Portal:Current events/2019 April 11
April 11, 2019 (Thursday)
Armed conflicts and attacks
- 2018–19 Sudanese protests, 2019 Sudanese coup d'état
- The Sudanese military surrounds the presidential palace in the capital Khartoum, and takes over state media buildings amid protests against President Omar al-Bashir. Several senior ministers are reportedly arrested, including former Defense Minister Abdel Rahim Mohammed Hussein. (The National)
- The army forms an interim council, with First Vice President Lt. General Ahmed Awad Ibn Auf as the leader. President al-Bashir is reported to have stepped down. (BBC News)
Politics and elections
- 2019 Australian federal election
- Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison calls an election for 18 May. (ABC News Australia)
- North Korea appoints Choe Ryong-hae as President of the Presidium of the Supreme People's Assembly, the country's nominal head of state, replacing Kim Yong-nam after 21 years. Kim Jae-ryong becomes premier. (Yonhap)
Law and crime
- Abortion in South Korea
- The Constitutional Court of Korea rules that the 1953 abortion ban is unconstitutional. (Korea Herald)
- WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is arrested in London after Ecuador withdraws asylum. He is later found guilty of breaching bail in 2012 by a British court, however he faces likely extradition to the United States over allegations he conspired with former US military analyst Chelsea Manning to acquire classified U.S. government files. (The Guardian)
- Police in Louisiana arrest Holden Matthews, a suspect in arson at three historically African-American churches in the past weeks which the NAACP flagged as hate crimes. Matthews is the son of a local deputy sheriff. He has ties to black metal music and commented on memes about musician Varg Vikernes, a neo-Nazi who boasted about burning churches in Norway and was imprisoned for arson and murder, but researchers are unsure if they prove hate was his motive. (CBS) (Rolling Stone) (Daily Beast)
- Michael Avenatti is charged by a federal grand jury in California on 36 counts, including embezzlement, wire fraud, tax evasion, bankruptcy fraud and bank fraud connected to his alleged theft of tens of millions of dollars from several clients. (United States Department of Justice) (ABC News)
Science and technology
- Israel's Beresheet lunar lander crashes at Mare Serenitatis on the surface of the Moon. The crash resulted from a failure in the lander's main engine, resulting in the total loss of the spacecraft. (The New York Times)
- SpaceX's Falcon Heavy launches successfully from Kennedy Space Center carrying Arabsat-6A to orbit. All three boosters landed successfully, marking the first time that all three boosters of a Falcon Heavy landed without failure. (CNN)