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Xinhua world news summary at 0030 GMT, June 16

Xinhua, June 16, 2016 Adjust font size:

The Czech government is to send an air instructors team to Iraq to help train pilots of Czech L-159 fighters in late July, said Czech General Staff spokesman Jan Sulc on Wednesday.

A 30-member team will operate in Iraq, and if needed, an additional five members would be sent as reinforcements. The Czech team will operate at the Balad air base which is about 65 km north of Baghdad and will not take part in combat operations.(Czech-Iraq)

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ORLANDO, the United States -- A U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) official said on Wednesday the shooting massacre at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida was both hate crime and an act of terror.

At least 49 people were killed and 53 other wounded, including a police officer, early Sunday morning in a shooting spree at a popular LGBT nightclub in Orlando, Florida. It was the worst mass shooting in U.S. history and the deadliest terror attack since the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001. (Orlando-FBI-Shooting)

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WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Federal Reserve left interest rates unchanged on Wednesday, but signaled it still plans two rate increases this year.

The central bank's updated projections released Wednesday showed that policymakers expected the federal funds rate to rise to 0.9 percent at the end of 2016, the same forecast as they did in March. This implies two quarter-percentage-point rate increases this year.(Fed-Rate)

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DAMASCUS -- At least 70 fighters and military soldiers have been killed over the past 24 hours during battles in Syria's northern province of Aleppo, a monitor group reported on Wednesday. (Syria-Aleppo-IS)

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CAIRO -- The search vessel hired by the Egyptian government provided several locations of the wreckage of the EgyptAir flight MS804 recently crashed in the Mediterranean, official MENA news agency reported Wednesday.

EgyptAir Flight MS804, an Airbus A320, went missing from radar screens earlier in May en route from Paris to Cairo with 66 people on board, including 30 Egyptians and 15 French. (Egypt-Air-Wreckage)

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LOS ANGELES -- Four months after the historic first-ever detection of gravitational waves, scientists said Wednesday they have directly detected another gravitational wave washing over the Earth.

Scientists said that the incredibly faint ripple that eventually reached Earth was the result of the spinning dance of a binary black hole pair on the brink of merging, although this duo weighed only 8 and 14 solar masses.(US-Gravitational waves) Endi