A two-year stop-start process exploring options to secure the release of Navalny began to accelerate when Abramovich visited Moscow in recent months, two of the sources said.

Former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had also embraced early efforts to win Navalny’s freedom, according to several sources.

Abramovich, who is sanctioned in the West and spends much of his time in the United Arab Emirates, met a US official as ideas for the complex exchange involving as many as seven people took shape, according to one source close to the process. Abramovich has kept a connection with the Kremlin since the Russian invasion of Ukraine and was instrumental in early efforts at negotiating an end to the conflict.

The source familiar with Abramovich’s involvement said he was “flabbergasted” to hear that Navalny had died even as he pursued the exchange.

On February 27, 11 days after Navalny’s death, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov side-stepped questions about Abramovich’s involvement. Asked whether he knew whether Abramovich had discussed a prisoner swap with Putin, he said: “You can ask Abramovich’s representatives. This is not a question to us.”

Even so, the proposal was still at an informal stage, according to several sources familiar with the process, and a deal did not appear imminent.

“The offer can only be made once it’s been accepted informally. That’s how it works in these negotiations,” he said.

“Navalny’s release was not imminent before his sudden death,” the official added.

An Aspen meeting

Back in the summer of 2022, Hillary Clinton was approached by Christo Grozev, who has worked with the Navalny team for several years, at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado.

Navalny adviser Pevchikh also said the Russian convicted of murdering a Chechen dissident in Berlin in 2019 was included in a proposed deal. Pevchikh said that “in early February, Putin was offered to exchange Vadim Krasikov, a killer and an FSB officer who is serving a sentence for murder in Berlin, for two American citizens and Alexey Navalny.”

German prosecutors said that Krasikov was sent by the Russian security services with a false identity to carry out the killing. He was sentenced to life in prison after his conviction in a Berlin court.

The Kremlin denied that he had been working on behalf of the state. But without naming Krasikov, Putin last month floated the idea of securing the release of a Russian “patriot” who he said was serving a life sentence for “liquidating a bandit” in Europe. Speaking to Tucker Carlson in Moscow, Putin implied the deal would be in exchange for the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who has been charged with espionage in Russia.

The final framework of the proposed deal is unclear, but an individual close to the Navalny team said that an expanded proposal included the possible release of both Gershkovich and another American imprisoned in Russia, Paul Whelan, in addition to Navalny.

“We had to find a way to package the German asset [Krasikov] into an American negotiation,” the source close to the Navalny team said. The Russians had initially proposed that a German-Russian dual citizen held in Russia on espionage charges be exchanged for Krasikov, an offer flatly refused by the Germans.

It became a complex triangular arrangement, he said. “It had to be explained to the Americans that the only way for them to get Whelan and Gershkovich is if the Russians get Krasikov. But the Germans would only hand over Krasikov in exchange for Navalny.”

“There are other places bad Russians are. The question was how to get everybody aligned, so various ideas were being thrown around,” the diplomat added. “You have to be creative.”

Another Russian who could be included is Sergey Vladimirovich Cherkasov, an alleged Russian spy who has been charged by the US Department of Justice with fraud and other crimes and is being held in Brazil. Russian and American extradition requests have been declined by Brazilian authorities.

Abramovich, according to multiple sources, did not chicken out. But exactly when and how he delivered the informal proposal to the Kremlin, or to President Putin himself, is still not confirmed. Ultimately, the process did not move swiftly enough to save Navalny.

And his aides remain convinced that Putin ordered the killing of the opposition leader, a claim the Kremlin denies.

This story has been updated to include further comment from a US official.

On February 26, one of Russia’s longest-serving human rights activists stood up at the end of his trial in a Moscow court and offered his uncensored verdict on Russian democracy.

“The state in our country is once again controlling not only social, political and economic life, but is now claiming full control over culture, scientific thought, and is inserting itself in private life. It’s becoming all-pervasive,” said Oleg Orlov, a 70-year-old who was on trial for “discrediting the army.”

Powerful voices like Orlov’s are becoming a rarity in Russia, where high-profile opponents to President Vladimir Putin and his ruling elite are now mostly either in exile, in prison, or dead.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 accelerated a process already two decades in the making — the erosion of democratic freedoms, media independence and civil society at home. With the war now in its third year, and Putin set to be re-installed for a fifth term in a tightly-controlled election next week, there are signs that this process is picking up speed once again.

Orlov, co-founder and co-chair of Memorial, a Nobel Prize-winning human rights organization set up in the Soviet Union’s twilight years, knew he had nothing to lose.

The day after his speech in court, he was sentenced to two and a half years in prison. Discrediting the army is just one of several new offenses added to Russia’s penal code since the invasion of Ukraine.

Orlov’s so-called crime was committed just over a year earlier, when he  published an article in a French online newspaper titled “They Wanted Fascism, They Got It.” After his sentencing, Amnesty International called him a “prisoner of conscience” and called for his immediate release.

Russian human rights group OVD-Info says more than 260 people are currently serving jail terms in the country for crimes related to taking an anti-war stance. The group has recorded almost 20,000 detentions, and while most of those were at the beginning of the war, there is still a steady stream. They’re not large numbers in a country of 140 million people, said OVD-Info lawyer and analyst Darya Korolenko, but just enough to make for an effective deterrent.

And it’s not just known opposition figures or activists who are being targeted.

The wartime censorship laws — discrediting the army, or the more serious offense of knowingly spreading “false” information about the army — have turned social media into a minefield.

Platforms are closely monitored by the FSB, which acts as Russia’s secret service, said Konstantin Eggert, an exiled Russian journalist who was among many added to Russia’s ever-growing list of “foreign agents” last year. He believes the grip on social media will tighten further.

Evgeniya Mayboroda, a pensioner in her early 70s from Shakhty, a town less than 50 km (around 30 miles) from the Ukrainian border, found herself unable to conform to that uniform ideology. According to OVD-Info, she was  arrested and fined in early 2023 for alleged anti-war social media posts.

In January, she was jailed for five and a half years for spreading “false” information about the army. Russian independent news outlet Mediazona reported she was convicted after two reposts on VKontakte — Russia’s version of Facebook — including one about Russian troop deaths.

In this climate, old practices are creeping in, like Soviet-style denunciations. In early February, 67-year-old Moscow pediatrician Nadezhda Buyanova was accused by a young patient’s mother of calling her husband — who had recently been killed in the war — a “legitimate target for Ukraine.”

The woman filed an official report and Buyanova was arrested, her modest Moscow apartment ransacked by police.

Russia’s powerful investigative committee ordered a criminal case be opened on charges of spreading false information about the army. Buyanova, who denies the charges, is out on bail, but is now suing to try to get her job back.

“The climate is fed by the mainstream media that everyone is a spy and a traitor, foreign agent, everyone wants to destroy Russia, destroy your home,” said Korolenko. “People fear that they will lose what they care about. So they try to protect this.”

‘Deeper and deeper into this darkness’

With mainstream Russian media now entirely state-controlled, the authorities are targeting other forms of expression — the arts, literature and culture. Orlov argued in his courtroom speech that this is yet more proof of Russia “sinking deeper and deeper into this darkness” at an ever-quickening pace.

He listed evidence from the last four months alone, including: the branding of the LGBTQ movement as extremist, new rules prohibiting students at Moscow’s prestigious Higher School of Economics from citing people on Russia’s growing list of “foreign agents” in their work, and the effective banning of many modern authors.

One of those authors is Grigory Chkhartishvili, who goes by the pen name Boris Akunin. One of Russia’s most popular modern literary figures, a master of the historical detective genre, he’s been living in exile since 2014 — but that has not insulated him from Russia’s crackdown. In December, Akunin was added to Russia’s “terrorist and extremist list” for allegedly justifying extremism and spreading false information about the Russian army.

Despite Akunin’s regular public criticism of Putin and the war, that move was apparently triggered by what he sees as an orchestrated setup — a prank call by Russians posing as Ukrainians, later posted online, in which he was tricked into expressing his opposition to the war and his willingness to help Ukraine.

In response, his main publisher in Russia announced it would not be releasing new copies of his books, and a major network of bookstores pulled them off its shelves. In January, Akunin was labeled a foreign agent, and in early February a Moscow court issued an arrest warrant for him for allegedly justifying terrorism and spreading false information about the Russian army.

“The Russia that I remember was not like this,” he said. “It was a troubled, chaotic democracy, an interesting country where a lot of things were happening. Now, it has become totally Kafkaesque, Orwellian.”

For many in Russia’s disparate dissident community, the death of Alexey Navalny, Putin’s most prominent critic, was the last stop on the country’s journey back to authoritarianism. Akunin said he believes it is clear evidence the Kremlin is no longer even trying to hide the lengths it will go to stamp out dissent.

Russia did not make the mass arrests or carry out a violent crackdown at Navalny’s funeral last week, as many of the activist’s supporters had feared, but no one should be fooled by that, said Andrei Soldatov, a Russian investigative journalist and expert on the Russian intelligence services.

Borrowing an effective tool from the days of Covid-19 regulations, he said, Russian authorities simply relied on surveillance from Moscow’s many facial recognition cameras, as well as plainclothes officers from the Center for Combating Extremism, a unit of Russia’s interior ministry.

Arrests of those who laid flowers at makeshift memorials and attended Navalny’s funeral have continued for days after the event, and in one case, according to OVD-Info, a Moscow resident arrested on March 5 was told he had been spotted on security camera footage.

Soldatov said this is this reaction stems from an official paranoia in Putin’s Russia, an “an incessant obsession with the fragility of the state,” fueled by history and made worse by the war in Ukraine, as well as the impending election.

It all goes back to the “two historical traumas of 1917 and 1991,” he said — the Bolshevik revolution and the collapse of the USSR.

“They don’t understand why two Russian empires basically collapsed for no apparent reason,” he said. “So everything you can do to prevent this is justifiable.”

In his final words to the Moscow court, Orlov echoed that sentiment.

“The authorities are even at war with the deceased Navalny,” he said. “They fear him, even when he is dead.”

Most of the men in Oksana Rubanyak’s platoon are at least 10 years older than her. Before the war, having a young woman in charge of an all-male Ukrainian military unit might have given the troops pause. But as the platoon prepares for a frontline deployment at a time Ukraine is desperately trying to hold off Russian advances, things like gender and age no longer matter that much, Rubanyak said.

It’s a huge change compared to when she first joined the army two years ago.

The number of women in the military has increased significantly since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, with more than 62,000 women currently serving in the Armed Forces of Ukraine, according to official statistics. More than 5,000 are serving in the combat zone, like Rubanyak, who is now 21.

Rubanyak was 19 when she joined the Ukrainian army as a volunteer. She served near Bakhmut and was, as now, the only woman in her platoon. She operated a heavy machine gun and, while she did everything the men did, she said she experienced some level of bias – such as some men trying to stop her from carrying heavy weapons.

“I heard people saying behind my back that I must be someone’s daughter, that my father would promote me and so on. It was something new for many people. Everyone was trying to find a catch, that just didn’t exist,” she said.

And while she said that there have been many positive changes in the past two years, there is still work to do. “Everything takes time,” she said. “Although all the conditions for women to serve in the army are there now, if they choose to.”

Working two jobs

As more and more Ukrainians join the war effort, the country’s women are increasingly stepping in – and not just in the military.

The Ukrainian government doesn’t disclose how many people have signed up to the armed forces in the last two years. However, it’s clear that hundreds of thousands have swapped their day jobs for military service.

With new waves of military conscription expected soon, employers are facing a new problem: how to fill the vacancies left by the men drafted. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of women have left the country, seeking refuge abroad.

According to the National Bank of Ukraine, employers nationwide are currently facing a shortage of about 60,000 skilled workers, an increase of some 20,000 since 2021.

With so many unfilled vacancies, women are often picking up the slack. A number of Ukrainian organizations and companies are offering training courses for women for some of the jobs conventionally thought of as male roles.

Halyna Shevchenko knows this firsthand. She works in a repair department of the Ukrainian Railways in the Poltava region. Before the war, she managed a team of 10 men who repaired complex parts of railway cars. When two of her colleagues were mobilized, the company couldn’t find anyone to fill their specialized positions.

So, Shevchenko started to learn the technical skills and now does some of the repairs herself. With women making up 40% of Ukrainian Railways’ employees, she is likely not the only one.

The new tasks – and the war – have significantly increased her workload.

The railways have carried more than 40 million passengers and huge amounts of cargo since the war began. The company has also introduced all sorts of new, military-focused services, including evacuation trains for wounded soldiers.

All of that means that Shevchenko’s team has to carry out more repairs.

“I am a techie, just like my colleagues. That’s why we communicate with the guys on an equal footing. We complement each other and consult on complex repairs,” she said.

War and the economy

Kernel, one of Ukraine’s largest agricultural producers and exporters, has also started to look for solutions to the worker shortages.

The company has also started training women to be boiler operators – a job women didn’t tend to do before the war.

“We piloted this project… to prove that women can work in conventionally male occupations. It was a successful experiment, and all the women continue to work,” she said.

Shevchenko said she is determined to keep doing the “man’s job” of fixing railway cars for as long as is needed. She has built up a good rapport with her team and said she feels respected by them.

“As long as I have enough health and strength, I will do everything to help my colleagues as much as possible – until the end, until we win,” she said.

A bold plan to genetically engineer a version of the woolly mammoth, the tusked ice age giant that disappeared 4,000 years ago, is making some progress, according to the scientists involved.

The long-term goal is to create a living, walking elephant-mammoth hybrid that would be visually indistinguishable from its extinct forerunner and — if released into its natural habitat in sufficient numbers — could potentially help restore the fragile Arctic tundra ecosystem.

Resurrecting the extinct species has been a pet project of Harvard University geneticist George Church for more than a decade. The plan gained traction in February 2021 when Church cofounded Dallas-based Colossal Biosciences with entrepreneur Ben Lamm and received an infusion of cash and an ensuing glare of publicity later that year.

Many challenging tasks, such as developing an artificial womb capable of gestating a baby elephant, remain. But Colossal Biosciences said on Wednesday that it had made a “momentous step” forward.

Church and Eriona Hysolli, Colossal’s head of biological sciences, revealed they had reprogrammed cells from an Asian elephant, the mammoth’s closest living relative, into an embryonic state — the first time stem cells have been derived from elephant cells. The team plans to publish the work in a scientific journal, but the research hasn’t yet undergone peer review.

These modified cells, known as induced pluripotent stem cells or iPSCs, can be further teased in the lab to grow into any kind of elephant cell — an important tool as the researchers model, test and refine the scores of genetic changes they need to make to give an Asian elephant the genetic traits it needs to survive in the Arctic. These include a woolly coat, a layer of insulating fat and smaller ears.

“So what’s beautiful about the cells is they can potentially renew indefinitely and differentiate into any cell type of the body,” said Hysolli, who is the company’s lead scientist on the mammoth project.

The stem cells will also make it easier for conservation scientists to study the Asian elephant’s unique biology. For their size, the creatures are uniquely resistant to cancer — for reasons that are not well understood. A key obstacle for the team in making the elephant cell lines was to inhibit genes that are thought to confer that cancer resistance.

Cellular research techniques pioneered by Colossal have opened up a new avenue for saving the endangered elephant, said Oliver Ryder, director of conservation genetics at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance.

“The intention to produce iPSCs from elephants has been out there for years. It has been difficult to accomplish,” said Ryder, who was not involved in the research. “The impact on conservation is going to be in the realm of genetic rescue and assisted reproduction,” he added.

For obvious reasons, it’s hard to study naturally occurring elephant embryos. The stem cells would allow scientists to create model elephant embryos that will lift the curtain on how an elephant develops into a fetus — a “very valuable asset,” Ryder said.

Engineering a woolly mammoth hybrid

The elephant stem cells also hold the key to the mammoth’s rebirth. Once edited to have mammoth-like genetic traits, the elephant’s cells could be used to make eggs and sperm and an embryo that could be implanted into some kind of artificial womb. However, that will take years of work.

Given an initial six-year deadline set by Colossal, the team plans to first employ existing cloning techniques similar to those used in 1996 to make Dolly the sheep, inserting genetically edited cells into a donor egg that would be gestated by a surrogate elephant mom. However, even though that technology has been around for a while, the results are hit and miss. And many question whether it is ethical to use endangered animals as surrogates given the likelihood of failed attempts.

“I think the first engineered elephant will be the major milestone and that may be consistent with Ben’s (Lamm) prediction of six years from 2021,” Church said. “The second thing that will make us happy is we have one that’s really cold resistant. Then the third one will be if we can do it in a way that’s scalable, that doesn’t involve surrogates. That’s an unknown distance out,” Church said.

The research team at Colossal has already analyzed the genomes of 53 woolly mammoths from ancient DNA recovered from fossils. The wide-ranging specimens from animals that lived in different places at different points in the past helped the scientists understand exactly which genes make a mammoth unique.

“We’ve come a long way. Mammoth DNA quality is almost as good as the elephant and both of them are almost as good as (DNA extracted from) humans,” Church said.

Church and Hysolli didn’t say exactly how many genetic changes they expect to make to Asian elephant DNA to make a creature that resembles a mammoth capable of withstanding Arctic temperatures. The geneticists also want to engineer a mammoth with no tusks, so the animals don’t fall prey to poachers.

Church, who has been at the forefront of work to genetically engineer pigs with organs compatible with the human body for transplants, said it is possible to make 69 edits at one time in pigs. The number of modifications needed to make an Asian elephant resistant to the cold would be broadly similar, he said.

The potential role of resurrected mammoths

Colossal has longed claimed that mammoths, should they return to the grasslands in the planet’s northernmost reaches in sufficient numbers, would help slow down permafrost thaw.

Some scientists believe that, before their extinction, grazing animals such as mammoths, horses and bison kept the earth frozen underneath by tramping down the grass, knocking down trees and compacting snow.

One small study in Siberia published in 2020 suggested that the presence of large mammals such as horses, bison, yak and reindeer resulted in lower soil temperatures in the protected area where they were kept compared with land outside that boundary. However, it’s hard to imagine herds of cold-adapted elephants making a significant impact on a region that’s warming faster than anywhere else in the world, other experts have said.

Colossal also announced plans to resurrect the Tasmanian tiger in 2022 and the dodo in 2023, but its work on the mammoth been going on longest.

Some are stabbed, some are shot, some are strangled. But all the women killed by femicide in Italy have one thing in common: they knew their killers.

More than 100 women were killed in 2023. The term ‘femicide’ – which is typically when a woman is killed by a current or former partner – became so topical an Italian encyclopedia named it as its word of the year in 2023.

Italy might have a female prime minister, but she makes a point of not identifying herself as a feminist.

The country only criminalized crimes of passion in 1981, and the judicial system still often gives lighter sentences to male killers if their wives were unfaithful.

In a notorious case in 2020, 80-year-old Antonio Gozzini was cleared of bludgeoning to death his 62-year-old wife, Cristina Maioli with a rolling pin while she slept and then slicing her throat and cutting up her legs because the court said he suffered a “raptus” or delirious jealousy over his wife’s job at a local school. Gozzini remains free today.

The prevalence of domestic violence in Italy is fed by societal failures, says Lorella Zanardo, an activist, educator and documentary filmmaker.

Zanardo’s 2009 documentary “Il Corpo delle Donne” or “Women’s Bodies,” about sexism in Italian public and private television, started a national conversation about the link between sexism, sexual assault and gender equality.

While Italy does not have Europe’s highest rate of domestic violence, it is among the lowest ranked in Europe when it comes to gender equality.

In 2023 Italy dropped in the rankings from the previous year based on factors like increasing wage disparity, which makes it harder for women to leave marriages because they cannot support themselves.

“Italy has been a country of patriarchy for many, many years, but it’s also a country of difficult to understand because in the 70s one of the most important and successful women’s movement was Italian,” Zanardo said.

“I have asked myself what happened after this movement. It’s difficult to explain but this movement was very political [and] had a very clear political connotation.”

Part of the problem with having a feminist movement so closely tied to politics is that it becomes divisive.

In Italy, the feminist movement was largely driven by the left, which meant that those who supported right-leaning parties, including current Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, have distanced themselves from feminism entirely.

“We have a woman prime minister, but she’s completely against it,” Zanardo said, adding that Meloni has even chosen to use the masculine article in front of the Italian word ‘prime minister’ rather than embracing the fact that Italy has one of the world’s few female leaders.

“She pretends to be called ‘il’ prime minister like a man and I think that a woman like her could be an activist also in language by showing to younger generations that leaders can be women,” Zanardo said.

Meloni’s office did not respond to a request for comment on the reason behind the use of the male article in front of her title.

Feminist movements have been successful vehicles to drive greater equality across the world. The Council of Europe says, “In general, feminism can be seen as a movement to put an end to sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression and to achieve full gender equality in law and in practice.”

And it is feminist movements that are doing the most to help Italian victims of abuse.

CADMI is a shelter and resource center for abused women in Milan that has rescued 600 women from abusive situations in the last year.

The center was started by Italy’s Union of Women, which is a left-leaning anti-fascist feminist group that opened the center to give women a lifeline.

When they started, people distrusted them, Carelli says.

“They were very young, but they hadn’t recognized the violence and hadn’t had the chance to get out of that story. Why? In fact, because the anti-violence centers were little known,” she said.

“And then because even culturally, women were still very rooted in patriarchal culture, which is that culture that is based on a disparity in power between males and females, also on a relationship dimension of very different conceptions of relationships.”

Carelli believes that success inspires other women. “For us, a woman’s path to freedom is also important for all other women, because it demonstrates, it is symbolically representative of a possibility,” she said. “Women have the right to be free and therefore this has a strong value for us, including political value.”

There was a flashpoint last year when in November, 22-year-old Giulia Cecchettin’s body was found with multiple knife wounds in a ravine in northern Italy a week after being seen with her ex-boyfriend Filippo Turetta.

Turetta fled to Germany where he confessed he had killed he woman he still called his girlfriend even though the two were no longer together.

Cecchettin’s friends told investigators that she was concerned that Turetta was stalking her. She met him to try to defuse the situation, her sister said.

Turetta is awaiting a fast-track trial that will take into account his confession. He faces up to life in prison, but will likely be given a shorter sentence due to his confession, based on cases with a similar precedent.

Cecchettin’s murder reignited the debate on violence against women, with massive protests held across the country. More than 8,000 people, including Italy’s president, attended her funeral. But a week after she was buried, four more women were dead, all killed by ex-husbands or boyfriends.

Maria Grazia escaped a relationship she describes as abusive.

Women in Italy who try to escape their abusers or fear for their lives consistently complain that police are often condescending or accusatory, that somehow it is the victim’s fault for provoking the man, or that they should just let him “cool off.”

“Weapons, messages, insults, my intercom was broken, I wasn’t sleeping at night.” She said she hid in her home with the lights out. She was afraid. “I called the police, who came, but then asked me, ‘there isn’t any blood?’,” she says. “I replied ‘but when there is blood I will no longer need you.’”

When she finally got away, she and a friend went on to start a cooperative called Maison Antigone, which has helped thousands of women navigate a complicated bureaucratic system that often makes it difficult to report abuse.

Often women are left to feel responsibility for the abuse, she said.

Her group also helps women work through Italy’s complex family law legal system to protect children as well.

Progress is slow and often hard to measure. After Cecchettin’s murder, the Italian senate passed a unanimous bill to strengthen protections for women who are at risk, or who have asked authorities for restraining orders or for abusive partners to be removed from the home.

“This law introduces measures that in many cases can make the difference between life and death,” Family Minister Eugenia Roccella said at the time.

But for many women the changes aren’t coming fast enough.

They have the calm of people who have lived through terrible things. But they are just kids.

Some are navigating life in neighborhoods ruled by gangs, doing their best to stay out of danger. Others work for the gangs, tasked with dangerous jobs such as spying on rival groups or the gory work of disposing of bodies. All of them face the daily risk of deadly violence, with one gang leader even warning of civil war that could end in genocide.

Meanwhile, across the country, many more children are going hungry, according to UNICEF, as food prices spike amid the insecurity.

Here are four of their stories:

Shot while playing

Woodjina Cadeau’s family was forced to flee their home in Port-au-Prince two years ago, as gangs battled for control of the area, setting buildings on fire. They thought they would be safer setting up a temporary home on an abandoned airplane runway in the city, as many others had done.

But on January 30, gunfire erupted down the street while the eight-year-old was playing outside, sending a stray bullet through Woodjina’s stomach. Amid the screams of other children, Donald Saint Surin, an emergency responder for local children’s organization OCCED’H (Organization of Hearts for the Assistance of Deprived Children) found her on the ground, a pool of blood soaking into the packed dirt, he recalls.

Saint Surin rushed her to a hospital; after surgery and two weeks of medical treatment, Woodjina was able to return to her family. But her father Jonel points out that the rough shelter of corrugated metal where she is now recovering is hardly a fit home. And he doesn’t know if they’ll ever be able to go back.

Afraid to go to school

In the coastal town of Jeremie, 15-year-old Shiloh, hasn’t been to school since January, when violent protests exploded over Haiti’s deteriorating living conditions. In one incident, protesters attacked the school itself. “They were trying to break down the school gate, the kids inside were screaming, eventually the school sent us home,” she says.

Now it feels too dangerous to go back, she says, but that also means missing the free lunch that is the only meal of the day for many students.

Raising the son of her rapist

It was late in the evening when this 16-year-old girl found a small banknote – 25 Haitian gourdes, the equivalent of 20 US cents. She was hungry, and decided to venture outside her home in Port-au-Prince’s gang-controlled area of Martissant to buy something to eat.

She was attacked on the way and raped. She believes the perpetrator was a gang member.

In January, she gave birth to a baby boy. Caring for him is not easy, she says; “When you’re faced with a child, it’s not a game.”

Working for the gangs

Now, when other members of the gang kill people, they make him burn the bodies, says the teen, who is now 14.

He would like to get out – but he doesn’t know how. His mother lives outside of Port-au-Prince; he’s not sure how to reach her and couldn’t afford such a trip anyway.

Ultra-Orthodox Israelis have long held a privileged position in that society.

Their religious schools, or yeshivas, get generous government subsidies. And yet young men of the Haredim, as they are known in Hebrew, are in all practical terms exempt from mandatory military service.

That exemption has bedeviled Israeli society since its founding. But a legal deadline to come up with a more equitable social compact, at least in the eyes of the Supreme Court, now looms at the end of March.

Powerful members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government have made clear they will not help him kick the can down the road without broad political support.

Ultra-Orthodox Jews view religious study as fundamental to the preservation of Judaism. For many of those who live in Israel, that means study is just as important to Israel’s defense as the military.

In Israel’s nascent days, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion agreed with Haredi rabbis to exempt from military service 400 men studying in religious schools, or yeshivas. In 1948, there were few Haredim in Israel – many were and remain opposed to the state on religious grounds – and the exemption had little practical impact.

In 1998, Israel’s Supreme Court ripped up the longstanding exemption, telling the government that allowing Haredim to get out of conscription violated equal protection principles. In the decades since, successive governments and Knessets have tried to solve the issue, only to be told again and again by the court that their efforts were illegal.

At the same time, the Haredi community has grown significantly. They now make up 24% of recruitment-aged Israelis, according to the IDI. Arab Israelis are exempt from mandatory service. In practice, anyone who tells a recruiter that he studies at yeshiva – anyone who presents themselves to be ultra-Orthodox – can get out of service.

Now, those piecemeal attempts to maintain the Haredi exemption may be running out. The latest government attempt to paper over the problem, in place since 2018,  expires at the end of March.

The day before Netanyahu’s press conference, Yoav Gallant,  Israel’s defense minister, made clear that he did not have his prime minister’s back.

“Any draft bill that will be agreed to by all members of the emergency coalition, I will agree to,” he said. “But without an agreement by all coalition members, the security establishment under my leadership will not support the bill.”

The implication was that the man that polls suggest is most likely to succeed Netanyahu as prime minister – Benny Gantz, who is part of the emergency coalition, but not the pre-October government – will have veto power over any solution to the issue.

Netanyahu was vague in his response.

“We will set goals for recruiting ultra-Orthodox men into the IDF and civilian service,” he told reporters. “The worst thing that can happen to us now is to go to general elections during the war, which means losing the war.”

Gantz, who just concluded a highly controversial trip to the United States and United Kingdom that his government declared to be unsanctioned, has made clear that “all parts of society should take part in the right to serve our country,” and that “this is not a matter for the court but for the leaders.”

What’s the view of Israeli public opinion?

Most Israelis agree that the situation is untenable.

Israel’s attorney general, Gali Baharav-Miara, added more urgency to the matter when she told the Supreme Court last month that as soon as the exemption arrangement expires, the government can no longer legally fund the yeshivas.

“How can you basically dodge service and at the same time be eligible for government subsidies for studying in a yeshiva?” asked IDI head Plesner, who is also a former member of Knesset and has long worked on this issue.

If the government cut off yeshiva funding, Plesner said, it “would create a situation that would prevent the government from being able to stall and procrastinate on this issue, because the ultra-Orthodox parties would not agree to sit in a coalition that does not fund their landmark institutions.”

Indeed, Netanyahu’s bind is that his government coalition relies on Haredi parties to stay in power. When the government came to power in late 2022, forming the most right-wing coalition in Israel’s history, the Haredim sensed an opportunity.

Their coalition agreement, Plesner said, stipulated that they would “define that the exemptions are a constitutional right of the ultra-Orthodox community, and, in a way, to elevate study in the yeshiva to a constitutional level that is above even military service.”

Haredi parties dismissed the efforts to conscript them as a political bludgeon used by their political enemies, not a practical need.

That idea was dealt a blow after October 7. The Israeli military has had a significant number of soldiers wounded in Gaza and has instituted massive call ups.

“The army’s solution for its need to expand after October 7 is to put a lot of burden on the part of the Israeli public that actually serves,” said Ofer Shelah, a senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies and former member of Knesset who helped draft one of the previous legislative attempts at a solution.

“Now it’s a real problem. It’s no longer just politics.”

A delicate moment

Some in the Haredi political leadership, perhaps recognizing the delicate political moment, have been generally cautious in defining a position.

Before Hamas’ attack, Yitzhak Goldknopf, minister of housing and construction, and head of the United Torah Judaism party, had threatened to quit the government unless Haredim were given a permanent exemption.

The Haredim “are talking differently,” he said. “They’re saying, listen, whoever doesn’t learn should go” and serve the country.

That view is far from universal.

In the poll conducted by IDI, 68.5% of Haredi respondents said that their exemption to military service “should not be changed.” Just last weekend, Haredi protesters opposed to conscription blocked a major highway near the largely ultra-Orthodox city of Bnei Brak.

Roth, from the United Torah Judaism party, is steadfast in his views.

“We, the Jewish people, are the people of the book. Being a scholar, being a Talmud scholar, is one of the key major pillars of our existence,” he said. “Jewish students have to be exempt.”

And yet, while very few Haredim serve in the military, not all have proven to be opposed.

Nechemia Steinberger, a Haredi rabbi who has for years worked to integrate mainstream education into his community, signed up to the IDF in the wake of the Covid pandemic.

“People like to blame the Haredi of being these parasites who are waiting for other people to die and be killed for them,” he said. “The issue of Haredi joining the army is an issue of identity.”

For most Israelis, he explained, military service is an ironclad tradition, instilled from a young age. And service – whether on the front lines, or in one of the many other departments – is a pathway to job training and a career.

“For Haredim, it’s not like that,” he said. “The educational system supports that we dream that every child by us is going to grow up to be a Torah scholar. That’s the dream.”

The concern among many Haredim, he explained, is that the military is not built to accommodate people with the social and religious values of the ultra-Orthodox – and that widespread conscription would strip the Haredi of their core identity.

“You serve in a mixed unit with non-Haredim, and you’re exposed to the world outside. Eventually you become part of it and you decide not to be part of the Haredi community or not be religious at all.”

Even if the Haredi exemption to conscription were scrapped, the practical realities are that we are unlikely to see scenes of military police dragging scores of young men to recruitment offices.

“If you want really to create the change, it’s going to take years. It’s going to take at least a generation.”

The road, which he said will be used for at least a year, will have three lanes: one for heavy tanks and armored vehicles, another for lighter vehicles and a third for faster movement. It will be possible to drive on the Netzarim Corridor from Be’eri, an Israeli kibbutz near the Gaza border, to the Mediterranean Sea in seven minutes, he said.

Chikli is not involved in Israeli military policy. But, in January, Chikli, along with other members of Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, proposed a plan to defeat Hamas that included steps to gain control over strategic parts of the strip. In it, they said that the Netzarim Corridor would be used “to enable treatment of the underground infrastructure of Hamas and its resistance pockets in the north of the Gaza Strip.”

“The residents of the Gaza Strip should not be allowed to return to the north at least until the demolition of all the underground infrastructure and the complete demobilization of the area,” they said in the proposal. It also included a second corridor further south that he called the Sufa Corridor. The plan has not been adopted by the IDF, but it includes elements that are coming into existence, including the Netzarim Corridor.

Cutting the strip in two

The Israeli military began bulldozing a path for its armored vehicles soon after declaring war against Hamas on October 7, following the militant group’s attack on Israel. Satellite imagery from November shows the tracks emerging, at a time when the military’s focus turned to surrounding Gaza City, advancing from the east. In early October, Israel ordered the evacuation of 1.1 million people from northern Gaza to south of Wadi Gaza, a strip of wetlands bisecting the enclave.

The Israeli military gave right-wing Israeli TV Channel 14 a tour of the Netzarim Corridor in February, revealing what it called a “buffer” that is being worked on around the road. The report showed forces from the Israeli Engineering Corps operating tractors, trucks and engineering tools.

Lt. Col. Shimon Orkabi, commander of Battalion “601” of the Combat Engineering Corps, told Channel 14 that the soldiers were busy destroying any remaining infrastructure in the buffer area. “It basically opened up this entire space of territory to us, allowing us to control everything that happens in this corridor,” he said.

He added that the Israeli military used a “large amount of mines and explosives” to demolish buildings in the buffer zone, and that the remaining buildings in the area will “probably disappear soon.”

The Channel 14 report shows the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital, about 380 meters (about 1,240 ft) away from the road, partly in ruins and soldiers operating in the area.

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk said in February that the IDF’s reported destruction of residential buildings and other civilian structures elsewhere in the Gaza Strip, within a kilometer of the Israel-Gaza fence to create a buffer zone, could amount to a war crime.

‘A barrier of humiliation’

A road splitting the strip will make it easier to “screen people moving back and forth between the north and south and try to figure out if any of them are Hamas fighters,” she added.

Harding said Israel’s biggest challenge since they started the operation in Gaza is to try to root out Hamas militants hiding amongst a civilian population: “The only way you do that is with really good tactical on the ground intelligence, and then preventing them from actually moving around.”

Many people in Gaza remember what such controls on movement were like before Israel withdrew from the strip.

“Israeli soldiers were stationed at the junction full-time, and because Israeli settlers used it, we Palestinians mostly could not,” he said.

During this period, Israel tightened its “internal closure” policies, mostly for the security of settlements, according to a 2004 Human Rights Watch (HRW) report, leaving only one route between the northern and southern halves of the Gaza Strip. Along this route were the Abu Holi and Matahen checkpoints, which severely limited movement.

“The Abu Holi checkpoint was notorious,” Al-Rozzi said, recalling a route from Gaza City to the southern city of Khan Younis that “took days” to travel.

“They placed a traffic light there that would only turn red. From red to red. Can you imagine? I remember it vividly.”

“I remember at that time my brothers and I were selling clothes. We used to go out very early in the morning to head southward. The checkpoint would be open sometimes, but on the way back, we would spend eight or nine hours on average. Sometimes it would remain closed, and people would spend their nights in the streets,” he said.

“The memories of that checkpoint are painful,” he said. “Imagine 200 to 300 cars waiting at the checkpoint to be granted passage by Israeli soldiers.”

The Israel-Hamas war has displaced both Al-Ashi and Al-Rozzi from the north to the southern city of Rafah.

“If our house in Gaza City has not been shelled, I would like to go back to it. How am I going to do that if there are gates and checkpoints in my way?” Al Rozzi said.

“More so, how do we function there if I manage to cross back in? Will there be infrastructure left? Roads I can use?” he said. “I am a teacher. Will there be schools I can teach at? Am I going to be able to access them?”

A peculiar fossil has helped scientists discover an unusual bird that lived among the dinosaurs 120 million years ago, and the find is changing the way researchers think about avian evolution.

The previously unknown species has been named Imparavis attenboroughi, which means “Attenborough’s strange bird” in Latin in honor of British naturalist Sir David Attenborough.

All birds descended from dinosaurs, and some of the earliest ones resembled them. But Imparavis, which belonged to a diverse bird group called enantiornithines, likely looked more like the birds we’re familiar with today, according to a new study published Tuesday in the journal Cretaceous Research.

Enantiornithines are known as “opposite birds” because they had a shoulder joint feature that greatly differs from the ones modern birds have.

“Enantiornithines are very weird. Most of them had teeth and still had clawed digits,” said lead study author Alex Clark, a doctoral student at the University of Chicago and the Field Museum of Natural History, in a statement. “If you were to go back in time 120 million years in northeastern China and walk around, you might have seen something that looked like a robin or a cardinal, but then it would open its mouth, and it would be filled with teeth, and it would raise its wing, and you would realize that it had little fingers.”

But Imparavis was the first known bird of its kind to be toothless in a landscape full of birds with teeth, according to the study.

“Before Imparavis, toothlessness in this group of birds was known to occur around 70 million years ago,” Clark said. “With Imparavis, it turns out it occurred nearly 48 million years earlier. Today, all birds lack teeth. But back in the Mesozoic, toothed little mouths were the norm. If you saw one without teeth, it’d be the oddball — and that’s what Imparavis was.”

Finding a strange fossil

The fossil was first discovered by an amateur collector near northeastern China’s Toudaoyingzi village and donated to the Shandong Pingyi Tianyu Natural Museum. When Jingmai O’Connor, the Field Museum’s associate curator of fossil reptiles, visited the Shandong museum’s collections a few years ago, the fossil caught her attention.

“I think what drew me to the specimen wasn’t its lack of teeth — it was its forelimbs,” said study coauthor O’Connor, who is also Clark’s adviser, in a statement. “It had a giant bicipital crest — a bony process jutting out at the top of the upper arm bone, where muscles attach. I’d seen crests like that in Late Cretaceous birds, but not in the Early Cretaceous like this one. That’s when I first suspected it might be a new species.”

Clark, O’Connor and their colleagues began studying the fossil in early 2023, and they were surprised by the bird’s lack of teeth in addition to its unusual forelimbs, or wing bones.

Imparavis had large attachment points for muscles in its wing bones, suggesting it could generate a lot of power with its wings and had a strong downward wing beat, kind of like doing a massive aerial push-up, Clark said.

“We’re potentially looking at really strong wing beats. Some features of the bones resemble those of modern birds like puffins or murres, which can flap crazy fast, or quails and pheasants, which are stout little birds but produce enough power to launch nearly vertically at a moment’s notice when threatened,” Clark said.

While modern birds have fused forelimb digits, enantiornithines still had independent movement in the “little fingers” on their wings.

“Most of the ‘hand’ would be encased in tissue to help form the wing, but the little claws (and yes they did have little claws) might have been used to manipulate food, aid in climbing, or other yet-not-thought-of behaviors,” Clark said.

The mysteries of avian evolution

Clark and his colleagues can’t say for sure what kind of foods Imparavis ate or exactly why it was toothless. Features of the bird’s hind limbs suggest it likely foraged on the forest floor, perhaps in search of fruits, seeds or insects.

The bird, like other enantiornithines, didn’t have a digestive organ called a gizzard that helps modern birds crush up their food for easier digestion, “so the evolutionary pressures that led to toothlessness in other groups of dinosaurs were likely not the same ones for enantiornithines like Imparavis,” Clark said.

As other birds lost their teeth over time, they would ingest stomach stones to create a gastric mill to help crush the food they ate. But Imparavis didn’t behave that way. Until the scientists find more examples of Imparavis, the mystery of what the bird ate and how it digested food remains.

Imparavis could likely be seen hopping and walking on the ground like modern robins, Clark said.

“It seems like most enantiornithines were pretty arboreal, but the differences in the forelimb structure of Imparavis suggests that even though it still probably lived in the trees, it maybe ventured down to the ground to feed, and that might mean it had a unique diet compared to other enantiornithines, which also might explain why it lost its teeth,” O’Connor said.

One of the key remaining questions among researchers about bird evolution is why the more diverse enantiornithines went extinct 66 million years ago along with the dinosaurs, while another group called ornithuromorphs survived and enabled modern birds to evolve.

“Some have thought maybe it was because ornithuromorphs were more commonly associated with water/river systems, others have thought maybe different metabolisms, and others still perhaps differences in nesting or rearing young,” Clark said in the statement. “This is where more fossil specimens and more statistical models will come into play in the future — so stay tuned!”

Understanding extinct species

Clark is currently researching new specimens that showcase both the surprising similarities and differences between ancient and modern birds, revealing what “little paradoxical creatures” they can be.

Clark credits his interest in the natural sciences to watching Attenborough’s nature documentaries, hence the name of the new fossil.

“It is a great honour to have one’s name attached to a fossil, particularly one as spectacular and important as this. It seems the history of birds is more complex than we knew,” Attenborough said in a statement.

But studying extinct animals doesn’t just shed light on the past — it also raises awareness for the future, according to the researchers.

“Learning about enantiornithines like Imparavis attenboroughi helps us understand why they went extinct and why modern birds survived, which is really important for understanding the sixth mass extinction that we’re in now,” O’Connor said. “The biggest crisis humanity is facing is the sixth mass extinction, and paleontology provides the only evidence we have for how organisms respond to environmental changes and how animals respond to the stress of other organisms going extinct.”

Former President of Honduras Juan Orlando Hernández was found guilty Friday of drug trafficking by an American jury after a two-week trial in Manhattan federal court.

Prosecutors had accused Hernández, 55, of conspiring with drug cartels during his tenure as they moved more than 400 tons of cocaine through Honduras toward the United States. In exchange, prosecutors said, Hernández received millions of dollars in bribes that he used to fuel his rise in Honduran politics.

Hernández was president of Honduras from 2014 until 2022. He was extradited to the United States in 2022 after the completion of his second term in office on charges of conspiracy to import cocaine into the United States, conspiracy to possess firearms and destructive devices for drug trafficking, and possession of this type of weapon during the drug trafficking conspiracy.

He faces a maximum sentence of life in prison for each of the charges.

During his years in office, Hernández “protected and enriched the drug traffickers in his inner circle,” the Justice Department said, citing his use of executive power to support extraditions of certain drug traffickers to the US “who threatened his grip on power” while “promising drug traffickers who paid him and followed his instructions that they would remain in Honduras.”

Prosecutors also said that members of the conspiracy Hernández participated in relied on the Honduran National Police to protect cocaine loads as they moved through the country.

Hernández had denied the charges against him and testified in his own defense earlier this week.

A lawyer for Hernández said Friday they would appeal the conviction.

“He’s still strong, but he’s quite disillusioned,” Raymond Colon, the attorney, said of the former president.

“It’s a tragedy,” he added, calling Hernandez “a noble man who fought for the same goals that the US had in terms of the war against drugs.”

In a statement, US Attorney General Merrick Garland said Hernández “abused his position as President of Honduras to operate the country as a narco-state where violent drug traffickers were allowed to operate with virtual impunity, and the people of Honduras and the United States were forced to suffer the consequences.”

“As today’s conviction demonstrates, the Justice Department is disrupting the entire ecosystem of drug trafficking networks that harm the American people, no matter how far or how high we must go,” he added.