Before fleeing North Korea in 2014, Jeon Jae-hyun kept U.S. dollars as a store of value and used Chinese yuan to make everyday purchases at markets, restaurants and other places. He used the domestic currency, the won, only occasionally.

"There were not many places to use the won, and we actually had little faith in our currency," Jeon said during a recent interview in Seoul. "Even the quality of North Korean bills was awful as they often ripped when we put them in our pockets."

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is studying the history books and considering the appointment of a mix of lawmakers and business leaders as he lays the groundwork for a new commission to tackle the nation's growing debt.

McCarthy is fresh off his biggest political victory since becoming speaker in January. He got the White House to negotiate on a bill that suspends the debt ceiling into January 2025 while also producing a projected $1.5 trillion in deficit savings over the coming decade. But the legislation only focused on a sliver of the federal spending that occurs each year and excluded programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid that account for the majority of government spending and are the biggest drivers of the debt.

Three people were lightly wounded after a drone crashed into a residential building in southwestern Russia near Ukraine, a regional governor said, exposing the latest vulnerabilities in the country's air defense systems as President Vladimir Putin's war in Ukraine increasingly affects Russian soil.

The latest drone attack to target Russian cities in recent weeks comes as Ukraine has been intensifying its efforts to expel Russian forces and rising talk of a Ukrainian counteroffensive in pockets of a vast swath of southern and eastern Ukraine that Russia invaded more than 15 months ago.

Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg said Friday she will no longer be able to skip classes as a way to draw attention to climate change because she is graduating from high school.

Thunberg, 20, started staging Friday protests outside the Swedish parliament building during school hours in 2018. Teenagers from around the world followed her lead, leading to an international student movement called Fridays for Future.

Tens of thousands of people on Thursday marched in Tel Aviv's Pride parade — an annual celebration that turns the city's seaside promenade into a boisterous festival of rainbow flags, pounding music and colorful costumes.

It was the first time that Tel Aviv has held the parade since Israel's new far-right government, which is stacked with openly anti-LGBTQ+ members, took office.

On a boat off the coast of an island near Abu Dhabi, marine scientist Hamad al-Jailani feels the corals, picked from the reef nursery and packed in a box of seawater, and studies them carefully, making sure they haven't lost their color.

The corals were once bleached. Now they're big, healthy and ready to be moved back to their original reefs in the hope they'll thrive once more.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan won reelection last month despite a battered economy and a cost-of-living crisis that experts say are exacerbated by his unconventional economic policies.

The longtime leader appointed an internationally respected former banker as finance and treasury minister and on Friday named a former co-CEO of a U.S.-based bank as head of the central bank.

Israeli soldiers fired tear gas to disperse scores of Lebanese protesters who pelted the Israeli forces with stones along the border with Lebanon Friday, leaving some Lebanese demonstrators and troops suffering breathing problems.

The tension on the edge of the Lebanese border village of Kfarshouba began earlier this week over the Israeli military digging in the area that Lebanon claims.

For days, the Ukrainian teenager has waited in the attic, just down the street from the cemetery of her flooded town, marking time with her 83-year-old grandfather and two other elderly people and hoping for help to escape the deluge of a catastrophic dam collapse.

But help is slow in coming to Oleshky, a Russian-occupied town across the Dnieper River from the city of Kherson with a prewar population of 24,000, according to those stranded and their desperate Ukrainian rescuers. Russian forces are taking rescuers' boats, they say. Some say the soldiers will only help people with Russian passports.

Philippine troops, police and rescue workers began forcibly evacuating residents near Mayon Volcano on Friday as its increasing unrest indicated a violent eruption of one of the country's most active volcanoes is possible within weeks or days.

The area within a 6-kilometer (3.7-mile) radius of Mayon's crater is supposed to be off-limits due to possible volcanic emissions, lava flows, rockfalls and other hazards. But many poor villagers have built houses and tended farms in Mayon's danger zone over the years.