Iran on Thursday prepared to inter its late president at the holiest site for Shiite Muslims in the Islamic Republic, a final sign of respect for a protégé of Iran's supreme leader killed in a helicopter crash earlier this week.

President Ebrahim Raisi's burial at the Imam Reza Shrine in Mashhad caps days of processionals through much of Iran, seeking to bolster the country's theocracy after the crash killing him, the country's foreign minister and six others.

Taiwan scrambled jets and put missile, naval and land units on alert Thursday over Chinese military exercises being conducted around the self-governing island democracy where a new president took office this week.

China's military said its two-day exercises around Taiwan were punishment for separatist forces seeking independence. Beijing claims the island is part of China's national territory and the People's Liberation Army sends navy ships and warplanes into the Taiwan Strait and other areas around the island almost daily to wear down Taiwan's defenses and seek to intimidate its people, who firmly back their de facto independence.

President Emmanuel Macron pushed Thursday for a lifting of protesters' barricades in riot-hit New Caledonia and pledged that reinforced police forces battling deadly unrest on the French Pacific archipelago "will stay as long as necessary," even when French security services will be focused in weeks ahead on the massive security operation for the Paris Olympics.

By binning his previously announced schedule to fly across the globe from Paris on his presidential jet, Macron brought the weight of his office and his personal touch to bear on the crisis that has left six dead and a trail of destruction on the archipelago that is a global source of nickel, used in batteries and other everyday necessities, and where Indigenous Kanak people have long sought independence from France.

French President Emmanuel Macron flew to New Caledonia Wednesday in a bid to find a political solution to the unrest that has rocked the French archipelago in the southwestern Pacific Ocean, some 16,000 kilometers (10,000 miles) from metropolitan France.

The unrest has raised new questions about Macron's handling of France's colonial legacy. There have been decades of tensions between Indigenous Kanaks, who seek independence for the territory of 270,000 people, and descendants of colonists and others who settled on the island and who want to remain part of France.

Perched on the open ramp at the rear of a British Chinook helicopter, Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas flew home from the annual Spring Storm military exercises, pleased to see NATO allies cooperating. But she later said that other types of warfare were on her mind.

Her nation, which borders Russia, has seen a rise in sabotage, electronic warfare and spying — all blamed on Moscow.

Leaders around the Baltic Sea reacted warily Wednesday to reports that Russia could revise the borders of its territorial waters in the region, with Lithuania's foreign minister calling it an "obvious escalation" that must be met with an "appropriately firm response."

In a draft proposal reported by some Russian media, Russia's Defense Ministry suggests updating the coordinates used to measure the strip of territorial waters off its mainland coast and that of its islands in the Baltic Sea. The existing coordinates were approved in 1985, the ministry says; adding they were "based on small-scale nautical navigation maps" and don't correspond to the "modern geographical situation."

Sustained Russian attacks on Ukraine's power grid in recent weeks have forced leaders of the war-ravaged country to institute nationwide rolling blackouts. Without adequate air defenses to counter assaults and allow for repairs, though, the shortages could still worsen as need spikes in late summer and the bitter-cold winter.

The Russian airstrikes targeting the grid since March have meant blackouts have even returned to the capital, Kyiv, which hadn't experienced them since the first year of the war. Among the strikes were an April barrage that damaged Kyiv's largest thermal power plant and a massive attack on May 8 that targeted power generation and transmission facilities in several regions.

When Karim Khan was sworn in as chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, he said the court should be judged by its acts -- "the proof of the pudding should be in the eating."

And by seeking arrest warrants for Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and senior Hamas figures, Khan has shown he is not afraid to take on the world's most controversial cases.

Among Iranian communities from London to Los Angeles, few tears are being shed over the death of President Ebrahim Raisi, killed in a weekend helicopter crash.

But there are not always loud cheers, either.

Iran's supreme leader presided over a funeral Wednesday for the country's late president, foreign minister and others killed in a helicopter crash, as tens of thousands later followed a procession of their caskets through the capital, Tehran.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei held the service at Tehran University, the caskets of the dead draped in Iranian flags with their pictures on them. On the late President Ebrahim Raisi's coffin sat a black turban — signifying him as a direct descendent of Islam's Prophet Muhammad.