Iran on Saturday criticized the European Union's imposition of new sanctions on high-ranking officials and the Revolutionary Guards for supplying drones to Russia and its Middle East allies.

France authorities have banned Israeli defense firms from exhibiting at a trade show next month near Paris, organizers said on Friday.

"By decision of the government authorities, there will be no stand for the Israeli defense industry at the Eurosatory 2024 fair," organizers Coges Events said.

Russia is preparing "provocations" at the Baltic region's borders, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Friday during a visit to Stockholm, referring to recent hybrid warfare attacks denounced by several Baltic countries.

"It is also evident that Russia is preparing for provocations in the Baltic region against borders," Zelensky said, a week after Estonia said Russian border guards had removed buoys from the Narva River marking the border.

Donald Trump became the first former American president to be convicted of felony crimes Thursday as a New York jury found him guilty of all 34 charges in a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election through a hush money payment to a porn actor who said the two had sex.

Trump sat stone-faced while the verdict was read as cheering from the street below could be heard in the hallway on the courthouse's 15th floor where the decision was revealed after more than nine hours of deliberations.

A former speaker of Iran's parliament registered Friday as a possible candidate in the Islamic Republic's June 28 presidential election to replace the late Ebrahim Raisi, who was killed in a helicopter crash earlier this month with seven others.

Ali Larijani is the first high-profile candidate to register for the contest. He and other serious contenders against Raisi had been barred from running in the 2021 election.

U.S. and Chinese defense chiefs met for more than an hour on the sidelines of a major security forum in Singapore on Friday, where disputes over Taiwan and other flashpoint issues are expected to dominate the three-day event.

The rare direct talks between the United States' Lloyd Austin and China's Dong Jun finished shortly after 2:00 pm (0600 GMT), AFP reporters said, in the first substantive face-to-face meeting between the two countries' defence chiefs in 18 months.

NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg on Friday downplayed the threat of escalation from Moscow, after the United States authorised Kyiv to use American weapons to hit targets inside Russia.

"This is part of efforts by President (Vladimir) Putin and Moscow to prevent NATO allies from supporting Ukraine to defend themselves, and, again, Ukraine has the right for self defence and we have the right to help Ukraine," Stoltenberg told journalists at a meeting of NATO foreign ministers.

Police dismantled a pro-Palestinian encampment Thursday at Wayne State University in Detroit, two days after the school suspended in-person classes and encouraged staff to work remotely to avoid any problems with the protesters' encampment.

Television footage showed campus police and Detroit police officers in riot gear tearing down fencing before they removed the protesters and started breaking down tents erected last week on green space near Wayne State's undergraduate library.

More than six years since Catalonia's separatist movement took Spain to the brink of rupture, the nation's Parliament gave its final approval Thursday to a controversial amnesty for hundreds of secessionists in hopes of putting a definitive end to the traumatic episode.

The legislation was backed by Spain's left-wing coalition government, two Catalan separatist parties and other smaller parties. It passed by a vote of 177-172 in the lower house with the conservative Popular Party and far-right Vox opposing it.

Deep divisions especially among the world's most powerful nations have significantly undermined what the United Nations can do to help nations move from conflict to peace, the U.N. peacekeeping chief said.

Jean-Pierre Lacroix told The Associated Press in an interview that these divisions – most notably between the U.S. and the West on one side and Russia and often China on the other -- don't only affect peacekeeping but everything the United Nations does in trying to promote peace and security.