Beijing accused the United States of “pressuring other countries” to curb trade, following media reports that the Trump administration will use tariff relief as leverage to push nations to scale back their economic ties with China.

• A new report is the latest to bolster long-standing allegations that many long-tailed macaques imported into the U.S. for biomedical research were illegally caught from the wild and falsely labeled as captive-bred, with suspiciously high birth rates at breeding facilities in Southeast Asia.
• Cambodia became a major supplier of monkeys for research after China stopped exports in 2020, but investigations found indications of large-scale monkey-laundering operations, leading to legal cases, failed prosecutions, and a 64% drop in exports by 2023. Despite concerns, global wildlife trade regulator CITES did not ban the trade.
• Vietnam’s reported monkey exports also show discrepancies, with new “satellite breeding facilities” appearing without proper documentation, raising concerns that wild monkeys are also being trafficked into breeding farms.
• A tuberculosis outbreak linked to Vietnamese monkey exports highlights the public health risks, while U.S. company Charles River Laboratories faces scrutiny over its alleged role in the illegal monkey trade, seeming to benefit from political ties to evade accountability.

A few recent months have been difficult for Oleksandr Markushyn, the mayor of Irpin. He has been under house arrest for almost three months, having spent more than a week in a pre-trial detention centre before that. The mayor’s problems were caused by the accusation about the organization of illegal trips abroad, made by Volodymyr Karpliuk, a famous builder.

Markushyn’s lawyer says that his client is facing a maximum penalty for a possible administrative offence — up to 7 years of imprisonment.

This case, which Markushyn is calling “a political put-up job”, has become widely publicized not only due to the inadequacy and selectivity of the justice system but also due to the fact that he proved himself to be a worthy leader of his community during the battles for Irpin.

Pope Francis, born Jorge Mario Bergoglio in Buenos Aires, Argentina, died on Easter Monday at the age of 88 after battling a serious bout of double pneumonia that he appeared to have conquered.

Heidi Ahonen is a bioacoustician recording whale calls, whistles and songs to understand if the marine mammals are crossing paths with krill fishing vessels in one of the most extreme environments on Earth.

The steel gray sea mirrored the overcast sky as Heidi Ahonen buckled her life jacket over her red waterproof coat. In just a few minutes she would jet out on a small inflatable zodiac boat in search of an underwater recording device she hoped to retrieve from more than 1,000 feet below the water’s surface.

She had waited nearly a year for this moment. Thankfully the weather was cooperating, she thought. Too much wind or wave action in the strait could have jeopardized her mission on this mid-January morning.

Still, she said, “I’m nervous,” as she prepared to board the zodiac from the tender pit of the MS Roald Amundsen, an 11-deck hybrid-powered cruise ship named after the Norwegian explorer who became the first person to cross Antarctica and reach the South Pole.

“What if the recorder flooded, or its batteries died?” said Ahonen, a research scientist from Finland who specializes in bioacoustics, a scientific field that examines animal behavior by the sounds they make. It had been 10 months since the device was released into the Gerlache Strait, a 120-mile-long waterway in the Southern Ocean—also known as the Antarctic Ocean—that separates a group of islands known as the Palmer Archipelago from the northwest coast of the Antarctic Peninsula.

Theoretically, she knew, it should have stayed close to where it was originally sunk along with a 50-pound weight attached to a mooring line near to where the ship now idled, deep enough to avoid getting snagged on icebergs. But it wasn’t out of the question that strong currents could have forced it to drift. What if she couldn’t find it?

It was her first time leading a project in Antarctica and she felt pressure to succeed.

“Relax,” said her partner, Andrew Lowther, a marine mammal ecologist from Australia who’s conducted field research in Antarctica for more than a decade. “We’ll either find it or we won’t.”

Uncertainty was a given working in one of the most extreme environments on Earth.

Last year, Ahonen launched a project through the Norwegian Polar Institute based in Tromsø, Norway, where she’s a senior researcher, to monitor the year-round presence of baleen whales in the strait that feed on reddish shrimp-like crustaceans called krill. There are 15 species of baleen whales, including the humpback, fin and the Antarctic minke whale that use comb-like plates of baleen instead of teeth to filter tiny prey out of the water. Some can eat more than 3,000 pounds of krill in a day.

Labor leaders past and present have insisted on expanding the scope of what constitutes health.

Sen. Chris Murphy was dropped at the L Street entrance of Washington, D.C.’s convention center and hustled through the kitchen to a ballroom where 2,000 progressive activists waited to hear his thoughts on what to do about the 47th president of the United States and the sorry state of the Democratic Party.

The audience was midway through a weeklong, largely off-the-record summit of “America Votes,” the self-described “coordination hub of the progressive community.” It promised “experts, strategists, and renowned progressive leaders to begin writing the next chapter of the American story.”

Among them was Murphy, 51, the Democratic junior senator from Connecticut. Reelected in November to a third term, Murphy is in his third new phase as a senator — the first 10 years building a gun control movement, the last two as a broker of bipartisan deals on gun safety and border control.

“And now I’m trying to convince my party to meet the moment and bash these guys over the head with a baseball bat, metaphorically,” Murphy said.

The moment, as Murphy describes it in increasingly heated terms in person and online, is a campaign by President Donald J. Trump and Elon Musk to undermine the press and bully law firms, universities and business leaders into submission, and the only way it can be met is with uncompromising, if risky, defiance.

“Our democracy isn’t at risk of dying. It is dying as we speak. We are watching it die. It is not too late to save it,” Murphy said in a Senate speech on April 10. “We say that again, it is not too late to save our democracy, but we can’t continue to close our eyes and think that our democracy can survive a coordinated assault on those four key institutions of accountability.”

Murphy is a multiplatform messenger, a believer in repetition. On Thursday night, unshaven and casually dressed after a basketball game with the youngest of his two teenage sons, he delivered a live video briefing on Instagram that repurposed and updated the Senate speech.

“So, I want to go over events that have been developing really, really fast. Trump’s plan is real. He has a plan,” said Murphy, who has 200,000 followers on Instagram and one million on X. “He is implementing it to convert our democracy to some form of autocracy, and that’s the only way that you can get away with the corruption and the thievery.”

Last week, the Supreme Court issued an unsigned opinion requiring the Trump administration to “facilitate” the return of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a 29-year-old Maryland man whom immigration officials deported to a Salvadoran megaprison 32 days ago. But the justices pointedly stopped short of requiring the administration to “effectuate” Abrego Garcia’s return, in light of the “deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs.” They did so despite the fact that lawyers for the government have conceded that it had no legal basis to deport Abrego Garcia; in court, they have characterized his disappearance as an “administrative error,” as if shipping a man who has not been accused of a crime to an overseas gulag is the equivalent of neglecting to attach an itemized receipt to an expense report.

In the corner of a family living room in a home south of Tel Aviv sits a brightly painted surfboard.

It is adorned with frangipanis, strawberries, turtles and a bottle of sparkling wine, along with the image of a smiling surfer.

This is how the Zender family want to remember their sun-loving, surfing daughter.

"Noa's character was to do at least one good thing a day, and we are trying to keep that going, and keep telling her story because we cannot forget October 7," Noa's mother Mali Zender told the ABC.

For the better part of A's life, she never suspected anything was wrong.

She breezed through getting her driver's license. She applied to college and filed her taxes year after year without any hiccups. That is, until she applied for her passport.

Suddenly, the document she always relied on — a delayed registration of birth, which is fairly common among adoptees — was no longer enough. She realized the papers that would prove she was a citizen were not just missing — they had never existed in the first place.no

" I just sensed there was something wrong and it seemed frightening," said A, who asked to be referred to by her last initial out of fear of deportation.

A later found out that her adoptive parents never completed her naturalization. It meant she was technically barred from accessing things that she took for granted all her life — like college financial aid. It also left A, who is now in her 40s, vulnerable to deportation to her native South Korea — a country she has never been to, where she doesn't speak the language or know of any family.

• Trump’s approval has taken a substantial swing of 9.6 points, from a net positive of 6.2 points in late January to a net negative of 3.4 points in mid-April.
• Trump’s loss in support among Hispanic and young adults has been especially steep.
• The president has not persuaded Americans that foreign countries and producers will bear the burden of higher tariffs, or that the gain will be worth the pain.

Russian President Vladimir Putin called for an Easter truce to pause fighting in the Ukraine war, but the proposal was quickly dismissed by his Ukrainian counterpart who said Russian attack drones were in the air even as Putin spoke.