Wednesday, January 7, 2014
DEADLY ATTACK AT FRENCH SATIRICAL NEWSPAPER HQ
At least 10 journalists and two policemen were killed after two heavily armed men opened fire at the Paris offices of the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo Wednesday morning. Four other people were seriously wounded in the shooting; the gunmen managed to flee and a large manhunt is now underway in Paris.
"This is a terrorist attack, there is no doubt about this," French President François Hollande told reporters.
The headquarters of the provocative weekly were already firebombed in 2011 after it published cartoons mocking the Muslim prophet Muhammad. Developing …
TAIL OF AIRASIA PLANE FOUND
The tail of the missing AirAsia flight QZ8501 has been found on the sea bed around 30 kilometers away from the plane’s last known location, an Indonesian search team announced during a press conference in Jakarta on Wednesday. It is a breakthrough that could lead investigators to find the black boxes — located in the tail — and understand what may have lead to the crash. The head of the Indonesian search and rescue agency, Fransiskus Bambang Soelistyo, said the plane part was identified by divers after it was spotted by an underwater machine, Reuters reports. Photographs of the wreckage were released Wednesday morning by the authorities.
Flight QZ8501 had vanished from radars over the northern Java Sea on Dec. 28, during a two-hour flight from Surabaya, Indonesia, to Singapore. Authorities say there are no survivors among the 162 people on board, most of them Indonesian. Another body was also found Wednesday, bringing the total recovered to 40.
DEADLY BLAST IN YEMEN
A car bomb killed at least 30 people and injured more than 50 outside a police college in Yemen’s capital Sanaa on Wednesday. An Al Jazeera journalist on site said the number of casualties is likely to be higher. The blast was heard across the city and a large plume of smoke was visible in the area, located near the defense ministry and the central bank. Yemeni police said the victims included students from the college as well as people waiting to enroll and passers by. No claim for responsibility had yet been made.
WORLDCRUNCH-TO-GO
To the surprise of many, the family of legendary novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez sold his personal papers to the University of Texas. It's nothing political — but all about posterity, and money of course, writes El Espectador’s Pablo Ximénez de Sandoval: “José Montelongo, Texas University's Librarian for Mexican Studies, says the archive's information on the novelist's self-editing process will be a "treat" for Gabo researchers. Among the papers are a first draft of One Hundred Years of Solitude, the novel that catapulted the writer to fame in 1967, several versions of Chronicle of a Death Foretold and Love in the Time of Cholera, and 10 versions of the unpublished We'll See Each Other in August. The last copy contains corrections, which means he considered it premature to publish.”
Read the full article, How The Garcia Marquez Papers Wound Up In A Texas Library.
OIL BARREL PRICE DROPS UNDER $50
Brent crude oil has fallen below $50 a barrel — going as low as a dollar to $49.92 in early trading Wednesday — for the first time since May 2009, The Wall Street Journal reports. Observers also expect prices to drop further as North American shale producers supply increasing quantities of oil and gas, and the oil-producing group Opec is not reacting to support prices, according to Forbes.
DEFLATION HITS EUROZONE
Euro zone consumer prices fell by more than expected in December because of much cheaper energy, a first estimate by the European statistical office showed in data that is likely to trigger the European Central Bank's government bond buying program, Reuters reports.
MY GRAND-PÈRE’S WORLD
TURKISH FAR-LEFT GROUP CLAIMS ISTANBUL ATTACKS
A suicide bombing that killed a policeman in central Istanbul Tuesday has been claimed by the “Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party/Front” (DHKP/C) on social media. The group wrote "our sacrificial fighter... carried out the sacrificial action on the tourist police department in Sultanahmet,” the Turkish daily Hürriyetreports.
BY THE NUMBERS: 6
Overtaken by the United Kingdom’s GDP, France has dropped from 5th to 6th position in the list of the world’s most powerful economies, Le Figaro reports.
ON THIS DAY
What happened to the Leaning Tower of Pisa on Jan. 7, 1990? Find it out (and much more) in your daily 57-second shot of history.
NEW “MOST EARTH-LIKE ALIEN WORLD”
Astronomers announced during a meeting of the American Astronomical Society Tuesday that a recently discovered planet resembles our Earth more than any other previously identified planet. It is part of eight new planets observed in distant solar systems by Nasa’s Kepler space telescope.
