Portal:Current events/2005 December 15
December 15, 2005 (Thursday)
- Former United States presidential candidate Al Sharpton agrees to pay $100,000 to the Federal Election Commission in a settlement over alleged corrupt practices during his 2004 electoral bid. (Reuters)
- A colleague of South Korean biomedical researcher Hwang Woo-Suk says that Hwang admitted that he faked nine of eleven stem cell colonies used in what had been hailed as a medical breakthrough in the journal Science. (BBC)
- Thousands of Iraqi Shia protest against Al Jazeera after a guest on a talk show on the network suggested that the Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Shia Islam's most senior cleric, should stay out of politics. (BBC)
- Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Israel continues to strike Palestinian areas in the Gaza Strip. (RTÉ)
- The European Council meets to discuss the next 7-year budget for the European Union. (BBC)
- Voting starts in Iraq to elect the first permanent 275-member Iraqi National Assembly under the new Constitution of Iraq. (BBC)
- A comparison of 42 articles by the journal Nature concludes that Wikipedia is almost as accurate on science topics as the Encyclopædia Britannica. The study also notes that Wikipedia's writing is more disorganized than Britannica's. (Nature) (BBC) (NPR)
- A Nepalese soldier shoots dead 11 people at a temple in Nagarkot, near Kathmandu. (BBC)
- Marwan Barghouti launches a new party called al-Mustaqbal (The Future), splitting from the Fatah movement in the Palestinian National Authority. (BBC)
- Bradley John Murdoch, convicted murderer of British backpacker Peter Falconio, is sentenced to a non-parole period of 28 years in prison in Australia. (NineMSN)