• KIEV, Ukraine (AP) -- Ukraine's new president on Saturday called for dialogue with the country's east, gripped by a violent separatist insurgency, and for armed groups to lay down their weapons but said he won't talk with rebels he called "gangsters and killers."
• Petro Poroshenko spoke in parliament after taking the oath of office and assumed leadership of a country mired in an uprising, severe economic troubles and tensions with its giant neighbor Russia.
• The 48-year-old Poroshenko, often called "The Chocolate King" because of the fortune he made as a confectionery tycoon, was elected May 25 and replaces an interim leader who had been in office since Russia-friendly president Viktor Yanukovych fled the country in February after months of street protests against him.
• The fall of Yanukovych aggravated long-brewing tensions in eastern and southern Ukraine, whose majority native Russian speakers denounced the new government as a nationalist putsch that aimed to suppress them.
• Within a month, the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea was annexed by Russia after a secession referendum and an armed insurgency arose in the eastern provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk. Ukrainian forces are fighting the insurgents in those regions and officials say more than 200 people have been killed.
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• WASHINGTON (AP) -- In desperate efforts to gain ground on battlefields, frustrated governments in the Mideast and Africa are using barrel bombs against their enemies -- launching the cheap, quickly manufactured weapons as a crude counter to roadside blasts and suicide explosions that insurgents have deployed with deadly success for years.
• New evidence that they are being used in Iraq after being dropped on civilian populations in Syria and Sudan has raised concerns that governments in a number of unstable nations will embrace them.
• Described as "flying IEDs" -- or improvised explosive devices -- barrel bombs have the power to wipe out a row of buildings in a single blast and can kill large

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