(1) Neeraj Chopra wins silver in Paris
Neeraj Chopra fought as hard as he could. He pushed himself harder than he ever had this season. In the qualification round, he produced his biggest throw of the season. He improved on that in his second throw of the final. 89.45m. It was the second best throw of his career. It wasn’t enough.
At the Stade de France on Thursday night, Pakistan’s Arshad Nadeem beat him as comprehensively as possible. On the sixth opportunity, he finally got the better of the man he’d always considered a role model and looked up to. He beat India’s reigning Olympic and world champion Neeraj Chopra and it took an all-time great Olympic performance to do it.
Nadeem bettered an Olympic record that had stood for 16 years, not once but twice. The first — a throw of 92.97m in his second throw of the competition ended it. The second of 91.79m in his final attempt put the final exclamation mark on a near flawless performance.
(2) Bangladesh’s interim government takes charge
Filling the leadership vacuum in Bangladesh, albeit temporarily, Nobel Laureate and economist Muhammad Yunus has taken oath as head of the interim government. The 84-year-old microfinance pioneer will head the government until fresh polls are held. The parliament has already been dissolved by the nation’s president Mohammed Shahabuddin.
This comes days after Sheikh Hasina - the country’s longest-serving Prime Minister and Awami League leader - resigned and fled the nation amid violent mass protests in which more than 300 people have been killed.
Extremist sections have used the chaos to target Hindus, Ahmedis, a minority sect in Islam, and Awami League functionaries. According to the Bangladesh Hindu Buddhist Christian Unity Council, the houses and shops of minorities were looted in several districts. Offices of the Awami League were vandalised and dozens of party functionaries and supporters were killed. Mr. Yunus, who was sworn in on Thursday (August 8, 2024), condemned the violence and appealed for calm.
(3) 61 dead as passenger plane crashes in Brazil
A passenger plane crashed into a gated residential community in Brazil’s Sao Paulo state on Friday (August 9, 2024), killing all 61 people aboard and leaving a smoldering wreck, officials and the airline said. The airline VOEPASS said that its plane, an ATR 72 twin-engine turboprop, was headed for Sao Paulo’s international airport Guarulhos with 57 passengers and 4 crew members aboard when it crashed in Vinhedo.
It was the deadliest airline crash since January 2023, when 72 people died on board a Yeti Airlines plane in Nepal that stalled and crashed while making its landing approach. That plane also was an ATR 72, and the final report blamed pilot error. The graphic below shows a timeline of the deadliest plane crashes in the world since 2018.
(4) Google loses antitrust case over its search dominance
Google’s payments to make its search engine the default option on smartphone web browsers violate US antitrust law, a federal judge ruled on Monday (August 5, 2024), handing a key victory to the Justice Department. Judge Amit Mehta in Washington said that the Alphabet Inc. unit’s $26 billion in payments effectively blocked any other competitor from succeeding in the market.
“Google’s distribution agreements foreclose a substantial portion of the general search services market and impair rivals’ opportunities to compete,” Mehta said in a 286-page ruling.
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The highly anticipated decision issued by U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta comes nearly a year after the start of a trial pitting the U.S. Justice Department against Google in the country’s biggest antitrust showdown in a quarter century.
The case is the first antitrust trial pitting the federal government against a US technology company in more than two decades. Here is a timeline:
(5) Thailand court dissolves Move Forward Party
A court in Thailand on August 7 ordered the dissolution of the progressive Move Forward Party, which finished first in last year’s general election, saying it violated the constitution by proposing an amendment of a law against defaming the country’s royal family.
The Constitutional Court said it voted unanimously to dissolve the party because its campaign to amend the law was considered an attempt to overthrow the nation’s constitutional monarchy.
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The Move Forward Party was unable to form a government after topping the polls because members of the Senate, at that time a conservative military-appointed body, declined to endorse its candidate for Prime Minister.
The country has been mired in cyclical political crises since a military coup in 2006. Here is a look at the turbulent two decades that led to the pivotal decision by the Constitutional Court:
