August 18, 2005 (Thursday)
- Ohio Governor Bob Taft pleads no contest to four counts of filing incomplete financial disclosure statements in Columbus, Ohio and a Franklin County municipal court judge finds him guilty, fines him $4,000, and orders him to apologize publicly. Taft says he will not resign his office. (The Cincinnati Enquirer)
- A man described as Al Qaeda's leader in Saudi Arabia, Saleh Mohammed al-Aoofi, is killed in a shootout with police.(CBS) (BBC)
- Dennis Rader, also known as the BTK Killer, is sentenced 10 consecutive life sentences for 10 murders between 1974 and 1991. (Reuters) (CNN)
- Pope Benedict XVI made his first foreign trip to his homeland Germany, attending the World Youth Day 2005. He was welcomed with cheers and made several speeches to leaders of Germany and to pilgrims at the Rhine banks at a ship as well as in front of the Cologne cathedrale. - BBC Pictures; BBC News; MSNBC.
- Conflict in Iraq:
- Insurgents kill 4 US Troops in an IED explosion in Samarra, north of Baghdad, Iraq. (Polit Info), (Xinhua)
- An angry Iraqi crowd thronged the Al-A'amiriya district of Baghdad, after US Troops killed 3 local brothers, including a disabled man, accusing them of being terrorists. (Reuters)
- NASA has decided to push the next shuttle mission STS-121 to March 2006 and reassign it to the Space Shuttle Discovery (MSNBC)
- Israeli troops forcibly remove Zionist Jews opposed to Ariel Sharon's unilateral disengagement plan one by one from their strongholds in the synagogues in the Israeli settlements on the Gaza Strip. Some of the protesters threw paint, rocks and acid at the soldiers. (BBC), (ABC)