Portal:Current events/2017 September 29
September 29, 2017 (Friday)
Armed conflicts and attacks
- War in Somalia
- Al-Shabaab militants attack a military base outside the Somalian capital Mogadishu, with 15 soldiers reported dead. (Reuters)
Disasters and accidents
- 2017 Mumbai stampede
- 2017 Central Mexico earthquake
- A Mexico City borough president says previous officials ignored warnings that unauthorized construction work had damaged the structural integrity of several buildings in the city. The overall death toll from the magnitude 7.1 quake which hit Sept. 19 now stands at at least 358 people. (AP)
International relations
- Aftermath of the Iraqi Kurdistan independence referendum, 2017
- Iraq's federal government halts all international flights to and from Iraqi Kurdistan until Kurdish security forces hand over control of Erbil International Airport and Sulaimaniyah International Airport. The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) calls the ban "illegal". (BBC)
- Cuba–United States relations
- The U.S. State Department removes all families of employees and nonessential personnel from Cuba following apparent sonic attacks that injured 21 personnel on the island. Cuba denies any involvement and has authorized the FBI to travel to the island to help the ongoing investigation into the causes. (CNN)
Politics and elections
- UK Independence Party leadership election, 2017
- Henry Bolton wins UKIP leadership, taking over the position from Paul Nuttall, who resigned after the party's poor performance in the last general election. (BBC)
- Presidency of Donald Trump
- Tom Price resigns as the Secretary of Health and Human Services in the midst of a scandal over his use of private planes. (CNN)
- Anti-corruption campaign under Xi Jinping
- Sun Zhengcai is expelled from the Communist Party of China after the results into the internal disciplinary investigation are announced by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection. (The Washington Post)
- Reverberations from the Sun Zhengcai case are said to have ensnared a number of senior officials from Chongqing, including former Organization Department head Zeng Qinghong (female). 14 out of 43 delegates to the 19th Party Congress from Chongqing are said to have lost their eligibility. (SCMP)
Science and technology
- Gene therapy
- The journal Protein & Cell publishes Sun Yat-sen University research describing the use of gene therapy in the removal of a version of the inherited blood disorder beta-thalassemia from an artificially-created nuclear transfer-type of cloning-model system of human oocytes. Collectively, this study demonstrated the feasibility of curing this and a range of other inherited diseases using the same genome editing technology of CRISPR. (BBC) (Protein & Cell)