PARIS (Dispatches) - The trial of former French president Nicolas Sarkozy, who is accused of illegally financing his failed 2012 re-election campaign, resumed after being adjourned on the opening day in March after a lawyer fell sick with COVID-19. The trial casts a further shadow over the career of a man who as president from 2007 to 2012 bestrode the national and global stage. Earlier this year, Sarkozy was convicted of corruption in a separate case. Prosecutors allege that Sarkozy’s conservative party splurged nearly double the 22.5 million euros (US$27.4 million) permitted under electoral law on lavish campaign rallies, and then hired a friendly public relations agency to hide the cost.

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SARAJEVO (Reuters) - Bosnia’s top court on Friday indicted eight Serb ex-soldiers for crimes against humanity over their alleged role in the murder of at least 78 Bosnian Muslim civilians early in the Bosnian war of the 1990s. A quarter of a century after the U.S.-sponsored Dayton peace accords ended the war among Bosnian Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks in which about 100,000 people were killed, Sarajevo is still hunting down suspected war criminals. The defendants are accused of “persecuting the Bosniak civilian population based on national, ethnic and religious grounds with discriminatory intention, and of killing civilians in violation of the international law,” the court said.

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Quetta/Islamabad, Pakistan (Dispatches) – A bomb blast has killed at least seven people at a pro-Palestinian rally in the southwestern Pakistani border town of Chaman, police and hospital officials said. The explosion took place as participants of the rally, organized by a regional religious political party, were dispersing, police official Muhammad Iqbal said. The death toll stood at seven killed and 17 wounded, local hospital official Akhtar Muhammad said.

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ABUJA (Dispatches) - Nigeria’s military is investigating reports that the leader of militant group Boko Haram may have been killed or seriously injured following clashes with their rivals, an army spokesman said on Friday. Abubakar Shekau has been the figurehead of terrorist group that has since 2009 killed more than 30,000 people, forced around 2 million people to flee their homes and spawned one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.

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FRANKFURT (Reuters) - The Group of Seven (G7) countries have agreed to stop funding the construction of coal-fired power stations, according to a document summarizing the conclusions of a G7 environment ministers’ meeting, which was seen by Reuters on Friday. “We stress that international investments in unabated coal must stop now and commit to take concrete steps towards an absolute end to new direct government support for unabated international thermal coal power generation by the end of 2021,” it said. Coal is considered unabated when it is burned without taking any measures to compensate for the carbon emitted, such as capturing and storing it.