Britain’s governing Conservative Party suffered heavy losses in local elections, a sign that they could be in real trouble when the country holds a general election at some point later this year.

With around a third of the results declared, the loss of more than 100 seats on local councils and one parliamentary seat in a by-election suggest that national polls in which Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and his party trail by a distance are correct. It also means that if a general election were held tomorrow, the opposition Labour Party would almost certainly win power.

Conservatives are attempting to spin some positives, with one campaign source saying: “Whilst this is a tough night for the Conservative party, it’s clear there is absolutely no love for (opposition leader) Keir Starmer.”

There may be some truth to this: Conservative losses were not exclusively gains for Labour. Parties across the political spectrum, including the new populist right-wing Reform UK, benefited from the Conservatives’ poor performance.

What these results don’t tell us is when the general election will take place. That decision rests solely in the hands of Sunak, who has until December 17 to call an election.

Conservatives are divided on when they think Sunak should bite the ballot bullet. He has to date only committed to it happening in the second half of 2024. The harsh truth is that there is no obvious good time for Sunak to call the election. In all scenarios, there are vanishingly few who think he has any chance of winning re-election, with most instead basing their opinions on what what be the least bad loss.

There has recently been speculation that he could decide to go to the polls as early as July.

The advantage of a summer election, proponents say, is that Sunak can tell a better story than he has been able to for some time. His flagship immigration policy, under which asylum seekers are flown to Rwanda to have their claims considered there, is finally getting off the ground.

Earlier this week, the government sent out a press release celebrating that immigration officers had rounded up people destined for Rwanda. Photographs showing asylum seekers in handcuffs and being locked in the back of vans were met with mixed responses, but the intended message was clear: We are serious and our plan is working.

He has other relatively positive stories to tell, compared to the past few months of relentless misery. While interest rates have not fallen as fast as hoped, the economic situation has improved. Tax cuts for workers are coming into effect and he has committed to raise British defense spending to 2.5% of GDP.

The proximity to government victories – especially Rwanda – could help Sunak fight off attacks from the right, who have been pressuring him on immigration for months. The longer he delays, the more time the public – especially those most concerned about immigration – will have to see any flaws in the policy.

Others think Sunak should look toward the end of the year, as it allows the most time for things to improve.

It is true that Sunak inherited a mess from his two predecessors Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. Johnson had to resign in disgrace after months of scandals dogging his premiership while Truss became the shortest-serving PM in history after her controversial economic policies saw the pound slump to its lowest ever point against the dollar.

Naturally, these left Sunak in a difficult position with the public, trailing in the polls. However, the picture has not gotten any better since Sunak took over and there is every chance that waiting could lead to things actually getting worse.

This is the unenviable situation Sunak finds himself in. Virtually no one thinks he will still be in power this time next year and even his allies are resigned to treating the rest of his time in office as damage limitation. Of course, there is always the chance that some freak event could change everything. But that seems unlikely and since taking office in late 2022, Sunak has not been a man who can rely on luck.

China launched an uncrewed lunar mission Friday that aims to bring back samples from the far side of the moon for the first time, in a potentially major step forward for the country’s ambitious space program.

The Chang’e-6 probe – China’s most complex robotic lunar mission to date – blasted off on a Long March-5 rocket from the Wenchang Space Launch Center in south China’s Hainan island, where space fans had gathered to watch the historic moment. The country’s National Space Administration said the launch was a success.

The launch marks the start of a mission that aims to be a key milestone in China’s push to become a dominant space power with plans to land astronauts on the moon by 2030 and build a research base on its south pole.

It comes as a growing number of countries, including the United States, eye the strategic and scientific benefits of expanded lunar exploration in an increasingly competitive field.

China’s planned 53-day mission would see the Chang’e-6 lander touch down in a gaping crater on the moon’s far side, which never faces Earth. China became the first and only country to land on the moon’s far side during its 2019 Chang’e-4 mission.

Any far-side samples retrieved by the Chang’e-6 lander could help scientists peer back into the evolution of the moon and the solar system itself – and provide important data to advance China’s lunar ambitions.

“The Chang’e-6 aims to achieve breakthroughs in the design and control technology of the moon’s retrograde orbit, intelligent sampling, take-off and ascent technologies, and automatic sample-return on the far side of the moon,” Ge Ping, deputy director of the China National Space Administration’s (CNSA) Center of Lunar Exploration and Space Engineering said last week from the launch site.

Ambitious mission

The Chang’e-6 probe will be a key test for China’s space capabilities in its effort to realize leader Xi Jinping’s “eternal dream” of building the country into a space power.

China has made rapid space advancements in recent years, in a field traditionally led by the United States and Russia.

With the Chang’e program, launched in 2007 and named for the moon goddess of Chinese mythology, China in 2013 became the first country to achieve a robotic lunar landing in nearly four decades. In 2022, China completed its own orbital space station, the Tiangong.

The technically complex Chang’e-6 mission builds on both the Chang’e-4’s 2019 record of landing on the far side of the moon, and Chang’e-5’s 2020 success returning to Earth with near-side moon samples.

This time, to communicate with Earth from the moon’s far side, Chang’e-6 must rely on the Queqiao-2 satellite, launched into lunar orbit in March.

The probe itself is composed of four parts: an orbiter, a lander, an ascender and a reentry module.

The mission plan is for the Chang’e-6’s lander to gather moon dust and rocks after touching down in the sprawling, roughly 2,500-kilometer diameter South Pole-Aitken basin, a crater formed some 4 billion years ago.

An ascender spacecraft would then transport the samples to the lunar orbiter for transfer to the reentry module and the mission’s return to Earth.

The complex mission “goes through virtually every step” that will be required for Chinese astronauts to land on the moon in the years ahead, according to James Head, a professor emeritus at Brown University who has collaborated with Chinese scientists leading the mission.

In addition to returning samples that could yield “fundamental new insights into the origin and early history of the moon and solar system,” the mission also serves as “robotic practice for these steps” to get astronauts to the moon and back, he said.

China plans to launch two more missions in the Chang-e series as it nears its 2030 target of sending astronauts to the moon before building a research station in the following decade on the lunar south pole – a region believed to contain water ice.

Chang’e-7, scheduled for 2026, will aim to search for resources on the moon’s south pole, while Chang’e-8 roughly two years later could look at how to utilize lunar materials to prepare for building the research base, Chinese officials have said.

Competitive space

Friday’s launch comes as multiple nations ramp up their lunar programs amid a growing focus on the potential access to resources and further deep space exploration access that successful moon missions could bring.

Last year, India landed its first spacecraft on the moon, while Russia’s first lunar mission in decades ended in failure when its Luna 25 probe crashed into the moon’s surface.

In January, Japan became the fifth country to land a spacecraft on the moon, though its Moon Sniper lander faced power issues due to an incorrect landing angle. The following month, IM-1, a NASA-funded mission designed by Texas-based private firm Intuitive Machines, touched down close to the south pole.

That landing – the first by a US-made spacecraft in over five decades – is among several planned commercial missions intended to explore the lunar surface before NASA attempts to return US astronauts there as soon as 2026 and build its scientific base camp.

NASA administrator Bill Nelson last month appeared to acknowledge that China’s pace – and concerns about its intentions – were driving the American urgency to return to the moon, decades after its Apollo-crewed missions.

“We believe that a lot of their so-called civilian space program is a military program. I think in effect we are in a race,” Nelson told lawmakers last month, adding his concern that China could try to bar the US or other countries from certain lunar areas if they arrive there first.

China has long said it stands for the peaceful use of space, and, like the US, has looked to use its space prowess to cultivate international goodwill.

This time, China has said the Chang’e-6 mission carries scientific instruments or payloads from France, Italy, Pakistan and the European Space Agency.

“China hopes to strengthen cooperation with its international counterparts and deepen international cooperation in the space field,” Ge of the CNSA told reporters a day ahead of the launch.

Demonstrations in solidarity with Palestinians under Israeli siege in Gaza have spread across university campuses in the United States and around the world in recent weeks.

More than 2,000 people have been arrested at US campuses since April 18, amid polarized debates over the right to protest, the limits of free speech and accusations of antisemitism.

But while clashes and standoffs with police at New York’s Columbia University, Portland State and UCLA have captured global attention, demonstrations and sit-ins are also being held on campuses in parts of Europe, Asia and the Middle East.

And although demands among protesters vary at each university, the majority of demonstrations have called for colleges to divest from companies that support Israel and the war in Gaza.

The current war began on October 7 when Hamas militants killed more than 1,200 people in southern Israel and took more than 200 people hostage. Israel’s military response has since sparked a humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza that has inflamed opinion globally.

Israel’s seven month bombardment of Gaza has killed more than 34,600 people, according to the Gaza health ministry. Half of the 2.2 million people in Gaza are on the brink of starvation and man-made famine is imminent, according to a scale used by United Nations agencies. Concerns are also heightened over an anticipated Israeli military operation in southern Gaza’s Rafah, prompting renewed calls for a ceasefire.

Here’s a look at some of the pro-Palestinian campus protests around the world.

Australia

Over the past few weeks, pro-Palestinian protest camps have appeared in at least seven universities across Australia.

The University of Queensland in Brisbane has become a gathering point for rival camps pitched around 100 meters (328 feet) from each other – one populated by supporters of the Students for Palestine UQ, and another smaller cluster of tents with the Israeli flag among others strung between trees.

They were erected in solidarity with Palestinians under Israeli siege in Gaza and student protesters in the US, but some Jewish groups say they’re causing unnecessary tension on campus and Australia’s opposition leader has called them “racist” and “antisemitic.”

Students for Palestine UQ want the university to disclose all links to Israeli companies and universities and to cut ties with weapons companies.

So far, violent scenes that have erupted at universities across the US have not been repeated in Australia.

At the University of Sydney, about 50 tents line the quadrangle where up to 100 protesters are sleeping each night. On May 3, Jewish groups held a counter protest against what they said is “a disturbing trend of antisemitic and anti-Israel activities” at the university.

More than 200 people, some wearing Israeli and Australian flags, gathered at the Sydney campus, but there was no direct encounter between them and the pro-Palestinian group, which had urged followers to help them “defend” their camp.

United Kingdom

Pro-Palestinian protests have been held at universities across the United Kingdom since the early days of Israel’s war in Gaza, with some setting up encampments in recent days.

At Newcastle University, a small pro-Palestinian encampment has been set up on a lawn in front of the college’s buildings, video and pictures on social media showed.

The X account “Newcastle Apartheid Off Campus” shared images of their encampment, which shows around a dozen tents on the lawn, some adorned with Palestinian flags.

The group describes itself as a “student-led coalition fighting for an end to Newcastle University’s partnership with defense companies supplying Israel.”

Students in the English cities of Leeds, Bristol and Warwick have also set up tents outside their university buildings to protest the war in Gaza, according to PA news agency.

The campus protests in Britain have received criticism from some Jewish student groups amid calls for universities to take their duty of care to Jewish students more seriously.

France

In Paris, pro-Palestinian protests erupted at the Sciences Po university and the Sorbonne university in late April.

On Friday, riot police cleared the main hall of Sciences Po, with protesters shouting “shame!” and “free Palestine!,” though the removal otherwise appeared to take place calmly.

Dozens of students had begun a sit-in inside the university the previous day, prompting the closure of the campus, a Sciences Po spokesperson said. One protester said a student had begun a hunger strike in protest at the university’s response to “students wishing to support Palestine.”

Sciences Po is one of France’s most highly ranked universities and the alma mater of a slew of presidents including incumbent leader Emmanuel Macron. It has strong ties to Columbia University, where students have been staging widespread pro-Palestinian protests.

Amid the protests, the Ile-de-France region president said the university will no longer receive funding from the Parisian regional authority, “until serenity and security are restored to the school.”

Samuel Lejoyeaux, president of the Union of Jewish Students of France, called for more dialogue between protesters on both sides of the ideological divide.

In a piece for Le Monde newspaper on Thursday, he said pro-Palestinian protesters needed to do more to “clearly denounce anti-Semitism” but that sending in police was not the answer.

“I’ll never be happy to see CRS [riot police] entering a campus,” he wrote.“More than anything, I believe in dialogue. The great social advances in France have always been the fruit of militancy and debate,” he added.

India

Protests have been held at the prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in New Delhi, in solidarity with students protesting at Columbia.

The protests coincided with an expected visit to the campus by US ambassador to India Eric Garcetti, which was postponed.

“JNU’s premises shall not provide a platform for administrations and personnel representing nations complicit in terrorism and genocide committed by Israel,” said a statement from JNU’s student union on April 29. The union has also expressed solidarity with protesters at Columbia.

JNU, one of India’s top universities, has been at the forefront of several protest movements, including 2019 demonstrations against a controversial law that critics say discriminates against Muslims.

Two student political parties at Jamia Milia Islamia University in New Delhi also expressed solidarity with pro-Palestinian protesters.

“We also denounce the stance taken by our BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party)-led government in supporting Israel, which deviates from India’s historical position,” said a statement from the Communist Party-affiliated Students’ Federation of India.

Canada

Protests against Israel’s war in Gaza have swept campuses across Canada.

At McGill University in downtown Montreal, pro-Palestinian student protesters have set up an encampment on the front lawn.

Like their counterparts in the US, students are demanding the college divest from companies with ties to Israel.

The university has attempted to disperse the protesters, saying it had requested police assistance after dialogue with student representatives failed to reach a resolution.

On May 2, a Quebec Superior Court judge rejected an injunction request that would have forced the pro-Palestinian protesters to leave their encampment.

Pro-Palestinian protesters have also set up encampments at the University of Toronto’s downtown campus and at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, among others, according to public broadcaster CBC News.

Lebanon

Hundreds of students gathered at campuses in Lebanon in late April, waving Palestinian flags and demanding their universities boycott companies that do business in Israel, Reuters reported.

In the capital, images showed students at the American University of Beirut protesting the war in Gaza outside the gates.

Some protesters said they were inspired by protests on US campuses.

“We want to show to show the whole world that we have not forgotten the Palestinian cause and that the young generation – which is aware and cultured – is still with the Palestinian cause,” Ali al-Muslem, 19, told Reuters.

Israel’s military and Iran-backed Hezbollah militants in Lebanon have routinely exchanged fire since October 7. More than 300 people — mostly fighters — have died in Israeli strikes. Eight civilians have been killed in Hezbollah attacks in northern Israel since last October.

Saudi Arabia and the United States are finalizing the details of a landmark deal to strengthen bilateral trade and defense – but an agreement will not be reached if the kingdom and Israel do not establish diplomatic relations, US officials said.

A defense treaty would solidify the seven-decade security alliance between Saudi Arabia and the US, and tie them ever closer to each other as US adversaries like Iran, Russia and China seek to expand their influence in the Middle East. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has long sought relations with Saudi Arabia, home of Islam’s holiest sites, as the move could domino across the wider Muslim world.

The US is currently negotiating one mega-deal involving three components, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said on Thursday.

The first component includes a package of agreements between the US and Saudi Arabia, another component has the normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel, and a third component for a pathway to a Palestinian state.

“All of them are linked together. None go forward without the others,” Miller said.

For normalization to be realized between Saudi Arabia and Israel, there has to be a pathway for a Palestinian state and “calm in Gaza,” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told a panel at an economic conference in Riyadh this week.

“The work that Saudi Arabia and the United States have been doing together in terms of our own agreements, I think is potentially very close to completion, but then in order to move forward with normalization two things will be required: calm in Gaza and a credible pathway to a Palestinian state,” he said.

On the sidelines of the forum, Blinken met Saudi Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman (MBS) to discuss the deal, the State Department said. Experts describe the Saudi-US pact as a “comprehensive set of understandings” that would include security, economic and technological guarantees to the kingdom, as well as support for its civilian nuclear program.

The normalization deal is expected to be modeled on the Abraham Accords, a set of treaties that saw four Arab states recognize Israel in 2020 that sidestepped the longstanding Arab demand for an independent Palestinian state as a prerequisite to recognition of Israel. MBS had said earlier that a pact with Israel would be “the biggest historical deal since the Cold War.”

In 2021, Netanyahu described the Accords as enabling Israel to replace “the old and dangerous doctrine of territories in exchange for peace and brought peace in exchange for peace, without giving up a single inch” and sought to expand what he called the “circle of peace.”

Since then, the Biden administration has made Israel-Saudi normalization central to its Middle East policy. The US and Saudi Arabia had continued discussions on the pact in 2023, and Blinken was expected to fly to Riyadh on October 10 last year to discuss the details, just three days before Hamas attacked Israel, postponing the effort.

The subsequent Israeli assault on Gaza, which has left the enclave in ruins and killed more than 34,000 Palestinians, may have changed the parameters of the deal for Saudi Arabia, analysts say. Now Israel’s acceptance of a component calling for an “irreversible” pathway to a Palestinian state would be key to the crucial normalization component of the wider deal.

“We have the broad outlines on what needs to happen on the Palestinian front…credible, irreversible [pathway to a Palestinian state],” Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan told a World Economic Forum panel without referencing normalization with Israel.

Netanyahu has repeatedly rejected the prospect of an independent Palestinian state, arguing that it would hurt Israel’s security, and is adamant on pressing ahead with the Gaza war until Hamas is eliminated.

Those obstacles might see the kingdom attempt to close the bilateral deal without the normalization component of the agreement, analysts say. But such an approach would face major hurdles. An agreement establishing a firm US military commitment to Saudi Arabia’s security, without the normalization component, is unlikely to pass through the US Congress, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham has said.

“If there is a mutual defense agreement negotiated in the form of a treaty, it needs 67 votes in the Senate to become binding. Without normalizing the Israeli-Saudi relationship and ensuring the security needs of Israel regarding the Palestinian file, there would be very few votes for a mutual defense agreement between the US and Saudi Arabia,” Graham said on X in response to reports of Saudi Arabia opting for a “plan B” to the agreement.

Experts say that Biden could be able to bypass Congress to reach the agreement by modeling it around another security agreement it signed with Bahrain last year.

“There is another pathway, modeled around the Comprehensive Security Integration and Prosperity Agreement the Biden administration signed with Bahrain in September of 2023,” according to Firas Maksad, Senior Fellow and Director for Strategic Outreach at the Middle East Institute in Washington DC. The text of that pact “explicitly states that other parties may be invited to join,” he said.

However, there has been no indication that the Biden administration would opt to bypass Congress for the bilateral agreement with Saudi Arabia to pass.

A victory for Saudi Arabia

For Saudi Arabia, a bilateral agreement with the US would be a major victory, marking an end to the era when Biden sought to undermine MBS by pledging to turn his country into a “pariah” after the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi at the hands of Saudi intelligence officials in Turkey.

The deal would also “consolidate America’s dominance in the Middle East for generations and would blunt the growing challenge posed by both China and Russia,” Maksad said.

MBS is eager to bolster the kingdom’s defenses and diversify the Saudi economy away from hydrocarbons, as he pursues an ambitious economic policy dubbed Vision 2030. The kingdom has a nascent civilian nuclear program that the Crown Prince is keen to develop with US support.

“Saudi Arabia would like to make a deal with the United States and this is probably the best time during the Biden administration to help some of the stickier issues get through Congress,” according to Karen Young, a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, referring to enrichment of nuclear materials.

Another sticking point in any US support for such a program is American opposition to local enrichment of uranium, a key component for nuclear power that could also be used to develop nuclear weapons. Saudi Arabia is rich in uranium deposits and has insisted on being able to enrich it domestically, which would be a first for an Arab state. Neighboring United Arab Emirates, for example, imports enriched uranium to power its nuclear plants.

On Wednesday, Democratic Senator Edward J. Markey, co-chair of the Nuclear Weapons and Arms Control Working Group, called on the Biden administration to ensure that Riyadh commits to forego enrichment and reprocessing of nuclear material, citing MBS as saying previously that Saudi Arabia would develop a nuclear weapon if Iran does too.

“The path towards Middle East peace should not include the prospect of a nuclear-armed Saudi Arabia, which would undermine the interests of the US, allies, and partners across the region,” he said in his letter.

The Saudi-US pact would make it incumbent on both countries to work together to deter and confront any external aggression, but doesn’t formalize it as a treaty alliance, according to Maksad.

“It is often described as Article 4.5, stopping just short of a treaty alliance that requires Senate approval but providing for a written commitment of mutual defense,” Maksad said, referring to the NATO treaty’s Article 5, which obliges all member states to come to the defense of any state facing attack.

“There will still be room for a multilateral security agreement that eventually includes Israel, along with Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the U.S. and others, when political circumstances allow…the choice will be Israel’s, when it’s ready to put something on the table that moves the ball forward towards a two-state solution with the Palestinians,” Maksad said.

Dozens of Palestinian children eagerly lined up for a meal in Deir al-Balah, in central Gaza, as aid workers unloaded huge saucepans of stew and rice from parked trucks under the bright sun.

The World Central Kitchen, a US-based non-profit that focuses on fighting hunger around the world, resumed work in Gaza this week, after a hiatus following a series of Israeli military strikes that killed seven staffers in April and drew the world’s condemnation. Israeli forces have previously taken responsibility for the deaths, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu offering rare public acknowledgment and a promise to investigate the “tragic incident.”

World Central Kitchen founder Jose Andres wrote on Wednesday that returning to Gaza after losing his staff was not easy, but that the organization could not “stand by” as people in Gaza suffered.

“The decision… to restart feeding in Gaza is both the hardest and the simplest one we could make,” Andres wrote on X. “Hard, because only a month has passed since seven of our WCK colleagues were killed in an IDF attack. These humanitarian heroes risked everything to feed people they did not know and would never meet. And yet simple, because the need is so great. We cannot stand by while so many people are so desperate for the essentials of life.”

Human rights agencies have long warned of a spiraling humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza under Israel’s military’s seven-month assault, launched in response to the Hamas-led October 7 terror attacks. More than 34,600 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli attacks in Gaza as of May 1, according to the local ministry of health.

Over the course of the war, more than 1.9 million Palestinians have been forcibly displaced, according to the UN, with many sheltering in crammed tent camps that cannot offer enough access to sanitation or food.

The entire population of more than 2.2 million people is now at risk of famine, and at least 30 children have already died of malnutrition and dehydration in Gaza, according to the health ministry.

“Since yesterday after we resumed working, we could see people’s desperation. People have no food, and we’ve all been displaced,” he said.

“[The World Central Kitchen’s] food makes people feel that they are at home. It is decent food, it is clean. They also treat people well.”

“I say thank you and may God protect them.”

A desperate need for more aid

Human rights organizations have repeatedly warned that Israel’s strict limitations on passage into Gaza is diminishing critical supplies and drastically hindering relief efforts within the Palestinian territory.

In March, the United Nations’ human rights chief, Volker Türk, warned Israel’s sustained restrictions on aid into Gaza may amount to the war crime of starvation.

Israel says there is “no limit” on the amount of aid that can enter Gaza, but its inspection regime on aid trucks has meant that only a tiny fraction of the amount of food and other supplies that used to enter Gaza daily before the war is getting in now.

Shortly after the deaths of the World Central Kitchen workers in April, Israeli officials agreed to open the Erez border crossing into northern Gaza to allow aid deliveries. Food shortages have been the worst there after Israel concentrated its military offensive there in the early days of the war.

On Wednesday, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant described the opening of Erez as “essential” to “increase the volume of humanitarian aid into Gaza.”

But efforts to increase aid have also run into repeated trouble. At least 48 aid trucks were blocked on Wednesday after Israeli settlers attacked a aid convoy en route to Gaza via the southern Kerem Shalom crossing, according to Jordanian authorities.

The US State Department also said Thursday that a delivery of aid that passed through Erez crossing earlier in the week had been temporarily intercepted by Hamas, which controls the isolated enclave, before being retrieved by the United Nations.

A violent hailstorm wreaked havoc on vineyards in Chablis in the famous French wine region of Burgundy Wednesday evening, delivering another weather blow to already hard-hit local Chardonnay winemakers.

Huge hailstones, ranging from the size of a ping pong ball to the size of a lime, rained down on north Burgundy, with Chablis particularly badly affected, according to French weather agency Météo-France.

The precipitation was part of an violent and intense storm known as a supercell storm, Météo-France said.

“We’ve never seen anything like this, it’s dramatic,” Julie Fèvre, a winemaker, told  BFM.

“Everything is partially destroyed,” Paul-Étienne Defaix, another winemaker said.

Just last week, grapevines in Chablis froze during a sharp drop in temperatures, alarming winegrowers.

Government bodies are looking for ways to help winemakers following the destruction, the French agriculture minister Marc Fesneau posted on X.

Chablis is famous for dry white wine made from the renowned Chardonnay grape, which is at the heart of the local economy. Some 38 million bottles of Chablis Chardonnay wine are sold every year, generating an estimated $340 million turnover, according to the Burgundy wine association.

Around 67% of Chablis wine is exported to foreign markets, the association said.

“If winemakers don’t work well and make a nice harvest, it disturbs everyone: craftspeople, business owners, the whole economic activity way beyond Chablis,” the Chablis mayor told BFM.

Extreme weather, including drought and heat as well as frost and hailstorms, is affecting the wine industry globally.

The world’s wine harvest in 2023 was the lowest in 61 years because of “extreme climatic conditions” as well as widespread fungal diseases, an April report from the International Organisation of Vine and Wine revealed.

Some winemakers in France are trying to remain hopeful.

“We have no choice. Loss of morale won’t advance anything,” Louis Poitout, a winemaker in Chablis told BFM.

“We winemakers and farmers are generally quite combative. We have to try and find solutions, and we’ll find them,” he said.

Many species of animals form social groups and behave collectively: An elephant herd follows its matriarch, flocking birds fly in unison, humans gather at concert events. Even humble fruit flies organize themselves into regularly spaced clusters, researchers have found.

Within those social networks, certain individuals will often stand out as “gatekeepers,” playing an important role for cohesion and communication within that group.

And now, scientists believe there is evidence that how central you are to your social network, a concept they call “high betweenness centrality,” could have a genetic basis. New research published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications has identified a gene responsible for regulating the structure of social networks in fruit flies.

The study’s authors named the gene in question “degrees of Kevin Bacon,” or dokb, after a game that requires players to link celebrities to actor Bacon in as few steps as possible via the movies they have in common.

Inspired by “six degrees of separation,” the theory that nobody is more than six relationships away from any other person in the world, the game became a viral phenomenon three decades ago.

Senior author Joel Levine, a professor of biology at the University of Toronto who went to high school with Bacon in Philadelphia, said the actor was a good human example of “high betweenness centrality.”

Aware of Levine’s link with Bacon, study lead author Rebecca Rooke, a postdoctoral fellow of biology at the University of Toronto Mississauga, suggested the gene’s name.

“The degrees of separation is a real-world thing for us,” Levine said.

Having high measures of centrality in a group network can be positive or negative, Levine explained.

“Patterns of sharing and communication can be absolutely wonderful,” he said. “You also have patterns that contribute to the spread of lethal diseases and infectious diseases, but the structure of the group is the same structure. It’s not a good or a bad or a positive or a negative.”

Levine said that the “degrees of Kevin Bacon” gene was specific to fruit flies’ central nervous systems, but he thought similar genetic pathways would exist in other animals, including humans. The study opened up new opportunities for exploring the molecular evolution of social networks and collective behavior in other animals.

The gene behind fruit fly social networks

The researchers investigated a number of gene candidates in fruit flies, a common lab organism used in the study of genetics.

“We found two versions of the dokb gene and one version produces networks with high betweenness centrality and the other version produces networks with low betweenness centrality,” Levine said.

“A network with a high average betweenness centrality indicates there are individuals in the network important for the flow of information from one part of the network to other parts.”

The team used gene-editing techniques to knock out and swap these distinct variants to see what happened among different strains of flies. This exchange influenced the patterns of interaction among a network of flies, with a social group taking on the pattern of the donor variant.

“The difference that we would see is a difference in group cohesion. It’s not a difference that you would see with your naked eye,” Levine said.

If you observe video footage of fruit flies in a dish in the lab, Levine said they appear to interact with one another, forming repeatable patterns specific to different strains that can be analyzed statistically.

“What we know is that there’s a repeatable structure to the groups that they’re in,” Levine said. “And we imagine that those structures facilitate how they live.”

In nature, fruit flies show group behavior when laying eggs and encountering predators, Levine said.

“In our paper, we don’t actually characterize what is flowing through the network, so it is hard to speculate what advantages/disadvantages there are to flies who form these different patterns of interaction,” he explained in an email.

“However, we do show that the two different dokb variants exist in several wild strains of flies spanning the globe and that one of these variants correlates with low elevation environments,” Levine said. “Perhaps in low elevations, certain patterns of interaction are advantageous? Again, we don’t directly test this, so it is just speculation.”

Allen J. Moore, a distinguished research professor at the University of Georgia’s department of entomology, said in an email that the research was “careful work” and he agreed with the findings.

“Although a first step — and we (and they) don’t know exactly how it works — it is fascinating to find a single gene that influences social cohesion,” said Moore, who wasn’t involved in the research but reviewed the paper before publication.

What fruit flies and humans share in common

Drosophila melanogaster, best known for hovering around fruit bowls, has been a model organism to explore genetics for more than 100 years. The insects breed quickly and are easy to keep.

While flies are very different from humans, the creatures have long been central to biological and genetic discovery.

“Fruit flies are useful because of the power of manipulation. We can investigate things experimentally in Drosophila that we can only examine indirectly in most organisms,” Moore said.

The tiny creatures share nearly 60% of our genes, including those responsible for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, cancer and heart disease. Research involving fruit flies has previously shed light on the mechanisms of inheritance, circadian rhythms and mutation-causing X-rays.

Japan’s “Moon Sniper” lander has defied the odds for a third time, surviving yet another long, frigid lunar night despite not being designed to endure such harsh conditions, according to the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.

Temperatures during the lunar night can plunge to minus 208 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 133 degrees Celsius), according to NASA. And Moon Sniper wasn’t expected to withstand even one lunar night, which is a period of darkness on the moon lasting about two weeks.

The robotic vehicle, also known as SLIM, or the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon, initially touched down on the lunar surface on January 19. The historic feat made Japan the third country this century, and the fifth ever, to land on the moon. The spacecraft touched down near the Shioli Crater, located about 200 miles (322 kilometers) south of the Sea of Tranquility, a region near the lunar equator, where Apollo 11 first landed humans on the moon.

But things didn’t quite go according to plan.

During descent, the spacecraft experienced an anomaly and landed on its nose, which meant its solar panels were facing west rather than upright and not receiving necessary sunlight to generate power. The lander had just enough energy to send back a mosaic of images before shutting down. The mission’s team in Japan remained hopeful that once sunlight could reach the solar panels again, the spacecraft might reawaken.

So far, Moon Sniper, which gained its nickname for the precision technology that allowed it to land about 55 meters (180 feet) from its target, keeps pleasantly surprising the team by waking up after each lunar night, taking new photos and transmitting them back before it goes back to sleep. The vehicle’s resilience in the face of lunar extremes is unique among missions that have landed on the moon in the past year, and experts have a couple ideas as to why that might be.

Riding out the lunar night

The mission team communicated with Moon Sniper on April 23 after the lander rode out its third lunar night. The spacecraft was able to transmit more images of its landing site.

“SLIM has maintained main functionality even after 3 nights on the Moon, which was not anticipated in the design!” the team shared on X, formerly known as Twitter.

In addition to surviving the extreme cold of the lunar night, Moon Sniper has also endured the searing temperatures of the lunar day, which can reach 250 degrees Fahrenheit (121 degrees Celsius), according to NASA.

The team shared that it’s closely monitoring SLIM’s condition in order to identify what components of the spacecraft could deteriorate over time as it experiences more of the lunar day and night environment.

JAXA engineers have been careful about how they communicate with SLIM when it first wakes up since the spacecraft is operating in such high temperatures, which could heat up the cameras and damage them. As a result, the mission team usually waits about a day after SLIM wakes up before commanding it to send back images.

So far, one of SLIM’s navigation cameras and the spacecraft’s Star Tracker have provided images from Moon Sniper’s experience on the lunar surface. The Star Tracker isn’t a true camera and instead was used to measure the direction of the spacecraft by tracking the alignment of the stars as the lander traveled to the moon. But the team has taken clever measures to make the most of Moon Sniper’s wonky landing.

“It was not originally planned to be used on the lunar surface, but in principle it can take pictures just like a camera, which led to its operation through ‘secret commands,’” the agency shared on X.

The spacecraft has two navigation cameras mounted in different directions. Given how Moon Sniper landed, one of those cameras is facing into space, but the other has a view of the landing site from the spacecraft’s perspective.

The sun has once again set near Shioli Crater, and Moon Sniper went into hibernation again on April 29, according to the agency.

“We plan to attempt to resume operation again in mid to late May, when SLIM’s solar cells start generating electricity. We appreciate your continued support,” the agency shared on X as Moon Sniper went to sleep once more.

Members of the mission team recently composed a song in honor of Moon Sniper’s inspiring journey that they call “15 Degree Slope.” The song encompasses every step of the surprising mission, from launching and traveling to the moon to the unexpected landing and “the awakening of resurrection,” team members shared on X.

The song borrows its name from the steep slope where Moon Sniper was intended to land. Now, the mission team believes the slope Moon Sniper landed on was about 10 degrees, which is still “surprisingly steep.”

A tale of two moon landings

In February, Houston-based space exploration company Intuitive Machines landed its uncrewed IM-1 mission, also known as Odysseus, at the lunar south pole, making it the first commercial spacecraft ever to soft-land on the moon and the first US-made vehicle to reach the lunar surface since Apollo 17 in 1972. But like SLIM, the “Odie” mission experienced a bit of a lunar rollercoaster ride that included having to rely on experimental technology to touch down and ultimately landing on its side.

On February 29, after seven days of operating, Odie went to sleep because it wasn’t intended to survive the lunar night. The Intuitive Machines team listened out in case Odie awakened in March, but the spacecraft never phoned home again.

“Odie was designed to only support his payloads, none of which were capable of lunar night, so we did not design him for more,” said Jack Fischer, former NASA astronaut and vice president of production and operations at Intuitive Machines. “There are measures we could have taken to allow for potentially lasting longer, but we were focused on economical, rapidly flown support of our payloads, as opposed to a nation-state sponsored mission.”

The fact that Odie landed near the moon’s south pole, while SLIM touched down near the equator, could affect survivability of the lunar night, Fischer said.

“It still depends on terrain, but the equator will generally have less issues with shadows and have more productive solar power generation (due to higher incidence angles) than Odie experienced at the South Pole,” he said.

Other factors that could increase survivability include keeping a chemical battery protected and working through extreme temperatures and a design that can feed solar power directly to the power system, both of which could be implemented in the future.

“Surviving the night is critical for any effort to build meaningful infrastructure on the Moon, and IM is working on a host of options with experiments as soon as our IM-3 mission,” Fischer said. “Our goal is to first ‘survive’ the night where the spacecraft goes into a sort of hibernation (like SLIM has done) and wakes up on the other side. Ultimately, we want to ‘thrive’ through the night, and are doing just that with our Lunar Terrain Vehicle program, where the vehicle can do meaningful work through the lunar night.”

Fischer offered a tip of his cap to JAXA on the continued success of its mission.

“While I’m not an expert on the design of their vehicle, it is quite a feat for their spacecraft to have survived three lunar nights, no matter the circumstances,” Fischer said.

A race to the moon

Japan’s success with Moon Sniper is just one entry into a renewed race to land on the moon that has played out over the past few years.

India became the fourth country to land a robotic mission on the moon in August 2023 when the Chandrayaan-3 mission touched down near the lunar south pole. The Vikram lander and the Pragyan six-wheeled rover it deployed studied the moon for nearly two weeks before shutting down to sleep through the lunar night — but attempts to reawaken them were unsuccessful.

And the push for lunar exploration continues as China seeks to land a sample-collecting mission on the moon’s far side, or the side facing away from Earth, and NASA aims to establish a sustained human presence at the lunar south pole through its ambitious Artemis program.

The continued success of Moon Sniper comes during what Noah Petro, NASA project scientist for both the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and Artemis III, calls a “great new era of lunar exploration.”

Six of the groundbreaking Apollo missions returned lunar samples from different landing sites on the moon, but all of them were on the near side of the moon. Exploring new lunar regions provides new windows into understanding Earth’s satellite.

“For me, there is great joy in seeing missions land on the lunar surface,” Petro said. “Every time we land on the surface, we learn more about this unique lunar environment that we’re getting ourselves into. Building up this database of lunar knowledge of what it means to be and work on the surface of the moon helps us be better prepared for the Artemis missions.”

Staff and visitors have been left stranded and buildings submerged at Kenya’s famous Maasai Mara nature reserve, as the death toll in catastrophic flooding in the country’s southwest rose to at least 188 people.

Local authorities ordered some tourist facilities in the National Reserve to close after River Talek, one of the tributaries of the Mara River, burst its banks and swept through more than a dozen riverside tourist lodges and camps.

Videos on social media showed some buildings and vehicles fully submerged inside the popular park as tourists scrambled to leave affected areas.

Weeks of heavy rain and flash flooding has ravaged parts of Kenya for days, leaving dozens of people missing around the capital, Nairobi, and causing a devastating mudslide in the town of Mai Mahiu.

In Maasai Mara, camp owners were told to leave the affected properties and “move to higher ground further away from River Talek,” governor of Narok county Patrick Ole Ntutu said on Wednesday.

But local administrators went even further in their warnings, threatening legal consequences for people still left behind, even accusing those who stay of attempting suicide.

“We will forcefully evacuate anybody left in any homes or lodges along the river. We will take action against them because that is considered attempted suicide,” Narok county commissioner Kipkech Lotiatia told reporters.

Authorities said they had deployed two helicopters to rescue stranded tourists and local staff around the national reserve after receiving distress calls. The flooding was caused by swollen rivers after several days of continuous rainfall, the county said on X.

“We were being rained on from around 2 a.m. to 5.30 a.m. but we couldn’t get out and the planes coming to rescue us couldn’t get in one time.”

The Kenya Red Cross said it had rescued more than 90 people and at least 14 camps around River Talek had been closed.

While parts of the Mara have flooded before in Kenya’s so-called long rains season, locals say the scale of this year’s deluge has been unprecedented.

The country has deployed “corps from the Paramilitary Academy” of its National Youth Service to Narok to “join the multi-agency team for search and rescue operations following the heavy downpour,” a statement on X said.

The Horn of Africa, a region of East Africa that includes Kenya, is one of the most climate-vulnerable regions in the world. Heavy rains have also affected Tanzania and Burundi.

“Kenya is facing a worsening flood crisis due to the combined effects of El Niño and the ongoing March-May 2024 long rains,” International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) CEO Jagan Chapagain said in a post on X earlier this week, referring to the climate pattern that originates in the Pacific Ocean along the equator and impacts weather all over the world.

“The unfolding devastation highlights the government’s obligation to prepare for and promptly respond to the foreseeable impacts of climate change and natural disasters,” said Nyagoah Tut Pur, Africa researcher at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement Thursday. “Kenyan authorities should urgently ensure support to affected communities and protect populations facing high risk.”

The United States has formally accused Russia of using chemical weapons “as a method of warfare” against Ukraine and imposed sweeping new sanctions on Russian firms and government bodies.

In a statement on Wednesday, the US State Department said it had “made a determination … that Russia has used the chemical weapon chloropicrin against Ukrainian forces in violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC).”

It added that Russia had also used “riot control agents,” or tear gas, during the war in violation of the CWC.

“The use of such chemicals is not an isolated incident, and is probably driven by Russian forces’ desire to dislodge Ukrainian forces from fortified positions and achieve tactical gains on the battlefield,” it said.

The US conclusion tallies with testimony from Ukrainian troops who say they have faced increased encounters with gas and other irritant chemicals on parts of their frontline with Russia’s forces in recent months.

In a statement posted on social media in March, Ukraine’s armed forces said they had recorded more than a thousand incidents where Russia had used “tear gas munitions equipped with toxic chemicals that are prohibited for warfare,” with 250 cases in February alone.

The Kremlin dismissed the US accusations. Asked about them during a regular press briefing, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said: “We saw the news about this. These accusations are absolutely groundless, not supported by anything. Russia was and remains committed to its obligations in international law.”

Chloropicrin was widely used as a chemical warfare agent in World War I, but is no longer authorized for military use, and is now mostly used in agriculture, according to the CDC. It irritates the lungs, eyes, and skin, and can cause nausea, vomiting and diarrhea lasting for weeks, according to the CDC.

Under a 1991 law against the use of chemical and biological warfare, the State Department is “re-imposing restrictions on foreign military financing, US Government lines of credit, and export licenses for defense articles and national security-sensitive items going to Russia,” it said on Wednesday.

It added that it is sanctioning three Russian government entities linked to the country’s chemical and biological weapons programs and four Russian companies that contributed to those government bodies.

The announcement was part of a tranche of nearly 300 new sanctions against companies and figures in multiple countries for their support of Russia’s war in Ukraine, including China, Azerbaijan, Belgium, Slovakia, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates.

The US has previously warned Russia against chemical warfare in Ukraine; in March 2022, a month after the invasion began, President Joe Biden said that NATO would respond if Russia used chemical weapons in Ukraine.

And last April at a G7 summit, the foreign ministers of member nations said in a joint statement that Russia would be met with “severe consequences” for any use of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.

Since then, US officials have warned of signs that Russia has done so anyway. In November, Mallory Stewart, the US assistant state secretary for arms control, deterrence, and stability, cited reports by Ukraine that Moscow was using riot control agents in the war.

The use of chemical weapons is banned by international law. Russia has signed those treaties and claims it doesn’t have chemical weapons, but the country has already been linked to the use of nerve agents against critics in recent years.

Those cases include the poisonings of Sergei Skripal and Alexey Navalny – the latter of whom died in February while jailed in a a penal colony in Siberia. The 47-year-old fierce critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin had fallen unconscious after taking a walk, according to the Russian prison service; the cause of his death is unclear.

On Wednesday, the State Department said it would also impose new sanctions on three individuals linked to Navalny’s death: the director of the prison where Navalny was imprisoned; the head of solitary confinement who oversaw Navalny’s cell, as well as the walking yard where he allegedly collapsed and died; and the prison’s medical chief.