Belarus' authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko on Wednesday pardoned 28 political prisoners, part of his efforts to improve relations with the West. Lukashenko's decree marking the country's Independence Day celebrated Friday announced that 28 convicts serving prison terms for "extremist crimes," a term used by the authorities' in their sweeping crackdown on dissent, were pardoned on "humanitarian" grounds.

Lukashenko has ruled the nation of 9.5 million with an iron fist for more than three decades, and the country has been sanctioned repeatedly by Western countries - both for its crackdown on human rights and for allowing Moscow to use its territory in the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Lukashenko's rule was challenged after a 2020 presidential election, when hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets to protest a vote they viewed as rigged. In an ensuing crackdown, tens of thousands were detained, with many beaten by police. Prominent opposition figures fled the country or were imprisoned.

US and Iranian negotiators met separately on Wednesday (July 1) with Qatari and Pakistani mediators, with "positive progress made," and they agreed to continue discussions, host Qatar said. The next meeting will be scheduled "at the earliest possible time" after the funeral of Iran's previous supreme leader, the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Majed al-Ansari, a spokesman for Qatar's Foreign Ministry, said on X. The funeral is set to start Saturday in Tehran.

US Mideast envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, US President Donald Trump's son-in-law, were in Qatar for talks seeking a permanent end to the war, along with Iran's top negotiator, Kazem Gharibabadi. Negotiators aim to nail down specifics to pave the way for top leaders to seal an agreement, though differences over the Strait of Hormuz and Lebanon loom large. Iran has used its ability to choke off the Strait of Hormuz as a key source of leverage, disrupting global markets for energy and other critical goods.

A divided US Supreme Court upheld a broad conception of birthright citizenship, rejecting President Donald Trump's executive order declaring that children born to people who are in the United States illegally or temporarily are not American citizens. By a 6-3 vote, the court struck down Trump's order. A bare majority of five justices, in an opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts, held that the long-settled understanding of the 14th Amendment, adopted after the Civil War, makes a citizen of anyone born in the country, with very limited exceptions.

"Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights-to freely participate in our political community. The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to 'every free-born person in this land,'" Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court, citing congressional debate over the amendment, "We keep that promise today." A sixth justice, Brett Kavanaugh, disagreed about the constitutional ruling, but pointed to a federal law that he said broadly conveys birthright citizenship.

Thousands of people gathered in a tiny village in Switzerland to witness the ordination of four new Catholic bishops, in defiance of an appeal by Pope Leo XIV. The four, one from the United States, one from Switzerland, and two from France, are members of the controversial Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX), also sometimes known as Lefebrvistes after SSPX's founder Marcel Lefebvre. The Society rejects key modernising reforms introduced by the Vatican in the 1960s and 1970s, including permission to hold Mass in languages spoken by the congregation, rather than only in Latin.

Pope Leo made a last minute appeal to SSPX leaders earlier this week not to proceed with the ordination, describing it as a "schismatic act", which could "tear the seamless garment of Christ". But on Wednesday morning, under cool grey Alpine skies, the society defied the Pope - regarded by millions of Catholics as God's representative on Earth - and proceeded with the ordination.