World News

By Diego Oré and Alberto Fajardo

MEXICO CITY, June 3 (Reuters) – Eight days before Mexico City kicks off the World Cup, mass protests by teachers and retired judges, road closures and last-minute construction work caused chaos in the capital on Wednesday for millions of residents who face long delays and complex rerouting of their daily commutes. 

On June 11, Mexico City will host the inaugural World Cup match between Mexico and South Africa at Azteca stadium in the capital. 

With Mexico in the global spotlight, teachers and other groups have staged marches and blocked major avenues. They have said their protests, which are unrelated to the tournament, could intensify unless President Claudia Sheinbaum’s government addresses their demands.

The CNTE, a dissident wing of the national teachers’ union, has threatened mass demonstrations at the opening of the World Cup in official statements shared on social media.

The union is demanding the government fulfill a campaign pledge to repeal a 2007 law that overhauled the pension and social security system for public-sector workers, as well as salary increases.

“The current government made a campaign commitment — both the government of (former President) Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and President Sheinbaum’s — they said they had that commitment to teachers to strike down that reform … but it never happened,” Rodrigo Arias, a schoolteacher from the southern state of Oaxaca with 40 years of classroom experience, said.

“There is neglect. There is a policy of managing timelines, of making commitments that are never truly kept. We will keep mobilizing until we are heard — even with the World Cup on the horizon,” added Arias, outside the Interior Ministry, where the CNTE was holding a protest while its leaders met with authorities in hope of reaching agreements.

The protests are concentrated on Insurgentes and Paseo de la Reforma, two of the capital’s busiest and most emblematic boulevards. Elsewhere in the capital, teachers were also blocking roads, generating traffic gridlock and frustrating commuters. 

On Tuesday, protesters toppled towering statues of football players on Mexico City’s Paseo de la Reforma. 

Arias said those responsible were not members of the union and that the CNTE was not seeking to destroy property or provoke confrontation. Nevertheless, several businesses along the avenue had by Wednesday erected metal and wooden barriers to protect themselves.

Sheinbaum said at her daily morning press conference that she would not be baited into provocations or order a crackdown on the demonstrations.

In downtown Mexico City, retired judges and magistrates were also protesting, demanding severance pay and pensions following a sweeping 2024 judicial reform that restructured the country’s justice system.

“The traffic is really affecting us; we’re losing too much time,” lamented Armando Escobedo, a delivery driver, as he took a detour around street closures. “You have to be empathetic with the teachers, but they do hurt us at work,” he added.

Mexico will host 13 World Cup matches: five in the capital, and four each in the cities of Guadalajara and Monterrey. Mexico City has undergone several infrastructure projects ahead of the world’s biggest sporting event. 

However, renovations at the Benito Juarez International Airport in Mexico City, the country’s largest and busiest airport, and repairs to the capital’s metro system and main avenues have yet to be completed. On Tuesday, a metal structure from a pedestrian bridge at the airport collapsed, injuring a motorist.

(Reporting by Diego Ore and Alberto Fajardo; Writing by Stefanie Eschenbacher; Editing by David Gregorio)

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Azerbaijan Becomes Israel’s Gas Buffer 

Backup supplies from SOCAR are giving Egypt and Jordan alternatives when Israeli gas exports are disrupted, while keeping Israel linked to regional customers that may avoid direct purchases 

[BAKU] As Israel’s gas exports to Egypt and Jordan have stopped and restarted three times since October 2023, Azerbaijan’s state oil company, known as SOCAR, has moved into every layer of Israel’s energy business at once. SOCAR now runs the largest new exploration zone in Israeli waters, holds 10% of the Tamar gas field, ships roughly three cargoes of liquefied natural gas (LNG) to Egypt each month, partners with a Qatari company to restart power plants in Syria using Azerbaijani gas piped through Turkey, and is in talks to expand further into Egypt and Jordan. No other foreign company holds that many positions in or around Israeli gas. 

Those positions came together publicly this week at the 31st Baku Energy Forum and the first Azerbaijan-US Economic Dialogue, held on Tuesday. They provide backup supply when Israeli gas goes offline, as it did for 32 days during the Hormuz war. They also allow gas produced in Israeli waters to reach customers who refuse to buy directly from Israel. 

“It is our first East Mediterranean investment, and we are definitely interested in developing it further,” Vitaliy Baylarbayov, SOCAR’s deputy vice president for investments and marketing, told The Media Line at SOCAR headquarters on Monday, referring to the Tamar stake closed in June 2025 for $510 million. The Tamar position is one of five pieces SOCAR has built in or around Israeli gas. 

Israeli energy security analyst Elai Rettig of the Begin-Sadat Center at Bar-Ilan University wrote about the pattern in a paper published May 6. The 32-day shutdown of Leviathan and Karish during the Hormuz war was the third major disruption of Israeli gas exports since October 7, 2023. 

Jordan, which draws roughly 68% of its electricity from natural gas and gets more than half of that from Israeli pipelines, paid an estimated $2.5 million a day in extra fuel costs during the March-April shutdown. Egypt’s bill for imported LNG tripled in the first quarter of 2026, from $560 million to $1.65 billion. Leviathan resumed exports on April 2, and Karish followed a week later. But the shift is permanent, Rettig told The Media Line. Egypt and Jordan are lining up alternatives in case Israeli gas goes offline again. 

The newest piece is Cluster I, a 660-square-mile exploration zone in the northern part of Israel’s waters, next to the Leviathan gas field and west of Energean’s Karish field. Israel’s petroleum commissioner awarded six exploration licenses there in October 2023, weeks after the Hamas attack froze the broader bid round. SOCAR leads the project. BP and NewMed Energy hold the remaining stakes, each at roughly one-third. 

Tamar is operated by Chevron, the American oil major that also operates Leviathan, the field shut for 32 days during the Hormuz war. Chevron took over both fields in 2020 with its purchase of Noble Energy and approved the Leviathan expansion in January. SOCAR’s 10% Tamar stake puts the Azerbaijani state company inside a Chevron-run field. On Tuesday in Baku, SOCAR and Chevron signed a joint study agreement to assess oil and gas potential in the Middle Caspian Basin, one of two cooperation tracks with American majors that Baylarbayov flagged Monday, alongside ExxonMobil. Both American majors are now tied to SOCAR’s portfolio while operating Israeli production. 

Mubadala Energy of Abu Dhabi holds 11% of Tamar, bought from Delek in 2021 in the largest commercial deal after the UAE-Israel normalization agreement. Combined with Chevron’s 25% and SOCAR’s 10%, foreign ownership of Tamar now stands at 46%, split across an American operator and Emirati and Azerbaijani partners. 

The same Gulf-Azerbaijan business ties run in the other direction. ADNOC International holds 30% of the Absheron gas field, where SOCAR, TotalEnergies, the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, and BOTAŞ signed a 15-year, 33 billion-cubic-meter supply agreement with Turkey on Tuesday. Masdar, the Abu Dhabi state renewables developer, operates a 230-megawatt solar plant at Garadagh and broke ground in 2024 on another gigawatt of solar and wind capacity. SOCAR holds an upstream stake in the SARB and Umm Lulu fields off Abu Dhabi. The Israel-Azerbaijan partnership sits inside a wider Gulf-Azerbaijani business web from the Abraham Accords era. 

Beyond the exploration deals, SOCAR’s trading business had been selling LNG to Egypt for nine months before the contract with the Egyptian Petroleum Corporation was formally signed in Cairo on March 31. Three SOCAR cargoes reached Egypt in March 2026 alone, worth roughly $146.5 million, putting SOCAR alongside Hartree and IRH as one of Egypt’s largest gas suppliers. 

Egyptian lawmaker Mohamed Fouad, who sits on the Economic Affairs Committee of the House of Representatives in Cairo, said SOCAR is meant to supplement Israeli pipeline gas, not replace it. Egypt’s December 2025 agreement with Israel for 130 billion cubic meters of pipeline gas over 15 years, worth roughly $35 billion, remains “structurally irreplaceable” in Cairo’s calculus, Fouad said. What SOCAR provides instead is what Fouad calls “resilience engineering around Leviathan dependence.” 

SOCAR Trading ships more cargoes when Israeli production drops or summer demand peaks, and fewer when Israeli supplies return to normal. Fouad estimates Egypt’s basic need at two to four cargoes per month, with more in summer. Egypt’s own gas production was still falling through March 2026, down to about 3.80 billion cubic feet per day. 

Cairo does not treat SOCAR and ExxonMobil as competitors. ExxonMobil is the long-term play, drilling new gas off Cyprus. SOCAR is the short- and medium-term backup, providing cargoes when Israeli supply drops. The two could overlap later, Fouad noted, if Egyptian production recovers and Cypriot exports move forward. 

Egypt and ExxonMobil put that arrangement in writing at Egypt’s energy conference earlier this year. John Ardill, ExxonMobil’s vice president for global exploration, told The Media Line at the Baku Convention Center on Tuesday that the company signed a preliminary agreement with Egypt’s petroleum ministry to ship Cypriot gas through Egypt’s existing LNG terminals rather than build new export terminals. 

ExxonMobil has finished evaluating its Glaucus gas find off Cyprus and is wrapping up Pegasus. ExxonMobil holds 60% of the block, and QatarEnergy holds 40%. ExxonMobil recently confirmed that the gas is commercial. Ardill said moving from discovery to actual production typically takes five to 10 years. “Rather than building all of this from scratch, that would let us move more quickly and more cost-effectively,” Ardill said. The same Egyptian terminals SOCAR uses for backup cargoes today will, by the early 2030s, handle Cypriot gas Egypt has helped develop. 

Turkey is building its own version, outside the East Mediterranean Gas Forum, whose members include Cyprus, Egypt, France, Greece, Israel, Italy, Jordan, and Palestine, with the European Union and the United States as observers. Turkey is not at the table. On the sidelines of the Baku Forum on Monday, Bayraktar met Egyptian Petroleum Minister Karim Badawi to discuss cooperation on oil, gas, and mining, building on talks held in Istanbul in April. The two countries deal directly, outside the forum. 

Turkish Energy Minister Alparslan Bayraktar delivered President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s opening message at the Baku Forum on Monday and laid out what he called “the electricity version of TANAP,” a power line running through Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Bulgaria to southeast Europe. In April, during the worst of the Hormuz war, Bayraktar called the global crisis “the mother of all crises” in an Al Jazeera Arabic interview, arguing that it would force the world to rethink how energy moves. 

Bayraktar’s plans include a 60-mile underwater pipeline announced in May between southern Turkey and northern Cyprus, set to begin operation by 2028. The pipeline can carry gas in either direction. The Republic of Cyprus learned about it from the media. Bayraktar also proposed a Qatar-to-Turkey pipeline routed through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Syria, a route that would compete directly with Israeli pipeline gas reaching Egypt and Jordan today. 

Behind Turkey’s plans sits the deepest bilateral energy relationship in the region. Turkey is the largest single buyer of Azerbaijani gas and the destination for SOCAR’s biggest foreign investment. 

The Azerbaijani state oil company is Turkey’s largest international investor, with $19.5 billion deployed since 2008 across the STAR refinery at Aliağa, the Petkim petrochemical complex, the SOCAR Terminal container port, and a majority stake in the Trans-Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline (TANAP), which carries Shah Deniz gas across Turkey. 

American private equity firm Apollo Global Management expanded its TANAP financing to $300 million on Monday. The Absheron supply agreement, signed on Tuesday, extends that integration with another 15-year delivery commitment. That depth is what makes the Turkey-Azerbaijan-Syria gas-to-power link work in practice, while Bayraktar’s proposals for northern Cyprus and Qatar remain on paper. 

Rauf Mammadov of Fuld + Company says Turkey’s hub ambitions, Israel’s production base, and Egypt’s LNG infrastructure “could just as easily form parts of a broader regional system as compete in a winner-takes-all struggle.” 

Yet all of this sits inside an Iranian threat. 

Iranian drones reached Azerbaijan’s Nakhchivan exclave in March. Azerbaijani security services announced the next day that they had disrupted an Iranian plot targeting the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline. That pipeline carries nearly half of Israel’s oil, a $2.5 billion annual flow similar to Israeli gas exports to Egypt and Jordan. Separate Iranian plots targeted the Israeli Embassy and a synagogue in Baku. Iran “never achieved in Azerbaijan what it achieved in Syria, Lebanon, or Yemen,” a former senior US official told The Media Line. The Israel-Azerbaijan artificial intelligence cooperation agreement, signed on February 3, covers the surveillance and coordination required for this kind of operation. 

In Syria, SOCAR has partnered with the Qatari company UCC Holding and Turkey’s BOTAŞ to supply natural gas from the Caspian’s Shah Deniz field across Turkish territory to power plants in Damascus, Homs, and Aleppo, restored under the post-Assad reconstruction beginning in August 2025. Initial delivery is 1.2 billion cubic meters annually. “We are bringing light, if you wish,” Baylarbayov said. 

That same gas corridor could one day carry Israeli gas in the opposite direction, Rettig told The Media Line. SOCAR’s exploration zone inside Israeli waters creates a buffer that shields Israeli-produced gas from political friction between Jerusalem and Ankara. By marketing the gas as Azerbaijani, SOCAR can help it reach buyers who would refuse to buy directly from Israel. The same thing already happens with oil. Azerbaijani crude has reached Israel through Turkey via the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline for nearly two decades, surviving Turkey’s diplomatic ruptures with Israel and Turkey’s formal sanctions on Israeli trade since October 2023. 

Asked whether SOCAR’s investments hurt Israel, Rettig said no. The East Mediterranean is a gas-hungry region, in his view, and having multiple suppliers benefits Israel as much as it guards against Israeli supply disruptions. “SOCAR is considered a supplement rather than a competitor,” he said. 

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TIRANA, Albania (AP) — A massive coastal development project linked to Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of U.S. President Donald Trump, is facing growing resistance from protesters in Albania.

The government says the development on the Adriatic coast would be transformational for the former communist nation as it seeks to enter the high-end tourism market and pushes for European Union membership.

But the venture, spanning an abandoned island and a nearby stretch of seafront on Albania’s southern coast, has drawn opposition from environmental campaigners and critics of long-time Socialist Prime Minister Edi Rama.

The luxury project has two components: a coastal development in the Narta Lagoon area, which is a wildlife reserve, and a smaller resort on the nearby uninhabited island of Sazan, a communist-era military base.

The planned development of hotels, apartments, villas and a marina is linked to Kushner and Trump’s daughter, Ivanka Trump.

In an interview this week with U.S. podcaster David Senra, Ivanka Trump said they discovered the site by accident.

“We were on a friend’s boat, and we stopped for a swim. Effectively, that’s how we found it,” she said. “We swam to the island. We went on a hike, barefoot all the way up to the top, and we were just captivated.”

An investment firm linked to Kushner has been granted special investor status by Albanian authorities.

Albania has 450 kilometers (280 miles) of coast that remained largely underdeveloped during decades of harsh communist rule.

Protest groups fear the sections of that pristine coastline could be snapped up by powerful investors. And public anger grew after video showed an activist being dragged by a private security guard while demonstrating at the site.

The development is planned within a nature reserve and one of Albania’s most valuable biodiversity areas, a key stopover for migratory birds along the Adriatic coast.

Protesters have carried cardboard cut-outs of pink flamingos, one of the protected migratory bird species, at rallies in the capital Tirana.

Since late May, excavators and other heavy machinery have entered the area, opening access routes, digging into the sand, clearing land among pine trees and installing fencing.

Environmental groups from Albania and elsewhere in Europe condemned the work, with one prominent local group charging that long-protected habitats are being “irreversibly destroyed.”

Albania’s state anti-corruption agency has confirmed it opened an investigation related to the project but has not disclosed details.

The government says the land earmarked for the project is privately owned. But competing claims have emerged questioning the privatization — a common type of legal dispute.

Rama has committed to the venture, saying it would align with Albania’s ambition to become a major global tourism destination.

“Albania should not be a country that fears an extraordinary project like this one, where exceptional partners have come together to invest 4 billion euros ($4.6 billion),” Rama said.

He added: “There is no chance for this investment to stop as long as I am here.”

However, the demise of a similar project in Serbia offers a cautionary tale. In November, Serbia’s Parliament passed a special law to enable the building of a luxury complex in the capital, Belgrade, to be financed by an investment company linked to Kushner.

The following month, Serbia’s prosecutor for organized crime charged four people, including a government minister, with abuse of office and falsifying of documents to help pave the way for the development.

Kushner later withdrew from the planned multi-million investment that would have replaced a sprawling bombed-out military complex, a designated heritage zone whose legal protection was lifted by the former officials now on trial.

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Israeli Flight Forced to Croatia After Ljubljana Landing Refusal 

An Israir flight from Israel to Ljubljana was diverted to Zagreb, Croatia, on Wednesday after Slovenian authorities refused to allow the Israeli carrier to land, triggering an aviation and diplomatic dispute over alleged political interference in an EU open-skies route. 

Israir said flight 6H755 was already en route to Slovenia when it was forced to change course. Passengers were informed during the trip that the aircraft would land in Croatia instead of its planned destination. 

Uri Sirkis, Israir’s CEO, accused Slovenian authorities of blocking the flight because of political opposition to Israel. “The Israir flight scheduled for Ljubljana had to land in Zagreb because the authorities in Ljubljana are refusing Israeli carriers to land, due to their firm political opposition to the route operated by the Israeli government. This is a blatant violation of EU air agreements,” he said. 

Israeli officials treated the incident as a serious breach of aviation norms. The Foreign Ministry, the Civil Aviation Authority, and other Israeli officials were involved in efforts to secure permission for the flight to continue to Ljubljana, but the attempt failed. 

The dispute comes during a political transition in Slovenia. The outgoing government was sharply critical of Israel, while the incoming government is expected to take a friendlier approach. It remains unclear whether direct Israir flights to Ljubljana will resume or when the route might return to normal. 

The incident adds another strain to Israeli-European aviation ties at a time when political disputes over Israel’s conduct have increasingly spilled into areas beyond diplomacy. Slovenia recognized a Palestinian state in 2024 under Prime Minister Robert Golob’s government and, the following year, declared Israeli Ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich personae non gratae. 

For Israel, the concern is larger than one diverted flight. Officials fear that if political considerations are allowed to override aviation agreements, other European countries could follow Slovenia’s example, creating uncertainty for Israeli carriers and passengers across the continent. 

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BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP) — In May 2015, the grisly killing of a pregnant 14-year-old girl named Chiara Páez by her 16-year-old boyfriend triggered massive protests in Argentina that evolved into a generation-defining movement throughout Latin America under the motto of “ Ni Una Menos,” or “Not One Woman Less.”

Now, 11 years after the first Ni Una Menos protest created a collective consciousness about what would come to be known as femicide — the killing of women and girls because of their gender — the nation is convulsing with anger once again.

This time, it’s over the killing of 14-year-old Agostina Vega, in the central city of Cordoba. She arrived at a family friend’s home the night of May 23, expecting to pick up a gift for her mother. Instead, she was sexually assaulted and hanged, initial autopsy results indicate, her body dismembered with a kitchen knife.

Her remains were found in a drainage ditch Saturday, a week after her disappearance, as vigils in her home province erupted into clashes with police.

The outrage has reverberated across the country ahead of Wednesday’s annual Ni Una Menos protest in downtown Buenos Aires, amplifying demands for government action and intensifying criticism of President Javier Milei.

The libertarian ally of U.S. President Donald Trump has called the feminist movement “a ridiculous and unnatural fight,” promoted scrapping femicide from the penal code, and defunded programs supporting victims of gender violence as part of his cultural war and cost-cutting campaign.

This year, lawyers at the Center for Legal and Social Studies, a leading Argentine human rights group, have counted 63 legally registered femicides. But they and other advocates say it can be an uphill battle against the government to get that classification. Some have compiled a list of more than 100 names of women killed this year, arguing that many aren’t properly labeled.

Reports of femicide in Argentina fell 12%, to 200 cases last year compared with 2024, according to statistics published by the Supreme Court. Victims’ lawyers say the change doesn’t reflect a drop in gender-based violence, but instead a failure to properly classify crimes.

“To stop calling femicides by their name, to deny the existence of gender violence — it’s an attempt to rewind the past 20 years,” said Natalia Gherardi, director of the Latin American Team for Justice and Gender, a Buenos Aires-based rights group. “I hope this reaction generated by Agostina’s case, what we show in the streets, will be enough to counter the desire to move backward.”

After Agostina’s death, protesters directed anger at local law enforcement, setting tires alight in the streets of Cordoba. Her family filed a missing person’s report the morning after her disappearance, but over 80 hours passed before phones across the province buzzed with a child abduction alert, according to family lawyer Gustavo Vaca.

The day after her death, a taxi driver reported that he’d driven Agostina to the house of the family friend, 33-year-old Claudio Barrelier, which security camera footage confirmed.

Agostina’s family has complained that security forces were consumed by concerns of fan violence during a major soccer game in the city of Cordoba that day. Three days later, police raided the house of Barrelier, an ex-boyfriend of Agostina’s mother.

Barrelier is in custody as the main suspect in the case and denies killing Agostina. Investigators say his criminal history shows he had been arrested for abducting a young woman a year ago but was released on bail of $3,500 after 20 days.

When peppered with accusations of foot-dragging, lead prosecutor Raúl Garzón said last week that authorities “are not engaging in any self-criticism.”

Calls grew to characterize Agostina’s killing as a femicide. Security Minister Alejandra Monteoliva has refused to do so.

“A homicide, whatever its nature, is not solely defined by what happens during one hour, two hours, or three hours, where the act itself occurs,” Monteoliva told reporters Monday in her only public comments on the case.

Advocates insist using the term femicide — which carries harsher penalties than other forms of homicide, with a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment in Argentina — is crucial for effective prosecution and victim protection.

“If we don’t name the specific form of violence, if we don’t recognize it, then we can’t understand the problem in all its dimensions, and we can’t create policies to prevent and combat it,” said Lucila Galkin, director of the gender and diversity program for the Argentina chapter of Amnesty International.

Milei has waged a cultural war against gender-based policies — what he sees as a dangerous consequence of socialism.

After Milei railed against the crime of femicide as “legally making a woman’s life worth more than a man’s” at the Davos summit last year, his justice minister announced plans to strip the category from the legal code.

Nothing came of that, but his government now is working to stiffen penalties for women who falsely report cases of gender-based violence. It is awaiting congressional debate.

In the last two and a half years, Milei has dissolved Argentina’s women’s ministry, shut down its anti-discrimination institute, gutted support programs for victims of gender violence, banned the use of gender-inclusive language in official documents, and defunded training in gender issues for public school students and state employees.

Among the affected programs is Acompañar, which assisted 350,000 women with aid equivalent to six months’ minimum wage before it was defunded. A 24-hour hotline to help victims lost two-thirds of its budget and half its staff last year. A government-sponsored program providing free legal assistance to people experiencing domestic violence or sexual abuse has also been dismantled.

On Wednesday, protesters prepared to gather at Plaza Congreso, opposite the seat of the National Congress, as they have every year since Chiara Páez’s death in 2015.

Agostina’s family says they’ll join a Cordoba protest that day to demand justice for her killing under the banner of the movement that once made Argentina a regional beacon for social and legal action on gender equality.

“I think this femicide, which caused so much pain, so much shock, also mobilized us, reminded us that this is a problem concerning all of society,” Galkin said of Agostina’s case.

“We are being forced to have conversations about issues we thought we had agreed on, a topic that we thought had been settled.”

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By Joshua McElwee

VATICAN CITY, June 3 (Reuters) – Pope Leo heads to Spain on Saturday for a week-long tour, his first visit to an EU country outside Italy, which will culminate with the pontiff meeting migrants in the Canary Islands who braved dangerous Atlantic waters to enter Europe.

Leo, who drew the ire of U.S. President Donald Trump after criticising his anti-immigration policies, is expected to attract large crowds on the June 6 to 12 visit and will also be the first pope to address the Spanish parliament.

The first U.S. pope’s itinerary includes stops in Madrid, Montserrat and Barcelona, where he will inaugurate the newest tower of the Sagrada Familia, the famed modernist basilica that has become the world’s tallest church.

DEADLY MIGRATION ROUTE

On the last two days of the visit, Leo will travel to the Spanish islands of Tenerife and Gran Canaria, off the western coast of Africa, where he will meet ​with migrants and organizations dedicated to helping them.

The visit to the islands will send a signal that the pope stands “shoulder to shoulder” with migrants, said Caya Suárez Ortega, who heads the Church’s leading NGO in the Canary Islands.

“The first thing the migrants said to me when they were invited (to the papal meetings) … was their enormous gratitude that he would stand alongside them,” said Suárez, director of Caritas Canarias.

More than 3,000 people died in 2025 trying to ​reach the Canary Islands, often in makeshift dinghies, according to NGO Caminando Fronteras.

The pope comes to Spain as Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s government has opened a mass amnesty programme, allowing an estimated 500,000 immigrants to apply for legal status.

Sanchez, who has been lauded abroad after sharply criticizing Trump, is trailing in polls and coming under fire over a string of corruption allegations against his party.

Leo will give two addresses in Madrid to Spain’s political leaders: on Saturday at the Royal Palace after meeting King Felipe and Queen Letizia, and on Monday at parliament.

NUMBERS OF PEOPLE INTERESTED IN VISIT ‘ASTONISHING’

The pope has adopted a more forceful tone in recent months and issued a fervent manifesto last week urging global governments to slow down the development of AI systems.

Leo, who spent decades as a missionary and bishop in Peru before becoming pope last May, is expected to speak Spanish throughout the trip.

Organisers of the pope’s Spain trip said interest in the visit has been strong, with more than 500,000 requesting to attend events.

The largest event is likely to be an outdoor Mass on Sunday in Madrid’s landmark ​Plaza de Cibeles, said Rafael Rubio, the national coordinator for the visit. “The numbers are astonishing,” he said.

The last pope to visit Spain was Benedict XVI, in 2011.

Narciso Michavila Nuñez, a sociologist with the Spanish consulting firm GAD3, said young Spaniards have shown particular interest in the visit. “This is the first time they are going to see a pope,” he said.

After three days in Madrid, Leo is travelling to Catalonia, the autonomous region in northeastern Spain.

In Montserrat, 60 km (37 miles) northwest of Barcelona, he will visit and have lunch with Benedictine monks who live at an 11th century abbey nestled inside the cliffs of a mountain range.

Sister Teresa Forcades, part of a nearby separate community of Benedictine nuns, said her group had not been invited to take part in the papal events there.

“No nun … has been invited to greet the pope or to the lunch,” she said. “Maybe if Pope Leo knew about it, he would like to change it.”

A Vatican spokesman did not respond to a question about why the nuns had not been invited to the events.

POPE LIKELY TO MEET ABUSE VICTIMS

Although it is not on the public agenda, Leo is also likely to have a meeting with Spanish survivors of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy, according to sources with knowledge of the matter.

A 2023 report by Spain’s human rights ombudsman estimated hundreds of thousands of victims of clergy abuse there over decades, echoing similar scandals that have shaken the Church in places across the globe.

The Vatican usually does not announce meetings between the pope and survivors in advance, so as to protect the survivors’ privacy.

Leo, who has undertaken three earlier trips outside Italy since becoming pope, is not known to have previously met with abuse survivors during a visit.

(Reporting by Joshua McElwee; Editing by Alex Richardson)

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By Andrew Osborn

MOSCOW, June 3 (Reuters) – President Vladimir Putin has read long-term ally Armenia the riot act: persist in wanting to join the European Union and you can kiss goodbye to cheap Russian oil and gas.

The Russian leader issued the warning before a parliamentary election in Armenia on Sunday, which polls suggest the party of Western-leaning Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan will win.

It is not an empty threat. Armenia, a landlocked country of 3 million with centuries-old ties to Russia, is highly dependent on Moscow, which has imposed temporary bans on important Armenian exports before the vote.

But Putin’s words also reflect an uncomfortable truth for Moscow. Waging war in Ukraine with no end in sight after more than four years of fighting, Russia is mounting an intensifying and increasingly complex rearguard action around the world to try to retain its geopolitical clout.

While Moscow focuses resources on the war in Ukraine, the European Union and the United States have been courting and squeezing traditional Russian allies and interests, both in what Moscow sees as its own backyard and also further afield.

From Havana and Caracas, from Belgrade to the steppes of Central Asia, and even in west Africa, where Moscow’s forces are helping fight Islamists, Russian influence is under pressure.

RUSSIAN CONCERN

Armenia, a longstanding recipient of Russian largesse and home to a Russian military base, signed a partnership agreement with the U.S. last month and Pashinyan won fulsome endorsement from President Donald Trump.

Armenia, once part of the Soviet Union, also passed a law last year setting out a legal basis for it to join the EU.

“Of course we are deeply concerned about the Armenian authorities’ policy of rapprochement with the Euro-Atlantic community whose core policy is directed against Moscow,” Maria Zakharova, Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, told reporters.

“The Anglo-Saxons are openly boasting about ‘detaching’ Armenia, as they say, from the bear hug of ‘authoritarian Russia’”.

Russian war bloggers and analysts say Russia is facing a concerted and largely Western attempt – as in other regions across the world – to squeeze it out of the wider South Caucasus region, of which Armenia is part.

“In such conditions, the question of adapting Russian strategy (to embrace soft power and economic levers) becomes key,” said Russian analytical Telegram channel “The Secret Chancery”, which has over 400,000 followers.

One source close to the Russian government said Moscow could see that countries such as Armenia were “all waiting to see how the war (in Ukraine) ends” and some were already building new ties while Moscow was largely distracted elsewhere.

For Moscow, Armenia’s hosting a meeting of European leaders including Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy last month was the last straw.

Since then, Russia has temporarily banned the import of many Armenian goods, warned it might cut off cheap oil, gas and rough diamond exports, suggested Armenia could be expelled from the Eurasian Economic Union, a Russian-led trade bloc, and recalled its envoy to Armenia for consultations.

Dmitry Medvedev, the outspoken deputy chairman of Russia’s powerful Security Council, also hinted that Armenia’s prime minister could, if not careful, suffer the fate of Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky whom Josef Stalin had killed with an ice pick.

RUSSIA UNDER PRESSURE

Meanwhile, Trump, who Moscow hoped would have strong-armed Ukraine into suing for peace by now, has instead targeted three traditional Russia-friendly countries – Iran, Venezuela and Cuba.

His actions have lifted oil prices, offering some respite to the war-battered Russian economy, but they have also exposed Moscow’s inability to meaningfully help old friends. Havana has received only one shipment of Russian oil so far.

In Europe, Moscow complains it faces an increasingly hostile continent that is re-arming while holding out the prospect of EU membership to countries where Russia once held sway.

Putin ally Viktor Orban lost power in Hungary in April, leading to the unlocking of billions of euros in EU funding for Budapest. Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic, another Russian ally, is under pressure, with moves under way to abolish visa-free entry for Russians as Belgrade seeks EU membership.

Russia is also feeling the heat in Transdniestria, a Russian-garrisoned separatist enclave which is internationally recognised as part of Moldova, whose current political leadership wants to join the EU.

Russia is also worried about what it casts as encroaching Western influence in Central Asia, while in the South Caucasus Putin is trying to move past a rocky period in relations with oil-producing Azerbaijan, which has strengthened ties with the West in recent years.

(Editing by Timothy Heritage)

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DUBAI, June 3 (Reuters) – An Iranian drone and missile attack struck Kuwait’s international airport early on Wednesday, causing injuries and forcing authorities to divert flights, Kuwait’s state news agency reported.

The attack caused “severe damage” to the airport’s T1 building, the report said, citing the General Civil Aviation Authority.

The U.S. military earlier said two Iranian missiles fired at Kuwait fell short or broke apart en route, and three missiles launched at Bahrain were intercepted by U.S. and Bahraini forces.

U.S. Central Command added that Iran launched ballistic missiles toward regional neighbours but all failed to hit targets.

U.S. forces conducted strikes on Qeshm Island in response to attempted attacks by Iran and defeated multiple Iranian ballistic missiles and drones.

(Reporting by Ahmed Elimam; Editing by Kate Mayberry and Andrew Heavens)

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NEW DELHI (AP) — A fire swept through a building in a New Delhi neighborhood Wednesday, killing at least four people and injuring several others, officials said.

The building in the Malviya Nagar neighborhood in the southern part of the city had a restaurant on the ground floor and residential units above. Fire crews rescued 37 people from the building, fire official Abhilash Malik said.

The fire was extinguished, but how it started was not immediately clear.

Four bodies were recovered from the site, while at least seven people were taken to hospitals for treatment, Jitendra Kumar, a senior administrative official, said.

Fires are common in India, where building laws and safety norms are often flouted by builders and residents.

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TRUJILLO, Peru (AP) — In a desert area along northwestern Peru’s Pacific coast, Gladys Saavedra eyed with suspicion the strangers who arrive at the small market where she works alongside a group of women who, despite meager sales, must collectively give $300 a month to extortionists or risk paying an even higher price.

The market in Trujillo was set on fire last June when the women refused to give in to threats. Days later, they marched, demanding protection from authorities. Nothing changed. But that didn’t surprise Saavedra, as police had failed her in August 2024, when her house was attacked with explosives in another extortion attempt.

That level of violence by Peruvian gangs is the main concern for voters who will elect a new president in a runoff election Sunday. Many will leave their homes to vote fearful of becoming crime victims again during their trip to the polls.

“You can’t even stick your head out for fear of being shot,” Saavedra, 49, said.

The first extortion cases reported in Trujillo took place more than 20 years ago, but the phenomenon has spread throughout Peru in the last five years. During that period, extortion complaints increased fivefold, reaching 28,948 cases last year, while murders doubled, reaching 2,226 in 2025, according to official data.

Police and security experts attribute the expansion of criminal gangs in Trujillo to their involvement in illegal gold mining. They say the gangs initially profited by providing security to illegal gold miners in a nearby town, then used the proceeds to hire hitmen, buy weapons and strengthen their presence in the city.

According to official data, illegal mining generates approximately $7 billion annually, much more than the roughly $1.2 billion generated annually by drug trafficking.

The first victims of extortion were public transportation companies, whose drivers were killed if payment was not made. Transportation workers continue to be targeted, with at least 239 drivers killed last year across the country, according to the independent Observatory of Crime and Violence.

Of those killed, more than half were motorcycle taxi drivers, widely used on the outskirts of cities where roads are often unpaved. But it has been the murders of bus drivers that have triggered transportation strikes and protests.

Experts attribute the increasing power of organized crime in Peru to the profits that decades-old criminal groups are earning from illegal gold mining in the Andes and the Amazon. In 2025, Peru exported 100 tons of illegally mined gold, nearly matching the 109 tons of legally mined gold it exported.

In a Trujillo neighborhood where a quarter of the country’s footwear is manufactured, union leader Máximo Varas said that around 1,500 small business owners in that industry pay extortionists to be able to work.

“Everyone pays — even I get extorted. No one is safe,” he said.

Across Trujillo, several buses, restaurants, corner stores, nightclubs and even schools have stickers placed on their facades. These include a puma, a cross and a Batman logo. Police said the stickers indicate that the businesses have paid extortion fees. So, authorities sometimes go around Trujillo removing those stickers and replacing them with ones from law enforcement.

For businessman Iván Díaz, 58, violence has increased “unreasonably” in Trujillo. In 2023, he was kidnapped for 11 days by criminals dressed as police officers who dragged him from his office. To obtain a $250,000 ransom, his captors cut off part of two fingers on his right hand and sent videos of the torture to his family to “advance the payment.”

“I had to adapt to reality and keep a cool head,” Díaz said.

In May, the courts sentenced four members of the criminal group Los Pulpos, which emerged in Trujillo in the 1990s and later expanded to neighboring Chile, to life imprisonment for Díaz’s kidnapping.

The Ministry of Economy estimated in July that crime costs Peruvians some $5 billion annually. This figure includes state investment to fund police operations, but also private spending on surveillance cameras and security guards.

Peru’s outlying neighborhoods lack paved roads, potable water and electricity, but above all, they lack a police presence. In contrast, wealthier municipalities like the capital’s San Borja, where the two presidential candidates — the conservative Keiko Fujimori and the progressive Roberto Sánchez — live, have a large number of uniformed officers as well as an additional force of private security agents patrolling their streets.

Security experts maintain that combating crime requires an anti-corruption purge of the national police force, which has some 130,000 officers, and significant funding for investigations.

An agent investigating organized crime groups who asked not to be identified because he is not authorized to speak to the press told The Associated Press that due to a lack of technology, the police cannot track the phones associated with the digital wallets that criminals use to receive extortion payments.

Harvey Colchado, a congressman-elect and retired police officer, said each of the country’s 70 police investigative units had a monthly budget of $29,000 five years ago, but now, they have no funds as the state allocated the money elsewhere. He added that this is compounded by laws approved in recent years with the support of the parties of Fujimori and Sánchez that make it difficult to prosecute criminals.

The laws Colchado referred to eliminated preliminary detention in certain cases and raised the threshold for seizing criminal assets and carrying out searches.

“This is a cancer,” Saavedra said. “(Police) don’t have the resources to trace the calls, to know where the messages are coming from. That’s the only way to stop it.”

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Follow AP’s coverage of Latin America and the Caribbean at https://apnews.com/hub/latin-america

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