Russian President Vladimir Putin has replaced his defense minister Sergei Shoigu with a civilian, Andrey Belousov, citing the country’s rising military spending and the need for “innovation.”

Shoigu had been “relieved” of his post of Minister of Defense by presidential decree and been appointed Secretary of Russia’s Security Council, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said on Sunday night local time.

Shoigu would also become Putin’s deputy in Russia’s Military-Industrial Commission, Peskov said, while Nikolai Patrushev, the previous Secretary of the Security Council, would “transfer to another job.”

Belousov, who previously served as first deputy prime minister, is a civilian.

He was selected by Putin because of a need for “innovation,” Peskov said in a press call, during which he highlighted the ministry’s rising budget, saying it was approaching levels last seen during the Cold War.

“Today on the battlefield, the winner is the one who is more open to innovation,” Peskov said. “Therefore, it is natural that at the current stage, the president decided that the Russian Ministry of Defense should be headed by a civilian.”

In a reference to the war in Ukraine, Peskov said that due to “well-known geopolitical circumstances, we are gradually approaching the situation of the mid-80s when the share of expenses for the security bloc in the economy was 7.4%. It’s not critical, but it’s extremely important,” Peskov said.

The budget currently amounts to 6.7% of GDP, he said.

Peskov highlighted Belousov’s previous leadership experience and economic background.

“This is not just a civilian, but a person who very successfully headed the Ministry of Economic Development of Russia, for a long time he was aide to the president on economic issues, and was also the first deputy chairman of the government in the previous cabinet of ministers,” Peskov said.

Peskov added that the new appointment did not signal a shift in Russia’s current military system.

“As for the military component, this appointment will in no way change the current coordinate systems. The military component has always been the prerogative of the Chief of the General Staff [Valery Gerasimov], and he will continue his activities. No changes are currently envisaged in this regard,” he said.

In his new role, Shoigu will oversee Russia’s military industrial complex, Peskov said.

“He is deeply immersed in this work, he knows very well the pace of production of military-industrial products at specific enterprises and often visits these enterprises,” he said.

The news follows the arrest last month of one of Shoigu’s close allies, deputy defense minister Timur Ivanov, who was charged with taking a bribe in what was the country’s highest-profile corruption scandal since Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine more than two years ago.

Ivanov has been accused of accepting a bribe of 1 million rubles (at least $10,800), according to Russian state media TASS.

Shoigu has also been criticized for his handling of the invasion of Ukraine – most forcefully by the Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin in the months before his death last year.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

Three bewildered children sit on the roof of a mosque in Baghlan province, northern Afghanistan, their eyes blinking away mud that covers their entire bodies.

Beside them, a rescuer lowers their baby brother, 2-year-old Arian, to the rooftop, a sheet tied around his waist that was used to pull him from the raging floodwaters below.

“Take it, let’s get take off the rope from his body,” the rescuer says on the video. “Bring his mother to hold him in her arms and be warm.”

In the past few days, at least 300 people have been killed in flooding in 18 districts across at least three provinces in northern Afghanistan, according to the United Nations’ World Food Programme (WFP), with at least 200 injured.

Videos show raging torrents of mud washing away mud houses – and people, their limbs flailing, in the fast-moving brown current, as would-be rescuers watch from higher ground, beyond reach.

The rescued children, ages 3, 5 and 6, were among eight siblings who were at home with their parents in Folo, in the Bulka district of Baghlan, when the flooding hit.

“Visibility was so poor that we couldn’t even see each other,” he said.

Then the rain started falling gently during Friday prayers – an unusual event for locals, who say it doesn’t rain very often so high in the mountain region, home to around 10,000 people, he added.

As the rain got heavier, suddenly the situation “turned dire.”

“People fled to higher ground, seeking refuge in mountains and hills. Unfortunately, some individuals who were unable to leave their homes fell victim to the floodwaters,” he said.

Aerial photos show belongings piled in plastic bags on rooftops, among them the hooded figures of women forced to cover their entire bodies even in times of disaster.

“Women who were rescued are forced to wear mud-soaked garments, while even infants as young as 2 to 3 months old are clothed in similarly soiled attire,” Barakatullah said.

In Folo, more than 100 people are believed to have been killed, he said – mostly women and children.

Some burials began over the weekend, but many more are already believed to be buried deep beneath mud.

From drought and hunger to flooding

The torrent swept away animals and farmland in an area already facing severe food shortages, according to Timothy Anderson, head of the WFP in Afghanistan.

He said the areas hit by floods had already been marked vulnerable to starvation after a difficult summer when searing heat brought drought.

Most years, locals expect to see flash flooding, he said. But this year, it’s been far worse.

The loss of the homes and their land is devastating for survivors, who were already among some of the country’s most impoverished people, Anderson said.

“When people lose a bit of livestock, that’s actually their livelihood,” he said.

Road access to the worst affected areas has been cut by floodwaters, forcing the WFP to use donkeys to send in supplies.

Within the first day, the WFP had distributed high energy biscuits and food for children. They’re also supporting local bakeries to supply free bread. In the next days, teams will start distributing food to feed families for a month – what happens next is unclear.

Anderson said 17 joint assessment teams are being sent to the area, along with other UN partners. He said it’ll take four or five days for the teams to properly examine the impact of the floods on people, and their housing and infrastructure.

‘Bearing the brunt’ of climate crisis

This latest natural disaster comes after drought in Afghanistan, and is being seen as an example of a climate crisis hitting those who have least contributed to rising global temperatures.

“They’re not net emitters of carbon,” said Anderson of the WFP. “This is a subsistence agriculture community and society. So, they’re bearing the brunt of it, without having necessarily contributed to the issue very much.”

He said during the recent dry months, efforts had been made to help the community capture rainfall in dams and irrigation canals to sustain crops. Now those efforts have been washed away, posing another challenge.

“The need is massive, not just in Afghanistan. The world is seeing the impacts of much larger, more severe events, whether that’s drought, rainfalls cyclones,” Anderson said.

Richard Bennett, the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights in Afghanistan said the recent floods “are a stark reminder of Afghanistan’s vulnerability to the climate crisis.”

And in a statement Sunday, Teresa Anderson, the Global Climate Justice Lead at ActionAid International, said: “The climate crisis continues to rear its ugly head.”

“With the latest incident, Afghanistan joins a long list of Global South countries grappling with floods this year,” she said.

At least 14 people have died and dozens were injured after a huge billboard fell on them during a thunderstorm in India’s financial capital Mumbai, according to local authorities.

The billboard collapsed on some houses and a petrol station next to a busy road in the eastern suburb of Ghatkopar following gusty winds and rain late on Monday.

Scores were trapped following the incident with rescue operations continuing till early on Tuesday. The thunderstorm brought traffic to a standstill in parts of the city and disrupted operations at its airport, one of the country’s busiest.

Mumbai’s municipal corporation said at least 74 people were taken to hospital with injuries following the accident and 31 have been discharged.

News channels and posts on social media showed the towering billboard billowing in the wind for a while before it gave way and crashed to the ground.

The local weather department had predicted that moderate spells of rain, accompanied by gusty winds reaching 40-50 kilometers per hour (25-30 miles per hour) were likely to occur in parts of Mumbai district on Monday.

There were temporary flight disruptions at the Mumbai airport, with 15 flight diversions and operations suspended for a little over an hour, ANI news agency, in which Reuters has a minority stake, reported.

Mumbai, like several Indian cities, is prone to severe flooding and rain-related accidents during the monsoon season, which usually lasts from June until September every year.

Georgia’s parliament has passed a controversial “foreign agents” bill despite widespread domestic opposition and warnings from the European Union that its enactment would imperil the country’s chances of joining the bloc.

The new law will require organizations receiving more than 20% of their funding from abroad to register as “agents of foreign influence” or face crippling fines. Opponents say that the legislation was modeled after similar laws in Russia that the Kremlin has used to increasingly snuff out opposition and civil society.

Many Georgians fear their foreign agents bill will be used the same way in their country. Nightly protests have shut down Tbilisi, the capital, for about a month.

Georgian Dream, the ruling party that pushed through the legislation, has hit back at criticism, saying the move will promote transparency and national sovereignty.

This is a developing story. More details to come.

For Ukraine, May is turning out to be the cruellest month.

The town of Vovchansk in the northern Kharkiv region, liberated from Russian occupation more than 18 months ago, awoke Friday to intense shelling and aerial bombardment. Russia has found another way of stretching Ukraine’s already thin blue line.

President Volodymyr Zelensky and other Ukrainian officials said that Russian efforts to advance towards the town had been thwarted, but the Russians have since tried to cut road links with Vovchansk.

The Russians launched battalion-strength attacks along a 60-kilometer stretch of the border on Friday, claiming to occupy several villages in what is known as the ‘gray zone’ along the frontier, after focusing much of their offensive capabilities this year on a grinding advance in Donetsk in the east that has seen incremental but significant progress.

As of Saturday, it appeared the Russians still held a handful of Ukrainian border villages, with intense aerial bombardment continuing in the Vovchansk area.

The cross–border attack is yet another example of what’s going wrong for the Ukrainians this year. Their forces are thinly stretched, with much less artillery than the Russians, grossly inadequate air defenses and above all a lack of soldiers. Their plight has been worsened by dry weather, allowing Russian mechanized units to move more easily.

The deputy head of Ukrainian Defense Intelligence, Major-General Vadym Skibitsky, told the Economist last week: “Our problem is very simple: we have no weapons. They always knew April and May would be a difficult time for us.”

Ukrainian intelligence estimates that despite immense losses since the full-scale invasion began, Russia has more than half-a-million men now inside Ukraine or at its borders. It is also “generating a division of reserves” in central Russia, according to Skibitsky.

“Russia sought to generate 60,000-100,000 troops for its group to attack Kharkiv and we assess it’s closer to 50,000,” Barros says, but “it still has a lot of combat power.”

It’s from this new force that units of armored infantry tried to cross the border. The available evidence suggests they were expected and suffered significant losses. But if more elite units join (there are reports that elements from other divisions may do so) Russia’s ambitions could grow.

One former Ukrainian officer who writes about the conflict on the blog Frontelligence says that “Manpower shortages compel Ukraine to avoid deploying large units along the border continuously, with fully stocked and ready for immediate-use artillery.”

He expects the situation to evolve, “with Russian forces deploying more units to penetrate additional border areas or to reinforce initial successes.”

Several analysts expect the Russians to broaden the border attacks westwards to Sumy region, which has seen months of raids by Russian special forces.

The Sever grouping could not attack and occupy a city the size of Kharkiv, but that’s likely not the goal. Barros says that it is instead to compel Ukrainian forces to pivot from Donetsk to Kharkiv region. The Russians seek to “thin Ukrainian forces out along the 600-mile frontline and create opportunities, specifically in Donetsk oblast, which is Russia’s main operational objective for 2024,” Barros says.

The latest cross-border assaults may also divert Ukrainian units from the defense of Kupiansk, also in Kharkiv region, where a Russian assault has stalled for months, as well as create a buffer zone inside Ukraine that the Kremlin says it wants to reduce attacks on Russian cities like Belgorod.

Upping the tempo

What’s happening in Kharkiv is not isolated. The Ukrainian military acknowledged this week a spike in combat engagements (more than 150 on Thursday alone), coming on top of a marked increase from March to April.

In effect, the Russians have the manpower to stretch Ukrainian defenses through multiple points of attack hundreds of kilometers apart, forcing Kyiv to guess where and when an anticipated early-summer offensive will focus.

The increased tempo of attacks exacerbates Ukraine’s two critical vulnerabilities: insufficient manpower and sparse air defenses. Russia is exploiting both in a hurry, keen to establish facts on the ground before a new wave of Western aid can help. That is at least weeks away in any meaningful amounts.

“Manpower remains a core challenge, and Ukraine is working to restore its existing degraded brigades as well as from about 10 new maneuver brigades,” Barros says.

Only in the last month has a law been passed to expand mobilization, nearly two years after Russia mobilized some 300,000 additional troops. The process was bogged down in the Ukrainian parliament for months, and President Zelensky was wary of both the cost and the political fallout of a more extensive mobilization. The numerical inferiority has sharply worsened across the frontlines, providing Russian commanders with a growing number of opportunities to probe for weaknesses.

Western analysts believe that in Chasiv Yar, Donetsk, for example, the Ukrainians may be outnumbered by 10:1, as well as suffering a chronic imbalance in shells and a complete lack of air cover. One Ukrainian military blogger this week estimated that elements of as many as 15 Russian motorized rifle brigades (each of which would have up to 1,000 men) were operating in the Chasiv Yar direction alone.

Lose the high ground around Chasiv Yar and an important belt of industrial towns and cities: Slaviansk, Kramatorsk and Kostyantinyvka, becomes much more vulnerable.

Skibitsky told the Economist that losing Chasiv Yar was a distinct possibility – “not today or tomorrow, of course, but all depending on our reserves and supplies.”

North-east of Chasiv Yar, a soldier called Stanislav told Ukrainian television this week that after a month of “very active hostilities” the Russians “are advancing from the direction of Kreminna, where they are accumulating great reserves.”

“Huge numbers of Russian infantry are attacking day and night, in large and small groups,” the soldier said.

Besides the shortage of trained soldiers, “Russia is leveraging Russian airspace as a sanctuary to strike Kharkiv oblast, highlighting the urgent need for the US to provide more long-range air defense assets and to allow the Ukrainians to use them to intercept Russian aircraft in Russian airspace,” says Barros.

The United States announced Friday a $400 million package of air defense munitions and other weapons, but much more will be needed.

Ukraine’s losses are compounded by a lack of prepared defensive positions behind the front lines. where they could fall back. In Krasnohorivka, for example, Ukrainian units were able for months to use apartment buildings and a brick factory as defensive positions. Slowly they have been obliterated – with one Russian military blogger claiming that artillery fire had buried them “under the rubble of their own shelters.”

President Zelensky and others have talked more about “active defense” – having better defensive fortifications as a building block to turn the tide on Russian advances. Zelensky himself has toured such fortifications. But they are too few and too late in critical areas, especially in Donetsk.

Zelensky asserted this week that “we will be able to stop the [Russians] in the east” when the aid arrives. But he acknowledged that “the situation there is really difficult” and contended that the aid that’s arrived so far is “not the volumes that were voted for.”

“We need everything to come faster,” he added.

Every day that it doesn’t, the Russians edge forward – and the Ukrainians lose soldiers they can’t afford to lose.

Barros says the Russians were prepared for the hiatus in military aid. “The recent Russian gains we see now are not merely opportunistic; the Russians prepared for it and are now exploiting it. Ukraine may need to make difficult decisions due to slowness of US action and the dilemma that is now causing.”

That may amount to trading territory for time. And ultimately accepting that much of the territory now lost may not be recovered.

Scientists have accomplished a whale of a feat. They’ve identified previously unknown complexity in whale communication by analyzing thousands of recorded sequences of sperm whale clicks with artificial intelligence.

Variations in tempo, rhythm and length of the whales’ click sequences, called codas, weave a rich acoustic tapestry. These variables hint that whales can combine click patterns in multiple ways, mixing and matching phrases to convey a broad range of information to one another.

What sperm whales are saying with their clicks remains a mystery to human ears. Still, uncovering the scope of whales’ vocal exchanges is an important step toward linking whale calls to specific messages or social behaviors, the scientists reported May 7 in the journal Nature Communications.

“This work builds on a lot of prior work focused on understanding the calls of sperm whales. However, this is the first work that has started to look at sperm whale calls in their wider communicative context and in the context of exchanges between whales, which has made some of the findings possible,” said study coauthor Dr. Daniela Rus, director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT, in an email.

“Understanding what aspects of their codas they can control and vary helps us understand how they can encode information in their calls,” Rus said.

The researchers dubbed their catalog of sound combinations a “phonetic alphabet” for sperm whales, comparing variations in the whales’ click sequences to the production of different phonetic sounds in human speech.

But while the team’s findings are interesting, that term offers a misleading perspective on whales’ vocal interactions, said Dr. Luke Rendell, a researcher at the University of St. Andrews in the United Kingdom whose work focuses on communication in marine mammals, in an email.

“The presentation of the ‘phonetic alphabet’ — it’s nothing of the sort,” said Rendell, who was not involved in the research.

“The way the tempo variation is used is completely different to how, say, we use elements of an alphabet to construct linguistic expression,” he said. “There’s no evidence of that, and it’s not a super helpful interpretation because it forces everything into a restricted and somewhat over-sold perspective of ‘is it like human language or not,’ when there are a much broader range of interpretations available.”

Pattern recognition

Sperm whales produce their clicks by forcing air through an organ in their heads called the spermaceti, and these sounds can be as loud as 230 decibels — louder than a rocket launch and capable of rupturing human eardrums — another team of scientists previously reported in the journal Scientific Reports.

For the new study, the researchers used machine learning to detect patterns in audio data collected by The Dominica Sperm Whale Project, a repository for observations of sperm whales that inhabit the Caribbean Sea. The recordings represented the voices of approximately 60 sperm whales — a subset of a group of about 400 whales known as the Eastern Caribbean clan — and the vocalizations were recorded between 2005 and 2018.

Prior research had identified 150 types of codas in sperm whales worldwide, but the Caribbean whales used just 21 of those codas.

The scientists examined the timing and frequency of 8,719 coda sequences — in solitary whale utterances, in choruses and in call-and-response exchanges between whales. When visualized with artificial intelligence, previously unseen coda patterns emerged.

The study authors defined four features in codas: rhythm, tempo, rubato and ornamentation. Rhythm describes the sequence of intervals between clicks. Tempo is the duration of the entire coda. Rubato refers to variations in duration across adjacent codas of the same rhythm and tempo. And ornamentation is an “extra click” added at the end of a coda in a group of shorter codas, Rus explained.

These so-called ornament clicks “occur more towards the beginning and end of turns” during vocal exchanges between whales, “behaving like discourse markers,” Rus said.

The discovery that whales could synchronize variations in coda tempo was “a really interesting observation,” Rendell said.

“I am less convinced by the ‘ornamentation,’” he added. “It occurs very rarely, and I think we need more evidence that they aren’t just production glitches,” or filler sounds, “like when we say ‘um’ or ‘err.’”

In all, the program detected 18 types of rhythm, five types of tempo, three types of rubato and two types of ornamentation. These coda features could all be mixed and matched to form an “enormous repertoire” of phrases, the study authors reported. What’s more, meaning could be tweaked even further depending on the placement of a coda — following or overlapping other codas — within an exchange or chorus involving two or more whales.

Interactive experimentation

“Actually, many of us have been waiting for advanced technology to allow us to do something like this for decades!” said Dr. Brenda McCowan, a professor at the University of California Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, in an email.

McCowan, who was not involved in the research, was part of another team that, in 2021, conducted an interactive “conversation” with a humpback whale in waters near Alaska. For about 20 minutes, a curious whale repeatedly responded to a recording of a humpback song transmitted from the scientists’ boat.

“This particular playback (with the humpback in 2021) was an opportunistic experiment with an inquisitive whale engaging us both behaviorally and vocally, and completely at her own volition,” McCowan said.

Such interactive experimentation with whales, along with observations of whale behavior, could be an important part of unraveling the syntax of sperm whale click sequences, the authors wrote in the study.

Their machine learning method may also prove useful for studying other types of animal vocalizations, McCowan added.

“Tempo, rhythm, rubato and ornamentation are likely to be found in other species of whales,” McCowan said. “We already know this is true of humpback song. But there is also evidence for this type of patterning in other aquatic, terrestrial and arboreal species to which this approach could be applied.”

But although this technique is helpful for identifying certain aspects of communication, it’s no Rosetta stone, Rendell cautioned.

“Machine learning is great for finding patterns in large datasets,” he said, “but it doesn’t create meaning.”

Mindy Weisberger is a science writer and media producer whose work has appeared in Live Science, Scientific American and How It Works magazine.

Chanu Gupta has lived in India’s financial capital Mumbai nearly his whole life, since arriving as a child from the northern state of Uttar Pradesh.

But when polls open in the city, the 59-year-old street vendor won’t be able to vote in the nationwide election – along with millions of internal migrant workers who are a major backbone of the country’s economy.

Under India’s election rules, eligible voters can only cast ballots in their constituencies – meaning those working outside of their state have to return home to vote.

That’s all but impossible for many out-of-state workers, especially underprivileged daily-wage workers in the unorganized sector. And it’s a huge group – one study estimates there were about 600 million internal migrants in 2020, making up 43% of the country’s nearly 1.4 billion population at the time.

These workers are often from poorer rural parts of India, in search of work in bigger cities. Even then, they earn low wages that are usually sent home to support family members.

Perhaps nowhere is this starker than Mumbai – India’s richest city and the birthplace of the Bollywood movie industry. Often referred to as the “city of dreams,” Mumbai draws migrants from across the country hoping to find wealth and success.

More than 43% of Mumbai’s population were classed as migrants in 2011 during the last national census, according to migration think tank Knomad. Many come from states with higher poverty and unemployment rates such as Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Rajasthan and Gujarat.

Signs of that diverse mix are everywhere in Mumbai – the varied languages spoken, the many day laborers across the city, from auto-rickshaw drivers to construction workers and sugarcane juice vendors lining the streets.

For these workers, forgoing daily wages to head home to vote would come at a high cost – both in the money they would spend getting there, and lost wages. And those losses have a ripple effect on the family members back home dependent on their income – from children missing out on tuition fees to elderly parents’ rent and food costs.

The Covid-19 pandemic only underscored the volatility of migrant workers’ circumstances when millions lost their jobs almost overnight and were forced to go home.

“Despite the living expenses being relatively high in large cities as compared to villages, their wages are considerably low causing poor living conditions including limited or non-existent public services such as water and sanitation,” said one United Nations-led study that examined the impact of the pandemic on this segment of the workforce.

Gupta said his shaved ice business relies on the hot summer months when the election takes place. “If I go to vote, I lose my business. Earning my living is more important to me than voting as I have to support my family,” he said.

“There are many migrants like me who are in Mumbai to earn money and are not able to vote.”

India’s diaspora

Many Indian citizens abroad – part of the massive global Indian diaspora – face the same problem, though their circumstances vary considerably.

Most are low-income laborers who helped build the economies and glittering cities of oil-rich Arab nations, while some are middle or upper-class students pursuing an international education or professional career in Western countries.

According to government figures, there are 13.6 million such “non-resident Indians,” or NRIs, globally. The biggest group is in the United Arab Emirates, with 3.4 million NRIs, followed by 2.5 million in Saudi Arabia; next is the United States with 1.2 million.

The plight of NRIs in Gulf nations – many of whom live in cramped dormitories and labor camps – was also highlighted during the pandemic when businesses shut down, wages dried up and border restrictions prevented them from returning home, leaving them in limbo.

For these overseas Indians, there is no such thing as online voting or postal ballots. Instead, NRIs must register as an “overseas voter” then travel to their hometown in India to be physically present in their constituencies to vote.

Local media reports highlight some dedicated voters with the means to fly back and vote, such as professionals in the United Kingdom or Dubai. But they remain a tiny minority of NRIs who do so.

According to the Election Commission of India, in the last national elections in 2019, more than 71,000 people registered as “overseas voters” – less than 1% of the total NRI population at the time.

Push for voter turnout

Indian authorities have pushed hard in recent years to increase turnout, urging all 968 million eligible voters nationwide to cast their ballots – a massive feat that includes setting up more than a million polling stations from remote forests to mountain peaks.

The ECI has also launched voter literacy initiatives and social media campaigns targeting young voters.

These efforts saw the highest voter turnout in the country’s history in the 2019 election, with more than 67% of Indians going to the polls.

The massive group of disenfranchised migrant workers stands in sharp contrast to these achievements – with no solution in sight.

In a 2011 study that surveyed workers across five Indian states, 60% of respondents had “missed voting in elections at least once because they were away from home seeking livelihood options.” It added that many migrants left home as young as age 13 to look for work – and did not have time to get their voter IDs when they became eligible at age 18.

The ECI acknowledged this problem in a 2022 report, raising the question of how to improve voter participation among internal migrants.

One issue the voting body highlighted was the absence of any clear definition of an internal migrant, adding that their inability to vote is a key reason “contributing to low voter turnout.”

The ECI said it had proposed remote voting machines to address the problem. But in 2023, the government said there were no such plans.

That means for now, voting remains an unlikely reality for many migrant workers.

“I cannot say now whom I would vote for if I was in my hometown,” said Gupta, the Mumbai vendor. “That is the last thing on my mind – my focus right now is earning my livelihood.”

Acclaimed Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof says he has fled his home country to an undisclosed location in Europe after a court in Iran sentenced him to prison on national security charges.

Rasoulof condemned the Iranian government in an Instagram post on Monday, calling it a tyrannical and oppressive regime, and posting a video that showed him crossing the country’s mountainous border.

“If geographical Iran suffers beneath the boots of your religious tyranny, cultural Iran is alive in the common minds of millions of Iranians who were forced to leave Iran due to your brutality and no power can impose its will on it. From today, I am a resident of cultural Iran,” he said.

In a separate statement dated May 12, Rasoulof said he had decided to escape Iran after his lawyers told him his prison sentence would be implemented on short notice.

“I had to choose between prison and leaving Iran. With a heavy heart, I chose exile,” he said in that statement, which was provided by a spokesperson.

Rasoulof is among several high-profile artists to have been caught up in a widening crackdown on dissent by Iranian authorities since nationwide protests broke out over the 2022 death in custody of Mahsa Amini, who was arrested for allegedly not wearing her headscarf properly.

Rasoulof, whose recent films have been critical of the Iranian government, was among a group of artists and filmmakers who signed a letter criticizing the violent response of security forces to quell a 2022 protest over a building collapse in the southwestern city of Abadan that killed more than 40 people.

Rasoulof won a Golden Bear for best film at the Berlinale festival in 2020 for “There Is No Evil” and his film “A Man of Integrity” was recognized for a “Certain Regard” honor at the Cannes Film Festival in France in 2017.

The filmmaker’s latest work, “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” is set to premiere at Cannes next week, but it’s unclear if he will be able to attend.

“We are very happy and much relieved that Mohammad has safely arrived in Europe after a dangerous journey,” said Jean-Christophe Simon, the distributor for Rasoulof’s latest film.

The Films Boutique and Parallel45 executive added that he hopes that Rasoulof will be able to attend the Cannes premiere for his film “in spite of all attempts to prevent him from being there in person.”

Rasoulof said on Instagram that he will now work to quickly finish the last technical steps of his film’s post-production.

“Many people helped to make this film. My thoughts are with all of them, and I fear for their safety and well-being,” he said, accusing the Iranian government of pressuring members of his production team with interrogations, court filings and travel restrictions.

Rasoulof didn’t specify how he escaped Iran, saying only that he did it secretly with the help of friends and acquaintances.

In 2022, an Iranian court sentenced Rasoulof to one year in prison and banned him from making films for two years on the charge of “propaganda against the system,” according to Human Rights Watch. Iranian authorities have previously arrested him multiple times and confiscated his passport because of his work, HRW said.

Additional reporting by Michael Rios

The United Nations on Monday clarified that the overall number of fatalities in Gaza tallied by the Ministry of Health in Gaza remains unchanged, at more than 35,000, since the war broke out between Israel and Hamas on October 7.

The clarification comes after the UN humanitarian agency OCHA (United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs) published a report on May 8 with revised data regarding the number of Palestinian casualties in the war. The UN agency in its report reduced the number of women and children believed to have been killed in the war by nearly half.

The number was reduced because the UN says it is now relying on the number of deceased women and children whose names and other identifying details have been fully documented, rather than the total number of women and children killed. The ministry says bodies that arrive at hospitals get counted in the overall death count.

UN spokesperson Farhan Haq told a daily briefing at the UN that the health ministry in Gaza recently published two separate death tolls – an overall death toll and a total number of identified fatalities. In the UN report, only the total number of fatalities whose identities (such as name and date of birth) have been documented was published, leading to confusion.

According to Haq, the ministry published a breakdown for 24,686 fully identified deaths out of the total 34,622 fatalities recorded in Gaza as of April 30. The fully identified death toll comprises of 7,797 children, 4,959 women, 1,924 elderly, and 10,006 men, the UN spokesperson said, citing the Gaza health ministry.

The health authority in Gaza noted that the documentation process of casualties’ full identification details is still ongoing, Haq added.

The total number of dead also does not include the approximately 10,000 people who are still missing and trapped under the rubble, the officials added.

Israel launched its military assault on Gaza on October 7 after the militant group Hamas, which governs Gaza, killed at least 1,200 people in Israel and abducted more than 250 others. Israel’s months-long siege of the Palestinian enclave has since pulverized large parts of Gaza and drastically diminished critical supplies, exposing the entire population of more than 2.2 million people to the risk of famine.

Both the UN and US officials have previously appraised the figures from the Ministry of Health in Gaza as credible.

People who lived in the Arabian Peninsula thousands of years ago went underground when they wanted to beat the heat. Possibly stopping there as they traveled between oases and pastures, they ducked into vast subterranean tunnels where molten lava had once flowed millions of years earlier, according to a recent study.

Beginning in the Stone Age, Neolithic herders descended into and occupied these vast tunnels, known as lava tubes, archaeologists have discovered. Cooler air underground would have provided a welcome respite from the sun and wind, and for thousands of years, humans sheltered with their livestock in the tunnels. The herders left behind objects and even carved pictures on the rocky walls, researchers reported April 17 in the journal PLOS One.

In the Harrat Khaybar lava field, about 78 miles (125 kilometers) to the north of Medina in Saudi Arabia is a tunnel system called Umm Jirsan, the longest in the region. Scientists haven’t yet confirmed the age of the lava that formed this system, but a 2007 study suggested it was around 3 million years old. Umm Jirsan spans nearly 1 mile (1.5 kilometers), with passages that are up to 39 feet (12 meters) tall and as much as 148 feet (45 meters) wide.

Archaeologists at Umm Jirsan recently found animal bones dating from 400 years to more than 4,000 years ago, and human remains ranging from 150 years to about 6,000 years ago. The research team also found cloth fragments, pieces of carved wood and dozens of stone tools — the first evidence that humans were using the tunnels, starting at least 7,000 years ago.

“From earlier reports we knew that fossils were preserved at the site,” said lead study author Dr. Mathew Stewart, a research fellow at the Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution at Griffith University in Australia.

This discovery highlights the significance of Umm Jirsan and other tunnels for understanding human dispersal in the region, said Guillaume Charloux, an archaeologist with the French National Centre for Scientific Research. In general, knowledge about ancient climate and humans in northwestern Arabia is limited, “particularly during the transitional phase between the Neolithic and the beginning of the 2nd millennium,” said Charloux, who studies ancient sites in Saudi Arabia but was not involved in the new research.                      .

Around this time, local people were settling around recently formed oases; the appearance of these desert refuges would shape human migration patterns in the region for millennia, he said via email. “The main contribution of this innovative and major research project seems to me to be that it brings to light the long-lasting use — probably ephemeral occupation — of this type of cave, which had remained unstudied, and their enormous potential, particularly for understanding paleoenvironmental contexts.”

‘Green Arabia’

For nearly 15 years, Stewart and his colleagues have been piecing together evidence of ancient human life in Arabia, mostly from sites around lake deposits, Stewart said. Beginning around 400,000 years ago, recurring periods of humidity saturated Arabian deserts with rainfall. During these “Green Arabia” phases, lakes and ponds abounded and the landscape bloomed with lush vegetation, leading to waves of migrating humans who dispersed into southwestern Asia, Stewart and other researchers previously reported in the journal Nature.

But the last Green Arabia phase was around 55,000 years ago, and harsh desert environments aren’t kind to archaeological evidence. While stone tools preserve well in dry deserts, bones and other organic materials are easily degraded and destroyed by erosion and extreme heat and cold, leaving little for researchers to interpret, Stewart noted.

“To that end, in 2019 we decided to investigate underground settings where organics and sediments might be better preserved,” he said.

So the scientists turned their attention to Umm Jirsan. The site had previously been mapped by the Saudi Geological Survey, and a report from 2009 described it as a refuge for wild animals such as foxes, wolves, birds and snakes. Caches of bones in the tunnels included human skull fragments estimated at the time to be about 4,000 years old. But until 2019, the tunnel system hadn’t yet been closely investigated by archaeologists, Stewart said.

“We were able to date the animal bones and sediments, which informed us that people began occupying the cave by 7,000 years ago and perhaps as early as 10,000 years ago,” Stewart said.

Compared with other sites where humans once lived, the amount of archaeological material at Umm Jirsan was “quite scant,” suggesting that people were visiting the tunnels as temporary refuges rather than living there permanently, the study authors reported.

Animal carvings

In another tunnel near Umm Jirsan, the researchers found 16 panels of engraved rock art. The carvings appeared to be herding scenes, with tool-wearing, stick-figure humans standing alongside domesticated animals such as dogs, cattle, goats and sheep. Other carvings showed animals with dramatically arching horns resembling those of an ibex; however, these horned animals could represent a different breed of domesticated goat, according to the study. The carvings’ subjects and their varnish coating hint that they date to a regional period known as the Chalcolithic (around 4500 to 3500 BC), which preceded the rise of the Bronze Age.

“Collectively, the archaeological findings at the site and in the surrounding landscape paint a picture of recurrent use of the Umm Jirsan Lava Tube over millennia,” Stewart said. The site — which lies along a known migratory route for Bronze Age herders — “may have served as a stopping off point, a place of refuge protected from the elements.”

This unprecedented evidence of human occupation in ancient Arabian lava tubes sheds light on how people adapted to live in arid landscapes, and further investigation of Umm Jirsan and other lava tubes promises to add even more details, Stewart added.

“These sites have tremendous potential to fill in some of the gaps in the natural and cultural archives that persist in the Arabian archaeological record.”

Mindy Weisberger is a science writer and media producer whose work has appeared in Live Science, Scientific American and How It Works magazine.