Portal:Current events/2021 May 21

Armed conflicts and attacks

• Insurgency in Balochistan, International protests over the 2021 Israel–Palestine crisis
  • 2021 Chaman bombing
    • Seven people are killed and 14 others are wounded in a bombing at a Palestine solidarity rally in Chaman, Balochistan, Pakistan. (Dawn)
• 2021 Israel–Palestine crisis
  • Ten more bodies are found under the rubble of bombed buildings in Gaza, thereby bringing the Palestinian death toll to 243. Despite this, the ceasefire agreed by Israel and Hamas begins. (Al Jazeera)
  • Israeli security forces fire stun grenades and rubber bullets at Palestinians attending Friday prayers at Al-Aqsa Mosque, and they also hit journalists at the scene with batons, injuring at least 20 people. (CNN)

Arts and culture

• A symbolic re-trial for medieval Italian writer Dante Alighieri, who was sentenced to exile in absentia in 1302, is held virtually in Florence. (DW)
• New York art collector Stuart Pivar says that he has rediscovered a long-lost Vincent van Gogh masterpiece titled "Auvers, 1890" at an auction. The painting is being sent to the van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam because they have requested to see it and authenticate it. The painting, which is signed on the back as "Vincent" and dated 1890, is a 36" by 36" square panorama of the valley of Auvers-sur-Oise, showing its mosaic of wheat fields bisected by a railway line. The painting also bears the label of art collector Jonas Netter. If authenticated, the work would be van Gogh's largest painting and his only painting in a square format. (Page Six)
• British Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden says that the government is considering penalizing the BBC for its 1995 interview with Diana, Princess of Wales, in which an independent inquiry conducted by former Justice of the Supreme Court John Dyson, Lord Dyson found interviewer Martin Bashir to be guilty of deceit and breaching the network's editorial conduct to obtain the interview. (The Economic Times)

Business and economy

• The Group of Seven agreed on Friday to stop international financing of coal projects that emit carbon by the end of this year, and to phase out such support for all fossil fuels. (Reuters)
• An outage in the Sabre passenger service system used by multiple airlines causes flight issues in multiple countries. The system is used for check-ins, selling tickets, and dispatching flights. Issues are reported with Alaska Airlines, American Airlines, JetBlue, Rex Airlines, and Virgin Australia. The vendor's redundancy systems are not activated during the outage. (9News) (MSN)

Disasters and accidents

• A Nigerian Air Force plane crashes near Kaduna International Airport, killing Chief of Army Staff Ibrahim Attahiru and several of his aides. (Reuters)
• An accident, believed to have been caused by an emission of methane, kills ten people, injures four others, and causes several more people to remain missing inside a water treatment plant outside the city of Taganrog, in Russia's Rostov Region. (TASS) (Pravda.ru)

Health and environment

• COVID-19 pandemic
  • COVID-19 pandemic in Asia
    • COVID-19 pandemic in Japan
      • The Japanese government officially approves the use of the Moderna and Oxford–AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccines for people aged 18 and older. It comes after the Health Ministry panel recommended the approval of both vaccines. (The New York Times) (Kyodo News)
      • Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga announces the extension of the state of emergency to Okinawa from May 23 until June 20 after a record 207 new cases of COVID-19 are reported in the prefecture in the past 24 hours. (The Japan Times)
    • COVID-19 pandemic in Lebanon
      • Lebanon eases some COVID-19 restrictions, allowing cinemas and theatres to reopen as well as allowing organized weddings, conferences, and trade shows at reduced capacity as the number of both cases and deaths continue to decline. (The National Herald)
    • COVID-19 pandemic in Pakistan
      • Pakistan surpasses 20,000 deaths from COVID-19. (Business Recorder)
    • COVID-19 pandemic in South Korea, COVID-19 vaccination in South Korea
      • South Korea approves the use of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine. (The Straits Times)
  • COVID-19 pandemic in Europe
    • COVID-19 pandemic in Germany, Travel restrictions related to the COVID-19 pandemic, Lineage B.1.617
      • Germany declares the United Kingdom a "virus variant area" due to the spread of the Indian Lineage B.1.617 variant. It means that anyone from the UK will be required quarantine for two weeks on arrival, even if they have tested negative. (DW)
    • COVID-19 pandemic in Norway
      • The Norwegian government announces that phase two of easing COVID-19 restrictions will begin on May 27, allowing bars to serve alcohol until midnight and raise the maximum number of guests in one's home to 10 people as the number of cases declined. (MedicalXpress)
    • COVID-19 pandemic in Spain, Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on tourism
      • Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez announces that Spain will allow all vaccinated travelers to visit the country starting on June 7 regardless of their country of origin, and it will also allow British holidaymakers to visit as well starting on May 24, as it aims to revive its pandemic-hit tourism industry. (The Local Spain)
  • COVID-19 pandemic in North America
    • COVID-19 pandemic in Cuba, COVID-19 vaccine
      • Over one million people in Cuba have received a dose of the Abdala and Soberana 02 vaccines. (UrduPoint)
    • COVID-19 pandemic in the United States
      • COVID-19 pandemic in Louisiana, Lineage B.1.617
        • Louisiana reports its first two cases of the Lineage B.1.617 variant first discovered in India. (AP)
  • COVID-19 pandemic in Egypt
    • Egypt receives its first shipment of raw materials used to manufacture the Sinovac Coronavac vaccine, as well as a shipment of 500,000 doses of the Sinopharm vaccine. (Ahram Online)
  • Director of the Pan American Health Organization Carissa F. Etienne announces that Latin America and the Caribbean have surpassed one million deaths caused by COVID-19. (EFE)

Law and crime

• Health Service Executive cyberattack
  • It is revealed that documents and patient records have already been leaked online from the Irish Health Service Executive ransomware cyberattack. These files were offered by the "ContiLocker Team", believed to be related to be the "Wizard Spider" group from Eastern Europe, as samples to prove that they had confidential information. The 27 files include personal records of 12 individuals, including admissions records and laboratory results. The group claims to have stolen 700GB of unencrypted files from the Irish health service, including patient and employee information, contracts, financial statements and payroll records. (News Talk)
  • A decryption key for the hospital records has been provided to the Irish Health Service Executive. The government says that it had not paid and would not pay any ransom in exchange for the purported key. The group responsible for the cyberattack continues to threaten to sell patient data. (US News and World Report)
• Animal welfare and rights in Germany
  • The Bundestag votes to ban the culling of male chicks starting on January 1, 2022. The ban makes Germany the first country to ban male chick culling by law. Agriculture Minister Julia Klöckner, who sponsored the bill, says that she did not consider chick culling "to be ethically acceptable". (DW)
• CNA Financial, the seventh-largest commercial insurer in the United States, reveals that in March 2021, it was the target of a ransomware attack and had paid $40 million to a group named Phoenix two weeks after a trove of company data was stolen, and CNA officials were locked out of their network. The CNA hackers used malware called Phoenix Locker, a variant of ransomware dubbed Hades. Hades was created by a Russian cybercrime syndicate known as Evil Corp., according to cybersecurity experts. In December 2019, the Treasury Department announced sanctions on 17 individuals and six entities linked to Evil Corp. The designation by the Treasury Department made it illegal for a U.S. company to knowingly pay a ransom to Evil Corp. (Bloomberg)(FOX Business)
• One Catholic priest is killed and another kidnapped in an armed attack on the parish in Malunfashi, Sokoto State, in northern Nigeria. Several other people are wounded in the assault. (Fides)

Politics and elections

• International protests over the 2021 Israel–Palestine crisis
  • Indonesian Islamists protest American support for Israel at the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta. Protesters also demand an end to Israeli airstrikes in the Gaza Strip despite the ceasefire going into force yesterday. (AP)
  • In Toronto, activists paint the Israeli consulate with a "river of blood" to symbolize the 200 Palestinians who were killed during the conflict. (CTV News)
• 2021 Catalan regional election
  • The Catalan government is formed after months of negotiations, with Pere Aragonès becoming the 132nd President, the first from the Republican Left of Catalonia in forty years and the youngest in the institution's seven-hundred-year history. Aragonès pledges to immediately restart independence talks with the Spanish government. (DW)