Russia

• Finland's national airline, Finnair, reported that some of its recent flights were interrupted because of radar jams hear the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad.
• Russia seems to be responsible for the jams, but - as The Economist explains - its interference is probably more defensive than nefarious: Kaliningrad is heavily militarized, and the jams are probably designed to scramble Ukrainian attack drones targeting Russian military sites there.

Gaza

• SecState Blinken will meet PM Netanyahu and other top Israeli officials today, and is expected to press them to speed up aid shipments to Gaza.
• Blinken and other diplomats have been encouraging Israel to stall its ground invasion of Rafah to improve odds for a ceasefire deal, but Netanyahu reaffirmed that the Rafah operation will go ahead "with or without" a deal.
• Separately, the UN's International Court of Justice rejected Nicaragua's case against Germany for shipping weapons to Israel.

China

• China's latest and most advanced aircraft carrier, the Fujian, left the Jiangnan Shipyard for its first sea trials. Following the trials, the 80,000-ton Fujian will become the third carrier in China's fleet, after the 66,000-ton Shandong and the 60,000-ton Liaoning.

Haiti

• Haiti's new transitional council selected little-known former sports minister Fritz Bélizaire to be the country's new interim prime minister as it tries to root out gangs and establish a stable government.
• Bélizaire replaced Michel Patrick Boisvert, who became interim PM only last week when the council formally took over from ousted (and unelected) PM Henry.
• Bélizaire may not last long either: he only won the support of four of the council's nine members, and the other five indicated they didn't know him well enough to appoint him.

DRC

• UN peacekeepers ended operations in South Kivu for good this week, leaving MONUSCO active in only North Kivu and Ituri provinces - which are currently facing worse violence than South Kivu. By the end of the year, the UN's longest and costliest peacekeeping mission will fully wind down and exit DRC.

Sahel

• Mali said its forces - along with Tuareg fighters - killed Islamic State commander Abu Huzeifa (aka Higgo), who planned the 2017 attack that killed four U.S. troops in Tongo Tongo, Niger.
• The operation took place in Liptako, which is where the porous borders of three junta-run countries - Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger - meet.
• Its success is a strategic win for the three juntas, who recently banded together (with Russian support) to form the anti-extremist Alliance of Sahel States after they were evicted from the regional ECOWAS bloc following their coups.

Sudan

• Amidst the looming spectre of a second genocide in Darfur, the U.S. asked the UAE and other allies to stop arming the Rapid Support Forces. (The UAE insists it "is not supplying any arms or ammunition to any faction engaged in the ongoing conflict in Sudan," but evidence suggests it actually is.)

Yemen

• Yemen's Iran-backed Houthi rebels claimed a drone strike on a container ship in the Red Sea on Friday, and yesterday authorities confirmed their claim.
• The ship they struck was the Portuguese-flagged MSC Orion, and this was their longest-range confirmed strike yet: it occurred around 375 miles (600 km) off the coast of Yemen.
• The Orion sustained only minor damage and continued its voyage.

Afghanistan

• Islamic State (IS) claimed Monday's attack at a Shia mosque in Herat that killed six, including the imam. IS is the main instigator of anti-Shia attacks in Afghanistan, so its claim wasn't a surprise.

Other News

• Zimbabwe launched banknotes and coins of its new currency, the ZiG. The ZiG - which was launched electronically in early April - is the sixth currency Zimbabwe has turned to since 2009 in its heretofore unsuccessful attempts to halt depreciation and stabilize the economy. And the ZiG will probably become another failed Zimbabwean currency worth more in an offbeat souvenir collection than in a grocery store: there's already a gap between the official and black market exchange rates.
• The Central African Republic's (CAR's) internationally-backed Special Criminal Court issued a warrant for the arrest of ex-CAR president François Bozizé over human rights abuses committed under his leadership from 2009 to 2013 (Bozizé was president from 2003 to 2013 - and was accused of abuses in his early years of rule too - but this warrant only covers his final violations.) Bozizé is unlikely to face justice: he lives in exile in Guinea-Bissau, which doesn't cooperate with foreign arrest warrants.