TOKYO (AP) — Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe visits Moscow on Thursday to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin and pursue talks on joint economic projects aimed at a possible breakthrough in their decades-old island dispute.
Japanese officials said North Korea is also likely to be discussed given the timing of Abe's trip, though the leaders' approaches remain different.
Japan recently held talks with key allies the U.S., South Korea and Australia, agreeing that China and Russia are crucial in pressuring North Korea to end its nuclear and missile programs. While China is seen as more cooperative, U.S.-Russia ties have deteriorated over Syria.

KIEV(AFP) - The presidents of Ukraine and Belarus toured Wednesday the site of the Chernobyl plant to mark 31 years since the "unhealing wound" of the world's worst civil nuclear accident spewed radiation across Europe.
The station's fourth reactor in the north of former Soviet Ukraine exploded in 1986 after a safety test went horribly wrong at 1:23 am on April 26.
Around 30 people were killed on site and several thousand more are feared to have died in the years that followed from radiation poisoning across Ukraine as well as its northern neighbor Belarus and Russia to the east.

PARIS (AP) — French police have arrested 10 people in an investigation of suspected suppliers of weapons to one of the attackers who killed 17 people at Charlie Hebdo magazine and a kosher store in January 2015, the Paris prosecutors' office said Wednesday.
Separately, police have also arrested four people in an anti-terror probe in the town of Trappes west of Paris, the prosecutors' office said. It said those arrests were unrelated to the weapons probe, but gave no additional details.
Arrests in the weapons investigation started Monday, with more on Tuesday and Wednesday morning, the prosecutors' office said.

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - European Union states granted asylum to more than twice as many people in 2016 as they did in 2015, mostly to people fleeing war in Syria and Iraq, the bloc's statistics office Eurostat said on Wednesday.
Just over 700,000 refugees were granted asylum in 2016 compared to about 330,000 in 2015, it said. Germany granted asylum to 445,000 refugees in 2016, three times more than it did in 2015, distantly followed by Sweden, Italy and France.
While the European border agency Frontex reported a drop in the number of refugees and migrants arriving in the EU from 2015 to 2016, the increase in the number of people being granted asylum may at least partly reflect lengthy procedures.