/17)
2017 Mar 29, In Jordan the 22-member Arab League looked to overcome divisions and "foreign interference" on regional crises including the devastating wars in Syria and Yemen as they met for an annual summit in Sweimeh. Arab leaders re-launched a peace plan that offers Israel full ties in exchange for Palestinian statehood.
(AFP, 3/29/17)(SFC, 3/30/17, p.A2)
2017 Mar 29, Israeli paramilitary police officers shot and killed a Palestinian woman who tried to attack them with a knife outside Jerusalem's walled Old City.
(Reuters, 3/29/17)
2017 Mar 29, Luxembourg claimed the legal right to host the London-based European Banking Authority after Brexit. PM Xavier Bettel made his case in a letter to EU Council President Donald Tusk and European Commission head Jean-Claude Juncker.
(AFP, 3/30/17)
2017 Mar 29, Malian security forces said two soldiers and a civilian were killed. A new jihadist alliance, the "Group to Support Islam and Muslims" (GSIM), led by Iyad Ag Ghaly of Islamist organization Ansar Dine, soon claimed responsibility.
(AFP, 4/1/17)
2017 Mar 29, South Korea-based Samsung introduced the Galaxy S8, its first major smartphone release since some of its Note7 smartphones spontaneously caught fire.
(SFC, 3/30/17, p.C3)
2017 Mar 29, In Syria a bomb blast hit a passenger bus in the government-held city of Homs at noon, killing five people and wounding six.
(Reuters, 3/29/17)
2017 Mar 29, In southern Thailand a gunbattle at a police checkpoint resulted in the deaths of two gunmen in Narathiwat province.
(AP, 3/30/17)
2017 Mar 29, Tunisia's former PM Mehdi Jomaa launched a new political party which he said would be non-ideological and could "restore hope for Tunisians" frustrated by the country's transition.
(Reuters, 3/29/17)
2017 Mar 29, Ukraine's National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) searched the offices of the central bank as part of an investigation into allegations that central bank officials abused their position to benefit third parties.
(Reuters, 3/29/17)
2017 Mar 29, The UN said a malaria outbreak has killed more than 4,000 people in Burundi this year, a significant increase over the 700 cited by the country’s health ministry on March 13.
(SFC, 3/30/17, p.A2)
2017 Mar 29, Venezuela's Supreme Court ruled that it can take over responsibilities assigned to Congress. Earlier this week, the high court also moved to place limits on lawmakers' immunity from prosecution. Opponents of President Nicolas Maduro said it's part of an attempt to install a dictatorship in the South American nation.
(AP, 3/30/17)
2017 Mar 30, SpaceX launched its first recycled rocket. The Falcon 9 hoisted a broadcasting satellite into the sky from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
(SFC, 3/31/17, p.C2)
2017 Mar 30, In Chicago five people were killed in separate shootings in the South Shore area. A drive-by shooting in the same area killed another two people.
(SFC, 4/1/17, p.A7)
2017 Mar 30, In Atlanta, Ga., a fire caused a portion of I-85 to collapse. Basil Eleby was arrested the next day in connection with the fire.
(SSFC, 4/2/17, p.A5)
2017 Mar 30, North Carolina’s Gov. Roy Cooper signed a bill rolling back the state’s “bathroom bill" to end a yearlong backlash over transgender rights that has cost the state dearly in various business projects, conventions and sport tournaments.
(SFC, 3/30/17, p.A12)
2017 Mar 30, In Argentina port workers in Greater Rosario suspended plans for a 24-hour strike after a truck driver ran over and killed a protester.
(Reuters, 3/30/17)
2017 Mar 30, Ethiopia's parliament approved a four month extension of a state of emergency that was first imposed in October to quell nearly a year of anti-government protests.
(AFP, 3/30/17)
2017 Mar 30, The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) accused Greece of failing to protect migrant workers who had been subject to "forced labor" and shot at by security guards when they protested over unpaid wages. It ordered Athens to pay 16,000 euros each to the workers whose case had triggered outrage across the country.
(Reuters, 3/30/17)
2017 Mar 30, Volkswagen AG said it has agreed to pay $157.45 million to settle environmental claims from 10 US states over its excess diesel emissions, as the world's largest automaker looks to move past the scandal.
(Reuters, 3/30/17)
2017 Mar 30, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s Security Cabinet approved a plan to create Israel's first new settlement in the occupied West Bank in more than 20 years despite international concern over the issue. Netanyahu also ordered limitations on settlement expansion in territory Palestinians claim for a state.
(AFP, 3/30/17)(AP, 3/31/17)(SFC, 3/30/17, p.A2)
2017 Mar 30, Italian police arrested three Kosovans in the lagoon city of Venice after one was caught on a phone intercept proposing they bomb the famed Rialto bridge while others lauded the recent attack in London. A minor was also detained.
(AP, 3/30/17)
2017 Mar 30, A Lithuanian university says a scholar has discovered a missing copy of the country's 1918 Independence Act in the archives of Germany's foreign ministry in Berlin. The document was apparently sent in 1918 to inform Germany it could no longer control the territory that was occupied by German Empire troops. The original was kept in Kaunas but disappeared in 1940 when Soviet Russia occupied the country.
(AP, 3/30/17)
2017 Mar 30, Malaysia said it has agreed to release the body of Kim Jong Nam to North Korea in exchange for the return of nine Malaysians held in the North's capital.
(AP, 3/30/17)
2017 Mar 30, In Nigeria Boko Haram jihadists raided the village of Pulka near border with Cameroon and kidnapped 18 girls. Jihadists outside Dumba killed a herdsman who had tried to escape after refusing to pay protection money. They shot dead 50 of his cattle and took four women from his family along with the rest of his herd.
(AFP, 4/1/17)
2017 Mar 30, In Pakistan a suspected militant killed Saleem Latif, a lawyer from the country's minority Ahmadi sect, over blasphemy allegations. Security forces arrested the attacker following the killing in eastern Punjab province.
(AP, 3/30/17)
2017 Mar 30, In Paraguay the annual meeting of the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) opened in Asuncion.
(Econ, 4/8/17, p.30)
2017 Mar 30, Philippine Pres. Rodrigo Duterte unleashed an expletive-laden tirade against the country's leading newspaper and TV network and threatened to humiliate them and their owners, whom he accused of distorting news of his anti-drug crackdown.
(AP, 3/30/17)
2017 Mar 30, Visa requirement between Russia and South Africa were scrapped allowing up to 90 days of trouble-free travel.
(Econ, 3/18/17, p.53)
2017 Mar 30, South Africa’s President Jacob Zuma late today fired the Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan in a Cabinet reshuffle, intensifying a rift in the party that took power after the 1994 end of white minority rule as well as concerns about corruption at top levels of government.
(AP, 3/31/17)
2017 Mar 30, In Syria Russian warplanes pounded rebel-held areas north of the city of Hama in an escalation of air strikes, as government forces fought to reverse the insurgents' biggest assault in months.
(Reuters, 3/30/17)
2017 Mar 30, In southern Thailand an army ranger was found shot dead. Five gunmen opened fire at a police station in Narathiwat province, killing a policeman and wounding three others in the latest killings in a region troubled by violent Muslim separatism.
(AP, 3/30/17)
2017 Mar 30, Uganda’s military said Michael Omona, a key aide to warlord Joseph Kony has, surrendered to Ugandan forces. A day earlier the US indicated it was pulling out of the international manhunt for one of Africa's most notorious fugitives.
(AP, 3/30/17)
2017 Mar 30, The UN refugee agency said the number of Syrians who have fled their country after six years of civil war has surpassed the 5-million mark.
(AP, 3/30/17)
2017 Mar 30, Venezuela's Supreme Court took over legislative powers from the opposition-majority National Assembly, a dramatic tightening of leftist President Nicolas Maduro and his allies' grip amid a devastating economic crisis.
(AFP, 3/30/17)
2017 Mar 30, Zambia’s Pres. Edgar Lungu said a Chinese bank will help finance the construction of 2,000 homes for local military personnel who face a critical shortage of housing.
(Reuters, 3/30/17)
2017 Mar 31, A US federal judge approved an agreement for Pres. Donald Trump to pay $25 million to settle lawsuits over his now defunct Trump University ending nearly seven years of legal battles. In 2018 a federal appeals court in San Francisco upheld the settlement.
(SFC, 4/1/17, p.A9)(SFC, 2/7/18, p.D2)
2017 Mar 31, Richard N. Bolles (b.1927), author of “What Color Is Your Parachute" (1970), died in Danville, Ca. The former Harvard physics major and Episcopal priest wrote the book as a guide to help readers understand themselves.
(SFC, 4/4/17, p.D1)
2017 Mar 31, NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio vowed to begin a ten-year process to shut down the Rikers Island jail.
(Econ, 4/15/17, p.26)
2017 Mar 31, Pop artist James Rosenquist (83) died in NYC. “F-111" his best known work was made in 1964-1965 as a protest against US militarism.
(SSFC, 4/2/17, p.C11)
2017 Mar 31, Belarus police searched the offices of a Polish satellite TV channel that has given extensive coverage to a recent wave of anti-government protests.
(AP, 3/31/17)
2017 Mar 31, Tens of thousands of Brazilians returned to the streets to protest reforms backed by President Michel Temer's conservative government.
(AFP, 3/31/17)
2017 Mar 31, In southern Colombia mudslides late today claimed at least 16 lives and injured some 65 people following recent torrential rains. The mudslides were caused by the rise of the Mocoa River and three tributaries. On April 7 Colombian officials formally abandoned the search for survivors as the death toll stood at 314.
(AFP, 4/1/17)(AP, 4/2/17)(AFP, 4/5/17)(AP, 4/8/17)
2017 Mar 31, In France hemmed in and closely watched by police, hundreds of Muslims unrolled rugs and mats and prayed outdoors in the busy streets of a Paris suburb to protest the closure of their prayer hall.
(AP, 3/31/17)
2017 Mar 31, A German court convicted a Moroccan-born man, identified only as Souhayl M. (19), of raping a 90-year-old woman and sentenced him to 5 ½ years in prison. The victim was attacked last October just after she visited a church.
(AP, 3/31/17)
2017 Mar 31, Hungarian PM Viktor Orban said the Central European University (CEU) in Budapest, founded by financier George Soros, had "cheated" in awarding its diplomas and violated Hungarian laws. Hungarian scholars and teaching organizations have come out in support of CEU, saying it was one of the preeminent centers of thought in the country and deserved to be saved.
(Reuters, 3/31/17)
2017 Mar 31, Japan's whaling fleet returned home after killing 333 whales in the Antarctic, achieving its goal for the second year under a revised research whaling program.
(AP, 3/31/17)
2017 Mar 31, Hundreds of Mongolians protested in Ulaanbaatar over the alleged theft of government funds deposited in offshore accounts. Opposition politicians and activists demanded the return of what some said is $17 billion in funds plundered by ruling party politicians and their influential friends.
(AP, 3/31/17)
2017 Mar 31, In Pakistan a powerful car bomb exploded near a minority Shiite Muslim place of worship in the northwest town of Parachinar, killing at least 24 people and wounding over 70 others. Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, a breakaway faction of Pakistani Taliban militants, claimed responsibility.
(AP, 3/31/17)
2017 Mar 31, Palestinian Hatem al-Maghari returned overnight to his family in Gaza after 17 years in an Israeli jail. He had been arrested and convicted of murder after the brutal lynching of two Israeli soldiers in 2000, but was released this week after new evidence emerged. He was still found guilty of aggression against a soldier and not preventing an offence and sentenced to 11 and a half years in prison, but with time already served was released immediately.
(AFP, 3/31/17)
2017 Mar 31, In Paraguay protesters stormed and set fire to the Congress after the Senate secretly voted for a constitutional amendment that would allow President Horacio Cartes to run for re-election.
(Reuters, 4/1/17)
2017 Mar 31, Teachers across Poland staged a strike to protest a sweeping overhaul of the education system by the populist government that will see middle schools eliminated this fall.
(AP, 3/31/17)
2017 Mar 31, Russian prosecutors moved to block calls on social networks for more street protests in Moscow and other Russian cities following a wave of rallies that have cast a new challenge to the Kremlin.
(AP, 3/31/17)
2017 Mar 31, The Scottish government formally asked British PM Theresa May for a second referendum on independence, deepening a constitutional crisis sparked by the Brexit vote.
(AFP, 3/31/17)
2017 Mar 31, Somali pirates seized an Indian cargo ship and 11 crew members. The "Al Kausar" is the third vessel to be hijacked in less than a month off Somalia’s coast.
(AFP, 4/3/17)
2017 Mar 31, South Korea's embattled former President Park Geun-hye was jailed in a scandal that has set off a political firestorm and led to the arrests and indictments of dozens of high-profile figures.
(AP, 3/31/17)
2017 Mar 31, The Stella Daisy cargo ship being used by a South Korean shipping company went missing in seas near Uruguay with 16 Filipino and 8 South Korean crew members. Two Filipino sailors were rescued on April 1.
(AP, 4/1/17)(AFP, 4/2/17)
2017 Mar 31, Swedish prosecutors investigating a suspected gang rape and its broadcast via Facebook Live said they had received a copy of the footage from the US social media company.
(Reuters, 3/31/17)
2017 Mar 31, Credit Suisse issued a brief statement saying that local authorities had made "visits" to its offices in Amsterdam, Paris and London in connection with unspecified client tax issues. The European Union judicial agency Eurojust said it had helped coordinate cross-border investigations in a major tax evasion investigation involving millions of euros and spanning several European countries and Australia.
(AP, 3/31/17)(Reuters, 3/31/17)
2017 Mar 31, In Turkey a court in Istanbul released singer Atilla Tas and 20 others from jail pending an outcome of their trial on terrorism charges. Five of them will remain in prison while two of the defendants are at large and being tried in absentia.
(AP, 3/31/17)
2017 Mar 31, In Turkey Selahattin Demirtas, the jailed leader the pro-Kurdish People's Democratic Party (HDP), said he has begun a hunger strike to protest prison conditions.
(AP, 3/31/17)
2017 Mar 31, Leaders of Turkmenistan and Belarus attended the launch of a huge potash fertilizer plant worth more than $1 billion. The plant in Garlyk, built near huge potash deposits, was built by Belarus.
(AP, 3/31/17)
2017 Mar 31, Venezuelan security forces violently repressed small protests that broke out in Caracas after the government-stacked Supreme Court gutted congress of its last vestiges of power, drawing widespread condemnation from foreign countries and even from the government's top prosecutor.
(AP, 3/31/17)
2017 Mar, Ransomware software dubbed Wanna Cry was leaked on to the Internet. The method it used had been discovered years ago by the US National Security Agency (NSA). Only after the theft did the NSA inform Microsoft of the flaw, leading the firm to rush out a fix.
(Econ 5/20/17, p.13)
2017 Mar, Eric Conn (56), a Kentucky lawyer, pleaded guilty to stealing from the federal government and bribing a judge of $550 million in federal disability benefits. Conn, once one of the country's top disability lawyers, was given a 12-year prison term. On June 2 Conn cut off his electronic monitor and escaped to Mexico. In October it was reported that Conn had help in carrying out the escape plot hatched a year before fleeing.
(AP, 10/17/17)(Econ 6/24/17, p.24)
2017 Mar, A Pennsylvania judge ruled that Allentown-based, long-term care insurer Penn Treaty American Corp. was insolvent. This left health insurers across the country on the hook for the company’s losses. Analysts estimated the company’s long-term liabilities near $4 billion, but assets at only about $700 million.
(SFC, 8/14/17, p.D1)
2017 Mar, Brazil’s environmental agency, IBAMA, ordered the suspension of two JBS meat packing plants and 13 others in southwest Pará state for buying cattle raised on pastures cleared by slashing and burning the forest. It fined the company 24 million reais ($7.7 million). JBS denied purchasing livestock from ranchers on land blacklisted by IBAMA and won an injunction from a federal judge allowing its plants to continue buying cattle. The agency appealed the ruling.
(Reuters, 4/2/17)
2017 Mar, In Brazil the howler-monkey population in Espirito Santo and Minas Gerais states was reported to be crashing. Doctors suspected this was due to yellow fever. Since December 371 human cases have been reported, a third of them fatal.
(Econ, 3/18/17, pp.)
2017 Mar, China’s government, under pressure from the US and the UN, agreed to make four variants of fentanyl, a synthetic opioid, illegal. Illicit fentanyl first started to appear in the 1980s.
(Econ 5/20/17, p.13)
2017 Mar, The Chinese TV show “In the Name of the People," a 55-part series about China’s battle against corruption, began broadcasting.
(Econ 5/13/17, p.68)
2017 Mar, Chi-Med, a biotech firm in Shanghai, received positive results in a late-stage trial of Fruquintinib, its drug for colorectal cancer.
(Econ, 3/18/17, p.68)
2017 Mar, China was now the 11th biggest donor to the Int’l. Development Association (IDA), the arm of the World Bank that helps the world’s poorest countries.
(Econ, 3/25/17, pp.)
2017 Mar, In Europe some 62,000 asylum seekers were stranded in Greece. Another 7,000 were stranded in Serbia.
(Econ, 3/18/17, p.57)
2017 Mar, Iceland lifted remaining controls on capital outflows, set up during the financial crisis of 2007-2008, allowing pension and investment funds to invest their money abroad. Controls on inflows were tightened.
(Econ, 3/18/17, p.77)
2017 Mar, India slipped a new rule into the annual budget bill that frees taxmen to raid or seize any property at any time with no need to explain why.
(Econ, 4/8/17, p.34)
2017 Mar, In Iran masked goons arrested 12 administrators of popular social-media news channels.
(Econ, 4/15/17, p.41)
2017 Mar, In Iraq American officers estimated that as few as 500 Islamic State fighters remained in Mosul.
(Econ, 3/11/17, p.45)
2017 Mar, In Japan a man (23) died of suicide while working at Tokyo’s new Olympic stadium. In October Japan’s labor standard office ruled that his death stemmed from overwork (karoshi) and that his family was eligible for government compensation. The man had recorded 190 hours of overtime in the month before killing himself.
(SFC, 10/11/17, p.A2)
2017 Mar, In Lithuania Evaldas Rimasauskas (48) was arrested at the request of US authorities, who accuse the man of wire fraud, money laundering and aggravated identity theft and conning Google and Facebook out of over $100 million. The companies say they recovered most of the money.
(AP, 5/18/17)
2017 Mar, Russia’s Ministry of Justice asked the Supreme Court to outlaw the Jehovah’s Witnesses Christian denomination. Members in Russia numbered about 170,000.
(SFC, 4/5/17, p.A5)
2017 Mar, Tanzania’s Pres. John Magufuli imposed a ban on the export of gold and copper concentrates.
(Econ 6/17/17, p.61)
2017 Mar, In Thailand Vivat Yodprasit, dubbed the "Popcorn Gunman," received a 37-year, 4-month sentence for murder, attempted murder and illegal possession of weapons, halved from the original term because of his confession to police for opening fire with an assault rifle concealed in a sack during a political confrontation in February 2014. However, he recanted his confession in court, claiming he had been tortured. On June 27 a court ruled that there was not enough evidence to convict Yodprasit in the shootings.
(AP, 6/27/17)
2017 Mar, United Nations satellite images showed at least 18,000 structures have been destroyed in the Yei area of South Sudan, one of the most significant caches of evidence of widespread destruction in the country's civil war.
(AP, 4/7/17)
2017 Mar, The UN said 7 million of Yemen’s 27 million people are going hungry and that the country is the world’s largest humanitarian crisis.
(Econ, 3/25/17, p.40)
2017 Mar, In Venezuela former general Raul Baduel was charged with treason two days before completed a sentence for illicit enrichment.
(Econ, 3/11/17, p.36)
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