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Two former Black Democratic lawmakers who were expelled by Republican colleagues in Tennessee say they want to be reappointed, then elected back to their seats, following their ouster for a protest on the House floor urging passage of gun-control measures in the wake of a deadly school shooting.

French President Emmanuel Macron said in comments published on Sunday that Europe had no interest in an acceleration of the crisis over Taiwan and should pursue a strategy independent of both Washington and Beijing.

Macron has just returned from a three-day state visit to China, where he received a warm welcome from President Xi Jinping. China began drills around Taiwan on Saturday in anger at President Tsai Ing-wen’s meeting with the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Kevin McCarthy on Wednesday.

China views democratically governed Taiwan as its own territory and has never renounced the use of force to bring the island under its control. Taiwan’s government strongly objects to China’s claims.

Macron said Europe should not accelerate the conflict but take the time to build its position as a third pole between China and the United States in comments to French newspaper Les Echos and Politico made during his visit to China.

“The worst thing would be to think that we Europeans must become followers on this topic and adapt to the American rhythm or a Chinese overreaction,” Politico quoted him as saying.

Europe must better fund its defense industry, develop nuclear and renewable energy and reduce dependence on the U.S. dollar to limit its reliance on the United States, both media outlets quoted him as saying.

The joint interview was given on a flight on Friday between Beijing and the city of Guangzhou.

On Friday, an adviser to Macron told reporters in Guangzhou that Xi and Macron had a “dense and frank” discussion on the issue of Taiwan during their meetings.

“The president’s feeling is that we should be careful there’s no accident or an escalation of tensions (that could lead) to the Chinese going on the offensive,” the Elysée adviser said.

Macron traveled to China with a 50-strong business delegation including Airbus and nuclear energy producer EDF, which signed deals during the visit.
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Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar pledged Sunday to intensify efforts with his British counterpart Rishi Sunak to restore power-sharing government in Northern Ireland and hopes to break the deadlock there in the next few months.

The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) has said it will not drop a yearlong boycott of the devolved assembly in protest at post-Brexit trade rules without further changes to a deal struck by the United Kingdom and the European Union in February to ease the trade barriers.

London has said it will not renegotiate any part of its new agreement.

“We put a huge amount of effort in the last few months into getting an agreement on revisions and reforms to the protocol,” Varadkar told national broadcaster RTE, referring to the checks on goods between Northern Ireland and the rest of the U.K. that has angered many pro-British unionists.

“The next piece now is deep engagement with the British government and also with the five parties in Northern Ireland to try and get the institutions up and running again, and certainly over the next few weeks I’ll be intensifying my contacts with Prime Minister Sunak.”

Varadkar said he would work toward restoring the mandatory power-sharing government “in the next few months,” noting that May’s local council elections and the annual marching season in July – which often sparks sectarian tensions – could make an agreement more difficult in the short term.

The DUP, at odds with opinion polls that suggest most Northern Irish voters support the revised Brexit deal, has said its concerns over the continued role of EU law and Northern Ireland’s place in the U.K.’s internal market must be addressed.

The latest suspension of the assembly is casting a shadow over Monday’s 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement. U.S. President Joe Biden will visit Northern Ireland on Tuesday to mark the peace accord that ended three decades of bloodshed.

Power-sharing has collapsed several times for different reasons since its introduction as part of the peace deal, each time being restored after long political talks. The most recent lasted from 2017 to 2020.
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The residents of the German city of Hamburg have been warned that toxins from  a warehouse fire in the city of Rothenburgsort, a few kilometers southeast of Hamburg are headed their way.

Reuters reports that despite not knowing just how toxic the fumes may be, authorities have decided to evacuate 140 Hamburg residents, while other Hamburg residents have been instructed to stay home with their doors and window closed.  

The fire erupted early Sunday and continued to burn Sunday afternoon, despite scores of firefighters battling the blaze.

The warehouse contents were not immediately clear.

Some information in this report came from Reuters.
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Pope Francis opened a celebration of Mass on Easter Sunday joined by dozens of prelates and tens of thousands of pilgrims and tourists in St. Peter’s Square, where spring flowers made the vast space bright. made bright by spring flowers.

Orange-red tulips, yellow sprays of forsythia and daffodils, and other colorful seasonal blooms were transported in trucks from the Netherlands on Saturday and set up in planters to decorate the Vatican square, which quickly filled up Sunday with Rome residents and Holy Week visitors to the city.

Some 45,000 people had gathered by the start of the mid-morning Mass, according to Vatican security services.

At the beginning of the Easter ceremony inspired by the core Christian belief that Jesus rose from the dead after his crucifixion, Francis sprinkled holy water and sounded somewhat tired as he recited ritual words in Latin.

A canopy on the edge of steps on the square sheltered the pontiff, who was back in the public eye 12 hours after a 2.25-hour long Easter vigil ceremony in St. Peter’s Basilica the night before.

Still recovering from bronchitis, Francis, 86, skipped the traditional Good Friday procession at Rome’s Colosseum due to unseasonably cold nighttime temperatures.

Sunday was breezy, but the temperature quickly rose a day after rain and strong wind gusts lashed Rome.

At the end of the Mass, Francis was set to deliver a speech that pontiffs give on Christmas and Easter. Known by its Latin name, “Urbi et Orbi,” which means to the city and to the world, the message is a frequently an occasion to decry wars and injustices around the globe, including religious persecution.

Francis has generally rebounded following a three-day stay last week at a Rome hospital where he was administered antibiotics intravenously for bronchitis. He was discharged on April 1. Except for forgoing the Colosseum Way of the Cross torch-lit procession, he has stuck to a heavy schedule of Holy Week public appearances.
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A missile fired from Ukrainian-held territory was shot down over the Black Sea town of Feodosia in Russian-controlled Crimea, the Moscow-installed head of Crimea’s administration said Saturday.
Russia’s campaign to “severely degrade” Ukraine’s energy system this winter has probably failed, Britain’s Defense Ministry said in a post on Twitter Saturday.
Thirty-one children “kidnapped by the Russians from Kherson and Kharkiv regions” are back in Ukraine after being separated from their parents for several months.

One day after 31 children were returned to Ukraine, the head of Presidential Office of Ukraine, Andriy Yermak, emphasized in a phone call with Amal Clooney, a prominent human rights lawyer, the importance of returning all the deported children to Ukraine.

Yermak and Clooney, co-founder of the Clooney Foundation for Justice, discussed protecting the rights of Ukrainian children and holding Russia accountable for crimes committed against them, according to the official website of the president of Ukraine.

Clooney, who specializes in international criminal law and human rights issues, has addressed the United Nations Security Council calling for justice as evidence of the crimes and atrocities allegedly committed by the Russian military began emerging weeks after the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

On behalf of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Yermak thanked Clooney.

“People in Ukraine know about your support and appreciate it a lot. Many people heard your speech and everything you said about the war and Ukrainians. This is extremely important indeed,” Yermak said, according to the president’s website.

Clooney reiterated her support for Ukraine and Ukrainians, adding that she and her foundation colleagues remain committed to their work to promote accountability and deliver justice for victims of international crimes committed by Russia in Ukraine.

Kyiv says thousands taken

Kyiv estimates nearly 19,500 children have been taken to Russia in what Ukraine condemns as illegal deportations since Moscow invaded in February of last year. Moscow claims the children were transported away for their own safety.

Earlier Saturday, the head of a humanitarian group said 31 children were reunited with their families in Ukraine after what he described as was one of the group’s most difficult operations to return children from Russia, where they had been taken during the war.

So far, the Save Ukraine humanitarian organization says it has undertaken five missions to return Ukrainian children to their families. The group has helped with the transportation and planning needed to help parents bring their children back.

Mykola Kuleba, the head of Save Ukraine and Ukraine’s former commissioner for children’s rights, told reporters no one in Russia was trying to find the children’s parents.

Missile downed over Crimea

A missile fired from Ukrainian-held territory was shot down over the Black Sea town of Feodosia in Russian-controlled Crimea, the Moscow-installed head of Crimea’s administration said Saturday.

“A missile launched from Ukraine was shot down over Feodosia,” Sergei Aksyonov said on Telegram, without providing any detail on the kind of projectile in question.

Feodosia, located in the southeastern part of Crimea, is almost 300 kilometers from the nearest Ukrainian-held area. Kyiv did not comment Saturday, and it is not publicly known to possess missiles with that range. U.S.-supplied HIMARS rockets used by Ukraine have a range of 80 kilometers.

Reuters said it could not immediately verify the reports and that it was unclear how Ukraine could have attempted such a strike.

Kramatorsk memorial

Ukrainians placed flowers at a small memorial Saturday to the 61 people killed a year ago when a Russian missile struck the transportation hub as about 4,000 people gathered there to board evacuation trains. Experts said the Tochka-U missile was armed with cluster munitions. More than 160 people were injured.

“What is there to say? My close friend and her daughter and their dog died. What more can be said?” 67-year-old Tetiana Syshchenko told Agence France-Presse, tearing up.

She said she narrowly avoided being killed in the blast.

Residents arrived a few at a time to approach the small plaque topped with flowers and children’s toys at the station.

Russia denied responsibility for the attack.

Classified documents leaked

The U.S. Justice Department said Friday it has begun an investigation into the leak of several classified U.S. military documents that have been posted on social media.

“We have been in communication with the Department of Defense related to this matter and have begun an investigation. We decline further comment,” a Justice Department spokesperson said Friday.

A new batch of classified documents that appear to detail U.S. national security secrets from Ukraine to the Middle East to China surfaced on social media sites Friday, The New York Times reported.

Russia or pro-Russian elements are likely behind an earlier leak of several classified U.S. military documents posted on social media that offer a skewed, month-old snapshot of the war in Ukraine, three U.S. officials told Reuters Friday.

Tatiana Vorozhko of VOA’s Ukraine Service contributed to this report. Some material in this report came from The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters.
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Ben Ferencz, the last living prosecutor from the Nuremberg trials, who tried Nazis for genocidal war crimes and was among the first outside witnesses to document the atrocities of Nazi labor and concentration camps, has died. He turned 103 in March.

Ferencz died Friday evening in Boynton Beach, Florida, according to St. John’s University law professor John Barrett, who runs a blog about the Nuremberg trials. The death also was confirmed by the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington.

“Today the world lost a leader in the quest for justice for victims of genocide and related crimes,” the museum tweeted.

Born in Transylvania in 1920, Ferencz immigrated as a very young boy with his parents to New York to escape rampant antisemitism. After graduating from Harvard Law School, Ferencz joined the U.S. Army in time to take part in the Normandy invasion during World War II. Using his legal background, he became an investigator of Nazi war crimes against U.S. soldiers as part of a new War Crimes Section of the Judge Advocate’s Office.

When U.S. intelligence reports described soldiers encountering large groups of starving people in Nazi camps watched over by SS guards, Ferencz followed up with visits, first at the Ohrdruf labor camp in Germany and then at the notorious Buchenwald concentration camp. At those camps and later others, he found bodies “piled up like cordwood” and “helpless skeletons with diarrhea, dysentery, typhus, TB, pneumonia, and other ailments, retching in their louse ridden bunks or on the ground with only their pathetic eyes pleading for help,” Ferencz wrote in an account of his life.

“The Buchenwald concentration camp was a charnel house of indescribable horrors,” Ferencz wrote. “There is no doubt that I was indelibly traumatized by my experiences as a war crimes investigator of Nazi extermination centers. I still try not to talk or think about the details.”

At one point toward the end of the war, Ferencz was sent to Adolf Hitler’s mountain retreat in the Bavarian Alps to search for incriminating documents but came back empty-handed.

After the war, Ferencz was honorably discharged from the U.S. Army and returned to New York to begin practicing law. But that was short-lived. Because of his experience as a war crimes investigator, he was recruited to help prosecute Nazi war criminals at the Nuremberg trials, which had begun under the leadership of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson. Before leaving for Germany, he married his childhood sweetheart, Gertrude.

At the age of 27, with no previous trial experience, Ferencz became chief prosecutor for a 1947 case in which 22 former commanders were charged with murdering more than 1 million Jews, Romani and other enemies of the Third Reich in Eastern Europe.  

Rather than depending on witnesses, Ferencz mostly relied on official German documents to make his case. All the defendants were convicted, and more than a dozen were sentenced to death by hanging even though Ferencz hadn’t asked for the death penalty.

“At the beginning of April 1948, when the long legal judgment was read, I felt vindicated,” he wrote. “Our pleas to protect humanity by the rule of law had been upheld.”

With the war crimes trials winding down, Ferencz went to work for a consortium of Jewish charitable groups to help Holocaust survivors regain properties, homes, businesses, art works, Torah scrolls, and other Jewish religious items that had been confiscated from them by the Nazis. He also later assisted in negotiations that would lead to compensation to the Nazi victims.

In later decades, Ferencz championed the creation of an international court that could prosecute any government’s leaders for war crimes. Those dreams were realized in 2002 with establishment of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, though its effectiveness has been limited by the failure of countries like the United States to participate.

Ferencz is survived by a son and three daughters. His wife died in 2019.
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Millions of Christians around the world are celebrating Easter Sunday, the most holy day on the Christian calendar, commemorating Jesus Christ’s resurrection from the dead.

At the Vatican, Pope Francis is set to deliver his twice-annual blessing, known by its Latin name “Urbi et Orbi” — “to the city and the world” — from St. Peter’s Basilica.

During the blessing, which will begin at noon on the basilica’s outdoor central balcony, the Roman Catholic leader will address Christians around the world.

Last year, the pope made a plea for an end to the “senseless” war in Ukraine, a conflict that at the time had been less than 2 months old. He also called for peace in other parts of the world plagued by armed conflict, including Syria and Iraq.

The pope, who is recovering from bronchitis, followed his doctor’s advice and skipped the traditional Good Friday nighttime procession at the Colosseum, which usually lasts more than two hours.

Traditions return after pandemic

In some parts of the world, Easter Week traditions are returning after a three-year hiatus because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Thousands of residents in eastern Indonesia held Mass in the Flores Island town of Larantuka for Good Friday and later attended a night parade to mourn the death of Jesus.

In the Philippines, Good Friday traditions also returned after a three-year absence. An estimated 15,000 people in villages north of Manila watched pilgrims flog themselves in displays of religious devotion.

Christians commemorate Good Friday as the day Jesus died on the cross.

Faithful travel to holy sites

In Jerusalem, Christian faithful have been making pilgrimages to holy sites, including the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the site where they believe Jesus was crucified and rose from the dead.

On Palm Sunday — a week before Easter — thousands of worshipers carrying palm fronds and olive branches marched from the top of the Mount of Olives to Jerusalem’s historic Old City, commemorating Jesus’s entry into the city.

Jerusalem is home to Christian, Jewish and Muslim holy sites. This year, Easter coincides with the Muslim holy month of Ramadan and the Jewish festival of Passover.

In Washington, the White House is planning its annual Easter egg roll. About 30,000 people, most of them children, are expected to participate on Monday in the festivities, which date back to 1878.

At the event, first lady Jill Biden will teach children about farming, healthy eating and exercise, according to the White House.

Christians worldwide celebrate Easter by going to church and gathering with family and friends.

The day marks the end of Holy Week, the church’s most solemn week, which begins with Palm Sunday, commemorating Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem, and includes Holy Thursday, his last supper with disciples; Good Friday, his crucifixion; and Easter Sunday, his resurrection.

Some information in this report came from the Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse.
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More than 30 children were reunited with their families in Ukraine this weekend after a long operation to bring them home from Russia or Russian-occupied Crimea, where they had been taken from areas occupied by Russian forces during the war.

Mothers hugged sons and daughters as they crossed the border from Belarus into Ukraine Friday after a complex rescue mission involving travel across four countries.

Dasha Rakk, a 13-year-old girl, said she and her twin sister had agreed to leave the Russian-occupied city of Kherson last year because of the war and go to a holiday camp in Crimea for a few weeks. But once in Crimea, Russian officials said the children would be staying for longer.

“They said we will be adopted, that we will get guardians,” she said. “When they first told us we will stay longer we all started crying.”

Dasha’s mother Natalia said she had traveled from Ukraine to Crimea via Poland, Belarus and Moscow to get her daughters. Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula has been occupied by Russia since 2014.

“It was terribly difficult, but we kept on going, we did not sleep at night, we slept sitting up,” she said, describing her journey to the camp. “It was heartbreaking to look at children left behind who were crying behind the fence.” 

Kyiv estimates nearly 19,500 children have been taken to Russia or Russian-occupied Crimea since Moscow invaded in February last year in what it condemns as illegal deportations.

Moscow, which control chunks of Ukraine’s east and south, denies abducting children and says they have been transported away for their own safety.

“Now the fifth rescue mission is nearing its completion. It was special regarding the number of children we managed to return and also because of its complexity,” said Mykola Kuleba, the founder of the Save Ukraine humanitarian organization that helped arrange the rescue mission.

Kuleba told a Kyiv briefing Saturday that all 31 children brought home said no one in Russia was trying to find their parents.

“There were kids who changed their locations five times in five months, some children say that they were living with rats and cockroaches,” he said. The children were taken to what Russians called summer camps from occupied parts of Ukraine’s Kharkiv and Kherson regions, Kuleba said.

The Russian Foreign Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

‘We were treated like animals’

Three children — two boys and a girl — were present at the media briefing in Kyiv. Save Ukraine said they came home on a previous mission last month that returned 18 children in total.

The three said they had been separated from their parents who were pressured by Russian authorities to send their children to Russian summer camps for what was billed as two weeks, from occupied parts of Kherson and Kharkiv regions.

The children at the briefing said they were forced to remain at the summer camps for four to six months and were moved from one place to another during their stay.

“We were treated like animals. We were closed in a separate building,” said Vitaly, a child from the Kherson region whose age was not clear. He added that they were told their parents no longer wanted them.

Arrest warrants issued for Russian leaders

The International Criminal Court last month issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russia’s children’s rights commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova, accusing them of abducting children from Ukraine.

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

Russia rejects the ICC allegations, saying it does not recognize the court’s jurisdiction and calling the warrants null and void.

Lvova-Belova said earlier this week that her commission acted on humanitarian grounds to protect the interests of children in an area where military action was taking place and had not moved anyone against their will or that of their parents or legal guardians, whose consent was always sought unless they were missing.

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

“In every story there is a whole range of international violations, and it cannot go unpunished,” she said.
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World Athletics on Saturday released details of a new event, the marathon race walk mixed relay, to be staged at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games. 

It takes the place of the men’s 50km race walk, which first appeared at the 1932 Olympics, but which has been scrapped in the pursuit of gender equality. 

The new mixed relay will feature 25 teams, each comprising one male and one female athlete, who will alternate to complete the marathon distance (42.195km) in four legs. 

“This format is designed to be innovative, dynamic and unpredictable,” said World Athletics CEO Jon Ridgeon. 

“We believe it will be easily understood by fans, will feature exciting competition and, importantly, it will ensure full gender equality across the Olympic track and field program for the first time,” he added. 

The relay will be held on the same course as the individual 20km race walking events, at the foot of the Eiffel Tower in central Paris. 

The team qualification “pathway” will be published shortly, World Athletics said. 

The 48-event athletics program at Paris 2024 is now perfectly balanced with 23 for both men and women with two mixed events, the 4x400m and walk marathon relay. 

Next year’s Games also include breakdancing for the first time on the Olympic program. 
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Joe Blewitt is just about the busiest man in Ballina. His phone rings constantly with calls from locals and the world’s media as he prepares to welcome a relative — U.S. President Joe Biden. 

Biden is scheduled to travel to Ireland next week, with a stop in Ballina, the town from which one of his great-great grandfathers left for the United States in 1850. Blewitt, a distant cousin who first met Biden when he came to town as vice president in 2016, said the U.S. leader pledged to return once he’d won the presidency. 

“He said, ‘I’m going to come back into Ballina.’ And sure to God he’s going to come back into Ballina,” Blewitt said. “His Irish roots are really deep in his heart.” 

The 43-year-old plumber was among Biden relations invited to the White House for St. Patrick’s Day last month. He says it was a “surreal” experience that included a half-hour private meeting with the president. 

“He’s a people person. He loves meeting the Irish people,” said Blewitt, who shares Biden’s high forehead — he says people joke that he looks like the president “from the mouth up.” 

“The Irish people love him back.” 

Buildings are getting a new coat of paint and American flags are being hung from shopfronts in Ballina, a bustling agricultural town of about 10,000 at the mouth of the River Moy in western Ireland that proclaims itself the nation’s “salmon capital.” 

There’s already a mural of a beaming Biden, erected in 2020 in the center of town. Many people from Ballina and the surrounding County Mayo moved to Pennsylvania in the 19th century. Ballina is twinned with Scranton, Biden’s hometown. 

“I wouldn’t think there’s a family in Ballina that doesn’t have someone, some connection with the States,” said Anthony Heffernan, owner of Heffernan’s Fine Foods, where Biden had lunch with his local relatives during his 2016 visit. 

“It was a fantastic day for Ballina,” Heffernan recalled. 

“He was very keen to talk about the town — how it was, and how it is now. He was really connected with the area.” 

The White House says Biden will visit Belfast, Northern Ireland, on Tuesday and Wednesday to mark 25 years since the Good Friday peace accord, before heading south to the Republic of Ireland, where he will address the Dublin parliament. In Ballina, he’s due to deliver a speech Friday in front of the 19th-century cathedral, which local lore says was built partly using bricks supplied by his great-great-great grandfather, Edward Blewitt, a brickmaker and civil engineer. 

The Irish Family History Center says Biden “is among the most ‘Irish’ of all U.S. Presidents” — 10 of his 16 great-great grandparents were from the Emerald Isle. All of them left for the U.S. during the Great Famine of the mid-19th century, which killed an estimated 1 million people. 

Biden also plans to visit the Cooley Peninsula in County Louth, about 150 miles (240 kilometers) from Ballina on Ireland’s east coast. His great-grandfather, James Finnegan, left the mountainous, wind-battered peninsula as a child in 1850, one of more than a million Irish people who emigrated during the famine years. 

“There’s a great sense of euphoria around the place. Everyone is asking ‘What’s happening, when’s he coming, where’s he going?'” said Andrea McKevitt, a local politician and distant Biden relative. 

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters that the president would use his Irish trip to highlight “how his family history is part of that larger shared history” between the U.S. and Ireland. 

The trip is also a reminder of the central role of Irish Americans in U.S. political life. Ireland has warmly welcomed American presidents since John F. Kennedy became the first to visit in 1963. Barack Obama got a jubilant reception in 2011 when he visited the tiny hamlet of Moneygall, home to one of his great-great-great grandfathers. 

“My name is Barack Obama, of the Moneygall Obamas, and I’ve come home to find the apostrophe we lost somewhere along the way,” he joked to a crowd in Dublin. 

More than 30 million Americans — almost one in 10 — claim some Irish ancestry. Richard Johnson, senior lecturer in U.S. politics at Queen Mary University of London, said Irish Americans no longer form the solidly Democrat voting bloc of decades gone by, but it’s still “good politics domestically for Americans to emphasize their Irish roots.” 

“One of the reasons Irish identity resonates so much with Americans is that U.S. identity is based in part on the notion that the United States broke free from the British Empire and set its own course,” he said. “There is a kind of echo of that story that can be found in the Irish experience. It makes it feel like the Irish have shared a common experience of breaking out of British rule that I think is attractive to Americans.” 

Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar said Biden “has always been a friend of Ireland,” and the visit would be “an opportunity to welcome a great Irish-American president home.” 

In Ballina, Blewitt said the town is getting ready to give Biden a rousing welcome. 

“The streets will be packed,” he said. “It’ll be like another St. Patrick’s Day.”
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Russia lost elections to three United Nations bodies this week, a sign that opposition to its invasion of Ukraine over a year ago remains strong.

The votes in the 54-member U.N. Economic and Social Council follow approval of six non-binding resolutions against Russia by the 193-member U.N. General Assembly. The latest — on Feb. 23, the eve of the first anniversary of the invasion — called for Moscow to end hostilities and withdraw its forces and was adopted by a vote of 141-7 with 32 abstentions.

In the ECOSOC votes, Russia was overwhelmingly defeated by Romania for a seat on the Commission on the Status of Women. It lost to Estonia to be a member of the executive board of the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF. And it was defeated by Armenia and the Czech Republic in secret ballot votes for membership on the Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice.

U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield said after Wednesday’s votes, “This is a clear signal from ECOSOC members that no country should hold positions on critical U.N. bodies when they are in flagrant violation of the U.N. Charter.”

In the voting for members of 14 commissions, boards and expert groups that ECOSOC oversees, Russia was elected to the Commission for Social Development by acclamation – which the United States and the United Kingdom dissociated their countries from, saying Russia’s invasion violates international law and Ukraine’s territorial integrity.

Russia was also elected by acclamation to the Intergovernmental Working Group of Experts on International Standards of Accounting and Reporting.
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A British Iranian man who has been on a hunger strike outside the British Foreign Ministry building in London for 44 days says he is ready to continue his protest for 100 days.

Vahid Beheshti told Forbes that he is preparing to more than double the length of his strike, despite not knowing “how long my physical body can cooperate with me.”

Beheshti is on a hunger strike to pressure the British government to add the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to the country’s list of terrorist organizations.

He met with British Security Minister Tom Tugendhat on March 27 but told Forbes he has yet to hear anything from Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.

Beheshti, who began his strike in February, has lost more than 13 kilograms (29 pounds).

The Guardian newspaper reported that Beheshti, 44, had been a friend of the journalist and activist Ruhollah Zam, who was abducted by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Iraq. Zam was executed while imprisoned in Iran in 2020.
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Leaked Western documents with information about the war in Ukraine appear to have been doctored by Russia to minimize their own losses and exaggerate Ukraine’s. VOA’s Laurel Bowman reports.
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