The House impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden has hit a crossroads, lacking the political appetite from within Republican ranks to go forward with an actual impeachment, but facing political pressure to deliver after months of work.

The Republican chairman of the House Oversight Committee, James Comer, has signaled an interest in another direction. He is stopping short of drawing up articles of impeachment against the president, but eying criminal referrals of Biden family wrongdoing to the Justice Department for possible prosecution.

Ukraine on Wednesday said Russian shelling had killed three people and wounded five in the northeastern city of Kharkiv.

"Russians shelled Kharkiv," Sergiy Bolvinov, head of the investigative department of Kharkiv's police, said on social media. "Three people died, five were wounded, a large-scale fire broke out".

A Russian border region plans to evacuate some 9,000 children from the area as it is continuously shelled from the Ukrainian side, an official said Tuesday. Kyiv's forces have increasingly been striking at targets behind the extensive front line that has changed little after more than two years of war.

The children are to be moved further east, away from the Ukraine border, the governor of Russia's Belgorod border region, Vyacheslev Gladkov, said.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken underscored Washington's "ironclad commitment" Tuesday to help defend the Philippines in case of an armed attack against its forces after clashes between Chinese and Filipino coast guards in the disputed South China Sea recently turned more hostile.

Blinken, the latest high-level official to visit the United States treaty ally, met his Philippine counterpart Enrique Manalo on Tuesday before separately meeting President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. in Manila.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin vowed Tuesday that the U.S. will continue to support Ukraine's war effort against Russia, even as the U.S. Congress remains stalled over funding to send additional weapons to the front.

"The United States will not let Ukraine fail," said Austin, addressing more than 50 defense leaders from Europe and around the world who are meeting at the Ramstein Air Base in Germany. "This coalition will not let Ukraine fail. And the free world will not let Ukraine fail."

Former President Donald Trump has charged that Jews who vote for Democrats "hate Israel" and hate "their religion," igniting a firestorm of criticism from the White House and Jewish leaders.

Trump, in an interview, had been asked about Democrats' growing criticism of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over his handling of the war in Gaza as the civilian death toll continues to mount.

Ukrainian shelling killed two people and wounded four in a village near the Russian border city of Belgorod on Monday, the region's governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said.

"In the Belgorod district, after air defences repelled an air attack by the Ukrainian army, two people were killed and four injured in the village of Nikolskoye," Gladkov said.

When Sabine Thonke joined a recent demonstration in Berlin against Germany's far-right party, it was the first time in years she felt hopeful that the growing power of the extremists in her country could be stopped.

Thonke, 59, had been following the rise of the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, with unease. But when she heard about a plan to deport millions of people, she felt called to action.

North Korea fired multiple short-range ballistic missiles toward its eastern waters Monday morning, its neighbors said, days after the end of the South Korean-U.S. military drills that the North views as an invasion rehearsal.

The launches — North Korea's first known missile testing activities in about a month — came as U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was in Seoul for a conference. Outside experts earlier predicted North Korea would extend its run of missile tests and intensify its warlike rhetoric ahead of the U.S. presidential election in November to boost its leverage in future diplomacy.

A decade ago, President Vladimir Putin seized Crimea from Ukraine, a bold land grab that set the stage for Russia to invade its neighbor in 2022.

The quick and bloodless seizure of the diamond-shaped peninsula, home to Russia's Black Sea fleet and a popular vacation site, touched off a wave of patriotism and sent Putin's popularity soaring. "Crimea is ours!" became a popular slogan in Russia.