China’s top leaders have pledged to loosen monetary policy and provide more support for the slowing economy, while Premier Li Qiang swiped at threats of higher tariffs on Chinese exports, saying they hinder global growth.

Shares in Hong Kong jumped Monday after state media released a report on the meeting by the ruling Communist Party’s Politburo that said leaders would “implement more active fiscal policies and moderately loose monetary policies.”

The shift to “moderately loose” from the “prudent” monetary policies of the past 14 years was taken as a significant shift by market players, unleashing a spate of buying that pushed the Hang Seng index up 2.8%.

“This marks a significant recalibration in their approach, aiming to cushion the anticipated economic shocks” (from higher tariffs), Stephen Innes of SPI Asset Management said in a commentary.

Several months ago, the Chinese central bank and other regulators began rolling out various policies aimed at encouraging businesses and households to spend more money. Overall, Monday’s statement mostly reiterated the same broad promises as usual.

“The readout leaves little doubt that the shift toward a more supportive policy stance that began in September is still alive and well,” Julian Evans-Pritchard said in a report. He noted that the last such shift was in late 2008, during the global financial crisis, and that it may be followed by faster interest rate cuts in the coming year.

Monday’s meeting has set the tone for an annual economic planning meeting later in the week that will reaffirm policies for the coming year.

China’s economy has growing a bit more slowly than the official target for a 5% expansion in annual terms this year, and the property market is still in the doldrums. Consumer spending remains subdued, having never fully recovered after the COVID-19 pandemic, and the statement from the Politburo meeting promised a “combination punch” of government spending and easier credit to help boost consumption.

Consumer inflation in November was a lower-than-expected 0.2%, the government reported Monday, down from 0.3% the month before mainly due to lower food prices. That leaves ample room for interest rate cuts, analysts said.

With youth unemployment still relatively high and many households feeling the pinch of lower housing prices and unstable jobs, the statement called for improving the “people’s sense of gain, happiness and security.”

“We must do a good job in people’s livelihood protection and security and stability the ensure the stability of the overall social situation,” it said.

Also Monday, Li, who as premier has the traditional role of overseeing the economy, met with heads of the World Bank and other big international financial organizations.

Li did not refer to the United States by name, but took aim at countries that restrict trade through higher tariffs and other measures, in a veiled slam at Washington at a time when the U.S. has been tightening controls on exports of advanced technology, while President-elect Donald Trump is threatening to sharply hike import duties on Chinese products.

South Korea’s President Yoon Suk Yeol faced parliamentary moves to impeach him after he sent heavily armed forces into Seoul’s streets with his baffling and sudden declaration of martial law that harkened to the country’s past dictatorships.

Opposition parties submitted the impeachment motion just hours after parliament unanimously voted to cancel Yoon’s declaration, forcing him to lift martial law about six hours after it began. Impeaching Yoon requires the support of two-thirds of the National Assembly and at least six of the nine Constitutional Court justices. The liberal opposition Democratic Party holds a majority in the 300-seat parliament and has called for Yoon’s resignation.

A vote on the impeachment motion could be held as early as Friday, Democratic Party lawmaker Kim Yong-min said.

During the tense hours under martial law, heavily armed forces surrounded the parliament, backed by army helicopters and armored vehicles. Lawmakers climbed walls to get into the building and held off troops by activating fire extinguishers. Politician and former news anchor Ahn Gwi-ryeong tried to pull an assault rifle away from a soldier who had pointed it at her chest as she shouted: “Aren’t you ashamed of yourselves?”

The lawmakers who managed to reenter the building rejected Yoon’s martial law declaration 190-0, including 18 lawmakers from Yoon’s party, forcing Yoon to rescind it at a hastily assembled Cabinet meeting.

Yoon ordered martial law without warning in a speech late Tuesday where he vowed to eliminate “anti-state” forces he said were plotting rebellion and accused the main opposition parties of supporting the country’s rival, North Korea.

Yoon gave no direct evidence when he raised the specter of North Korea as a destabilizing force. Yoon has long maintained that a hard line against the North is the only way to stop Pyongyang from following through on its nuclear threats against Seoul.

Until the late 1980s, South Korea had a series of strongmen who repeatedly invoked North Korea when struggling to control domestic dissidents and political opponents. South Korea’s constitution gives the president power to use the military to keep order in “wartime, war-like situations or other comparable national emergency states.” That can include suspending civil rights like the freedom of the press and assembly, and temporarily limiting the powers of the courts and government agencies.

But it also gives the National Assembly power to lift the declaration with a majority vote.

Some experts say the way Yoon imposed martial law went far beyond his legitimate powers. While it comes with far-reaching powers, the constitution doesn’t allow a president to use the military to suspend parliament. Many also question whether the country really faces a situation comparable to war.

The opposition lambasted Yoon’s actions as undemocratic. Opposition leader Lee Jae-myung, who narrowly lost to Yoon in the 2022 presidential election, called Yoon’s announcement “illegal and unconstitutional.”

The sudden declaration was also opposed by the leader of Yoon’s own conservative party, Han Dong-hoon, who called the decision wrong and vowed to “stop it with the people.”

“The people will block the president’s anti-constitutional step. The military must be on the side of the public in any case. Let’s resolutely oppose it,” Kim Dong Yeon, the opposition party governor of Gyeonggi province, which surrounds Seoul, wrote on X.

Average South Koreans were in shock. Social media was flooded with messages expressing surprise and worry over Yoon’s announcement. There were quick claims that the emergency declaration was linked to Yoon’s political struggles.

He has had little success in getting his policies adopted by a parliament that has been controlled by the opposition since he took over in 2022.

Conservatives have said the opposition moves are political revenge for investigations into Lee, who is seen as the favorite for the next presidential election in 2027.

Just this month, Yoon denied wrongdoing in an influence-peddling scandal involving him and his wife. The claims have battered his approval ratings and fueled attacks by his rivals.

The scandal centers on claims that Yoon and first lady Kim Keon Hee exerted inappropriate influence on the conservative ruling People Power Party to pick a certain candidate to run for a parliamentary by-election in 2022 at the request of Myung Tae-kyun, an election broker and founder of a polling agency who conducted free opinion surveys for Yoon before he became president.

A top Romanian court on Thursday asked the official electoral authority to recount and verify all of the ballots cast in the first round of the presidential election, which was won by a far-right outsider candidate, sending shockwaves through the political establishment.

The Constitutional Court in Bucharest approved the recounting of the more than 9.4 million ballots, and said its decision was final. The Central Election Bureau is expected to meet on Thursday afternoon to discuss the request.

Calin Georgescu, a little-known, far-right populist and independent candidate, won the first round, beating the incumbent prime minister. Georgescu was due to face reformist Elena Lasconi, the leader of the Save Romania Union party, in a Dec. 8. runoff.

Georgescu’s unexpected success has prompted nightly protests by people concerned with previous remarks he made in praising Romanian fascist and nationalist leaders and Russian President Vladimir Putin, and believe he poses a threat to democracy.

Without naming Georgescu, Romanian President Klaus Iohannis’ office said following a Supreme Council of National Defense meeting in Bucharest on Thursday that an analysis of documents revealed that “a presidential candidate benefited from massive exposure due to preferential treatment granted by the TikTok platform.”

Earlier this week, Romania’s National Audiovisual Council asked the European Commission to investigate TikTok’s role in the Nov. 24 vote. Pavel Popescu, the vice president of Romania’s media regulator Ancom, said he would request TikTok’s suspension in Romania if investigations find evidence of “manipulation of the electoral process.”

TikTok did not immediately respond to a request from The Associated Press.

The vote recount was prompted by a complaint made by Cristian Terhes, a former presidential candidate of the Romanian National Conservative Party who garnered 1% of the vote. Terhes alleged that Lasconi’s party had urged people to vote before some diaspora polls had closed on Sunday, saying it violated electoral laws against campaign activities on polling day.

After Thursday’s court ruling, Terhes’ press office posted on Facebook that the court ordered the recount “due to indications of fraud,” and alleged that valid votes cast for Ludovic Orban — who had dropped out of the race but remained on the ballot — had been reassigned to Lasconi.

It is the first time in Romania’s 35-year post-communist history that the country’s most powerful party, the Social Democratic Party, did not have a candidate in the second round of a presidential race. Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu resigned as party leader after he narrowly lost to Lasconi by just 2,740 votes.

The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants on Thursday for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his former defense minister and Hamas officials, accusing them of war crimes and crimes against humanity over their 13-month war in Gaza and the October 2023 attack on Israel respectively.

Netanyahu condemned the arrest warrant against him, saying Israel “rejects with disgust the absurd and false actions.” In a statement released by his office, he said: “There is nothing more just than the war that Israel has been waging in Gaza.”

The decision turns Netanyahu and the others into internationally wanted suspects and is likely to further isolate them and complicate efforts to negotiate a cease-fire to end the fighting. But its practical implications could be limited since Israel and its major ally, the United States, are not members of the court and two of the Hamas officials were killed in the conflict.

Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders have condemned ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan’s request for warrants as disgraceful and antisemitic. U.S. President Joe Biden blasted the prosecutor and expressed support for Israel’s right to defend itself against Hamas. Hamas also slammed the request.

The three-judge panel issued a unanimous decision to issue warrants for Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant.

“The Chamber considered that there are reasonable grounds to believe that both individuals intentionally and knowingly deprived the civilian population in Gaza of objects indispensable to their survival, including food, water, and medicine and medical supplies, as well as fuel and electricity,” the decision said.

The court also issued a warrant for Mohammed Deif, one of the leaders of Hamas, over the October 2023 attacks that triggered Israel’s offensive in Gaza. The ICC chief prosecutor withdrew his request for warrants for two other senior Hamas figures, Yahya Sinwar and Ismail Haniyeh, after they were both killed in the conflict.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry said in September that it had submitted two legal briefs challenging the ICC’s jurisdiction and arguing that the court did not provide Israel the opportunity to investigate the allegations itself before requesting the warrants.

“No other democracy with an independent and respected legal system like that which exists in Israel has been treated in this prejudicial manner by the Prosecutor,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Oren Marmorstein wrote on X. He said Israel remained “steadfast in its commitment to the rule of law and justice” and would continue to protect its citizens against militancy.

The ICC is a court of last resort that only prosecutes cases when domestic law enforcement authorities cannot or will not investigate. Israel is not a member state of the court. The country has struggled to investigate itself in the past, rights groups say.

Despite the warrants, none of the suspects is likely to face judges in The Hague anytime soon. The court itself has no police to enforce warrants, instead relying on cooperation from its member states.

South Korean opposition leader Lee Jae-myung was convicted of violating election law and sentenced to a suspended prison term Friday by a court that ruled he made false statements while denying corruption allegations during a presidential campaign.

If it stands, the ruling could significantly shake up the country’s politics by potentially unseating Lee as a lawmaker and denying him a shot at running for president in the next election. But Lee, who faces three other trials over corruption and other criminal charges, is expected to challenge any guilty verdict and it remains unclear whether the Supreme Court will decide on any of the cases before the presidential vote in March 2027.

Lee told reporters that he plans to appeal Friday’s verdict by the Seoul Central District Court, which gave him a sentence of one year in prison, suspended for two years. Under South Korean law, Lee would lose his legislative seat and be barred from running in elections for five years if he receives either a penalty exceeding a 1 million won ($715) fine for election law violations or any prison sentence for other crimes.

“There are still two more courts left in the real world, and the courts of public opinion and history are eternal,” he said, apparently referring to plans to take the case to the Supreme Court. “This is a conclusion that’s impossible to accept.”

Lee, a firebrand liberal who narrowly lost the 2022 election to conservative President Yoon Suk Yeol, has steadfastly denied wrongdoing. Choo Kyung-ho, the floor leader of Yoon’s People Power Party, said the verdict showed that “justice was alive” and called for the judiciary to conclude the case swiftly.

The ruling drew intense media coverage and seemingly thousands of protesters. Surrounded by police lines, Lee’s supporters and critics occupied separate streets near the court, shouting opposing slogans and holding signs that said “Lee Jae-myung is innocent” and “Arrest Lee Jae-myung.” There were no immediate reports of major clashes.

Prosecutors indicted Lee in 2022 over charges that he made false claims related to two controversial development projects in the city of Seongnam, where he was mayor from 2010 to 2018, while campaigning as the presidential candidate for the Democratic Party.

One of the comments cited by prosecutors is related to suspicions that Seongnam city in 2015 changed the land-use designation to allow a housing project on a site previously preserved as green space due to lobbying by private developers.

Lee said during a parliamentary hearing in October 2021 that the city was instead “coerced” by the national government to make the change to the site in the district of Baekhyeon-dong. Prosecutors say there’s no evidence to back Lee’s claim, which has been denied by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport.

Prosecutors also cited a TV interview Lee gave in December 2021, when he said he didn’t know a senior official at Seongnam city’s urban development arm during his time as mayor. Lee spoke a day after the official was found dead during an investigation into a property development project in the district of Daejang-dong, which reaped huge profits for a small asset management firm and its affiliates and raised suspicions about possible corrupt links between them, city officials and politicians.

Prosecutors argued that Lee was lying to the public to distance himself from the controversies and improve his chances of winning the election. They had sought a two-year prison sentence for him.

The court found Lee guilty over the comments related to the Baekhyeon-dong project, saying it was clear that the city’s decision to change the site’s land-use designation wasn’t based on demands by the land ministry. It acquitted Lee on most of the charges related to his Daejang-dong comments, citing a lack of evidence.

In a matter of minutes, flash floods caused by heavy downpours in eastern Spain swept away almost everything in their path. With no time to react, people were trapped in vehicles, homes and businesses. Many died and thousands of livelihoods were shattered.

A week later, authorities have recovered 218 bodies — with 213 of them in the eastern Valencia region. Police, firefighters and soldiers continued to search Tuesday for an unknown number of missing people.

In many of the 69 devastated localities, mostly located in the southern outskirts of Valencia city, people still face shortages of basic goods. Water is back to running through pipes but authorities say it is only for cleaning and not fit for drinking. Lines form at impromptu emergency kitchens and food relief stands in streets still covered with mud and debris.

Thousands of volunteers are helping soldiers and police reinforcements with the gargantuan task of cleaning up the mire and the countless wrecked cars. At least 46,000 insurance claims for totaled vehicles had been filed, according to Spain’s Economy Minister Carlos Cuerpo.

The ground floors of thousands of homes have been ruined. Inside some of the vehicles that the water washed away or trapped in underground garages, there were still bodies waiting to be identified.

The frustration over the crisis management boiled over on Sunday when a crowd in hard-hit Paiporta hurled mud and other objects at Spain’s royals, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and regional officials when they made their first visit to the epicenter of the flood damage.

The storms concentrated over the Magro and Turia river basins and, in the Poyo canal, produced walls of water that overflowed riverbanks, catching people unaware as they went on with their daily lives on Tuesday evening and early Wednesday.

In the blink of an eye, the muddy water covered roads and railways, and entered houses and businesses in towns and villages on the southern outskirts of Valencia city. Drivers had to take shelter on car roofs, while residents took refuge on higher ground.

Spain’s national weather service said that in the hard-hit locality of Chiva, it rained more in eight hours than it had in the preceding 20 months, calling the deluge “extraordinary.” Other areas on the southern outskirts of Valencia city didn’t get rain before they were wiped out by the wall of water that overflowed the drainage canals.

When authorities sent alerts to mobile phones warning of the seriousness of the flooding and asking people to stay at home, many were already on the road, working or covered in water in low-lying areas or underground garages, which became death traps.

Scientists trying to explain what happened see two likely connections to human-caused climate change. One is that warmer air holds and then dumps more rain. The other is possible changes in the jet stream — the river of air above land that moves weather systems across the globe — that spawn extreme weather.

Climate scientists and meteorologists said the immediate cause of the flooding is called a cut-off lower-pressure storm system that migrated from an unusually wavy and stalled jet stream. That system simply parked over the region and poured rain. This happens often enough that in Spain they call them DANAs, the Spanish acronym for the system, meteorologists said.

And then there is the unusually high temperature of the Mediterranean Sea. It had its warmest surface temperature on record in mid-August, at 28.47 degrees Celsius (83.25 degrees Fahrenheit), said Carola Koenig of the Centre for Flood Risk and Resilience at Brunel University of London.

The extreme weather event came after Spain battled with prolonged droughts in 2022 and 2023. Experts say that drought and flood cycles are increasing with climate change.

“Climate change kills, and now, unfortunately, we are seeing it firsthand,” Sánchez said Tuesday after announcing a 10.6-billion-euro relief package for 78 municipalities.

A court in Russia’s far-eastern city of Vladivostok on Friday convicted a former U.S. Consulate worker charged with cooperating with a foreign state and sentenced him to four years and 10 months in prison.

Robert Shonov, a Russian citizen and former employee of the U.S. Consulate in Vladivostok, was arrested in May 2023. Russia’s top domestic security agency, the FSB, accused him of “gathering information about the special military operation” in Ukraine, a partial call-up in Russian regions and its influence on “protest activities of the population in the runup to the 2024 presidential election.”

The U.S. Embassy in Moscow condemned the sentence and rejected the charges against him as “completely false and unfounded.”

“The criminal prosecution of Mr. Shonov only underscores the campaign of intimidation the Russian government is increasingly taking against its own citizens,” the embassy said in a statement.

Shonov was charged under a new article of Russian law that criminalizes “cooperation on a confidential basis with a foreign state, international or foreign organization to assist their activities clearly aimed against Russia’s security.” Kremlin critics and human rights advocates have said it is so broad that it can be used to punish any Russian with foreign connections. It carries a prison sentence of up to eight years.

The U.S. State Department last year said Shonov worked at the U.S. Consulate in Vladivostok for more than 25 years. The consulate closed in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic and never reopened.

The State Department has said that after a Russian government order in April 2021 required the dismissal of all local employees in U.S. diplomatic outposts in Russia, Shonov worked at a company the U.S. contracted with to support its embassy in Moscow.

State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said in May 2023 that Shonov’s only role at the time of his arrest was “to compile media summaries of press items from publicly available Russian media sources.”

Shonov was held in the Lefortovo Prison in Moscow, notorious for its harsh conditions, pending investigation, but stood trial in Vladivostok’s Primorsky District Court.

In addition to a prison term, which Shonov was ordered to serve in a general regime penal colony, the court ruled that he must pay a fine of 1 million rubles (just over $10,000) and face additional restrictions for 16 months after finishing his prison sentence.