Top News Stories –

Kanye West appears to have torrent site Pirate Bay open in a photo he’s tweeted –
Kanye West is in trouble over his tweets – again – after the background to a photo he posted made it look like he was illegally downloading files. He sent out a picture on Twitter showing him listening to a Sufjan Stevens track on YouTube, but fans quickly spotted other tabs he had open. One of them says “Xfer Records Serum”, but is next to others saying “Pirate Bay Torrent Xfe” and “MediaDownloader”. Deadmau5 hit out at Kanye, saying: “@kanyewest – can’t afford Serum?” Kanye’s original tweet simply said “Day 3” alongside the photo. [BBC Newsbeat]
In September 2015 West announced he will be running for US President in 2020.
Kanye West

Emirates A380 makes longest non-stop flight as airlines launch long-haul battle –
An Emirates superjumbo touched down in Auckland, New Zealand, on Wednesday, after spending more than 17 hours in the air from Dubai – making it the world’s longest commercial scheduled flight. The Emirates A380 covered a route of about 8825 miles, before turning around and doing it all again on the way home. It beat the previous record – Qantas’s Dallas to Sydney route – by about 250 miles. [Daily Telegraph]

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Armed conflicts and attacks

• One Chinese national is killed and three others injured in a possible militant attack on a Chinese-invested company in Laos, the official Xinhua News Agency reports. (Reuters)
• Israeli–Palestinian conflict
  • Two Palestinian teenagers, from the nearby village of Qaryout, got into a Jewish settlement and stabbed an Israeli settler at his home in the Eli settlement near Nablus in the occupied West Bank. They were stopped and killed by the army. The injured settler was taken to a hospital. (Reuters)(AFP via i24news)
• Spillover of the Syrian Civil War
  • Jordan says an overnight raid on an ISIL cell in the city of Irbid has left seven militants and one security officer dead, with five others injured. Those killed were planning to blow up civilian and military targets in the country, according to the General Intelligence Directorate (GID). (BBC)
• War in Afghanistan (2015–present)
  • Nine people are killed in an attack on the Indian consulate In Jalalabad, Afghanistan. (NDTV)
• Libyan Crisis (2011–present)
  • The Tunisian Army kills five suspected ISIL militants near the town of Ben Gardane after they infiltrated across the border from neighboring Libya. (Reuters)

Business and economy

• Mining company Samarco agrees to pay $4.4bn reais (£804m) in compensation to victims of the Bento Rodrigues dam disaster in Brazil. (BBC)

Disasters and accidents

• Iraqi engineers warn that the Mosul Dam could collapse at anytime, resulting in a catastrophic flash flood that could kill up to one million people along the Tigris, with the major Iraqi cites of Mosul, Tikrit,Samarra and Baghdad all at risk. The U.S. embassy in Baghdad has urged American citizens to leave the area. (The Guardian)
• 2016 Sumatra earthquake
  • The Meteorological, Climatological and Geophysical Agency of Indonesia (BMKG) and the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) issue tsunami warnings, after an undersea 7.9 magnitude earthquakestrikes southwest of Sumatra, in the Indian Ocean. (RT) (BOM)

International relations

• South China Sea disputes
  • Philippines Foreign Secretary Albert del Rosario says Chinese coast guard ships that were sighted two weeks ago near the disputed Jackson Atoll in the northeast Dangerous Ground are no longer there today. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hong Lei said ships were dispatched to the area in late 2015 to salvage a fishing vessel that posed a risk to navigation. Chinese ships, “… persuaded fishing boats to leave the waters in an effort to ensure safety conditions for normal navigation,” Hong said. In addition to China and the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Brunei also lay claim to theSpratly Islands waters. (AP via The Washington Post)
• European migrant crisis
  • The European Union launches a new aid program worth an initial 700 million euros (US$760 million) to address the growing refugee crisis in Greece. EU Humanitarian Aid Commissioner Christos Stylianides says the so-called Emergency Assistance Instrument will be used to help migrants trapped in Greece and, if needed, in other countries on the migration route front lines. Approval by a majority of EU members is required. The next EU meeting is scheduled for Monday. (The New York Times) (Reuters) (Kathimerini)
• The Gulf Cooperation Council formally designates Lebanon‘s Hezbollah militia a terrorist organization. The GCC member states are Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.(The Washington Post)
• The United Nations Security Council adopts the toughest sanctions on North Korea in twenty years due to continued efforts to develop a nuclear weapons program. (Fox News)

Politics and elections

• Spanish general election, 2015
  • The conservative People’s Party (PP) and the left-wing Podemos party, which together hold 192 seats in Spain’s 350-seat parliament following December’s election, confirm they will vote against Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) leader Pedro Sánchez’s candidacy to form a new government. (AP via The Washington Post)

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