By Jonathan Landay

WASHINGTON – The U.S. Supreme Court’s top security officer has asked Maryland Governor Larry Hogan to enforce laws barring picketing outside the Maryland homes of high court justices, saying protests and “threatening activity” have increased.

Supreme Court Marshal Gail Curley made the request in a July 1 letter to Hogan, noting that Maryland law prohibits people from intentionally assembling “in a manner that disrupts a person’s right to tranquility in the person’s home.”

“I am writing to request that the Maryland State Police, in conjunction with local authorities as appropriate, enforce laws prohibiting picketing outside the homes of Supreme Court justices who live in Maryland,” Curley told Hogan, according to a copy of the letter posted on the Fox News website.

Abortion rights activists began protesting outside the Maryland homes of Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh and the Virginia home of Justice Samuel Alito Jr. after the leak in May of a draft opinion indicating the court would overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision guaranteeing women the right to an abortion.

The court last month issued a final opinion that did just that.

Curley reminded the governor that in May, he said he was “deeply concerned” over picketing outside justices’ homes in his state. Hogan made the statement in a joint letter with Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland seeking enforcement of a federal law barring demonstrations intended to sway judges on pending cases.

“Since then, protest activity at Justices’ homes, as well as threatening activity, has only increased,” Curley told Hogan, adding that protesters have for weeks used bullhorns, chanted slogans, and banged on drums.

The letter also noted “an attempt on a Justice’s life,” an apparent reference to the arrest last month near Kavanaugh’s home of a California man armed with a handgun, a knife and pepper spray.

(Reporting by Jonathan Landay; Editing by David Gregorio)

By Sabine Siebold and Robin Emmott

MADRID – NATO invited Sweden and Finland on Wednesday to join the military alliance in one of the biggest shifts in European security in decades after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine pushed Helsinki and Stockholm to drop their traditional of neutrality.

NATO’s 30 allies took the decision at their summit in Madrid and also agreed to formally treat Russia as the “most significant and direct threat to the allies’ security”, according to a summit statement.

“Today, we have decided to invite Finland and Sweden to become members of NATO,” NATO leaders said in their declaration, after Turkey lifted a veto on Finland and Sweden joining.

Ratification in allied parliaments is likely to take up to a year, but once it is done, Finland and Sweden will be covered by NATO’s Article 5 collective defence clause, putting them under the United States’ protective nuclear umbrella.

“We will make sure we are able to protect all allies, including Finland and Sweden,” Stoltenberg said.

In the meantime, the allies are set to increase their troop presence in the Nordic region, holding more military exercises and naval patrols in the Baltic Sea to reassure Sweden and Finland.

After four hours of talks in Madrid on Tuesday, Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan agreed with his Finnish and Swedish counterparts a series of security measures to allow the two Nordic countries to overcome the Turkish veto that Ankara imposed in May due to its concerns about terrorism.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation was founded in 1949 to defend against the Soviet threat. Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine gave the organisation a new impetus after failures in Afghanistan and internal discord during the era of former U.S. President Donald Trump.

“We are sending a strong message to (Russian President Vladimir) Putin: ‘you will not win’,” Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said in a speech.

Allies also agreed on NATO’s first new strategic concept – its master planning document – in a decade. Russia, previously classed as a strategic partner of NATO, is now identified as NATO’s main threat.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is “a direct threat to our Western way of life,” Belgian Prime Minister Alexander de Croo added, citing the wider impact of the war, such as rising energy and food prices.

The planning document also cited China as a challenge for the first time, setting the stage for the 30 allies to plan to handle Beijing’s transformation from a benign trading partner to a fast-growing competitor from the Arctic to cyberspace.

Unlike Russia, whose war in Ukraine has raised serious concerns in the Baltics of an attack on NATO territory, China is not an adversary, NATO leaders said. But Stoltenberg has repeatedly called on Beijing to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which Moscow says is a “special operation”.

‘MORE NATO’

At the summit, NATO agreed a longer-term support package for Ukraine, in addition to the billions of dollars already pledged in weapons and financial support.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said that arms would continue to be supplied to Kyiv, which seeks help to overpower Russian artillery, particularly in eastern Ukraine, where Russia is slowly advancing in a grinding war of attrition.

“The message is: We will continue to do so – and to do this intensively – for as long as it is necessary to enable Ukraine to defend itself,” Scholz said.

The Western alliance is also in agreement that big allies such as the United States, Germany, Britain and Canada pre-assign troops, weapons and equipment to the Baltics and intensify training exercises. NATO is also aiming to have as many as 300,000 troops ready for deployment in case of conflict, part of an enlarged NATO response force.

Russia is achieving the opposite of what Putin sought when he launched his war in Ukraine in part to counter the expansion of NATO, Western leaders say.

Both Finland, which has a 1,300 km (810 mile) border with Russia, and Sweden, home of the founder of the Nobel Peace Prize, are now set to bring well-trained militaries into the NATO, aimed at giving the alliance Baltic Sea superiority.

“One of the most important messages from President Putin … was that he was against any further NATO enlargement,” Stoltenberg said on Tuesday evening. “He wanted less NATO. Now President Putin is getting more NATO on his borders.”

(Additional reporting by Aislinn Laing, Belen Carreno, Humeyra Pamuk, Andrea Shalal, writing by Robin Emmott; Editing by Frank Jack Daniel)

By Pavel Polityuk and Simon Lewis

KYIV/KONSTYANTYNIVKA, Ukraine -Fighting intensified on Saturday for Lysychansk, Ukraine’s last bastion in the strategic eastern province of Luhansk, while blasts shook a southern city after the civilian toll from Russian strikes climbed in towns well behind the front lines.

Rodion Miroshnik, ambassador to Russia of the pro-Moscow self-styled Luhansk People’s Republic, told Russian television that “Lysychansk has been brought under control,” but added: “Unfortunately, it is not yet liberated.”

Russian media showed videos of Luhansk militia parading in Lysychansk streets waving flags and cheering, but Ukraine National Guard spokesman Ruslan Muzychuk told Ukrainian national television the city remained in Ukrainian hands.

“Now there are fierce battles near Lysychansk, however, fortunately, the city is not surrounded and is under the control of the Ukrainian army,” Muzychuk said.

He said the situations in the Lysychansk and Bakhmut areas, as well as in Kharkiv region, were the most difficult on the entire front line.

“The goal of the enemy here remains access to the administrative border of Donetsk and Luhansk regions. Also, in the Sloviansk direction, the enemy is attempting assault actions,” he said.

Oleksandr Senkevych, mayor of the southern region of Mykolaiv, which borders the vital Black Sea port of Odesa, reported powerful explosions in the city.

“Stay in shelters!” he wrote on the Telegram messaging app as air raid sirens sounded.

The cause of the blasts was not immediately clear, although Russia later said it had hit army command posts in the area.

Reuters could not independently verify the battlefield reports.

Authorities said a missile slammed into an apartment block near Odesa on Friday, killing at least 21 people. A shopping mall was hit on Monday in the central city of Kremenchuk, leaving at least 19 dead.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy denounced the strikes on Friday as “conscious, deliberately targeted Russian terror and not some sort of error or a coincidental missile strike.”

In his nightly television address on Saturday, he said it would be a “very difficult path” to victory but it was necessary for Ukrainians to maintain their resolve and inflict losses on the “aggressor … so that every Russian remembers that Ukraine cannot be broken.”

“In many areas from the front, there is a sense of easing up, but the war is not over,” he said. “Unfortunately, it is intensifying in different places and we musn’t forget that. We must help the army, the volunteers, help those who are left on their own at this time.”

Kyiv says Moscow has intensified missile attacks on cities far from the main eastern battlefields and that it deliberately hit civilian sites. Ukrainian troops on the eastern front lines meanwhile describe intense artillery barrages that have pummelled residential areas.

Thousands of civilians have been killed and cities levelled since Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov repeated Russian denials that its forces targeted civilians.

The Chief of General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, Valery Gerasimov, inspected Russian troops involved in what Moscow calls its “special military operation,” Russia’s defence ministry said, although it was not clear if he was in Ukraine.

The inspection followed slow but steady gains by Russian forces with the help of relentless artillery in east Ukraine, a focus for Moscow after it narrowed its broader war goals of toppling the government following fierce Ukrainian resistance.

Russia is seeking to drive Ukrainian forces out of Luhansk and Donetsk provinces in the industrialised eastern Donbas region where Moscow-backed separatists have been fighting Kyiv since Russia’s first military intervention in Ukraine in 2014.

“Definitely they are trying to demoralise us. Maybe some people are affected by that, but for us it only brings more hatred and determination,” said a Ukrainian soldier returning from Lysychansk.

HOUSES ‘BURNING DOWN’

Russian forces seized Lysychansk’s sister city Sievierodonetsk last month, after some of the heaviest fighting of the war that pounded whole districts into rubble. Other settlements now face similar bombardment.

Luhansk Governor Serhiy Gaidai said on Telegram shelling had stopped Lysychansk residents dousing fires and added: “Private houses in attacked villages are burning down one by one.”

Ukraine has appealed for more weapons from the West, saying its forces are heavily outgunned by the Russian military.

Troops on a break from the fighting and speaking in Konstyantynivka, a market town about 115 km (72 miles) west of Lysychansk, said they had managed to keep the supply road to the embattled city open, for now, despite Russian bombardment.

“We still use the road because we have to, but it’s within artillery range of the Russians,” said one soldier, who usually lives in Kyiv and asked not to be named, as comrades relaxed nearby, munching on sandwiches or eating ice cream.

“The Russian tactic right now is to just shell any building we could locate ourselves at. When they’ve destroyed it, they move on to the next one,” the soldier said.

Reuters reporters saw an unexploded missile lodged into the ground in a residential neighbourhood on the outskirts of the Donbas city of Kramatorsk on Saturday evening.

The missile fell in a wooded area between residential tower blocks. Police and military cordoned off an area a few meters around the missile and told onlookers to stand back. Outgoing artillery fire and several large explosions were heard in central Kramatorsk earlier in the evening.

Despite being battered in the east, Ukrainian forces have made some advances elsewhere, including forcing Russia to withdraw from Snake Island, a Black Sea outcrop southeast of Odesa that Moscow captured at the start of the war.

Russia had used Snake Island to impose a blockade on Ukraine, one of the world’s biggest grain exporters and a major producer of seed for vegetable oils. The disruptions have helped fuel a surge in global grain and food prices.

Russia, also a big grain producer, denies it has caused the food crisis, blaming Western sanctions for hurting its exports.

(Reporting by Reuters bureaux; Writing by Lincoln Feast, Edmund Blair, Ron Popeski and David Brunnstrom; Editing by William Mallard, Catherine Evans, Matthew Lewis and Jonathan Oatis)

By Ali Sawafta

RAMALLAH, West Bank -The Palestinian Authority has handed the bullet that killed prominent Palestinian-American Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh to U.S. authorities for forensic examination, a Palestinian official said on Saturday.

Abu Akleh was killed on May 11 while covering an Israeli military raid in the Palestinian city of Jenin in the occupied West Bank. Her death sparked Palestinian outrage and international condemnation.

“The relevant parties in the state of Palestine agreed to allow the U.S. side to conduct ballistic works on the bullet. It was handed over to them,” Akram al-Khatib, General Prosecutor for the Palestinian Authority, said in a statement published by the official Palestinian news agency WAFA.

There was no immediate comment from U.S. diplomatic officials in Jerusalem.

The Israeli military, prime minister’s office and defence ministry did not immediately comment when asked whether Israel would be cooperating with the U.S. investigation and, if so, how.

Defence Minister Benny Gantz said in May that Israel was “prepared to conduct an investigation in collaboration with international actors”.

After its own investigation, the Palestinian Authority said Abu Akleh had been shot by an Israeli soldier in a “deliberate murder”.

Israel has denied the accusation and says it is continuing its own investigation.

But it says it cannot determine whether she was shot accidentally by an Israeli soldier or by a Palestinian militant during an exchange of fire without examining the bullet to see if it matches an Israeli military rifle.

U.S. President Joe Biden is expected to meet separately with Palestinian and Israeli leaders during a visit to the region on July 13-16.

Video footage showed that Abu Akleh, 51, was wearing a blue vest clearly marked “Press” when she was shot. At least two colleagues who were with her said they had come under Israeli sniper fire without being near any militants.

(Additional reporting by Maayan Lubell in Jerusalem and Nidal al-MUghrabi in Gaza; Writing by Maayan Lubell; Editing by Kevin Liffey)

DUBAI -At least five people were killed and 49 injured by a magnitude 6.1 earthquake in southern Iran early on Saturday, state media reported, with the area also hit soon after by two strong quakes of up to 6.3 magnitude.

Some 24 tremors, two with a magnitude of 6.3 and 6.1, followed the 2 a.m. local time quake that flattened the village of Sayeh Khosh near Iran’s Gulf coast in Hormozgan province. The most recent tremor occurred around 8 a.m., officials told state TV.

“All of the victims died in the first earthquake and no-one was harmed in the next two severe quakes as people were already outside their homes,” said Foad Moradzadeh, governor of Bandar Lengeh country, quoted by the state news agency IRNA.

Emergency services spokesperson Mojtaba Khaledi told state TV that half of the 49 people injured had been discharged from hospitals.

Officials said search and rescue operations had ended.

Saeid Pourzadeh of the Kish island crisis task force said Gulf shipping and flights had not been affected by the quakes.

State TV said 150 quakes and tremors had struck western Hormozgan over the past month.

Major geological fault lines crisscross Iran, which has suffered several devastating earthquakes in recent years. In 2003, a magnitude 6.6 quake in Kerman province killed 31,000 people and flattened the ancient city of Bam.

(Reporting by Dubai newsroom and Mrinmay Dey in Bengaluru; Editing by Chris Reese, Sandra Maler and Kenneth Maxwell)

By Nate Raymond and Brendan Pierson

(Reuters) -The top courts in Texas and Ohio on Friday allowed the Republican-led states to enforce restrictions and bans on abortions after the U.S. Supreme Court last week overturned the nationwide constitutional right to abortion.

The Texas Supreme Court late on Friday allowed a nearly century-old abortion ban to take effect after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling and erased women’s constitutional right to abortion.

The order, which allows the law to be enforced civilly but not criminally, came the same day the Ohio Supreme Court gave the state the go-ahead to enforce a 2019 ban on abortions at six weeks of pregnancy.

The dual orders came one week after the conservative-majority U.S. Supreme Court restored states’ authority to ban abortions, triggering a flurry of lawsuits seeking to preserve the ability of women to terminate their own pregnancies.

The Texas Supreme Court acted in response to a request by Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton to put on hold a temporary restraining order a judge issued Tuesday that allowed abortions to resume in the state up to the already-restricted six weeks of pregnancy.

Lawyers for the abortion clinics who challenged the 1925 ban vowed to continue fighting. A lower court judge could block the law once more following arguments slated for July 12, the clinics say.

“We won’t stop fighting to ensure that as many people as possible, for as long as possible, can access the essential reproductive health care they need,” said Julia Kaye, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union representing the Texas abortion clinics challenging the ban.

Abortion rights groups have since last week challenged anti-abortion laws in 11 states, and judges in Florida, Louisiana, Kentucky, and Utah have prevented restrictions or bans from being enforced.

Friday’s orders came as two Democratic-controlled states, New York and New Jersey, moved to bolster abortion rights within their borders.

In New Jersey, Governor Phil Murphy signed legislation designed to allow women who venture to the state seeking abortions to do so without fear of prosecution or civil litigation from their home states.

The measures also established new legal protections for reproductive healthcare practitioners in New Jersey who provide interstate abortion services.

The New York Senate passed an amendment to the state constitution to codify the right to an abortion, as well as the right to contraception.

Roe had guaranteed a national right to end any pregnancy up until the time of fetal viability outside the womb – generally between 24 and 28 weeks of gestation.

Ohio’s law, S.B. 23, bans abortion after fetal cardiac activity can first be detected, around six weeks of gestation, a point before many women even realize their pregnant.

The Ohio measure, which Republican Governor Mike DeWine signed into law, had been blocked in the federal courts. But hours after the Supreme Court’s decision, a federal judge dissolved the injunction preventing its enforcement.

Republican Attorney General Dave Yost had argued Ohio’s state constitution did not recognize a right to abortion. In a statement, he said the plaintiffs should be “pursuing their policy goals through the political process, not the courts.”

Also on Friday, Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers brought a lawsuit before the Oklahoma Supreme Court challenging two state abortion bans, one from 1910 and one passed this year.

Oklahoma Attorney General John O’Connor did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The Oklahoma Supreme Court, in an 8-1 ruling on Tuesday, allowed another abortion ban in the state to take effect.

(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston and Brendan Pierson in New York; Additional reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Jonathan Oatis, Alistair Bell and William Mallard)