• France confirms that an explosion aboard French oil tanker Limburg off the coast of Yemen was, indeed, a terrorist act.
• Israeli-Palestinian conflict
  • A suicide bomber killed a 71-year-old woman and injured several other at a bus stop near Tel Aviv, Israel.
  • A large crowd of Palestinian police officers and militiamen marched in a funeral procession for a policeman killed by a Hamas militiaman. Hamas claims that, although they did not authorize the killing, it was justified under Islamic law.

• Hungarian Holocaust survivor Imre Kertész wins the Nobel Prize for Literature. The Nobel Committee singled out his 1975 novel Fateless, a semiautobiographical account of a boy sent to Auschwitz who survives by detaching himself from the everyday gritty reality.
• In the journal Nature, anthropologist Milford Wolpoff and colleagues at the University of Michigan argued that the fossil skull discovered in Chad in July is not that of an early human, but of an ape.

• The International Court of Justice grants sovereignty over the Bakassi peninsula to Cameroon and not Nigeria.