At least 28 have been killed in an attack on a building in the town of Lysychansk in the Russian-occupied region of Luhansk in eastern Ukraine, the region’s Moscow-installed head said Sunday.

In a statement on Telegram, the head of self-proclaimed Luhansk People’s Republic Leonid Pasechnik said emergency services had rescued 10 people from under the rubble after what he said was a Ukrainian attack on a building housing a bakery on Saturday.

Pasechnik said Sunday has been declared a day of mourning in the Luhansk People’s Republic for the victims of the attack.

Ukraine’s defense ministry has not commented on the incident.

Lysychansk was taken over by Russian forces in July 2022, becoming the last town in the key region of Luhansk in eastern Ukraine to fall.

Ukraine has been escalating its attacks on Russia and Russian-controlled territory as its ground offensive stalls.

Earlier this week, Ukraine’s military intelligence says it sank a Russian warship off the coast of Crimea, landing the latest in a series of blows to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.

Last month, the Russian Defense Ministry said it stopped Ukrainian drones headed toward Moscow and St Petersburg. Also in January, an oil depot was set ablaze as a result of a Ukrainian drone strike in Russia’s Bryansk region, bordering Ukraine, according to authorities.

In December, Ukraine launched an attack on the Russian border city of Belgorod, killing at least 24 and wounding 108 others. Russia responded with retaliatory strikes on Kharkiv.

It comes as Russian forces are working hard to break through Ukraine’s defenses on the battlefield. A member of the Ukrainian army said they are in “deep defense mode.”

Russian troops are aiming to advance towards Chasiv Yar, a highly militarized town on higher ground a few kilometers west of Bakhmut.

Further south, Russian attention has been focused for months on the town of Avdiivka, and its massive coke plant, both of which Russia has been attempting to encircle.

Facebook turns 20 years old today, and if you don’t like it, I’m sure you have your reasons. The numerous scandals. The loss of privacy. The time it drains away from other, better activities. And on and on.

But I’ve been thinking about the role Facebook has played in my life, and I’ve come to a realization. I hesitate to share this status update, this decidedly uncool confession, but I’m going to, eventually. Just let me work up to it.

Last Friday I found myself scrolling down toward the beginning of my timeline. It took a long time to get there, even though I joined the party relatively late. On September 23, 2007, a friend wrote on my wall, “Welcome to Facebook. Finally.”

By then some of the youngsters had already left, but it all felt new and exciting to me. I was 27, and I remember the strange thrill of tagging your friends in a picture. Or better yet, being tagged. There was a lot of work involved, with the digital camera and the unwieldy cable and the uploading and whatnot, but eventually I posted the pictures from that one epic Halloween party. I dressed as Jonathan the YouTube Zombie, which confused some of my early Facebook friends.

“I like turtles,” I wrote, by way of explanation.

As hundreds of millions of others joined, Facebook began to change the world, for better and worse. My future boss wrote a viral story titled “The 12 most annoying Facebookers.” I was probably several of them at one time or another: mysteriously “waiting for a sign,” or “pondering the meaning of Donnie Darko,” or shamelessly promoting the stories I’d written.

But my list of friends grew. In 2009, roughly 40 of them wrote on my wall to wish me happy birthday. About the same number congratulated me later that year, when I told Facebook I was going to be a dad.

As I got older and had children, the tenor of my posts evolved

Now the posts shifted away from concerts and parties, and toward the ramblings of the domesticated. I loaded the dishwasher twice in one evening. I wandered the grocery store, “too hungry and confused to know what to buy.” My daughter was born, and one afternoon I somehow changed two diapers in the span of two minutes.

That year, 2010, more than 50 people wished me happy birthday. This, it turned out, was Peak Happy Birthday. Such greetings became less common on Facebook after that, at least for me. Maybe the novelty wore off. We were all tired of something. On September 23, 2011, I wrote this status update: Groggy wife, referring to my persistent alarm clock: “I’ll throw it in the river. I don’t know what river, but I’ll find one.”

Another child was born. My children began talking, which led to my new favorite genre of Facebook post: Cute Thing My Kid Said. My daughter strung together her first five-word sentence. “I need more too, Mama.” She was talking about a doughnut. Other random kids said cute things, too, and these also became Facebook posts. At the park, a seven-year-old girl started talking to me about my daughter.

“What kind of girl will she be?” this outgoing youngster asked me. “Sports? Lazy? I’m sports. Fashionable? Playing girl, which not sports? Running girl? There are different types of girls.”

The next year only six people wrote on my timeline for my birthday. One was my wife’s sister, Jill:

Happy Birthday, Bro-in-Law! Hope it’s GREAT!

Another son was born. I memorialized his arrival in a Facebook post but did not say he was fighting for his life in intensive care. He got well and came home, but 2015 was still a hard year. One day I posted some Bruce Springsteen lyrics:

Everything dies

Baby, that’s a fact

But maybe everything that dies

Someday comes back

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, BRO-IN-LAW!!!!!! I shall buy you a Mickey ice cream bar soon!!!!!!

A decade into the Facebook experiment, I was posting less and less. Memories began popping up automatically, old pictures from years past, and I resurfaced them with new comments and new hearts. In 2019 only one person wrote on my timeline for my birthday. I heard a song by the Goo Goo Dolls in the grocery store, which led to a rare status update:

what if you wrote a song that said “a tired song keeps playing on a tired radio” and then 25 years later your song became the tired song that keeps playing on the tired radio

The coronavirus pandemic brought an upsurge in Facebook activity as we huddled in our homes and wondered what was happening out there. We sent out encouragement to the brave healthcare workers and paid tribute to departed musicians with virtual concerts on Facebook Live. That July I had my 40th birthday. Jill did not write on my wall. She had died two days earlier, at age 39, after an illness that led to a pulmonary embolism.

As its best, Facebook is a digital museum

As I write this in early February, I have yet to post anything on Facebook in 2024. I don’t know why, exactly. Too busy, perhaps, or too lazy. But this is my confession about Facebook: If given the chance, I would join all over again.

Yes, I am grateful for Facebook.

I’ve never consistently kept a journal, so Facebook is one of the closest things I have to a contemporaneous record of my life. And in some ways it’s better than a journal, because it has pictures and videos and annotations from my friends.

At its best, Facebook is a digital museum, a repository for the milestones of life. It has made party invitations a lot easier — and helped me find some good Ultimate Frisbee games. It has connected me with old friends and classmates and relatives who otherwise might have remained disconnected. It has helped preserve my memories of several very dear people who, like Jill, have since passed away.

Facebook friendship is no substitute for real-life friendship, and someone else’s Facebook pictures are no substitute for your own experience. But at times, Facebook has helped me appreciate real life more deeply. On November 9, 2021, as new coronavirus variants forced us back into isolation, I asked my friends, “What’s a small thing that makes you happy?’”

The post got 85 comments. People gave thanks for cozy blankets and a fire, hideous fuzzy socks, the smell of leather boots, an empty dishwasher, a cup of hot chocolate, a cold beer after a good run, autumn leaves at golden hour, reading books in the evening before bed.

“The excited way my dog looks at me in the morning,” my neighbor Cheryl wrote. “‘Oh boy! We get to do this all over again?”

It was an outpouring of gratitude, a celebration of life. Online, yes, but real, and satisfying. Like an orange sunrise. A frosted windowpane. A silent alarm clock on a Sunday morning.

Programming Note: Watch The Whole Story with Anderson Cooper: What Whales Tell Us tonight at 8 p.m. ET/PT.

About 15 billion miles from where you sit, two 12-inch golden records are hurtling through outer space with multilingual greetings to the universe from 55 humans and one humpback whale.

With a playlist curated by astronomer Carl Sagan and inspired by the way humpbacks use low frequencies to send messages across entire oceans, they were launched on NASA’s two Voyager probes in 1977.

“As much as the sounds of any baleen whale, it is a love song cast upon the vastness of the deep.” Sagan wrote of the golden records.

And, since 95% of the planet’s biggest species had been harpooned to oblivion at the time, it could’ve easily been the kind of love song that ends in tears.

But almost a half-century later, the comeback of the humpback is arguably the greatest success story in the history of conservation. While artificial intelligence could one day help us understand the lyrics of those songs in space, new science is putting a dollar value on the life of a whale — and finding they provide so much more than blubber and song.

“They’re literally seeding the upper parts of the ocean with the opportunity for plant life to grow,” veteran marine ecologist Ari Friedlaender explained while bobbing on a Zodiac raft off the Antarctic Peninsula. “And that’s what feeds the food for whales, birds, seals — everything. They’re basically farmers recycling nutrients and there’s more food available to them the more they’re around.”

When baleen whales gulp vital nutrients like iron and nitrogen from the depths of the sea and defecate at the surface, they serve as the ocean’s biggest fertilizer pumps — feeding the tiny phytoplankton which produces half the world’s oxygen and captures as much planet-warming CO2 as four Amazon rainforests while holding up the bottom of the food chain.

“That’s the gold,” smiled Chris Johnson, the global lead of whale and dolphin conservation at the World Wildlife Fund, as he held up a whale stool sample jarred from the chilly Antarctic water.

“We have the poo. Repeat, we have humpback poo,” Eva Prendergast, the British polar scientist at the helm, radioed back to the Ocean Endeavor, the cruise ship serving as base.

The team interacted with dozens of whales over the course of four days in Antarctica. They used specialized camera drones to measure body size and suction-cupped tags slapped onto the animals’ backs with a long pole to record the way they move while capturing whale’s-eye-view video.

But the most useful tools were MacGyvered into existence back at the lab in Santa Cruz. For over a decade, Friedlaender’s team has been using crossbows with hollow-tipped darts to collect biopsy samples. It feels like “a mosquito bite” to the whales, Johnson said, but what they can test for is priceless: from stress hormones to toxins to — most importantly — pregnancy rates.

“What else tells you how a population is growing or shrinking?” Friedlaender said after darting a humpback with a 20-yard shot and securing the tip in a sterile zip lock bag. “We can now tell if that whale is pregnant or not.”

He has over 2,500 samples from the same region back in a fridge at UC Santa Cruz, a data set that allows him to compare fertility rates with year-by-year changes in the environment. And as global warming melts sea ice at staggering rates, the habitat for krill is shrinking and humpback pregnancies are dropping.

“In the first year of life, juvenile krill spend the winter under the sea ice and feed on the microbial and algal communities,” Friedlaender explained. “We have a very good understanding that when you have a poor sea ice year, the following year you’re going to have lower reproductive rates. In good ice years, the reproductive rates are very high.”

Since the last two years have been the lowest levels of sea ice on record around Antarctica, the correlation is worrying, and the trend is only expected to accelerate as the planet warms.

21st century threats

But the climate crisis is just one tragic setback in the humpback’s comeback. While on the longest migration routes of any animal, whales must dodge cargo ships on crowded coastlines, “ghost” fishing gear cut loose at sea and floating clouds of plastic pollution.

And because of a global market for omega-3 krill oil supplements and nutraceutical feed for pets and fish farms, whales now compete with humans for their main source of food.

Industrial krill fishing fleets are taking to the Southern Ocean in growing numbers and have been recorded dragging their nets into areas full of feeding whales. After years of challenging whalers, the activist group Sea Shepherd will spend this season tracking krill fishers.

Early in a career devoted to marine mammals, Johnson spent five years sailing on the research vessel of Roger and Katy Payne, the married scientists who blew humanity’s minds by releasing Songs of the Humpback Whale in 1970.

While people were familiar with the echolocating clicks of dolphins and orcas, the first baleen whale noises were recorded by Navy engineer Frank Watlington by accident in the 1950s, and after the Paynes worked with fellow cetologist Scott McVay to record more humpback songs around Bermuda, they were played during marine mammal protection hearings in Congress and the United Nations. Ten million copies were inserted into National Geographic magazine in 1979 — the largest single pressing in history — and a global movement to Save The Whales grew big enough to … save the whales.

By 1986, the International Whaling Commission had instituted a global ban on all commercial whaling. While Japan, Norway and Iceland have continued regardless, years of lawsuits and international pressure forced Japan to lower its annual quota of Minke whales from 1,000 to 333, and the two boats of Kristján Loftsson, Iceland’s last whaler, harpooned two dozen fin whales in 2023.

But while the commercial harpoon is critically endangered, other threats remain — especially to whales that aren’t as supremely adaptable as the humpback.

Scientists believe there are only about 360 North Atlantic right whales left on Earth — a species named by whalers who pointed out the “right ones” to hunt. Entanglements with fishing and lobster gear are the main hazard for the species migrating from the Arctic down the Atlantic coast. But concern over the North Atlantic right whale, and a number of other species, found dead on American beaches has galvanized an unusual coalition of environmentalists, fishermen and Republican beach town mayors hoping to stop the development of offshore wind farms.

On a campaign stop in South Carolina, former President Donald Trump mocked a call for ship speed limits during whale migration season while blaming the nascent wind industry for the harm. “Windmills are causing whales to die in numbers never seen before,” Trump said, with no evidence to support the claim.

While pursuing its goal of generating 30 gigawatts of offshore wind power by 2030, the Biden administration recently finalized plans to protect whales by limiting leases that could impact key whale habitat, monitoring noise thresholds and helping develop whale-safe fishing gear, like innovative lobster pots which are brought to the surface with remote-controlled air bags instead of ropes.

“It’s a positive sign that the Biden administration is doing this in a collaborative approach involving science, communities, industry and government agencies,” Johnson said, and described how “bubble curtains” around turbine installations can contain acoustic pollution.

A whale’s song

Advances in artificial intelligence are beginning to help experts like Johnson and Friedlaender spot patterns of behavior previously unseen, while others hope to use AI to eventually understand the “lyrics” in humpback song.

In December, a Templeton Foundation-funded team from the University of California at Davis and the Whale SETI Institute had a 20-minute “conversation” with a humpback in Alaska.

When they played a whale’s “thrruup” call recorded in the same spot the day before, a female humpback known as Twain responded 36 times, matching the intervals and waiting for responses from the boat.

The Alaska team’s federal permit only allowed it to engage with Twain for 20 minutes, and when they stopped the playback, “she basically called three times as she was moving away and then stopped,” McCowan said.

“It’s like, ‘where’d you go, my new friends? Where’d you go?’” Sharpe speculated.

While female humpbacks communicate in “thrruups” and “bloops,” only males sing in the haunting tones that travel so well through the depths, and there is debate over whether they are more like singers in a seductive boy band or rivals in a rap battle.

Carl Sagan was among the generation who believed they are mating calls like those of birds.

“I work with a couple of these projects that are trying to use AI to understand the context and the meaning to animal communication, but I don’t have a need to talk to a whale,” Friedlaender said when asked about the possibilities. “A whale shouldn’t have to tell us ‘Here’s all the things you’re doing to screw us.’”

“If I could talk to a whale, I’d say ‘Sorry,’” Friedlaender added.

While in Antarctica, he was giddy with the news that the first-ever Global Oceans Treaty had passed in the United Nations, creating a framework to protect 30% of the oceans by 2030, including key whale migration corridors. But almost a year later, only one country has ratified it.

“We are seeing countries start to ratify it, but it’s urgent we move fast,” Johnson said. “As soon as 60 countries ratify it, it enters into force. Last week Palau was the first, with Chile and the Maldives soon to do so. We’re hopeful others will ratify soon.”

At times, such diplomacy can feel as whimsical as launching golden records of whale song out of the galaxy.

“Many, if not most of our messages will be indecipherable,” Carl Sagan wrote of the Voyager message. “But it is important to try.”

People saved the whales once. By doing it again, the experts say, humankind will enjoy the added benefit of saving itself.

A number of people, including journalists from foreign press organizations, have been detained in Moscow after authorities cracked down on protesters at Russian President Vladimir Putin’s election headquarters, independent outlets reported Saturday.

The protest was organized by the wives of mobilized men amid a growing movement of women who are demanding that their husbands and sons are returned home from fighting in Ukraine.

The “500 days of mobilization” rally brought women to the walls of the Kremlin before moving to Putin’s nearby election headquarters, it was reported. The independent Russian news outlet SOTAvision posted on their Telegram channel that a correspondent saw security forces “snatching random people from the crowd, and only men.”

At least 27 people, only one of them a protester, were driven in a police van to Kitay-Gorod station where they are currently being held, according OVD-info, a group that monitors Russian repression. OVD-info said they dispatched a lawyer to visit the detainees but was denied access.

Independent Russian media group Mediazona reported Saturday that among those held are journalists working for Kommersant, France Press and Spiegel, as well as human rights activists.

Another seven journalists covering the rally were taken to the Basmanny police station, OVD-info said. Among them is the representative of the Japanese television company “Fuji” Andrei Zaiko, they report.

One state media employee has since been released from Kitay-Gorod along with three minors, according to OVD-info on Telegram. They said: “Police officers told them that they planned to soon release the rest of the employees of federal and foreign media, but to leave ‘foreign agents’ media representatives in the police station. All detainees also had their phones taken away.”

Russia’s foreign agents law was expanded in late 2022 to include individuals or groups who “received support and (or) is under foreign influence”, criticised as a move by the Kremlin to silence those critical of its war on Ukraine, including journalists.

In a historic moment, a nationalist politician has become First Minister of Northern Ireland as power-sharing resumed after a two-year break.

Michelle O’Neill of the pro-united Ireland party Sinn Féin, once the political arm of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), said in an address to lawmakers following her appointment: “Today opens the door to the future. I am honoured to stand here as First Minister.”

She vowed to “serve everyone equally and be a First Minister for all”, including those who identify as British and Unionist.

“I am wholeheartedly committed to continue the work of reconciliation between all of our people. The past cannot be changed or cannot be undone. But what we can do is build a better future.”

O’Neill has been entitled to the post since 2022 when Sinn Féin won a majority in the May election. The leading opposition party however, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), had refused to enter a power-sharing government in protest over post-Brexit trading rules.

The DUP agreed to a deal on Thursday with the UK government, which saw their Brexit concerns alleviated – paving the way for lawmakers to be recalled to the Northern Ireland Assembly on Saturday which ends the two-year political deadlock.

A house speaker was also sworn in, as well as a DUP-nominated Emma Little-Pengelly as Deputy First Minister – an office which holds the same powers as First Minister – who said in an address that she “could never have imagined” serving Northern Ireland in such a way, recalling the aftermath of an IRA bomb outside her home when she was a child.

“Michelle is an Irish Republican, and I am a very proud Unionist,” she said. “We will never agree on those issues. But what we can agree is that cancer doesn’t discriminate, and our hospitals need fixed.”

The Good Friday Agreement of 1998, which brought an end to decades of sectarian violence between pro-republican Catholics and pro-unionist Protestants – a period known as “The Troubles” – stipulates that both communities have equal powers in government and institutions.

“The offices have exactly the same powers and status. But the symbolism of a Sinn Féin representative becoming first minister is still obvious and in Northern Ireland symbols matter a lot – perhaps too much.

“The whole point of creating Northern Ireland a century ago was that it would always have a Protestant majority committed to staying within the United Kingdom. Michelle O’Neill’s accession to office as the leader of the largest party in the assembly dramatizes the end of that project.

“It doesn’t mean that a United Ireland is an immediate prospect but it does mean that the whole future of Northern Ireland is very much an open question. The task now is to make that openness promising and full of opportunity rather than threatening and full of fear.”

The Northern Ireland Assembly is the devolved legislature for Northern Ireland.

Although part of the United Kingdom, lawmakers in the Assembly have the powers to legislate over a range of issues not explicitly reserved for the Westminster government in London.

The United States on Friday conducted major airstrikes on dozens of targets across Iraq and Syria in retaliation for a drone attack in Jordan last month that killed three US troops.

The strikes were larger in number and scale than previous ones launched since October, when Iran-backed armed groups began attacking US forces across the region in protest of Israel’s war in Gaza.

With the US warning of more strikes to follow, here’s what we know.

What triggered the strikes?

The US strikes were in response to a drone attack by Iran-backed militants on a US military outpost in Jordan on January 28, which killed three US service members and wounded more than 40 others.

The attack marked the worst loss of US military life in the region in nearly three years and the first US military fatalities since the war in Gaza erupted.

US President Joe Biden at the time vowed to hold “all those responsible to account at a time and in a manner our choosing.”

The attack in Jordan marked a significant escalation in tensions between the US and Iran-backed groups attacking American bases across the region in protest at Israel’s war in Gaza. Believed to be funded and trained by Iran, these groups view the US as responsible for Israel’s actions by supplying weapons to the Jewish state and failing to force a ceasefire.

Biden specifically gave the green light for the first set of strikes in Iraq and Syria that was executed Friday in a Situation Room meeting with his top national security advisers on Monday.

It was in that same meeting that the president was informed with the assessment that Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-backed militant groups were to blame for the Sunday drone attack, according to the sources.

Since October, when the Israel-Hamas war began, the US military has carried out several strikes targeting Iranian proxies’ weapons depots in Iraq and Syria, but none of those strikes deterred the militants, whose 165 attacks injured more than 120 US service members across the region.

None of the proxy groups’ other attacks since October, however, have resulted in the deaths of US service members – compelling Biden and his national security team to respond more forcefully.

What and where did the US hit?

The US said the attack lasted 30 minutes, hitting 85 targets across seven locations in Iraq and Syria.

The White House said aircraft including B-1 bombers were used in the operation. More than 125 precision-guided munitions were fired, the White House said, adding that the strikes were “successful.”

The US strikes killed at least 16 people in Iraq, including civilians, and injured 25 others, the Iraqi government said Friday. The attacks hit areas close to the border with Syria, and targeted facilities used by Iranian-linked al Hashd al Shabi – or Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) – in the Iraqi city of Al-Qaim, Iraqi officials said.

The PMU is a predominantly Shiite Iran-backed paramilitary force based in Iraq. Unlike other Iran-backed groups around the region, the PMU is tied to the Iraqi government and is closely linked to Iran-aligned Shiite blocs that for years dominated politics in Iraq.

In 2016, the Iraqi parliament passed a bill recognizing the PMU as a government entity operating alongside the Iraqi military. The organization is an umbrella group, with several forces operating underneath its wing – including Iraq’s powerful Kataib Hezbollah.

The mayor of Al-Qaim, Turki Al-Mahalawi, said the strikes hit three houses used as weapon warehouses by the Iran-backed PMU. The US had struck targets there last month.

While US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said Washington had informed the Iraqi government of its plans before carrying out the strikes, the Iraqi government denied that claim, saying the US is “misleading international public opinion.”

Syria’s state-run news agency SANA said the airstrikes hit the eastern areas of Deir Ezzor, Al-Bukamal, Al-Mayadeen and their surroundings on the Syrian-Iraqi border.

Kirby said the US did not know now how many militants were killed or wounded, but the Syrian military on Saturday said the strikes had killed civilians and soldiers and caused “significant damage” to infrastructure.

Director of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Lt. Gen. Douglas Sims, said the locations of the strikes were chosen “with an idea that there would likely be casualties” among the Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and militia personnel who use them.

What has the reaction been?

Iraq and Syria condemned the US attack as infringements on their sovereignty that risk fueling regional conflict.

The Syrian foreign ministry said it “condemns this blatant American violation,” adding that it “categorically rejects all the pretexts and lies promoted by the American administration to justify this attack.” Syria also warned that the US attack could “fuel the conflict in the Middle East in a very dangerous way.”

A spokesperson for Iraq’s Armed Forces, meanwhile, decried the attacks as a “violation of Iraqi sovereignty.”

Echoing both, Iran warned the strikes would only escalate tensions.

“Iran considers the attacks as a violation of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Iraq and Syria, international law and a clear violation of the United Nations Charter,” Iran’s foreign ministry said in a statement Friday. The attack is “an adventurous action and another strategic mistake by the US government, which will have no result other than intensifying tension and instability in the region,” the statement added.

Some US lawmakers were happy with the attack, while others thought it came too late and wasn’t surprising enough for the intended targets.

Speaker of the US House of Representatives Mike Johnson, a Republican, criticized the military response, writing in part, “The administration waited for a week and telegraphed to the world, including to Iran, the nature of our response.

“The public handwringing and excessive signaling undercuts our ability to put a decisive end to the barrage of attacks endured over the past few months,” Johnson said.

Senate Armed Services Chairman Jack Reed, a Democrat, praised the strikes, saying in a statement that “this was a strong, proportional response.”

What happens next?

The US strikes are likely to continue. But neither the US nor Iran wants a wider war.

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said the US strikes in Iraq and Syria on Friday are “the start of our response,” adding that Biden has “directed additional actions to hold the IRGC and affiliated militias accountable for their attacks on US and Coalition Forces.”

Both Austin and Biden have however repeated that the US does not seek a wider regional war.

“The United States does not seek conflict in the Middle East or anywhere else in the world,” Biden said in a statement Friday, following the strikes on Iraq and Syria. “But let all those who might seek to do us harm know this: If you harm an American, we will respond.”

Friday’s US strikes were more significant than previous attacks on Iranian-backed militias over the last several weeks, which have primarily focused on weapons storage or training facilities.

The airstrikes were “far bigger than any action undertaken before against Iran’s proxies,” wrote Charles Lister, director of the Syria and Countering Terrorism and Extremism programs at the Middle East Institute in Washington, DC, on X. He added that “huge secondary explosions on both sides of the border suggest big rocket/missile depots have been hit.”

But the Biden administration is threading a needle – it wants to deter and stop further attacks but avoid a full-scale conflict with Iran in a region already roiled by the continuing Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.

For now, it doesn’t seem like the US struck “high value targets, focusing instead on command/control, logistics and drone/rocket stock,” Lister wrote on X.

Tehran has repeatedly said it does not seek conflict. On Friday, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi said his country will not initiate a war but will “respond strongly” to bullies.

There have been mixed messages from Iran-backed militias across the region. While the Iran-backed Kataib Hezbollah group in Iraq announced Tuesday it is suspending attacks on US forces, another group in Iraq, Al-Nujaba, said it would continue attacking American forces.

Adding to a volatile situation, experts say that Iran does not exercise full control over its proxies.

This story has been updated with additional information.

Jailed Pakistani former Prime Minister Imran Khan and his wife Bushra Bibi have been sentenced to seven years in prison after a district court ruled their 2018 marriage violated the law.

This is the third sentence for Khan and the second for his wife this week.

Bibi’s former husband, Khawar Farid Maneka, had filed a case against Khan and Bibi almost six years after his divorce and accused them of marrying without completing the Iddat — a compulsory waiting period in Islam after divorce — and committing adultery.

The conviction was by a district court in Adiala Jail in the city of Rawalpindi where Imran Khan – who has been imprisoned since August on various charges – is currently incarcerated. Proceedings were held in the jail due to security reasons.

Khan’s party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) released a statement condemning the judgment calling it “a mockery of the law.”

PTI spokesperson Syed Zulfiqar Bukhari told journalists that he was a witness to the marriage ceremony in 2018 and called the judgement “a victory for Imran Khan. Shows everything else is also false on him hence such ridiculous cases and sentences need to be slapped on him.”

This latest conviction adds to a myriad of recent legal woes for Khan.

His political party said Tuesday that he had been sentenced, along with former Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi, to 10 years in prison for leaking state secrets.

Then, the following day, PTI said the former prime minister and his wife were each sentenced to 14 years in prison for corruption relating to the unlawful sale of state gifts during his tenure as prime minister from 2018 to 2022.

The judgements comes before Pakistan’s General Election on Thursday.

Khan is barred from contesting and cannot hold office for a decade, according to PTI.

The former star cricketer turned politician, who rose to power on a ticket of anti-corruption, was ousted in a parliamentary no-confidence vote in April 2022 after being embroiled in political controversy.

Pakistan’s upcoming election is seen by many analysts as one of the least credible in the country’s nearly 77-year history, owing to the military’s crackdown on Khan and his aides.

Is your dog a small male with a long nose? Or a medium-size female with a face of average canine proportions? If so, your furry companion is more likely to be at your side for a long time, according to new research. But if yours is a pooch with a squished muzzle, the picture might be a bit less rosy.

A large study published Thursday looked at data from more than 584,000 dogs across the United Kingdom and found that snout length, along with body size and sex, can influence how long a dog is likely to live.

“A medium-sized, flat-faced male like a bulldog is three times more likely to live a shorter life than a small-sized, long-faced female, like a miniature dachshund or an Italian greyhound,” said Kirsten McMillan, a data scientist at Dogs Trust, the UK’s largest dog charity, and lead author of the paper in the journal Scientific Reports.

‘These dogs are not doing well’

The study authors examined data on 155 breeds plus mixes. While a typical Labrador retriever or border collie had a median life expectancy of just over 13 years, the researchers found that almost across the board, flat-faced, or brachycephalic, dogs fared worse by that measure. That shorter-nosed bunch included large mastiffs (9 years), beefy English bulldogs (9.3 years) and French bulldogs (9.8 years).

“This paper is showing people that at a population level, these dogs are not doing well,” McMillan said.

One smush-faced survivor stood out in the findings: Lhasa Apsos clocked in with one of the highest median life expectancies at 14 years. That’s up there with Shiba Inus (14.6), papillons (14.5), miniature dachshunds and Italian greyhounds (14).

Most of the results fell within expected patterns. Females lived longer than males, small dogs longer than large ones. Small and medium dogs with pronounced schnozes lived over 12 years on average, while flat-faced dogs of all sizes fell short of that mark.

The grim outlook may or may not come as a shock to owners of Frenchies, America’s most popular dog breed. (Last year, it unseated the Lab, which had held the title for three decades.) It’s well known that the bat-eared darlings are predisposed to a number of health issues, often owing to their flattened face shape — breathing problems, skin infections and eye trouble to name a few. Pugs and English bulldogs face these challenges, too.

The Brachycephalic Working Group, a consortium of veterinary organizations, breeding associations and nonprofits in the UK, has declared “a health and welfare crisis” for flat-faced breeds.

“This new research underlines these major health issues by revealing that flat-faced dogs live 1.5 years shorter lives than typical dogs,” said Dan O’Neill, an associate professor at the Royal Veterinary College in London and the working group’s chair, in a statement. “We urge anyone considering getting a flat-faced breed to ‘stop and think’ and to ensure that they acquire a dog with the best chances of a long and happy life.”

Esme Wheeler, a dog welfare expert at the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, concurred. “We completely understand why there is so much love out there for these breeds, but breeding bodily features which compromise the basic health and welfare of pets is wrong,” she said. “Health and welfare should always be the priority, not fashions or aesthetic trends.”

Neither O’Neill nor Wheeler contributed to the research.

Though limited to the UK, the results would probably be similar in the United States, especially with respect to pure breeds, since they are fairly standard around the globe, said veterinarian Dr. Silvan Urfer, an expert in dog life span at the University of Washington, who was not involved in the research. However, he posited that there might be more differences between mixes there and in the US.

“It’s an excellent study that makes a very good point regarding the breeding of short-nosed dogs,” Urfer said. “I’m not at all surprised that brachycephalic breeds didn’t live as long.”

The designer dog debate

One of the study’s more surprising takeaways was that purebred dogs were found to outlive mixes by about eight months. This finding doesn’t align with the commonly held notion that mixes are generally heartier and healthier than their inbred kennel club counterparts. But the current study can’t tell the whole picture, McMillan said.

The data — collected from vets, breed registries, rescue organizations and pet insurance companies — divided dogs into two categories: purebred and crossbred. Within the crossbred category, the data did not distinguish between genetically diverse mutts and intentional crosses, or “designer breeds,” such as the cockapoo, labradoodle and cavachon.

These are not random mixes or the products of natural selection. “We’re talking about strategically bred dogs and that has changed the game,” McMillan said. Dogs Trust is already working on a new study to determine whether these popular crosses have longer or shorter life expectancies than the breeds they’re derived from.

“Designer dogs is a relatively new phenomenon, so you have a population that skews young,” Urfer said. Studying the population as it grows and ages should give better insight into the health and longevity of these burgeoning breeds.

The study includes millions of data points, but it doesn’t necessarily represent the full spectrum of companion dog life, McMillan said. For instance, not everyone has pet insurance or makes regular vet visits.

The research also did not account for cause of death, which is often euthanasia.

“The ethical and welfare concerns surrounding dog breeding have become one of the most important issues — if not the most important issue — within canine welfare,” McMillan said.

“I hope this paper is a catalyst to start policymakers, government, vets, owners, everyone asking, ‘Why are these dogs dying?’

“It will be very difficult to answer, but every time we answer even a small part of it, we are progressing towards having a much healthier canine population.”

Farmers are holding protests across Europe, clogging the streets with their tractors, blocking ports and pelting the European Parliament with eggs over a long list of complaints from environmental regulation to excessive red tape.

While some of the most dramatic protests have been in France, similar action has been taking place in a host of countries including Italy, Spain, Romania, Poland, Greece, Germany, Portugal and the Netherlands.

Farming makes up just 1.4% of the European Union’s GDP, the latest figures show, but protests in Eastern Europe last year over cheap Ukrainian imports – which saw lengthy blockades at border crossings – show how farmers as a group are capable of causing major disruption.

Both national governments and the EU are now under pressure to quell the fresh demonstrations.

What’s happening and where?

This week, the farmers’ protests struck at the heart of the European Union, when they rolled into Brussels on Thursday as leaders held a major summit on Ukraine. Once camped outside the parliament building, they lobbed eggs, blared their horns and sparked fires.

Belgian farmers targeted border crossings with the Netherlands in Zandvliet, Meer and Postel, causing delays.

In France, farmers blocked major highways leading to Paris as well as the cities of Lyon and Toulouse. Dozens of farmers set up tents and lit fires to keep themselves warm as they attempted to shut off routes into the French capital.

Also this week, tractors in Greece marched towards the second biggest city of Thessaloniki on Thursday, with the aim of blocking key routes inside the city.

Images from Portugal showed long lines of trucks parked near the Spanish border.

Last month, cities in Germany were brought to a standstill by thousands of rallying farmers braving freezing temperatures, piling misery on Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s governing coalition.

Major road blockages stretched across cities from east to west including Hamburg, Cologne, Bremen, Nuremberg and Munich – with up to 2,000 tractors registered for each protest.

The protests echo those of last year, when farmers in Eastern European countries, including Poland, Romania and Bulgaria, demonstrated against the impact of cheap Ukrainian grain imports, which were undercutting domestic prices and hitting the sales of local producers.

What are the grievances?

While anger over economic, regulatory and green policies unites many of the protests, there are also grievances unique to each country.

Farmers across the bloc say that the costs of energy, fertilizer and transport have risen, particularly in light of Russia’s war in Ukraine. On top of this, governments have been trying to reduce rising food prices amid inflation.

Eurostat data shows that the prices farmers get for their agricultural products peaked in 2022 but has been declining since then – dropping nearly 9% on average between the third quarter of 2022 and the same period in 2023.

In France, a government plan to phase out a tax break for farmers on diesel fuel, as part of a wider energy transition policy, has also sparked anger.

Cheap foreign imports have fanned the flames of discontent, with farmers arguing that such products are unfair competition.

Farmers, particularly in Eastern Europe, continue to voice grievances over the cheap agricultural imports from Ukraine, including grain, sugar and meat. The EU has waived quotas and duties on Ukrainian imports in light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Climate change is aggravating the situation in different ways. Extreme weather events such as wildfires and droughts are increasingly affecting production.

Anger has also been directed at Brussels over the EU’s environmental targets. Renaud Foucart, a senior economics lecturer at Lancaster University in England, points to the European Green Deal as a major source of tension.

The deal aims to introduce measures including a tax on carbon, pesticide bans, nitrogen emissions curbs and restrictions on water and land usage.

Foucart says farmers are trying to postpone the regulations of the Green Deal for as long as possible. “So they want to further postpone any attempt to tax carbon, any attempt to reduce pesticides.”

He points out that each European country has its own specific concerns.

“In Germany, it was really focused on diesel, so starting to tax diesel for tractors. In the Netherlands, the specific problem was about the taxation of nitrogen, which affects the industrial production of pigs and chickens. Poland is a very interesting case because it has been at the forefront of military support for Ukraine, but at the same time the Polish farmers are very angry and blockading the border to make sure Ukrainian grain doesn’t arrive in Poland.”

What’s being done to calm the protests?

At the EU level, farmers won a compromise from Brussels on January 31, when a delay was announced to rules that would have required them to set aside land to encourage soil health and biodiversity.

The European Commission offered an exemption to EU farmers from a requirement to keep a minimum share of their land fallow while allowing them to keep associated support payments.

The Commission also said it would extend the suspension of import duties on Ukrainian exports for another year to June 2025.

At a governmental level, Berlin has partially walked back on its plans to cut diesel subsidies last month. Watering down its original blueprint, the government said a car tax exemption for farming vehicles would be retained and cuts in diesel tax breaks would be staggered over three years. Many farmers however are calling for a complete reversal.

Greece announced it would extend a special tax rebate on agricultural diesel by one year, in response to calls from farmers who had their crops and livestock lost in destructive flooding.

France this week announced a series of measures for farmers in light of the protests. Newly appointed French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal pledged to safeguard “food sovereignty” and said that France would increase checks on food imports “that don’t respect our rules at a European and French level,” in an effort to protect farmers from unfair competition.

Attal also announced the allocation of 150 million euros ($162 million) to livestock farmers “in tax and social support, starting this year and continuing on a permanent basis.”

There are signs that the French measures are working – some blockades have been lifted after two major unions called for an end to the roadblocks. But elsewhere the protests continue.

What happens next?

While governments have granted concessions, some farmers say they do not go far enough and are calling for continued action.

The protests have also fueled backlash against the EU ahead of European Parliament elections in June.

European Commission President Ursula von Der Leyen has championed the EU target of reaching net zero by 2050. However, she is facing pressure from her own center-right party to water down green legislation.

European far-right parties are hoping to make gains in the elections and may capitalize on the farmers’ grievances for their own political gain.

This has already been seen in Germany, when the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) involved itself in the protests and expressed solidarity with the farmers.

And there is precedent for protesting farmers to do more than just take to the streets.

In March last year, a Dutch populist party surfed a wave of rural anger to land a big election. The Farmer-Citizen Movement or BoerburgerBeweging (BBB) grew out of mass demonstrations against the government’s environmental policies. It is now the largest party in the Dutch senate.

For anyone worried that Taylor Swift might not make it home from her overseas tour in time to see her boyfriend Travis Kelce in the Super Bowl, the Japanese Embassy has a comforting message: “Be fearless.”

The diplomatic mission in Washington put out a statement Friday apparently to ease the concerns of fans fearing their idol could miss next week’s big game due to the tight timeframe.

Swift is scheduled to play the Tokyo Dome in the Japanese capital from February 7 to 10, leaving her little time – given the long-haul flight and large time difference – to get back for the Super Bowl at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas on February 11.

Making it even more of a stretch, Swift’s final show is expected to begin at 6 p.m. and seems likely to run for about three hours, in line with her other Eras Tour dates.

And that’s not to mention all the traffic she’s likely to encounter around the stadium.

But if all that has you feeling worried, then just maybe you need to calm down.

“Despite the 12-hour flight and 17-hour time difference, the Embassy can confidently Speak Now to say that if she departs Tokyo in the evening after her concert, she should comfortably arrive in Las Vagas before the Super Bowl begins,” the Japanese mission said in an apparent reference to the singer’s third studio album.

Continuing with a reference to Swift’s second studio album, it added: “We know that many people in Japan are excited to experience Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, so we wanted to confirm that anyone concerned can be Fearless in knowing that this talented performer can wow Japanese audiences and still make it to Las Vegas to support the Chiefs.”

This year, the Kansas City Chiefs, with Kelce at tight end, will go head-to-head with the San Francisco 49ers in the NFL championship game.

But some viewers are likely to be as interested in the action off the pitch as that on it.

Swift has been a regular at Kansas City Chiefs games since she  turned up at Kelce’s family suite in September last year to watch them against the Chicago Bears, sparking speculation that the two were dating.

The pair later confirmed in separate interviews that they had already been seeing each other prior to that game.

Since then, the amount of attention broadcasters have been paying the pop star in the crowd has sparked controversy among some football fans – even though it has been credited with finding a whole new audience for the game.

Still, as the Japanese Embassy’s statement shows, Taylor-mania is hardly confined to the NFL or even America. In Asia, the singer sparked a ticketing frenzy after announcing that she would be playing six shows in Singapore and four in Tokyo.

Tickets for the Singapore dates sold out within hours, leaving legions of “Swifties,” as her fans are known, disappointed and empty-handed.

So fierce has the competition been that fans have taken to calling it the “Great War” for tickets.

After her Tokyo shows – and hopefully for fans, an appearance in Vegas – Swift is expected to return overseas for seven shows in Australia.