While Serbia is not an EU member state, it is part of an EU enlargement plan that also includes some of its neighbors.

However, Serbia is also very reliant on Russia when it comes to gas. It is also militarily cooperative with Moscow. In short, Serbia benefits enormously from its relationship with Russia, and even if it obtains EU membership down the road, it will not want to burn its bridges with the Kremlin.

Serbia is so big and important that it is crucial to the EU's enlargement project, which seeks to strengthen and expand European values, stability and security.

"If concluded, the deal would dash hopes of those who saw an opportunity to reduce the Russian influence in the region," said Filip Ejdus, associate professor of international security at the University of Belgrade. 

Steven Blockmans, director of research at the Centre for European Policy Studies, told CNN that ever since the start of the war, "the EU has been pressuring third countries, including China, to have a similar approach to sanctions. If even states currently trying to join the EU circumvent the sanctions, it lends credence to outliers within the bloc to withstand pressure from Brussels to support a strong common position on Russia."

"This whole situation is a major pain for us, because it ties in with the conversation about whether or not Ukraine should join the EU,"

Finally, some member states share a degree of Euroskepticism and would welcome another member state less enamored with calls from some countries, notably France, for the bloc to become more closely politically integrated.

The UK, no longer part of the EU, has worked well with its European allies and shown that -- despite Brexit -- it can still play a leading role in a united European front.

The EU has faced many difficulties since the Ukraine crisis began, and keeping all 27 of its member states on side has been no easy task.

"We will expand US Coast Guard presence and cooperation in Southeast and South Asia and the Pacific Islands, with a focus on advising, training, deployment, and capacity-building," the strategy's action plan says.

"Don't be too anxious and don't be too nervous, because the common development and prosperity of China and all the other developing countries would only mean great harmony, greater justice and greater progress of the whole world," he said.

The pact, if accepted, would have marked a significant advance in Beijing's connection to the region, which holds geo-strategic importance in the Indo-Pacific.

The relationships the US Coast Guard has forged in the Pacific islands have deep roots, said Collin Koh, research fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore.

With fish as the main food source and key economic driver of the island nations, the Coast Guard says the emphasis of Operation Blue Pacific is to deter illegal and unregulated fishing.

"You cannot understate the Coast Guard's importance to ... relationships in the Central and Western Pacific," he said.

"It's difficult to imagine China having sufficient political capital to push for something analogous to what the US is currently doing," Koh said.

“For too many years, the ideological opposition to harm reduction has cost lives,” said Dr. Carolyn Bennett, the federal minister of mental health and addictions, at a news conference on Tuesday.

British Columbia has been a leader in Canada’s harm reduction movement.

The exemption will go into effect on Jan. 31, 2023, and will expire after three years.

Decriminalization will allow police to focus on organized crime and drug traffickers, instead of individual users, said Sheila Malcolmson, the provincial minister of mental health and addictions. “We will take this year ahead to ready our justice and health systems,” she added.

“I think making drug use easier for them is kind of like palliative care,” said Mr. Doucette, who spent 35 years working for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police before retiring, most of which he spent in drug enforcement. “It’s just condemning them to a slow death because of drugs, whereas if you get them off drugs, get them a life back, they can enjoy life.”

British Columbia has one of the highest per capita rates of drug death across North America, at 42.8 deaths per 100,000 people in 2021, according to provincial data.

In the U.S., the 10 states with the highest level of drug overdose, have rates ranging between 39.1 deaths per 100,000 in Connecticut, to 81.4 deaths per 100,000 in West Virginia, according to the latest mortality data, for 2020, by the Centers for Disease Control.

The deal will lead to the removal of tariffs on 96 percent of goods traded between the two countries within five years, both ministries said.

Mohamed Al Khaja, the Emirati ambassador to Israel, called it “an unprecedented achievement.”

Jews living in the Emirates are also observing their religious traditions increasingly openly.

According to a U.S. intelligence assessment, a group of investors led by one of Russia’s richest men, Gennady Timchenko, who has been under sanctions since 2014, provided the money to buy three ships: the Scheherazade, the Crescent and the Amadea, whose construction at a German shipyard was overseen by Imperial Yachts. Their combined cost of as much as $1.6 billion could have bought six new frigates for the Russian navy.

“Imperial Yachts conducts all its business in full compliance with laws and regulations in all jurisdictions in which we operate,” the company added. “We are not involved in our clients’ financial affairs.”

But Treasury officials disputed that contention in their announcement. U.S. and international authorities have moved to seize the three yachts connected to Mr. Kochman and his company.

In an interview Tuesday, before the new sanctions were announced, Elizabeth Rosenberg, the assistant secretary for terrorist financing and financial crimes at the Treasury Department, said that international cooperation to go after Russian oligarchs and their assets was increasing.

“It feels like we’re experiencing a sea change right now,” Ms. Rosenberg said. “It’s a huge leap forward on international cooperation for hunting assets, for freezing them and for pursuing law enforcement investigations and activity, including seizure activities.”

Treasury officials say taking action against oligarchs and the companies that help them spend their wealth will ultimately hurt the Russian government’s ability to wage war against Ukraine.

In the ensuing decades, the queen has become an irreplaceable figure in Britain, central to its self-identity.

That the queen made it to this Platinum Jubilee at all was far from given. She contracted the coronavirus in February and has talked about how the ordeal left her exhausted. She lost her husband, Prince Philip, last year, and her fragile health has forced her to cancel multiple public appearances, including two major events on the royal calendar: a remembrance service for the war dead and the state opening of Parliament.

“I like democracies, but I have a fascination with monarchical displays of power,” said Nichola Persic, an Italian exchange student who left his college in Canterbury, England, at dawn to stake out a position along the parade route. “And it’s nice to be a part of something people will remember.”

Strictly speaking, Elizabeth has not yet set the longevity record for any monarch.

The harsher one criminalized deliberately spreading “false information” about the military, interpreted as anything outside the official version of events.

With the first criminal cases only now coming to trial, it remains unclear how harshly judges — generally prone to toe the Kremlin line — will treat defendants.

“It is impossible to keep silent,” Mr. Novashov said, while noting ruefully that people around town had mostly reacted to his case with indifference. He added: “People have been taught that nothing is going to change, so the less you know, the better you sleep.”

Russians have been prosecuted for wearing workout clothes and even nail polish in the blue and yellow colors of the Ukrainian flag, lawyers said.

The swelling case list across Russia indicates that prosecutors realized that Moscow wanted results, lawyers said. “There is a feeling that there is a directive to push the cases to the court as soon as possible,” Mr. Chikov said. “Everyone immediately understood that this was of the highest political priority.”

“It is an attempt also to show to the Turkish public at home and to Turks living in Germany and other Western European countries that Erdogan has the power to assert his will beyond the political boundaries of the country,” said Mustafa Aksakal, a professor of history at Georgetown University in Washington. “The name change may seem silly to some but it puts Erdogan in the role of protector, of safeguarding international respect for the country.”

Mr. Erdogan’s dislike of the Anglicized name was on display in December 2019, when he unveiled prototypes of a locally made electric car. He signaled that products should say they were “Made in Türkiye,” not “Made in Turkey.”

When the turkey started making its way to other parts of the world in the 16th century, people tried to associate it with known places, Mr. Aksakal said. For instance, he said, it is known as the Indian bird in both French and Turkish.

Stripping the region of its special status had long been a goal of India’s Hindu nationalists.

Kashmir has been disputed between India and Pakistan since the end of British rule in 1947. In the late 1980s, a Kashmiri separatist movement, which received support and training in Pakistan, intensified the targeting of the region’s Hindus, known as Pandits. A mass migration of tens of thousands of Hindu families — perhaps 300,000 people in all — followed.

At the Vessu camp in the same district, where Mr. Raina and his family live, one-third of the 900 families have fled their modest two-bedroom houses.

The organization said that there had been more than a dozen targeted attacks, some fatal, recorded against Hindus since 2020. The Indian news media said a total of 18 Hindus had been killed since the 2019 change in the region’s status. Many Muslims seen as supporting the government have also been killed.

“Don’t force Kashmiri Pandits to pelt you with stone,” Mr. Jotshi is seen in a video telling the police, referring to an act that young local Kashmiri Muslim sometimes resort to against the region’s heavy security forces.

“We want to leave, at any cost,” Mr. Jotshi said. “We do not want to die here.”

The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that some members of OPEC were exploring the idea of suspending the OPEC+ supply agreement to allow countries such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to step in and ease a supply crunch that pushed global oil prices above $120 a barrel this week.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine prompted Western powers to ban imports of Russian crude and refined products. The European Union earlier this week agreed to ban 90% of Russian oil by the end of this year.

At the same time, Russia has started to choke off exports of natural gas to some EU countries — adding to the energy supply crunch that has helped send US and European inflation to its highest level in decades and prices for gasoline and diesel to all-time highs.

"Hopefully, just as they care because we have captured criminals, they would care about our children, about our elderly, about our working people, about the innocent Salvadorans who have suffered at the hands of those same criminals," he said during a speech before the Legislative Assembly.

In one instance, a 16-year-old, who was arrested in April and held for 13 days for being an alleged member of an illegal group, was chained to a wall of the detention center, where he said he was beaten by police. Later, he was transferred to youth detention center, where he was beaten by gang members, who he said also threw a bag of urine at his head, it said.

Many of the detainees are being held without due process "purely because the authorities view them as having been identified as criminals in the stigmatizing speeches of President Bukele's government, because they have tattoos, are accused by a third party of having alleged links to a gang, are related to someone who belongs to a gang, have a previous criminal record of some kind, or simply because they live in an area under gang control, which are precisely the areas with high levels of marginalization and that have historically been abandoned by the state," according to Amnesty.

Bukele, the self-proclaimed "world's coolest dictator," took office in June 2019 with broad support, after promising to stand tough against gang violence

Conde had changed the constitution to allow himself to stand for a third term in office in 2020, sparking widespread anger.

Many of Conde's opponents, including FNDC leaders, cautiously welcomed the coup, but relations with Doumbouya's junta have since soured.

"contrasts with Colonel Doumbouya's rhetoric when he took power, which excoriated killings during protests".

In its statement, the FNDC said the security forces' response

Attorneys for Trump and the attorney general have been engaged in a back and forth over whether Trump has scoured file cabinets, storage rooms and electronic filings to produce records called for by the subpoena.

The West has used export bans to cut off technology shipments, leaving Moscow struggling to replace and repair its arms.

“The entire world is suffering from this conflict, but we in Africa are already facing the collateral damages,” said Ousmane Sène

For months, African leaders also shunned President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, who asked at least twice to address the African Union. Mr. Sall said Thursday that Mr. Zelensky could soon address the organization in a videoconference, although no date has been announced.

More than 14 million people are on the brink of starvation in the Horn of Africa, according to relief groups, and nearly 40 million people are at imminent risk of famine in West Africa this year, according to the World Food Program, a United Nations agency.

The Kremlin said in a statement that the two leaders would discuss “the expansion of political dialogue and economic and humanitarian cooperation with the countries of the continent.”

In West Africa, one of the most visible effects of the war so far has been on bread prices that were already on the rise. In Burkina Faso, bakers went on strike last month after the government shuttered bakeries that had raised the price of a baguette. In the Ivory Coast, bakers have decreased the size of the baguette in the face of soaring wheat costs.

“Twice, I’ve held his hands and looked into his eyes and promised him I will do everything I can to help him,” she told me, out of earshot of Mr. Islam, her voice threatening to break. “But I only have two hands.”

Now, like the others, they’re waiting to see what their futures look like under Australia’s new Labor government.

The exhibition is one of several ways that Ukraine’s government is highlighting the devastation its people have endured even as new suffering is inflicted every day.

And Ukraine has taken the rare step of prosecuting Russian soldiers for war crimes just months after they were allegedly committed, greatly accelerating the normal judicial timetable.

“It is necessary to explain to our children what is happening in Ukraine now,” Mr. Spodinskiy said, as other visitors took photographs of the debris. “We cannot speak with our children as if nothing is happening,” he added, “because they clearly understand everything, and they see what happens in our country.”

“The history of our country is being created, and now this is an opportunity to get in touch with it,” said another visitor, Serhiy Pashchukov, a 31-year-old from Luhansk, which was occupied by Russia in 2014.

Those discoveries and many others have become items in an exhibition called “Crucified Ukraine” that opened on May 8 at Mr. Savchuk’s museum, an unusual effort to chronicle the war even as battles continue to rage in Ukraine’s east and south.

The rooms are dank and cold, but the most striking thing, many visitors said, was that it smells as if the people who sheltered with their belongings there — including onions, blankets, and toys — had just left.

“We had a similar basement in Bucha in a newly built apartment building,” said Evgeniya Skrypnyk, a 32-year-old from a suburb of Kyiv where Russian soldiers killed and terrorized civilians.

The one historical inaccuracy in the shelter was the absence of the five buckets that stood in the hallway where the people who lived underground for more than a month relieved themselves.

Remembrance of World War II has become more complex since the war started. In Russia, the Kremlin has sought to glorify the Soviet victory — to which millions of Ukrainians contributed — as a source of national pride. But it has also called upon memories of that war to justify and build support for the invasion of Ukraine, with Mr. Putin seeking to falsely portray Ukrainian leaders as “Nazis.”

Mr. Savchuk said that in light of the current war, people were talking about a “complete reconstruction” of the museum complex, whose architecture is intended to awe visitors with the memory of the Soviet victory in World War II, to de-emphasize the fight against Nazi Germany.

“This war changed everything,” he said. “A museum is not only an exhibition, it is a territory, it is its monuments, it is a place of memory. We are thinking about changing not only the ideology, but also the architecture, the emphasis.”

"There's no one more qualified to lead the proud women and men of the Coast Guard and she will also be the first woman to serve as commandant of the Coast Guard, the first woman to lead any branch in the United States Armed Forces. And it's about time," the President said.

Admiral Fagan shows that young people, young people entering the service, we mean it when we say: There are no doors, no doors closed to women

He noted -- to applause -- that 40% of the US Coast Guard is now comprised of women, as he called for continued efforts to improve diversity within the US armed forces.

“We can only speculate what worries the Kremlin most about defaulting: the stain on Putin’s record of economic stewardship, reputational damage, the financial and legal dominoes a default sets in motion and so on,” said Tim Samples

“If Russia is unable to find a legal way to make these payments, and they technically default on their debt, I don’t think that really represents a significant change in Russia’s situation,” Ms. Yellen said. “They’re already cut off from global capital markets, and that would continue.”

Sanctions experts have estimated that Russia has about $20 billion worth of outstanding debt that is not held in rubles.

Russia owes about $71 million in interest payments for a dollar-denominated bond that will mature in 2026. The contract has a provision to be paid in euros, British pounds and Swiss francs.

Adam M. Smith, who served as a senior sanctions official in the Obama administration’s Treasury Department, said he expected that Russia would most likely default sometime in July and that a wave of lawsuits from Russia and its investors were likely to ensue.

“The interesting question to me is, What is the policy goal here?”

MLRS missiles typically have a range of up to 40 miles, and can be equipped with GPS-guided missiles.

However they are unlikely to arrive in time to save swaths of the country's east from being battered and overrun.

saying Wednesday that Russian forces now control around 80 percent of the ruined city.

“The combination of artillery barrage, airstrikes and missile strikes is what we expected from Russia from the beginning of the war and they are grinding the Ukrainians down,” said William Alberque

“This is an active artillery war. A war in which you need long-range firepower," the official said. “This war is about shooting and moving. Who can shoot the longest and fastest wins.”

Biden on Monday told reporters that the U.S. would not “send to Ukraine rocket systems that can strike into Russia." A senior administration official said Ukraine has agreed not to use them to launch rockets into Russia.

Moscow's messaging over the long-range weapons systems showed it "knows exactly how to play on the West's doubts and fear of a direct NATO-Russia confrontation,"

“But each day the West hesitates is a day Russian artillery rules the battlefield. Russian advances are preceded by massive fire. Each city lost by Ukraine is a city leveled to the ground, making each retreat even more painful,” Horowitz said.