Seventy-one Chinese military aircraft crossed the sensitive median line of the Taiwan Strait on Saturday as China began drills around Taiwan in anger at President Tsai Ing-wen’s meeting with the speaker of the U.S.

Kateryna Rashevska, a lawyer from a Ukrainian NGO called Regional Centre for Human Rights, told the briefing they were collecting evidence to build a case that Russian officials deliberately prevented return of the Ukrainian children.

The theme is one Putin has frequently discussed, not least when he suggested in speeches before the invasion that Ukraine was an artificial construct and an ‘inalienable part’ of Russian history and culture.

Some Russian media have alleged Wagner’s involvement in the July 2018 killings of three Russian journalists, who were shot dead in the Central African Republic while investigating the group’s activities there.

Mykola Kuleba said at a news conference in Kyiv that the children were expected to arrive in the capital later in the day.
Kuleba is the executive director of the Save Ukraine organization and is the presidential commissioner for children’s rights.

ICRC spokesman Jason Straziuso said the organization was in contact with Lvova-Belova “in line with its mandate to restore contact between separated families and facilitate reunification where feasible.”

Moscow has not concealed a programme under which it has taken thousands of Ukrainian children from occupied areas, but presents this it as a humanitarian campaign to protect orphans and children abandoned in the conflict zone.

Malaysia said on Saturday it was firmly committed to protecting its sovereign rights and interests in the South China Sea after China expressed concern about Malaysian energy projects in a part of the sea that China also claims.

U.S.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken will visit Vietnam next week, Senator Jeff Merkley told a news conference in Hanoi on Saturday, as part of Washington’s efforts to move diplomatic relations with Hanoi on to a higher level this year. Blinken’s visit, which has not yet been officially announced, would come after U.S.

The International Committee of the Red Cross said this week it had been in contact with Lvova-Belova, the first confirmation of high-level international intervention to reunite families with children who were forcibly deported.

Dar said he would attend important attend bilateral and multilateral meetings virtually and a Pakistani delegation would be present in Washington. The minister played down reports of the canceled trip being linked to a holdup in Pakistan’s IMF bailout program.

House of Representatives. The three-day drills, announced the day after Tsai returned from the United States, had been widely expected after Beijing condemned her Wednesday meeting with Speaker Kevin McCarthy in Los Angeles.

There, from the same spot where he first appeared to the world as pope on the night of his election in 2013, he spoke of “the darkness and the gloom in which, all too often, our world finds itself enveloped”, and prayed to God for peace.

Putin is said to be furious at the slow pace of his campaign, which he had hoped to end within days given his country’s military superiority – on paper at least – and has fired at least eight generals since waging war on the former Soviet state, intelligence sources claim. 

In a further attempt to rein in increasing numbers of women defying the compulsory dress code, Iranian authorities are installing cameras in public places and thoroughfares to identify and penalize unveiled women, the police announced on Saturday.

VATICAN CITY, April 9 (Reuters) – Pope Francis appeared to ask Russians to seek the truth about their country’s invasion of Ukraine in his Easter message to the world on Sunday and appealed for dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians following recent violence.

A 2017 video posted online showed a group of armed people, reported to be Wagner contractors, torturing a Syrian man, beating him to death with a sledgehammer and cutting his head before mutilating and then burning his body.

“On this day, Lord, we entrust to you the city of Jerusalem, the first witness of your resurrection. I express deep worry over the attacks of these last few days that threaten the hoped-for climate of trust and reciprocal respect, needed to resume the dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians, so that peace may reign in the Holy City and in the entire region,” he said.

Video posted by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty shows military ambulances driving through the Belarusian city of Homel in early March, with employees at the region’s clinical hospital claiming more than 2,500 bodies have already been shipped back to Russia as of March 13. 

A carpet of 38,000 flowers donated by the Netherlands bedecked the square for the most important and joyous date in the Church’s liturgical calendar – commemorating the day Christians believe Jesus rose from the dead.

‘This is a very interesting sign that there’s a degrading of their capabilities,’ Candace Rondeaux, an expert on Wagner who is a senior director at New America, a Washington think tank, told the New York Times.