His face has become instantly recognizable around the world: A red-haired baby boy holding a pink elephant toy, looking directly into the camera with a toothless smile.

His name is Kfir Bibas, and he is the youngest of the 253 hostages taken into Gaza by Hamas and other militant groups during the terror attacks against Israel on October 7.

On Thursday, Kfir turns one — if he is still alive.

The baby boy was kidnapped from Kibbutz Nir Oz in southern Israel alongside his parents Yarden and Shiri, and his four-year old brother Ariel.

Friends and relatives of the Bibas family held a small event at Nir Oz on Tuesday, commemorating Kfir’s birthday with a large balloon display and a cake featuring the famous photo of Kfir with the pink elephant.

On Thursday, the family is holding a public event in Tel Aviv on Thursday, pleading for their release.

“You know, any rules even from the Quran because in the Quran, you cannot do damage to kids … so Hamas breaks all the rules of the Islam,” he added.

It is not clear whether Kfir and his family are still alive. The two boys and their mother were not released from Gaza during the temporary truce in late November, despite the fact that the deal agreed between Israel and Hamas called for all women and children to be set free.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said at that time they believed the family was being held hostage by other militia groups and not by Hamas.

However, later that week, Hamas said, without providing any evidence, that Kfir, his brother and his mother were killed in an Israeli airstrike.

A few days after making the claim that the family were dead, Hamas released a video of Yarden Bibas, Kfir’s father, in which he blamed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the death of his wife and two children. Bibas appeared to be in extreme distress in the video and was very likely speaking under duress.

The IDF called the video a “cruel act of psychological terror which Hamas is using against families of hostages.”

Israel believes 253 hostages were taken into Gaza during the Hamas attack on October 7. Following hostage releases and one rescue, the Prime Minister’s Office says 132 hostages remain in Gaza, of whom 105 are alive and 27 dead.

In an ancient temperate forest in what is now Oregon, an insect dug deep into a sandy bank near a creek. There, in a damp burrow, she laid dozens of oblong eggs, about 50 in all. Despite her careful work building this underground nursery, none of the eggs would ever hatch. Instead, the eggs, enclosed within a pod, fossilized into a stony, mineralized mass. And now, 29 million years later, they stand as a record of insect reproduction that could be unlike anything paleontologists had seen before.

Recently, micro-CT scans of the egg case revealed not only that it was millions of years old, but also that it was most likely made by a grasshopper. The eggs and overall nest construction closely resemble the eggs and pods of modern grasshopper species. This newly documented knowledge paints a clearer picture of that ancient ecosystem, confirming that grasshoppers were present and thriving there — and that some types of grasshoppers were burying their eggs underground.

Insect eggs are extremely rare in the fossil record, and intact egg cases are even rarer. This is likely the only fossilized grasshopper egg pod on record, and it offers a view of their reproduction dating back to the Oligocene Epoch (33.9 million to 23 million years ago), researchers reported Monday in the journal Parks Stewardship Forum.

Undisturbed fossilization

What makes this fossil even more remarkable is that it was found in a habitat that typically isn’t kind to fossilization, said study coauthor Dr. Nick Famoso, a paleontology program manager and museum curator at John Day Fossil Beds National Monument. The site, located in Mitchell, Oregon, is under the management of the National Parks Service.

Delicate fossils such as this specimen are usually preserved in lake deposits alongside plant matter. Such places tend to be anoxic, or oxygen-poor, and relatively static, Famoso explained. There, fossils can form in peace, untouched by currents or bacteria. But millions of years ago, a river or stream ran through this location. Nevertheless, conditions surrounding this egg pod were just right for it to stay buried and fossilize undisturbed in nearly perfect condition, despite the dynamic environment of flowing water nearby, Famoso said.

The eggs in this fossil stand out for their preservation, “both individually and in clusters,” paleobiologist Dr. Ricardo Pérez-de la Fuente, deputy head of research at the University of Oxford’s Museum of Natural History in the United Kingdom, said in an email.

“They are the first to be recognized as belonging to orthopterans — grasshoppers and their kin — in the fossil record, which is noteworthy,” said Pérez-de la Fuente, who was not involved in the research.

“The work also represents an important step towards formalizing the description of immature stages of insects, more particularly those of eggs,” Pérez-de la Fuente said. This branch of science, known as ootaxonomy, “can provide paramount data on the evolution, behavior and ecology of insects in deep time, but which tend to be neglected in paleontological studies.” What’s more, he added, the pod and eggs may offer clues about the environment where they fossilized.

The eggs had an unusual curvature

Christopher Schierup, a collection manager for the National Parks Service, discovered the egg case in the fossil beds in July 2012. Schierup was conducting a routine visual survey of the site when he spotted the object, which was embedded in a chunk of rock that had rolled down a hill, Famoso recalled.

“It did not require any tool work to get it out of the ground,” he said. Schierup swaddled the object in toilet paper, “and carefully returned to the visitor center where our lab is located,” Famoso added.

Based on surface analysis of the fossil, the researchers initially thought they had found a cluster of ant eggs. But Famoso was skeptical, as their curvature differed from the curves of ant eggs and pupae. His suspicions were corroborated by Lee, who first saw the object in 2022 during a visit to the John Day Fossil Beds. They brought the specimen to the University of Oregon’s Knight Campus in Eugene, where micro-CT scans were conducted by study coauthor Angela Lin, director of the X-ray Imaging Research Core Facility.

“That’s when we discovered that there was this protein layer that was holding everything together,” Famoso said. This wasn’t just a cluster of eggs — it was a type of subterranean egg pod called an ootheca, with the eggs cradled by a protective layer that had mineralized into a stony rind.

“Belowground egg pods are currently produced by only two groups of insects,” Lee said. These are grasshoppers (order Orthoptera, suborder Caelifera) and heelwalkers (order Mantophasmatodea).

Radial arrangement

On the surface, 28 ellipsoid eggs were visible, each measuring no more than 0.18 inches (4.65 millimeters) long and 0.07 inches (1.84 millimeters) wide (this is comparable to the eggs of modern grasshoppers, though egg size can vary depending on the species). Scans revealed over two dozen more eggs buried in the matrix in four to five layers, arranged in a radial pattern. Some of the eggs were hollow, while others had filled with sediment, the study authors reported.

“The mineralization that we were able to see in each of the eggs made it very clear that that was a fossilization structure,” Famoso said.

Because fossil insect eggs are so scarce, there weren’t many specimens available for comparison. So Lee consulted a global insect egg database, containing more than 6,700 living species, to identify the eggs in the fossil pod.

“I compared the defining egg features, including size, length to width ratio, and curvature of the individual eggs to those of the living ones,” he said. “Such large, elliptically curved eggs in a large clutch size (~50 eggs in total) are unknown from any other living groups of insects other than grasshoppers and locusts.”

This unusual find provides a never-before-seen glimpse of reproduction in the ancient relatives of modern grasshoppers. The virtually pristine specimen also speaks to the level of preservation in the national park site’s fossil beds, Famoso added.

“Just being able to see that internal structure and really properly describe what these things look like — that was something that was really exciting for us,” Famoso said. “There just isn’t anything else like this in the fossil record anywhere that we know of.”

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

A new official portrait of King Charles III that will hang in public buildings in the United Kingdom has been unveiled.

The photograph, which was taken in Windsor Castle last year, shows the king wearing a Royal Navy Admiral of the Fleet uniform adorned with medals.

Public bodies such as courts, schools and councils can request free oak-framed copies of the portrait, which was taken by photographer Hugo Burnand.

The framed portrait measures 64 centimeters (25 inches) by 51 centimeters (20 inches).

British photographer Burnand has long held close ties to the royal family, taking official pictures at Charles and Queen Camilla’s coronation. He also took the official photos for both Charles and Camilla’s wedding in 2005, and William and Catherine’s wedding in 2011.

“Official portraits of Queen Elizabeth II are currently on display in many public institutions, and the offering of the new official portrait of King Charles III will enable organisations across the UK to carry on that tradition,” the UK Cabinet Office said in a press statement last year.

However, the portrait scheme, which has a £8 million ($10.1 million) price tag, has faced criticism, with anti-monarchy group Republic describing it as a “shameful waste of money.”

“At a time when a majority of local councils are raising taxes and cutting public services, when schools and hospitals are struggling, to spend even £1 ($1.2) on this nonsense would be £1 too much,” Graham Smith, chief executive of Republic, said following the government’s announcement in April.

The UK’s Cabinet Office said in a press release Monday that the king’s portrait will “reflect the new era in our history.”

Ordered portraits are due to be delivered from February onwards and commercial copies will be made available, the government said.

Pakistan on Tuesday strongly condemned an Iranian airstrike inside its borders that killed two children, calling it an “unprovoked violation of its airspace” and warning of retaliation.

Iran said it used “precision missile and drone strikes,” to destroy two strongholds of the Sunni militant group Jaish al-Adl, known in Iran as Jaish al-Dhulm, in the Koh-e-Sabz area of Pakistan’s southwest Balochistan province, according to Iran’s state-aligned Tasnim news agency.

The attack comes after Iran launched missiles in northern Iraq and Syria Monday, in the latest escalation of hostilities in the Middle East where Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza risks spiraling into a wider regional conflict.

Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry said the attack on its territory killed “two innocent children” and warned Iran of “serious consequences.”

It described the airstrike as an “unprovoked violation of its airspace by Iran … inside Pakistani territory.”

“It is even more concerning that this illegal act has taken place despite the existence of several channels of communication between Pakistan and Iran,” the ministry said.

Following the strike, nuclear-armed Pakistan lodged a “strong protest” with a senior official in Iran’s Foreign Ministry in the Iranian capital Tehran and called on the Iranian charge d’affairs, saying the “responsibility for the consequences will lie squarely with Iran.”

The Jaish al-Adl militant group late Tuesday said Iran’s Revolutionary Guards had used six attack drones and a number of rockets to destroy two houses where the children and wives of its fighters lived.

Khetran also said a mosque near the homes was targeted and hit in the strikes.

Koh-e-Sabz — about 50 kilometers (31 miles) from Pakistan’s border with Iran — is known to be the home of Jaish-ul-Adl’s former second-in-command Mullah Hashim, who was killed in clashes with Iranian forces in Sarawan, an Iranian region adjacent to Panjgur, in 2018.

Last month, Iran accused Jaish al-Adl militants of storming a police station in the Iranian province of Sistan and Baluchistan, which resulted in the deaths of 11 Iranian police officers, according to Tasnim.

Jaish al-Adl, or Army of Justice, is a separatist militant group that operates on both sides of the border and has previously claimed responsibility for attacks against Iranian targets. Its stated goal is the independence of Iran’s Sistan and Baluchistan province.

The strikes in Pakistan came a day after Iran’s Revolutionary Guards launched ballistic missiles, targeting what it claimed was a spy base for Israel’s intelligence agency Mossad in Erbil, northern Iraq, and at “anti-Iran terror groups” in Syria.

Iran said the strikes in Iraq were in response to what it said were Israeli attacks that killed Iranian Revolutionary Guard commanders, and claimed targets in Syria were involved in the recent dual bombings in the city of Kerman during a memorial for the slain Quds Force Commander Qasem Soleimani that left scores dead and wounded.

It defended the strikes as a “precise and targeted” operation to deter security threats, Iranian foreign ministry spokesperson Nasser Kanaani said in a statement on Tuesday.

Iran’s attacks will further raise fears that Israel’s war in Gaza could widen into a full-scale war in the Middle East with grave humanitarian, political and economic consequences.

The attacks in Iraq and Syria were condemned by the United States as “reckless” and imprecise, while the United Nations said, “security concerns must be addressed through dialogue, not strikes.”

Iraq said it submitted a complaint to the UN Security Council and the UN on Tuesday. Iraqi Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein said there are no Mossad-affiliated centers operating in Erbil in the semi-autonomous Kurdistan region.

Concerns of an escalating war

Israel’s relentless bombing of Gaza in response to Hamas’ October 7 terror attacks has killed more than 24,000 people, according to the Hamas-run Ministry of Health, and wrought widespread devastation, as civilians live with the threat of imminent death – either by an airstrike, starvation or disease.

The conflict has escalated hostilities across the region, with Iran’s allies and proxies – the so-called axis of resistance – launching attacks on Israeli forces and its allies.

A few hours later, the Houthis launched a missile into international shipping lanes in the southern Red Sea, hitting the M/V Zografia, a Maltese flagged bulk carrier, the official said.

The strikes are at least the third round of attacks the US military has launched against the Houthis’ infrastructure since last Thursday, when American and British conducted a joint operation that targeted command and control nodes and weapons depots used by the Houthis to launch missile and drone attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea.

US troops in Iraq and Syria have also repeatedly come under rocket and drone attacks from Tehran’s proxies. Last week, the US carried out a strike in Baghdad that killed a leader from an Iran-backed proxy group that Washington blamed for attacks against US personnel in the region.

And fighting has intensified between Israel and the powerful Iran-backed group Hezbollah, across the Lebanon border. On Sunday, Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah vowed to press on with confrontations with Israeli forces on the Lebanon border until the end of the Israeli offensive in Gaza.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

The Israeli soldiers stand rifles in hand, arm over shoulder, speaking to the camera. Behind them is the shell of a Gazan building.

“We are here adding light after the black sabbath that the people of Israel had,” one of the men says in the video, circulating on Telegram. “We are occupying, deporting, and settling. Occupying, deporting, and settling. Did you hear that Bibi? Occupying, deporting, and settling.”

As Israel’s war against Hamas enters its fourth month, the Israeli government has said little of substance, at least in any official way, on its plans for post-war Gaza.

Hamas seized control of the territory – home to about 2.2 million Palestinians – from the Palestinian Authority in 2007, two years after Israel unilaterally withdrew all its troops and about 8,000 Jewish settlers. Who governs it after Israel’s war against Hamas concludes is an open question.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rejected the idea of establishing Jewish settlements, but has said only that neither Hamas nor the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority should govern the territory, and that Israel will keep “full security control.”

Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, a member of Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party, has released his own proposal, saying that there should be “no Israeli presence in the Gaza Strip,” but light on detail about what governance there would look like.

Into that void has stepped a group – once fringe, but now in the governing coalition –that hopes for full Israeli control, to resettle Gaza and even expel Palestinians. And its ideas are permeating mainstream debate.

“We must promote a solution to encourage the emigration of the residents of Gaza,” far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said on January 1.

Far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who also holds a position in the Defense Ministry, says that Israel “will rule there. And in order to rule there securely for a long time, we must have a civilian presence.”

The United States’ top diplomat is concerned enough that he has publicly rebuked those plans.

“These statements are irresponsible, they’re inflammatory, and they only make it harder to secure a future of Palestinian-led Gaza with Hamas no longer in control, and with terrorist groups no longer able to threaten Israel’s security,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said during a recent trip to Qatar.

Polling in Israel on the question of re-establishing settlements varies widely, reflecting subtleties in how the question is asked, and the fact that public opinion in the wake of Hamas’ October 7 attack is wildly in flux, says Dahlia Scheindlin, a polling expert, journalist, and contributor to Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

There is also an established track record in Israel of politicians pushing seemingly extremist ideas into mainstream conversation, and even into law. Netanyahu last year supported an effort started by a right-wing minister from his own Likud party to push through a law limiting the Supreme Court’s ability to scrutinize legislation, despite months of protests that roiled the nation. That proposal never had majority support, but the Knesset nonetheless passed it into law. The Supreme Court struck down the proposal earlier this month, saying it would deal a “severe and unprecedented blow to the core characteristics of the State of Israel as a democratic state.”

“Ideas that often seem very extreme at a certain phase in Israel’s history can over time become increasingly normalized very incrementally – sometimes a little bit below the radar, not exactly hidden, but not exactly advertised,” Scheindlin said of Israeli policymaking.

Diana Buttu, a Palestinian human rights lawyer who has served as an adviser to the Palestinian Authority, gives little credence to Netanyahu’s professed opposition to re-establishing settlements in Gaza.

People are ‘waking up’

Far from a new idea, the desire to re-settle Gaza comes from decades of frustration with then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s 2004 decision to dismantle 21 Israel settlements in Gaza – known as Gush Katif – and expel their 8,000 Jewish residents, a process which was completed in 2005.

Settler activists like Yishai Fleisher, a spokesman for Jewish settlers in Hebron, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, sense an opportunity.

As a protester, in 2005, Fleisher was among those ejected from Gaza by the Israeli government. With public opinion in flux, he hopes that his movement’s moment has come.

“People are waking up – they’re trying to open their minds,” he said of fellow Israelis, reevaluating their politics in the wake of October 7.

If Palestinians in Gaza are “post-Jihad, pro-Israel, and want to live that good life in that beautiful soil, there should be an opportunity for that,” he said. “Anti-Israel, pro-jihad Arabs have got to leave. And they’re going to have to find a different place to go. It might be Turkey, and it might be Jordan, and it might be South America,” he said. “If they can’t muster in their heart to live in or next to the Jewish state, we can’t have them.”

The Norwegian Refugee Council in December warned that “any attempts by Israel to deport and permanently displace Palestinians within and from Gaza would constitute a serious breach of international law and an atrocity crime.”

Since October 7, about 85% of Gaza’s population, or some 1.9 million people, have been displaced from their homes, according to the United Nations – many of them moved multiple times, fleeing airstrikes and heeding Israeli warnings of military attacks, and largely squeezed into a small, southwestern corner of the territory.

Israel was last week accused of genocide in Gaza by South Africa, whose lawyers argued at the International Court of Justice in The Hague that Israel’s military campaign was intended to “bring about the destruction” of its Palestinian population, and that comments made by Israeli leaders signalled their “genocidal intent.” Israel strenuously denied the accusation and said that the charge was “a concerted and cynical effort to pervert the meaning of the term ‘genocide’ itself.”

Humanitarian framing

At the Gush Katif museum in Jerusalem, former settlers are printing T-shirts in bright orange. That color was adopted in 2004 and 2005 by the movement protesting Israel’s disengagement from Gaza. At the time, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers pulled settlers from settlement synagogues. Days later, Palestinian forces razed the buildings to the ground.

“Home, returning to Gush Katif,” the slogan on the T-shirts reads.

The movement to re-establish Gush Katif, has found a place, too, among some of the many (IDF) soldiers posting from Gaza on social media.

A photograph from a ruined Gaza street shows two soldiers holding an Israeli flag, altered to include an orange stripe and the words, in Hebrew: “Coming home!”

Another photograph shows soldiers with an orange banner that reads: “Only settlement would be considered victory!”

When the megastar Israeli singer Hanan Ben Ari serenaded Israeli troops in October ahead of their deployment, he sang:

Returning to Gush Katif

Playing beach volleyball

Establishing Nova Beach on the Gaza coast

The nation of Israel lives!

Those advocating for renewed Israeli settlements often frame their arguments in humanitarian terms, arguing that Palestinians would have a better life elsewhere.

“This is a correct, just, moral and humane solution,” said Ben Gvir, who has previously been convicted for supporting terrorism and inciting anti-Arab racism.

Gila Gamliel, Israel’s intelligence minister and a member of Likud, suggested in November that Israel “promote the voluntary resettlement of Palestinians in Gaza, for humanitarian reasons, outside of the Strip.”

Between 68% and 81% of buildings in northern Gaza have been damaged by Israel’s war in Gaza, according to analysis of satellite imagery up to January 5 by researchers at Oregon State University and the City University of New York. In all of Gaza, the figure is between 45% and 56%.

‘Ethnic cleansing’

Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, which exercises limited self-rule in the West Bank, has made clear his government’s “complete rejection of the displacement of any Palestinian citizen.”

“Can the population now return to northern Gaza, which has largely been destroyed?”

“As a result of this, there is an opening for those ministers, media people, and so forth on the Israeli right to say, ‘Well the most humanitarian solution is to remove that population’ — or to encourage, as they say — to move out of Gaza. If that happens, then this entire scenario that I’m talking about will be seen as ethnic cleansing.”

Buttu, who said she has little doubt about the determination of some in Israel to re-settle Gaza based on their settlement efforts in the West Bank, voiced a similar concern.

Israel has “created the conditions whereby Gaza is no longer liveable,” she said. “Now they’re just simply repacking it as some sort of humanitarian gift, or humanitarian solution, when really what it is, is aiding Israel and ethnically cleansing Gaza of Palestinians.”

Netanyahu has rejected the idea of new settlements as “unrealistic,” saying in an English-language statement that “Israel has no intention of permanently occupying Gaza or displacing its civilian population.”

In October, the Israeli government admitted that a leaked intelligence document proposing the relocation of millions of Palestinian Gazans to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula was genuine, but downplayed its significance as “a preliminary paper, like dozens of such papers prepared by all political and security echelons.”

Nonetheless, the fact the re-settlement movement is now being openly discussed in Israel’s parliament, or Knesset, as it was during a committee hearing earlier this month, is a step-change in the debate. And despite international opprobrium, its far-right proponents are not holding back.

“We first need to occupy, to annex, to destroy all the houses there, build neighborhoods there,” Tzvi Sukkot, a member of Knesset from Smotrich’s Religious Zionism said during the committee hearing.

The only image that will convince Israel’s enemy of its defeat, said Limor Son Har Melech from Ben Gvir’s Jewish Power Party, to applause, is “the settlement, and Jewish children walking in its streets.”

The UK government approved a £2 billion (around $2.5 billion) project on Tuesday to create a “carbon negative” wood-burning power plant. But some climate experts say it’s a costly experiment for a technology that may not be green.

Energy secretary Claire Coutinho’s decision greenlights a plan to bolt carbon capture units onto two generators at a power station in Yorkshire, northern England, run by Drax. Once operational, each would be capable of preventing 4 million tons of carbon pollution a year from entering the atmosphere, according to the company.

The carbon would then be stored under the North Sea, with the aim of preventing it from adding to global warming.

Once the most polluting power station in western Europe, Drax switched from burning coal to burning biomass — mostly wood pellets — in 2019. The power station in Yorkshire, which produces around 4% of the UK’s power, mostly burns wood imported from North America.

Biomass is already considered carbon neutral because even though carbon pollution is released when trees are burned, the idea is emissions are offset by the growth of new trees to replace those burned, which suck up carbon through photosynthesis as they grow.

Adding carbon capture units will convert the plant to a form of energy called “bioenergy with carbon capture and storage,” or BECCS, which Drax says will allow it to remove more carbon pollution from the atmosphere than it is produced by burning the biomass, making it carbon negative.

But the technology has been heavily criticized by some climate experts.

“BECCS is an unproven and highly controversial technology that would come at significant financial cost to the UK public,” said Tomos Harrison, electricity transition analyst at energy think tank Ember.

Some scientists have cast doubt on the climate credentials of burning biomass. A 2021 study from the European Academies Science Advisory Council concluded that burning wood for energy “is not effective in mitigating climate change and may even increase the risk of dangerous climate change.”

A main criticism is that it takes decades for the carbon released by burning biomass to be reabsorbed by new trees and plants as they grow.

There are also concerns that wood sourcing may be damaging to forests.

Last May, following a BBC investigation which alleged some of Drax’s wood came from mature forests in Canada, the UK energy regulator Ofgem launched an investigation into Drax over whether it had breached sustainability requirements in relation to the wood pellets it was burning.

In response to Ofgem’s investigation, which is still ongoing, Drax said at the time it was confident in its compliance, and added that in 2022 the company had appointed a third party to “independently verify the accuracy of its biomass sustainability.” Drax has said it only uses wood from sustainable sources.

Some experts believe money would be better spent on other renewable technology.

Laith Whitwham, senior policy advisor at climate think tank E3G, said the renewable status of burning wood pellets remains “hotly contested” and Drax’s project was a distraction from where investment was most needed.

Drax has received an average of around £785 million ($620 million) a year in government subsidies, according to Ember research.

“BECCS is an expensive gamble,” concludes an Ember report published Tuesday, which calculated that the project could cost taxpayers up to £1.7 billion a year.

A spokesperson for Drax said Ember’s report “veers between factual inaccuracies and a series of misguided assumptions.”

In its own analysis published Tuesday, Drax said the development of BECCs at its power station would lead to savings of around £15 billion ($19 billion) for the UK.

BECCS “offers the most cost-effective, straightforward and efficient way to help the country meet climate targets and could save billions of pounds, remove millions of tons of carbon from the atmosphere and support the UK’s energy security,” Will Gardiner, CEO of Drax Group, said in a statement Tuesaday.

Gardiner called the government’s decision “another milestone” in the development of BECCs. He said it demonstrated the “critical role” Drax could have in “delivering large-scale carbon dioxide removals.”

In its decision letter, the UK government said the project would “make a meaningful contribution to meeting the urgent need for carbon capture storage infrastructure to support the transition to Net Zero by 2050.”

At least 10 people have died following an explosion on Wednesday at a fireworks depot in Suphan Buri in central Thailand, according to local officials.

Police said the fire around the area had now been put out, and that rescue workers and forensic officers were working to retrieve human remains from and around the demolished factory.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on Monday vowed to remove a massive monument to the possible reunification of the Korean Peninsula that his father constructed in Pyongyang, calling it an “eyesore.”

Kim’s call during a speech at a Supreme People’s Assembly (SPA) meeting in Pyongyang was the latest in a string of recent bellicose statements from the North Korean leader, including a New Year’s declaration that the North was ending a policy of seeking reconciliation with South Korea.

North Korea has also been active militarily in recent weeks, firing hundreds of artillery rounds into waters near a disputed border between North and South and testing what it said was a ballistic missile topped with a hypersonic glide vehicle.

Besides calling for the destruction of the reunification monument, Kim on Monday also said Pyongyang was abolishing all agencies for promoting cooperation with Seoul. At the same time, he called the South the North’s “primary foe and invariable principal enemy.”

While the North Korean leader’s rhetoric is strong, backing it up with the destruction of a symbolic structure constructed by his father Kim Jong Il – and one that represents the principles of his grandfather Kim Il Sung – shows decades of North Korean policy is being abandoned, experts said.

The Kim family, beginning with Kim Il Sung, has ruled North Korea since its post-World War II founding in 1948.

The North and South remain technically at war, but both sides have long declared an ultimate goal of one day peacefully reunifying the peninsula and viewed each other as members of the same family.

But Kim’s most recent rhetoric moves away from the goal of reunification and instead is increasingly portraying South Korea as an implacable foe.

“Yesterday’s speech shows that Kim Jong Un is establishing his own way of unification based on power, breaking Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il’s legacy,” said Jeong Eun-mee, research fellow at the Korea Institute for National Unification.

“Demolition of the monument symbolically shows this,” she said.

Straddling the Reunification Highway between Pyongyang and the demilitarized zone separating the North and South, the nine-story arch called the Monument to the Three Charters for National Reunification was completed in 2001 after two years of construction.

It symbolizes the efforts of Kim Jong Il and Kim Il Sung to set guidelines for uniting North and South Korea.

Kim Jong Un on Monday declared an emphatic end to reunification thinking.

“We should completely remove the eyesore ‘Monument to the Three Charters for National Reunification’ … and take other measures so as to completely eliminate such concepts as ‘reunification,’ ‘reconciliation’ and ‘fellow countrymen’ from the national history of our Republic,” Kim is quoted as saying by KCNA.

Leif-Eric Easley, a professor at Ehwa University in Seoul, said breaking with the unification policies of his father and grandfather showed “Kim is sending a strong domestic message that North Korea’s challenges are externally driven.”

Rejecting peaceful reunification

One of the parts of Kim Jong Il’s three charters, and a principle introduced by Kim Il Sung into North Korean policy in the 1970s, was that “national reunification should be achieved by peaceful means without resorting to arms.”

But Kim on Monday said the North, officially known as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) “does not want war, but we also have no intention of avoiding it.”

The North Korean leader said that “the danger of the outbreak of a war to be caused by a physical clash has considerably aggravated,” and he vowed that if war happens, the North would take the entire peninsula by force.

At the same meeting at which Kim spoke, North Korea’s Parliament announced the abolishment of the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Country, the National Economic Cooperation Bureau and the Kumgangsan International Tourism Administration, entities all designed for cooperation with the Republic of Korea (ROK), South Korea’s official name.

“It is a serious anachronistic mistake to regard the ROK as a partner for reconciliation and reunification any longer as it declared the DPRK as a ‘principal enemy’ and is seeking only an opportunity for ‘bringing down the government’ and achieving ’unification by absorption,’” KCNA said.

South Korea’s 2022 Defense White Paper, published in early 2023, included a line saying: “the North Korean regime and the North Korean military are our enemy,” for the first time in six years.

South Korea not backing off

On Tuesday, South Korean leader Yoon Suk Yeol said his government will not be cowed by Kim’s latest threats.

“If North Korea provokes, we will punish them multiple times as hard,” Yoon said at a Cabinet meeting in Seoul.

Yoon noted that Kim Jong Un declared the Northern Limit Line (NLL), a disputed de facto border drawn up by the United Nations at the end of the Korean War in 1953, to be illegal.

Yoon on Tuesday called Kim’s rejection of the NLL “a political provocative act to crack South Korea and make our people nervous.”

The NLL runs three nautical miles from the North Korean coastline and puts five islands close to the coast under South Korean control. Earlier this month, North Korea fired around 200 artillery rounds that fell within a maritime buffer zone near it.

North Korea has previously rejected the NLL and proposed a different line – one that would roughly extend the DMZ southwest out into the Yellow Sea, rather than hug the North Korean shoreline.

Yoon, who has taken a much harder line on North Korea than his predecessors, said the South’s quarrel was with the Kim regime, not the people of North Korea.

The South Korean constitution defines all Koreans on the peninsula as equal, with northerners entitled to the same rights as southerners, and Yoon said Tuesday the South would welcome defectors from the North.

“The government will not spare attention and support for the defectors to settle well in our society,” Yoon said.

Netflix has removed an Indian film from its platform after it sparked backlash and protest from right wing Hindu groups – the latest in several recent controversies where India’s entertainment industry has caved to religious pressure campaigns.

The film, ‘Annapoorani: the Goddess of Food’, follows a young woman’s journey to become the best chef in India – which included cooking and eating meat, despite protests from her family, members of Hinduism’s highest and traditionally vegetarian caste, the Brahmins.

The movie was released on Netflix on December 29, where it quickly became the streaming platform’s top trending movie in India, according to production studio Zee Entertainment. But less than two weeks later, the film vanished from the site, including its international platforms.

The film had come under fire from several far-right Hindu groups, with some filing a First Information Report (FIR) – which is required to start an official police investigation – against the film’s director, producer and actors.

India has various anti-hate speech laws designed to keep relations between different communities civil in a country with a long and bloody history of communal and inter-religious violence.

In recent years Hindu nationalist groups have been increasingly adept at using those laws, or the threat of an investigation, to protest and remove content from art and media deemed to be offensive.

The main complaint was that the film showed the “daughter of a Brahmin man” eating meat and saying that the revered deity Lord Ram would eat meat, he said.

Shriraj Nair, a spokesperson for another group, Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), said they had sent letters of complaint to both Netflix and Zee Entertainment on January 9, claiming the movie “hurt the religious sentiments of Hindus and Brahmins of India.”

Another VHP spokesperson claimed Zee Entertainment had issued an apology later that day, sharing an image of the letter on X, formerly Twitter. In the letter, the studio said it was coordinating with its co-producers to take action – including removing the film from Netflix “until (it is) edited.”

Censorship fears for streaming giants

India is a huge part of Netflix’s push into Asia, with the company pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into the market in recent years, and adding a Hindi option on its platform in 2020 to reach more Indian users.

But, as Netflix and other streaming platforms have found out, navigating India’s media landscape can be fraught, especially with deepening divides in recent years between the country’s religious groups.

In 2020, Netflix faced boycott calls in India over a scene in its series “A Suitable Boy,” depicting a young Hindu woman being kissed by a Muslim man at a Hindu temple. The complexity of inter-religious relationships in India is a core part of the seminal novel by Indian writer Vikram Seth that was adapted into the show.

But this kiss nonetheless angered many viewers, including members of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) – Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist party.

That incident, like the ongoing controversy over ‘Annapoorani,’ prompted a police complaint against Netflix executives.

A year later, Amazon’s new Prime Video series “Tandav” came under similar fire, with Indian politicians complaining to police and regulators over its depiction of some Hindu deities. Both Amazon and the show’s creators issued an apology.

These controversies have also heightened long-simmering fears among filmmakers and creators over censorship.

Indian filmmakers have faced censorship for decades, with reasons ranging from religious objections to accusations that plots are “obscene” or “immoral.”

Streaming content broke that mold because it was, until recently, unregulated by the government – but in 2020, authorities announced new rules to rein in streaming services and online content.

Those vaguely worded new rules have troubled filmmakers, pointing to a wide range of topics that have already been targeted with complaints and outrage.

There are similar fears of censorship and press freedoms among the media, with the government using emergency powers last January to ban the release of a documentary about Modi, and tax authorities searching the BBC’s offices in Delhi and Mumbai the following month.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky made a passionate plea to leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, urging them not to allow Russia’s war in Ukraine to become “frozen.”

Speaking in person at the conference for the first time since Russia launched its full-scale invasion nearly two years ago, Zelensky said Ukraine had defied expectations in repelling Moscow’s forces for so long and that its allies “know what’s needed” to allow “progress on the ground,” which has been in short supply for many months.

At the start of Zelensky’s address, which he delivered in English, he said he understood many in the audience would be asking difficult questions: “When will the war end? Is the third world war possible? Is it time to negotiate with Putin?”

Zelensky warned “any frozen conflict will eventually reignite,” pointing to how Russia renewed its aggression after “attempts to freeze the war in the Donbas” after 2014. Instead, he said Ukraine needed to be provided with more weapons to bring about a “just and stable” peace.

Putin’s war was less than a year old when Zelensky last spoke at Davos via a video link in January 2023. Ukraine had then recently liberated the cities of Kherson and Kharkiv, which had been occupied in the early weeks of the war, and Kyiv was beginning to prepare for a broader counteroffensive it hoped would yield greater gains still.

A year on, those gains have failed to materialize. The head of Ukraine’s armed forces, Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, warned in November that the war had instead entered a “stalemate,” and that without technological improvements there would “likely be no deep and beautiful breakthrough,” but an equilibrium of devastating losses and destruction.

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s allies have been distracted by Israel’s war against Hamas – which is threatening to spark into a regional conflagration – and many will soon be distracted further by their own elections. Also speaking Tuesday at Davos, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen called 2024 “the biggest electoral year in history.”

But, despite these setbacks, Von der Leyen stressed that Ukraine had far exceeded expectations at the war’s outset, which she said was a cause for optimism.

“We haven’t forgotten that when Russia invaded Ukraine, many feared that Kyiv would fall in just a few days and the rest of the country within weeks. This did not happen. Instead, Russia has lost roughly half of its military capabilities,” Von der Leyen said, claiming Russia had failed militarily, economically and diplomatically.

Speaking later on Tuesday, Zelensky echoed this message, saying Ukraine began its defense “at a time when almost no one in the world believed in Ukraine. But we turned the tables, so that now the world has stopped believing in Russia.”

He said “even Putin’s current buddies in Pyongyang and Tehran” were exploiting him, “using his madness while he still has technologies and resources to pay them. No one believes in his future or invests in it.”

While expressing his gratitude to his allies, Zelensky also criticized their timidity and sluggishness in refusing to provide Ukraine with better weapons sooner. He said that the West’s fear that doing so would “escalate” Russia’s war had denied Ukraine the chance to make military gains and emboldened Putin.

“Every ‘Don’t escalate’ to us sounded like ‘You will prevail’ to Putin,” Zelensky told the heads of state gathered at Davos. He said “nothing harmed our coalitions more than this concept,” stressing that the West should have been quicker to call Putin’s bluff and Moscow’s baseless threats.

“We asked for new types of weapons, and the response was ‘Don’t escalate.’ But then weapons arrived and there was no escalation,” he said.

Zelensky did not refer to specific weapons which he alleged Ukraine’s allies were slow to provide. But allies spent months debating whether to provide Ukraine with, for instance, cluster munitions, Leopard 2 tanks, and F16 fighter jets. Each time they voiced their fears that Putin would use the supply of weapons as a pretext for “escalating” the war, which Zelensky said wasted time and lives.

“Because of ‘Don’t escalate,’ time was lost,” he said. “And the lives of many of our most experienced warriors, who fought since 2014, were lost. Some opportunities were lost.”

Zelensky urged his allies not to make the same mistakes again: “Every reduction in pressure on the aggressor adds years to the war, but every investment in the confidence of the defender shortens the war.

“We must gain air superiority for Ukraine, just as we have gained superiority in the Black Sea. We can do it. Partners know what’s needed and in what quantities. This will allow progress on the ground,” he said.

Speaking at Davos shortly before Zelensky, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said only continued support for Ukraine would make Putin to relent.

“What we can do is to just maximize the likelihood that at some stage President Putin will understand that to continue this war will have too high a price, and then at some stage he has to sit down and negotiate some kind of just, lasting peace, where Ukraine prevails as a sovereign, independent nation,” Stoltenberg said.

“And the paradox is that, if we want that to happen… the way to get there is [to send] more weapons to Ukraine. The more credible we are in our military support, the more likely it is that the diplomats will succeed.”