Portal:Current events/2013 May 23
May 23, 2013 (Thursday)
Armed conflicts and attacks
- Syrian Civil War:
- Riots continue for a fourth night in suburbs of the Swedish capital Stockholm heavily populated by immigrants with unrest spreading. (Irish Times)
- Code Pink's Medea Benjamin condemns Barack Obama's use of drones and the Guantanamo hunger strikes during Obama's speech outlining U.S. drone policy. (AP) (The Hill) (Business Insider)
- Two suicide bombers strike in the northern Niger towns of Agadez and Arlit with twenty-one dead and ten more people killed in a gun battle between soldiers and Islamist fighters. (Euronews)
Arts and culture
- The Boy Scouts of America vote to allow openly gay youth to join. (Time)
Business and economy
- Ford Motor Company announces the closure of its Australian manufacturing operations in October 2016, including a car factory in Broadmeadows and an engine plant in Geelong with a loss of 1,200 jobs. (The Australian)
Disasters and accidents
- Five people are killed and thirty eight injured in a road accident in the eastern Indian state of Odisha. (Xinhua)
- The Interstate 5 bridge over the Skagit River collapses in the US town of Mount Vernon, Washington, dumping vehicles in the river but with no fatalities. (KOMO News), (CBC News Canada), (AP via ABC News America)
Health and environment
- Most of the population in Montreal, Canada, is advised to boil water before drinking after sediments are found in the reservoir of a major water treatment plant. (CBC)
- A cluster of mysterious and serious respiratory illnesses that affected Southeast Alabama and killed 2 people was nothing more than the ordinary common cold, mostly rhinovirus, and seasonal influenza A. (NBC)
International relations
- Ban Ki-moon, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, visits the Democratic Republic of the Congo as fighting continues near the eastern city of Goma. (BBC)
Law and crime
- The victim of yesterday's attack in London is confirmed to have been a serving British soldier, and named as Drummer Lee Rigby of the 2nd Battalion the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers. (BBC)
- Abdul-Baki Todashev, the father of Ibragim Todashev (the man who had confessed to the FBI the day before in Orlando, Florida, to working with Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the deceased older brother in the April 2013 Boston Marathon bombings, in a previously unsolved 2011 triple homicide, and subsequently while being questioned attacked an agent with a knife and was killed) claims that his son is innocent and that federal investigators are biased against Chechens and made up their case against him. (NBC)