Portal:Current events/2023 July 18

Armed conflicts and attacks

• Russian invasion of Ukraine
  • 2022 Russian mobilization
    • The Russian Federal Assembly amends its mobilization laws, raising the age limits for conscription to 70 years old from 65 for the highest-ranking officers of the armed forces. (Reuters)

Business and economy

• Philippine president Bongbong Marcos signs into law the Maharlika Investment Fund, the country's sovereign wealth fund, amid warnings and opposition from various sectors. (Bloomberg)
• Spain's competition commission fines American technology companies Amazon and Apple €194 million (US$218 million) for allegedly agreeing to restrict competition by having Apple products sold directly through Amazon's platforms and limiting opportunities for third-party retailers. (AP)
• The Bank of Japan governor Kazuo Ueda says that the bank's loose monetary policy will continue, and since "our assumption ... is unchanged, our overall narrative on monetary policy remains unchanged." (Reuters)

Disasters and accidents

• 2023 North India floods
  • Eight people are killed and more than 115,000 people are displaced after heavy flooding in Assam, India. (Reuters)
• An elderly woman is killed and two other people are injured when a three-story residential building partially collapses in Cairo, Egypt. (Al-Ahram)

Health and environment

• 2023 European heat waves
  • The European Union's emergency response coordination centre issues red alerts due to extreme heat in Croatia, Montenegro, Serbia, most of Italy, and parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Spain. (Reuters)
• An outbreak of dengue fever infects over 200 people in a rural region of Egypt's Qena Governorate. The patients are said to all have mild to moderate symptoms, which include fatigue and fever. (Egyptian Independent)

International relations

• North Korea–United States relations, American military defectors to North Korea
  • An American soldier facing disciplinary action flees across the inter-Korean border into North Korea and is believed to be in North Korean custody. (Reuters)
• South Korea–United States relations
  • The USS Kentucky is deployed to Busan, South Korea, marking the first time that a nuclear-capable missile submarine has been deployed to the region since 1981. (Navy Times)

Law and crime

• Attempts to overturn the 2020 United States presidential election
  • Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel announces charges against 16 “fake electors” for former U.S. President Donald Trump in a effort to reverse president Joe Biden’s victory in the state during the 2020 election. (CNBC)
• Philippine drug war
  • The Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Court rejects the appeal of the Philippine government against the resumption of the investigation of the war on drugs under the presidency of Rodrigo Duterte. (CNN)
• An Egyptian court sentences Christian rights activist Patrick Zaki to three years in prison over an opinion article he wrote in 2019 about discrimination against Coptic Christians. (AP) (BBC News)

Science and technology

• 2023 in archosaur paleontology, 2023 in paleomammalogy
  • In a study published in the journal Scientific Reports, researchers present a 125-million-year-old fossil from central China depicting a mammalian Repenomamus robustus hunting a dinosaur, Psittacosaurus lujiatunensis, suggesting that small mammals may have actively hunted dinosaurs, not merely scavenged from them. (AP)

Sports

• 2026 Commonwealth Games
  • The Australian state of Victoria withdraws as host of the 2026 Commonwealth Games due to the increasing cost projections relative to initial estimations. (AFP via Philippine Daily Inquirer)