US President Donald Trump suggested June 16 that Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa could wipe out Hezbollah if Israel was unable to do so without causing heavy civilian casualties. The comment came in spite of repeated statements from Damascus ruling out any military intervention in neighboring Lebanon.

The Pechersk Lavra, one of the most important historical and religious sites in Ukraine, was hit in Moscow's latest barrage of drone and missile attacks on Kyiv overnight June 14-15, in what President Volodymyr Zelensky called "one of Russia's most serious crimes against Christian culture to date." Images circulating on social media show flames rising above the UNESCO World Heritage site, which contains structures dating from between the 11th and 18th centuries, including the gold-domed Dormition Cathedral. The head of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, Metropolitan Epiphanius, confirmed that the roof of the cathedral caught fire in the attack, calling the strike another Russian crime "against humanity, against history, against Christianity." Some 42,000 Kyiv residents spent the night in the capital's metro stations to escape the aerial assault on the city. (EuroNews)

The military wing of the Party of Free Life of Kurdistan (PJAK) issued a statement saying that armed clashes broke out between its forces and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in Marivan region of Iran's Kordistan province. The East Kurdistan Defense Units (YRK) wrote that the IRGC initiated artillery and mortar attacks against their positions  starting on June 8. (IranWire) 

Indian authorities have deported thousands of Bangladeshi citizens in the month since Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won elections in the state of West Bengal. Shortly after taking power in West Bengal, BJP officials ordered the creation of detention centers both for undocumented Bangladeshis and Rohingya Muslims who are fleeing persecution in their native Burma and mistreatment in overcrowded refugee camps in Bangladesh.

UN rights experts on June 8 condemned Nigerian authorities in response to ongoing reports that mass killings, kidnappings, forced conversion, sexual violence, and enforced disappearances are disproportionately targeting women and girls in Christian and minority religious communities.

Protesters clashed with security forces May 30 at the site of a planned luxury resort on Albania's Adriatic coast linked to Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, the daughter and son-in-law of US President Donald Trump. The site, at Zvërnec, is one of the last nearly pristine coastal zones in the entire Mediterranean, and is located within Albania's southern Greek-speaking region. The project has raised serious concerns among local ethnic Greek residents over the loss of their traditional lands.

A delegation from the Vatican—including cardinals and bishops—joined representatives of the Catholic Church in Peru to kneel before local campesinos and ask their forgiveness at a "Mass of Reparation" held May 23 at the parish of San Juan Bautista in Catacaos, Piura region. A Vatican investigation found that the Tallán indigenous communities of the parish for over a decade suffered land expropriation, physical threats and other abuses at the hands of the Sodalitium Christianae Vitae. The lay society, better known as "Sodalicio," was among the most active Catholic movements in Latin America from the early 1970s until it was suppressed by order of Pope Francis in April 2025. (Vatican News, Vatican News, OSV News, NCR)

Riot police erected steel barriers and used water cannon to prevent crowds from gathering to hear a speech by the deposed leader of Turkey's main opposition party in Izmir's central Cumhuriyet Square on May 26. Özgür Özel and the core leadership of the Republican People's Party (CHP) were removed from their posts five days earlier by a court order that they charged was politically motivated. Following issuance of the order, Özel and his supporters barricaded themselves inside the CHP headquarters in Ankara. Police stormed the building on May 24, firing rubber bullets and tear-gas in a violent end to the standoff.