Portal:Current events/2017 December 4

December 4, 2017 (Monday)

Armed conflicts and attacks

Saudi Arabian-led intervention in Yemen; Yemeni Civil War
- Former Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh is killed by Houthi forces in a roadside attack outside Sana'a after an earlier attack on his house. (BBC) (NPR)
Israeli intervention in the Syrian Civil War
- For the second time in three days, Israel carries out a missile strike on military facilities near Damascus. (Daily Star UK)

International relations

Positions on Jerusalem
- Jordan's foreign minister Ayman Safadi has warned the U.S. of "dangerous consequences" if it recognizes Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. (BBC)
- Hamas calls the U.S. government's plan to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel "a flagrant attack on the city by the American administration" and threatens to start a Third Intifada. (France 24)
- Turkey's deputy foreign minister Bekir Bozdağ warns of a "major catastrophe" if the U.S. moves its embassy to Jerusalem as planned in the Jerusalem Embassy Act. The last six-month presidential waiver delaying the move was signed on June 1. (Deutsche Welle) (The Daily Mail)
2017 North Korea crisis
- South Korea and the United States launch their largest-ever annual joint aerial drill. (The Australian)
- A high-level United Nations delegation led by Department of Political Affairs head Jeffrey D. Feltman travels to North Korea for talks this week. It will be the first such diplomatic visit in six years. (The Guardian)
Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017
- France puts the concern on the E.U. Ecofin agenda that the current version of the United States fiscal act would unduly penalize E.U. companies by taxing their U.S. operations beyond locally produced value added. (Le Figaro)
Executive Order 13769
- The Supreme Court of the United States rules that the act banning most people from eight countries, six of them Muslim-majority, to travel to the United States can take full effect pending legal challenges. (U.S. News & World Report)

Law and crime

Syrian Civil War
- The British government suspends payments to the so-called Free Syrian Police after a BBC Panorama investigation revealed that the cash has been diverted to the Salafist rebel groups of Nour al-Din al-Zenki and Jabhat al-Nusra, police officers being hand-picked by these groups, dead people appearing on the payroll and some police officers participating in summary executions. (BBC)
Murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia
- Malta arrests 10 people over the investigative journalist's murder on October 16. (CNN)
2017 Spanish constitutional crisis
- The prosecutor in a Brussels court repeats the demand to extradite Carles Puigdemont and four other former Catalan officials to Spain. The defense says that the adduced facts are "not punishable" under Belgian law. The judge delays the decision until December 14. (Politico.eu)
- The Supreme Court of Spain grants six former Catalan officials bail of €100,000 each. Four other people, Oriol Junqueras, Joaquim Forn and two leading activists, remain in jail over the "risk of re-offending". (Bloomberg)
Investigation of Apple's transfer pricing arrangements with Ireland
- Apple Inc. and Ireland agree on an interim deal to put €13 billion in an escrow fund for the repayment of back taxes, starting early 2018. Still, both parties refute that the alleged "sweetheart" corporate tax deals were illegal. In 2016, the European Commission found that an unfair advantage of €13 billion is to be reimbursed. (Silicon Republic)

Politics and elections

The Eurogroup selects Mário Centeno, Portugal's Minister of Finance, to succeed Jeroen Dijsselbloem as their next president. (Chicago Tribune)
Federal lands in Utah
- U.S. President Donald Trump signs executive orders shrinking the Bears Ears National Monument area by 85% and the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by half. (Fox News)
Roy Moore sexual abuse allegations
- Debbie Wesson Gibson, one of the women accusing Roy Moore of sexual misconduct, shares evidence of their relationship when she was 17 to the press. (Washington Post)