June 12, 2013 (Wednesday)
Armed conflict and attacks
- Syrian Civil War:
- United Nations peacekeepers from Austria start withdrawing from the Golan Heights. (AP via the Idaho Statesman)
- Gunmen kidnap a Scottish man working for a British energy company in the Indonesian province of Aceh. (Daily Telegraph), (Miami Herald)
Arts and culture
- The government of Greece shuts down the public radio and television broadcaster ERT, calling it a "haven of waste". (The Guardian)
- Jiroemon Kimura, who had been the world's oldest living person and the verified longest lived man ever, dies in the Japanese city of Kyōtango. (AFP via New Straits Times)(The Age)
- Facebook announces it plans to introduce clickable hashtags. (The Guardian)
Business and economics
- The New Zealand Dollar falls against all major currencies after RBNZ keeps interest rates unchanged. (Bloomberg)
- The United States Dollar suffers significant losses against a variety of currencies. (Reuters)
- Safeway Inc agrees to sell its 200+ Canadian stores to Sobeys for US$5.7 billion. (Financial Times)
- Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert W. Fogel dies at age 86. (Newsday)
- India's Apollo Tyres announces that it will acquire US-based Cooper Tire & Rubber Company for $2.5 billion. (Times of India)
Disasters and accidents
- A bus and a trolley car collide in downtown San Francisco, California, injuring fifteen people. (San Francisco Chronicle)
Health and environment
- A study finds that taking the AIDS drug tenofovir greatly reduces the risk of HIV infection among intravenous drug users. (Medpage Today)
- India becomes the latest country to ban the pain killer dextropropoxyphene. (The Hindu)
Law and crime
- A Tunisian court sentences two French and one German members of the FEMEN movement to four months in jail for protesting topless. (AP via ABC News)
Politics and elections
- 2013 protests in Turkey: The Turkish government offers to put the development project that sparked the initial protests to a public vote. (CBC)
- New figures from UNICEF show that 150 million children are engaged in child labor worldwide. (Pakistan Daily Times)
- Russia's Duma passes a law banning "gay propaganda". (CBS News)
Science
- Harminder Dua announces the discovery of a new layer in the human cornea, dubbed Dua's layer. (Popular Science)
- A new study suggests that altitude plays a role in language evolution, explaining why ejective sounds are more popular in languages of high-altitude regions. (Scientific American)
Sports
- The International Rugby Board announces that the Rugby World Cup Sevens, originally intended to be scrapped after its upcoming 2013 edition in Moscow, will be retained. The competition cycle will be reset so that future editions will occur in the middle of the Summer Olympic cycle, with the next World Cup Sevens edition set for 2018. (AP via Times Colonist)
- Officials of Nippon Professional Baseball in Japan acknowledge that they introduced a new, livelier ball for the current season. Previously, NPB had denied that a marked increase in home runs from last season was due to changes in the ball. (AP via Fox News)
- In motor sport, NASCAR driver Jason Leffler dies following a crash at Bridgeport Speedway in the US state of New Jersey. (NBC Sports)