10 things you need to know today: June 6, 2023

1. Ukraine claims battlefield gains, Russia blows up dam

Ukraine's military said Monday it regained some territory in the Bakhmut area, which it called the "epicenter" of the fighting with Russian forces. Moscow said it appeared Ukraine had launched its long-awaited counteroffensive. Ukraine's deputy defense minister, Hanna Maliar, said on the Telegram messaging app that Ukrainian forces now "occupy the dominant heights" surrounding Bakhmut, a long-besieged city that Russia recently claimed it had seized after months of fighting. Ukraine declined to officially declare that its counteroffensive had begun. Ukraine said Russian strikes severely damaged the hydroelectric Nova Kakhovka dam, causing flooding near Kherson in southern Ukraine that forced evacuations. The dam supplies water to Russian-controlled Crimea and the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. Kyiv warned the destruction threatened to cause an "ecological disaster."

USA Today The Washington Post

2. Rail traffic resumes at India crash site as investigation continues

Indian rail authorities on Monday started letting trains resume travel, slowly, along tracks where three trains crashed on Friday, killing at least 275 people and injuring 1,200. Trains inched past the mangled cars as crews repaired the tracks. Investigators continued to go through the wreckage, but early evidence suggested that a signal failure likely caused the accident, India's worst rail disaster in more than two decades. The crash started when a passenger train slammed into a stationary freight train. Part of the first passenger train jumped the tracks and hit cars in another passenger train that was passing in the opposite direction in the eastern state of Odisha.

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Reuters

3. California slams Florida over migrant flights

California leaders on Monday criticized Florida officials they said were responsible for a second plane carrying migrants that arrived in Sacramento from Texas. The first flight arrived over the weekend with more than a dozen South American migrants flown to Sacramento from New Mexico. The second flight carried about 20 asylum seekers. It arrived from Texas with documents on board indicating that the flight was arranged through the Florida Division of Emergency Management under a state program to relocate migrants from Texas to other states, California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta said. The same contractor, Vertol Systems Co., arranged flights that carried dozens of Venezuelan migrants from San Antonio to Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, last year, Bonta said.

Los Angeles Times The Associated Press

4. Robert Hanssen, FBI agent who spied for Russia, dies at 79

Former FBI agent Robert Hanssen, who was sentenced in 2002 to life in prison for spying for the Soviet Union and later Russia, was found dead in his cell in Colorado on Monday. Hanssen, 79, pleaded guilty to what the FBI has called the most damaging espionage scandal in its history. He joined the FBI in 1976 and started selling government secrets to the Soviet Union nine years later. He was arrested in 2001. By then, Moscow had paid him more than $1.4 million in cash, diamonds, and bank funds. Hanssen gave his handlers classified documents, and information that compromised human sources and U.S intelligence-gathering techniques. He was arrested after being caught making a "dead drop" of classified material in Virginia.

Reuters

5. Afghan officials say 89 people apparently poisoned at girls' schools

Local officials in northern Afghanistan said 89 schoolgirls and teachers were hospitalized last weekend in a suspected case of poisoning, The New York Times reported Monday. Sixty-three students and employees at a girls' elementary school, Kabod Aab School, fell ill in classrooms on Saturday, followed by 26 students and staff members at nearby Faiz Abad Girls' School the next day. "Unknown people spread poisonous substances inside the classrooms, and when the students entered the classrooms, they experienced shortness of breath, watery eyes and noses, and they lost consciousness," Umair Sarpuli, director of culture and information in Sar-i-Pul, said. The Taliban, after seizing power in 2021, last year barred girls and young women from attending high school and college, but girls can attend elementary schools.

The New York Times

6. Cessna pilot was slumped over controls before crash

The pilot of the Cessna Citation business jet that flew through restricted airspace over Washington, D.C., before crashing in a mountainous area in Virginia was slumped over and unresponsive, fighter pilots who scrambled to intercept the aircraft said Monday. Federal investigators are going to the site where the private plane crashed Sunday, killing all four people on board. John Rumpel, who runs the company that owns the plane, said his daughter, Adina Azarian, and 2-year-old granddaughter Aria, were among the victims. The plane inexplicably turned around on its way from Tennessee to New York, and strayed directly over the U.S. capital. The military dispatched two fighter jets to intercept it, and they produced a sonic boom over the city.

The Associated Press

7. SEC sues crypto exchange Binance

The Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday filed a lawsuit accusing foreign-based Binance, the world's biggest cryptocurrency exchange, of running an illegal exchange in the United States, The Wall Street Journal reported. The SEC also said Binance misused customer assets. The lawsuit named Binance founder and controlling shareholder Changpeng Zhao as a defendant, saying he and the company diverted customers' funds to Sigma Chain, a trading entity he controlled. Binance also allegedly mixed billions of dollars' worth of customer assets and sent them to Merit Peak, another entity owned by Zhao. "This will be a landmark case," said Haynes and Boone partner Kurt Gottschall, former head of the SEC's Denver office. "The SEC appears to be very concerned about the commingling of customer funds."

The Wall Street Journal

8. Crews find bodies of all 3 missing men in collapsed Iowa building

Davenport, Iowa, authorities said on Monday that crews had found the bodies of all three men who had remained unaccounted for after last week's partial collapse of a six-story apartment building. The body of the first confirmed victim, Branden Colvin Sr., was found Sunday. Police said the bodies of the other two victims — Ryan Hitchcock and Daniel Prien — were found a short time later. After a rush to get survivors out of the building, local officials transitioned quickly toward demolishing the unstable remaining part of the building, as there was no evidence anyone remained inside. But protesters gathered at the site demanding a delay until several missing people could be accounted for. One woman was found alive and rescued.

The New York Times

9. Pence joins GOP presidential field

Former Vice President Mike Pence on Monday filed paperwork officially launching his campaign for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. The move sets up an unprecedented contest pitting a former vice president against the president under which he served. Former President Donald Trump dominates the polls, with Pence trailing far behind in a growing GOP field, polling in single digits. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) is Trump's closest rival, but he is far behind Trump. Pence, who has distanced himself from Trump since the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack by a mob of Trump's supporters, will have to win members of the MAGA base to gain ground. Some in Pence's inner circle had encouraged him to run for Indiana's open Senate seat in 2024 instead of running for president.

Politico NBC News

10. Australian mother freed after 20 years in prison for her children's deaths

The governor of Australia's New South Wales state pardoned Kathleen Folbigg, 55, after she spent 20 years in prison for the deaths of four of her children after new scientific evidence emerged suggesting they died of natural causes. Three of the children were under age 1 when they died in 1989, 1991, and 1993. The fourth was 19 months old when she died in 1999. Folbigg always maintained she did nothing to harm them, but she was sentenced to 30 years in prison. Ninety scientists and medical professionals signed a statement saying there was "significant positive evidence of natural causes of death." Both of her daughters who died carried a rare CALM2 genetic variant that experts said could have contributed to their deaths.

NPR