Portal:Current events/2013 March 6

• Syrian civil war:
  • Battle of Ar-Raqqah: Syrian rebels capture Ar-Raqqah, the first major city to be under rebel control in the Syrian civil war. (AP via Fox News)
  • British Foreign Secretary William Hague announces the UK will send armoured vehicles and body armour to opposition forces in Syria to help save lives. (BBC)
  • The Arab League grants the Syrian National Coalition the seat within its organisation formerly occupied by the Syrian Republic. (AP via Fox News)
  • 20 United Nations peacekeepers are detained by around 30 armed fighters in the Golan Heights on the border between Syria and Israel. (Reuters)
• War in Somalia:
  • The United Nations Security Council adopts Resolution 2093 that partially lifts a decades-old arms embargo on Somalia for one year, allowing the government in Mogadishu to buy weapons to strengthen its security forces to fight al-Qaeda linked Islamists. (Reuters)

• The European Commission fines Microsoft €561 million for failing to provide residents of the European Union with a selection of web browsers as an alternative to Internet Explorer. (BBC)
• The UK's Office of Fair Trading gives the country's top 50 payday loans companies 12 weeks to change their practices after identifying "widespread irresponsible lending". (BBC)

• All nine people, including two pilots and seven passengers, on board a Beechcraft Super King Air B200 airplane chartered by Peruvian mining company die after the plane became ensnared in power lines and crashed to the ground in the La Libertad Region, Peru. (Reuters) (MARSA)

• The South Korean military states that it is prepared to respond if North Korea launches an attack as it threatened yesterday. (Reuters)

• Bob Carr, the Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs, releases a report into the handling of the case of Ben Zygier who died in Israeli custody in December 2010 and was believed to be a Mossad agent. (AAP via The Australian)
• The 7th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals holds in favor of Google in a lawsuit based on Wisconsin privacy laws in a decision that will tend to protect the vendors of search engines from those who object to the unwholesome responses they get when entering a vanity search. (Reuters)

• Ted Baillieu resigns as the Premier of the Australian state of Victoria as his embattled government was pushed close to collapse. (The Australian)

• Papal conclave, 2013: The Brazilian Conference of Bishops (the largest such conference in the world) officially advises the cardinals of Brazil in the conclave explicitly to ask the mass media to print supportive articles on the Archbishop of São Paulo, Cardinal Odilo Scherer. (Rorate Caeli)

• A newly discovered Y-chromosome haplogroup is thought to push back the time of Y-chromosomal Adam to 338,000 years ago. (New Scientist)

• Italy's Juventus and France's Paris Saint-Germain reach 2012–13 UEFA Champions League quarter-finals defeating Celtic and Valencia respectively. (CNN) (CBC) (Reuters)
• Fallout of Manchester United v. Real Madrid:
  • UEFA backs Turkish referee Cüneyt Çakır over his controversial decision to red card Manchester United's Nani in last night's elimination by a 2–1 scoreline (3–2 on aggregate) at the feet of Real Madrid in the second leg of their 2012–13 UEFA Champions League last 16 tie at Old Trafford. (The Guardian) (The Independent)
  • Manchester United assistant manager Mike Phelan says Sir Alex Ferguson is "distraught"; the Scottish manager has not appeared in public since the incident. (Irish Independent)
  • Manchester United player Rio Ferdinand may face a disciplinary procedure after his sarcastic hand-clapping gesture before Cüneyt Çakır at the end of the game. (The Guardian) (The Daily Telegraph)
  • Former Manchester United captain Roy Keane backs Cüneyt Çakır's red carding of Nani. (Irish Independent)
  • Paddy Crerand, who won the competition in 1968, blasts Roy Keane over his position on Nani's controversial red card, describing Keane as being "in a minority of one. Not one person said it was a red card except Roy". (BBC) (The Daily Telegraph)