DAKAR (Reuters) - Mali’s military-led government said on Thursday it was temporarily suspending troop rotations by the UN peacekeeping mission MINUSMA, days after arresting 49 soldiers from Ivory Coast who it said had arrived in the country without permission. Mali’s ruling junta, which seized power in an August 2020 coup, has repeatedly butted heads with many of its traditional partners following sanctions and condemnation over election delays and its security cooperation with Russian mercenaries.

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MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia on Friday imposed sanctions against 384 members of Japan’s parliament, the foreign ministry said in a statement. Moscow said the measures were taken against those who had “taken an unfriendly, anti-Russian position.” Tokyo has hit Russia with harsh sanctions, joining the G7 in freezing the central bank’s assets, since Moscow sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine on Feb. 24.

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PARIS (AFP) -A former CIA software engineer was convicted of federal charges accusing him of the biggest theft of classified information in CIA history. Joshua Schulte, who chose to defend himself at a New York City retrial, had told jurors in closing arguments that the CIA and FBI made him a scapegoat for an embarrassing public release of a trove of CIA secrets by WikiLeaks in 2017. Schulte watched without visibly reacting as U.S. District Judge Jesse M. Furman announced the guilty verdict on nine counts, which was reached in mid-afternoon by a jury that had deliberated since Friday. The so-called Vault 7 leak revealed how the CIA hacked Apple and Android smartphones in overseas spying operations, and efforts to turn internet-connected televisions into listening devices. Prior to his arrest, Schulte had helped create the hacking tools as a coder at the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

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LONDON (Reuters) – Around 25 million children around the world missed out on routine vaccinations that protect against life-threatening diseases last year, as the knock-on effects of the pandemic continue to disrupt health care globally. That is two million more children than in 2020, when COVID-19 caused lockdowns around the world, and six million more than pre-pandemic in 2019, according to new figures released by UNICEF and the World Health Organization. UNICEF described the drop in vaccination coverage as the largest sustained backslide in childhood vaccination in a generation, taking coverage rates back to levels not seen since the early 2000s.

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MOSCOW (RT) - North Korea’s Foreign Ministry has dismissed Ukraine’s protest and invocation of its sovereignty following Pyongyang’s recognition of the two Donbass republics, which Kiev considers part of its territory. The DPRK diplomats insisted that Ukraine had itself breached North Korea’s sovereignty in the past by joining “unjust and illegal” U.S. sanctions against the country. In a statement released by the DPRK’s state media on Friday, the country’s Foreign Ministry argued that Kiev had sided with Washington in targeting its weapons programs.