Portal:Current events/2021 May 12

Armed conflicts and attacks

• War in Afghanistan
  • 2021 Afghanistan attacks
    • Mullah Mannan Niazi, the deputy leader of a splinter group of Taliban led by Mullah Rasul, is wounded and left in a coma after attackers target the area where he lived in Herat Province. Three of Niazi's men are also killed and four others wounded during the clash. (TOLO News)
    • Afghan officials confirm that Nirkh District, in Maidan Wardak Province, was captured by the Taliban yesterday as the group seized the district building and set it on fire after days of intense siege. Attacks by the group have significantly increased as United States troops have started to withdraw from the country before the final deadline of September 11. (DW)
• 2021 Israel–Palestine crisis
  • Thirty-seven more Palestinian civilians are killed after further airstrikes are executed by Israel in the Gaza Strip, thereby bringing the death toll to 69. Among the victims are a five-year-old child and their parents, who died when a residential building collapsed, while five more are farmers killed at their farms. The number of children killed rises to seventeen. At least 390 people have also been injured. The main Palestinian headquarters and all of the police stations in Gaza are destroyed by the strikes. Protests also erupt in the West Bank, resulting in the deaths of three protesters. (Al Jazeera)
  • Three additional people are killed by Hamas' rockets in Lod, while an IDF soldier is killed as a military jeep outside Gaza is bombed, thereby bringing the Israeli death toll to seven. (BBC News)
  • The Israel Defense Forces says that it has conducted a "complex and first-of-its-kind operation" in the Gaza Strip, killing several senior members of Hamas. (AP) (Reuters)
  • Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declares a state of emergency in the city of Lod following rioting between Arabs and Jews. It is the first use of emergency powers over an Arab community in Israel since 1966. (Times of Israel)
  • U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken announces that the Biden administration will send Hady Amr to help defuse tensions. Blinken also defends Israel's right to exist and condemns Hamas for firing rockets. (Ynet)
• 2021 Colombian protests
  • President of Colombia Iván Duque Márquez announces that 65 officers have been given disciplinary actions for acts of brutality allegedly committed while repressing demonstrations. Of the actions, eight were for homicide, 27 for abuse of authority, and 11 for physical assaults. (MercoPress)
• Insurgency in the Maghreb
  • 2021 Niger attacks
    • Five villagers are killed and two more wounded as militants storm the village of Fantio, in the Tillabéri Region, Niger, during Eid al-Fitr celebrations. (Africa News)

Business and economy

• Amazon wins a legal dispute against a European Union order to pay back taxes of €250 million ($303 million). The setback renewed calls from EU lawmakers for a global corporate tax deal and for several to voice their support for the Biden administration's proposed 21% minimum tax rate on multinationals. (Reuters)
• Tesla announces they will no longer accept Bitcoin as payment. (AP)

Health and environment

• COVID-19 pandemic
  • COVID-19 pandemic in Asia
    • COVID-19 pandemic in India
      • India reports a record 4,205 deaths from COVID-19 in the past 24 hours, thereby bringing the nationwide death toll to 254,197. (The Times of India)
      • COVID-19 pandemic in Uttar Pradesh
        • A total of 52 bodies have been found floating in the Ganges in the state of Uttar Pradesh with suspicions that villages may simply be disposing of pandemic deaths in the river. (The New Indian Express)
    • COVID-19 pandemic in Kyrgyzstan
      • Kyrgyzstan signs an agreement with the World Bank to purchase vaccines developed by Sinopharm. (Kabar)
    • COVID-19 pandemic in Malaysia
      • Malaysia reports a record 39 deaths from COVID-19 in the past 24 hours, thereby bringing the nationwide death toll to 1,761. (Malay Mail)
    • COVID-19 pandemic in Sri Lanka, Travel restrictions related to the COVID-19 pandemic
      • Sri Lanka imposes a night travel ban from 11:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m. until May 31 in order to combat the rise of COVID-19 cases. (The Hindu)
    • COVID-19 pandemic in Taiwan
      • Taiwan reports a record 16 new locally transmitted cases of COVID-19 in the past 24 hours, thereby bringing the nationwide total of confirmed cases to 1,231. (CNA)
    • COVID-19 pandemic in Thailand
      • Thailand reports a record 34 deaths from COVID-19 in the past 24 hours, thereby bringing the nationwide death toll to 486. (Bangkok Post)
  • COVID-19 pandemic in Europe
    • COVID-19 pandemic in France
      • The French National Assembly approves the creation of a COVID-19 health pass to enable international travel and organization of large events. MPs also agree to end the state of emergency on June 1 and replace it with a transitional period that will last until the end of September, which will allow the prime minister to extend the 9 p.m. curfew until June 30. (Euronews) (The Connexion)
    • COVID-19 pandemic in Hungary
      • Hungary announces that hospitals are resuming elective surgeries, which had been suspended during the pandemic. However, due to the workload, altered circumstances, the vaccination campaign, and other factors, waiting list times have effectively doubled and are now one to two years for most patients. (Hungary Today)
    • COVID-19 pandemic in Norway
      • Prime Minister Erna Solberg announces that Norway will remove the Oxford–AstraZeneca vaccine from its vaccination programme due to the risk of rare blood clots. (Bloomberg)
  • COVID-19 pandemic in North America
    • COVID-19 pandemic in Cuba, Deployment of COVID-19 vaccines
      • Cuba initiates its mass vaccination campaign for around 1.7 million people, using its locally-developed SOBERANA 02 and ABDALA vaccines, both of which have yet to complete its Phase III clinical trials. (The New York Times)
    • COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, COVID-19 vaccination in the United States
      • The Centers of Disease Control and Prevention advisory panel votes to recommend the use of Pfizer–BioNTech vaccine for children aged 12 to 15 years. (The New York Times)
  • Lineage B.1.617
    • The World Health Organization says that the B.1.617 variant first detected in India in October has now been detected in more than 4,500 samples from 44 countries that were uploaded to an open-access database. (Khaleej Times)
• Climate change
  • A study published in Nature estimates that during the last glacial maximum, low-to-mid latitude land surfaces at low elevation cooled on average by 5.8 °C relative to their present day temperatures. The study was based on an analysis of noble gases dissolved in groundwater rather than examinations of species abundances that have been used in the past. (phys.org) (Nature.com)

Law and crime

• Child sexual abuse in the United Kingdom
  • Twenty-nine men are charged with the sexual exploitation and rape of a teenage girl over a seven-year period in Calderdale and Bradford, West Yorkshire, between 2003 and 2010. (BBC News)
• The government of Sierra Leone decides to push for the abolition of capital punishment. (AFP via IOL)
• Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz is investigated by anti-corruption prosecutors for allegedly lying to Parliament about his role in the Ibiza affair. Kurz denies the charges. (Politico.eu)
• UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab reports that war criminal and former Republika Srpska President Radovan Karadžić will serve the rest of his life sentence in the United Kingdom. Karadžić was handed the sentence by International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in 2019 for crimes against humanity committed during the Bosnian War. (Al Jazeera)

Politics and elections

• Protests against the 2021 Israel–Palestine crisis
  • Protesters gather in Paris, France, in support of Palestine following attacks on the Al-Aqsa Mosque and Gaza Strip. During the protest, police dispersed crowds. (Anadolu Agency)
  • Protests break out in Chicago, Illinois, at the Chicago Loop in opposition to Israel's occupation. (Voice of America)
  • In Milwaukee, protesters gather near The Calling sculpture in opposition to Israel's occupation. (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)
• United States House Republicans vote to remove Wyoming representative Liz Cheney as Chair of the House of Representatives Republican Conference, following her critical statements about former President Donald Trump. (BBC News)