Portal:Current events/2010 June 10

June 10, 2010 (Thursday)

Armed conflicts and attacks

War in Afghanistan:
- Taliban militants execute a 7-year-old boy for "spying for the government" in Helmand province in southern Afghanistan, in an increasing wave of killings. (CNN) (The New York Times)
- David Cameron, on his first visit to Afghanistan, and Hamid Karzai issue a joint condemnation of a recent suicide attack on a wedding, labelling it "a crime of massive inhuman proportions". (Aljazeera)

Art, culture and entertainment

Soweto hosts an opening concert ahead of the 2010 FIFA World Cup, attended by tens of thousands of people and featuring appearances from international figures such as Desmond Tutu, Hugh Masekela, Amadou & Mariam, Shakira, Juanes, Black Eyed Peas and Alicia Keys. (AFP) (The Hindu) (USA Today)
15 large storage boxes containing manuscripts, notebooks and letters belonging to J. G. Ballard are acquired by the British Library. (BBC) (The Guardian) (The Independent)

Disasters

Gulf of Mexico oil spill:
- The Obama administration announces that BP will speed up claims payments stemming from the massive Gulf oil spill, to fishermen, property owners and businesspeople who have filed damage claims and are complaining of delays, excessive paperwork and inadequate compensation. (USA Today) (AP)
- British Prime Minister David Cameron offers to help the US deal with the oil as clean-up costs mount and BP shares slide to their lowest levels in 13 years. (Reuters)^{[permanent dead link]} (BBC)
- A new government calculation suggests that an amount of oil equivalent to approximately 25,000 to 30,000 barrels of oil could have been flowing into the Gulf of Mexico before BP capped some of the flow on June 3, an amount that is far above the previous estimate of 12,000 to 19,000 barrels a day. (The New York Times)

International relations

A group of German Jews prepare to send a ship with humanitarian aid to the blockaded Gaza Strip. (AFP)
Russia announces plans to sell Iran S-300 ground-to-air missiles, stating that the new United Nations sanctions do not cover stationary air defense weaponry. (Ynetnews)

Law and crime

Seven former British soldiers join 98 American soldiers to sue American defence firm KBR, who they say exposed them to dangerous levels of toxic chemicals in Iraq. (BBC)
Former president of Taiwan Chen Shui-bian's life sentence is cut to twenty years in prison. (AP via Houston Chronicle)
Vujadin Popović and Ljubiša Beara, former high-ranking officers of the Bosnian Serb army, are found guilty of genocide and sentenced to life imprisonment for their roles in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, the harshest judgment ever delivered by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. (AP) (Al Jazeera)
Miloš Simović is arrested in a forest near Belgrade while attempting to cross into Croatia. He was convicted in absentia of the assassination of Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Đinđić in 2003. (BBC) (Reuters) (Miami Herald)^{[permanent dead link]}
Max Goeldi, the Swiss businessman at the centre of a long-running diplomatic row between Libya and Switzerland, is released from prison in Tripoli. (BBC) (France24)
Two Norwegians, including one with British citizenship, Joshua French and Tjostolv Moland, are sentenced to death by a military court in the Democratic Republic of the Congo on charges of murder and espionage. (BBC)
Kenyan police hunt for an alleged cult leader who instructed a serial killer to take up a killing spree. (Capital FM) (BBC) (IOL)

Politics and elections

The Palestinian Authority (PA) indefinitely postpones local elections scheduled for July 17: no reason is provided. (Aljazeera)
Ireland's Labour Party tops an opinion poll, the first time in the country's history that this has occurred and an event which would "radically alter" Irish politics in a general election. (Reuters Africa) (The Irish Times) (RTÉ) (The Wall Street Journal)

Science

The first solar sail is unfurled by Japanese space organization JAXA. (inhabitat)
South Korea's space agency, KARI, loses contact with a Naro-1 rocket carrying the STSAT-2B satellite, 132 seconds after launch. Officials believe the rocket exploded. (BBC) (Yonhap)

Sports

In the first move of a possible major realignment of U.S. college sports, the Pacific-10 Conference announces that the University of Colorado, a current member of the Big 12 Conference, has accepted the Pac-10's invitation to join that conference. (ESPN)