February 1, 2018 (Thursday)
Armed conflicts and attacks
- Persecution of Muslims in Myanmar
- The existence of five mass graves in northern Rakhine State is confirmed by the Associated Press through multiple eyewitness testimonies and video evidence. Many of the bodies in the graves were Rohingya victims of the Gu Dar Pyin massacre. (AP)
Arts and culture
- The Canadian Senate agrees with the House of Commons to make the Canadian national anthem, "O Canada", gender neutral. The second line of the song will now read "in all of us" instead of "in all thy sons." (NPR)
Business and economy
- Apple Inc. briefly removes the Telegram messaging service from its iOS App Store. Telegram CEO Pavel Durov says Apple claims "inappropriate content" is available on the service. (The Verge)
Disasters and accidents
- Eleven people are killed in a fire at a Japanese residential facility for people in financial difficulty. (BBC)
International relations
- China–Holy See relations:
- A framework accord between the Vatican and China on the appointment of bishops is ready and could be signed in a few months in what would be an historic breakthrough in relations, according to a senior Vatican source. (Reuters)
- United States–Mexico relations
- United States Secretary of State Rex Tillerson arrives in Mexico to meet with President Enrique Peña Nieto and Foreign Secretary Luis Videgaray. (Reuters)
Law and crime
- School shootings in the United States
- Two 15-year-old students are seriously wounded and three other people injured in a shooting at Sal Castro Middle School in Los Angeles, California. A 12-year-old female student is taken into custody. (CNN)
- Human rights in the State of Palestine
- The Palestine Liberation Organization "rejects and condemns" the United States decision to put Hamas leader Ismael Haniyeh on the OFAC SDN terror blacklist. (Times of Israel)
- Slender Man stabbing
- Morgan Geyser is sentenced to 40 years in a mental institution for her role in the attempted murder of Payton Leutner. (ABC News)
- 2018 Calais migrant violence
Politics and elections
- Cabinet of Donald Trump
- Tom Shannon, the United States Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, announces he will be resigning for personal reasons. The State Department's third-ranking official and its most senior career diplomat says he will stay on until a successor is named. (Reuters)
Science and technology
- 2018 in spaceflight
- NASA confirms that Scott Tilley, a Canadian amateur astronomer and satellite tracker, has rediscovered NASA's IMAGE (Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration) satellite while he was searching for the U.S. government's classified Zuma satellite. NASA engineers will try to analyze the data from the spacecraft to learn more about the state of the spacecraft. (The Independent) (Phys.org)