Xi’s government gave no details of what the Chinese leader hoped to accomplish. Xi and Putin declared they had a “no-limits friendship” before the February 2022 attack on Ukraine, but China has tried to portray itself as neutral. Beijing called for a cease-fire last month, but Washington said that would ratify the Kremlin’s battlefield gains.

The Chinese government said Xi would visit Moscow from Monday to Wednesday but gave no indication whether he had left. The Russian government said Xi was due to arrive at midday and meet later with Putin.

Ahead of the meeting, China's foreign ministry called on the ICC to “respect the jurisdictional immunity” of a head of state and “avoid politicization and double standards.”

China looks to Russia as a source of oil and gas for its energy-hungry economy and as a partner in opposing what both see as American domination of global affairs.

The meeting gives Putin and Xi a chance to show they have “powerful partners” at a time of strained relations with Washington, said Joseph Torigian, an expert in Chinese-Russian relations at American University in Washington.

“China can signal that it could even do more to help Russia, and that if relations with the United States continue to deteriorate, they could do a lot more to enable Russia and help Russia in its war against Ukraine,” Torigian said.

Beijing's relations with Washington, Europe and its neighbors are strained by disputes over technology, security, human rights and the ruling Communist Party's treatment of Hong Kong and Muslim minorities.

Some commentators draw a parallel between Russia's claims to Ukrainian territory and Beijing's claim to Taiwan. The Communist Party says the self-ruled island democracy, which split with China in 1949 after a civil war, is obliged to unite with the mainland, by force if necessary. Xi's government has been stepping up efforts to intimidate the island by flying fighter jets nearby and firing missiles into the sea.

China has stepped up purchases of Russian oil and gas, helping to top up the Kremlin's revenue in the face of Western sanctions. But it has avoided doing anything visible that crosses the red lines laid down by Washington and European governments in regard to financial sanctions and the provision of military aid.

This week's meeting follows the ICC announcement Friday of charges that Putin is personally responsible for the abductions of thousands of children from Ukraine. Governments that recognize the court's jurisdiction would be obligated to arrest Putin if he visits.

Putin has yet to comment on the announcement, but the Kremlin rejected the move as “outrageous and unacceptable.”

In a show of defiance, Putin visited Crimea and the occupied Ukrainian port city of Mariupol to mark the ninth anniversary of Russia's seizure of the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine. Russian news reports showed him chatting with Mariupol residents and visiting an art school and a children’s center in Sevastopol in Crimea.

The ICC should “uphold an objective and impartial stance, respect the jurisdictional immunity enjoyed by the head of state in accordance” and “avoid politicization and double standards," said Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin.

“China will uphold its objective and fair position on the Ukrainian crisis and play a constructive role in promoting peace talks,” Wang said.

Xi said in an article published Monday in the Russian newspaper Russian Gazette that China has “actively promoted peace talks” but announced no initiatives.

“My upcoming visit to Russia will be a journey of friendship, cooperation and peace,” Xi wrote, according to text released by the official Xinhua News Agency.

“A reasonable way to resolve the crisis” can be found if “all parties embrace the vision of common, comprehensive, cooperative and sustainable security,” Xi wrote.

The trip follows the surprise announcement of a diplomatic thaw between Iran and Saudi Arabia after a meeting in Beijing, a propaganda coup for Xi’s government.

Xi wants to be seen as a global statesman who is “playing a constructive role” by talking about peace but is unlikely to press Putin to end the war, said Torigian. He said Beijing worries about possible Russian battlefield losses but doesn’t want to be seen to “enable Russia’s aggression."

“They won’t spend political capital” on pressing Moscow to make peace, “especially if they don’t think it will get them anything,” he said.

UBS shares were down 14% in early trading on the Swiss stock exchange.

Swiss authorities urged UBS to take over its smaller rival after a plan for Credit Suisse to borrow up to 50 billion francs ($54 billion) failed to reassure investors and the bank’s customers. Shares of Credit Suisse and other banks plunged after the failure of two banks in the U.S. raised questions about other potentially shaky global financial institutions.

Credit Suisse is among 30 financial institutions known as globally systemically important banks, and authorities worried about the fallout if it were to fail.

The deal was “one of great breadth for the stability of international finance," Swiss President Alain Berset said as he announced it Sunday night. "An uncontrolled collapse of Credit Suisse would lead to incalculable consequences for the country and the international financial system.”

Switzerland's executive branch, a seven-member governing body that includes Berset, passed an emergency ordinance allowing the merger to go through without shareholder approval.

Markets remain jittery despite the best efforts of regulators to restore calm. Global stock markets sank Monday, with Hong Kong’s main index sliding more than 3%. Market benchmarks in Frankfurt and Paris opened down more than 1%. Shanghai, Tokyo and Sydney also declined. Wall Street futures were off 1%. Oil prices plunged more than $2 per barrel.

Credit Suisse Chairman Axel Lehmann called the sale to UBS “a clear turning point.”

“It is a historic, sad and very challenging day for Credit Suisse, for Switzerland and for the global financial markets,” Lehmann said, adding that the focus is now on the future and on Credit Suisse's 50,000 employees, 17,000 in Switzerland.

Following news of the Swiss deal, the world’s central banks announced coordinated moves to stabilize banks, including access to a lending facility for banks to borrow U.S. dollars if they need them, a practice widely used during the 2008 crisis. Three months after Lehman Brothers collapsed in September of 2008, such swap lines had been tapped for $580 billion. Swap lines also were rolled out during market turmoil in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Today is one of the most significant days in European banking since 2008, with far-reaching repercussions for the industry," said Max Georgiou, an analyst at Third Bridge. “These events could alter the course of not only European banking but also the wealth management industry more generally.”

Colm Kelleher, the UBS chairman, hailed “enormous opportunities” from the takeover and highlighted his bank’s “conservative risk culture” — a subtle swipe at Credit Suisse's reputation for more swashbuckling gambles in search of bigger returns. He said the combined group would create a wealth manager with over $5 trillion in total invested assets.

UBS officials said they plan to sell off parts of Credit Suisse or reduce the bank’s size.

Swiss Finance Minister Karin Keller-Sutter said the council "regrets that the bank, which was once a model institution in Switzerland and part of our strong location, was able to get into this situation at all.”

The combination of the two biggest and best-known Swiss banks, each with storied histories dating to the mid-19th century, amounts to a thunderclap for Switzerland’s reputation as a global financial center — putting it on the cusp of having a single national banking champion.

The deal follows the collapse of two large U.S. banks last week that spurred a frantic, broad response from the U.S. government to prevent further panic.

European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde lauded the “swift action” by Swiss officials, saying they were “instrumental for restoring orderly market conditions and ensuring financial stability.”

She reiterated that the European banking sector is resilient, with strong financial reserves and plenty of ready cash. The banks “are in a completely different position from 2008” during the financial crisis, partly because of stricter government regulation, she said.

The Swiss government is providing more than 100 billion francs to support the takeover.

As part of the deal, approximately 16 billion francs ($17.3 billion) in Credit Suisse bonds will be wiped out. European bank regulators use a special type of bond designed to provide a capital cushion to banks in times of distress. The bonds are designed to be wiped out if a bank’s capital falls below a certain level, and that was triggered by the government-brokered deal.

That has triggered concern the market for those bonds and for other banks that hold them.

Berset said the Federal Council had been discussing Credit Suisse's troubles since early this year and held urgent meetings last week.

Investors and banking industry analysts were still digesting the deal, but at least one analyst suggested the deal might tarnish Switzerland’s global banking image.

“A country-wide reputation with prudent financial management, sound regulatory oversight, and, frankly, for being somewhat dour and boring regarding investments, has been wiped away,” said Octavio Marenzi, CEO of consulting firm Opimas LLC, in an email.

The Financial Stability Board, an international body that monitors the global financial system, designated Credit Suisse as one of the world’s important banks, meaning that regulators feared a collapse could ripple throughout the financial system like that of Lehman Brothers 15 years ago.

The Credit Suisse parent bank is not part of European Union supervision, but it has entities in several European countries that are.

Credit Suisse’s troubles resurfaced after it reported managers had identified “material weaknesses” in its internal controls on financial reporting. That fanned fears it would be the next domino to fall. Many of its problems are unique and unlike the weaknesses that brought down Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank. Their failures led to significant rescue efforts by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the Federal Reserve to prevent a crisis similar to what occurred in 2008.

Credit Suisse's shares plunged Wednesday to a record low after its largest investor, the Saudi National Bank, said it wouldn't invest any more money in the bank to avoid tripping regulations that would kick in if its stake rose about 10%.

On Friday, its shares dropped 8% to close at 1.86 francs ($2) on the Swiss exchange. The stock has seen a long downward slide: It traded at more than 80 francs in 2007.

UBS is bigger but Credit Suisse still wields considerable influence, with $1.4 trillion assets under management. It has significant trading desks around the world, caters to the rich through its wealth management business, and is a major mergers and acquisitions advisor. The bank did weather the 2008 financial crisis without assistance, unlike UBS.

Credit Suisse is seeking to raise money from investors and roll out a new strategy to overcome an array of troubles, including bad bets on hedge funds, repeated shake-ups of its top management and a spying scandal involving UBS.

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Associated Press Writers Frank Jordans and Emily Schultheis in Berlin, Barbara Ortutay in Oakland, Calif., Chris Rugaber in Washington, Ken Sweet in New York and David McHugh in Frankfurt, Germany, contributed.

Ma presided over a period of warm ties with Beijing, but left office under a cloud after a trade deal with the mainland failed to win approval amid the island's largest protests since the 1990s. Although the former president is visiting in a private capacity, his stature as a former leader gives the trip political overtones.

Ma's proposed visit comes as China's People Liberation Army sends fighter jets toward Taiwan on a near daily basis, and as official communications between the two governments have broken off. China's ruling government claims Taiwan is part of its territory, but Taiwan's governing Democratic Progressive Party says it's already a sovereign state that is not part of China.

Ma, a member of the opposition Nationalist Party (Kuomingtang), will lead a delegation of academics and students as well as his former presidential staffers from March 27 to April 7, his office said Sunday.

The office of President Tsai Ing-wen said Ma had notified her of his plans on Monday. The president's office said it "hoped Ma, in his role as the former head of state ... can show the value of Taiwan’s democracy and freedom and the position of equality and dignity in cross-strait exchanges.”

Ma will visit Nanjing, Wuhan and Changsha, as well as other cities, Hsiao Hsu-tsen, the director of the Ma Ying-jeou Foundation on Monday, told a news conference in Taipei.

Hsiao also announced that Ma would bring college students from Taiwan to meet with colleagues from Shanghai's Fudan University and Changsha's Hunan University.

“He strongly believes, as both sides of the (Taiwan) Strait have entered this frozen situation in recent years, allowing young people to have an exchange will help reduce tensions,” Hsiao said. “I think no matter how many weapons we buy, it's not as good as having young people from both sides understand each other, and deepen their exchange.”

Ma will not go to Beijing, Hsiao said. The trip is also a chance for him to honor his ancestors, he added, ahead of Tomb Sweeping Day on April 5. During the festival, which is celebrated in Taiwan and China, among other countries, families pay a visit to ancestral graves to remember the deceased and to maintain the burial grounds.

Ma's trip was also confirmed by China’s Taiwan Affairs Office.

Any results are likely to be symbolic, and will mostly benefit China, said Hoo Tiang Boon, a professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore who studies Chinese foreign policy. “Then they can then show they are not against Taiwan, they are not against the Taiwanese people,” he said. "It’s the DPP and what they deem as separatists causing provocations in cross-strait relations."

Hoo added that he didn’t think it was likely the trip would influence Taiwan’s presidential elections next year.

Other experts agreed that it was unlikely to resolve any major issues, but it could still prove helpful.

Ma's visit follows Andrew Hsia, vice chairman of the Kuomingtang, who went on a 10-day tour of China in February and met with the head of the Taiwan Affairs Office.

Members of the Kuomingtang regularly have exchanges with China. Taipei Mayor Chiang Wang-an, who belongs to the Kuomingtang, had hosted Shanghai city officials in February as well, and discussed exchanges in culture, sports and tourism.

“He's not really representing the government to go and negotiate, I think he just wants to transmit the idea of peaceful exchange,” said Kao-cheng Wang, a professor at the Graduate Institute of International Affairs and Strategic Studies at Tamkang University in Taiwan, referring to Ma's plan to bring students. “This will be helpful to cross-strait relations and future development.”

During Ma’s terms in office, Taiwan and China increased contacts. Ma negotiated a trade pact with Beijing in 2010 and Chinese tourists flocked to Taiwan.

But as both sides opened their borders to each other, concerns grew that Taiwan was falling inescapably into Beijing's orbit, eventually leading to protests over a proposed trade deal with Beijing in 2014. The protests, known as the Sunflower Movement, sparked a rally that drew more than 200,000 people and a 24-day occupation of Taiwan’s parliament by students.

Ma met with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Singapore in 2015, while he was still in office. The meeting was the first between the leaders of the two sides since Taiwan split from mainland China in 1949 during the Chinese civil war, but was considered more symbolic than substantive.

In 2016, the independence-leaning Democratic Progressive Party won national elections and Beijing cut off contact with Taiwan's government, citing Tsai's refusal to endorse the idea that Taiwan and China are one country.

On his two-day trip to India, Kishida said Modi accepted his invitation to participate in the G-7 summit, which will be held in Japan’s western city of Hiroshima.

Kishida held delegation-level talks with Modi to deepen cooperation between Tokyo and New Delhi, while also addressing food security and development financing.

The two leaders discussed their priorities for their respective presidencies of the G-7 and G-20, Modi said in a speech.

Kishida said late Sunday that he will present his new action plan for Japan’s free and open Indo-Pacific vision, a Tokyo-led initiative aimed at curbing China’s growing assertiveness in the region, during his India visit. The plan is expected to include Japan’s support for human development in maritime security, a provision of coast guard patrol boats and equipment and other infrastructure cooperation.

India, which is heading this year’s Group of 20 industrial and emerging-market nations, says ties with Japan are key to stability in the region. The two nations, along with the United States and Australia, make up the Indo-Pacific alliance known as the Quad that is countering China’s rising influence in Asia.

India is the only Quad member that has not condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It has refrained from taking sides and abstained from voting against Russia at the United Nations or criticizing President Vladimir Putin.

Japan, meanwhile, has imposed financial sanctions to isolate Russia, including export controls on high-tech products.

In an article for the Indian Express newspaper Monday, Kishida said “the foundation of order in the international community was shaken by Russia’s aggression against Ukraine” and its impact on food access and fertilizer prices were felt by the international community, including in the Indo-Pacific region.

“In order to respond effectively to the various challenges that the international community is currently facing, cooperation between the G-7 and the G-20 has greater significance. Such pressing challenges include food security, climate and energy, fair and transparent development finance,” Kishida wrote.

India and Japan share strong economic ties. Trade between the two was worth $20.57 billion in fiscal year 2021-2022.

The Japanese investments in India touched $32 billion between 2000 and 2019. Japan has also been supporting infrastructure development in India, including a high-speed rail project.

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Associated Press writer Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo contributed to this report.

The 27-nation bloc’s foreign and defense ministers will discuss the plan at a joint session in Brussels. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba is due to provide an update of the latest developments in the year-long war and to set out his country’s military needs.

The EU’s aim is to provide Ukraine with 1 million 155-millimeter artillery shells this year.

EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, who is chairing the meeting, is seeking approval for a proposal to provide 1 billion euros ($1.1 billion) to encourage member nations to provide artillery shells from their stocks and any orders for new rounds that they might have placed with industry.

A further 1 billion euros would then be used to fast-track new orders and encourage member countries to work together on those purchases through the European Defense Agency or in groups of at least three nations. Germany has already called for countries to join its effort.

The third track of the scheme involves support to Europe’s defense industry so that it can ramp up production in the longer term. EU officials have said that new joint orders could be placed by May if the plan is endorsed.

Germany’s defense industry says it stands ready to ramp up its output, including the kinds of arms and ammunition needed by Ukraine, but that it needs clarity about what governments want before investing in further production capacity.

Ukraine became the world’s third-largest importer of arms in 2022 after Russia’s invasion triggered a big flow of military aid to Kyiv from the United States and Europe, according to Swedish think tank SIPRI.

“What’s important for us as an industry is to get predictability,” Hans Christoph Atzpodien, the head of Germany’s arms manufacturing association, told The Associated Press last week. “That means we have to be clearly told which products are needed within which time.”

For the residents, it’s a lifeline. Even before Russia's war, access to specialist medical help was available only to those who could get to the city, but the village near the eastern Ukrainian city of Sloviansk did have a primary care doctor.

Now, with the village health clinic damaged by the war, its residents have been left with little access to health care, and in particular to specialist care.

“There is no doctor. We are without a doctor. They left us alone,” wept Mariia Hrebenko, 79, as a doctor took her blood pressure and tried to calm her, gently patting her hand. “No one is helping us.”

The limited availability of health care has led to an exacerbation of existing illnesses that could be easily treated with regular medical attention, said Bohdan Avramenko, a 27-year-old cardiologist who is the medical coordinator of FRIDA Ukraine, a Ukrainian-Israeli medical aid organization.

“Right now their limited access to the medicine is causing more chronic conditions and the exacerbation of the chronic conditions, which is very bad for the patients because simple diseases like hypertension, diabetes, which can be treated with a very simple medication, to be frank, very cheap medication, they cannot get it,” said Avramaneko. “So they stay with high blood pressure, with high glucose levels.”

The teams have also been diagnosing what appears to be an increasing level of cancer, he said. “The limited access to the specialists, the limited access to the ultrasound, to the onco(logy) screening cause a lot, a lot, and a lot of new diagnoses of cancer.”

Staffed by volunteer doctors, the group has been providing specialist doctors through mobile clinics in villages and towns near the front lines and in areas recently retaken by Ukrainian troops from Russian forces. Depending on the location, they can see anywhere between a few dozen and 250 patients a day, and they try to return to the places they have already visited once a month to provide follow-up care.

The specialists most in demand are the ophthalmologist, the endocrinologist and the cardiologist, Avramenko said, while the team also provides childhood vaccinations. The 14 doctors who were working in Khrestyshche on Sunday were expecting to see about 50-60 patients that day.

The teams of volunteers run the mobile clinics in the villages mostly during the weekends as they work in public and private hospitals across Ukraine during the week.

Paramedic, nurse and former New York police officer Joseph Farkas, 61, has been with FRIDA Ukraine for about eight months, helping treat families in bomb shelters in towns pummeled by shelling and in villages that haven’t seen a doctor for months.

“I wanted to help out,” he said. “Obviously, what is going on here, the Russian military invading Ukraine is wrong. So I wanted to do my share in helping out the people here.”

Olena Chetskaya, 38, said both a general practitioner and a pediatrician had worked in the village before the war, but now there was no one to write referrals for specialists, leaving a trip to Sloviansk as the only option.

“It’s very important,” she said of the volunteer clinic as she waited in line to see a doctor. “We have a lot of old people and they don’t have the opportunity to leave and go to the city.”

One of them was Lyubo Rimar, 74, who sat patiently waiting for the endocrinologist. She hadn’t been feeling well all morning, she said, and felt a lot of pressure in her head.

"Of course this is important,” she said of the volunteer group’s services. “We are old, and all the illnesses come to us.”

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Vasilisa Stepanenko contributed to this report.

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Follow the AP’s coverage of the war at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

A 41-year-old man was arrested in New South Wales state and charged by police with the war crime of murder, an Australian Federal Police statement said.

“It will be alleged he murdered an Afghan man while deployed to Afghanistan,” the statement said.

He is expected to appear before a Sydney court within days, when a magistrate will likely consider whether he can be released from custody on bail.

The man was identified by Australian Broadcasting Corp. and News Corp as former Special Air Service Regiment trooper Oliver Schulz.

ABC broadcast helmet camera video in 2020 of a soldier it said was Schulz shooting an Afghan man in 2012 in a wheat field in Uruzgan province.

He faces a potential sentence of life in prison if convicted.

Police are working with the Office of the Special Investigator, an Australian investigation agency established in 2021, to build cases against elite SAS and Commando Regiments troops who served in Afghanistan between 2005 and 2016.

A military report released in 2020 after a four-year investigation found evidence that Australian troops unlawfully killed 39 Afghan prisoners, farmers and civilians. The report recommended 19 current and former soldiers face criminal investigation.

Benjamin Roberts-Smith, Australia’s most highly decorated member of the armed services when he left the SAS in 2013, has been accused by former colleagues of unlawful treatment of prisoners, including illegal killings. The former corporal, who was awarded the Victoria Cross and the Medal for Gallantry for his service in Afghanistan, has denied any misconduct.

His year-long defamation trial against The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and The Canberra Times newspapers ended in July 2022 but a judgment has yet to be announced.

More than 39,000 Australian military personnel served in Afghanistan during the 20 years until the 2021 withdrawal, and 41 have been killed there.

In a 2016 indictment from the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., unsealed late 2022, prosecutors say Daniel Duggan conspired with others to provide training to Chinese military pilots in 2010 and 2012, and possibly at other times, without applying for an appropriate license.

Prosecutors say Duggan received about nine payments totaling around 88,000 Australian dollars ($61,000) and international travel from another conspirator for what was sometimes described as “personal development training.”

Boston-born Duggan, 54, has been in custody in Australia since October and appeared in a Sydney court Monday by video link from a prison cell for a brief hearing about a U.S. application to extradite him.

His lawyer, Dennis Miralis, told reporters outside the court that Duggan returned from China in 2022 to work in Australia after he received an Australian security clearance for an aviation license. A few days after his arrival, the clearance granted by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, the nation’s main domestic spy agency, was removed, Miralis said.

“It’s striking to us that a sequence of events like that could occur,” Miralis said. “We are exploring at this stage whether he was lured back to Australia by the U.S., where the U.S. knew he would be in a jurisdiction where he would be capable of being extradited back."

Duggan served in the U.S. Marines for 12 years before immigrating to Australia in 2002. In January 2012, he gained Australian citizenship, choosing to give up his U.S. citizenship in the process.

The indictment says Duggan traveled to the U.S., China and South Africa, and provided some training to Chinese pilots in South Africa.

Duggan has denied the allegations, saying they were political posturing by the United States, which unfairly singled him out.

His next court appearance is set for May 1.

The North’s leader Kim Jong Un instructed his military to hold more drills to sharpen the war readiness of his nuclear forces in the face of “aggression” by his enemies, state media reported.

The South Korean and Japanese militaries detected the short-range missile being launched Sunday into waters off the North's eastern coast, which reportedly came less than an hour before the U.S. flew long-range B-1B bombers for training with South Korean warplanes. The North characterizes the U.S.-South Korea exercises as a rehearsal to invade, though the allies insist they are defensive in nature. Some experts say the North uses the exercises as a pretext to advance its weapons programs.

Pyongyang’s official Korean Central News Agency said the missile, which flew about 800 kilometers (500 miles), was tipped with a mock nuclear warhead. It described the test as successful, saying that the device detonated as intended 800 meters (yards) above water at a spot that simulated an unspecified “major enemy target,” supposedly reaffirming the reliability of the weapon’s nuclear explosion control devices and warhead detonators.

The report said the launch was the final step of a two-day drill that also involved nuclear command and control exercises and training military units to switch more quickly into nuclear counterattack posture, properly handle nuclear weapons systems and execute attack plans.

The exercise was also a “stronger warning” to the United States and South Korea, who are “undisguised in their explicit attempt to unleash a war” against the North, KCNA said.

Photos published by state media showed Kim walking through a forest with his daughter and senior military officials and a missile the North described as a tactical nuclear weapon system soaring from the woods spewing flames and smoke.

Saying that his enemies are getting “ever more pronounced in their moves for aggression,” Kim laid out unspecified “strategic tasks” for further developing his nuclear forces and improving their war readiness, KCNA said. This indicated that the North could up the ante in its weapons demonstrations in coming weeks or months.

Jeon Ha Gyu, spokesperson of South Korea’s Defense Ministry, said it’s clear North Korea with its ramped-up testing activity is making “considerable progress” in nuclear weapons technology. He did not provide a specific assessment about the North’s claim about the successful warhead detonation.

North Korean photos indicated the latest launch was of a solid-fuel missile apparently modeled after Russia’s Iskander mobile ballistic system that the North has been testing since 2019. The missiles are built to travel at low altitudes and be maneuverable in flight, which theoretically improve their chances of evading South Korean missile defenses.

While these missiles have been mostly fired from wheeled vehicles, North Korea has also tested them or their variants from railcars, a submarine and a platform inside a reservoir. Photos of the latest test suggested the missile was possibly fired from a silo dug into the ground, highlighting the North’s efforts to diversify its launch options and make it harder for opponents to identify and counter them.

South Korea’s military said the launch took place at a mountainous northwestern region near Tongchangri, which hosts a site where the North conducted long-range rocket and satellite launches in previous years.

North Korea likely has dozens of nuclear warheads, but there are differing assessments on how far the North has advanced in miniaturizing and engineering those weapons so that they could fit on the newer weapons it tested in recent years.

While the North after six nuclear tests may be able to place simple nuclear warheads on some of its older systems, like Scuds or Rodong missiles, it will likely require further technology upgrades and nuclear tests to build warheads that can be installed on its more advanced tactical systems, according to Lee Choon Geun, an honorary research fellow at South Korea’s Science and Technology Policy Institute.

Sunday’s short-range launch was the North’s fifth missile event this month and the third since the U.S. and South Korean militaries began joint exercises on March 13. The allies' drills, which are to continue through Thursday, include computer simulations and their biggest springtime field exercise since 2018.

The North so far in 2023 has fired around 20 missiles over nine different launch events. They included short-range missiles fired from land, cruise missiles launched from a submarine, and two different intercontinental ballistic missiles fired an airport near Pyongyang as it tries to demonstrate a dual ability to conduct nuclear attacks on South Korea and the U.S. mainland.

The latest ICBM test last Thursday preceded a summit between South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, who agreed to resume security dialogues and take other steps to improve their oft-strained relations in the face of North Korean threats.

North Korea already is coming off a record year in testing activity, with more than 70 missiles fired in 2022, as Kim accelerates his weapons development aimed at forcing the United States to accept the idea of the North as a nuclear power and negotiating badly needed sanctions relief from a position of strength.

In response to the most recent ICBM launch, the U.N. Security Council scheduled an emergency open meeting Monday morning at the request of the United States, United Kingdom, Albania, Ecuador, France and Malta. Security Council resolutions have long banned North Korean ballistic missile activity, but permanent council members Russia and China have thwarted punishment or further sanctions in recent years.

The U.N. Security Council held an informal meeting Friday at which the U.S., its allies and human rights experts shone a spotlight on what they described as the dire rights situation in North Korea. China and Russia denounced the meeting as a politicized move.

North Korea’s U.N. Mission called the meeting about “our non-existent 'human rights issue’” unlawful. It also said the U.S. held Friday’s meeting “while staging the aggressive joint military exercise which poses a grave threat to our national security.”

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Associated Press writer Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations contributed to this report.

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Find more AP Asia-Pacific coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/asia-pacific

President Milo Đukanović, 61, won around 35% of the votes while 37-year-old economist Jakov Milatović won some 29%, according to projections released by the Center for Monitoring and Research.

If confirmed in the official tally, the two will face each other in the April 2 runoff. The CeMI monitoring group insisted that they don't expect major changes as the counting continues. It was not immediately clear when official results will be published.

The presidential election came after months of political crisis and uncertainty over whether the small NATO member state in the Balkans would unblock its bid to join the European Union or instead seek to improve ties with Serbia and Russia.

Though the presidency is largely ceremonial in Montenegro, the ballot also is seen as a key indicator of popular sentiment before a parliamentary election set for June 11.

“We achieved exactly what we wanted, this is what we planned,” Djukanovic said.

He described the outcome as “wind in the back” for his DPS party ahead of upcoming parliamentary votes "so that we confirm the strength of European Montenegro and form a government that will continue to lead Montenegro on the European path."

Milatovic, a former economy minister and a leader of the recently-formed Europe Now group, also struck a victorious tone in the post-election speech, pledging to “send Djukanovic to political retirement” following his more than 30 years in power.

“This is a victory of entire Montenegro that generations have waited for,” said Milatovic.

Đukanović and his Democratic Party of Socialists, or DPS, led Montenegro to independence from Serbia in 2006, and defied Russia to join NATO in 2017. An alliance dominated by parties seeking closer ties with Serbia and Russia ousted DPS from power in 2020, accusing the party of corruption and links to organized crime.

The new ruling alliance, however, soon plunged into disarray, which stalled Montenegro’s path toward the EU and created a political deadlock. The latest government fell in a no-confidence vote in August, but has remained in office for months because of the stalemate.

Observers say Milatović, who served in the government elected after the 2020 parliamentary vote but later split from the ruling coalition, has sought to portray himself as civic-oriented, centrist and pro-EU.

Milatovic received backing from Andrija Mandic of the staunchly pro-Serbia and pro-Russia Popular Front party. Mandic won around 19%, on Sunday and urged his voters to support Milatovic in the runoff.

Montenegro, whose population is around 620,000, long have been deeply split between supporters of Đukanović’s policies and those who view themselves as Serbs and want Montenegro to ally itself with Serbia and fellow-Slavic Russia.

Đukanović, who has served multiple times as both president and prime minister in the past 30 years, has seen his popularity plummet. He has hoped to regain trust among Montenegro's approximately 540,000 eligible voters and help pave the way for his party's return to power.

Đukanović has portrayed the presidential election as a choice between an independent Montenegro and a country controlled by neighboring Serbia and Russia.

The political chaos and stalled reforms in a country long seen as the next in line for EU membership has alarmed U.S. and EU officials, who fear Russia could try to stir trouble in the Balkans to divert attention from the war in Ukraine.

Countries quickly signed off on a summary of global warming research compiled since the "2015 Paris Climate Accord," but disagreements over the main text lasted hours.

Emissions targets, financial aid and how to define vulnerable developing countries were all points of debate. The U.S. took issue with the concept of historic responsibility for climate change.

The UN is expected to publish the full report Monday afternoon.

Putin arrived in Mariupol late Saturday after visiting Crimea, southwest of Mariupol, to mark the ninth anniversary of the Black Sea peninsula’s annexation from Ukraine, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Sunday. He was shown chatting with Mariupol residents and visiting an art school and a children’s center in Sevastopol, Crimea.

Mariupol became a worldwide symbol of resistance after outgunned and outmanned Ukrainian forces held out in a steel mill there for nearly three months before Moscow finally took control of it in May. Much of the city was pounded to rubble by Russian shelling.

Putin has not commented on the arrest warrant, which deepened his international isolation despite the unlikelihood of him facing trial anytime soon. The Kremlin, which does not recognize the authority of the ICC, has rejected its move as "legally null and void."

The surprise trip also came ahead of a planned visit to Moscow by Chinese President Xi Jinping this week, expected to provide a major diplomatic boost to Putin in his confrontation with the West.

In an essay published Monday in the People's Daily, the newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party's Central Committee, Putin said: “We are grateful for the balanced line (of China) in connection with the events taking place in Ukraine, for understanding their background and true causes. We welcome China's willingness to play a constructive role in resolving the crisis.”

China in February released a position paper calling for an end to fighting in Ukraine and for upholding all countries' sovereignty and territorial integrity. It did not address how to resolve Russia's illegal claim to have annexed four regions of Ukraine.

White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told “Fox News Sunday” that any call for a cease-fire in Ukraine coming out of the Putin-Xi meeting would be unacceptable to the U.S. because it would only “ratify Russian’s conquest to date,” and give Moscow “time to refit, retrain, re-man and try to plan for a renewed offensive.”

Putin arrived in Mariupol by helicopter and then drove himself around the city’s “memorial sites,” concert hall and coastline, Russian news reports said. The state Rossiya 24 channel on Sunday showed Putin chatting with locals outside what looked like a newly built residential complex, and being shown around one of the apartments.

Following his trip to Mariupol, Putin met with Russian military leaders and troops at a command post in Rostov-on-Don, a southern Russian city some 180 kilometers (about 112 miles) farther east, and conferred with Gen. Valery Gerasimov, who is in charge of the Russian military operations in Ukraine. Peskov said.

Peskov said the trip had been unannounced, and that Putin intended to “inspect the work of the (command) post in its ordinary mode of operation.”

Speaking to the state RIA-Novosti agency, Deputy Prime Minister Marat Khusnullin made clear that Russia was in Mariupol to stay. He said the government hoped to finish the reconstruction of its blasted downtown by the end of the year.

“People have started to return. When they saw that reconstruction is underway, people started actively returning,” Khusnullin told RIA.

Mykhailo Podolyak, chief of staff for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, heaped scorn on Putin's trip to Mariupol.

“The criminal is always drawn to the crime scene," he said. "While the countries of the civilized world are announcing the arrest of the ‘war director’ in the event of crossing the border, the organizer of the murders of thousands of Mariupol families came to admire the ruins of the city and mass graves.”

When Moscow fully captured the city in May, an estimated 100,000 people remained, out of a prewar population of 450,000. Many were trapped without food, water, heat or electricity. Relentless bombardment left rows of shattered or hollowed-out buildings.

Mariupol’s plight first came into international focus with a Russian airstrike on a maternity hospital on March 9, 2022, less than two weeks after the invasion of Ukraine began. A week later, about 300 people were reported killed in the bombing of a theater being used as the city's largest bomb shelter. Evidence obtained by The Associated Press suggested the real death toll could be closer to 600.

A small group of Ukrainian fighters held out for 83 days in the sprawling Azovstal steel works in eastern Mariupol before surrendering, their dogged defense tying down Russian forces and coming to symbolize Ukrainian tenacity in the face of Moscow’s aggression.

Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, a move that most of the world denounced as illegal, and moved in September to officially claim four regions in Ukraine’s south and east as Russian territory, following referendums that Kyiv and the West described as a sham.

The ICC on Friday accused Putin of bearing personal responsibility for the abductions of children from Ukraine. U.N. investigators also said there was evidence for the forced transfer of “hundreds” of Ukrainian children to Russia. According to Ukrainian government figures, over 16,000 children have been deported to Russian-controlled territories or Russia itself, many of them from Mariupol.

While the ICC's move was welcomed by Kyiv, the chances of Putin facing trial are slim because Moscow does not recognize the court’s jurisdiction or extradite its nationals.

Ukrainian officials reported Sunday that at least three civilians had been killed and 19 wounded by Russian shelling in the previous 24 hours. The deaths were in the eastern Donetsk region, amid fierce battles for control of the city of Bakhmut, according to Gov. Pavlo Kyrylenko on Ukrainian TV.

Kharkiv regional Gov. Oleh Syniehubov said in a Telegram update that a 51-year-old woman was “fighting for her life” after being hit by shrapnel as Russian troops fired on the border town of Dvorichna.

Top Ukrainian presidential aide Andriy Yermak said Ukrainian troops were holding the line near Bakhmut, a key target of a long, grinding Russian offensive, adding that the enemy's plan to occupy the city "are now foundering.”

The spokesman for Ukraine’s eastern forces said Russian troops are “tactically unable to complete” Bakhmut's capture.

“Yes, there are very active battles, (the Russians) continue to carry out several dozen attacks by inertia, but they suffer huge losses,” Serhii Cherevaty said on Ukrainian TV, adding that Ukrainian defenses are “bleeding the enemy, breaking his fighting spirit.”

Taking Bakhmut would give the Kremlin a battlefield victory after months of setbacks, and could pave the way for Russia to threaten other Ukrainian strongholds in the region, including Sloviansk and Kramatorsk.

Russian forces shelled a house in Bilozerka, a suburb west of the southern city of Kherson, and a woman who was pulled from the rubble was hospitalized, according to the Kherson regional military administration, writing on Telegram.

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Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine: https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

Macron had hoped his push to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64 would cement his legacy as the president who transformed France's economy for the 21st century. Instead, he finds his leadership contested, both in parliament and on the streets of major cities.

His brazen move to force a pension reform bill through without a vote has infuriated the political opposition and could hamper his government's ability to pass legislation for the remaining four years of his term.

Demonstrators hoisted the parody photo at protests after Macron chose at the last minute Thursday to invoke the government’s constitutional power to pass the bill without a vote at the National Assembly.

In his first public comment on the issue since then, the 45-year-old leader expressed his wish for the bill to “reach the end of its democratic path in an atmosphere of respect for everyone,'' according to a statement Sunday from his office provided to The Associated Press.

Since becoming president in 2017, Macron often has been accused of arrogance and being out of touch. Perceived as “the president of the rich,'' he stirred resentment for telling a jobless man he only needed to “cross the street” to find work and by suggesting some French workers were “lazy.”

Now, Macron’s government has alienated citizens “for a long time” to come by using the special authority it has under Article 49.3 of the French Constitution to impose a widely unpopular change, said Brice Teinturier, deputy director general of the Ipsos poll institute.

He said the situation's only winners are far-right leader Marine Le Pen and her National Rally party, “which continues its strategy of both ‘getting respectable’ and opposing Macron,” and France's labor unions. Le Pen was runner-up to Macron in the country's last two presidential elections.

As the garbage piles get bigger and the smell from them worse, many people in Paris blame Macron, not the striking workers.

Macron repeatedly said he was convinced the French retirement system needed modifying to keep it financed. He says other proposed options, like increasing the already heavy tax burden, would push investors away, and that decreasing the pensions of current retirees was not a realistic alternative.

The public displays of displeasure may weigh heavily on his future decisions. The spontaneous, sometimes violent protests that erupted in Paris and across the country in recent days have contrasted with the largely peaceful demonstrations and strikes previously organized by France’s major unions.

Macron's reelection to a second term last April bolstered his standing as a senior player in Europe. He campaigned on a pro-business agenda, pledging to address the pension issue and saying the French must “work longer.”

In June, Macron’s centrist alliance lost its majority in the lower house of parliament, though it still holds more seats than other political parties. He said at the time that his government wanted to “legislate in a different way,” based on compromises with a range of political groups.

Since then, conservative lawmakers have agreed to support some bills that fit with their own policies. But tensions over the pension plan, and widespread lack of trust among ideologically diverse parties, may end attempts at seeking compromise.

Macron's political opponents in the National Assembly filed two no-confidence motions Friday against the government of Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne. Government officials are hoping to survive a vote on the motions set for Monday because the opposition is divided, with many Republicans expected not to support it.

If a motion passes, however, it would be a big blow for Macron: the pension bill would be rejected and his Cabinet would have to resign. In that case, the president would need to appoint a new Cabinet and find his ability to get legislation passed weakened.

Macron notably hopes to propose new measures designed to bring France’s unemployment rate down to 5%, from 7.2% now, by the end of his second and final term.

If the no-confidence motions fail, Macron could enact the higher retirement age but try to appease his critics with a government reshuffle.

Either way, Macron would keep his job until his term runs out in 2027, and retain substantial powers over foreign policy, European affairs and defense. As commander-in-chief of the armed forces, he can make decisions about France's support for Ukraine and other global issues without parliamentary approval.

France’s strong presidential powers are a legacy from Gen. Charles de Gaulle’s desire to have a stable political system for the Fifth Republic he established in 1958.

Another option in the hands of the president is to dissolve the National Assembly and call for an early parliamentary election.

That scenario appears unlikely for now, since the unpopularity of the pension plan means Macron's alliance would be unlikely to secure a majority of seats. And if another party won, he would have to appoint a prime minister from the majority faction, empowering the government to implement policies that diverge from the president's priorities.

Le Pen said she would welcome a dissolution.

And Mathilde Panot, a lawmaker from the leftist Nupes coalition, said with sarcasm Thursday that it was a “very good” idea for Macron to disband the Assembly and trigger an election.

“I believe it would be a good occasion for the country to reaffirm that yes, they want the retirement age down at 60," Panot said. "The Nupes is always available to govern.”

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Follow AP's coverage of the French government at https://apnews.com/hub/france-government

But a Palestinian shooting attack that wounded two Israelis in the occupied West Bank underscored the tough work that lies ahead as the Muslim holy month of Ramadan approaches this week.

The Israeli and Palestinian delegations met for the second time in less than a month, shepherded by regional allies Egypt and Jordan, as well as the United States, to end a year-long spasm of violence. More than 200 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire in the West Bank and east Jerusalem, and more than 40 Israelis or foreigners have been killed in Palestinian attacks during that time.

Following Sunday's summit in the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, a joint communique said the sides had reaffirmed a commitment to de-escalate and prevent further violence.

These include pledges to stop unilateral actions, it said. Israel pledged to stop discussion of new settlement construction for four months, and to stop plans to legalize unauthorized settlement outposts for six months.

“The two sides agreed to establish a mechanism to curb and counter violence, incitement and inflammatory states and actions,” the communique said. The sides would report on progress at a follow-up meeting in Egypt next month, it added.

There were no additional comments from Israel or the Palestinians. The agreement marked a breakthrough, in words at least, but implementing the pledges could be a challenge.

A similar meeting in Jordan late last month ended with pledges to de-escalate tensions. But the meeting was quickly derailed when a new burst of violence erupted on the same day. A Palestinian gunman shot and killed two Israelis in the occupied West Bank and Jewish settlers in response rampaged in the Palestinian town of Hawara, destroying property and leading to the death of one Palestinian.

As Sunday's talks were going on, a Palestinian gunman opened fire at an Israeli vehicle in Hawara again, seriously wounding an Israeli man, medics said. The man's wife was treated for shock. The Israeli military released a photo of the car showing the windshield riddled with bullet holes.

The Israeli military said the wounded man and Israeli troops opened fire and hit the assailant. The man was later arrested, the army said. His condition was not immediately known.

Hawara lies on a busy road in the northern part of the West Bank that is used by Israeli residents of nearby Jewish settlements. Many settlers carry guns.

The Israeli pledges were largely symbolic. Israel recently approved the construction of thousands of new settlement homes, and there were no immediate plans to approve additional construction. Still, mere talk of slowing settlement activity could risk a backlash in Israel's new coalition government, which is dominated by settler leaders and supporters.

Bloodshed has been surging since the meeting in Jordan. Sunday's shooting, along with the killing of an Islamic Jihad militant in neighboring Syria, added to the tensions. The militant group, which is active in the northern West Bank, accused Israel of assassinating the commander. Israel had no comment.

In Gaza, the Hamas militant group, which opposes Israel's existence, praised Sunday's shooting as a “natural response” to Israeli military raids and said the meeting in Egypt would not stop it. But it did not claim responsibility for the attack.

Mediators want to ease tensions ahead of Ramadan, which start this week and which will coincide next month with the weeklong Jewish holiday of Passover.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made no mention of Sunday's summit in his weekly Cabinet meeting. Later, he called the Israeli man who was shot a “wounded hero.”

“Anyone trying to harm the citizens of Israel will pay the price,” Netanyahu said.

Palestinian official Hussein al-Sheikh tweeted that the meeting in Egypt was meant to “demand an end to this continuous Israeli aggression against us.”

The upcoming period is sensitive because large numbers of Jewish and Muslim faithful pour into Jerusalem's Old City, the emotional heart of the conflict and a flashpoint for violence, increasing friction points.

Large numbers of Jews are also expected to visit a key Jerusalem holy site, known to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary and to Jews as the Temple Mount — an act the Palestinians view as a provocation.

Under longstanding arrangements, Jews are allowed to visit the site but not pray there. But in recent years, the number of visitors has grown, with some quietly praying. Such scenes have raised fears among Palestinians that Israel is trying to alter the status quo.

Clashes at the site in 2021 helped trigger an 11-day war between Israel and Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip.

Israeli police said it was wrapping up preparations in Jerusalem to “enable the freedom of worship” for all faiths during Ramadan and Passover “while maintaining security, law and public order.” It said hundreds of police offices were being deployed, with a focus on Jerusalem's Old City.

While the latest violence began under the previous Israeli government, it has intensified in the first two months of the new government, headed by Netanyahu and his coalition — the country's most right-wing administration ever.

The government is dominated by hard-line settlement supporters. Itamar Ben-Gvir, the minister who oversees the police, was once relegated to the fringes of Israeli politics, with past convictions for incitement to violence and support of a Jewish terror group. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called for Hawara to be “erased” after last month's settler rampage, apologizing after an international outcry.

The violence is one of the worst rounds between Israel and the Palestinians in the West Bank and east Jerusalem in years.

Following a spate of Palestinian attacks against Israelis last spring, Israel launched near-nightly raids in the West Bank against what it says are militant networks. But the raids have not slowed the violence.

So far this year, 85 Palestinians have been killed, according to a tally by The Associated Press. Fourteen people in Israel, all but one of them civilians, have been killed in Palestinian attacks.

Israel says most of those killed have been militants. But stone-throwing youths protesting the incursions and people not involved in the confrontations have also been killed.

Israel captured the West Bank, east Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip in the 1967 Mideast war. The Palestinians seek those territories for their future independent state.

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Federman reported from Jerusalem. Associated Press writer Fares Akram in Gaza City, Gaza Strip, contributed to this report.

Officials, led by President Katerina Sakellaropoulou, marched from Eleftherias ("Freedom") Square, where members of the city’s Jewish community were rounded up by the German occupying forces, to the city’s Old Train Station, where they laid red carnations on the tracks. Some marchers held a banner reading “Thessalonki Auschwitz 80 years: Never again” and white balloons carrying the same slogan were released.

The first train carrying Jewish people departed from the station, which is now a freight terminal, on March 15, 1943; the last one, on Aug. 7 that year. Most Jews, more than 48,000 of them, were sent to the Auschwitz II-Birkenau sub-camp, where almost all were immediately gassed. Another 4,000 were sent to Treblinka and a smaller number to Bergen Belsen. About 90% of a once-thriving community, most of them descendants of Sephardic Jews who fled Spain after 1492, perished in the Holocaust.

“Thessaloniki has acknowledged its part of the responsibility” in the fate of the Jewish community, Sakellaropoulou said. Thessaloniki, once part of the Ottoman Empire, was captured by Greece in 1912, and relations between the Greek and Jewish communities were often uneasy. The tension was exacerbated by the arrival, after 1922, of ethnic Greeks fleeing Asia Minor following Greece’s defeat in a three-year war with Turkey. The new impoverished refugees saw Thessaloniki’s Jews, many of them successful professionals, as remnants of the hated Ottoman Empire.

European Commission Vice President Margaritis Schinas said that, just like the Nuremberg court administered justice after World War II, “The Hague (court) awaits those who think they will play history’s executioners.”

Schinas also made reference to preparations to set up a European network of locations associated with the Holocaust.

David Saltiel, head of Greece’s Central Jewish Council and vice president of the World Jewish Congress, expressed his satisfaction that a long-planned Holocaust Museum in Thessaloniki will soon be ready.

The Israeli government was represented by Science and Technology Minister Ofir Akunis, who mentioned that his paternal grandparents left Thessaloniki in 1944, the year the city was liberated from the Germans. Akunis was one of the featured speakers at the ceremony, along with Yaakov Hagoel, chairman of the World Zionist Organization.

Among the attendees was 75-year-old Shlomo Sevy, both of whose parents were among the rare Auschwitz survivors. He said his father had told him “'don’t ask how we stayed alive,'” he told The Associated Press.

There are now only about 1,200 Jews living in Thessaloniki, once home of Europe’s largest Jewish community called the “Jerusalem of the Balkans.” Smaller Jewish populations in other Greek cities were also heavily affected by the Holocaust, but not to the same extent. In Athens, especially, many Jews passed themselves off as Christians, with the assistance of the local population.

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Demetris Nellas reported from Athens.

In some of his first public comments since Benedict’s Dec. 31 death, Archbishop Georg Gaenswein said he remained loyal to Francis and that he was still waiting for the pontiff to give him a new job.

Gaenswein’s future has been the subject of much speculation following Benedict’s death and the publication of “Nothing But the Truth: My Life Beside Pope Benedict XVI.” In the memoir, Gaenswein charted his nearly 30 years working with Benedict, but also settled old scores, revealed palace intrigues and detailed some of the bad blood that accrued during the decade in which Benedict lived as a retired pope alongside Francis.

Published during the emotional period around Benedict’s Jan. 5 funeral, the book came to encapsulate the conservative criticism that has been directed at Francis and his more progressive bent by people nostalgic for Benedict’s doctrinaire papacy.

Speaking to Sky TG24 Sunday after celebrating Mass at a Rome-area church, Gaenswein acknowledged his book had raised eyebrows both for its content and the timing of its publication.

“There are and will be criticisms,” he said. “And I have to live with the criticisms.”

He said that he welcomed well-founded criticism.

“If the criticisms aren’t well-founded, but are criticisms from (anti-Benedict) prejudice or other unfounded motives, I have to accept them, but I cannot take them seriously. True criticism I accept and I learn from,” he said.

He spoke to Sky at Santa Maria Consolatrice, which was the titular church of Benedict when he was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. After the Mass, a plaque honoring the late pope was unveiled.

In an interview with The Associated Press on Jan. 24, Francis responded to Gaenswein's critiques, and those of other conservatives, by saying they were natural after 10 years and proved that the prelates felt free to speak.

The report by hundreds of the world’s top scientists was supposed to be approved by government delegations on Friday at the end of a weeklong meeting in the Swiss town of Interlaken.

The closing gavel was repeatedly pushed back as officials from big nations such as China, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, the United States and the European Union haggled through the weekend over the wording of key phrases in the text.

The report by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change caps a series that digests vast amounts of research on global warming compiled since the Paris climate accord was agreed in 2015.

A summary of the report was approved early Sunday but agreement on the main text dragged on for several more hours, with some observers fearing it might need to be postponed.

The U.N. plans to publish the report at a news conference early Monday afternoon.

The unusual process of having countries sign off on a scientific report is intended to ensure that governments accept its findings as authoritative advice on which to base their actions.

At the start of the meeting, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres called on delegates to provide “ cold, hard facts ” to drive home the message that there's little time left for the world to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) compared with preindustrial times.

While average global temperatures have already increased by 1.1 Celsius since the 19th century, Guterrres insisted that the 1.5-degree target limit remains possible "with rapid and deep emissions reductions across all sectors of the global economy.”

Observers said the IPCC meetings have increasingly become politicized as the stakes for curbing global warming increase, mirroring the annual U.N. climate talks that usually take place at the end of the year.

Among the thorniest issues at the current meeting were how to define which nations count as vulnerable developing countries, making them eligible for cash from a “loss and damage” fund agreed on at the last U.N. climate talks in Egypt. Delegates have also battled over figures stating how much greenhouse gas emissions need to be cut by over the coming years, and how to include artificial or natural carbon removal efforts in the equations.

As the country that has released the biggest amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere since industrialization, the United States has pushed back strongly against the notion of historic responsibility for climate change.

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A previous version of this story corrected an erroneous reference to the United Nations, when it should have been the United States, in the third paragraph.

The Federal Council, the seven-member governing body that includes Swiss President Alain Berset, is expected to announce that UBS is acquiring Credit Suisse in a potential deal brokered by the Swiss government.

Sunday's news conference follows the collapse of two large U.S. banks last week that spurred a frantic, broad response from the U.S. government to prevent any further bank panics. Still, global financial markets have been on edge since Credit Suisse's share price began plummeting this week.

The deal was announced just days after the 167-year-old Credit Suisse received a $50 billion (54 million Swiss francs) loan from the Swiss National Bank, which briefly caused a rally in the bank's stock price. Yet the move did not appear to be enough to stem an outflow of deposits, according to news reports.

Still, many of Credit Suisse’s problems are unique and do not overlap with the weaknesses that brought down Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, whose failures led to a significant rescue effort by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Federal Reserve. As a result, their downfall does not necessarily signal the start of a financial crisis similar to what occurred in 2008.

The deal caps a highly volatile week for Credit Suisse, most notably on Wednesday when its shares plunged to a record low after its largest investor, the Saudi National Bank, said it wouldn't invest any more money into the bank to avoid tripping regulations that would kick in if its stake rose about 10%.

On Friday, shares dropped 8% to close at 1.86 francs ($2) on the Swiss exchange. The stock has seen a long downward slide: It traded at more than 80 francs in 2007.

Its current troubles began after Credit Suisse reported on Tuesday that managers had identified “material weaknesses” in the bank’s internal controls on financial reporting as of the end of last year. That fanned fears that Credit Suisse would be the next domino to fall.

While smaller than its Swiss rival UBS, Credit Suisse is considered a globally systemically important bank. The firm has significant trading desks around the world, caters to the rich and wealthy through its wealth management business, and is a major advisor for global companies in mergers and acquisitions. Notably, Credit Suisse did not need government assistance in 2008 during the financial crisis, while UBS did.

Despite the banking turmoil, the European Central Bank on Thursday approved a large, half-percentage point increase in interest rates to try to curb stubbornly high inflation, saying Europe’s banking sector is “resilient,” with strong finances.

ECB President Christine Lagarde said the banks “are in a completely different position from 2008” during the financial crisis, partly because of stricter government regulation.

The Swiss bank has been pushing to raise money from investors and roll out a new strategy to overcome an array of troubles, including bad bets on hedge funds, repeated shake-ups of its top management and a spying scandal involving UBS.

Two surviving off-piste skiers sounded the alarm shortly after the 1 p.m. avalanche on Val Veny, above Courmayeur, but low-lying clouds prevented helicopters from reaching the scene, Courmayeur Mayor Roberto Rota told Sky TG24.

Rescuers were getting to the site by snowmobile, but Rota said the chances of finding the skiers alive was slim given the amount of time that had passed.

Rota suggested the four skiers were amateurs who hadn’t gone up with a guide or proper avalanche safety equipment, though he added that avalanche airbags would have only been useful if rescuers were nearby and had gotten to the scene within the first 15-20 minutes.

“Unfortunately, it’s 99% that those involved won’t make it,” he said.

The avalanche risk Sunday for the area was a level-three “considerable” danger on a scale of five risk levels — low, moderate, considerable, high and very high — used by the European Avalanche Warning Services, Rota said.

Local authorities in the port of Rijeka sounded emergency sirens early on Sunday to mark the start of the operation. They earlier had evacuated parts of the city while also halting all traffic to secure the area during the removal of the bomb with 690 kilograms (1,500-pounds) of explosives.

Officials said that the mine, which was first discovered last June, was positioned too close to the city and that it had to be moved further away before emergency teams could perform the controlled detonation.

Videos released by Croatian police after the operation was completed on Sunday showed the mine at the bottom of the sea, and divers strapping it up so it could be moved. Another video showed a huge explosion further away, sending seawater high up in the air.

Police officer Nenad Krasny said the mine was very dangerous and contained huge quantities of explosives. He added that 24 people took part in the operation, and that great care was taken to remove the mine from the port “because anything else would be too dangerous for the citizens and infrastructure.”

Although the electoral field was unusually large with two newly registered parties and hundreds of individual candidates joining the race, turnout appeared relatively unenthusiastic — about 54% of eligible voter cast ballots, according the national elections commission.

The early election came on the fourth anniversary of the resignation of President Nursultan Nazarbayev, who had led Kazakhstan since independence following the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 and who had established immense influence.

His successor, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, was widely expected to continue Nazarbayev’s authoritarian course and even renamed the capital as Nur-Sultan in his predecessor’s honor.

But the country’s political landscape changed markedly after a wave of violence in January 2022, when provincial protests initially sparked by a fuel price hike engulfed other cities, notably the commercial capital, Almaty, and became overtly political as demonstrators shouted “Old man out!” in reference to the now 82-year-old Nazarbayev.

More than 220 people, mostly protesters, died as police harshly put down the unrest. Amid the violence, Tokayev removed Nazarbayev from his powerful post as head of the national security council. He restored the capital’s previous name of Astana, and the parliament repealed a law granting Nazarbayev and his family immunity from prosecution.

Tokayev also initiated reforms to strengthen the parliament, reduce presidential powers and limit the presidency to a single seven-year term. Under the reforms, a third of the lower house of parliament’s 98 seats will be chosen in single-mandate races rather than by party list.

The ruling Amanat party holds the overwhelming majority of seats in the current parliament and the rest belongs to parties that are largely loyal to Amanat.

Although opinion surveys indicate that Amanat will remain the largest party in the new parliament, the likely final balance is unclear. More than 400 candidates, most of them self-nominated, competed in the single-mandate races, and the national elections commission authorized two additional parties to enter the proportional contest.

“We can only hope that these elections will contribute to the further consolidation of society, of democracy, and that the idea of a new and fair Kazakhstan will develop with the population really participating in this,” Austrian Martin Sajdik, a member of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe's elections observation mission, said Sunday.

Eric Ciotti tweeted a photo of his office in the French Riviera city with shattered windows, after a paving stone was thrown at it overnight into Sunday. The vandals also scrawled the words “the motion or the stone” — in reference to the motions of censure against the pension reform that will be voted on Monday in the National Assembly in Paris.

Amid weeks of mass protests over Macron's plan to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64, Macron last week ordered Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne to invoke a special constitutional power to skirt a vote in the lower chamber of parliament. In response, lawmakers at both ends of the political spectrum filed no-confidence motions against her Cabinet on Friday.

Ciotti had announced his party would not vote for either of the two motions of censure — meaning there would not be enough votes to stop the law.

Reacting to the vandals, Ciotti tweeted: “I will never give in to the new disciples of terror.”

Getting a no-confidence motion to pass will be challenging — none has succeeded since 1962, and Macron’s centrist alliance still has the most seats in the National Assembly. A minority of conservatives could stray from the Republicans party line, but it remains to be seen whether they’re willing to bring down Macron’s government.

The North’s continuation of missile tests showed its determination not to back down despite the U.S.-South Korea exercises, which are the biggest of their kind in years. But many experts say the tests are also part of North Korea's bigger objective to expand its weapons arsenal, win global recognition as a nuclear state and get international sanctions lifted.

The missile launched from the North’s northwestern Tongchangri area flew across the country before it landed in the waters off its east coast, according to South Korean and Japanese assessments. They said the missile traveled a distance of about 800 kilometers (500 miles), a range that suggests the weapon could target South Korea.

The chief nuclear envoys from South Korea, Japan and the U.S. discussed the launch on the phone and strongly condemned it as a provocation that threatens peace on the Korean Peninsula and in the region. They agreed to strengthen their coordination to issue a firm international response to the North’s action, according to Seoul’s Foreign Ministry.

South Korea’s military said it will thoroughly proceed with the rest of the joint drills with the U.S. and maintain a readiness to “overwhelmingly” respond to any provocation by North Korea. As part of the drills, the U.S. on Sunday flew long-range B-1B bombers for joint training with South Korean warplanes, according to South Korea’s Defense Ministry.

North Korea is highly sensitive to the deployment of B-1Bs, which are capable of carrying a huge conventional weapons payload. It responded to the February flights of B-1Bs by test-launching missiles that demonstrated potential ranges to strike some air bases in South Korea.

Japanese Vice Defense Minister Toshiro Ino said the missile landed outside Japan’s exclusive economic zone and there were no reports of damage to vessels or aircraft. He said the missile likely showed an irregular trajectory, a possible reference to North Korea’s highly maneuverable, nuclear-capable KN-23 missile that was modeled on Russia’s Iskander missile.

The U.S. Indo-Pacific Command said the latest launch doesn’t pose an immediate threat to the U.S. territory or its allies. But it said the North’s recent launches highlight “the destabilizing impact of its unlawful” weapons programs and that the U.S. security commitment to South Korea and Japan remains “ironclad.”

The launch was the North’s third round of weapons tests since the U.S. and South Korean militaries began their joint military drills last Monday. The drills, which include computer simulations and field exercises, are to continue until Thursday. The field exercises are the biggest of their kind since 2018.

The weapons North Korea recently tested include its longest-range Hwasong-17 intercontinental ballistic missile designed to strike the U.S. mainland. The North’s state media quoted leader Kim Jong Un as saying the ICBM launch was meant to “strike fear into the enemies.”

Thursday’s launch, the North’s first ICBM firing in a month, drew strong protests from Seoul, Tokyo and Washington. It was carried out just hours before South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol flew to Tokyo for a closely watched summit with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.

During the summit, Yoon and Kishida agreed to resume their defense dialogue and further strengthen security cooperation with the United States to counter North Korea and address other challenges.

Ties between Seoul and Tokyo suffered a major setback in recent years due to issues stemming from Japan’s 1910-45 colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula.

But North Korea’s record run of missile tests last year — it launched more than 70 missiles in 2022 alone — pushed Seoul and Tokyo to seek stronger trilateral security partnerships involving Washington, which also wants to reinforce its alliances in Asia to better deal with China’s rise and North Korean nuclear threats.

North Korea has missiles that place Japan within striking distance. Last October, North Korea fired an intermediate-range missile over northern Japan, forcing communities there to issue evacuation alerts and halt trains.

After Sunday’s launch, Kishida ordered a prompt response, including working closely with South Korea and the U.S., according to Ino, the Japanese vice defense minister.

A day before the start of the drills, North Korea also fired cruise missiles from a submarine. The North’s state media said the submarine-launched missile was a demonstration of its resolve to respond with “overwhelming powerful” force to the intensifying military maneuvers by “the U.S. imperialists and the South Korean puppet forces.”

According to South Korean media reports, the U.S. and South Korea plan more training involving a U.S. aircraft carrier later this month after their current exercises end. This suggests animosities on the Korean Peninsula could last a few more weeks as North Korea would also likely respond to those drills with weapons tests.

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Associated Press writer Yuri Kageyama in Tokyo contributed to this report.

The attack took place as the activists were leaving a meeting at the offices of the Bosnian branch of the global anti-corruption group Transparency International in Banja Luka. The meeting was organized after the event they hoped to stage in the northwestern city on Sunday to promote LGBT rights was banned by local police.

The activists said a few dozen men chased them through the streets, hurling insults and punches. Before police arrived on the scene, several activists were hurt, including one who required medical attention.

The Banja Luka police said law enforcement officers had escorted the activists to the police station to take their statements and were still looking for the perpetrators.

The canceled LGBT event, organized and supported by several rights groups from across Bosnia, was to include a movie screening followed by a panel discussion. Its announcement provoked a strong homophobic backlash last week, including from the Bosnian Serb president, Milorad Dodik, who said LGBT people were “harassers” and that he hoped the “official bodies will prevent them from gathering both in closed venues and in the open.”

Banja Luka Mayor Drasko Stanivukovic also denounced the event saying the LGBT community should restrict itself to Bosnia’s multiethnic capital, Sarajevo, because Bosnian Serbs cherish “patriarchal, traditional families and are clear about our faith and our identity."

Bosnia remains highly conservative and torn by divisions stemming from a 1992-95 ethnic war involving Bosnia’s Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks during the breakup of Yugoslavia. Homophobia remains deep seated despite some progress over the years in reducing discrimination.

Since 2019, an annual pride parade has been organized regularly in Sarajevo without any notable unrest, but with a large law enforcement presence.

The violence in Banja Luka prompted condemnation from European Union officials, several Western embassies and international organizations.

“Words have consequences,” the EU mission to Bosnia tweeted, adding that regular verbal attacks by Bosnian Serb politicians against civil society activists and journalists create “a climate where physical attacks can follow.”

British Ambassador to Bosnia Julian Reilly concurred in a tweet that the “shocking attack on civic activists … showed the real impact of hate speech.”

The U.S Embassy in Sarajevo tweeted that the Bosnian Serb authorities “must identify and prosecute those who committed this heinous act.”

The Al-Quds Brigades, the military wing of the Islamic Jihad group, said in a statement that Ali Ramzi al-Aswad, 31, was killed Sunday morning in the Damascus countryside in a “cowardly assassination with bullets bearing the fingerprints of the Zionist enemy,” referring to Israel.

There was no immediate statement from Israel on Sunday’s alleged assassination.

The Islamic Jihad said in a statement Aswad’s family had been displaced from the city of Haifa in 1948 and settled in the refugee camps in Syria, where he joined the organization as a young man.

In 2019, Israeli warplanes fired missiles at the home of Akram al-Ajouri, a member of Islamic Jihad’s leadership living in exile. Ajouri was not harmed, but his son was reportedly killed in the attack.

Last month, airstrikes on residential areas in Damascus that Syrian officials said killed at least five people were attributed to Israel. An Islamic Jihad official warned Israel in a statement that there would be “a decisive response without delay to any assassination attempt (on) the leaders of the resistance.”

Israel has carried out hundreds of strikes on targets inside government-controlled parts of Syria in recent years, including attacks on the Damascus and Aleppo airports, but it rarely acknowledges or discusses the operations.

But the bounty also comes with danger as each year there are reports of people dying after eating poisonous fungi. Discerning between safe and toxic mushrooms has evolved into an inter-generational transfer of indigenous knowledge from mothers to daughters. Rich in protein, antioxidants and fiber, wild mushrooms are a revered delicacy and income earner in Zimbabwe, where food and formal jobs are scarce for many.

Beauty Waisoni, 46, who lives on the outskirts of the capital, Harare, typically wakes up at dawn, packs plastic buckets, a basket, plates and a knife before trekking to a forest 15 kilometers (9 miles) away.

Her 13-year-old daughter Beverly is in tow, as an apprentice. In the forest, the two join other pickers, mainly women working side by side with their children, combing through the morning dew for shoot-ups under trees and dried leaves.

Police routinely warn people of the hazards of consuming wild mushrooms. In January, three girls in one family died after eating poisonous wild mushrooms. Such reports filter through each season. A few years ago 10 family members died after consuming poisonous mushrooms.

To avoid such a deadly outcome, Waisoni teaches her daughter how to identify safe mushrooms.

“She will kill people, and the business, if she gets it wrong,” said Waisoni, who says she started picking wild mushrooms as a young girl. Within hours, her baskets and buckets become filled up with small red and brown buttons covered in dirt.

Women such as Waisoni are dominant players in Zimbabwe's mushroom trade, said Wonder Ngezimana, an associate professor of horticulture at the Marondera University of Agricultural Science and Technology.

“Predominantly women have been gatherers and they normally go with their daughters. They transfer the indigenous knowledge from one generation to the other,” Ngezimana told The Associated Press.

They distinguish edible mushrooms from poisonous ones by breaking and detecting “milk-like liquid oozing out,” and by scrutinizing the color beneath and the top of the mushrooms, he said. They also look for good collection points such as anthills, the areas near certain types of indigenous trees and decomposing baobab trees, he said.

About one in four women who forage for wild mushrooms are often accompanied by their daughters, according to research carried out by Ngezimana and colleagues at the university in 2021. In “just few cases” — 1.4% — mothers were accompanied by a boy child.

“Mothers were better knowledgeable of wild edible mushrooms compared to their counterparts — fathers,” noted the researchers. The researchers interviewed close to 100 people and observed mushroom collection in Binga, a district in western Zimbabwe where growing Zimbabwe's staple food, maize, is largely unviable due to droughts and poor land quality. Many families in the Binga are too poor to afford basic food and other items.

So mushroom season is important for the families. On average, each family made just over $100 a month from selling wild mushrooms, in addition to relying on the fungi for their own household food consumption, according to the research.

In large part due to harsh weather conditions, about a quarter of Zimbabwe's 15 million people are food insecure, meaning that they’re not sure where their next meal will come from, according to aid agencies. Zimbabwe has one of the world's highest rates of food inflation at 264%, according to the International Monetary Fund.

To promote safe mushroom consumption and year-round income generation, the government is promoting small-scale commercial production of certain types such as oyster mushrooms.

But it appears the wild ones remain the most popular.

“They come in as a better delicacy. Even the aroma is totally different to that of the mushroom we do on a commercial aspect, so people love them and in the process communities make some money,” said Ngezimana.

Waisoni, the Harare trader, says the wild mushrooms have helped her put children through school and also weather the harsh economic conditions that have battered Zimbabwe for the past two decades.

Her pre-dawn trip to the forest marks just the beginning of a day-long process. From the bush, Waisoni heads to a busy highway. Using a knife and water, she cleans the mushrooms before joining the stiff competition of other mushroom sellers hoping to attract passing motorists.

A speeding motorist hooted frantically to warn traders on the sides of the road to move away. Instead, the sellers charged forward, tripping over each other in hopes of scoring a sale.

One motorist, Simbisai Rusenya, stopped and said he can’t pass the seasonal wild mushrooms. But, aware of the reported deaths from poisonous ones, he needed some convincing before buying.

“Looks appetizing, but won’t it kill my family?” he asked.

Waisoni randomly picked a button from her basket and calmly chewed it to reassure him. “See?" she said, "It’s safe!”

The U.S. Geological Survey reported an earthquake with a magnitude of about 6.8 that was centered just off the Pacific Coast, about 50 miles (80 kilometers) south of Guayaquil, Ecuador's second-largest city. One of the victims died in Peru, while 14 others died in Ecuador, where authorities also reported that at least 126 people were injured.

Ecuadorian President Guillermo Lasso told reporters the earthquake had “without a doubt ... generated alarm in the population." Lasso's office in a statement said 12 of the victims died in the coastal state of El Oro and two in the highlands state of Azuay.

In Peru, the earthquake was felt from its northern border with Ecuador to the central Pacific coast. Peruvian Prime Minister Alberto Otárola said a 4-year-old girl died from head trauma she suffered in the collapse of her home in the Tumbes region, on the border with Ecuador.

One of the victims in Azuay was a passenger in a vehicle crushed by rubble from a house in the Andean community of Cuenca, according to the Risk Management Secretariat, Ecuador's emergency response agency.

In El Oro, the agency also reported that several people were trapped under rubble. In the community of Machala, a two-story home collapsed before people could evacuate, a pier gave way and a building's walls cracked, trapping an unknown number of people.

The agency said firefighters worked to rescue people while the National Police assessed damage, their work made more difficult by downed lines that interrupted telephone and electricity service.

Machala resident Fabricio Cruz said he was in his third-floor apartment when he felt a strong tremor and saw his television hit the ground. He immediately headed out.

“I heard how my neighbors were shouting and there was a lot of noise,” said Cruz, a 34-year-old photographer. He added that when he looked around, he noticed the collapsed roofs of nearby houses.

Ecuador's government also reported damages to health care centers and schools. Lasso said he would travel on Saturday to El Oro.

In Guayaquil, about 170 miles (270 kilometers) southwest of the capital, Quito, authorities reported cracks in buildings and homes, as well as some collapsed walls. Authorities ordered the closure of three vehicular tunnels in Guayaquil, which anchors a metro area of over 3 million people.

Videos shared on social media show people gathered on the streets of Guayaquil and nearby communities. People reported objects falling inside their homes.

One video posted online showed three anchors of a show dart from their studio desk as the set shook. They initially tried to shake it off as a minor quake but soon fled off camera. One anchor indicated the show would go on a commercial break, while another repeated, “My God, my God.”

Luis Tomalá was fishing with others when the earthquake struck. He said their boat began moving “like a racehorse, we got scared, and when we turned on the radio, we heard about the earthquake.” That’s when his group, Tomalá said, decided to stay at sea fearing a tsunami could develop.

A report from Ecuador's Adverse Events Monitoring Directorate ruled out a tsunami threat.

Peruvian authorities said the old walls of an Army barracks collapsed in Tumbes.

Ecuador is particularly prone to earthquakes. In 2016, a quake centered farther north on the Pacific Coast in a more sparsely populated area of the country killed more than 600 people.

Machala student Katherine Cruz said her home shook so badly that she could not even get up to leave her room and flee to the street.

“It was horrible. I had never felt anything like this in my life,” she said. ___

Associated Press writers Regina Garcia Cano in Caracas, Venezuela, and Franklin Briceño in Lima, Peru, contributed to this report.

The New York Times reported that researchers swabbed areas of the market in January 2020, right after authorities shut it down. They discovered large amounts of genetic material that matched the racoon dog in places where COVID-19 was also found.

Raccoon dogs are related to foxes and can transmit the "coronavirus."

The evidence adds to the theory that the virus spread from a wild animal to humans.

Largely non-violent protests were held in various cities, including Nantes and Marseille, where protesters got past police to occupy the main train station for around 15 minutes. In the eastern city of Besancon, hundreds of demonstrators lit a brazier and burned voter cards.

In Paris, police sought to restore calm after two consecutive nights of unrest. Police banned gatherings on the Champs-Elysées avenue and the elegant Place de la Concorde, where protesters tossed an effigy of Macron into a bonfire as a crowd cheered Friday night.

Several thousand protesters gathered Saturday evening at a public square in southern Paris, the Place d'Italie, then marched toward Europe’s biggest waste incineration plant, which has become a flashpoint of tensions. Some set trash cans on fire, and protesters chanted mottos such as “the streets are ours” as firefighter sirens wailed.

Protesters are trying to pressure lawmakers to bring down Macron’s government and doom the unpopular retirement age increase he’s trying to impose without a vote in the National Assembly.

After Macron ordered Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne to invoke a special constitutional power to skirt a vote in the chaotic lower chamber, lawmakers on the right and left filed no-confidence motions against her Cabinet on Friday. The motions are expected to be voted on Monday.

Some Paris residents who were out buying their weekend baguettes blamed Macron’s administration for the fumes wafting from the trash piled up near a bakery in the city's 12th district.

“The government should change its position and listen to the people because what is happening is extremely serious. And we are seeing a radicalization,” Isabelle Vergriette, 64, a psychologist, said. “The government is largely responsible for this.”

The district’s mayor, Emmanuelle Pierre-Marie, was out and about from the crack of dawn voicing concern in her neighborhood about the consequences of the uncollected garbage, which has become a visual and olfactory symbol of the actions to defeat the president's pension reform plan.

“Food waste is our priority because it is what brings pests to the surface,” Pierre-Marie said. “We are extremely sensitive to the situation. As soon as we have a dumpster truck available, we give priority to the places most concerned, like food markets.”

Police have requisitioned garbage workers to clean up some neighborhoods, but heaps of refuse remain.

More labor strikes were planned for Monday in numerous sectors, from transportation to energy. The Civil Aviation authority asked to have 30% of flights canceled at Orly, Paris’ second airport, and 20% in Marseille.

Trade union confederation CGT warned that at least two oil refineries might be shut down starting Monday. Industry Minister Roland Lescure said the government could requisition personnel — order workers back to their posts — to avoid fuel shortages.

At Saturday's protest, Melodie Tunc, 22, said Macron passing the bill without a vote was the last straw. Marching carefully to avoid garbage piled up on Paris streets, she said, “It is a good thing that garbage in the streets is so visible. It tells people how garbage collectors are so useful.”

“The government used force to pass its bill. But we have to fight for our social achievements and the only way to do it is to take to the streets,” she said.

Macron has argued that requiring people in France to work two more years is needed to invigorate the country's economy and to prevent its pension system from falling into a deficit as the population ages.

Laurent Berger, head of the moderate CFDT union, said the retirement reform “must be withdrawn.”

“We condemn violence. ... But look at the anger. It’s very strong, even among our ranks,” he said on RMC radio.

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Jade le Deley in Paris contributed.

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Follow AP's coverage of the French government: https://apnews.com/hub/france-government

New governors were being chosen for 28 of Nigeria’s 36 states as the political opposition continues to reject the victory of President-elect Bola Tinubu, who belongs to the ruling All Progressives Congress party.

By Saturday night, the counting of votes has started in most of the polling units across the country, though the winners in most of the states are not expected to be announced until Monday. Voting was postponed in a few locations, including in a Lagos town, over fear of attacks on electoral officials.

The performance of the Independent National Electoral Commission "has improved considerably compared to the Feb. 25 elections, but violence has been much more intense across the country,” said Idayat Hassan, head of the Center for Democracy and Development, Nigeria’s largest democracy-focused group. The group, which deployed more than 1,200 observers for the election, said violence in the election was more rampant in the southern region.

Local observer group YIAGA Africa said it found several instances in which voters were intimidated and prevented from voting unless they agreed to cast their ballots for certain political parties.

Among the places it listed was Lagos state, where the president-elect's party is seeking to retain the governor's office. The All Progressives Congress lost the state in last month's presidential and legislative elections.

“Security agencies should respond promptly to reports of voter intimidation and attack at polling units to accord citizens the opportunity to exercise their constitutional rights to vote,” Samson Itodo, executive director of YIAGA Africa, said in a statement.

Allegations of vote-buying were also rampant. In Enugu, voters were intimidated and lured with as little as 200 naira ($0.43), according to Chidimma Igwe, who voted in the state.

“They (party representatives) will follow you right into the ballot box to see who you voted for. If you vote for PDP (one of the political parties), they will give you 200 naira,” Igwe said.

Many Nigerians are struggling to survive in the aftermath of an ongoing currency swap program that created a cash shortage.

In Delta state, suspected thugs disrupted the voting in Ughelli and damaged election materials, according to resident Apkozie Emmanuel.

“Even the police were overwhelmed; they just stood aside,” Emmanuel said.

A record 87.2 million people were registered to vote in the election, but observers reported low turnout Saturday, perhaps even lower than in the February elections. The 26.7% voter participation last month was the lowest in Nigerian history.

Although Nigeria is Africa’s largest economy and one of its top oil producers, endemic corruption and poor governance have stifled the country's development. The Nigerian Constitution grants enormous powers to state governors, who are immune from prosecution while in office.

The prospect of holding the authority accorded governors make many politicians eager to get elected as one, the Center for Democracy and Development's Hassan said.

Yet polls have shown that many citizens do not have a high level of interest in the election or the performance of governors, a trend analysts said affects the level of accountability across the states.

“Even if we get the president right, everything else is against us — the people in the national assembly, the governors and the structural problems in terms of our constitution,” said Ayisha Osori, a director at Open Society Foundations, a nonprofit organization.

Some voters also urged incoming governors to take steps to make life better for many living in poverty and unemployed.

In Lagos, trader Monica Obi lamented the high price of food items. “When you go to the market, you cannot buy one cup of rice," Obi said. “I have four children. I cannot feed them very well because the price is too much.”

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Associated Press journalists Hilary Uguru in Asaba, Nigeria, and Dan Ikpoyi in Lagos, Nigeria, contributed.

The protesters say the proposed changes undermine the country's democracy by restricting the power of the Supreme Court. Netanyahu and his allies say the plan is needed to curb what they claim are excessive powers of unelected judges.

The main protest in the central city of Tel Aviv drew tens of thousands of people who waved Israeli flags and traffic sign banners that read “Dead End!” and “Risk Ahead!” Smaller protests were reported in other parts of the country.

On Wednesday, Netanyahu swiftly rejected a compromise proposal by Israeli President Isaac Herzog to resolve the standoff, deepening the crisis over a program that has roiled the country and drawn international criticism.

Israeli police deployed a water cannon to disperse protesters gathered at a main junction in Karkur, a town in northern Israel.

A video obtained by The Associated Press showed the water canon spraying at protesters as they chanted “Democracy,” in Hebrew. It was not immediately clear if anyone was injured.

Netanyahu and his ultranationalist and religious coalition allies have pledged to plow ahead with the legal changes despite the demonstrations. Business leaders, legal experts and retired military leaders have joined the protests, and Israeli reservists have threatened to stop reporting for duty if the overhaul passes.

In the latest step of the overhaul plans, the Israeli parliament on Monday advanced a bill that would make it harder to oust Netanyahu over the corruption charges against him, as it plowed ahead with the broader plan to overhaul the judiciary.

Ahead of her visit, Home Secretary Suella Braverman said the migration policy “will act as a powerful deterrent against dangerous and illegal journeys.”

Britain's Conservative government wants to stop migrants from reaching the U.K. on risky journeys across the English Channel, and a deportation agreement signed with Rwanda last year was part of measures intended to deter the arrivals. More than 45,000 people arrived in Britain by boat in 2022, compared with 8,500 in 2020.

Under the plans, some migrants who arrive in the U.K. in small boats would be flown to Rwanda, where their asylum claims would be processed. Those granted asylum would stay in the African country rather than return to Britain.

But the 140 million-pound ($170 million) plan has been mired in legal challenges, and no one has yet been sent to Rwanda. The U.K. was forced to cancel the first deportation flight at the last minute in June after the European Court of Human Rights ruled the plan carried “a real risk of irreversible harm.”

Human rights groups cite Rwanda's poor human rights record, and argue it is inhumane to send people more than 4,000 miles (6,400 kilometers) to a country they don’t want to live in.

Earlier this week, a group of asylum-seekers from countries including Iran, Iraq and Syria were granted permission to launch court appeals against the British government's decision to relocate them.

Defending the plan, Braverman said it will “support people to rebuild their lives in a new country” as well as boost Rwanda's economy through investments in jobs and skills.

She is expected to meet President Paul Kagame and her counterpart, Vincent Biruta, to discuss details of the deportation agreement.

Sonya Sceats, chief executive at the nonprofit Freedom from Torture, described the policy as a “cash-for-humans" plan.

“Rather than pushing through this inhumane and unworkable policy, ministers should focus on establishing safe routes to the U.K. and tackling the unacceptable backlog of asylum claims, so people fleeing war and persecution can rebuild their lives with dignity," she said.

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Follow AP’s coverage of global migration at https://apnews.com/hub/migration

The flurry of developments — which followed China's brokering of an agreement between Saudi Arabia and Iran to resume diplomatic relations and its release of what it calls a “peace plan” for Ukraine — came as the Biden administration watches warily Beijing's moves to assert itself more forcefully in international affairs.

U.S. President Joe Biden said Friday he believes the decision by the International Criminal Court in The Hague to charge Putin was “justified.” Speaking to reporters as he left the White House for his Delaware home, he said Putin “clearly committed war crimes.”

While the U.S. does not recognize the court, Biden said it “makes a very strong point” to call out the Russian leader for his actions in ordering the invasion of Ukraine.

Other U.S. officials privately expressed satisfaction that an international body had agreed with Washington’s assessment that Russia has committed war crimes and crimes against humanity in Ukraine.

Asked about the Xi-Putin meeting, Biden said, “Well, we’ll see when that meeting takes place.”

The Biden administration believes China's desire to be seen as a broker for peace between Russia and Ukraine may be viewed more critically now that Putin is officially a war crime suspect, according to two U.S. officials. The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the matter publicly, said the administration hopes the warrants will help mobilize heretofore neutral countries to weigh in on the conflict.

A look at the Xi-Putin meeting and how it may be affected by the warrant.

WHAT IS THE SIGNIFICANCE OF XI MEETING WITH PUTIN?

The visit to Russia will be Xi's first foreign trip since being elected to an unprecedented third term as China's president. It comes as Beijing and Moscow have intensified ties in steps that began shortly before Russia's invasion of Ukraine with a meeting between the two leaders in Beijing during last year's Winter Olympics at which they declared a “no limits” partnership.

Since then, China has repeatedly sided with Russia in blocking international action against Moscow for the Ukraine conflict and, U.S. officials say, is considering supplying Russia with weapons to support the war. But it has also tried to cast itself in a more neutral role, offering a peace plan that was essentially ignored.

The meeting in Moscow is likely to see the two sides recommit to their partnership, which both see as critical to countering what they consider undue and undeserved influence exerted by the U.S. and its Western allies.

WHAT IS THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE ICC ARREST WARRANT ISSUED FOR PUTIN?

In the immediate term, the ICC's warrant for Putin and one of his aides is unlikely to have a major impact on the meeting or China's position toward Russia. Neither China nor Russia — nor the United States or Ukraine — has ratified the ICC's founding treaty. The U.S., beginning with the Clinton administration, has refused to join the court, fearing that its broad mandate could result in the prosecution of American troops or officials.

That means that none of the four countries formally recognizes the court's jurisdiction or is bound by its orders, although Ukraine has consented to allowing some ICC probes of crimes on its territory and the U.S. has cooperated with ICC investigations.

In addition, it is highly unlikely that Putin would travel to a country that would be bound by obligations to the ICC. If he did, it is questionable whether that country would actually arrest him. There is precedent for those previously indicted, notably former Sudanese President Omar Bashir, to have visited ICC members without being detained.

However, the stain of the arrest warrant could well work against China and Russia in the court of public opinion and Putin's international status may take a hit unless the charges are withdrawn or he is acquitted.

WHAT IS THE VIEW FROM WASHINGTON?

U.S. officials have not minced words when it comes to Xi's planned visit to Moscow. White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby called Beijing’s push for an immediate cease-fire in Ukraine a “ratification of Russian conquest” and warned that Russians could use a cease-fire to regroup their positions “so that they can restart attacks on Ukraine at a time of their choosing.”

“We do not believe that this is a step towards a just, durable peace,” he said. Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan this week called on Xi to also speak with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the Ukrainian leader has also expressed interest in talks with Xi.

WHAT IS THE VIEW FROM KYIV?

Speaking before the ICC warrant was unveiled, Ukrainian analysts cautioned against falling into a potential trap ahead of the Xi-Putin meeting. “We need to be aware that such peace talks are a trap for Ukraine and its diplomatic corps,” said Yurii Poita, who heads the Asia section at the Kyiv-based New Geopolitics Research Network.

“Under such conditions, these peace talks won’t be directed toward peace,” said Nataliia Butyrska, a Ukrainian analyst on politics related to Eastern Asia. She said the visit reflects not so much China's desire for peace but its desire to play a major role in whatever post-conflict settlement may be reached.

“China does not clearly distinguish between who is the aggressor and who is the victim. And when a country begins its peacekeeping activities or at least seeks to help the parties, not distinguishing this will affect objectivity,” Butyrska said. “From my perspective, China seeks to freeze the conflict.”

WHAT IS THE VIEW FROM MOSCOW?

Even if China stops short of providing military assistance to Russia as the U.S. and its allies fear, Moscow sees Xi's visit as a powerful signal of Chinese backing that challenges Western efforts to isolate Russia and deal crippling blows to its economy.

Kremlin spokesman Yuri Ushakov noted that Putin and Xi have “very special friendly and trusting personal ties” and hailed Beijing’s peace plan. “We highly appreciate the restrained, well-balanced position of the Chinese leadership on this issue,” Ushakov said.

Observers say that despite China’s posturing as a mediator, its refusal to condemn the Russian action leaves no doubt about where Beijing’s sympathy lies.

“The Chinese peace plan is a fig leaf to push back against some Western criticism on support for Russia,” said Alexander Gabuev, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “The optics that it creates is that China has a peace plan, both parties of war endorsed it and were ready to explore the opportunities and then it was killed by the hostile West.”

WHAT IS THE VIEW FROM BEIJING?

Chinese officials have been boasting about their new-found clout in the international arena as their country's foreign policy has become increasingly assertive under Xi.

In announcing the Xi visit, China's foreign ministry said Beijing's ties with Moscow are a significant world force. “As the world enters a new period of turbulence and change, as a permanent member of the UN Security Council and an important power, the significance and influence of China-Russia relations go far beyond the bilateral scope,” it said.

It called the visit “a journey of friendship, further deepening mutual trust and understanding between China and Russia, and consolidating the political foundation and public opinion foundation of friendship between the two peoples for generations.”

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Associated Press writers Aamer Madhani in Washington and Hanna Arhirova in Kyiv contributed to this report.

Putin visited an art school and a children’s center that are part of a project to develop a historical park on the site of an ancient Greek colony, Russian state news agencies said.

The ICC accused him Friday of bearing personal responsibility for the abductions of children from Ukraine during Russia's full-scale invasion of the neighboring country that started almost 13 months ago.

Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, a move that most of the world denounced as illegal. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has demanded that Russia withdraw from the peninsula as well as the areas it has occupied since last year.

Putin has shown no intention of relinquishing the Kremlin’s gains. Instead, he stressed Friday the importance of holding Crimea.

“Obviously, security issues take top priority for Crimea and Sevastopol now,” he said, referring to Crimea’s largest city. “We will do everything needed to fend off any threats.”

Putin took a plane to travel the 1,821 kilometers (1,132 miles) from Moscow to Sevastopol, where he took the wheel of the car that transported him around the city, according to Moscow-installed governor Mikhail Razvozhaev.

The ICC's arrest warrant was the first issued against a leader of one of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council. The court, which is based in The Hague, Netherlands, also issued a warrant for the arrest of Maria Lvova-Belova, the commissioner for Children’s Rights in the Office of the President of the Russian Federation.

The move was immediately dismissed by Moscow — and welcomed by Ukraine as a major breakthrough. However, the chances of Putin facing trial at the ICC are highly unlikely because Moscow does not recognize the court’s jurisdiction or extradite its nationals.

Despite the court's action and its implication's for Putin, the United Nations and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced Saturday that a wartime deal that allowed grain to flow from Ukraine to countries in Africa, the Middle East and Asia was extended, although neither said for how long.

Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Oleksandr Kubrakov tweeted that the deal had been renewed for 120 days, the period that Ukraine, Turkey and the U.N. wanted. But Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told Russian news agency Tass that Moscow agreed to a 60-day extension.

Russia and Ukraine are both major global suppliers of wheat, barley, sunflower oil and other affordable food products that developing nations depend on. They signed separate agreements with the U.N. and Turkey last year to allow food to leave Ukraine's blockaded ports.

Russia has complained that shipments of its fertilizers — which its deal was supposed to facilitate — are not getting to global markets. The country briefly pulled out of the agreement in November before rejoining and agreeing to a 120-day renewal.

Putin signed a law Saturday that imposes stiff fines for discrediting or spreading misleading information about volunteers or mercenaries fighting in Ukraine. The law calls for a fining individuals 50,000 rubles ($660) for a first offense and up to 15 years in prison for repeated offenses.

The measure mirrors one passed in the early days of the war that applied to speaking negatively about soldiers or the Russian military in general.

Fighters from the Wagner Group, a private Russian military company known for fierce tactics, have taken key roles in Ukraine, particularly in Russia's grinding campaign to seize the eastern Donetsk province town of Bakhmut.

In Ukraine, authorities reported widespread Russian attacks between Friday night and Saturday morning. Writing on Telegram, the Ukrainian air force command said 11 out of 16 drones were shot down during attacks that targeted the capital, Kyiv, and the western Lviv province, among other areas.

The head of the Kyiv city administration, Serhii Popko, said Ukrainian air defenses shot down all drones heading for the capital. Lviv Gov. Maksym Kozytskyi said Saturday that three of six drones were shot down, with the other three hitting a district that borders Poland.

According to the Ukrainian air force, the attacks were carried out from the eastern coast of the Sea of Azov and Russia’s Bryansk province, which also borders Ukraine.

The Ukrainian military reported that between Friday morning and Saturday morning, Russian forces launched 34 airstrikes, one missile strike and 57 rounds of anti-aircraft fire. It said falling debris hit southern Ukraine's Kherson province, damaging seven houses and a kindergarten.

Russia is still concentrating the bulk of its offensive operations in Ukraine’s industrial east, focusing attacks on Bakhmut and other parts of Donetsk province.

Regional Gov. Pavlo Kyrylenko said one person was killed and three wounded when 11 towns and villages in the province were shelled Friday.

Further west, Russian rockets hit a residential area overnight in the city of Zaporizhzhia, the regional capital of the partially occupied province of the same name. No casualties were reported, but houses were damaged, Anatoliy Kurtev of the Zaporizhzhia City Council said.

British military officials said Saturday that Russia was likely to expand mandatory conscription to replenish its troops fighting in Ukraine. The U.K. Defense Ministry said in its latest analysis that deputies in the Russian Duma, the lower house of Russia’s parliament, introduced a bill to change the draft ages for men to 21-30, from the current 18-27.

The ministry said many Russian men ages 18-21 claim exemptions from military service because they are enrolled in higher education institutions. The wider age range would mean they would have to serve eventually. British officials said the law would likely pass and take effect in January 2024.

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Kishida told a joint news conference after the talks that the sides agreed to strengthen supply chains in minerals, semiconductors, batteries and other strategic areas, in order to “counter economic coercion, state-led attempts to illegally acquire technology and non-market practices,” apparently referring to China.

“Japan and Germany, both industrial nations that share fundamental values, need to take global leadership to strengthen resilience of our societies,” Kishida said.

Scholz brought six of the 17 Cabinet members for talks with Japanese counterparts, including economy, finance, foreign, interior, transport and defense ministers. They discussed deepening economic and national security cooperation in the Indo-Pacific region, as well as China’s assertiveness in pressing its maritime territorial claims and its closer ties with Russia.

Germany has similar “government consultations” framework with several countries.

In Tokyo, the two leaders again condemned Russia's war on Ukraine and agreed to continue tough sanctions against Moscow and strong support for Ukraine, Kishida said.

Russia's nuclear threat has made atomic weapons disarmament even more difficult and divided the international community, Kishida said, adding that it's crucial to get China, Russia and other nuclear states to resume discussing nuclear disarmament.

Kishida is an advocate of a world without nuclear weapons, though critics say being under the U.S. nuclear umbrella makes his stance less convincing.

Scholtz said the government consultations will “further advance our strategic cooperation, and they’re a very important part of giving a new drive to this close cooperation we want to achieve together,” German news agency dpa reported.

In separate talks, the two defense ministers confirmed the German armed forces' continued engagement in the Indo-Pacific region and a stronger military cooperation between the countries.

Japanese Defense Minster Yasukazu Hamada and his German counterpart Boris Pistorius agreed to coordinate closely in future regional deployments of the German military and step up joint exercises. They also agreed to seek a legal framework to facilitate increased joint defense activities, as well as cooperation in defense equipment and technology, the Japanese Defense Ministry said in a statement.

Japan, noting growing threats from China and North Korea, has been expanding military cooperation beyond its main ally, the United States, and has developed partnerships with Australia, Britain, European and Southeast Asian nations. Kishida's government last year adopted a new national security strategy under which Japan is deploying long-range cruise missiles to strengthen its strike-back capability, a major break from the country's postwar self-defense-only principle.

Scholtz visited Japan last year before going to China, making a point of prioritizing Germany’s economic ties with Tokyo over Beijing. Scholz is pushing to diversify Germany’s trade partners, while speaking out against a complete decoupling from China.

Japan, along with the United States, is seeking ways to stand up to increasing Chinese economic influence in the region. Tokyo also wants to reinforce economic security with other democracies in areas such as supply chains and the protection of sensitive technologies, apparently as a counter to China.

But Japan, which is a top U.S. ally and a major trade partner with China, is in a delicate situation and must balance its position between the two superpowers.

For Germany, China was its biggest trading partner in 2021 for the sixth consecutive year, as business ties have flourished even though political relations have turned tense.

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Associated Press journalists Geir Moulson in Berlin, Haruka Nuga and Chisato Tanaka in Tokyo contributed to this report.

At least seven journalists with the state broadcaster were detained in January following the circulation of the video of President Salva Kiir during the inauguration of a road project.

In a statement on Friday, the Union of Journalists of South Sudan said the two remaining journalists had been freed. None of the journalists were charged.

The union "will continue to engage with all stakeholders in the country to ensure journalists work in a free and safe environment,” the journalists' organization said.

The South Sudan Broadcasting Corporation footage aired in December and was widely shared online. It showed the 71-year-old Kiir standing during the national anthem and then looking down at what appeared to be a spreading stain, before the camera turned away.

One of the released journalists, Garang John, in a Facebook post said his health had been “totally compromised” by the 60 days of confinement.

“I am completely weak and tired but it shall be well," he said.

Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic and Kosovo Prime Minister Albin Kurti arrived at North Macedonia's lakeside resort of Ohrid for meetings with international envoys and rare head-to-head talks.

They tentatively agreed last month to the wording of an 11-point EU plan to normalize relations following the neighbors' 1998-1999 war and Kosovo’s declaration of independence from Serbia in 2008.

Both countries hope to join the European Union one day, and have been told they must first mend their relations.

Solving the dispute has become more important as war rages in Ukraine and fears mount that Russia could try to stir instability in the volatile Balkans where it holds historic influence.

“This is the time for the leaders of Kosovo, Serbia, and of the entire Western Balkans to show courage and to demonstrate shared responsibility for the success of the EU accession process of the region,” said EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, who will chair Saturday's meeting.

He said the talks will focus on how to implement the EU plan that calls for the two countries to maintain good neighborly relations, and recognize each other’s official documents and national symbols. If implemented, it would prevent Belgrade from blocking Kosovo’s attempts to seek membership in the United Nations and other international organizations.

The tentative agreement, drafted by France and Germany and supported by the U.S., doesn’t explicitly call for mutual recognition between Kosovo and Serbia.

“We will focus our discussion on the Implementation Annex of the recent EU Agreement that will result in the far-reaching normalization of relations between Kosovo and Serbia,’’ Borrell wrote in a blog ahead of the summit. “Both together will, in essence, result in the normalization of life of people in the region and open Kosovo’s and Serbia’s respective paths towards joining the EU.”

Although tentatively agreeing on the EU plan reached last month, Serbia's populist President Vucic seemed to backtrack on some of its points after pressure from far-right groups which consider Kosovo the cradle of the Serbian state and Orthodox religion.

Vucic said Thursday that he “won't sign anything” at the Ohrid meeting and earlier pledged never to recognize Kosovo or allow its U.N. membership.

On the other hand, Kurti said the implementation of what was already agreed should be the focus of the Ohrid talks.

“I’m an optimist but it is not up to me whether this will succeed or not,” Kurti said. “I offered to sign the European proposal (at the last meeting in Brussels) but the other side was not ready and refused.”

Thousands of far-right Serbian supporters, chanting “Treason, Treason," marched in downtown Belgrade Friday evening demanding that Vucic reject the latest EU plan. They carried a large banner reading “No to Capitulation” and called for the Serbian president’s resignation if he signs the plan.

Kosovo is a majority ethnic Albanian former Serbian province. The 1998-99 war erupted when separatist ethnic Albanians rebelled against Serbia’s rule, and Belgrade responded with a brutal crackdown. About 13,000 people died, mostly ethnic Albanians. In 1999 a NATO military intervention forced Serbia to pull out of the territory. Kosovo declared independence in 2008.

Tensions have simmered ever since. Kosovo's independence is recognized by many Western countries, but is opposed by Belgrade with the backing of Russia and China. EU-brokered talks have made little headway in recent years.

Serbia has maintained close ties to its traditional Slavic ally Russia despite the war in Ukraine, partly because of Moscow’s opposition to Kosovo’s independence and possible veto on its U.N. membership at the Security Council.

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AP writer Dusan Stojanovic contributed from Belgrade, Serbia.

The snap election comes on the third anniversary of the resignation as president of Nursultan Nazarbayev, who had led Kazakhstan since independence following the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 and who had established immense influence. His successor, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, was widely expected to continue Nazarbayev's authoritarian course and even renamed the capital as Nur-Sultan in his predecessor's honor.

But the country's political landscape changed markedly after a wave of violence in January 2022 when provincial protests initially sparked by a fuel price hike engulfed other cities, notably the commercial capital, Almaty, and became overtly political as demonstrators shouted “Old man out!” in reference to Nazarbayev. More than 220 people, mostly protesters, died as police harshly put down the unrest.

Amid the violence, Tokayev removed Nazarbayev from his powerful post as head of the national security council. He restored the capital’s previous name of Astana, and the parliament repealed a law granting Nazarbayev and his family immunity from prosecution.

Tokayev also initiated reforms to strengthen the parliament, reduce presidential powers and limit the presidency to a single seven-year term. Under the reforms, a third of the lower house of parliament's 98 seats will be chosen in single-mandate races rather than by party list.

Tokayev's Amanat party holds the overwhelming majority of seats in the current parliament and the rest belong to parties that are largely loyal to Amanat. Although opinion surveys indicate that Amanat will remain the largest party in the new parliament, the likely final balance is unclear.

More than 400 candidates, most of them self-nominated, are competing in the single-mandate races, and the national elections commission authorized two additional parties to enter the proportional contest.

The widened competition appears to have energized the electorate.

Although electioneering was allowed to start only in mid-February, “the campaign so far appears lively, in particular online and in the single-mandate electoral districts with a large number of candidates,” said an assessment from the elections observation mission of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

Candidates have raised a wide array of issues including further political reforms, housing and rising food prices, and the country does not show a clear path forward. But many are encouraged by the expanded election opportunity.

“There is hope that the upcoming parliamentary election that will be held under the new mixed electoral system will bring change and facilitate democratization and political liberalization in Kazakhstan,” analyst Assel Nussopova wrote for the Astana Times newspaper.

It was the first time the global court has issued a warrant against a leader of one of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council.

The ICC said in a statement that Putin “is allegedly responsible for the war crime of unlawful deportation of (children) and that of unlawful transfer of (children) from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation.”

The move was immediately dismissed by Moscow — and welcomed by Ukraine as a major breakthrough.

Its practical implications, however, could be limited as the chances of Putin facing trial at the ICC are highly unlikely because Moscow does not recognize the court’s jurisdiction or extradite its nationals.

But the moral condemnation will likely stain the Russian leader for the rest of his life — and in the more immediate future whenever he seeks to attend an international summit in a nation bound to arrest him.

"So Putin might go to China, Syria, Iran, his ... few allies, but he just won’t travel to the rest of the world and won’t travel to ICC member states who he believes would ... arrest him,” said Adil Ahmad Haque, an expert in international law and armed conflict at Rutgers University.

Others agreed. “Vladimir Putin will forever be marked as a pariah globally. He has lost all his political credibility around the world. Any world leader who stands by him will be shamed as well,” David Crane, a former international prosecutor, told The Associated Press.

The court also issued a warrant for the arrest of Maria Lvova-Belova, the commissioner for Children’s Rights in the Office of the President of the Russian Federation. The AP reported on her involvement in the abduction of Ukrainian orphans in October, in the first investigation to follow the process all the way to Russia, relying on dozens of interviews and documents.

ICC President Piotr Hofmanski said in a video statement that while the ICC’s judges have issued the warrants, it will be up to the international community to enforce them. The court has no police force of its own to do so.

The ICC can impose a maximum sentence of life imprisonment “when justified by the extreme gravity of the crime,” according to its founding treaty, the Rome Statute, that established it as a permanent court of last resort to prosecute political leaders and other key perpetrators of the world’s worst atrocities — war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.

Still, the chances of Putin or Lvova-Belova facing trial remain extremely remote, as Moscow does not recognize the court’s jurisdiction — a position it vehemently reaffirmed Friday.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russia doesn’t recognize the ICC and considers its decisions “legally void.” He called the court’s move “outrageous and unacceptable.”

Peskov refused to comment when asked if Putin would avoid making trips to countries where he could be arrested on the ICC’s warrant.

Ukraine’s human rights chief, Dmytro Lubinets, has said that based on data from the country's National Information Bureau, 16,226 children were deported. Ukraine has managed to bring back 308 children.

Lvova-Belova, who was also implicated in the warrants, reacted with dripping sarcasm. "It is great that the international community has appreciated the work to help the children of our country, that we do not leave them in war zones, that we take them out, we create good conditions for them, that we surround them with loving, caring people,” she said.

Ukrainian officials were jubilant at the move.

In his nightly address to the nation, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called it a “historic decision, from which historic responsibility will begin."

Sergiy Kyslytsya, Ukraine’s U.N. ambassador, recalled that on the night of Russia’s invasion, “I said at the Security Council meeting that there is no purgatory for war criminals, they go straight to hell. Today, I would like to say that those of them who will remain alive after the military defeat of Russia will have to make a stop in The Hague on their way to hell.”

In Washington, President Joe Biden called the ICC's decision “justified,” telling reporters as he left the White House for his Delaware home that Putin “clearly committed war crimes.” While the US does not recognize the court either, Biden said it “makes a very strong point” to call out the Russian leader's actions in ordering the invasion.

Olga Lopatkina, a Ukrainian mother who struggled for months to reclaim her foster children who were deported to an institution run by Russian loyalists, welcomed news of the arrest warrant. “Everyone must be punished for their crimes,” she said in a message exchange with the AP.

While Ukraine is also not a member of the global court, it has granted it jurisdiction over its territory and ICC prosecutor Karim Khan has visited four times since opening an investigation a year ago.

Besides Russia and Ukraine, the United States and China are not members of the 123-member ICC.

The ICC said its pre-trial chamber found “reasonable grounds” that Putin "bears individual criminal responsibility” for the child abductions “for having committed the acts directly, jointly with others and/or through others" and for failing to “exercise control properly over civilian and military subordinates who committed the acts.”

During a visit this month, ICC prosecutor Khan said he went to a care home for children 2 kilometers (just over a mile) from front lines in southern Ukraine.

“The drawings pinned on the wall ... spoke to a context of love and support that was once there," he said in a statement. "But this home was empty, a result of alleged deportation of children from Ukraine to the Russian Federation or their unlawful transfer to other parts of the temporarily occupied territories.”

“As I noted to the United Nations Security Council last September, these alleged acts are being investigated by my office as a priority. Children cannot be treated as the spoils of war,” Khan said.

And while Russia rejected the allegations and warrants, others said the ICC action will have an important impact.

“The ICC has made Putin a wanted man and taken its first step to end the impunity that has emboldened perpetrators in Russia’s war against Ukraine for far too long," said Balkees Jarrah, associate international justice director at Human Rights Watch. "The warrants send a clear message that giving orders to commit, or tolerating, serious crimes against civilians may lead to a prison cell in The Hague.”

Crane, who indicted Liberian President Charles Taylor 20 years ago for crimes in Sierra Leone, said dictators and tyrants around the world "are now on notice that those who commit international crimes will be held accountable.”

Taylor was eventually detained and put on trial at a special court in the Netherlands. He was convicted and sentenced to 50 years' imprisonment.

On Thursday, a U.N.-backed inquiry cited Russian attacks against civilians in Ukraine, including systematic torture and killing in occupied regions, among potential issues that amount to war crimes and possibly crimes against humanity.

The sweeping investigation also found crimes committed against Ukrainians on Russian territory, including deported Ukrainian children who were prevented from reuniting with their families, a “filtration” system aimed at singling out Ukrainians for detention, and torture and inhumane detention conditions.

On Friday, the ICC put the face of Putin on the child abduction allegations.

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Casert reported from Brussels. AP writers Hanna Arhirova in Kyiv, Ukraine; Ellen Knickmeyer in Washington and Sarah El Deeb in Beirut contributed.

___ Follow AP’s coverage of the war at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

“These data do not provide a definitive answer to how the pandemic began, but every piece of data is important to moving us closer to that answer,” World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Friday.

How the coronavirus emerged remains unclear. Many scientists believe it most likely jumped from animals to people, as many other viruses have in the past, at a wildlife market in Wuhan, China. But Wuhan is home to several labs involved in collecting and studying coronaviruses, fueling theories scientists say are plausible that the virus may have leaked from one.

The new findings do not settle the question, and they have not been formally reviewed by other experts or published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Tedros criticized China for not sharing the genetic information earlier, telling a press briefing that “this data could have and should have been shared three years ago.”

The samples were collected from surfaces at the Huanan seafood market in early 2020 in Wuhan, where the first human cases of COVID-19 were found in late 2019.

Tedros said the genetic sequences were recently uploaded to the world's biggest public virus database by scientists at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

They were then removed, but not before a French biologist spotted the information by chance and shared it with a group of scientists based outside China that's looking into the origins of the coronavirus.

The data show that some of the COVID-positive samples collected from a stall known to be involved in the wildlife trade also contained raccoon dog genes, indicating the animals may have been infected by the virus, according to the scientists. Their analysis was first reported in The Atlantic.

“There’s a good chance that the animals that deposited that DNA also deposited the virus," said Stephen Goldstein, a virologist at the University of Utah who was involved in analyzing the data. “If you were to go and do environmental sampling in the aftermath of a zoonotic spillover event … this is basically exactly what you would expect to find.”

The canines, named for their raccoon-like faces, are often bred for their fur and sold for meat in animal markets across China.

Ray Yip, an epidemiologist and founding member of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control office in China, said the findings are significant, even though they aren't definitive.

“The market environmental sampling data published by China CDC is by far the strongest evidence to support animal origins,” Yip told the AP in an email. He was not connected to the new analysis.

WHO's COVID-19 technical lead, Maria Van Kerkhove, cautioned that the analysis did not find the virus within any animal, nor did it find any hard evidence that any animals infected humans.

“What this does provide is clues to help us understand what may have happened,” she said. The international group also told WHO they found DNA from other animals as well as raccoon dogs in the samples from the seafood market, she added.

The coronavirus’ genetic code is strikingly similar to that of bat coronaviruses, and many scientists suspect COVID-19 jumped into humans either directly from a bat or via an intermediary animal like pangolins, ferrets or racoon dogs.

Efforts to determine the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic have been complicated by factors including the massive surge of human infections in the pandemic's first two years and an increasingly bitter political dispute.

It took virus experts more than a dozen years to pinpoint the animal origin of SARS, a related virus.

Goldstein and his colleagues say their analysis is the first solid indication that there may have been wildlife infected with the coronavirus at the market. But it is also possible that humans brought the virus to the market and infected the raccoon dogs, or that infected humans simply happened to leave traces of the virus near the animals.

After scientists in the group contacted the China CDC, they say, the sequences were removed from the global virus database. Researchers are puzzled as to why data on the samples collected over three years ago wasn’t made public sooner. Tedros has pleaded with China to share more of its COVID-19 research data.

Gao Fu, the former head of the Chinese CDC and lead author of the Chinese paper, didn’t immediately respond to an Associated Press email requesting comment. But he told Science magazine the sequences are “nothing new. It had been known there was illegal animal dealing and this is why the market was immediately shut down.”

Goldstein said his group presented its findings this week to a WHO advisory panel investigating COVID-19’s origins.

Michael Imperiale of the University of Michigan, a microbiology and immunology expert who was not involved in the data analysis, said finding a sample with sequences from the virus and a raccoon dog “places the virus and the dog in very close proximity. But it doesn’t necessarily say that the dog was infected with the virus; it just says that they were in the same very small area.”

He said the bulk of the scientific evidence at this point supports a natural exposure at the market, and pointed to research published last summer showing the market was likely the early epicenter of the scourge and concluding that the virus spilled from animals into people two separate times. “What’s the chance that there were two different lab leaks?” he asked.

Mark Woolhouse, an infectious diseases expert at the University of Edinburgh, said it will be crucial to see how the raccoon dogs' genetic sequences match up to what's known about the historic evolution of the COVID-19 virus. If the dogs are shown to have COVID and those viruses prove to have earlier origins than the ones that infected people, “that’s probably as good evidence as we can expect to get that this was a spillover event in the market.”

After a weeks-long visit to China to study the pandemic's origins, WHO released a report in 2021 concluding that COVID-19 most probably jumped into humans from animals, dismissing the possibility of a lab origin as “extremely unlikely.”

But the U.N. health agency backtracked the following year, saying “key pieces of data” were still missing. And Tedros has said all hypotheses remain on the table.

The China CDC scientists who previously analyzed the Huanan market samples published a paper as a preprint in February suggesting that humans brought the virus to the market, not animals, implying that the virus originated elsewhere. Their paper didn't mention that animal genes were found in the samples that tested positive.

In February, the Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. Department of Energy had assessed “with low confidence” that the virus had leaked from a lab. But others in the U.S. intelligence community disagree, believing it more likely it first came from animals.

Experts say the true origin of the pandemic may not be known for many years — if ever.

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Cheng reported from London. AP Science Writer Laura Ungar contributed to this story from Louisville.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

On Friday, Malawi authorities said Freddy killed at least 326 people, with 200 still missing. There are hundreds of evacuation centers set up across the country for survivors. Malawi’s president, Lazarus Chakwera, declared a 14-day national mourning period on Thursday.

In Mozambique, authorities said at least 53 were killed since Saturday, with 50,000 more still displaced. It’s expected that the death toll in both nations will continue to climb.

Cyclone Freddy dissipated over land late Wednesday after it made second landfall in Mozambique and then Malawi over the weekend and caused mass devastation in several regions, including Malawi's financial capital, Blantyre.

“A lot of areas are inaccessible restricting movement of assessment and humanitarian teams and life-saving supplies,” said Paul Turnbull, the World Food Program’s director in Malawi. “The true extent of the damage will only be revealed once assessments have been concluded."

Both nations were already facing a cholera outbreak before the cyclone hit and there are fears than the flooding could worsen the spread of water-borne diseases. Mozambique was also dealing with Freddy's first battering and floods earlier in the year.

Scientists say human-caused climate change has worsened cyclone activity, making them wetter, more intense and more frequent.

Cyclone Freddy has ravaged southern Africa since late February, when it pummeled Mozambique, Madagascar and Réunion. It then looped back on to the mainland after regaining strength over the Mozambique Channel.

Freddy first developed near Australia in early February and the World Meteorological Organization has convened an expert panel to determine whether it has broken the record for the longest-ever cyclone in recorded history.

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Alexandre Nhampossa and Tom Gould contributed to this report from Maputo, Mozambique. Kabukuru reported from Mombasa, Kenya.

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Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

A day after Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne invoked a special constitutional power to skirt a vote in the chaotic lower chamber, lawmakers on the right and left filed no-confidence motions to be voted on Monday.

At the elegant Place de Concorde, a festive protest by several thousand, with chants, dancing and a huge bonfire, degenerated into a scene echoing the night before. Riot police charged and threw tear gas to empty the huge square across from the National Assembly after troublemakers climbed scaffolding on a renovation site, arming themselves with wood. They lobbed fireworks and paving stones at police in a standoff.

On Thursday night, security forces charged and used water cannons to evacuate the area, and small groups then set street fires in chic neighborhoods nearby. French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin told radio station RTL that 310 people were arrested overnight, most of them in Paris.

Mostly small, scattered protests were held in cities around France, from a march in Bordeaux to a rally in Toulouse. Port officers in Calais temporarily stopped ferries from crossing the English Channel to Dover. Some university campuses in Paris were blocked and protesters occupied a high-traffic ring road around the French capital.

Paris garbage collectors extended their strike for a 12th day, with piles of foul-smelling rubbish growing daily in the French capital. Striking sanitation workers continued to block Europe’s largest incineration site and two other sites that treat Paris garbage.

Some yellow vest activists, who mounted formidable protests against Macron’s economic policies during his first term, were among those who relayed Friday's Paris protest on social media. Police say that “radicalized yellow vests” are among troublemakers at protest marches.

Trade unions organizing the opposition urged demonstrators to remain peaceful during more strikes and marches in the days ahead. They have called on people to leave schools, factories, refineries and other workplaces to force Macron to abandon his plan to make the French to work two more years, until 64, before receiving a full pension.

Macron took a calculated risk ordering Borne to invoke a special constitutional power that she had used 10 times before without triggering such an outpouring of anger.

If the no-confidence votes fail, the bill becomes law. If a majority agrees, it would spell the end of the retirement reform plan and force the government to resign, although Macron could always reappoint Borne to name the new Cabinet.

“We are not going to stop,” CGT union representative Régis Vieceli told The Associated Press on Friday. He said overwhelming the streets with discontent and refusing to continue working is “the only way that we will get them to back down.”

Macron has made the proposed pension changes the key priority of his second term, arguing that reform is needed to make the French economy more competitive and to keep the pension system from diving into deficit. France, like many richer nations, faces lower birth rates and longer life expectancy.

Macron's conservative allies in the Senate passed the bill, but frantic counts of lower-house lawmakers Thursday showed a slight risk it would fall short of a majority, so Macron decided to invoke the constitution's Article 49-3 to bypass a vote.

Getting a no-confidence motion to pass will be challenging — none have succeeded since 1962, and Macron’s centrist alliance still has the most seats in the National Assembly. A minority of conservatives could stray from the Republicans party line, but it remains to be seen whether they're willing to bring down Macron's government.

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Surk reported from Nice, France. Associated Press reporters Elaine Ganley, Alex Turnbull and Nicolas Garriga in Paris contributed to this report.

The U.S. military said it ditched the Air Force MQ-9 Reaper in the Black Sea on Tuesday after a pair of Russian fighter jets dumped fuel on the surveillance drone and then one of them struck its propeller while it was flying in international airspace. Moscow has denied that its warplanes hit the drone, alleging that it crashed while making a sharp maneuver. It said that its aircraft reacted to a violation of a no-flight zone Russia has established in the area near Crimea amid the fighting in Ukraine.

On Friday, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu lauded the pilots for preventing the drone from flying into the area that Moscow has banned for flights. The Defense Ministry emphasized that the ban was “in line with international norms.”

Moscow's announcement comes a day after the U.S. military released a declassified 42-second color footage showing a Russian Su-27 fighter jet approaching the back of the U.S. drone and releasing fuel as it passes in what appeared to be aimed at blinding the drone’s optical instruments to drive it from the area.

On a second approach, either the same jet or another Russian Su-27 that had been shadowing the MQ-9 struck the drone’s propeller, damaging a blade, according to the U.S. military, which said it then ditched the aircraft in the sea. The video excerpt does not show the collision, although it does show the damage to the propeller.

The top U.S. and Russian defense and military leaders spoke Wednesday about the destruction of the drone in the first calls between them since October, underscoring the event’s seriousness.

While calling out Russia for “reckless” action, the White House also tried to avoid exacerbating tensions. U.S. officials emphasized that they have not been able to determine whether the Russian pilot intentionally struck the American drone and stressed that lines of communication with Moscow remain open.

Russian officials also emphasized the need to maintain lines of communication, but they harshly denounced the U.S. action as arrogant disregard of Moscow's no-flight zone.

Dmitry Medvedev, deputy head of Russia's Security Council chaired by President Vladimir Putin, said Friday that, “simply put, the Americans have become far too gross, and we shouldn't be too polite with them." He added on a more cautious note that “of course, contacts between the military are necessary.”

Pro-Kremlin political analyst Sergei Markov pointed at the award for the pilots who buzzed the U.S. drone as "a clear sign that Russia will keep downing the American drones.”

“This decision will receive a strong support from the Russian society that wants the government to toughen its policy,” Markov wrote in a commentary.

Moscow has repeatedly voiced concern about U.S. intelligence flights close to Crimea, which Russia seized from Ukraine in 2014 amid strong international condemnation. The Kremlin has charged the U.S. and its allies of effectively becoming engaged in the conflict by providing weapons and sharing intelligence with Kyiv.

Some Russian officials charged that the U.S. surveillance flights helped gather intelligence that allowed Ukraine to strike Russian targets.

The breakthrough came as Finnish President Sauli Niinisto was in Ankara to meet with Erdogan. Both Finland and Sweden applied to become NATO members 10 months ago in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, abandoning decades of nonalignmen t.

NATO requires the unanimous approval of its 30 existing members to expand, and Turkey and Hungary are the only countries that have not yet ratified the Nordic nations' bids. The Turkish government accused both Sweden and Finland of being too soft on groups that it deems to be terror organizations, but expressed more reservations about Sweden.

“When it comes to fulfilling its pledges in the trilateral memorandum of understanding, we have seen that Finland has taken authentic and concrete steps,” Erdogan told a news conference in Ankara following his meeting with Niinisto.

“This sensitivity for our country’s security and, based on the progress that has been made in the protocol for Finland’s accession to NATO, we have decided to initiate the ratification process in our parliament,“ the president added.

With Erdogan’s agreement, Finland’s application can now go to the Turkish parliament, where the president’s party and its allies hold a majority. Ratification is expected before Turkey holds its presidential and parliamentary elections scheduled for May 14.

Commenting on Turkey's willingness to consider ratifying Sweden’s accession to NATO, Erdogan said it would “depend on the solid steps Sweden will take.”

Explaining the difference between the Nordic countries from Ankara's viewpoint, Erdogan claimed that Sweden had “embraced terrorism,” and cited demonstrations by supporters of Kurdish militants on the streets of Stockholm. “Such demonstrations do not take place in Finland,” he said. “For that reason we had to consider (Finland) separately from Sweden.”

Niinisto welcomed Turkey's willingness to move on his country's bid but also expressed solidarity with its neighbor. “I have a feeling that Finnish NATO membership is not complete without Sweden,” he said.

Referring to a NATO summit scheduled for July in Lithuania's capital, Niinisto added: “I would like to see in Vilnius that we will meet the alliance of 32 members.”

Turkey, Finland and Sweden signed a memorandum of understanding in June of last year to resolve differences over the Nordic states’ membership.

The document included clauses addressing Ankara’s claims that Stockholm and Helsinki did not take seriously enough its concerns with those it considers terrorists, particularly supporters of Kurdish militants who have waged a 39-year insurgency in Turkey and people Ankara associates with a 2016 coup attempt.

A series of separate demonstrations in Stockholm, including a protest by an anti-Islam activist who burned the Quran outside the Turkish Embassy, also angered Turkish officials.

In Stockholm, Swedish Foreign Minister Tobias Billstrom said separate ratification of Finland and Sweden's bids by Ankara was “a development that we didn't want but it's something that we're prepared for. We comply and will continue to comply with the memorandum established between our three countries.”

Billstrom stressed that "it's about when Sweden becomes a member, not about our security. We are even more secure now than we were before we applied for membership in NATO.”

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and lawmakers have promised to ratify the two country's NATO membership applications. But the country's parliament has repeatedly postponed a ratification vote.

The parliamentary head of Orban's Fidesz party said Friday that a vote on Finnish accession would be held on March 27. Mate Kocsis said in a Facebook post that lawmakers for Fidesz, which holds a two-thirds majority in parliament, would "vote unanimously in favor.”

Niinisto arrived in Turkey on Thursday and toured areas affected by a magnitude 7.8 earthquake that killed more than 52,000 people in Turkey and Syria last month.

Prior to Friday's announcement, Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said Sweden hoped for “a rapid ratification process” after Turkey’s elections.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said the decision would strengthen the security of NATO, Finland and Sweden. “The most important thing is that both Finland and Sweden become full members of NATO quickly, not whether they join at exactly the same time,” he said.

U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said Washington welcomes Turkey's decision on Finland and encourages Ankara to “quickly ratify" Sweden's application while urging Hungary to conclude the ratification process for both countries “without delay.” “Sweden and Finland are both strong, capable partners that share NATO’s values and will strengthen the Alliance and contribute to European security,” Sullivan said in a statement.

Turkey’s parliament is set to go into a pre-election recess in three weeks but an “accelerated process” to endorse Finland’s NATO membership was expected, Ozgur Unluhisarcikli, director of the German Marshall Fund in Ankara, said.

He predicted a tougher path for Sweden after the elections, regardless of whether Erdogan is returned to office after 20 years in power or the opposition takes charge.

“While there is now a president who commands a majority in parliament, the next president, whoever is elected, will likely not have a majority in parliament,” Unluhisarcikli said.

Three political alliances made up of more than a dozen parties are taking part in the elections, including a left-wing alliance of politicians who tend to be ideologically opposed to NATO.

“Now it’s enough to persuade to President Erdogan, but several parties will need to be persuaded after the election,” Unluhisarcikli said.

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Jari Tanner in Helsinki and Justin Spike in Budapest, Hungary contributed to this report.

Overhead, WeatherNation plays on the television, looping footage of last year’s mega storms and flashing a headline: “2022 billion dollar disasters.”

Aspen Skiing Company's vice-president of sustainability, who sits nearby eating a slice of pizza, says it's not enough for resorts to just change their on-site operations to become “green."

“If you’re a ski resort and you care about climate change or you profess to care about climate change, it absolutely has to go beyond reducing your carbon footprint,” said Auden Schendler. “If your CEO hasn’t spoken out on climate publicly or in an op-ed, you’re not a green company.”

As global warming threatens to put much of the ski industry out of business over the next several decades, resorts are beginning to embrace a role as climate activists in the halls of government. The industry contributes just a tiny fraction of overall greenhouse gas emissions, which cause climate change, but arguably has outsized influence on popular culture and in the business world. While many resorts are focused on reducing their own emissions, others are going much further, leveraging their influence to shift public opinion and advocate for climate legislation.

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Arapahoe Basin is a ski area leading such efforts in the United States. Positioned high up on the craggy, wind-whipped continental divide in central Colorado, the mountain is relatively well-positioned to endure a warmer, shorter winter season. High altitude, which keeps temperatures cooler and lengthens the time snow stays on the ground, is its golden ticket. But it isn’t immune to extreme weather: it has experienced close calls with wildfires and subsequent mudslides, which washed out a parking lot adjacent to its slopes in 2021.

About a decade ago, the ski area transitioned from spending thousands of dollars annually to cancel out some carbon emissions by paying for carbon credits to instead funding a staff position focused on reducing on-site emissions.

“If we are gonna ask our guests to be better, we’re gonna ask our guests to talk to their leadership, we’re gonna go talk to our leadership directly, we definitely feel like we need to be doing it too,” said Sustainability Manager Mike Nathan.

One way they're working to nudge a transition to renewable energies is with newly installed electric vehicle chargers. After a day on the slopes, Denver resident Kurt Zanca returned to his Tesla, which had been charging for free at one of the five dual-port stations situated in the front row of the mountain's parking lot.

Zanca said he thinks charging infrastructure at ski areas can help encourage hesitant shoppers to purchase an EV. “If you can drive up here, charge, go back, no problem, it makes it a lot easier,” Zanca said.

In the northern French Alps, luxury chalet operator Alikats also sees incentives for customers as a catalyst for change. They offer discounts to guests who travel by train, opt out of eating meat or don't use a hot tub during their stay.

Al Judge, who owns and operates the business with his wife Kat, considers himself a realist. He’s not trying to save snowfall—massive reductions in greenhouse gases emissions worldwide are needed to slow global warming—but rather set a standard for how businesses should operate in a way that respects natural resources and protects biodiversity.

“The more that becomes a cultural imperative, the quicker change will happen, and I think business has a very important role to play in that process,” Judge said.

Arapahoe Basin, affectionately known by locals as “A-bay,” is working toward net-zero emissions by 2025, partially by relying on credits through the Colorado Carbon Fund to offset some natural gas and diesel they'll still be burning at that time. They also aim to divert 75% of their waste by then — they're currently at 50% through various recycling and composting programs. Nathan says these efforts give them clout when trying to flex their influence off the mountain.

They've pressured their utility, Xcel Energy, to expedite the transition to renewable power. Earlier this year, Nathan and other industry leaders met with the governor's staff to encourage the rapid transition to manufacturing EV heavy machinery statewide. And, after watching a federal bill that eventually became the Inflation Reduction Act stall, Nathan and Chief Operating Officer Alan Henceroth co-authored an op-ed and sent letters to Colorado’s congressional delegation.

“Kicking the can for another legislative session was going to have direct and negative impacts on businesses like us,” Nathan said.

Similarly active in policy work, Judge runs an organization that's studying the lack of public transit in the region and expects to soon lobby French officials for a solution. A train route through the northern Alps would provide a more direct public transit option that could reduce the number of flights coming in, Judge said.

Customer travel remains a primary source of pollution for ski areas, with air travel, in particular private jets, a major culprit. For example, over 80 percent of flights in and out of Aspen-Pitkin County Airport are private jets, airport officials said. Ideally, airports could tax private jets and invest that money in renewable energy projects, said Schendler. But the Federal Aviation Administration remains a roadblock. Federal law prohibits airports from spending tax revenue offsite. This restricts any renewable projects to airport grounds, and any revenue made from them must be used exclusively at the facility.

While Aspen has yet to win over the FAA, it found a way to sway its local utility, Holy Cross, which supplies power to more than a dozen towns in addition to Vail Mountain Resort along the Interstate-70 corridor. About 15 years ago, Schendler began phoning environmentally minded locals and encouraged them to run for board positions for the utility, which produced about 10% renewable electricity at the time. Today, the board is stacked with pro-renewable members, largely the fruit of lobbying by Aspen and other activists. The utility is split about 50/50 between renewables and fossil fuels, and is committed to 100% renewables by 2030.

Another way to speed the transition to renewables is through power purchase agreements. This is when a business or utility commits to buying a set amount of energy from yet-to-be-built projects, guaranteeing some of the funding to be built.

Vail Resorts, which owns 37 ski areas in three countries, has done this with a wind farm in Nebraska, and is one of five partners for a new solar array in Salt Lake City. Power purchase agreements have helped Vail reach 100% renewable electricity for all its resort and ski areas in North America, and 96% internationally.

Snowshoe Mountain is a ski resort in West Virginia still largely powered by fossil fuels. As the climate bill stalled last summer in Congress, CEO Patti Duncan felt the need to get involved. She doesn't consider herself an activist but wanted to speak up when she watched one of her state’s senators, Joe Manchin, defend the state’s coal industry and hold up the legislation. Duncan wondered, what about the thriving outdoor industry, which is negatively impacted by the burning of fossil fuels?

With encouragement by owner Alterra Mountain Company and climate activist group Protect Our Winters, she wrote a letter to Manchin. Days later, he came out in support of the bill. Duncan said she doesn’t know whether her letter played a role in the senator’s decision but is glad she spoke up.

“It’s my responsibility to do something about it for our resort and our community and our state,” Duncan said.

On the other side of the country, Aspen had installed a kiosk at its Limelight Hotel lobby at the base of Snowmass Mountain. The kiosk allowed guests to send a pre-paid card to the senator, encouraging him to support the bill.

The climate bill passed and was signed into law. As a result, record federal funding is now available for households and businesses to decarbonize buildings and transportation. But Mario Molina, executive director of Protect Our Winters, says the work is just getting started.

The next steps are “anything and everything that resorts can engage in to leverage not only their political power but also their power as large consumers to help implement and realize the promise of the Inflation Reduction Act,” Molina said. He cautioned of local opposition to renewable energy projects, and said resorts could make a big impact advocating for the permitting necessary for those projects, in addition to taking advantage of every available credit on their own.

Many skiers applaud such efforts and want their favorite ski areas to have a role in fighting climate change — with an important caveat.

“As long as they’re being sincere and not just sort of doing it for show and not actually making much of a change,” said Archie Bolgar, a British student on vacation at Aspen in January with friends from Boston’s Bentley University.

While there are many environmental issues corporations could embrace, Schendler says the focus must be on reducing emissions to make sure global temperatures don't rise more than 2 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) compared to preindustrial times. The rise is currently about 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit), and climate scientists warn that as it increases so too will extreme weather events.

“If we can stabilize warming at sub 2 degrees Celsius, we’re going to prevent billions of people from suffering. That’s profound,” he said.

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Xi’s visit was the latest sign of Beijing’s emboldened diplomatic ambitions, and came amid sharpening East-West tensions over the war in Ukraine, now in its 13th month.

The U.S. on Friday said it would oppose any effort by China at the meeting to propose a ceasefire in Ukraine as the “ratification of Russian conquest.”

White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby encouraged Xi to reach out to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to get his country’s perspective on the war and avoid any “one-sided” proposals.

China has sought to project itself as neutral in the conflict, even while it has refused to condemn Moscow’s aggression and declared last year that it had a “no-limits” friendship with Russia. Beijing has denounced Western sanctions against Moscow, and accused NATO and the United States of provoking Putin's military action.

Throughout the conflict, China has said the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries should be respected. It remains unclear, however, whether it sympathizes with Moscow’s claims to seized Ukrainian territory.

Russian troops remain bogged down in a battle of attrition, focused now on those areas in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region.

Xi’s visit would mark his first meeting with Putin since September, when they met on the sidelines of a regional summit in Uzbekistan. Before that, Putin attended the opening of the 2022 Beijing Winter Games and met with Xi shortly before sending troops into Ukraine.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Friday that Putin and Xi would have a one-on-one meeting over an informal dinner Monday. Broader talks involving officials from both countries on a range of subjects are scheduled for Tuesday.

Putin’s foreign policy adviser, Yuri Ushakov, suggested the talks could yield new approaches to the fighting in Ukraine. “I’m sure that our leader and the Chinese leader will exchange their assessments of the situation" there, he said. “We shall see what ideas will emerge after that.”

Kyiv doesn’t just want Russia to pull back from areas taken since its February 2022 full-scale invasion. Zelenskyy has demanded that Russia also withdraw from the peninsula of Crimea, which Moscow annexed in 2014 in a move denounced by most of the world as illegal.

But Putin has shown no intention of relinquishing the Kremlin’s gains. Instead, he stressed Friday the importance of holding Crimea.

“Obviously, security issues take top priority for Crimea and Sevastopol now,” he said, referring to Crimea’s largest city. “We will do everything needed to fend off any threats.”

On Thursday, Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang reached out to his Ukrainian counterpart, Dmytro Kuleba, saying Beijing was concerned about the war spinning out of control and urging talks on a political solution with Moscow.

China has “always upheld an objective and fair stance on the Ukraine issue, has committed itself to promoting peace and advancing negotiations, and calls on the international community to create conditions for peace talks," Qin said.

Kuleba later tweeted that he and Qin “discussed the significance of the principle of territorial integrity.” Ukraine has listed Russia's withdrawal from the occupied areas as the main condition for peace.

“I underscored the importance of (Zelenskyy’s) peace formula for ending the aggression and restoring just peace in Ukraine,” wrote Kuleba, who spoke the same day with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

China last month called for a cease-fire and peace talks between Kyiv and Moscow. Zelenskyy cautiously welcomed Beijing’s involvement but the overture appeared to go no further.

Yurii Poita, head of the Asia section at the Kyiv-based New Geopolitics Research Network, believes the Ukrainian government is going along with China’s involvement because it is reluctant to make another powerful enemy.

“Do not antagonize the dragon when you are fighting against a bear,” Poita told The Associated Press.

Beijing’s apparent deeper dive into Ukraine issues follows its success last week in brokering talks between Iran and its chief Middle Eastern rival, Saudi Arabia. Those two countries agreed to restore their diplomatic ties after years of tensions.

The agreement cast China in a leading role in Middle Eastern politics, a part previously reserved for longtime global heavyweights like the U.S.

On the back of that, Xi called for China to play a bigger role in managing global affairs.

Washington has marshaled Western military and diplomatic efforts against Putin.

On Friday, Kirby told reporters, “A ceasefire now is, again, effectively the ratification of Russian conquest.” It would ”in effect recognize Russia’s gains and its attempt to conquer its neighbor’s territory by force, allowing Russian troops to continue to occupy sovereign Ukrainian territory.”

Russia could use a ceasefire to regroup “so that they can restart attacks on Ukraine at a time of their choosing," he warned.

A spokesman for Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said Britain would welcome any genuine effort by China aimed at “restoring sovereignty to Ukraine.”

“Any peace deal which is not predicated on Ukraine’s sovereignty and self-determination is not a peace deal at all,” Sunak’s spokesman Jamie Davies said.

Nataliia Butyrska, a Ukrainian political analyst, said Beijing’s potential peacemaking role could be clouded by its stance on territorial integrity.

“China does not clearly distinguish between who is the aggressor and who is the victim” in Ukraine, she told The AP.

China has its own territorial issues, with Taiwan, which it claims as its own, to be brought under its control by force if necessary.

U.S.-Russia tensions were further escalated this week with the destruction of a U.S. drone over the Black Sea on Tuesday after an encounter with Russian fighter jets, although that also prompted the first conversations since October between the countries' defense and military chiefs.

Putin invited Xi to visit Russia during a video conference call the two held in late December. The visit, Putin said, could “demonstrate to the whole world the strength of the Russian-Chinese ties” and “become the main political event of the year in bilateral relations.”

Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Wang Wenbin said Friday that Xi and Putin will discuss “bilateral relations and major international and regional issues of common concern...."

“Currently, the world is entering a new period of turbulence and reform with the accelerated evolution of changes of the century,” he added." As permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and important major countries, the significance and impact of the China-Russia relations go far beyond the bilateral sphere.”

The arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court at The Hague accused Putin of involvement in abductions of children from Ukraine to Russia. It also issued a warrant for his commissioner for children's right, Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova.

The court has no police force of its own to enforce warrants, and the Kremlin has said it doesn’t recognize the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court.

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Hanna Arhirova in Kyiv, Ukraine, contributed to this story.

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Follow AP's coverage of the war in Ukraine: https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine-war

According to the federal Public Safety Department, the boy rode up on a motorcycle and opened fire on a family in Chimalhuacan on January 22nd.

ABC News reported that the family was holding a birthday party at the time.

Eight were killed, and another five adults and two children were wounded.

Police did not release the boy's name, but said his nickname, which translates to "Little Chapo," is a reference to imprisoned drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman.

Authorities said another gang member, known as "El Nono," was also arrested.

Seven gang members were arrested on drug charges in connection with the attack.

The country’s Aemet weather agency said Friday that statistics showed Spain entered a long-duration drought at the end of 2022 and the first three months of 2023 show no major signs of change.

“The first available predictions for the summer of 2023 point to a likely situation of temperatures once again above normal,” said Aemet spokesman Rubén del Campo, adding that the coming summer “the risk of fires could be very high given the high temperatures.”

But Del Campo pointed out that the country has experienced severe droughts before in 2017, 2005 and at the end of the 1990s and 1980s.

“To put it in context, we´re in a drought but there have been worse droughts, which is not to say this will not be important,” he told a press conference.

Aemet says Spain is geographically prone to high temperatures and drought, but climate change is key factor.

Del Campo said Spain has warmed 1.3 degrees Celsius (34 F) since the 1960s, a warming that is noticeable all year round but especially in summer — when average temperatures have risen by 1.6 degrees.

He said such an increase may not appear too big but pointed out that “when we talk about a scenario as large as the Iberian Peninsula, half a million square kilometers, annual data, this trend translates into many more hours of heat,” which he said have doubled in the last 10 to 12 years, compared to the number of heat hours of previous years.

Last year was Spain´s 6th driest year and the hottest one since 1961, when records began. Rainfall was 16% below average and daily temperatures averaged above 15 degrees Celsius (59 degrees Fahrenheit) for the first time.

However, December was among the wettest in recent years, improving the situation considerably. The recent rains have boosted water reserves in reservoirs to 51% of capacity, way above the dangerously low of under 35% in late 2022. But at least two areas, most noticeably Spain’s northeastern Catalonia around Barcelona, are suffering severe shortages.

Spain’s Ecological Transition Ministry says that while the situation is “worrying” there are no current drinking water restrictions in any part and none are envisaged this year.

Localized agricultural and industrial water restrictions may occur, as in the case in Catalonia which since November 2022 has had to restrict water use in agriculture and industry. Potable water is forbidden for use in washing cars or filling swimming pools.

Land heat waves have become commonplace in many countries around the Mediterranean, with dramatic side effects like wildfires, droughts, crop losses and uncomfortably high temperatures.

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Prime Minister Eduard Heger said during a news conference announcing the decision that his government was “on the right side of history.” Earlier, Heger tweeted that military aid was key to ensuring Ukraine can defend itself and all of Europe against Russia.

Poland announced Thursday that it would give Ukraine around a dozen MiG-29s, starting with four expected to be delivered in the coming days. Both Poland and Slovakia had indicated previously they were ready to grant Ukraine's requests for military aircraft, but only as part of a wider international coalition.

Heger said his government's move “is closely coordinated with the Polish side, Ukraine and other allies.”

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the promised planes were another example of NATO members "raising the level of their direct involvement in the conflict.”

“The equipment deliveries naturally won’t have any impact on the outcome of the special military operation, but it may bring more misfortune to Ukraine and Ukrainian people,” Peskov said during a conference call with reporters.

Slovakia will receive 200 million euros ($213 million) from the European Union as compensation and unspecified arms from the United States worth 700 million euros ($745 million) in exchange for giving its MiG-29 fleet to Ukraine, Defense Minister Jaroslav Nad said.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has repeatedly asked Western countries for fighter jets, but NATO allies held off, citing concern about escalating the alliance’s role in the war.

In response to Poland’s announcement on Thursday, the White House said Warsaw's move would have no bearing on President Joe Biden, who has resisted calls to provide U.S. F-16s to Ukraine, and that it was up to other nations to explain their own positions.

Michał Baranowski, managing director of Warsaw-based GMF East, part of the German Marshall Fund think tank, said changing conditions now permit such a move since the initial reluctance to respond to Ukraine's request.

“Many red lines have been crossed since that discussion last year,” Baranowski told The Associated Press by phone. Sending MiGs now “is not the same difficult political sale that it was last year.”

Ukraine will be able to use the MiGs immediately without needing any training.

Zelenskyy appealed directly to Heger for aircraft at an EU summit in Brussels last month.

Slovakia grounded its MiGs in the summer due to a lack of spare parts and expertise to help maintain them after Russian technicians returned home. In the absence of its own aircraft, fellow NATO members Poland and the Czech Republic stepped in to monitor Slovak air space.

Before Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, Ukraine had several dozen MiG-29s it inherited in the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, but it’s unclear how many remain in service after more than a year of fighting.

The Slovak government that made the decision to sign a bilateral deal with Ukraine for the jets has only limited powers after a December no-confidence vote brought down the coalition government that was formed after the country's 2020 election.

The next election is set for September, when the opposition stands a good chance of winning. Its leaders include populist former Prime Minister Robert Fico, who opposes military support for Ukraine and EU sanctions on Russia and has said Slovakia’s government has no mandate to deliver fighter jets to Ukraine.

Opposition parties including Fico's Smer-Social Democracy party rejected the government's decision Friday, threatening to sue.

Slovakia signed a deal to buy 14 U.S. F-16 Block 70/72 fighter jets, but delivery was pushed back two years to early 2024.

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Vanessa Gera in Warsaw, Poland contributed.

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Follow AP's coverage of the war in Ukraine: https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine-war

The comments from Volker Türk came as his office released a new report that documents violations of international law like unlawful killings, torture, sexual violence and deprivation of the right to freedom of expression and association. The report is based on interviews with more than 200 victims and witnesses and other sources.

“Our report paints an unacceptable picture of impunity and the near-total destruction of civic space and fundamental freedoms in Belarus,” Türk said in a statement, calling on the Minsk government to end “this mass repression” and to carry out impartial investigations to ensure accountability.

Critics say the repression is continuing, and rights advocates in Belarus sounded the alarm on Tuesday about a new heavy crackdown on dissent by the authoritarian government that saw over 100 people detained in a week.

Authorities targeted opposition activists, journalists, medical workers, members of shooting sports clubs and people working with drones, according to Viasna, Belarus’ oldest and most prominent rights group.

The U.N. report pointed to the beatings of thousands of peaceful protesters in August 2020 — the largest demonstrations ever in the country — following widely contested elections that gave President Alexander Lukashenko another term.

It lamented more than a dozen legislative amendments adopted over the last two years that target political activists and opponents, and said that nearly 1,500 people are currently in detention on “politically motivated charges.” Nearly 800 nongovernmental groups had been shut down as of last month, the report said.

Lukashenko, a longtime ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin who backed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, has ruled the ex-Soviet country with an iron fist since 1994.