January 28, 2015 (Wednesday)
Armed conflicts and attacks
- Israeli–Lebanese conflict
- Following a January 18 airstrike against a Hezbollah convoy, Hezbollah targets an Israeli military convoy near the Lebanon border at the Shebaa farms area, killing two and wounding another seven. While the Israeli military responds with artillery fire upon several South Lebanon border villages and Shebaa Farms, Hezbollah responds with mortar shells. Cross fire fighting kills a Spanish UN peacekeeper in the town of Ghajar. (CNN) (BBC) (Reuters)
Business and economy
- The Chinese yuan becomes the fifth most-highly-used currency in the world. (AP)
- The US Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James picks the Boeing 747-8 for the next replacement of Air Force One. (Reuters)
Disasters and accidents
- A Vietnamese military Bell UH-1 Iroquois helicopter crashes in southern Ho Chi Minh City killing four people. (AFP via Straits Times)
Law and crime
- The High Court of Australia finds that a group of 157 Sri Lankan asylum seekers were legally detained by Australian authorities at sea. The government acted lawfully and the group is not entitled to damages. (ABC News Australia)
- A federal judge in Albuquerque, New Mexico sentences an ex-Los Alamos physicist Pedro Leonardo Mascheroni, who pleaded guilty in 2013 to offering to spy on the US to help Venezuela develop a nuclear weapon, to five years imprisionment. (AP) (AP)
- The President of Sri Lanka Maithripala Sirisena reinstates former Chief Justice Shirani Bandaranayake who had been sacked by former President Mahinda Rajapaksa. (Reuters)
Politics and elections
- Akram Hasson becomes leader of Israel's former government party Kadima and thus the first Druze ever to lead a Jewish party. (Israel National News)
Science and technology
- Discoveries of exoplanets
- The Astrophysical Journal publishes research from the University of Rochester and the University of Leiden announcing the discovery of either a brown dwarf substellar object or a gas giant exoplanet titled J1407b. The object is the first known nonstar to have a super ring system. (AFP via ABC News Australia)