Hundreds of Hong Kong police officers raided the newsroom (NYT) of the pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily, arresting five editors and executives and freezing company accounts. It was one of the most aggressive uses yet of a national security law Beijing imposed on Hong Kong last year.
 
Authorities previously raided the newsroom nine months ago, and the newspaper’s founder, Jimmy Lai, is already jailed. This time, police said at least thirty articles from 2019 potentially violated the national security law (Straits Times) by calling for foreign sanctions on the Chinese and Hong Kong governments. One police official said the public should cut all ties with the arrested executives and that people could face prosecution for sharing the newspaper’s reports online. Human Rights Watch denounced the raid (Nikkei) as a “new low in a bottomless assault on press freedom.” A top Apple Daily editor said the newspaper will attempt to keep publishing reports.

During a summit in Geneva, U.S. President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin committed to holding a strategic-stability dialogue (NYT) that includes arms control talks and beginning consultations on cyber-related issues. Biden warned Putin that the United States would use its cyber capabilities to respond if Russia attacked any of sixteen examples of critical U.S. infrastructure. 
 
CFR’s Stephen Sestanovich analyzes the summit’s outcomes in the New York Times.
 
Germany: German pharmaceutical firm CureVac announced what observers called disappointing preliminary results in its COVID-19 vaccine trial, in which the vaccine had an efficacy of 49 percent (NYT).

Three astronauts arrived at China’s Tiangong space station (AFP) in the first manned flight to the station and China’s first crewed space mission in almost five years. 

Security forces set fire to a village of about eight hundred people in central Myanmar after a confrontation there with opponents of the country’s ruling military junta, village residents told Reuters. 
 
Afghanistan: More than one hundred Taliban fighters and ninety Afghan security-force members died in clashes across the country over a twenty-four-hour period, TOLOnews reported. The military said it regained control of the center of Khanabad district in Kunduz Province after the Taliban took over the area earlier this week.

Former Vice President Mohsen Mehralizadeh, lawmaker Alireza Zakani, and former nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili withdrew from Iran’s presidential race (National), state media reported. Only four candidates remain in tomorrow’s election, with Judiciary Chief Ebrahim Raisi leading in the polls.
 
This In Brief breaks down what to know about Iran’s presidential election.
 
Tunisia: Protests against police brutality have spread across several working-class districts (Al Jazeera) in the capital city, Tunis. They were sparked by a video shared on social media of police officers beating a young man and by another man’s death in police custody. 

Former Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo is expected to return to the country today (Africanews) after being away for a decade, during which the International Criminal Court acquitted him on charges including murder, rape, and persecution. He was violently ousted in 2011.
 
Ethiopia: A government delegation is in Washington today to meet with (National) the U.S. envoy to the Horn of Africa amid growing U.S. criticism of the crisis in Ethiopia’s Tigray region. Tigrayan activists are expected to protest outside the State Department.
 
For the Africa in Transition blog, CFR’s Michelle Gavin argues that the foreign observers should take further action on Tigray.

Colombian authorities are investigating two car bomb explosions (Al Jazeera) that occurred on Tuesday at a military base near the country’s border with Venezuela. Thirty-six people were injured. A small number of U.S. military personnel were at the base at the time of the blasts, but they were reportedly unharmed.
 
Peru: Election authorities completed their tally (MercoPress) from the country’s presidential runoff, with left-wing Pedro Castillo beating right-wing Keiko Fujimori by around forty-four thousand votes. Fujimori has not conceded, as she is contesting some of the ballots.

Both houses of Congress passed a bill (AP) to make Juneteenth, which commemorates the end of slavery in the United States, the first new federal holiday since 1983. June 19, 1865, was the day that enslaved Black people in Galveston, Texas, received news of the end of slavery.