Portal:Current events/2016 October 21
October 21, 2016 (Friday)
Armed conflicts and attacks
- Iraqi Civil War (2014–2017)
- ISIL militants launch attacks on government buildings, police stations, and a power station in the city of Kirkuk, Iraqi Kurdistan, killing dozens of people. (BBC)
Arts and culture
- Per Wästberg, a member of the Swedish Academy, says that songwriter and artist Bob Dylan has not yet indicated whether he intends to accept the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature. (BBC), (The Guardian)
Business and economy
- British American Tobacco offers to buy out U.S. cigarette maker Reynolds American Inc in a $47 billion takeover that would create the world's biggest listed tobacco company. (Reuters)
- AT&T reportedly agrees in principle to buy Time Warner for about $85 billion. (Reuters)
Disasters and accidents
- A magnitude 6.6 earthquake hits Tottori Prefecture in western Japan. Local media report that there are 14 injuries in Kurayoshi. Tottori is Japan's least populous prefecture. (Bloomberg), (BNO News)
- A chemical spill at the MGP Ingredients plant in Atchison, Kansas, United States, injures 26 people and leads to evacuations. The spill of sodium hypochlorite and sulfuric acid produces a toxic fog. (The Kansas City Star)
- Authorities evacuate London City Airport after a chemical incident, but, after some remediation, police later declare the airport safe. (CNN)
- 2016 Eséka train derailment
- A passenger train derails in central Cameroon, killing at least 53 people and injuring 575 others. (Africa News), (Reuters)
- A Mil Mi-8 helicopter crashes and leaves at least 19 dead and three others injured on the Yamal Peninsula in Russia's Extreme North. (Radio Free Europe)
International relations
- South Africa formally begins the process of withdrawing from the International Criminal Court amid a dispute over the country's refusal to arrest Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir at last year's African Union summit in Johannesburg. (BBC)
Law and crime
- The pursuit of a car jacking suspect in Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States, leaves four police officers injured and hospitalized. (The Albuquerque Journal)
- October 2016 Dyn cyberattack
- A series of cyberattacks utilizing distributed denial-of-service attacks, targeting networks operated by DNS provider Dyn, makes major Internet platforms and services unavailable to large swaths of users in Europe and North America. Affected companies include Amazon, Twitter, Spotify, Reddit, PayPal, Netflix, and Airbnb. (The Wall Street Journal)
- 2014 Iguala mass kidnapping
- After two years on the run, Mexican officials arrest the former police chief of a Mexican city, Felipe Flores, capturing him in Iguala in the southern state of Guerrero. The city is where 43 students disappeared in September 2014. The police arrested the students and then handed them over to a drug cartel who killed them and incinerated their bodies. (BBC)
Science and technology
- The Tennessee Valley Authority completes the Watts Bar Nuclear Plant, the first U.S. nuclear reactor to enter commercial operation in 20 years. (CNN)