DolphinMath

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.

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.

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.

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.

The White House on Tuesday provided the most complete definition yet of what it considers a "major ground operation" in Rafah that could trigger a change in United States policy toward Israel, and said Israel's actions there have not yet reached that level.

"We have not seen them smash into Rafah - we have not seen them go in with large units, large numbers of troops in columns and formations in some sort of coordinated maneuver against multiple targets on the ground. That is a major ground operation. We have not seen that," White House national security spokesperson John Kirby told reporters at a briefing.

Aid workers fear a new disaster as militia forces close in on a major Darfur city.

On a sunny April afternoon in 2006, thousands of people flocked to the National Mall in Washington, D.C., for a rally with celebrities, Olympic athletes, and rising political stars. Their cause: garner international support to halt a genocide in Sudan’s Darfur region.

“If we care, the world will care. If we act, then the world will follow,” Barack Obama, then the junior Illinois senator, told the crowd, speaking alongside future House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. That same week, then-Sen. Joe Biden introduced a bill in Congress calling on NATO to intervene to halt the genocide in Sudan. “We need to take action on both a military and diplomatic front to end the conflict,” he said.

Reading too much into the language seems, at this point, to be less of a danger than reading too little into it.

This week, Israel released an appalling video featuring five female Israeli soldiers taken captive at Nahal Oz military base on October 7. Fearful and bloody, the women beg for their lives while Hamas fighters mill around and alternately threaten to kill them and compliment their appearance. The captors call the women “sabaya,” which Israel translated as “women who can get pregnant.” Almost immediately, others disputed the translation and said sabaya referred merely to “female captives” and included no reference to their fertility. “The Arabic word sabaya doesn’t have sexual connotations,” the Al Jazeera journalist Laila Al-Arian wrote in a post on X, taking exception to a Washington Post article that said that it did. She said the Israeli translation was “playing on racist and orientalist tropes about Arabs and Muslims.”

These are real women and victims of ongoing war crimes, so it does seem excessively lurid to suggest, without direct evidence, that they have been raped in captivity for the past several months. (“Eight months,” the Israelis noted, allowing readers to do the gestational math. “Think of what that means for these young women.”) But to assert that sabaya is devoid of sexual connotation reflects ignorance, at best. The word is well attested in classical sources and refers to female captives; the choice of a classical term over a modern one implies a fondness for classical modes of war, which codified sexual violence at scale. Just as concubine and comfort woman carry the befoulments of their historic use, sabaya is straightforwardly associated with what we moderns call rape. Anyone who uses sabaya in modern Gaza or Raqqah can be assumed to have specific and disgusting reasons to want to revive it.

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LOS ANGELES, May 24 (Reuters) - Three weeks after a mob attacked pro-Palestinian activists encamped at the University of California, Los Angeles, police have made their first arrest in the violence, a man they say was seen in video footage beating victims with a wooden pole.

The suspect, identified as Edan On, 18, was taken into custody on Thursday in the city of Beverly Hills and booked on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon, the UCLA Police Department said in a statement on Friday.

The man, who police said had no affiliation with UCLA, was reported by local media to be a Beverly Hills High School student.

These numbers matter—first, because of the dignity of those killed or still living.

Between May 6 and May 8, the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) revised its estimates of how many women and children had died in Gaza. The numbers appeared to drop drastically: first, it reported at least 24,000 dead women and children, and two days later, it reported exactly 12,756 “identified” dead women and children. One could be forgiven for wondering whether the UN had raised about 6,700 Gazan children and 4,500 Gazan women from the dead.

OCHA has provided a running body count since the beginning of the Gaza war, and it currently stands at 34,844. This figure was generated by Hamas and is apparently accepted, give or take a few thousand, by Israelis. On a podcast last week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu estimated that Israel had killed roughly 14,000 combatants and said the country regretted the deaths of another 16,000 Palestinian civilians. The apparent downward revision was made without any accompanying statement to explain the change or sudden precision. Israel’s military did not make a big deal about it either, probably because there is no way to sound good when celebrating a reduction in the number of children you have killed.

Many noticed anyway. David Adesnik, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, gave the most detailed account of what had happened. For about two months, OCHA had been repeating numbers from Hamas’s Government Media Office, and on May 8 it switched back to Hamas’s Ministry of Health, its source at the beginning of the war. The Ministry of Health is acknowledged to be the more reliable of the two, and it is unclear why OCHA switched to the worse of the two sources, or switched back. A UN spokesperson, Farhan Haq, later explained that the Ministry of Health was “for whatever reason, given the conditions on the ground, unresponsive.” But the Ministry of Health kept publishing statistics in the interim. OCHA didn’t use them.

The White House has condemned an attack on an aid convoy heading to Gaza by Israeli settlers who threw packages of food into the road and set fire to the vehicles.

Video of the incident on Monday at Tarqumiya checkpoint, west of Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, showed settlers blocking the trucks and throwing boxes of much-needed supplies on the ground. Photographs from the scene showed piles of damaged aid packages and drifts of rice and flour across the road.

Late on Monday, photos began circulating on social media showing the trucks on fire.

TEL AVIV, Israel - The U.S. military on Saturday said it began dropping food over the Gaza Strip, a war-torn enclave desperate for humanitarian aid.

A "a combined humanitarian assistance airdrop into Gaza" of over 38,000 meals along the coastline using C-130 aircraft was conducted by U.S. and Jordanian air forces, U.S. Central Command said in a statement.

Reddit said in a filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission that its users’ posts are “a valuable source of conversation data and knowledge” that has been and will continue to be an important mechanism for training AI and large language models. The filing also states that the company believes “we are in the early stages of monetizing our user base,” and proceeds to say that it will continue to sell users’ content to companies that want to train LLMs and that it will also begin “increased use of artificial intelligence in our advertising solutions.”

On Wednesday, Reuters reported that Reddit has entered a contract with Google, which will license its content for $60 million a year in order to train Google’s AI models.