Portal:Current events/2015 March 6

March 6, 2015 (Friday)

Armed conflicts and attacks

Canadian special forces member Sgt. Andrew Doiron is shot and killed by Kurdish Peshmerga fighters in Iraq in a friendly fire incident, the first Canadian death in Operation Impact. (Ottawa Citizen)
At least two knife-wielding attackers injure nine people at a train station in southern China; the police fatally shoot one of the suspects. (AP)
The United Kingdom's National Crime Agency arrests a man as a suspected hacker in western England in connection with a June 15, 2014 cyber attack on the messaging service used by employees at the U.S. Department of Defense. (AP)(Bloomberg)
The U.S. Justice Department charges two Vietnamese citizens (Quoc Nguyen and Giang Hoang Vu) and a Canadian (David-Manuel Santos Da Silva) with running a massive cyberfraud ring that stole one billion email addresses, then sent spam offering knockoff software products of Adobe Systems Inc with the hacking having occurred between February 2009 and June 2012. The victim breaches include a massive 2011 attack on email marketing firm Epsilon, a unit of Alliance Data Systems Corp. Although the other two are in custody, Nguyen remains at large. The charge against Da Silva is conspiracy to commit money laundering. (Reuters)

Business and Economy

Disasters and accidents

A road accident along the highway between Ismaïlia and Cairo in Egypt, east of Cairo, involving a bus that collided with a microbus kills fifteen people. (AP)
Two massive snowy traffic jams in Kentucky strand motorists for 24 hours or longer. One stretched for about 26 miles along Interstate 65 from just north of Elizabethtown past Shepherdsville, and the other stretched the entire length of Interstate 24 in Kentucky, more than 90 miles. (AP, I-65) (WSMV-TV, I-24)

International relations

Writing in the FIFA Weekly magazine, FIFA president Sepp Blatter calls Iran to end its "intolerable" ban on women attending soccer matches, describing the situation as one that "cannot continue." (CNN)

Health

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approves the country's first biosimilar drug, Zarxio (Europe: 2009, as Zarzio), made by Novartis. Biosimilars are a relatively new class of drugs designed to pave the way for less expensive versions of the complex biologics drug class, and they are not synthesized from chemicals like other drugs, but are made from living cells. Some well known biologics include Remicade and Enbrel for autoimmune diseases, and Herceptin and Avastin for cancer. Zarxio, used to prevent infection in cancer patients receiving chemotherapy, is a close copy of Neupogen, made by Amgen. (The New York Times)

Law and crime

2014 Taipei Metro attack
- The New Taipei City district court sentences Cheng Chieh to death for the May 2014 knife attack on a Taipei Metro train that left four dead and 22 passengers injured. (AP)
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director John O. Brennan announces plans for a major restructuring and reorganization, including a focus on digital espionage (through the creation of the CIA Directorate of Digital Innovation). The plan will end some longstanding divisions, and create ten new centers that team analysts with operators, fostering collaboration and focus on a range of new security issues and threats, and replacing geographic division offices with hybrid mission centers modeled on the CIA Counterterrorism Center. (The Washington Post via MSN)
Customs officers at the Shahjalal International Airport catch Son Young Nam, a North Korean diplomat trying to smuggle an estimated $1.4 million worth of gold into Bangladesh. Bangladesh authorities release him but will still seek to press charges. (Reuters)
Madison Police Department officers fatally shoot an unarmed 19-year-old black teenager who was suspected of a recent battery. A struggle ensued between the suspect and an officer, and the teen was fatally shot. (Reuters via MSN)

Science and technology