With tired faces, residents of a homeless shelter in Argentina's capital pass through the main entrance and line up to receive a hot drink and a slice of cake for an afternoon snack.

Places like the Bepo Ghezzi Social Inclusion Center in the Parque Patricios neighborhood of Buenos Aires have seen demand soar as more people are struggling to make ends meet amid an annual inflation rate above 100%.

How do you cook a meal when a staple ingredient is unaffordable?

This question is playing out in households around the world as they face shortages of essential foods like rice, cooking oil and onions. That is because countries have imposed restrictions on the food they export to protect their own supplies from the combined effect of the war in Ukraine, El Nino's threat to food production and increasing damage from climate change.

Five family members were killed in a mass shooting Wednesday in an Arab town in northern Israel, police and advocates said, the latest victims of a recent surge of gun violence within the country's Arab communities. Another Arab citizen of Israel was killed in a separate shooting earlier Wednesday.

Israeli police said that three men and two women were shot and killed at a house in the northern Bedouin town of Basmat Tab'un. They said they were treating the incident as criminal and hunting down suspected assailants. Israeli medics said that a sixth man was shot and wounded in the rampage.

Russia accused the United States on Wednesday of promoting Israel's normalization of relations with Arab nations and circumventing the Arab Peace Initiative launched by Saudi Arabia in 2002, which calls for a settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict before any diplomatic recognition of Israel.

The statement by Russia's U.N. Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia at the U.N. Security Council's monthly meeting on the Mideast also implicitly criticized Saudi Arabia — without naming it — for moving toward establishing diplomatic relations with Israel while taking "aggressive illegal actions" including an "unprecedented" expansion of settlements on territory that is supposed to be part of an independent Palestinian state.

Israel's Supreme Court on Thursday was hearing a challenge to a law that makes it harder to remove a sitting prime minister, which critics say is designed to protect Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who has been working to reshape the justice system while he is on trial for alleged corruption.

The hearing is part of several pivotal court challenges against a proposed package of legislation and government steps meant to alter the country's justice system. It comes as Israel has been plunged into months of turmoil over the plan and deepens a rift between Netanyahu's government and the judiciary, which it wants to weaken despite unprecedented opposition.

The separatist government of Nagorno-Karabakh announced Thursday that it will dissolve itself and the unrecognized republic will cease to exist by the end of the year, and Armenian officials said more than half of the population has already fled.

That is after Azerbaijan carried out a lightning offensive to reclaim full control over its breakaway region and demanded that Armenian troops in Nagorno-Karabakh lay down their weapons and the separatist government dissolve itself.

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan on Thursday accused Azerbaijan of carrying out a campaign of "ethnic cleansing" in Nagorno-Karabakh and said all Armenians will have fled the once disputed separatist region in "the coming days".

"The exodus of Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh continues. Our analysis shows that in the coming days there will be no Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh. This is an act of ethnic cleansing of which we were warning the international community for a long time," Pashinyan told his cabinet.

Israel has arrested five Palestinians in a plot allegedly hatched in Iran to target and spy on senior Israeli politicians, including Israel's far-right national security minister, the country's internal security agency said.

The Shin Bet security service alleged that an Iranian security official living in neighboring Jordan had recruited three Palestinian men in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and another two Palestinian citizens of Israel to gather intelligence about several high-profile Israeli politicians.

A Lebanese military court has sentenced an official with the extremist Islamic State group to 160 years in prison for carrying out deadly attacks against security forces and planning others targeting government buildings and crowded civilian areas, judicial officials said Wednesday.

The officials said Imad Yassin, a Palestinian in his 50s, confessed to all 11 charges against him, including joining a "terrorist organization," committing crimes in Lebanon's largest Palestinian refugee camp of Ain el-Helweh, shooting at Lebanese soldiers, and transporting weapons and munitions for militant groups.

Oil prices have risen, meaning drivers are paying more for gasoline and truckers and farmers more for diesel.

The increase also complicates the global fight against inflation and feeds Russia's war chest. That poses problems for politicians as well as the people having to spend more to get to work, transport the world's goods or harvest fields.