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SAO PAULO (AP) — The fate of Brazil’s former President Jair Bolsonaro is largely in the hands of five people.

Within the next three weeks, a panel of five of Brazil’s 11 Supreme Court justices will decide whether Bolsonaro and 33 others charged by the country’s prosecutor-general of attempting a coup will stand trial.

To expedite certain cases, including criminal ones, Brazil’s top court can use one of its two five-justice panels, both of which are permanent and exclude the chief justice. Changes in each panel usually take place mostly by request or when one of its members becomes chief justice. In Brazil, the chief justice serves for two years.

As rapporteur of the cases against Bolsonaro, Justice Alexandre de Moraes was authorized to bring them before the panel he sits on.

The 5-judge panel that could decide Bolsonaro’s future excludes the two justices he appointed: André Mendonça and Kássio Nunes Marques. They sit on the other panel of the court.

Bolsonaro’s lawyers have said that they want the decision to fall on the full-court, not just on the 5-justice panel. But that decision can only be made by de Moraes, as the rapporteur of the case, or by three of the justices in the panel —a majority.

If the charges are accepted, that same panel could become the main judicial body to hear Bolsonaro’s defense, witness testimony and sentencing.

Brazil’s legal experts are split on whether to keep the trial within the 5-justice panel, so it doesn’t drag into the 2026 presidential election, or to move for a full-court decision, which would carry greater authority.

Luis Henrique Machado, a criminal attorney and professor at the IDP university in Brasilia, says it is “virtually impossible” that the panel will reject the charges against Bolsonaro, though this does not guarantee a guilty verdict.

The former President denies any wrongdoing in all five counts against him and has claimed that he is being politically persecuted.

Here are the judges set to decide whether Bolsonaro will be on trial and likely rule on the case:

De Moraes is the rapporteur of the cases against the former president in the court and also a target of Bolsonaro and his allies. Appointed by former president Michel Temer in 2017, de Moraes is regarded as a conservative member of the court who, unlike his peers, has experience as public security secretary. The 56-year-old justice was also targeted by billionaire Elon Musk, who advocated for nis impeachment for alleged judicial overreach.

Lúcia, who is also the chairwoman of Brazil’s top electoral court, was appointed by Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in 2006 during his first term. Since then, the 70-year-old justice has been considered one of the harshest on the court on criminal cases, including those once aimed at the current president. Lúcia has often followed de Moraes in her decisions regarding democratic guardrails. Two years ago, she wrote in one of her rulings that Bolsonaro didn’t respect the presidency.

Zanin is the chairman of the panel. The 49-year-old was Lula’s attorney between 2013 and 2023, when he was appointed by the leftist leader to the country’s top court. Zanin’s work helped overturn Lula’s graft conviction at the Supreme Court, allowing him to leave jail and defeat Bolsonaro in the 2022 election. He was a critic of judicial overreach during the sprawling Car Wash corruption probe, which put Lula behind bars for almost one year.

A former federal judge who transitioned to politics before being appointed to Brazil’s top court, Dino, 56, is the latest justice to take his seat. He was appointed by Lula in 2023 after serving as his justice minister. He was on that job when Bolsonaro supporters trashed government buildings on Jan. 8, 2023, which the country’s prosecutor-general says was part of a plan to return the far-right leader to the presidency. Dino has been a Bolsonaro critic for years.

Fux, regarded by his peers as a moderate, was appointed in 2011 by then President Dilma Rousseff. The 71-year-old had a difficult relationship with the Bolsonaro presidency during his time as chief-justice between 2020 and 2022, particularly with respect to matters regarding the COVID-19 pandemic. When he left the position, shortly before the latest presidential election, he said the court was targeted daily by “hostile words or undemocratic acts.” He often follows de Moraes’ decisions.

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The deafening booms of the first airstrikes. Buildings bursting into flames, reduced to rubble. Terrified people hiding in basements. Cries of despair and hugs of support.

This was the reality of Feb. 24, 2022, the first day of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

From the first explosions on the morning of that fateful day, Ukraine was forever changed. By nightfall, Ukrainians were counting their first dead and in many parts of the country found themselves under Russian occupation.

Others crammed into overcrowded trains, rushing to escape rapidly advancing Russian forces.

Uncertainty and dread hung in the air. No one knew whether Ukraine could withstand the onslaught of a far larger and better-equipped Russian army.

Three years on, the constant fear — for one’s own life, for loved ones — is just as unrelenting as it was that first day.

Europe’s biggest armed conflict since World War II has claimed tens of thousands of lives on both sides. Thousands of Ukrainian civilians have been killed in the fighting. Millions have fled their country, many unlikely to return.

Countless families have been decimated, forced to bury loved ones, their homes and livelihoods shattered. A fifth of Ukraine remains under Russian occupation, with no signs that Kyiv will be able to regain control of the territories.

Those who have taken up arms to fight for Ukraine and who have survived this far don’t know what tomorrow will bring and when — and if — they can go back to their civilian lives.

And while Ukrainians have adapted to life at war, that first day remains seared in their memory, forever dividing life to “before” and “after.”

This photo gallery, curated by photo editor Tony Hicks, highlights some of the most compelling images by The Associated Press from that first day of the war.

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MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico’s government is reviewing a petition by Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, a longtime leader of the Sinaloa cartel who is jailed in the United States, to be returned to Mexico for trial, President Claudia Sheinbaum said Friday.

The president confirmed Mexico’s consulate in New York had received the request.

Sheinbaum noted that Mexico’s attorney general was already investigating the circumstances of how Zambada was arrested in the U.S. with another Sinaloa cartel leader by authorities near El Paso, Texas in July. He is awaiting trial.

“No one is defending this person,” Sheinbaum said. “Beyond the person and his crimes … the issue is how he was detained.”

Zambada has maintained that he was kidnapped by Joaquín Guzmán López, one of the sons of former cartel leader Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, and flown to the United States. The Mexican government shortly after said it was opening an investigation of possible treason against those involved in turning over a Mexican citizen to foreign agents.

Guzmán López was also arrested by U.S. authorities on arrival in Texas.

In his request, Zambada argued that the legality of his entering the United States has not been verified and asked that he instead be tried in Mexico, according to a report in Mexico’s Reforma newspaper Friday.

He also asked the Mexican government to intervene so that the death penalty is not a possibility in his case, the report said.

In January, U.S. prosecutors said they were discussing a possible plea deal with Zambada.

Zambada is one of the most notorious drug traffickers in the world and a leader of the powerful Sinaloa cartel for decades alongside “El Chapo.” He is known for running the cartel’s smuggling operations while keeping a lower profile.

Mexico could ask that the death penalty not be on the table for Zambada’s case since there is no death penalty in Mexico, but normally the U.S. only repatriates convicted criminals after they serve their sentences.

An exception came in November 2020 during the first administration of President Donald Trump. Drug trafficking charges against Mexico’s former Defense Secretary Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos were dropped after Mexico protested his arrest in Los Angeles. The U.S. returned Cienfuegos to Mexico where he was promptly exonerated.

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WARSAW, Poland (AP) — A Polish court on Friday handed an eight-year prison term to a Ukrainian man convicted of planning acts of sabotage and arson on Russia’s behalf.

The court in the southwestern city of Wroclaw found the 51-year-old man, identified only as Serhyi S., guilty of being part of a criminal ring and of preparing to set fire to various structures in the city.

Polish state security officers arrested the man in January 2024 and he had remained under arrest. Poland’s Internal Security Agency alleged that he was acting for Russia.

Authorities said he was preparing to set fire to a U.S.-owned paint factory and to other objects.

The man has denied the charges, but admitted to accepting online orders from an unknown person to commit arson in return for money.

Four other people have been charged in the case and more than a dozen others of Polish, Ukrainian and Belarusian citizenship have been arrested in connection with other acts of sabotage or espionage.

Poland’s government says the country is being targeted by Russia as part of Moscow’s hybrid war on Western countries that support Poland’s neighbour Ukraine in its war against Russian invasion.

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BRATISLAVA, Slovakia (AP) — Thousands rallied all across Slovakia on Friday to mark the seventh anniversary of the slayings of an investigative journalist and his fiancee.

The rallies are part of a wave of protests against the pro-Russia policies of populist Prime Minister Robert Fico.

People in Slovakia’s capital, Bratislava, observed a minute of silence to honor Ján Kuciak and Martina Kušnírová, both age 27, were shot dead at their home in the town of Velka Maca, east of Bratislava, on Feb. 21, 2018.

The killings prompted major street protests unseen since the 1989 anti-communist Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia. The ensuing political crisis led to the collapse of a coalition government headed by Fico.

Kuciak had been investigating possible government corruption, among other issues, when he was killed.

People applauded the parents of Kuciak and the mother of Kušnírová who greeted them from the stage.

“I believe that our common fight will be successful,” said Jozef Kuciak, the father of Ján.

Marián Kočner, a businessman who had been accused of masterminding the killings, has been acquitted twice. Prosecutors have said they believe Kočner paid the convicted triggerman to carry it out and appealed.

The current anti-government protests are the biggest demonstrations since the 2018 slayings.

They are fueled by Fico’s recent trip to Moscow for talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin, a rare visit to the Kremlin by a European Union leader since Moscow’s all-out invasion of Ukraine began almost three years ago and his recent remarks that Slovakia might leave the 27-nation EU and NATO.

“We’ve had enough of Fico,” people chanted.

The crowds at rallies in 47 towns and cities at home and 16 abroad, according to organizers, demanded Fico’s resignation. About 10,000 protesters chanted “Resign, resign,” at Freedom Square in Bratislava.

Fico’s views on Russia have sharply differed from the European mainstream. He returned to power last year after his leftist party Smer (Direction) won a parliamentary election in 2023.

He has since ended Slovakia’s military aid for Ukraine, criticized EU sanctions on Russia and vowed to block Ukraine from joining NATO. He declared Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as an enemy after Ukraine halted on Russian gas supplies to Slovakia and some other European customers.

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SAO PAULO (AP) — A bus carrying university students and a truck collided on a highway in southeastern Brazil, killing 12 passengers and injuring 21 others, authorities said Friday.

The truck driver, who was also injured, tried to flee the scene of the crash late Thursday night on a highway near Nuporanga, a city about 370 kilometers (230 miles) from the state’s capital, but was caught and hospitalized. He was later charged with attempting to flee the scene, involuntary homicide and bodily harm.

All of the dead were students from the University of Franca, officials said. The injured were taken to hospitals in the region.

Local television stations broadcast images from the crash scene showing the bus, its left side completely destroyed in the collision.

Gov. Tarcísio de Freitas declared three days of official mourning in the state of Sao Paulo, where the accident occurred.

“It is with great sadness and sorrow that we receive the news that our students had their dreams cut short in a tragic accident,” the university said in a statement.

In 2024, more than 10,000 people died in traffic accidents in Brazil, according to the Ministry of Transportation.

In December, another crash between a passenger bus and a truck killed 38 people on a highway in Minas Gerais state.

Last September, a bus carrying the Coritiba Crocodiles football team flipped on a road, killing three people. The bus was traveling from the southern city of Curitiba to a game in Rio de Janeiro, where the team was to play in the country’s American football championship. The game was canceled following the deadly accident. ____

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BISHKEK (Reuters) – Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, two ex-Soviet Central Asian states, said on Friday that they had resolved a decades-old border dispute that had sparked clashes between different ethnic groups that had killed over a hundred people.

Top security officials from both countries signed an agreement setting down the state borders over more than 970 km (600 miles) after resolving disputes over certain sections. The document must now be signed by the countries’ presidents.

Two days of skirmishes in border regions killed more than 100 people in September 2022 and prompted the evacuation of about 140,000 residents. Similar clashes in April 2021 killed about 20 people and injured more than 200.

“The border demarcation between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan is taking place after two quite bloody conflicts and this complicates the problem,” Temur Umarov, a Central Asian expert at the Berlin Carnegie centre, told Reuters.

“This is a sensitive political issue. If the documents agreed on are published, they will become of considerable public interest and groups in both countries could well oppose the newly-agreed borders.”

Border issues in Central Asia have persisted since the Soviet era, when authorities made demarcations that sought to reflect the ethnic make-up of specific regions.

But settlements in which other groups were predominant often found themselves on the wrong side of a border.

Both Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan host Russian military bases and maintain close ties with Moscow.

Tajikistan, with a population of 10 million and Kyrgyzstan, with more than seven million, are among the poorest countries in a region subject to unrest.

A civil war in newly-independent Tajikistan in the 1990s, pitting Russian-backed government troops against Islamist and other groups, killed tens of thousands of people.

(Reporting by Aigerim Turgunbayeva, writing by Ron Popeski; Editing by Ros Russell)

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SURYAPET, India (AP) — Chants of “Om Linga, Om Linga” resonated as barefoot Hindu pilgrims, many balancing offering-filled baskets and clay pitchers on their heads, climbed more than 100 steps to a hilltop shrine in southern India.

One family led a goat wearing a marigold garland around its neck. A burly man carrying two young children in his arms gripped a live chicken in his free hand while another man carried a goat across his shoulders.

The animals were offered as sacrifices to Lingamanthula Swamy, believed to be a form of Lord Shiva, and his sister Choudamma, in return for prosperity and protection.

A box in which idols of Lingamanthula, his sister, and other deities are stored was brought to the Lingamanthula Swamy temple during the pilgrimage and opened ceremoniously in front of the devotees.

Their pilgrimage, known as the Peddagattu Jatara, takes place every two years. During the five-day festival that ended Thursday, tens of thousands visited the temple in Suryapet, in the southern state of Telangana.

Women wore bright clothes and flowers in their braided hair. Tumeric, an Indian cooking staple but also essential in Hindu rituals, was made into a paste and smeared on the temple steps and walls, as well as the foreheads of the goats before they were sacrificed.

The pilgrimage is believed to have originated in the 16th century — before the temple was built on the huge rock that gave the pilgrimage its name Peddagattu, or “large rock” in the local Telugu language.

At the central shrine, clay pitchers filled with bonam — rice cooked with the coarse sugar known as jaggery — were offered. Devotees walked clockwise around the shrine, under the dappled light filtering from bamboo canopies shielding them from the blazing sun. Some played drums, danced and enacted scenes from Hindu epics. Others chanted prayers and walked reverently with folded palms.

A woman wearing a holy mark on her forehead went into a trance shouting and swaying violently. The words out of her mouth were guttural and slurred but the pious surrounded her and asked for blessings.

Devotees, who arrived from faraway places, cooked their sacrificed animals on open fires outside their tents on the grounds surrounding the temple. The food was then shared among family and friends with much merriment and cheer.

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MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — Australia warned international airlines flying between Australian airports and New Zealand to beware of Chinese warships conducting a live-fire exercise in the Tasman Sea, Foreign Minister Penny Wong said Friday.

Wong confirmed an Australian Broadcasting Corp. report that regulator Airservices Australia had warned commercial pilots of a potential hazard in airspace between the countries as three Chinese warships conduct exercises off the Australian east coast.

Several international flights had diverted as a result, ABC reported.

“It would be normal practice where a task group is engaging in exercises for there to be advice given to vessels and aircraft in the area and Airservices Australia is doing what it should do, which is to give that advice,” Wong told ABC.

Australia was discussing with China about the notification and transparency around its naval exercises, “particularly live-fire exercises,” Wong said.

Australian military ships and planes have been monitoring the Chinese warships for days as they pass in international waters off the Australian east coast.

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WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — A decade after wellness influencer Belle Gibson admitted she didn’t have terminal brain cancer, which she claimed was cured by the healthy lifestyle that made her famous, her story has inspired a new Netflix series — and fresh outrage in Australia about the case’s lack of resolution.

Authorities said this week they’re still pursuing the disgraced Instagram star for unpaid fines, fueling ongoing ire among Australians about one of the country’s most brazen online scams — an episode that drew attention to the destructive harms of false health claims on social media.

Apple Cider Vinegar, Netflix’s dramatic retelling of Gibson’s story released this month, doesn’t recount what happened after it was revealed in 2015 that she wasn’t sick. In real life, she never faced criminal charges.

But in 2017, Australia’s federal court fined her 410,000 Australian dollars ($261,000), which she had raised for charity and failed to donate. The consumer watchdog in the state of Victoria is still trying to recover the funds, a spokesperson told The Associated Press.

Gibson’s healthy recipe app, The Whole Pantry, had 200,000 downloads in one month from the Apple store in 2013. She claimed proceeds from the app and her cookbook — published by a Penguin imprint — would be donated to charities and to the family of a child with cancer.

Only 2% of the total was donated and Gibson was found to have breached consumer law. A court ordered her to produce the remaining funds and barred her from making health claims.

In a letter to the court, Gibson said she was in debt, didn’t have a job and couldn’t pay the costs.

“Consumer Affairs Victoria has continued to undertake actions to enforce the debt owed by Annabelle Natalie Gibson (Belle Gibson) under court order,” said a statement from the agency that was supplied on Wednesday.

The statement did not say if any of the money has been recovered. Authorities have raided Gibson’s home twice in attempts to seize assets, but they didn’t publicly divulge an outcome.

The AP tried to reach Gibson for comment but didn’t receive a response. She hasn’t spoken publicly in years and wasn’t involved with, or paid by, the creators of the Netflix show.

Jacinta Allan, the premier of Victoria, said this month she was “disappointed” the case remains unresolved. But the authorities “won’t let up,” Allan told reporters.

Journalist Richard Guilliatt, who in 2015 was the first to report that Gibson was lying, said the lack of legal consequences still fuels “vitriol” toward the erstwhile influencer.

“The thing remains sort of like an open wound,” he said. “What she has suffered is just incredible public humiliation. There’s a part of me that thinks people are just going to have to let it go at some point.”

Gibson’s book publisher paid a $30,000 ($19,000 US) fine in the civil case for failing to fact-check her claims.

While Gibson hasn’t faced more charges, her case had other repercussions. Australia’s code governing therapeutic health claims was dramatically overhauled in 2022 and breaches can now be punished by millions of dollars in fines — changes some analysts attribute in part to Gibson’s conduct.

Paid testimonials for such goods are now prohibited, and anyone claiming health expertise cannot endorse them.

“This would have applied to the therapeutic claims that Belle made,” said Suzy Madar, a Sydney-based partner at the law firm King & Wood Mallesons.

Apple Cider Vinegar has drawn praise for its skewering of online wellness culture — and criticism from Australians involved in the real-life events it recounts. The series is billed as a “true-ish story, based on a lie,” and Gibson is the only real person the show purports to depict.

But Queensland man Col Ainscough, whose wife and daughter — also a wellness influencer — both died of cancer decried the production in a statement this month, because its characters included a family with a different name whose story appeared to parallel his own.

The show was “insensitive and clearly profit-driven,” Ainscough said.

“Behind the TV stories, behind the dramatization, are real people who have had their lives devastated by the actions of this individual,” Allan, the state premier, told reporters.

But the case still holds fascination as one of Australia’s most “bizarre and flagrant” online scams, reporter Guilliatt said.

“I like to think that it really was a wake-up call for a lot of people,” he said. “I hope it’s had an impact in terms of people’s gullibility about accepting advice on very serious health conditions online.”

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