Courtesy of Marjory Collins / Wikimedia Commons.
- French Prime Minister Manuel Valls announced Thursday that French police have foiled five terror attacks in the past few months, during which such threats have reached unprecedented levels. Most recently, police arrested an Algerian man planning an attack on a church in Villejuif outside Paris.
- Maltese government officials held a funeral on Thursday for the 24 Middle Eastern and African migrants who drowned earlier this week when their raft capsized in the Mediterranean. Later on Thursday, European Union ministers held a summit to address the issue of migrants crossing the Mediterranean to seek refugee status in Europe.
- A January U.S. raid on an al-Qaeda compound in a border region of Pakistan and Afghanistan killed two hostages held by the militants, the White House acknowledged Thursday. Warren Weinstein, an American, had been held hostage at the camp since 2011, while Giovanni Lo Porto, an Italian, had been held since 2012.
- An experimental 28-day treatment for the Makona strain of Ebola has cured a monkey suffering from the virus, scientists at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston announced Wednesday. Researchers infected six monkeys with a high dose of the virus and then administered the drug, TKM-Ebola-Makona, to three, all of which lived, while the untreated apes died of the disease.
- A federal judge approved a settlement in a class-action lawsuit brought by more than 5,000 former National Football League players against the NFL. Under the compensation agreement, each player who retired on or before July 7, 2014 will receive a minimum of $5 million for conditions related to repeated head traumas.
- Five students of Georgia Southern University’s School of Nursing were killed, and two were injured in a car crash on I-16 eastbound near Savannah early Wednesday morning. A tractor-trailer failed to stop and struck seven cars ahead of it, including two other tractor-trailers and an SUV carrying the seven students.
