More than 50 civilians were evacuated on Sunday from Mariupol's Azovstal steel works in a convoy with vehicles bearing United Nations symbols, signalling a deal had been struck to ease the ordeal of the most destructive siege in the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
The siege of Mariupol has turned the port city into a wasteland with an unknown death toll and thousands trying to survive without water, sanitation or food.
The city is under Russian control but some fighters and civilians remain holed up in the Azovstal works - a vast Soviet-era plant founded under Josef Stalin and designed with a labyrinth of bunkers and tunnels to withstand attack.
In one of the first major signs of an evacuation deal, a group of around 40 civilians arrived on Sunday at a temporary accommodation centre after leaving the area around the Azovstal plant.
They arrived in the village of Bezimenne in the Russian-backed Donetsk Region, around 30km east of Mariupol, with Ukrainian number plates in a convoy with Russian forces and vehicles with United Nations symbols.
Later, another group, numbering around 14 people, arrived at the accommodation centre.
U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres said after meeting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv on Thursday that intense discussions were under way to enable the evacuation of Azovstal.
Israel bombarded northern Gaza overnight in some of the heaviest shelling in weeks, causing panic amongst residents and flattening neighbourhoods in an area from which the Israeli army had previously down its troops, residents said on Tuesday.
Russia launched a drone attack on Ukraine that injured seven people in the Black Sea port of Odesa, two of them children, and also targeted Kyiv, the capital, Ukraine's military officials said early on Tuesday.
A Delhi court on Tuesday extended the pre-trial detention of Indian opposition leader Arvind Kejriwal until May 7 in a corruption case, the legal news website Live Law reported.
Taiwan's quake-hit eastern county of Hualien was rattled by more than 200 aftershocks late on Monday and early on Tuesday, but only minor damage was reported and no casualties and major chipmaker TSMC said it saw no impact on operations.
Two Malaysian navy helicopters collided in mid-air during a rehearsal for a naval parade on Tuesday, killing all 10 crew members aboard, the navy said in a statement.