August 18, 2016 (Thursday)
Armed conflicts and attacks
- Kurdish–Turkish conflict (2015–present)
- Syrian civil war
- Syrian government warplanes bomb Kurdish-held areas of Al-Hasakah for the first time in the country's five-year civil war, killing at least 13 people. (BBC) (Reuters)
Law and crime
- Eddie Bauer reports that malware was used to access payment data for cards used at their stores; payments made via their website were reportedly unaffected. (Reuters)
- U.S. District Judge Jane Triche Milazzo sentences former NFL player Darren Sharper to 18 years in prison in rape and drugging case involving as many as 16 women in several U.S. states. (BBC)
- Mexico's National Human Rights Commission says 22 people were executed by federal police during the 2015 Ecuandureo shootout in the western state of Michoacán last year. (BBC)
Politics and elections
- Proposal for a new flag of Fiji:
- Fiji prime minister Voreqe Bainimarama scraps plans to change the flag of Fiji as the feel-good factor envelops the Pacific nation following a first Olympic medal, a gold in men's rugby sevens. (Guardian)
- The Obama Administration says it wants to phase out the use of privately owned federal prisons. The move would affect private prisons which house 22,660 federal inmates, out of a total of nearly 200,000. (BBC)
Science and technology
- Twitter announces 235,000 terror-linked accounts have been suspended over the past six months amid increasing pressure on tech companies from the White House to censor extremists from groups like ISIS. (CBS News)