August 30, 2013 (Friday)
Armed conflicts and attacks
- Syrian civil war:
- British Prime Minister David Cameron says that a "robust response" to the alleged use of chemical weapons in Syria is needed despite UK military action being ruled out. (BBC)
- Defence Secretary Hagel says US still building "international coalition", despite UK and Germany ruling out action. (Al Jazeera)
- The United Nations team of chemical weapons inspectors has headed out on the last day of its probe into a deadly poison gas attack in Syria. (The Guardian)
- U.S Secretary of State John Kerry has said Syrian government forces killed 1,429 people in the chemical weapons attack last week. (BBC)
- Damascus said Friday that a US intelligence report concluding that the Syrian regime used chemical weapons in an onslaught that killed close to 1,500 people was "entirely fabricated". (France 24)
- U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told the five permanent Security Council members that it may be two weeks before final results of an analysis of samples experts collected at the site of a chemical weapons attack last week in Syria are ready, diplomats said on Friday. (Yahoo! News)
- Political violence in Egypt (July 2013–present):
- Protests in Cairo and other cities, led by supporters of deposed President Morsi, follow Friday prayers. (Al Jazeera)
- M23 rebellion in the Democratic Republic of the Congo:
- M23 rebel chief says fighters to withdraw from frontline of fighting in country's east, as violence spikes. (Al Jazeera)
Arts and culture
- Poet Seamus Heaney from Northern Ireland, recipient of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature, dies aged 74. (The Guardian)
Disasters and accidents
- A magnitude 7.0 earthquake is recorded off the coast of the Aleutian Islands. (Huffington Post)
Law and crime
- Indonesia's highest court has upheld the death sentence for Lindsay Sandiford, a British woman convicted of smuggling $2.5 million worth of cocaine into the resort island of Bali, a court official has said. (Al Jazeera)
- Lebanon has charged five men, including a Syrian army officer and a Sunni cleric close to the Syrian government, over bomb attacks on two mosques in the northern city of Tripoli last week that killed at least 47 people (Al Jazeera)
- A 15-year-old student is shot and wounded at Carver High School in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, U.S. An 18-year-old student is arrested and charged. (Huffington Post) (Winston-Salem Journal)
Science