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.

Angry Israelis cut across a field of stubble to try to get around a police blockade to disrupt shipments of food and supplies intended for Gaza.

For weeks Israeli border officers allowed protesters to disrupt the critical aid convoys at Kerem Shalom, the country’s sole functioning border crossing with Gaza. But at the end of last month, with international pressure and condemnation mounting, authorities announced they were moving additional officers to the crossing to take back control. But even with the area now declared a closed military zone, protesters continue to arrive and try to outmaneuver the police.

Watch the video to see the scene.

The protests are being led by the “Tsav 9” movement, a grouping of demobilized reservists, families of hostages and settlers. Its name, meaning “Order 9,” is a reference to the emergency mobilization notices that call up reservists.

The protesters say they fear the aid is helping militants still holding their friends and relatives hostage, five months after the murderous cross-border raids led by Hamas that killed about 1,200 people in Israel with 200 more being taken prisoner. They hope preventing food and supplies from entering Gaza will force Hamas to release them. A recent poll by the Israel Democracy Institute found that two-thirds of Jewish Israelis support their view opposing the transfer of humanitarian aid into Gaza.

Watch the video to see protesters say why they don’t believe food should be sent to Gaza.

The war in Gaza has killed more than 30,000 people, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza, and the remaining population has been forced from their homes and struggle to survive. The World Health Organization says food and safe water have become scarce and diseases are spreading. There is a surge of acute malnutrition, it says. Children are dying.

But aid has been slow to reach those in desperate need. Israel restricts what can go in, and a UN official said from February 24 to March 3 fewer than 1,000 trucks entered the strip, far below the required 500 daily.

Some countries started dropping aid from the air, and the US, UK and European Union are setting up a shipping corridor in the Mediterranean to access Gaza directly, but the UN says road access remains vital to stop a deepening of the catastrophe.

On Thursday, the Israeli border police ensured aid trucks got through at Kerem Shalom, but only after turning away several attempts by protesters over the course of several hours. As the day wore on, officers took a more aggressive stance against protesters.

Watch the video to see the tense exchanges.

This is a critical moment for aid delivery through Kerem Shalom as Gaza inches closer to famine. According to Gaza’s health authorities, at least 17 children have died from malnutrition and dehydration already.

Many more are sick. Inside Kamal Adwan Hospital – the only pediatric facility still operating in the north of Gaza – doctors are struggling to treat 7-year-old Fadi al Sant.

Watch the video to see Fadi, suffering from severe dehydration and malnutrition, with his mother. 

• Here’s how to help humanitarian efforts in Israel and Gaza.

Often called the father of mathematics, Archimedes was one of the most famous inventors in ancient Greece, with some of his ideas and principles still in use today.

But one fabled device has left scientists speculating on its existence for hundreds of years — the death ray. Now, a middle schooler may have some answers.

Brenden Sener, 13, of London, Ontario, has won two gold medals and a London Public Library award for his minuscule version of the contraption — a supposed war weapon made up of a large array of mirrors designed to focus and aim sunlight on a target, such as a ship, and cause combustion — according to a paper published in the January issue of the Canadian Science Fair Journal.

The Greek polymath has fascinated Sener since he learned of the inventor during a family vacation to Greece. For his 2022 science project, Sener recreated the Archimedes screw, a device for raising and moving water. But he didn’t stop there.

Sener found the death ray to be one of the more intriguing devices — sometimes referred to as the heat ray. Historical writings suggested that Archimedes used “burning mirrors” to start anchored ships on fire during the siege of Syracuse from 214 to 212 BC.

“Archimedes was so ahead of his time with his inventions. And it really did revolutionize technology at that time, because Archimedes was thinking about stuff that no one actually had before,” Sener said. “(The death ray) is such a neat idea that no one at that time would have thought of.”

There is no archaeological evidence that the contraption existed, as Sener noted in his paper, but many have tried to recreate the mechanism to see if the ancient invention could be feasible.

Miniature death ray

In Sener’s attempt at the ray, he set up a heating lamp facing four small concave mirrors, each tilted to direct light at a piece of cardboard with an X marked at the focal point. In this project he designed for the 2023 Matthews Hall Annual Science Fair, Sener hypothesized that as the mirrors focused light energy onto the cardboard, the temperature of the target would increase with each mirror added.

In his experiment, Sener conducted three trials with two different light bulb wattages, 50 watts and 100 watts. Each additional mirror increased the temperature notably, he found.

“I wasn’t exactly sure how the results would come out due to there being lots of different results with this topic, but I did expect that there would be increases in heat — but not as drastic as I found when I actually did my experiment,” Sener said.

The temperature of the cardboard during with just the heating lamp and the 100-watt light bulb and no mirrors was about 81 degrees Fahrenheit (27.2 degrees Celsius). After waiting for the cardboard to cool, Sener added one mirror and retested. The focal point’s temperature increased to almost 95 F (34.9 C), he found.

The greatest increase occurred with the addition of the fourth mirror. The temperature with three mirrors aimed at the target was almost 110 F (43.4 C), but the addition of a fourth mirror increased the temperature by about 18 F (10 C) to 128 F (53.5 C).

Writing in the paper, Sener said he found these results to be “quite remarkable as it suggests that light is going in all directions and that the shape of the concave mirror focuses the light waves onto a single point.”

Praising Sener for insights into Archimedes’ death ray, Cliff Ho, a senior scientist at Sandia National Laboratories, said the project is “an excellent evaluation of the fundamental processes.” The facility is an engineering and science laboratory with the US Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

While the experiment doesn’t offer “anything significantly new to the scientific literature … his findings were a nice confirmation of the first law of thermodynamics,” which states energy or heat can be transferred, Ho said. The scientist had proposed a conference in 2014 on the death ray, concluding the idea was possible but would have been difficult for Archimedes to pull off.

Sener was not attempting to light anything on fire, as “a heating lamp does not generate anywhere near enough heat as the sun would,” he said. But he believes that with the use of the sun’s rays and a larger mirror, “the temperature would increase even more drastically and at a faster rate” and “would easily cause combustion.”

More theories on the death ray

Every two years, the Olympic torch is set ablaze using a curved parabolic mirror that concentrates sunlight into one point. Once the torch is put in that focal point, the sun’s rays ignite the torch. It is not widely believed that Archimedes used a single parabolic mirror, as it cannot be aimed the same way a flat mirror can.

Archimedes’ death ray is more commonly speculated to have been an array of several mirrors or polished shields. However, this theory is often discredited due to the idea that ships would be moving during battle. In order for the vessels to ignite from heat generated by the mirrors, they would have needed to be stationary and anchored near shore, said Thomas Chondros, a retired associate professor with the department of mechanical engineering and aeronautics at Greece’s University of Patras. Chondros has studied Archimedes and his inventions.

The Discovery Channel series “MythBusters” featured episodes in 2004, 2006 and 2010 testing out scenarios for the purported death ray but ultimately declared the legend to be a myth when each test failed to light a wooden boat on fire. In 2005, a class of students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, inspired by the show’s first episode, was able to ignite a wooden boat once with a similar technique to Sener’s on a larger scale, but failed on a second attempt.

Sener said he believes that combining MIT’s findings with his own, the data could suggest the death ray was plausible, and Archimedes likely could have used the sun’s rays with large mirrors to cause combustion. But the technology may not work in cold temperatures or cloudy weather, and the sea’s impact on the ships’ motion affects the practicality of this device, he added in his paper.

Despite the limitations for the practicality of the death ray, Chondros found Sener’s project to be “interesting and well documented” and the teen’s experimental setup could “form the base of a discussion for young students, even University students,” he said in an email.

Sener’s mom, Melanie, was not surprised by her son’s choice in science project. “He has always been fascinated with history, with science, with nature. … He’s always had a thirst for any form of education and knowledge,” she said.

Sener could see himself one day being a scientist, whether it be in engineering, bioengineering or medicine, he said.

Hong Kong’s government unveiled a new suite of powerful national security laws on Friday that critics and foreign governments warn could deepen the ongoing crackdown in the city and further undermine its reputation as an international business hub.

The 212-page draft bill tabled into the city’s opposition-less legislature introduces a range of new national security crimes including treason, espionage, external interference and disclosure of state secrets.

The most serious offenses are punishable with up to life imprisonment, with the involvement of “external forces” – a byword for foreign governments and organizations – treated as an aggravating factor.

China and Hong Kong’s leaders say the laws are needed as part of their drive to “restore stability” following huge and often violent democracy protests in 2019 and argue their legislation is similar to other national security laws around the world.

Critics counter that what China’s Communist Party views as national security offences are far broader and more sweeping, often ensnaring political criticism, dissent and even business activity that would not be criminalized elsewhere.

They point to the application of national security laws in mainland China as well as in Hong Kong where a Beijing-imposed national security law has already transformed the once outspoken city since 2020, silencing almost all dissent and jailing dozens of political opponents. Many civil society groups have disbanded, and outspoken media outlets have shut down.

The new draft Hong Kong law – known locally as Article 23 – is aimed at “filling the loopholes” left by the Beijing-imposed version enacted in 2020, according to the Hong Kong government.

A previous attempt to pass Article 23 laws back in 2003 sparked huge protests and a government u-turn.

But the atmosphere in Hong Kong this time around is very different.

Many of the city’s leading pro-democracy figures are in jail either convicted or facing charges under the 2020 national security law.

Others have fled overseas, and the city’s once raucous legislature has been cleared of pro-democracy opposition politicians, resembling instead the type of rubber stamp bodies favored by the Chinese Communist Party on the mainland.

Public consultations for the new laws this time lasted 28 days, two months short of the time given during the earlier attempt in 2003 when hundreds of thousands of residents hit the streets in protest.

The government said 98% of the 13,147 pieces of feedback it received during the consultation period “showed support” for the new law and just 0.7% voiced opposition, including a dozen from what it called “overseas anti-China organizations or abscondees.”

Hong Kong’s legislature convened special sessions for the first and second reading of the proposed bill on Friday and within three hours after it was tabled.

They were prompted by Hong Kong’s leader John Lee – a former police officer and security chief – who told lawmakers to pass the law “at full speed.”

“Completing the legislative work even one day earlier means we can more effectively safeguard national security one day earlier,” he said in a letter to the legislature on Thursday.

Authorities have yet to announce when a third reading will take place.

Last month, the United States warned Article 23 risks “compounding the 2020 National Security Law that has curtailed the rights and freedoms of people in Hong Kong.”

In a statement, the US Department of State said it was concerned by the “broad and vague definitions of ‘state secrets’ and ‘external interference,’” which could potentially be used to silence dissent, and some of the provisions that may have extraterritorial effects.

Akira Toriyama, the Japanese manga artist who created the enormously popular and influential Dragon Ball series, died of a brain condition last week at the age of 68, his production studio said Friday.

Toriyama was the mind behind the fantasy martial arts franchise featuring Son Goku, a boy from outer space with superhuman strength and a monkey tail who embarks on a quest for the seven dragon balls.

The Dragon Ball universe remains one of Japan’s most successful global hits, captivating the hearts of many manga-loving teens and adults from around the world since its debut in the 1980s.

Toriyama’s death was announced on Friday by Dragon Ball’s official website in a shared statement from Bird Studio and Capsule Corporation Tokyo.

“It’s our deep regret that he still had several works in the middle of creation with great enthusiasm,” it said.

“He would have many more things to achieve. However, he has left many manga titles and works of art to this world,” it added, thanking fans for their support on Toriyama’s behalf.

The artist died of acute subdural hematoma, a form of brain bleeding, the statement said.

Born on April 5, 1955 in Kiyosu City, Aichi prefecture, Toriyama began drawing manga at the age of 23.

He made his debut as a cartoonist in 1978 by submitting a short story to manga fans’ magazine Weekly Shonen Jump.

His “Dragon Ball” series went on to be featured in the same magazine in 1984 and was front and center of a creative career that spanned more than four decades.

The franchise is based on classic Chinese novel Journey to the West and has since been adapted into into anime and the 2009 Hollywood action movie “Dragon Ball Evolution.”

As Son Goku sets off for his quest in search of the seven dragon balls, he fights off villains along the way and protects the Earth. As he ages, the storyline shifts to his descendants and friends.

The dragon balls, when collected, can summon Shen Long, a divine dragon that can grant any wish. Son Goku often ended up spending the wishes on his friends or restoring a heavily destructed Earth in the series centered on courage, friendship and kinship.

Prominent Japanese author and game designer Yuji Horii, a longtime friend of Toriyama, said they worked on the popular game Dragon Quest together.

“I can’t believe he’s gone,” he wrote on social media platform X.

Eiichiro Oda, creator of manga series “One Piece,” said the thought of never seeing his friend Toriyama again “fills me with sadness.”

Toriyama “took the baton from the era when reading manga would make you stupid, and created an era where both adults and children read and enjoy manga. He showed us the dream that manga can do things like this and that we can go to the world,” Oda said on the Shonen Jump website.

Many fans also paid tribute to the manga heavyweight online.

“Dragon Ball was my textbook for life. It taught me that I could overcome any hardship if I worked on it cheerfully and with enjoyment,” one fan wrote on X.