Portal:Current events/2018 August 21

August 21, 2018 (2018-08-21) (Tuesday)

Armed conflicts and attacks

• War in Afghanistan
  • Mortars are fired at the diplomatic quarter of Kabul. After several hours of fighting, officials say that the attackers are dead. (BBC)

International relations

• Foreign relations of El Salvador, Foreign relations of Taiwan
  • El Salvador severs diplomatic relations with Taiwan, opting to instead establish ties with China. (Financial Times)

Law and crime

• Sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic dioceses of Pennsylvania
  • The University of Scranton removes the names of three Catholic bishops implicated in the August 2018 grand jury report on abuse in Pennsylvania from its campus buildings. (Times-Tribune) (CNN)
• Pursuit of Nazi collaborators
  • Jakiw Palij, a 95-year-old who is believed to have been a Nazi Trawniki concentration camp guard in 1943, is deported from the United States to Germany. (Time)
• Plea bargaining in the United States
  • Michael Cohen, the ex-lawyer of US President Donald Trump, reaches a plea deal with federal prosecutors. (NBC News)
• Trials of Paul Manafort
  • Former Donald Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort is found guilty on eight charges for false tax returns and bank fraud. (The Guardian)
• People who disappeared mysteriously: post-1970
  • Mollie Tibbetts, a University of Iowa student who was last seen during an evening jog a month ago, is believed to have been found dead. A murder charge was filed against 24-year old Cristhian Rivera, an undocumented immigrant who lives in the area where the college student vanished. (NBC News) (ABC News)

Politics and elections

• Liberal Party of Australia leadership spill, 2018
  • Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull survives a challenge by conservative Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton for leadership of the Liberal Party, with 48 votes to 35. (The Guardian)

Science and technology

• Lunar water
  • Ice is confirmed at the Moon's poles. (BBC) (Independent) (The Guardian)
• Discoveries of exoplanets
  • The mass of exoplanet Beta Pictoris b is measured directly for the first time through astrometry, giving it a mass of 11±2 Jupiter masses, and marking one of the first times an exoplanet was detectable through measuring its effect on the host star's location. (Phys.org)

Sports

• Swimming at the 2018 Asian Games
  • Liu Xiang breaks the 50-metre backstroke swimming world record, setting it at 26.98 seconds, to win the women’s gold medal at the Asian Games. (ESPN) (Reuters India)

Month

August 2018

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