Shops closing, companies going bankrupt and pharmacies with shelves emptying — in Lebanon these days, fistfights erupt in supermarkets as shoppers scramble to get to subsidized powdered milk, rice and cooking oil.

Like almost every other Lebanese, Nisrine Taha's life has been turned upside down in the past year under the weight of the country's crushing economic crisis. Anxiety for the future is eating at her.

French President Emanuel Macron said Thursday that a new "approach" is needed to deal with the Lebanese crisis.

Russian President Vladimir Putin authorized influence operations to help Donald Trump in last November's presidential election, according to a declassified intelligence assessment that found broad efforts by the Kremlin and Iran to shape the outcome of the race but ultimately no evidence that any foreign actor changed votes or otherwise disrupted the voting process.

The report released Tuesday from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence represents the most detailed assessment of the array of foreign threats to the 2020 election. These included efforts by Iran to undermine confidence in the vote and harm Trump's re-election prospects as well as Moscow operations that relied on Trump's allies to smear Joe Biden, the eventual winner.

Shootings at two massage parlors in Atlanta and one in the suburbs Tuesday evening left eight people dead, many of them women of Asian descent, authorities said. A 21-year-old man suspected in the shootings was taken into custody in southwest Georgia hours later after a manhunt, police said.

The attacks began around 5 p.m., when five people were shot at Youngs Asian Massage Parlor in a strip mall near a rural area in Acworth, about 30 miles (50 kilometers) north of Atlanta, Cherokee County Sheriff's Office spokesman Capt. Jay Baker said. Two people died at the scene and three were transported to a hospital where two of them also died, Baker said.

Daraa was an impoverished, neglected provincial city in the farmlands of Syria's south, an overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim backwater far from the more cosmopolitan cities of the country's heartland.

But in March 2011 it became the first to explode against the rule of President Bashar Assad. Assad's decision to crush the initially peaceful protests propelled Syria into a civil war that has killed more than a half million people, driven half the population from their homes and sucked in foreign military interventions that have carved up the country.

Outraged protesters returned to the streets of Lebanon's capital Tuesday, blocking roads with burning tires and garbage containers as the currency continued to plummet to all-time lows and the country's financial crisis intensified.

The protests resumed -- although in smaller numbers -- following several days of relative calm as the Lebanese pound continued its slide, plunging to a new low of 15,000 to the U.S. dollar on the black market.

The head of Hizbullah’s Loyalty to Resistance bloc, MP Mohammed Raad, met Monday in Moscow with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

Lebanon's currency plummeted to a new record low on Saturday, continuing its crash amid a worsening economic crisis that has triggered near-daily protests throughout the tiny country.

Among the Saturday afternoon protests was a small one near parliament, where riot police fired tear gas to disperse scores of young men throwing stones at security forces. The protesters also tried to break through a metal gate leading to the legislature.

Protesters attacked a coast guard station in southern Iran after a patrol from the force shot and killed a fuel smuggler, the semiofficial Fars news agency reported Saturday.

The report said the attack happened Friday when coast guard patrols shot at vessels smuggling fuel to neighboring countries, killing at least one smuggler.

The U.N. Security Council urged Somalia's government on Friday to organize elections "without delay" in a resolution that stressed the pressing threat to the country's security from al-Shabab and armed opposition groups.

The resolution, which was adopted unanimously, authorized the African Union to maintain its nearly 20,000-strong force in Somalia until the end of the year with a mandate to reduce the threat from the extremist groups to enable "a stable, federal, sovereign and united Somalia."