• Sectarianism in Pakistan
  • Sunni militants linked to the Pakistani Taliban kill at least 40 people and injure 50 in a bombing at a Shiite mosque in the Shikarpur District of Pakistan's Sindh province. (BBC)
• Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant
  • Islamic State fighters kill Kurdish commander Brigadier General Shirko Rauf and five other peshmerga soldiers in heavy fighting in Iraq's Kirkuk province. (AFP via The Guardian)
• 2014–15 Russian military intervention in Ukraine
  • The Government of Ukraine and pro-Russian separatists call off peace talks that were to be held in Minsk. (Reuters)
  • Artillery fire kills at least twelve civilians in Donetsk. (AP)

• Greek government-debt crisis
  • The new Greek government, represented by finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, meets with Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the head of the Eurogroup, and declares that Greece now rejects any further cooperation with its main international lenders known as the troika (the Eurogroup, the IMF, and the ECB); instead, it wants to negotiate directly with other European countries. (Deutsche Welle)

• The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that this season's influenza hospitalizations of 65-year-old and older Americans hit a record high since the 2005-2006 season. (AP)

• Israel announces plans to build 430 new settler homes in the West Bank. (AFP via Al Arabiyah)

• A judge at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia upholds the conviction of five men in connection with the Srebrenica massacre. (BBC)
• Los Angeles police arrest American hip hop mogul Suge Knight on suspicion for murder in relation to the January 29 hit-and-run incident in Compton, California. (CNN)
• Justice Minister Michael Masutha paroles South African apartheid-era death squad commander Eugene de Kock, nicknamed "Prime Evil", after having served 20 years for killing activists. (BBC)

• Zhelyu Zhelev, who became the first democratically elected president of Bulgaria, dies at 79. (Euronews) (Novinite)
• King Salman of Saudi Arabia names a new cabinet and replaces officials in several key government positions, removing two sons of the late monarch Abdullah from their regional governorships in the process. (Ahram Online)

• Two balloonists, Troy Bradley of the United States and Leonid Tiukhtyaev of Russia, are crossing the Pacific Ocean in the Two Eagles gas balloon and have surpassed the distance and duration records for straight gas balloons. They are set to land in Mexico on Saturday. (BBC)
• The German Chemical Society's Angewandte Chemie International Edition publishes research from chemist Donald Fleming of the University of British Columbia announcing the confirmational discovery of a new form of chemical bond, the vibrational bond. (Scientific American)