Iran's foreign ministry said Monday that a defense pact signed last week between Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan was "a sign of a change in the perception" of countries in the region towards the United States.

Iran set preconditions on Saturday for a reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, including compensation for war damages, complicating a potential deal to open the waterway essential to the world economy.

Iran's Revolutionary Guards on Sunday said they would not reopen the Strait of Hormuz until the United States accepts all of Tehran's demands.

A drone that entered Bulgaria from neighboring Romania on Saturday exploded near the border between the two countries and the Trans-Balkan gas pipeline, which links Turkey to Ukraine, Bulgarian Prime Minister Rumen Radev announced.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will on Saturday make his first official visit to Serbia, one of the few European countries that have maintained friendly relations with Russia despite its invasion of Ukraine.

The office of Serbia's populist President Aleksandar Vucic announced the visit late Thursday. Zelensky's office has not officially confirmed his trip to Belgrade.

Ukrainian long-range drones hit a warehouse in the Ural Mountains belonging to Russia's biggest online retailer, more than 2,000 kilometers (1,200 miles) from the two countries' border, local officials and the company said Friday.

Ukraine has regularly hit targets in the distant Urals this year and has even struck a Russian oil refinery in western Siberia, nearly 2,500 kilometers (1,550 miles) from the border. The attacks are examples of how Kyiv has used drone innovation as a key part of its response to the invasion by its much bigger enemy more than four years ago.

A 20-minute burst of electricity is a small miracle in Havana nowadays — a miracle that sometimes comes at 3 a.m.

That's when 72-year-old Leidis Rodríguez frantically cooked beans after the lights switched on this week following hours of uninterrupted blackouts.

The suspect in a school shooting in Thailand killed a total of eight people Friday, police said.

First he shot his grandparents dead, using his grandfather's handgun, then went to his school north of Bangkok and killed three teachers and three students, national police said in a statement.

A Republican-led U.S. Senate panel on Thursday voted to hold the country's former top infectious disease official Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress, in an escalation of efforts to blame him for potential pandemic missteps.

On the advice of lawyers Fauci last week had invoked his constitutional right to stay silent under antagonistic questioning from Republican senators, as they probed him over unsubstantiated claims that the origins of the pandemic were covered up.

Hiroshima on Thursday marked the 81st anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombing of the western Japanese city, with its mayor criticizing major powers for waging wars and urging them to stop justifying the possession of nuclear weapons as a method of deterrence.

"Downplaying the inhumanity of nuclear weapons and accepting the use of force to pursue one's own prosperity risk cycles of violent retaliation that could ultimately result in another Hiroshima or Nagasaki," Mayor Kazumi Matsui said.