Kremlin-staged voting continues in occupied regions of Ukraine
CBSN
Russian forces launched new deadly strikes overnight in Ukrainian cities, including Zaporizhzhia, where Kremlin-staged voting is underway. Saturday marks the second day that people in Russian-occupied regions of Ukraine are voting on whether to become part of Russia.
The referendums, which bid to annex four occupied territories in Ukraine, are similar to the 2014 referendum that led to the annexation of Crimea.
As CBS News foreign correspondent Debora Patta reports, exiled mayor Ivan Federov of the now-Russian-occupied Melitopol said Ukrainian citizens are being forced to vote under Russia's watchful eye.
Lawmakers in Poland have voted in favor of measures to ease the country's near-total ban on abortion, setting the stage for a potential clash over women's rights with the country's conservative president. With their vote on Friday, parliamentarians endorsed several proposals to relax the abortion restrictions, including one from newly elected Prime Minister Donald Tusk's party to decriminalize abortions up to 12 weeks into a pregnancy.
The last opportunity for U.S. nationals to flee violence-wracked Haiti on a government-chartered evacuation flight arrived Friday, with no sign of the chaos easing in the tiny Caribbean nation. The U.S. State Department said last week in an email to Americans in Haiti that charter flights were not scheduled to continue after April 12.
London - The wife of Julian Assange said Thursday that her husband's legal case "could be moving in the right direction" after President Biden indicated that the U.S. could drop charges against the imprisoned WikiLeaks founder. It came as supporters in several cities rallied to demand the release of Assange on the fifth anniversary of his incarceration in London's high-security Belmarsh prison.