Berlin police said Friday they have launched an investigation into Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas over his comments on the Holocaust during a recent visit to the German capital.

Police have received a complaint accusing Abbas of "relativizing the Holocaust" and are investigating "on suspicion of inciting hatred", a police spokeswoman told AFP.

Troubled by the number of unvaccinated COVID-19 patients showing up at his hospital, the French doctor logged on to Facebook and uploaded a video urging people to get vaccinated.

He was soon swarmed by dozens, then hundreds, then more than 1,000 hateful messages from an anti-vaccine extremist group known as V_V. The group, active in France and Italy, has harassed doctors and public health officials, vandalized government offices and tried to disrupt vaccine clinics.

The sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said her country will never accept South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol's "foolish" offer of economic benefits in exchange for denuclearization steps, accusing Seoul of recycling proposals Pyongyang already rejected.

In a commentary published by state media Friday, Kim Yo Jong stressed that her country has no intentions to give away its nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles program for economic cooperation, saying "no one barters its destiny for corn cake."

China's response to U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan was anything but subtle — dispatching warships and military aircraft to all sides of the self-governing island democracy, and firing ballistic missiles into the waters nearby.

The dust has still not settled, with Taiwan this week conducting drills of its own and Beijing announcing it has more maneuvers planned, but experts say a lot can already be gleaned from what China has done, and has not done, so far. China will also be drawing lessons on its own military capabilities from the exercises, which more closely resembled what an actual strike on the island claimed by Beijing as its own territory would look like, and from the American and Taiwanese response.

For tiny Moldova, an impoverished, landlocked nation that borders war-torn Ukraine but isn't in the European Union or NATO, it's been another week plagued by bomb threats.

On an overcast day outside the international airport serving Moldova's capital of Chisinau, hundreds of people lined up this week as bomb-sniffing dogs examined the vicinity. That's now a common scene in Europe's poorest nation as it battles what observers believe are attempts to destabilize the former Soviet republic amid Russia's war in Ukraine.

Turkey's leader and the U.N. chief have met in Ukraine with President Volodymr Zelensky in a high-powered bid to ratchet down a war raging for nearly six months. But little immediate progress was reported.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said he would follow up with Russian President Vladimir Putin, given that most of the matters discussed would require the Kremlin's agreement.

Last week's attack on author Salman Rushdie and the indictment of an Iranian national for plotting to murder former national security adviser John Bolton have given the Biden administration new headaches as it attempts to negotiate a return to the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran.

A resolution may be tantalizingly close. But as the U.S. and Europe weigh Iran's latest response to an EU proposal described as the West's final offer, the administration faces new and potentially insurmountable domestic political hurdles to forging a lasting agreement.

In the Brazilian Amazon these days, it's nearly impossible to run for office talking up the environment.

More common is a scene like this: A candidate for Congress parades a helicopter — the symbol of illegal gold mining — painted with the Brazilian flag, through the streets of the Amazon city of Boa Vista. He defends a gold rush that has devastated Indigenous territories and contaminated rivers. In a neighboring state an Indigenous candidate stops wearing green clothing in public out of fear of violence.

The U.S. government will hold trade talks with Taiwan in a sign of support for the island democracy that China claims as its own territory, prompting Beijing to warn Thursday it will take action if necessary to "safeguard its sovereignty."

The announcement of trade talks comes after Beijing fired missiles into the sea to intimidate Taiwan after U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi this month became the highest-ranking American official to visit the island in 25 years.

Fashion designer Giorgio Armani and dozens of others were forced to flee from their vacation villas overnight as firefighters worked to extinguish the remnants of two wildfires on the Sicilian island of Pantelleria on Thursday.

A photo shows flames that appear to encroach on Armani's villa, but his press office said they stopped short of the property. Armani and guests evacuated to a boat in the harbor overnight.