Honduras, Tunisia, Gambia.

Today's three stories you should know.

Jun 21, 2023

Honduras

At least 46 women have been killed in a women’s prison in Honduras as rival gangs clashed in a particularly brutal battle. Gang members locked other inmates inside a cell that was set alight, while other victims were shot with automatic weapons, killed with machetes or beaten to death. President Xiomara Castro called the incident “monstrous” and said he would take “drastic measures” in response. Honduras is grappling with a severe gang violence problem and the groups often hold sway in the country’s prisons, controlling entire wings and smuggling weapons in with ease.

Tunisia

Away from missing Titanic submarines, people continue to drown in the Mediterranean almost every day and often with little media attention. The UK’s Channel 4 News, though, today carried a harrowing report from Tunisia’s port city of Sfax, where exhausted and barely breathing survivors were brought to shore after a boat capsized, killing 11 people. Local fishermen told reporter Paraic O'Brien that incidents like this happen several times a week. The United Nations estimates that 1,000 people have drowned or gone missing in the Mediterranean this year.

More from Channel 4 here (warning: report is very distressing).

Gambia

Gambia said today that it plans to have all medicine from India tested before it is imported after at least 70 children died last year when they took an Indian cough medicine. Other batches of the medicine, which was found to contain chemicals ordinarily used in car brake fluid, were linked to deaths of children in Uzbekistan. India has now made it compulsory for cough-syrup makers to have their products tested before export. One-third of the world’s medicine is produced in India.