World News

Hundreds of residents in four neighborhoods in the southern end of Canada’s oil sand hub of Fort McMurray, Alberta, were ordered to evacuate with a wildfire threatening the community, authorities said Tuesday.

The Rural Municipality of Wood Buffalo said residents in Beacon Hill, Abasand, Prairie Creek and Grayling Terrace needed to leave by 4 p.m.

CANADA BATTLES WORST-EVER WILDFIRE SEASON, AS NORTH AMERICA ENGULFED IN SMOKE

An emergency evacuation warning remained in place for the rest of Fort McMurray and surrounding areas.

The rural municipality said the residents in the four neighborhoods were being ordered out to clear room for crews to fight the fire, which had moved to within 13 kilometers (8 miles) of the city.

Fort McMurray has a population of about 68,000, and a wildfire there in 2016 destroyed 2,400 homes and forced more than 80,000 people to flee.

"It’s very important for me to know that this fire activity is very different than the 2016 Horse River wildfire. We have an abundance of resources and we are well positioned to respond to this situation," Regional Fire Chief Jody Butz said.

Suzy Gerendi, who runs the dessert shop in the Beacon Hill neighborhood, said she was already packed up when the evacuation order came down. Gerendi lived in Beacon Hill when fire overtook it in 2016.

She immediately began the drive towards Edmonton, Alberta with her three dogs.

"It’s very, very dark and orange," Gerendi said. "It brings up some memories and it’s not a good feeling."

Residents were also dealing with heavy smoke and ash.

"It’s dark. The smoke is everywhere," said resident Else Hoko.

Hoko picked up her two sons from school in Abasand after receiving the evacuation order. She had also fled in 2016.

"I’m so stressed," she said, adding that she’s praying for rain.

The Beacon Hill and Abasand neighborhoods saw serious losses in 2016.

The current fire has grown to about 110 square kilometers (42.5 square miles) and remains out of control.

Josee St. Onge, an Alberta Wildfire information officer, said wind is pushing the fire toward the community.

She said crews have been pulled from the fire line for safety reasons, and air tankers and helicopters continue to drop water and retardant on the "active edges."

"Unfortunately, these are not favorable winds for us, and the fire will continue to advance towards the town until we see a wind shift," she said.

In the northeast of the neighboring province of British Columbia, areas subject to mandatory evacuation increased, with the latest order Monday for Doig River First Nation and the Peace River Regional District as a fire threatened nearby.

Forecasts on Tuesday called for wind that could blow a growing wildfire closer to Fort Nelson. Emergency workers had been phoning as many of the estimated 50 residents still in town and urging them to go.

The British Columbia Wildfire Service said the blaze had grown to 84 square kilometers (32 miles). On Monday, it was about 53 square kilometers (21 miles) in size. A photo by the service shows the billowing blaze spreading in a vast wooded area.

The community of about 4,700 and the neighboring Fort Nelson First Nation have been under an evacuation order since Friday.

Northern Rockies Regional Municipality Mayor Rob Fraser said one drawback of the evacuation is the challenge for essential staff, including firefighters, to find food.

"This is really going to be weather dependent, and so far the weather has been holding with us," Fraser said of the wildfire in a video posted to Facebook.

In 2023, Canada experienced a record number of wildfires that caused choking smoke in parts of the U.S. and forced more than 235,000 Canadians to evacuate their communities. At least four firefighters died.

Several wildfires are burning across western Canada.

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday signed a decree appointing a new government, including replacement of the defense minister with a former deputy prime minister who is an economics expert with no military background.

When Putin was inaugurated for a new six-year term on May 7, the government submitted its resignation in line with Russian law. Putin reappointed Mikhail Mishustin as prime minister three days later, which was quickly approved by the lower house of parliament.

WHAT TO EXPECT FROM PUTIN AS RUSSIAN STRONGMAN BEGINS NEW SIX-YEAR TERM

On Sunday, he signed a decree moving Sergei Shoigu from his post as defense minister to head of the national security council. Putin also nominated deputy prime minister Andrei Belousov to take Shoigu's place.

Putin also proposed names for some Cabinet members to return to their posts and Mishustin submitted names for several new ministers, all of which were approved by the parliament.

Shoigu has been widely seen as a key figure in Putin’s decision to send Russian troops into Ukraine. Russia had expected the operation to quickly overwhelm Ukraine’s much smaller and less-equipped army and for Ukrainians to broadly welcome Russian troops.

Instead, the conflict galvanized Ukraine to mount an intense defense, dealing the Russian army humiliating blows, including the retreat from an attempt to take the capital, Kyiv, and a counteroffensive that drove Moscow’s forces out of the Kharkiv region.

Shoigu also was shadowed by the arrest last month of deputy defense minister Timur Ivanov on charges of accepting huge bribes.

The decree by Putin largely retains the previous Cabinet, but names new energy, sports, transport, industry and agriculture ministers.

Argentina’s monthly inflation rate eased sharply to a single-digit rate in April for the first time in half a year, data released Tuesday showed, a closely watched indicator that bolsters President Javier Milei’s severe austerity program aimed at fixing the country’s troubled economy.

Prices rose at a rate of 8.8% last month, the Argentine government statistics agency reported, down from a monthly rate of 11% in March and well below a peak of 25% last December, when Milei became president with a mission to combat Argentina’s dizzying inflation, among the highest in the world.

ARGENTINA WILL GET NEXT INSTALLMENT OF BAILOUT AS IMF PRAISES MILEI'S AUSTERITY POLICIES

"Inflation is being pulverized," Manuel Adorni, the presidential spokesperson, posted on social media platform X after the announcement. "Its death certificate is being signed."

Although praised by the International Monetary Fund and cheered by market watchers, Milei’s cost-cutting and deregulation campaign has, at least in the short term, squeezed families whose money has plummeted in value while the cost of nearly everything has skyrocketed. Annual inflation, the statistics agency reported Tuesday, climbed slightly to 289.4%.

"People are in pain," said 23-year-old Augustin Perez, a supermarket worker in the suburbs of Buenos Aires who said his rent had soared by 90% since Milei deregulated the real estate market and his electricity bill had nearly tripled since the government slashed subsidies. "They say things are getting better, but how? I don’t understand."

Milei’s social media feed in recent weeks has become a stream of good economic news: Argentine bonds posting some of the best gains among emerging markets, officials celebrating its first quarterly surplus since 2008 and the IMF announcing Monday it would release another $800 million loan — a symbolic vote of confidence in Milei’s overhaul.

"The important thing is to score goals now," Milei said at an event Tuesday honoring former President Carlos Menem, a divisive figure whose success driving hyperinflation down to single digits through free-market policies Milei repeatedly references. "We are beating inflation."

Even so, some experts warn that falling inflation isn’t necessarily an economic victory — rather the symptom of a painful recession. The IMF expects Argentina’s gross domestic product to shrink by 2.8% this year.

"You’ve had a massive collapse in private spending, which explains why consumption has dropped dramatically and why inflation is also falling," said Monica de Bolle, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics who studies emerging markets. "People are worse off than they were before. That leads them to spend less."

Signs of an economic slowdown are everywhere in Buenos Aires — the lines snaking outside discounted groceries, the empty seats in the city’s typically booming restaurants, the growing strikes and protests.

At an open-air market in the capital's Liniers neighborhood, Lidia Pacheco makes a beeline for the garbage dump. Several times a week, the 45-year-old mother of four rummages through the pungent pile to salvage the tomatoes with the least mold.

"This place saves me," Pacheco said. Sky-high prices have forced her to stick to worn-out clothes and shoes and change her diet to the point of giving up yerba mate, Argentina’s ubiquitous national drink brewed from bitter leaves. "Whatever I earn from selling clothes goes to eating," she said.

Argentina's retail sales in the first quarter of 2024 fell nearly 20% compared to the year before, a clip comparable to that of the 2020 pandemic lockdowns. The consumption of beef — an Argentine classic — dropped to its lowest level in three decades this quarter, the government reported, prompting panicked editorials about a crisis in Argentina's national psyche.

"Now I buy pork and chicken instead," said Leonardo Buono, 51-year-old hospital worker. "It’s an intense shock, this economic adjustment."

Milei, a self-proclaimed "anarcho-capitalist" and former TV personality, warned his policies would hurt at first.

He campaigned brandishing a chainsaw to symbolize all the cutting he would do to Argentina’s bloated state, a dramatic change from successive left-leaning Peronist governments that ran vast budget deficits financed by printing money.

Promising the pain would pay off, he slashed spending on everything from construction and cultural centers to education and energy subsidies, from soup kitchens and social programs to pensions and public companies. He has also devalued the Argentine peso by 54%, helping close the chasm between the peso’s official and black-market exchange rates but also fueling inflation.

Inflation in the first four months of 2024 surged by 65%, the government statistics agency reported Tuesday. Prices in shops and restaurants have reached levels similar to those in the U.S. and Europe.

But Argentine wages have remained stagnant or declined, with the monthly minimum wage for regulated workers just $264 as of this month, with workers in the informal economy often paid less.

Today that sum can buy scarcely more than a few nice meals at Don Julio, a famous Buenos Aires steakhouse. Nearly 60% of the country’s 46 million people now live in poverty, a 20-year high, according to a study in January by Argentina’s Catholic University.

Even as discontent appears to rise, the president’s approval ratings have remained high, around 50%, according to a survey this month by Argentine consulting firm Circuitos — possibly a result of Milei’s success blaming his predecessors for the crisis.

"It’s not his fault, it’s the Peronists who ruined the country, and Milei is trying to do his best," said Rainer Silva, a Venezuelan taxi driver who fled his own country’s economic collapse for Argentina five years ago. "He’s like Trump, everyone’s against him."

Argentina’s powerful trade unions and leftist political parties have pushed back against Milei with weekly street protests, but haven’t managed to galvanize a broad swath of society.

That could change — last week, a massive protest against budget cuts to public universities visibly hit a nerve, drawing hundreds of thousands of people.

"The current situation is completely unsustainable," said de Bolle, the economy expert.

A court on Tuesday convicted one of the best-known figures in the far-right Alternative for Germany party of knowingly using a Nazi slogan in a speech and ordered him to pay a fine.

The verdict in Björn Höcke’s trial comes months before a regional election in the eastern state of Thuringia in which he plans to run for the governor’s job.

FAR-RIGHT GERMAN POLITICIAN CHARGED WITH SECOND COUNT OF USING NAZI SLOGAN

The state court in the eastern city of Halle convicted Höcke of using symbols of a former Nazi organization. It imposed a fine totaling about $14,000.

The charge can carry a maximum sentence of three years in prison. Prosecutors had sought a six-month suspended sentence, while defense lawyers argued for acquittal.

The case centered on a speech in Merseburg in May 2021 in which Höcke used the phrase "Everything for Germany!" Prosecutors contended he was aware of its origin as a slogan of the Nazis’ SA stormtroopers, but Höcke has argued that it is an "everyday saying."

Court spokesperson Adina Kessler-Jensch said judges were convinced that Höcke was aware the formulation was a banned SA slogan.

Presiding Judge Jan Stengel told Höcke that "you are an articulate, intelligent man who knows what he is saying," German news agency dpa reported.

The former history teacher testified at the trial that he is "completely innocent" and described himself as a "law-abiding citizen."

The 52-year-old Höcke is an influential figure on the hard right of Alternative for Germany, or AfD.

He has led the AfD’s regional branch in Thuringia since 2013, the year the party was founded, and is due to lead its campaign in a state election set for Sept. 1.

He once called the Holocaust memorial in Berlin a "monument of shame" and called for Germany to perform a "180-degree turn" in how it remembers its past. A party tribunal in 2018 rejected a bid to have him expelled.

Prosecutor Benedikt Bernzen argued in Tuesday’s closing arguments that Höcke had used Nazi vocabulary "strategically and systematically" in the past, dpa reported.

Höcke accused prosecutors of not looking for exonerating circumstances and argued that freedom of opinion is limited in Germany.

It’s questionable whether the conviction in the trial, which opened in mid-April, will have any significant political effect on Höcke’s ambitions. It won’t have any direct legal effect on his candidacy.

AfD is particularly strong in Germany’s formerly communist east, where Thuringia is located. It’s unlikely that any other party will agree to work with Höcke and put him in the governor’s office, but AfD’s strength has made forming governing coalitions in the region very complicated.

The Thuringia branch of AfD is one of three that the domestic intelligence agency has under official surveillance as a "proven right-wing extremist" group.

On Monday, a court ruled in a separate case that the agency was justified in putting the whole party under observation for suspected extremism. AfD has portrayed the designation as a political attempt to discredit the party and said it will seek to appeal.

The U.S. Treasury on Tuesday put sanctions on a Russian citizen and three Russia-based companies it said were trying to evade U.S. sanctions in a scheme that could have unfrozen more than $1.5 billion belonging to Russian metals tycoon Oleg Deripaska.

Deripaska, who himself was placed under U.S. sanctions in April 2018, branched out into metals trading as the Soviet Union crumbled, making a fortune by buying up stakes in aluminum factories. Forbes ranked his fortune this year at $2.8 billion.

The Treasury said that in June 2023 Deripaska coordinated with Russian citizens Dmitrii Beloglazov, the owner of Russia-based financial services firm Obshchestvo S Ogranichennoi Otvetstvennostiu Titul (Titul), on a planned transaction to sell Deripaska's frozen shares in a European company.

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Within weeks of this, Russia-based financial services firm Aktsionernoe Obshchestvo Iliadis was set up as a subsidiary of Titul. In early 2024, Iliadis acquired Russia-based investment holding company International Company Joint Stock Company Rasperia Trading Limited (Rasperia), which holds Deripaska's frozen shares.

The Treasury said sanctions were imposed on Beloglazov, Titul, and Iliadis on Tuesday for operating or having operated in Russia's financial services sector. It said Rasperia was sanctioned for being owned or controlled by, or having acted or purported to act on behalf of Iliadis.

Nobel laureate Alice Munro, the Canadian literary giant who became one of the world’s most esteemed contemporary authors and one of history's most honored short story writers, has died at age 92.

A spokesperson for publisher Penguin Random House Canada said Munro, winner of the Nobel literary prize in 2013, died Monday at home in Port Hope, Ontario. Munro had been in frail health for years and often spoke of retirement, a decision that proved final after the author's 2012 collection, "Dear Life."

Often ranked with Anton Chekhov, John Cheever and a handful of other short story writers, Munro achieved stature rare for an art form traditionally placed beneath the novel. She was the first lifelong Canadian to win the Nobel and the first recipient cited exclusively for short fiction. Echoing the judgment of so many before, the Swedish academy pronounced her a "master of the contemporary short story" who could "accommodate the entire epic complexity of the novel in just a few short pages."

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Munro, little known beyond Canada until her late 30s, also became one of the few short story writers to enjoy ongoing commercial success. Sales in North America alone exceeded 1 million copies and the Nobel announcement raised "Dear Life" to the high end of The New York Times' bestseller list for paperback fiction. Other popular books included "Too Much Happiness," "The View from Castle Rock" and "The Love of a Good Woman."

Over a half century of writing, Munro perfected one of the greatest tricks of any art form: illuminating the universal through the particular, creating stories set around Canada that appealed to readers far away. She produced no single definitive work, but dozens of classics that were showcases of wisdom, technique and talent — her inspired plot twists and artful shifts of time and perspective; her subtle, sometimes cutting humor; her summation of lives in broad dimension and fine detail; her insights into people across age or background, her genius for sketching a character, like the adulterous woman introduced as "short, cushiony, dark-eyed, effusive. A stranger to irony."

Her best known fiction included "The Beggar's Maid," a courtship between an insecure young woman and an officious rich boy who becomes her husband; "Corrie," in which a wealthy young woman has an affair with an architect "equipped with a wife and young family"; and "The Moons of Jupiter," about a middle-aged writer who visits her ailing father in a Toronto hospital and shares memories of different parts of their lives.

"I think any life can be interesting," Munro said during a 2013 post-prize interview for the Nobel Foundation. "I think any surroundings can be interesting."

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Disliking Munro, as a writer or as a person, seemed almost heretical. The wide and welcoming smile captured in her author photographs was complemented by a down-to-earth manner and eyes of acute alertness, fitting for a woman who seemed to pull stories out of the air the way songwriters discovered melodies. She was admired without apparent envy, placed by the likes of Jonathan Franzen, John Updike and Cynthia Ozick at the very top of the pantheon. Munro's daughter, Sheila Munro, wrote a memoir in which she confided that "so unassailable is the truth of her fiction that sometimes I even feel as though I'm living inside an Alice Munro story." Fellow Canadian author Margaret Atwood called her a pioneer for women, and for Canadians.

"Back in the 1950s and 60s, when Munro began, there was a feeling that not only female writers but Canadians were thought to be both trespassing and transgressing," Atwood wrote in a 2013 tribute published in the Guardian after Munro won the Nobel. "The road to the Nobel wasn't an easy one for Munro: the odds that a literary star would emerge from her time and place would once have been zero."

Although not overtly political, Munro witnessed and participated in the cultural revolution of the 1960s and '70s and permitted her characters to do the same. She was a farmer's daughter who married young, then left her husband in the 1970s and took to "wearing miniskirts and prancing around," as she recalled during a 2003 interview with The Associated Press. Many of her stories contrasted the generation of Munro's parents with the more open-ended lives of their children, departing from the years when housewives daydreamed "between the walls that the husband was paying for."

Moviegoers would become familiar with "The Bear Came Over the Mountain," the improbably seamless tale of a married woman with memory loss who has an affair with a fellow nursing home patient, a story further complicated by her husband's many past infidelities. "The Bear" was adapted by director Sarah Polley into the feature film "Away from Her," which brought an Academy Award nomination for Julie Christie. In 2014, Kristen Wiig starred in "Hateship, Loveship," an adaptation of the story "Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage," in which a housekeeper leaves her job and travels to a distant rural town to meet up with a man she believes is in love with her — unaware the romantic letters she has received were concocted by his daughter and a friend.

Even before the Nobel, Munro received honors from around the English-language world, including Britain's Man Booker International Prize and the National Book Critics Circle award in the U.S., where the American Academy of Arts and Letters voted her in as an honorary member. In Canada, she was a three-time winner of the Governor General's Award and a two-time winner of the Giller Prize.

Munro was a short story writer by choice, and, apparently, by design. Judith Jones, an editor at Alfred A. Knopf who worked with Updike and Anne Tyler, did not want to publish "Lives of Girls & Women," her only novel, writing in an internal memo that "there's no question the lady can write but it's also clear she is primarily a short story writer."

Munro would acknowledge that she didn't think like a novelist.

"I have all these disconnected realities in my own life, and I see them in other people's lives," she told the AP. "That was one of the problems, why I couldn't write novels. I never saw things hanging together too well."

Alice Ann Laidlaw was born in Wingham, Ontario, in 1931, and spent much of her childhood there, a time and place she often used in her fiction, including the four autobiographical pieces that concluded "Dear Life." Her father was a fox farmer, her mother a teacher and the family’s fortunes shifted between middle class and working poor, giving the future author a special sensitivity to money and class. Young Alice was often absorbed in literature, starting with the first time she was read Hans Christian Andersen’s "The Little Mermaid." She was a compulsive inventor of stories and the "sort of child who reads walking upstairs and props a book in front of her when she does the dishes."

A top student in high school, she received a scholarship to study at the University of Western Ontario, majoring in journalism as a "cover-up" for her pursuit of literature. She was still an undergraduate when she sold a story about a lonely teacher, "The Dimensions of a Shadow," to CBC Radio. She was also publishing work in her school’s literary journal.

One fellow student read "Dimensions" and wrote to the then-Laidlaw, telling her the story reminded him of Chekhov. The student, Gerald Fremlin, would become her second husband. Another fellow student, James Munro, was her first husband. They married in 1951, when she was only 20, and had four children, one of whom died soon after birth.

Settling with her family in Vancouver, Alice Munro wrote between trips to school, housework and helping her husband at the bookstore that they co-owned and would turn up in some of her stories. She wrote one book in the laundry room of her house, her typewriter placed near the washer and dryer. Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers and other writers from the American South inspired her, through their sense of place and their understanding of the strange and absurd.

Isolated from the literary center of Toronto, she did manage to get published in several literary magazines and to attract the attention of an editor at Ryerson Press (later bought out by McGraw Hill). Her debut collection, "Dance of the Happy Shades," was released in 1968 with a first printing of just under 2,700 copies. A year later it won the Governor’s General Award and made Munro a national celebrity — and curiosity. "Literary Fame Catches City Mother Unprepared," read one newspaper headline.

"When the book first came they sent me a half dozen copies. I put them in the closet. I didn’t look at them. I didn’t tell my husband they had come, because I couldn’t bear it. I was afraid it was terrible," Munro told the AP. "And one night, he was away, and I forced myself to sit down and read it all the way through, and I didn’t think it was too bad. And I felt I could acknowledge it and it would be OK."

By the early ’70s, she had left her husband, later observing that she was not "prepared to be a submissive wife." Her changing life was best illustrated by her response to the annual Canadian census. For years, she had written down her occupation as "housewife." In 1971, she switched to "writer."

Over the next 40 years, her reputation and readership only grew, with many of her stories first appearing in The New Yorker. Her prose style was straightforward, her tone matter of fact, but her plots revealed unending disruption and disappointments: broken marriages, violent deaths, madness and dreams unfulfilled, or never even attempted. "Canadian Gothic" was one way she described the community of her childhood, a world she returned to when, in middle age, she and her second husband relocated to nearby Clinton.

"Shame and embarrassment are driving forces for Munro’s characters," Atwood wrote, "just as perfectionism in the writing has been a driving force for her: getting it down, getting it right, but also the impossibility of that."

She had the kind of curiosity that would have made her an ideal companion on a long train ride, imagining the lives of the other passengers. Munro wrote the story "Friend of My Youth," in which a man has an affair with his fiancee’s sister and ends up living with both women, after an acquaintance told her about some neighbors who belonged to a religion that forbade card games. The author wanted to know more — about the religion, about the neighbors.

Even as a child, Munro had regarded the world as an adventure and mystery and herself as an observer, walking around Wingham and taking in the homes as if she were a tourist. In "The Peace of Utrecht," an autobiographical story written in the late 1960s, a woman discovers an old high school notebook and remembers a dance she once attended with an intensity that would envelop her whole existence.

"And now an experience which seemed not at all memorable at the time," Munro wrote, "had been transformed into something curiously meaningful for me, and complete; it took in more than the girls dancing and the single street, it spread over the whole town, its rudimentary pattern of streets and its bare trees and muddy yards just free of the snow, over the dirt roads where the lights of cars appeared, jolting toward the town, under an immense pale wash of sky."

The hunt is underway for a Sumatran tiger believed to have attacked a man in western Indonesia, killing him.

The victim was identified by CBS News as being 26 years old. He was found dead at a plantation in the Riau province on Sumatra island on Thursday afternoon with a missing right hand and bite wounds on his neck.

Local authorities received a notification from two workers that their friend was screaming, and that, when they searched for him, all they saw were tiger tracks, CBS reported.

"Our team has left this morning (to search for the tiger). Based on the report, the area is within the tiger habitat," local conservation agency head Genman Suhefti Hasibuan told Agence France Presse (AFP) on Saturday.

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AFP reported there are about several hundred wild tigers left on the western island of Sumatra due to being targeted by poachers and deforestation of their habitat for oil palm plantations. 

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Sumatran tigers are carnivorous mammals whose life span in the wild is about 15 years, according to National Geographic. They can be as large as eight feet, and weigh as much as 260 pounds. 

Last week's tiger attack is one of three fatal incidents in the past five months, according to CBS News. A Siberian tiger reportedly attacked a dog and killed its owner in Russia in December. Last month, a man was killed by tigers at a zoo in Pakistan.

Four farmers in Indonesia's Aceh province were attacked by tigers in two separate incidents back in February, CBS reported.

The Georgian parliament on Tuesday approved in the third and final reading a divisive bill that sparked weeks of mass protests, with critics seeing it as a threat to democratic freedoms and the country’s aspirations to join the European Union.

The bill requires media and nongovernmental organizations and other nonprofits to register as "pursuing the interests of a foreign power" if they receive more than 20% of their funding from abroad.

The government says the bill is necessary to stem what it deems as harmful foreign influence over the country’s politics and to prevent unspecified foreign actors from trying to destabilize it.

GEORGIA POLICE ARREST DOZENS PROTESTING 'RUSSIAN LAW'

The opposition has denounced the bill as "the Russian law," because Moscow uses similar legislation to crack down on independent news media, nonprofits and activists critical of the Kremlin.

Mass protests against the law in recent weeks have swept the South Caucasus nation of 3.7 million.

European Council President Charles Michel on Tuesday spoke of Georgia in Copenhagen, at a conference on democracy, and said that "if they want to join the EU, they have to respect the fundamental principles of the rule of law and the democratic principles."

The bill is nearly identical to one that the governing Georgian Dream party was pressured to withdraw last year after street protests. Renewed demonstrations have rocked Georgia for weeks, with demonstrators scuffling with police, who used tear gas and water cannons to disperse the crowds.

Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili, who is increasingly at odds with the governing party, has vowed to veto the law, but Georgian Dream has a majority sufficient to override a presidential veto.

As the lawmakers began debating the bill on Tuesday, a large crowd of demonstrators gathered in front of the parliament to protest once again, with a heavy presence of riot police at the site. Over the weekend, thousands poured into the streets of the Georgian capital Tbilisi, and many stayed in front of the parliament until Monday morning.

Inside the parliament, the debate was interrupted by a brawl. Georgian Dream MP Dimitry Samkharadze was seen charging toward Levan Khabeishvili, the chairman of main opposition party United National Movement, after Khabeishvili accused him of organizing mobs to beat up opposition supporters.

In recent days, several protesters and opposition members have been beaten up. The opposition linked the incidents to the protests.

Another Georgian Dream lawmaker, Archil Talakvadze, accused in his speech on Tuesday "the radical and anti-national political opposition united by political vendetta" of using the protests for their own political purpose and "hoping for events to take a radical turn."

"But nothing and nobody can stop the development of our country," Talakvadze said.

Ana Tsitlidze, a member of the United National Movement, said the protests showed how unified Georgia was "in fighting for its European future," adding that "today, saying no to the Russian law equals saying no to the Russian regime."

After the debate, 84 lawmakers out of 116 attending Tuesday's session voted in favor of the law, and 30 voted against. It will now be sent to Zourabichvili, the president, and she has 14 days to either veto or approve it.

Armed assailants killed two French prison officers and seriously wounded three others in an attack on a convoy in Normandy on Tuesday and an inmate escaped, officials said. A search was underway.

The convoy was transporting prisoner Mohamed Amra to Évreux jail after a court hearing in Rouen when it was ambushed on the A154 freeway, which has been closed.

"All means are being used to find these criminals. On my instructions, several hundred police officers and gendarmes were mobilized," Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin posted on social platform X.

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French President Emmanuel Macron in a post on X called the attack "a shock for all of us."

Authorities worked to secure the area in northwestern France and apprehend the assailants. It was not clear how many were involved.

Amra was detained at the Val de Reuil prison center near Rouen following his recent sentencing for burglary. He was also under investigation for a kidnapping and homicide case in Marseille, according to public prosecutor Laure Beccuau.

French media reported that Amra was nicknamed "La Mouche" (The Fly).

Beccuau announced an investigation into the attack, considered a case of organized crime and murder, and said two of the wounded officers were in critical condition.

The investigation will also address organized escape attempts, possession of military-grade weapons and conspiracy to commit a crime.

A missile fired by a drone struck a house in a former stronghold of the Pakistani Taliban in northwestern Pakistan along the Afghan border before dawn Tuesday, killing at least four villagers, including children, police said.

The strike happened in South Waziristan in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, local police chief Hidayat Ullah said. 

He said it was not immediately clear who fired the missile and officers were investigating. The Pakistan army evicted Pakistani Taliban insurgents from the region years ago, but they have been regrouping there.

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Those killed in the missile strike were civilians with no known links to the insurgents. Villagers put their bodies on a road near a military camp and protested the killings and demanded information about who was responsible.

Most of the previous drone strikes in the area were carried out by the United States or the Pakistan army.

There was no immediate comment from the government or the military about the strike. The Pakistani Taliban, officially known as Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, is separate from but a close ally of the Afghan Taliban. It has been emboldened by the Afghan Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan in August 2021.

Top envoys from the U.S. and China huddled in closed-door talks in Geneva on Tuesday to lay out their national approaches to the promise and perils of emerging artificial intelligence technology.

The talks, which Presidents Joe Biden and Xi Jinping agreed to launch in last 2023, are meant to open up bilateral dialogue between the world’s two biggest economies — and increasingly, geopolitical rivals — on a fast-moving technology that already has consequences for trade, lifestyles, culture, politics, national security and defense and much more.

U.S. technology experts say the meeting — led on the American side by high-level White House and State Department officials — could offer a glimpse into Beijing’s thinking about AI amid a generally tight-lipped Chinese approach to the technology.

STATE DEPARTMENT WANTS CHINA, RUSSIA TO DECLARE THAT AI WON'T CONTROL NUCLEAR WEAPONS, ONLY HUMANS

Co-founder Jason Glassberg of Casaba Security in Redmond, Washington, an expert on new and emerging threats posed by AI, handicapped the meeting as a get-to-know-you that will likely yield few concrete results, but get the two sides talking.

"What’s most important right now is that both sides realize they each have a lot to lose if AI becomes weaponized or abused," Glassberg said in an e-mail. "All parties involved are equally at risk. Right now, one of the biggest areas of risk is with deepfakes, particularly for use in disinformation campaigns."

"This is just as big of a risk for the PRC as it is for the U.S. government," he added, referring to the People’s Republic of China.

It was not immediately clear why the meeting was taking place in Geneva, though the internationally-minded Swiss city bills itself as a hub of diplomacy and U.N. and international institutions.

The Geneva-based International Telecommunications Union — a U.N. agency currently headed by American Doreen Bodgan-Martin and previously run by China’s Houlin Zhao — is set to host its annual "AI for Good" conference in the city later this month.

The meeting is the first under an intergovernmental dialogue on AI agreed upon during a multi-faceted meeting between Xi and Biden in San Francisco six months ago.

The U.S. government has sought to set some guardrails around the technology while fostering its growth, seeking a possible boon for economic output and jobs.

Western experts have suggested that China’s government, meanwhile, has in part kept a lid on AI applications because of its real or potential applications for military and surveillance activities under the ruling Communist Party.

U.S. officials suggested they would lay out ways to mitigate possible risks from the technology by creating voluntary commitments with the sector’s leading companies and requiring safety tests of AI products.

Two men accused of plotting to gun down Jews in an Islamic State-inspired attack in northwest England were held without bail Tuesday after appearing in a London court.

Walid Saadaoui, 36, and Amar Hussein, 50, were accused of planning to use automatic weapons to kill Jews, police and military personnel, prosecutors said in Westminster Magistrates’ Court.

The duo face charges of preparing terrorist acts between Dec. 13 and last Thursday.

WARSAW SYNAGOGUE ATTACKED AT NIGHT WITH 3 FIREBOMBS, NO INJURIES REPORTED

The charges come as incidents of antisemitism in the U.K. hit a record high last year — with a spike following Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel and Israel’s ensuing military campaign in Gaza, according to Community Security Trust, an advocacy group for British Jews that works to eliminate antisemitism.

"This is one of a number of recent and ongoing cases that demonstrate why the Jewish community needs such extensive security measures," said Amanda Bomsztyk, northern regional director of the trust.

A third man, Bilel Saadaoui, 35, was accused of making arrangements for the expected death of his brother, co-defendant Walid Saadaoui.

He pleaded not guilty to a charge of failing to disclose information about an act of terrorism.

Defense lawyer Angelo Saponiere said Bilel Saadaoui was a family man unaware of the alleged plot.

The three were arrested last week by Greater Manchester Police. They were held without bail and scheduled to appear May 24 for a hearing in the Central Criminal Court.

Israel for the first time has released its estimated civilian death toll in Gaza, saying that 16,000 have been killed in the war that began on Oct. 7 instead of the approximately 35,000 that the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas' Ministry of Health is claiming. 

Israel government spokesperson Avi Hyman tells Fox News that for 221 days, his country has been "condemned globally because of a fake and fabricated civilian death toll created and disseminated by Hamas.  

"The United Nations has rubber-stamped these Hamas numbers and become a Hamas newswire to the world," he said. "In reality, Israel is setting the new gold standard for urban warfare with what appears to be the lowest civilian to combatant casualty ratios in history." 

On Monday, Hyman, citing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said in a video that "we believe we have killed in excess of 14,000 terrorists and sadly around 16,000 civilians" inside the Gaza Strip. 

TURKEY’S ERDOGAN DEFENDS HAMAS, CLAIMS MORE THAN 1,000 MEMBERS ARE AT HIS COUNTRY’S HOSPITALS 

"We would expect everyone to now take these figures as a genuine estimate from a free democratic country that fights in strict accordance with the laws of armed conflict in one of the most challenging urban warfare scenarios in history," he added. "Let me make it clear, every civilian casualty is a tragedy. That would not have happened if Hamas hadn’t insisted on using their own people as human shields." 

Hyman also said the figures coming from Hamas "spits in the face of our brave heroes who have paid the ultimate price to fight this just and moral war." 

WHITE HOUSE WALKS DIPLOMATIC TIGHTROPE ON ISRAEL WITH CONTRADICTORY MESSAGING 

The Israeli Defense Forces’ own losses in the conflict have risen to 620, he said. 

Israel’s new estimates come after the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs revised its data pertaining to the number of women and children who have died in the war. 

However, the World Health Organization on Tuesday said there is "nothing wrong" with the numbers being provided by the Hamas-led Gaza Ministry of Health, according to Reuters. 

As Japan embarks on a major military build-up, it's struggling to fill its ranks with the women that its forces need, and its policymakers have pledged to recruit.

Following a wave of sexual harassment cases, the number of women applying to join the Self-Defense Forces (SDF) decreased by 12% in the year ending March 2023, after several years of steady growth. Some victims have said an entrenched culture of harassment could deter women from signing up.

But nine months after the defense ministry pledged to take drastic measures, it has no plans to take action on a key recommendation issued by an independent panel of experts - implementing a national system for reviewing anti-harassment training standards - according to two ministry officials responsible for training.

US AMBASSADOR PRAISES JAPAN'S MILITARY OVERHAUL, ALLOWING EXPORT OF PATRIOT MISSILES

The government-appointed panel had identified in a report published in August that the military's superficial harassment education - which made only limited mention of sexual harassment - and a lack of centralized oversight of such training were contributing factors to cultural problems within the institution.

The head of the panel, Makoto Tadaki, said some training sessions - one of which Reuters attended - were at odds with the gravity of the situation.

A servicewoman who is suing the government over an alleged sexual harassment incident also said in an interview that the education she received over the past 10 years was ineffective.

Calls to root out harassment and increase the number of servicewomen come as aging Japan faces rising threats from China, North Korea and Russia and navigates the burdensome legacy of its wartime past.

Women make up just 9% of military personnel in Japan, compared to 17% in the United States, Tokyo's key security ally.

JAPAN CALLS FOR HEIGHTENED SECURITY MEASURES AFTER DRONE VIDEO OF WARSHIP POSTED ON CHINESE SOCIAL MEDIA

The SDF referred Reuters' questions to the defense ministry, which said in an emailed response that harassment "must never be allowed, as it destroys mutual trust between service members and undermines their strength."

The ministry said it had hosted harassment prevention lectures by external experts since 2023, made sessions more discussion-based and planned to invite specialists to review its training this year.

It did not respond to questions on whether it would implement the panel's recommendation to centralize oversight of training.

After ex-soldier Rina Gonoi went public with allegations of sexual assault in 2022, the defense ministry conducted a survey that year that uncovered more than 170 alleged sexual harassment incidents in the SDF.

Another alleged victim was an Okinawa-based servicewoman who accused a senior of making lewd remarks toward her in 2013. She was then publicly named in harassment training materials distributed to her colleagues in 2014, she told Reuters. The alleged perpetrator was not identified in the materials.

Reuters does not name alleged victims of sexual harassment. Her allegations were corroborated with documents in the lawsuit she filed last year, after she said she exhausted an internal complaints process.

The defense ministry offers an annual online module on general harassment. It also provides training materials to officers for in-person sessions, but doesn't offer training on delivering harassment education and doesn't track how or when the officers carry out harassment training, the two defense officials said.

The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter, justified the existing system as offering flexibility to commanders.

The six experts concluded in their review that existing training amounted to "generic, superficial statements" that were "not effective in helping people apply the training in the real world."

In April, Reuters attended a harassment prevention course delivered by an external instructor to over 100 mid-ranking military officers at a base on the outskirts of Tokyo.

Instructor Keiko Yoshimoto presented harassment as a communication issue and focused discussions on generational differences and how they played out in preferences for types of cars and flavors of crisps.

"Generational differences make it hard for people to communicate," she said, adding that people should understand the basics of communication before they could deal with specifics around sexual harassment.

Law professor Tadaki, who separately witnessed part of Yoshimoto's session, said it "did not feel like the sort of training you would expect against a backdrop of there being so many cases of harassment surfacing."

He added that it would likely take more time to increase oversight over the quality of training.

Two months after the panel issued its report, local media reported that a sailor had in 2022 been ordered against her will to meet a superior that she had accused of sexual harassment. She later quit the SDF.

Gonoi and the Okinawa-based servicewoman have criticized the system as inadequate.

"People would say 'everyone put up with that kind of behavior, it was normal back in our time,' – but these issues are being passed down to my generation because nothing was done to stop it," the servicewoman told Reuters in March.

She added that the harassment training she has since received was often poorly conducted and that more centralized oversight was needed: "Rather than trying to make a point about sexual harassment, (officers) pick materials that are easy to teach, something that will fit into the time they have."

The defense ministry officials said that training on sexual harassment largely takes place within a broader anti-harassment curriculum. At the two-hour training session attended by Reuters, about two minutes were dedicated to sexual harassment.

When Reuters asked about sexual harassment incidents during interviews with the officials, as well as two senior uniformed officers, they responded by speaking about general harassment.

The officials said it was challenging to give standardized training on harassment because service members in high-stress environments may give orders in a direct way that is unusual in other circumstances.

The two officers said there were concerns within the military that too much focus on harassment could create operational issues and one suggested it might lead to unfair complaints.

The defense ministry said in a statement that it does not tolerate abuse and that its training aims to ensure commanders do not "hesitate to give necessary guidance on the job because they are concerned about harassment."  

Tadaki, the professor, said Japan could learn from other militaries.

"The U.S., U.K., and France have a much clearer focus on preventing harassment from its root causes so its prevention program is structured around improving the internal climate and culture of its organization," he said.

More than 300 Syrian refugees headed back home to Syria in a convoy on Tuesday, leaving two remote northeastern towns in crisis-stricken Lebanon where anti-refugee sentiment has been surging in recent months.

Lebanese officials have long urged the international community to either resettle the refugees in other countries or help them return to Syria. Over the past months, leading Lebanese political parties have become increasingly vocal, demanding that Syrian refugees go back.

A country of about 6 million people, Lebanon hosts nearly 780,000 registered Syrian refugees and hundreds of thousands who are unregistered — the world’s highest refugee population per capita.

VIOLENCE IN SYRIA RISES, AID DRIES UP AS CIVIL WAR BEGINS 14TH YEAR

In the northeastern town of Arsal, Syrian refugees piled their belongings onto the back of trucks and cars on Tuesday as Lebanese security officers collected their U.N. refugee agency cards and other paperwork before clearing them to leave.

As the trucks pulled away, the refugees waved to friends and relatives staying behind, heading to an uncertain future in Syria.

Ahmad al-Rifai, on his way to the Qalamoun Mountains after over a decade in Lebanon, said that whatever the situation was in Syria, "it’s better to live in a house than in a tent."

Lebanese security forces this year stepped up deportations of Syrians, although nowhere near the level threatened two years ago when the Lebanese government announced a plan to deport some 15,000 Syrians every month, to what they dubbed " safe areas," in cooperation with the government in Damascus.

AIRSTRIKES IN SYRIA KILL AN IRANIAN ADVISER AND A MEMBER OF A WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION TEAM

Tuesday's convoy from the mountainous towns of Arsal and Qaa consisted of only 330 refugees who had signed up for repatriation, the first such "voluntary return" return organized by Lebanese security forces since late 2022.

"Nobody can not be happy to return to their home," Ahmad Durro told The Associated Press while waiting in his truck. "I signed up a year ago to be in the convoy."

But many other Syrians — especially young men facing compulsory military service or political opponents of the government of President Bashar Assad — say it's unsafe to return.

Others see no future in Syria, where in many parts the fighting may have died down but an economic crisis has pulled millions into poverty.

An increasing number of refugees in Lebanon have taken to the sea in an attempt to reach Europe.

The UNHCR has said it only supports voluntary returns of Syrians based on informed consent. Yet, major human rights organizations remain skeptical of the voluntary nature of these returns amid anti-refugee hostility in Lebanon.

"Syrian refugees are, targeted by both geo sources and host communities. They are subjected to violence, insults and other degrading treatment," Amnesty International’s deputy Middle East and North Africa Regional Director Aya Majzoub told the AP, also decrying curfews and other restrictions imposed on refugees by a handful of Lebanese municipalities.

"So our assessment is that in these conditions, it is very difficult for refugees to make free and informed decisions about returning to Syria."

Amnesty International and other human rights organizations have documented cases of refugees detained and tortured by Syrian security agencies upon their return.

The UNHCR says nine out of 10 Syrian refugees in Lebanon live in extreme poverty and need humanitarian aid to survive. That aid has declined amid donor fatigue and as international attention shifted to other crises.

Many increasingly impoverished Lebanese have accused Syrian refugees of benefitting from the aid while beating Lebanese to jobs by accepting lower pay. Lebanon’s ruling political parties and leadership claim that most Syrians living in the tiny Mediterranean country are economic migrants rather than refugees escaping the war at home, now in its 13th year. Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Lebanon's militant Hezbollah group, a top ally of Assad, has made such an allegation.

"They have dollars and they are sending those dollars to relatives in Syria," Nasrallah said in a speech on Monday.

Lebanese security agents have in the past weeks raided shops and other businesses employing undocumented Syrian workers, and shut them down.

The European Union this month announced an aid package worth about $1.06 billion of which about 200 million euros would go to security and border control, in an apparent bid to curb migration from Lebanon to Cyprus, Italy, and other parts of Europe.

While Lebanon's caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati welcomed the aid, other officials described it as a bribe for tiny Lebanon to keep the refugees.

Parliament is to discuss the EU package on Wednesday, with lawmakers from the entire political spectrum expected to ramp up anti-refugee sentiment and call for more refugee returns and crackdowns.

A young Thai activist who went on a hunger strike after being jailed for advocating reform of the country’s system of monarchy died Tuesday in a prison hospital, officials said.

Netiporn Sanesangkhom, 28, was a member of the activist group Thaluwang, known for their bold and aggressive campaigns demanding reform of the monarchy and abolition of the law that makes it illegal to defame members of the royal family. The group’s name can be loosely translated to "breaking through the palace," a reference to its open criticism of Thailand’s monarchy.

She appears to be the first political activist in Thailand to have died after carrying on a hunger strike.

THAILAND'S PRIME MINISTER MOVES TO OUTLAW MARIJUANA 2 YEARS AFTER ITS DECRIMINALIZATION

The royal institution until recent years was widely considered an untouchable, bedrock element of Thai nationalism. Criticism of the monarchy was taboo, and insulting or defaming key royal family members remains punishable by up to 15 years in prison under a lese majeste law, usually referred to as Article 112 of Thailand’s Criminal Code.

Student-led pro-democracy protests beginning in 2020 openly criticized the monarchy, leading to vigorous prosecutions under the law, which had previously been relatively rarely employed. Critics say the law is often wielded as a tool to quash political dissent.

The protest movement faded due to government harassment and the coronavirus pandemic, but Netiporn was one of more than 270 activists charged with Thailand’s royal defamation law since the protests in 2020-21.

Netiporn suffered cardiac arrest early Tuesday morning, and medical teams spent several hours trying to resuscitate her. She was pronounced dead just before noon, according to a press release from the Corrections Department..

She had two charges of lese majeste pending against her, both of them involving conducting polls in public spaces in 2022 asking people’s opinion about the royal family, according to the group Thai Lawyers for Human Rights. Her release on bail was revoked in January due to her participation in a political rally last year.

Netiporn started her hunger strike after she was detained in January. The Corrections Department said she started eating and drinking water again after April 4. However, the human rights lawyer group’s latest update on her condition on April 25 said she was still fasting.

Two fellow jailed activists are also carrying out hunger strikes. Both are Thaluwang’s monarchy reform activists slapped with lese majeste charges, and they started their hunger strike about a month after Netiporn.

Netiporn’s lawyers had applied to transfer her from the Central Corrections Hospital to Thammasat University Hospital but was never granted a prolonged stay there for treatment, said her lawyer Kritsadang Nutcharas.

"Does it seem like there’s standard treatment in the Thai justice system when we compare what these kids are going through with their political charges and what some prominent adults have gone through?" Kritsadang said. He was making an apparent reference to former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who returned from exile last year to serve a prison term on corruption-related cases but never spent a single night in jail on grounds of ill health.

Thaluwang has made high-profile protests calling not only for reform of the monarchy, but also changes in the justice system and an end to political persecution through the courts. It has also called for rejection of Thailand’s application to join the U.N. Human Rights Council.

Thailand announced its bid for a seat on the U.N. Human Rights Council for the 2025-2027 term after the current government took office last year, seeking to show its commitment to protect human rights. Critics charge that the reality of law enforcement in the country strongly contradicts its ambition to be recognized by the international community as a human rights defender.

Human Rights Watch has raised concerns over "the Thai government’s use of arbitrary arrest and pretrial detention to punish critics of the monarchy for their views" which it says is a violation of their rights under international human rights law.

Two teachers met them with a smile at the steel door, and down the concrete staircase the mother and daughter clattered, hand in hand, through another blast door and into the bunker for the first day of school.

Hundreds of children began lessons this week in Ukraine's first purpose-built bunker school, 20 feet below the ground to protect them from Russian drone and missile attacks.

Kharkiv's primary school 155 is reached through a door in a small white concrete box on the pavement. At the bottom of the stairs classrooms branch off a corridor. There are are no windows, but the rooms are brightly lit and the hallways painted in white and lime green.

ONLY A FEW HUNDRED REMAIN IN VOVCHANSK AS RUSSIAN ADVANCE INTENSIFIES IN NORTHEAST UKRAINE

Ukraine's second-biggest city, located in the country's northeast near the Russian border, has been under relentless Russian attack since Moscow's invasion was halted at its ramparts 26 months ago. In recent weeks the fighting has grown closer and the airstrikes more constant as a Russian offensive in the surrounding countryside pushed Ukrainian troops back.

In these days of war, most children in Kharkiv do most of their learning at home on a computer. Masha, 9, and her brother Oleksii, 6, were giddy over the chance to go to a real class with a real live teacher, in person with other kids.

"My daughter, a third grader, could hardly wait to come, dress up for the occasion, meet her friends that she missed very much," said their mother, Marina Prikhodko. "For my son, a first grader, it's like a festive day, a chance to meet his classmates in real life, not online."

The latest upsurge in fighting? "Yes, it is scary," she said. "But whatever happens, life goes on and we have to try and live here and now, every day."

The new school has an initial enrollment of 300 pupils, but Kharkiv Mayor Ihor Terekhov said that would expand to two daily shifts of 450 each.

"We need to make sure that both teachers and students get accustomed to the school and hopefully from Sept. 1 there will be full complement of students," he said.

At the school's opening on Monday, many pupils wore traditional Ukrainian embroidered shirts, or "vyshyvanky", to celebrate. Children of all ages mingled in hallways and sat behind desks in spacious, windowless classrooms. Lunch was burgers and boxes of juice.

"It's like day and night," said headmaster Ihor Voznyi, comparing the new school with what pupils had to deal with before.

"Our schools do not have bomb shelters. There are basements, underground spaces which are totally unsuited to conduct any teaching. The spaces here are designed to provide quality, modern spaces."

A second senior Russian defense official was arrested on bribery charges, officials said Tuesday, days after President Vladimir Putin replaced the defense minister in a Cabinet shake-up that fueled expectations of more such purges.

Lt. Gen. Yury Kuznetsov, the 55-year-old chief of the Defense Ministry’s main personnel directorate, was arrested in a raid early Monday on his suburban Moscow villa, Russian media reported. He was detained on charges of bribery and jailed pending an investigation and trial, according to the Investigative Committee, Russia's top state criminal investigation agency.

Kuznetsov is accused of accepting an "exceptionally large bribe," a charge punishable by up to 15 years in prison. The committee alleged he received the bribe in his previous post as head of the military General Staff's directorate in charge of preserving state secrets, a position he held for 13 years.

PUTIN TO VISIT CHINA THIS WEEK TO MEET WITH XI, CHINESE FOREIGN MINISTRY SAYS

In the raid, agents of the Federal Security Service, or FSB, broke down the doors and windows of his home while he was asleep, the reports said, seizing gold coins, luxury items and just over $1 million in cash.

His wife, who previously worked in several Defense Ministry structures, was also reportedly interrogated.

On Sunday, Putin reshuffled his Cabinet as he starts his fifth term in office, replacing Sergei Shoigu, who served as defense minister for 11 1/2 years, with Andrei Belousov, an economics expert and former deputy prime minister. Putin named Shoigu the secretary of Russia's Security Council, a role roughly similar to the U.S. national security adviser, replacing Nikolai Patrushev.

Patrushev, a hawkish and powerful member of Putin’s inner circle who held the job for 16 years, was appointed a presidential aide. Alexei Dyumin, the governor of the Tula region and often mentioned as a potential Putin successor, also was named a presidential aide.

ONLY A FEW HUNDRED REMAIN IN VOVCHANSK AS RUSSIAN ADVANCE INTENSIFIES IN NORTHEAST UKRAINE

Patrushev will oversee Russian shipbuilding industries in his new job, but may later also deal with other duties, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Tuesday.

He rejected notions that Shoigu's reshuffle represented a demotion, describing his new role as a "very senior job with broad responsibilities."

While Shoigu, who had personal ties with Putin and accompanied him on vacations in the Siberian mountains over the years, was given a new senior position, the future of his close entourage in the Defense Ministry appeared in doubt under Belousov.

Shoigu’s deputy, Timur Ivanov, was arrested last month on bribery charges and was ordered to remain in custody pending an official investigation. His arrest was widely interpreted as an attack on Shoigu and a possible precursor to his dismissal.

The shake-up appeared to be an attempt to put the defense sector in sync with the rest of the economy and tighten control over soaring military spending amid allegations of rampant corruption in the top military brass.

Speaking Tuesday at the upper house of parliament, Belousov said Putin has given him the task to more closely integrate the defense sector into the national economy.

"It's not an easy task, it’s comprehensive and primarily implies optimization of military spending," he said. "First and foremost, optimization means increasing efficiency."

He credited Shoigu with overseeing the modernization of the military but emphasized the importance of attaining Russia's goals in Ukraine with minimal casualties.

Belousov also cited the need to increase supplies of modern artillery and missile systems, drones and electronic warfare assets. He said the military would continue bolstering its ranks with volunteers, noting there is no need for another round of mobilization.

A partial mobilization of 300,000 reservists that Putin ordered in fall 2022 amid the military setbacks was widely unpopular, prompting hundreds of thousands to flee abroad to avoid being drafted.

In an apparent jab at Shoigu and his entourage who were widely criticized by pro-Kremlin military bloggers of hiding setbacks in Ukraine from Putin, Belousov said he would proceed from the "ironclad principle: it's possible to make mistakes but it's inadmissible to lie."

Shoigu has been widely seen as a key figure behind Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine in February 2022, and many Russian hawks criticized him for overstating Russian military capabilities.

He and the chief of the General Staff, Gen. Valery Gerasimov, had faced strong criticism from Russian hawks for military setbacks, including the failure to capture Kyiv early in the war and a Russian retreat from northeastern and southern Ukraine later that year.

The shake-up came as Russian troops pressed new offensives, trying to take advantage of a slowdown in Western aid to Ukraine in what many observers see as a decisive moment in the war.

The Kremlin sought to ease widespread bewilderment over choosing an economics expert with no military record as defense minister by emphasizing that Gerasimov, who directs the fighting in Ukraine, has kept his post.

Peskov also dismissed the allegations that the shake-up and the arrests of senior Defense Ministry officials could disorganize the military and affect events in Ukraine.

European Union nations endorsed sweeping reforms to the bloc’s failed asylum system on Tuesday as campaigning for Europe-wide elections next month gathers pace, with migration expected to be an important issue.

EU government ministers approved 10 legislative parts of The New Pact on Migration and Asylum. It lays out rules for the 27 member countries to handle people trying to enter without authorization, from how to screen them to establish whether they qualify for protection to deporting them if they’re not allowed to stay.

Hungary and Poland, which have long opposed any obligation for countries to host migrants or pay for their upkeep, voted against the package but were unable to block it.

EU ANNOUNCES 1 BILLION EUROS IN AID FOR LEBANON AMID A SURGE IN IRREGULAR MIGRATION

Mainstream political parties believe the pact resolves the issues that have divided member nations since well over 1 million migrants swept into Europe in 2015, most fleeing war in Syria and Iraq. They hope the system will starve the far right of vote-winning oxygen in the June 6-9 elections.

However, the vast reform package will only enter force in 2026, bringing no immediate fix to an issue that has fueled one of the EU’s biggest political crises, dividing nations over who should take responsibility for migrants when they arrive and whether other countries should be obligated to help.

Critics say the pact will let nations detain migrants at borders and fingerprint children. They say it’s aimed at keeping people out and infringes on their right to claim asylum. Many fear it will result in more unscrupulous deals with poorer countries that people leave or cross to get to Europe.

Europe’s asylum laws have not been updated for about two decades. The system frayed and then fell apart in 2015. It was based on the premise that migrants should be processed, given asylum or deported in the country they first enter. Greece, Italy and Malta were left to shoulder most of the financial burden and deal with public discontent. Since then, the ID-check-free zone known as the Schengen Area has expanded to 27 countries, 23 of them EU members. It means that more than 400 million Europeans and visitors, including refugees, are able to move without showing travel documents.

Some 3.5 million migrants arrived legally in Europe in 2023. Around 1 million others were on EU territory without permission. Of the latter, most were people who entered normally via airports and ports with visas but didn’t go home when they expired. The pact applies to the remaining minority, estimated at around 300,000 migrants last year. They are people caught crossing an external EU border without permission, such as those reaching the shores of Greece, Italy or Spain via the Mediterranean Sea or Atlantic Ocean on boats provided by smugglers.

The country on whose territory people land will screen them at or near the border. This involves identity and other checks -– including on children as young as 6. The information will be stored on a massive new database, Eurodac. This screening should determine whether a person might pose a health or security risk and their chances of being permitted to stay. Generally, people fleeing conflict, persecution or violence qualify for asylum. Those looking for jobs are likely to be refused entry. Screening is mandatory and should take no longer than seven days. It should lead to one of two things: an application for international protection, like asylum, or deportation to their home country.

People seeking asylum must apply in the EU nation they first enter and stay until the authorities there work out what country should handle their application. It could be that they have family, cultural or other links somewhere else, making it more logical for them to be moved. The border procedure should be done in 12 weeks, including time for one legal appeal if their application is rejected. It could be extended by eight weeks in times of mass movements of people. Procedures could be faster for applicants from countries whose citizens are not often granted asylum. Critics say this undermines asylum law because applicants should be assessed individually, not based on nationality. People would stay in "reception centers" while it happens, with access to health care and education. Those rejected would receive a deportation order.

To speed things up, a deportation order is supposed to be issued automatically when an asylum request is refused. A new 12-week period is foreseen to complete this process. The authorities may detain people throughout. The EU’s border and coast guard agency would help organize joint deportation flights. Currently, less than one in three people issued with an order to leave are deported. This is often due to a lack of cooperation from the countries these people come from.

The new rules oblige countries to help an EU partner under migratory pressure. Support is mandatory, but flexible. Nations can relocate asylum applicants to their territory or choose some other form of assistance. This could be financial -– a relocation is evaluated at $21,462 per person -– technical or logistical. Members can also assume responsibility for deporting people from the partner country in trouble.

Two issues stand out: Will member countries ever fully enact the plan, and will the EU’s executive branch, the European Commission, enforce the new rules when it has chosen not to apply the ones already in place? The commission is due to present a Common Implementation Plan by June. It charts a path and timeline to get the pact working over the next two years, with targets that the EU and member countries should reach. Things could get off to a rocky start. Hungary, which has vehemently opposed the reforms, takes over the EU’s agenda-setting presidency for six months on July 1.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan reportedly defended Hamas on Monday, claiming that more than 1,000 members of the terrorist group from Gaza are being treated at hospitals in his NATO nation. 

At a joint press conference in Ankara, Turkey, Erdogan took issue with Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis having categorized Hamas as a "terrorist organization." 

"If you call Hamas a 'terrorist organization,' this would sadden us," Erdogan said, according to Reuters. 

"We don't deem Hamas a terrorist organization," he reportedly said. "More than 1,000 members of Hamas are under treatment in hospitals across our country." 

The press conference followed a two-hour face-to-face summit with the Greek prime minister. 

TURKEY AND GREECE LEADERS TO MEET, PUT FRIENDSHIP INITIATIVE TO THE TEST AMID GAZA AND UKRAINE WARS

"I do not see Hamas as a terror group," Erdogan said at the press conference, according to The Associated Press. "I see it as a group of people trying to protect their own land."

Greece, like most Western states, considers Hamas a terrorist organization, but Erdogan repeated his reference to the group as a "resistance organization." The leaders were meeting for the fourth time in the past year in a bid to strengthen a normalization process.

A Turkish official who spoke on condition of anonymity later told Reuters that Erdogan meant to refer to Palestinians from Hamas-controlled Gaza, not members of Hamas. 

"President Erdogan misspoke, he meant 1,000 Gazans are under treatment, not Hamas members," the official reportedly said. 

TURKEY CARRIES OUT NEW AIRSTRIKES IN NORTHERN IRAQ, KILLING 16 KURDISH MILITANTS

In November, the Turkish government said it planned to evacuate some wounded or sick Gazans, mostly cancer patients, as well as Turkish nationals, Turkish Cypriots and their relatives. 

Turkey and Greece, which are NATO members, have been at odds for decades over a series of issues, including territorial claims in the Aegean Sea and drilling rights in the Mediterranean, and have come to the brink of war three times in the last half-century. A dispute over energy exploration rights in 2020 led to the two countries’ warships facing off in the Mediterranean.

They agreed last December to put their disputes aside and focus on areas where they can find consensus. The list of items on the so-called positive agenda includes trade, energy, education and cultural ties. Since that summit in Athens, the regional rivals have maintained regular high-level contacts to promote fence-mending initiatives, such as allowing Turkish citizens to visit 10 Greek islands without cumbersome visa procedures.

Stressing the ties between the two countries, Mitsotakis said the deal allowed Turks and Greeks to "get to know each other, which is an important step." Similarly, Erdogan referred to the Turkish-Muslim minority in Greece's Thrace region as a "friendship bridge between the two communities."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.