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Nancy Reagan dies –
Nancy Reagan, the former first lady, died on Sunday at home in Los Angeles at the age of 94. A much-loved figure in America, Mrs Reagan – who like her husband moved from being a Hollywood star to living in the White House – died from congestive heart failure. Born in New York, Mrs Reagan grew up in Chicago before moving to California to pursue an acting career. She met her future husband in Hollywood, when she was blacklisted for suspected Communist sympathies and she turned to Reagan, then president of the Screen Actor’s Guild, for advice. The couple married in 1952. [Daily Telegraph]
Nancy Reagan in 1983

Leicester City fan cashes out £72,000 on Premier League bet –
A Leicester City fan, who stood to win £250,000 from a £50 bet on his team winning the Premier League, has cashed out for £72,000. The Warwickshire man, who has chosen to remain anonymous, bowed out of the 5,000-1 wager on Saturday. Hours later his stake would have been worth £91,000 after the Foxes beat Watford 1-0, said Ladbrokes. The winner said: “It will mean so much if we win, so there’s no point in being greedy.” [BBC]

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Armed conflicts and attacks

• Iraqi Civil War (2014–present)
  • A suicide bomber kills at least 60 people and wounds 70 others after ramming his explosives-laden truck into a security checkpoint at one of the entrances to the Iraqi city of Hillah, south of Baghdad. TheIslamic State of Iraq and the Levant claims responsibility for the attack. (Reuters) (FOX News) (AP via Yahoo! News)
• Syrian Civil War
  • Battle of Aleppo (2012–present)
    • At least nine civilians are killed and dozens are injured after rockets and mortars hit the mainly Kurdish neighborhood of Sheikh Maqsood in the city of Aleppo. The neighborhood is controlled by thePeople’s Protection Units (YPG). (Reuters)

Arts and culture

• Former First Lady of the U.S. Nancy Reagan dies at age 94. (NBC News)

Disasters and accidents

• Twelve coal miners are killed following a gas leak in a mine near the Chinese city of Baishan in Jilin province. (AAP via SBS)
• European migrant crisis
  • At least 25 migrants, including 10 children, drown after their wooden boat capsizes in the Aegean Sea near the seaside town of Didim, Turkey. The Turkish Coast Guard was able to rescue 15 people.(International Business Times) (AFP via Yahoo7 News)

Health and medicine

• Zika virus outbreak (2015–present)
  • Researchers publish findings on a possible mechanism for how the Zika virus may go about causing microcephaly in infected infants by infecting a certain type of early neural stem cell, specifically cortical neural precursor. (Health Day, via MSN), (full text in Cell Stem Cell), (Johns Hopkins University news release), (CDC)

International relations

• North Korea and weapons of mass destruction
  • North Korea threatens a pre-emptive nuclear strike against South Korea and the United States in response to the two nations’ annual joint military exercise which Pyongyang considers is a pretext for an invasion. (The Washington Times)

Law and crime

• Iranian billionaire Babak Zanjani is sentenced to death for corruption. Zanjani was arrested in December 2013 after accusations that he withheld billions in oil revenue channelled through his companies. He denies the allegations. (BBC)
• Egyptian interior minister Magdy Abdel-Ghaffar accuses Hamas and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in the June 2015 assassination of Attorney General Hisham Barakat. (Latin American Herald Tribune)(Debkafile)

Politics and elections

• Beninese presidential election, 2016
  • Voters in Benin go to the polls for the first round of voting in a presidential election with 33 candidates vying to replace current President Thomas Yayi Boni. (Bloomberg)
• Thousands of people gather in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi to protest against their government’s negotiations with Russian state-owned oil company Gazprom. (Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty)
• United States presidential election, 2016
  • Marco Rubio wins the Puerto Rican Republican Party primary. (BBC)
  • Bernie Sanders wins the Maine Democratic caucuses. (AP)

• Slovak parliamentary election, 2016
  • Prime Minister Robert Fico’s Smer party won 28.3 percent of the vote, but with just 49 seats, lost its majority in the 150-member parliament. The Freedom and Solidarity party won 21 seats (12.1%), and the Ordinary People party took 19 seats (11.0%). (AP via Daily Sabah)
  • The right scored first-time seats. The Slovak National Party won 15 seats; and, the Kotleba – People’s Party Our Slovakia won 14 seats, nearly three times more than predicted. (The Washington Post)(Irish Independent)
  • Analysts indicate Fico may find it very difficult to form a new government. Political analyst Samuel Abrahám says coalition-building “could take weeks, even months. … Fico’s rhetoric strengthened the right in Slovakia.” (Daily Times) (Reuters via Azerbaijan State News Agency )

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