The world at a glance

London

Rescue migrant kids: A former child refugee who was saved from the Nazis by Britain’s Kindertransport program is urging the U.K. to take in unaccompanied migrant children, mostly Muslims, stuck in makeshift tent camps in France. Lord Alf Dubs, a Jewish Labor member who was transported from Prague to London at age 6, pushed a bill through the House of Lords last week to allow in 3,000 children; the bill still needs to go to the House of Commons, where it faces opposition from the Conservative government. “I owe it to Britain—and to the children—to do as much as I can to get this provision into the law,” Dubs said. Labor parliamentarian Yvette Cooper warned that children in the camps were being recruited by pimps and drug gangs into “modern slavery.”

Havana

Castro vs. Obama: Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro, who wasn’t present at any events during President Obama’s visit to Cuba last week, has published a screed accusing Obama of failing to understand Cuban history. Writing in the state paper Granma, Castro mocked Obama’s call to set aside decades of animosity between the U.S. and Cuba. “Each of us runs the risk of a heart attack hearing these words from a U.S. president,” said Castro, outlining a long list of grievances—including the U.S.-backed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion—that should never be forgotten. Analysts said the fact that Castro waited until after Obama’s departure to launch his criticism shows that he does not intend to undermine his brother President Raúl Castro’s new opening to the U.S.

Mexico City

Flaming Trumps: Mexicans burned and exploded effigies of Donald Trump this year in their Easter weekend “burning of Judas” ritual. Usually, an effigy of an unpopular local politician takes the place of Jesus’ betrayer. But at this year’s festivities Trump figures, some of them adorned with swastikas, were most popular. Mexico’s President Enrique Peña Nieto recently criticized the GOP presidential front-runner’s bellicose rhetoric against Mexicans, saying, “That’s how Mussolini got in—that’s how Hitler got in.” Also spotted on the streets of Mexico City during celebrations were effigies of recently captured drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán and of Kate del Castillo, the actress who helped arrange actor Sean Penn’s Rolling Stone interview with the cartel boss.

Bogotá, Colombia

War crimes warning: A proposed peace agreement between the Colombian government and leftist rebel group FARC could grant impunity to military personnel who murdered civilians, human rights activists warned this week. Soldiers allegedly massacred thousands of civilians between 2002 and 2008 and dressed their remains in guerrilla uniforms, to create “false positives” and inflate their battlefield kills. Those cases are now under investigation in the courts, but the peace deal would set up a special judicial system for combatants on both sides of Colombia’s five-decade-old civil war. Loopholes in the agreement “could guarantee that many of those responsible for false-positive killings, ranging from low-ranking soldiers to generals, will escape justice,” said José Miguel Vivanco of Human Rights Watch

Buenos Aires

Falklands oil at stake: The Argentine government was celebrating this week after the United Nations declared that the potentially oil-rich waters around the British-ruled Falkland Islands belong to Argentina. A U.N. commission endorsed a new maritime boundary proposed by Buenos Aires in 2009, expanding the area of the South Atlantic Ocean under Argentina’s sovereignty by 650,000 square miles, encompassing the archipelago. “This is a historic occasion,” said Argentina’s foreign minister, Susana Malcorra. The British government dismissed the commission’s finding, noting that the U.N. body is not allowed to consider cases—like the Falklands—in which overlapping territorial claims are made. Argentina tried and failed to seize the disputed islands in a brief 1982 war with the U.K.

Vilnius, Lithuania

NATO to deter Russia: NATO must add significant troops and aircraft and change its Baltic mission from peacetime policing to combat-ready air defense, the alliance’s supreme commander said this week. “The alliance does need to be ready,” Gen. Philip Breedlove said. He was responding to pleas from NATO’s smallest members, the vulnerable former Soviet states of Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania, which fear a more aggressive Russia. NATO increased its number of jets patrolling the Baltic skies from four to eight after Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014. “It is obvious that in case of a military conflict neither four nor eight jets would be enough,” said Lithuanian defense chief Jonas Zukas.

Palmyra, Syria

ISIS ousted: Syrian troops backed by Russian air power this week retook the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra, which had been held by ISIS for 10 months. The jihadists blew up the 1,800-year-old Roman Arch of Triumph and other monuments, and planted mines around many ruins, but about 80 percent of the UNESCO World Heritage Site remains intact. At Palmyra’s museum, ISIS militants smashed the faces off most statues. “We can renovate them,” said Syria’s head of antiquities, Maamoun Abdul Karim. “Yes, we lost part of the original, but we didn’t totally lose them.” President Vladimir Putin made a personal phone call to U.N. culture officials offering Russian help in restoration and mine removal.

Luanda, Angola

Rapper jailed: Angolan rapper Luaty Beirão and 16 other dissidents have been sentenced to two to eight years in prison for allegedly trying to overthrow the government. The charges stem from a book club meeting last year, at which Beirão and some friends discussed American scholar Gene Sharp’s 1993 book on nonviolent resistance, From Dictatorship to Democracy. Beirão, 34, who performs under the name Ikonoklasta, is an outspoken critic of Angola’s government and has called for a fairer distribution of the country’s oil wealth. Amnesty International called the sentences “an affront to justice” and the Anonymous hacking collective shut down about 20 Angolan government websites in retaliation. President José Eduardo dos Santos has ruled the former Portuguese colony as a dictator since 1979.

Beijing

Who wrote that letter? Chinese authorities have detained and questioned more than a dozen people, including journalists, website technicians, and family members of overseas dissidents, in an effort to discover who wrote a letter calling for President Xi Jinping to resign. The mysterious missive—which first appeared on an overseas Chinese-language human rights site and was then republished on the Chinabased Wujie News site—accuses Xi of centralizing power in himself, personally directing economic and foreign policy, and bypassing other Communist Party bigwigs. The writer claims to speak for “loyal party members” and says Xi has “weakened the power of all state organs.” Zhang Ping, a Chinese human rights activist living in Germany, said his two younger brothers had been arrested in southwestern China, and that police had even ordered his distant relatives to tell him to stop criticizing the party

Pyongyang, North Korea

Famine coming: A month after the U.N. imposed sweeping new sanctions on North Korea over its recent nuclear tests, North Korean state media is warning that the country could fall into famine. “Another arduous march, when we would be forced to eat grass, could come about, and we are left in isolation to fight against the enemy,” declared state newspaper Rodong Sinmun. The 1995–98 famine killed millions when North Korea diverted food to the army and the people starved to death. The same day as the famine w arning, state media showed photos of dictator Kim Jong Un and his wife touring a posh department store

Larnaca, Cyprus

Amateur hijacker: An apparently unstable man wearing a fake suicide vest hijacked an EgyptAir flight en route from Alexandria to Cairo, forcing it to land in Cyprus, where he was arrested. All the passengers and crew disembarked safely. Hijacker Seif Eddin Mustafa, 58, who has a long criminal record in Egypt, was trying to deliver a letter to his ex-wife, who divorced him in 1994 and now lives in Cyprus. “He’s not a terrorist, he’s an idiot,” an Egyptian Foreign Ministry official said. One British passenger, Ben Innes, posed for a grinning photo with Mustafa while the plane sat on the tarmac in Cyprus. “I just threw caution to the wind,” said Innes, 26. “I thought, ‘Why not? If he blows us all up, it won’t matter anyway.’

Hebron, West Bank

Soldier accused of murder: A video of an Israeli soldier shooting a captured and subdued Palestinian attacker in the head has outraged Palestinians and divided Israeli opinion. Abdel Fattah al-Sharif, 21, allegedly stabbed an Israeli soldier and was then shot and wounded; he was lying on his back in a Hebron street when he was killed. The Israeli Defense Forces arrested the soldier and condemned his actions. “These are not the values of the IDF, and these are not the values of the Jewish people,” said IDF spokesman Moti Almoz. But a poll revealed that 57 percent of Israelis opposed the soldier’s arrest. Palestinians, meanwhile, demanded a U.N. investigation. “These executions are not isolated events,” said Palestinian official Saeb Erekat.