Gunmen opened fire at a synagogue, an Orthodox church and a police post in Russia's North Caucasus region of Dagestan on Sunday, killing six policemen and injuring 12, the region's interior ministry was quoted as saying.

The ministry, quoted by Russian news agencies, said two gunmen had been shot dead as the incidents unfolded. An Orthodox priest was also reported to have been killed.

MOSCOW, June 23 (Reuters) - Russia said on Sunday that the United States was responsible for a Ukrainian attack on the Russian-annexed Crimean peninsula with five U.S.-supplied missiles that killed at least five people including three children and injured 124 more.

The Russian Defence Ministry said four of the U.S.-delivered Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) missiles, equipped with cluster warheads, were shot down by air defence systems and the ammunition of a fifth had detonated in mid-air.

June 22 (Reuters) - Reuters denied on Saturday that it had reported that Israel would attack Lebanon within 48 hours, after reports circulated on social media citing the news agency as saying this.

"Any claims that Reuters reported that Israel will attack Lebanon within the next 48 hours are false. Reuters did not report this," a Reuters spokesperson said.

Gangs in Haiti have destroyed schools, pharmacies and factories. But they have largely spared one infrastructure network: the country’s telecommunications grid. 

Gangsters, it turns out, need working cellphones, too.

Digicel, Haiti’s largest operator and biggest foreign investor, has been able to keep 85% of its cell towers functioning and its mobile services online by carefully navigating gang territories and engaging warlords, said Maarten Boute, the Belgian-born chairman of the company in Haiti. Digicel uses subcontractors they call “community liaisons” to meet with gang chieftains so that the company can secure fuel from ports controlled by the gangs and ensure the safety of technicians conducting repair jobs in gang-controlled neighborhoods.

In the past several weeks, I have watched dozens of sleek U.S. military planes descend over Toussaint Louverture International Airport in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where I live. They were the first flights to land since gangs blockaded and halted commercial air traffic in March. U.S. news reports suggest that the aircraft contained civilian contractors and supplies to pave the way for the deployment of a Kenyan-led security mission to Haiti, which is expected to begin any day now.

But no one has informed Haitians who or what was on board. Even the members of Haiti’s new transitional government told me that they did not know precisely what the United States was flying into the country. Although the Haitian members of the presidential council have met with Kenyan and Haitian officials to discuss the force, they said they have not provided input to U.S. officials. Aides to newly installed Prime Minister Garry Conille confirmed that he has had no say on decisions related to the mission. It remains unclear what the force’s specific goals are or how it can contribute to rebuilding the Haitian state.

PODGORICA, June 21 (Reuters) - A major power outage hit Montenegro, Bosnia, Albania and most of Croatia's coast on Friday, disrupting businesses, shutting down traffic lights and leaving people sweltering without air conditioning in the middle of a heatwave.

Montenegro's energy minister said the shutdown was caused by a sudden increase in power consumption brought on by high temperatures, and by the heat itself overloading systems. Power distribution is linked across the Balkans for transfers and trading.

This year marks 30 years since the Rwandan genocide in 1994, when a Hutu-majority government and a privately owned radio station with close ties to the government colluded to murder 800,000 people.

The year 1994 may seem recent, but for a continent as young as Africa (where the median age is 19), it’s more like a distant past.

Suppose this had happened today, in the age of the algorithm. How much more chaos and murder would ensue if doctored images and deepfakes were proliferating on social media rather than radio, and radicalizing even more of the public? None of this is beyond reach, and countries including the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, and Niger are at risk—owing to their confluence of ethno-religious tensions, political instability, and the presence of foreign adversaries.

AfricaCheck.org

BEIRUT/SIDON, June 20 (Reuters) - Lebanese product designer Tara Tabet does not want to see her country pulled into a full-scale war with Israel, but like many of her compatriots is bracing for possible conflict after new threats by armed group Hezbollah against both Israel and Cyprus.

Hezbollah chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah surprised many on Wednesday when he said Cyprus - the EU member state closest to Lebanon - could be drawn into the group's conflict with Israel, raging in parallel with the Gaza war. Cyprus has denied taking sides in any war.

MADRID, June 20 (Reuters) - Marine biologists have moved a pair of beluga whales from the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv - the target of daily shelling by Russian forces - to the eastern Spanish city of Valencia, in what they described as a long and risky international rescue operation.

The animals, 15-year-old male Plombir and 14-year-old female Miranda, arrived at Valencia's famed Oceanografic complex late on Monday in a fragile state of health, according to a statement by the Spanish oceanarium.

The Chinese coast guard came in small boats with axes, long knives and spears.

They used the crude weapons to slash and puncture the Philippine military’s rubber craft. One Chinese boat rammed a Philippine boat at high speed, severing the thumb of a Filipino seaman who was holding on to the side of his ride.

Video footage isn’t paywalled for those interested in viewing it without a subscription or an archive link.

To the outside world, they were a physician, a journalist. No one suspected their apartment had become a prison.

The 73-year-old general practitioner Ahmad Al-Jamal was a fixture of his community.

He worked mornings at a public clinic in the Gaza Strip refugee camp of Nuseirat and afternoons at his own small private clinic, where residents turned to him for procedures such as circumcisions. He also was an imam at a local mosque, where he was known for his beautiful voice when reciting the Quran.

But for the past several months, when he finished his duties each day, he would return home to the apartment he shared with his son, his daughter-in-law and their children—and the three Israeli hostages they were hiding there for Hamas.

An unprecedented nearly 5,000 migrants have died at sea in the first five months of 2024 trying to reach the Spanish Canary Islands, according to a report released by migration rights group Walking Borders on Wednesday.

Between Jan. 1 and May 31, 4,808 people died on the Atlantic voyage to the Canaries after departing from Morocco, Mauritania, Senegal and Gambia, making it the deadliest route between Africa and Spain, with 95% of migrant deaths, according to the group.

Arrivals to the archipelago in that period soared five times to over 16,500 from a year ago, Interior Ministry data showed.