• The videogame company Rockstar Games releases its fifth installment of the Grand Theft Auto series Grand Theft Auto V, which nets 800 million U.S. Dollars on its launch day. [1]

• Syrian civil war:
  • The head of a United Nations war crimes tribunal states that it is investigating 14 alleged instances of chemical weapons attacks. (Al-Jazeera)
• Islamic insurgency in the Philippines:
  • Philippine Army troops free dozens of prisoners held hostage by the Moro National Liberation Front in the Battle of Zamboanga City in the city of Zamboanga. (BBC)

• The Costa Concordia is pulled completely upright from the place where it sunk in early 2012 off the coast of Tuscany in Italy. (Courier-Mail)

• Iranian President Hassan Rouhani confirmed he had contacted U.S. President Barack Obama via letters. Both countries cut all diplomatic relations after the Iranian Hostage Crisis in 1980. (Reuters)

• Abdul Kader Mullah, a leader of the Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami party, is sentenced to death for war crimes in the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971. (BBC)
• A standoff between Austrian police and a poacher suspected of killing three police officers and an ambulance driver in a shooting near Annaberg ends with the suspect likely to be dead. (ABC)