STOCKHOLM (AP) — The Stockholm City Council has rejected the U.S. Embassy’s demands that it comply with the Trump administration’s rollback of diversity, equity and inclusion policies.

It’s the latest in U.S. President Donald Trump’s efforts to terminate such programs within the federal government — and beyond — in what he described in his inauguration speech as a move to end efforts to “socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life.”

Countries and cities across Europe have received similar outreach from U.S. embassies, including France, Belgium and the city of Barcelona, all of which lashed out at the U.S. efforts to expand its anti-DEI policies to the continent.

In an email to the city’s planning office, dated April 29, the U.S. Embassy in Stockholm asked that Stockholm officials sign a certification that their contractors do not operate any programs promoting DEI that would violate U.S. anti-discrimination law.

The city council said Friday that it will not comply with the embassy’s demands or respond officially.

“We were really surprised, of course,” Jan Valeskog, vice mayor for city planning, told The Associated Press. “We will not sign this document at all, of course not.”

Valeskog said that while the city wants to continue its good relationship with the embassy, it will follow Swedish law and city policies to include DEI practices.

By KATHY McCORMACK

A Tufts University student from Turkey told a federal judge Friday that she has had a dozen asthma attacks in the six weeks since she was arrested while walking along a street in a Boston suburb.

Rumeysa Ozturk, 30, participated in her bail hearing in Vermont by video from an immigration detention center in Louisiana. She said the first of 12 asthma attacks came on at the Atlanta airport while she was waiting to be taken to Louisiana. The attack was severe, and she did not have all her medications.

“I was afraid, and I was crying,” she said.

Her lawyers say her detention violates her constitutional rights, including free speech and due process. They have called for her release.

The U.S. Justice Department said an immigration court in Louisiana, which is conducting separate removal proceedings regarding Ozturk, has jurisdiction over her case.

U.S. District Judge William Sessions ordered Ozturk’s transfer to Vermont, where she was last confined before she was taken to Louisiana. The government requested a delay, but a federal appeals court upheld his decision Wednesday, ordering Ozturk to be transferred to ICE custody in Vermont no later than May 14.

Sessions decided not to wait for the transfer, going ahead with the bail hearing.

Immigration officials surrounded Ozturk in Massachusetts on March 25 and drove her to New Hampshire and Vermont before putting her on a plane to a detention center in Basile, Louisiana. Her student visa had been revoked several days earlier, but she was not informed of that, her lawyers said.

Ozturk’s lawyers first filed a petition on her behalf in Massachusetts, but they did not know where she was and were unable to speak to her until more than 24 hours after she was detained. A Massachusetts judge later transferred the case to Vermont.

Ozturk was one of four students who wrote an op-ed in the campus newspaper, The Tufts Daily, last year criticizing the university’s response to student activists demanding that Tufts “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide,” disclose its investments and divest from companies with ties to Israel.

Ozturk said Friday that if she is released, Tufts would offer her housing and her lawyers and friends would drive her to future court hearings.

“I will follow all the rules,” she said.

A State Department memo said Ozturk’s visa was revoked following an assessment that her actions ”‘may undermine U.S. foreign policy by creating a hostile environment for Jewish students and indicating support for a designated terrorist organization’ including co-authoring an op-ed that found common cause with an organization that was later temporarily banned from campus.”

A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said in March, without providing evidence, that investigations found that Ozturk engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist group.

Associated Press writer Holly Ramer in Concord, New Hampshire, contributed to this report.

The Frost will be without a key piece in Game 2 of their first-round playoff series in Toronto after the PWHL suspended winger Britta Curl-Salemme one game for a hit she delivered in Game 1.

The PWHL Player Safety Committee handed down the suspension, the third of Curl-Salemme’s rookie season, on Friday morning.

It’s a difficult loss for Minnesota, which trails the series 1-0 after a 3-2 loss in Toronto on Wednesday. Curl-Salemme scored the Frost’s first goal in that game, but moments later was assessed a 5-minute major and game misconduct for what PWHL Player Safety characterized as “a high and forceful check” on Toronto blue liner Renata Fast.

Curl-Salemme, was skating the puck out of her own end when she raised an elbow and appeared to catch Fast in the jaw. The hit, the league said in a statement Friday, made “the head the main point of contact on a play where such contact to the head was avoidable.”

A rookie from Wisconsin, Curl-Salemme had been fined and suspended twice already this season, once for a high sticking incident on Jan. 2 against Boston and again for an illegal check to the head on Mar. 9 against Toronto.

In a Zoom interview with reporters on Thursday, Toronto coach Troy Ryan said Fast had been seen twice by the Sceptres’ medical team and was likely to play on Friday.

Minnesota coach Ken Klee said Curl-Salemme was not “a malicious person,” and, while acknowledging it cost her a game, that Wednesday’s incident was a competitive hockey play.

“For players that play hard and aggressive, sometimes it’s tough,” Klee said. “It’s happening in a split second. It’s nothing malicious for her. I mean, obviously, we know that decisions are going to be made, but for her, she’s trying to play hard, trying to do her job.”

The PWHL’s Player Safety Committee is chaired by PWHL executive vice president of hockey operations and includes PWHL special advisor Cassie Campbell-Pascall, former NHL referee Bill McCreary, longtime NHL executive Mike Murphy and Matt McMahon, a member of the NHL’s Player Safety department.

MOSCOW (AP) — Russia on Friday celebrated the 80th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II, as President Vladimir Putin presided over a massive parade of tanks, missiles and troops through Red Square and welcomed over two dozen world leaders — the most since Moscow sent troops into Ukraine.

Victory Day, which Russia marks on May 9, is the country’s most important secular holiday. The parade and other festivities underline Moscow’s efforts to project its global power and cement the alliances it has forged while seeking a counterbalance to the West amid the conflict in Ukraine that is grinding through a fourth year.

Friday’s parade was the largest since Russia sent troops into Ukraine in 2022 and drew the most global leaders to Moscow in a decade, including high-profile guests like Chinese President Xi Jinping, who sat next to Putin, and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Their attendance underscored how Putin has tried to emphasize the failure of the West to turn Russia into a global pariah.

“It’s again showing that Russia is not isolated, that Russia is seen as a very legitimate victorious nation that is among victors in World War II,” said Alexander Gabuev, director of Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center.

“Russia is standing tall among the so-called global majority,” Gabuev said, adding that the attendance of Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico showed that “Russia has allies even within the Western camp” and marked a major public relations victory for Putin.

World War II is a rare event in the nation’s divisive history under Communist rule that is revered by all political groups, and the Kremlin has used that sentiment to encourage national pride and underline Russia’s position as a global power.

The Soviet Union lost 27 million people in what it calls the Great Patriotic War in 1941-45, an enormous sacrifice that left a deep scar in the national psyche.

Addressing the crowd in Red Square, Putin praised Russian troops fighting in Ukraine, saying that “we are proud of their courage and determination, their spiritual force that always has brought us victory.”

Putin, who has ruled Russia for 25 years, has turned Victory Day into a key pillar of his tenure and has tried to use it to justify his action in Ukraine.

For Putin, Victory Day celebrations have become “a civic religion that boosts patriotism, nationalism, nostalgia, and justifies both his repressive regime at home and Russia’s increasingly expansionist foreign policy abroad, particularly including towards its neighbors,” Gabuev said.

The parade featured over 11,500 troops and more than 180 military vehicles, including tanks, armored infantry vehicles and artillery used on the battlefield in Ukraine. As a reminder of Russia’s nuclear might, huge Yars nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles launchers rolled across Red Square. Also among the weaponry on display were drones carried on military trucks, a tribute to their pivotal role in the conflict.

Fighter jets of Russian air force’s aerobatic teams flew by in close formation, followed by jets that trailed smoke in the colors of the national flag.

Afterward, Putin shook hands with Russian generals who led the troops onto Red Square and spoke to medal-bedecked senior North Korean officers who watched the parade, hugging one of them.

Last month, Putin thanked North Korea for fighting alongside Russian troops against Ukrainian forces and hailed their sacrifices as Pyongyang confirmed its deployment for the first time.

The Russian and North Korean statements emphasized their expanding military partnership, especially after Russia said its troops have fully reclaimed the Kursk region that Ukrainian forces seized in a surprise incursion last year. Ukraine denied the claim.

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After the parade, Putin hosted foreign leaders at a Kremlin reception and sat down with Lula for a bilateral meeting. More sessions were planned, officials said.

Putin and U.S. President Donald Trump exchanged “warm words” and “congratulations on the occasion of our common holiday” through their aides, the Russian leader’s foreign policy adviser Yuri Ushakov told state Channel One TV.

Victory Day festivities this year were overshadowed by Ukrainian drone attacks targeting Moscow and severe disruptions at the capital’s airports. Aeroflot on Wednesday canceled more than 100 flights to and from Moscow, and delayed over 140 others as the military repelled Ukrainian drone attacks on the capital.

Russian authorities tightened security ahead of the parade and cellphone internet outages were reported amid electronic countermeasures aimed at foiling more potential drone attacks.

Military parades and other festivities were also held in scores of other cities across Russia amid tight security. As a historic tribute, Putin’s hometown of St. Petersburg symbolically regained its Soviet-era name of Leningrad for a day Friday and Volgograd temporarily reverted to Stalingrad, as it was known during World War II.

Putin had declared a unilateral 72-hour ceasefire starting May 7 to coincide with the Victory Day celebrations, but warned that Russian troops would retaliate to any attacks. Moscow has been reluctant to accept a U.S.-proposed 30-day truce that Ukraine has accepted, linking it to a halt in Western arms supplies to Ukraine and Kyiv’s mobilization effort, conditions Ukraine and its Western allies have rejected.

Ukrainian authorities reported scores of Russian strikes Friday that killed at least two people in the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions and damaged buildings. A Russian drone also struck a civilian vehicle in Zaporizhzhia, critically injuring a man and also wounding his wife.

As the parade and other festivities unfolded in Moscow, dozens of European officials met in Lviv, in western Ukraine, to endorse the creation of a special tribunal to prosecute Russian officials accused of war crimes.

“Russia needs to feel our common and, most importantly, growing strength,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said, addressing the Lviv meeting. He emphasized the need for Russia to be held accountable, adding that “this is the moral duty of Europe and of everyone in the world who values human life.”

“I’m sure that this tribunal will allow for the fight against impunity against all war crimes that have been committed during this war of aggression of Russia against Ukraine,” said French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot.

Russian authorities have fiercely denied allegations of war crimes. Asked about the tribunal on Friday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Moscow “will not be reacting to this.”

Barrot also said European allies have agreed on another package of sanctions against Russia.

Standing alongside top Ukrainian government officials in Lviv, EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said the tribunal’s launch will mean that “nobody can be left unpunished for the crimes committed.”

Most of Europe marks the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II on May 8.