Ukraine claims it has evidence Russia fired an advanced hypersonic missile – one that experts say is almost impossible to shoot down – for the first time in the almost 2-year-old war.

The government-run Kyiv Scientific Research Institute of Forensic Expertise said in a Telegram post that debris recovered after a February 7 attack on the Ukrainian capital pointed to the use of a Zircon hypersonic cruise missile by the Russian military.

“Markings on the parts and fragments, the identification of components and parts, and the features of the relevant type of weapon” point to the first-ever use of the Zircon in combat, said the institute, which is part of Ukraine’s Justice Ministry.

The Telegram post was accompanied by a video showing dozens of pieces of debris believed to be from the new missile.

Ukrainian authorities reported four people were killed and 38 others injured in Kyiv during the February 7 attacks, but no casualties have been directly attributed to the alleged Zircon missile.

There was also no mention of the launch platform for the missile, though previous reports in Russian state media say it has been deployed on a warship.

Experts say the Zircon, if it lives up to what the Russian government says about it, is a formidable weapon.

Its hypersonic speed makes it invulnerable to even the best Western missile defenses, like the Patriot, according to the United States-based Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance (MDAA).

The alliance says its speed has been put at Mach 8, or almost 9,900 kilometers per hour (6,138 mph). Hypersonic is defined as any speed above Mach 5 (3,836 mph).

“If that information is accurate, the Zircon missile would be the fastest in the world, making it nearly impossible to defend against due to its speed alone,” the alliance says on its website.

The site also points to the missile’s plasma cloud as another “valuable” feature.

“During flight, the missile is completely covered by a plasma cloud that absorbs any rays of radio frequencies and makes the missile invisible to radars. This allows the missile to remain undetected on its way to the target,” it says.

Additionally, the MDAA says the Zircon is “a maneuvering anti-ship hypersonic cruise missile” with a range of somewhere between 500 and 1,000 kilometers (310 to 620 miles).

When the Russian navy frigate Admiral Gorshkov set out on a combat mission last January, leader Vladimir Putin boasted about the Zircon missiles the ship was carrying.

“It has no analogues in any country in the world,” Putin said, according to a report from the state media agency TASS. “I am sure that such powerful weapons will reliably protect Russia from potential external threats and will help ensure the national interests of our country,” he added.

If Russia has introduced the new weapon into the conflict, it could mean trouble for a Ukrainian air defense already straining to repel Moscow’s aerial attacks.

For instance, in that February 7 attack in which the Zircon was allegedly used, three Iskander ballistic missiles and four Kh-22 cruise missiles fired by Russian forces evaded attempts to bring them down, data from Ukraine’s air force shows.

Although air defenses have brought down Iskander missiles in the past, it is believed that Ukraine has failed to intercept a single Kh-22 in almost two years of war. Speaking in December, Ukrainian Air Force spokesperson Yurii Ihnat said that Russia had fired almost 300 Kh-22s so far in the war.

Ukraine’s air defenses did have some success during the February 7 attack, bringing down 26 of 29 Kh-101, Kh-555 and Kh-55 type cruise missiles, all three Kalibr cruise missiles and 15 of 20 Shahed drones fired by Russia. But those are less-advanced than the Zircon.

Despite that, analysts caution not to exaggerate the impact the use of the Zircon could have on the war as a whole.

As it is a new – and expensive – technology, one question is, how many has Russia produced?

A key “consideration is Russia’s ability to produce and field a capability like Zircon at scale, especially as the program will compete for financial and other resources with priorities like rebuilding the Russian ground forces,” Sidharth Kaushal, research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London, wrote last year after the Admiral Gorshkov allegedly deployed with Zircons aboard.

An overturned vessel has caused a huge oil spill along Trinidad and Tobago’s coastline, in what the Caribbean country’s prime minister described as a “national emergency” on Sunday.

The spill occurred on February 7 off the southern shores of the Tobago Island, according to the country’s Office of Disaster Preparedness and Management (ODPM). About 15 kilometers (9 miles) of the coastline “is now blackened,” the agency said in a statement Saturday.

Photos from the scene show recovery workers wading through thick black sludge, with huge areas of the beach covered in oil. Several government agencies, including at least 1,000 volunteers, have been working to control the spill.

Prime Minister Keith Rowley said in a news conference Sunday that “the situation is not under control.” The origins of the vessel have not yet been identified, he added.

“This is a national emergency and therefore it will have to be funded as an extraordinary expense,” Rowley said, adding, “we don’t know the full scope and scale of what is going to be required.”

Authorities installed booms – floating barriers – to prevent the spill from spreading to other areas, said Farley Augustine, the chief secretary of the Tobago House of Assembly. Officials have also dispatched divers to try to plug the leak but have not been successful.

“What has to happen is that we have to find a way to now extract every bit of oil that’s in the vessel, bearing in mind as we have been reiterating – not knowing the schematics of the vessel,” Augustine told reporters.

“We’re not sure if it’s a freighter, a tanker, or a barge because only the keel of the vessel is visible. And its identifying physical characteristics are in water that we can’t penetrate for the moment,” Rowley said Sunday.

“But we do know it appears to be broken having made contact here and is leaking some kind of hydrocarbon that is fouling the water and the coastline,” he added.

Residents in the local area of Lambeau reported a constant stench from the spill, leaving some worried about their health, according to local media.

Augustine, the chief secretary of the Tobago House of Assembly, advised those with respiratory illnesses to use masks and “self-relocate or find ways to mitigate against that.”

The spill took place during Carnival season, one of the country’s biggest tourist attractions.

“The best part of Tobago’s economy is its tourism, so it is important that we be cognizant that we don’t expose the tourism product to this kind of thing, and because this has happened, we have to contain it,” the prime minister said.

The area of Greenland’s ice loss in the past three decades is roughly 36 times the size of New York City — land that is rapidly giving way to wetlands and shrubs, a study published Tuesday shows.

The amount of vegetation in Greenland doubled between the mid-1980s and mid-2010s, as swaths of the country that were once covered in ice and snow were transformed into barren rock, wetlands or shrub area. Wetlands alone quadrupled in that time.

By analyzing satellite imagery, the scientists found that Greenland had lost 28,707 square-kilometers (around 11,000 square-miles) of ice in the three-decade period, and warned of a cascade of impacts that could have serious consequences for climate change and sea level rise.

Warmer air temperatures have driven ice loss, which has in turn raised land temperatures. That has caused the melting of permafrost, a frozen layer just beneath the Earth’s surface and found in much of the Arctic, and that melt releases planet-warming carbon dioxide and methane, contributing to more global warming. Permafrost melt is also causing land instability, which could impact infrastructure and buildings.

“We have seen signs that the loss of ice is triggering other reactions which will result in further loss of ice and further ‘greening’ of Greenland, where shrinking ice exposes bare rock that is then colonized by tundra and eventually shrub,” one of the report’s authors, Jonathan Carrivick, said in a press release. “At the same time, water released from the melting ice is moving sediment and silt, and that eventually forms wetlands and fenlands.”

The loss of ice is creating what’s known as a feedback loop. Snow and ice typically reflect the sun’s energy back into space, preventing excessive heating in parts of the Earth. But as ice disappears, those areas absorb more solar energy, raising land surface temperatures, which can cause further melt and other negative impacts.

Ice melt also increases the amount of water in lakes, where water absorbs more heat than snow, which increases land surface temperatures.

Greenland has been warming at twice the global mean rate since the 1970s, and the study’s authors warn that more extreme temperatures in the future are likely.

Greenland is the world’s biggest island and is mostly covered by ice and glaciers. Around 57,000 people live in the country, which is an autonomous country within the Kingdom of Denmark. Much of the population is indigenous and many people there rely on natural ecosystems for their survival.

Michael Grimes, the report’s lead author, said that the flow of sediments and nutrients into coastal waters was particularly problematic for indigenous communities that rely on fishing, as well as for hunters on other parts of the island.

“These changes are critical, particularly for the indigenous populations whose traditional subsistence hunting practices rely on the stability of these delicate ecosystems,” he said.

“Moreover, the loss of ice mass in Greenland is a substantial contributor to global sea level rise, a trend that poses significant challenges both now and in the future.”

The area of Greenland’s ice loss in the past three decades is roughly 36 times the size of New York City — land that is rapidly giving way to wetlands and shrubs, a study published Tuesday shows.

The amount of vegetation in Greenland doubled between the mid-1980s and mid-2010s, as swaths of the country that were once covered in ice and snow were transformed into barren rock, wetlands or shrub area. Wetlands alone quadrupled in that time.

By analyzing satellite imagery, the scientists found that Greenland had lost 28,707 square-kilometers (around 11,000 square-miles) of ice in the three-decade period, and warned of a cascade of impacts that could have serious consequences for climate change and sea level rise.

Warmer air temperatures have driven ice loss, which has in turn raised land temperatures. That has caused the melting of permafrost, a frozen layer just beneath the Earth’s surface and found in much of the Arctic, and that melt releases planet-warming carbon dioxide and methane, contributing to more global warming. Permafrost melt is also causing land instability, which could impact infrastructure and buildings.

“We have seen signs that the loss of ice is triggering other reactions which will result in further loss of ice and further ‘greening’ of Greenland, where shrinking ice exposes bare rock that is then colonized by tundra and eventually shrub,” one of the report’s authors, Jonathan Carrivick, said in a press release. “At the same time, water released from the melting ice is moving sediment and silt, and that eventually forms wetlands and fenlands.”

The loss of ice is creating what’s known as a feedback loop. Snow and ice typically reflect the sun’s energy back into space, preventing excessive heating in parts of the Earth. But as ice disappears, those areas absorb more solar energy, raising land surface temperatures, which can cause further melt and other negative impacts.

Ice melt also increases the amount of water in lakes, where water absorbs more heat than snow, which increases land surface temperatures.

Greenland has been warming at twice the global mean rate since the 1970s, and the study’s authors warn that more extreme temperatures in the future are likely.

Greenland is the world’s biggest island and is mostly covered by ice and glaciers. Around 57,000 people live in the country, which is an autonomous country within the Kingdom of Denmark. Much of the population is indigenous and many people there rely on natural ecosystems for their survival.

Michael Grimes, the report’s lead author, said that the flow of sediments and nutrients into coastal waters was particularly problematic for indigenous communities that rely on fishing, as well as for hunters on other parts of the island.

“These changes are critical, particularly for the indigenous populations whose traditional subsistence hunting practices rely on the stability of these delicate ecosystems,” he said.

“Moreover, the loss of ice mass in Greenland is a substantial contributor to global sea level rise, a trend that poses significant challenges both now and in the future.”

One woman said she had no choice but to abandon her elderly stepmother on the beach, and feared she’d since been attacked by dogs that were roaming the area.

In extensive interviews, the women alleged that Israeli forces abducted their husbands and sons, older relatives, and one sister, a female doctor, from the apartment building where they were sheltering in Gaza City. They accused the Israeli military of blowing up the building, as well as others nearby.

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk said in a statement last Thursday that Israeli forces were carrying out demolitions of residential buildings and other civilian structures across the enclave, including in Gaza City.

The upscale Al-Rimal neighborhood in Gaza City has been devastated by Israel’s intense bombing campaign, launched in response to Hamas’ deadly attacks in Israel on October 7. Near-constant airstrikes have reduced the city’s once vibrant business district, with its offices, luxury apartment buildings and restaurants, to rubble.

Tens of thousands of people have fled the city in waves since the bombing began. In late January, dozens of people were killed in airstrikes on the city and Israeli troops swarmed Al-Rimal district, according to Khader Al Za’anoun, a journalist for the official Palestinian news agency WAFA.

More than 28,000 Palestinians have been killed and 66,000 injured in Israeli attacks since the war started, according to the Hamas-run Ministry of Health in Gaza.

One woman, Israa Hassan Ahmed al-Ashkar, said that for a whole week the group were trapped in the apartment building in Al-Rimal. The Israeli military “terrorized us and terrorized the children. For a whole week, they besieged us,” al-Ashkar said.

She said that they had had nothing to eat or drink. “There is nothing in the house, hardly finding some water, and it was salty water. It was salty. We drank it, and our children. We were not able to make any noises… so they wouldn’t know that we were there.”

Hoda Harb, another member of the group who made it to the hospital, said that when Israeli soldiers finally came to the building where they were hiding, they stormed it despite her saying there were children inside. “We opened the door for them and asked them not to shoot. We told them we only have kids, but they kept shooting.”

She said that when they were told to leave, Israeli troops said the building would be blown up within 10 minutes.

Al-Ashkar said that at first, they did not want to leave the building, but the Israeli military began intensive bombing in the immediate area. They “destroyed the building entrance and came upstairs. They took all the men. They gathered the people who were in the basement and took them upstairs,” she said.

She alleged that Israeli troops had beaten and stripped the men in the building. “They were freezing, only wearing their undergarments. After that they asked us all, all the women, to go downstairs.” Many men had been detained, she claimed. “We heard their screams because they were beating them up.”

Al-Ashkar said that Israeli forces had placed explosives in the buildings where people had been sheltering. “We heard the houses collapsing on the heads of people,” she claimed, and then the ruins of the buildings were bulldozed.

“They were about to bury us as well, but we begged them to let us out. They let us out and took the men in the tanks. They told us to go towards the sea to Rafah.”

“Individuals suspected of involvement in terrorist activity are being detained and questioned. Individuals who are found not to be taking part in terrorist activities are released,” the IDF said, adding that those detained were “treated in accordance with international law,” but that strip searches were “often necessary” to ensure they were not concealing explosive vests or other weaponry.

“In situations where soldiers fail to adhere to IDF orders, the incidents are thoroughly reviewed, and disciplinary actions are implemented, if necessary,” the IDF said.

Walla Abdul Rahim Shabaan al-Arbeel recounted how difficult the trek south from Al-Rimal had been – with an uncle suffering from cancer and two disabled people requiring wheelchairs. Seven people in the group had gotten as far as a roundabout called al-Mina on the coast, she said, but they had not been able to proceed any further and the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) had been unable to reach them. What happened to them is unknown.

“My children were walking all day in the rain. We spent over eight hours walking. Without shoes and without clothes. They didn’t let us take anything,” al-Ashkar said, referring to their journey from the building in Gaza City.

Based on the route the women described, the journey on foot would have been more than 20 kilometers (at least 12.43 miles). Much of the walk was on sand down the coast.

Al-Ashkar said that the walk had been longer than eight hours and said that Israeli forces were firing towards them as they walked. She said: “We left with nothing. They refused to give us anything. No milk. My son doesn’t have any milk or diapers. Not even water. All the way, I’m asking him to walk and he is saying ‘I am tired.’ I told him I am also tired.”

She described the devastation as they walked along the coast. “All the streets are destroyed.”

Al-Arbeel provided a very similar account of their interaction with Israeli forces. “Last week on Sunday, late in the afternoon, they came and they surrounded us with tanks. We were not able to go out. There was no food, no drinks, no water. We were not even able to turn on the lights. We were scared they would see us.”

Her sister, who’s a doctor, her two brothers and her husband had been taken away, she said. She does not know what happened to them.

When she finally left the building, al-Arbeel said the Israeli soldiers “didn’t let me take milk for my son. No jackets for my children. They were barefoot. Nothing. I was begging them, but they didn’t give me anything.”

Describing the journey to the hospital, she said that they could see Israeli missile boats off the coast and were fearful they would be fired on. “We were not allowed to stop. If we stopped a little bit, either the boats in the sea would see us, or the tanks from the other side. We were dying. We went to through hell.”

Harb said they had no food while under siege in Al-Rimal. “The children kept asking for food… a piece of bread… just a little water.”

She said that during the long walk along the beaches in the cold rain, she was frightened that stray dogs were hunting the children, and at one point her stepmother fell.

“She turned blue, she got so tired… I tried, I wanted to help her and bring her help, but I couldn’t, I cried so much for her, I kept telling her, ‘Get up, just try and walk, get up,’” Harb recalled. “She told me, ‘Just leave me, just go away from the Israelis.’ She kept saying, ‘Go, go, go, I don’t want them shooting you.’”

“I covered her, I couldn’t do anything for her, the dogs were around her… I left her alive, I gave her a bottle of water and told her to forgive me that I couldn’t help her.”

Harb’s daughter Tala, 10, also described what happened when they said they were forced by Israeli troops to leave the building, saying: “They took my father, uncle, and cousins, they made them take all their clothes off. My father is sick and might die from the cold… Even my uncle and grandfather [they] left them with their underwear and a short-sleeved shirt.”

Tala said she was afraid that the Israelis might have blown up the building while the men of the family were still inside, but she didn’t know for sure what had happened to them.

Another member of the same family, Warda Fadeel El Helw, also recalled Harb’s stepmother collapsing during the journey. “We couldn’t help her; she couldn’t keep going and she fell on the beach… She told us to leave her and go, and that God is with her, so we covered her and left,” she said.

“We were walking in the water, on the sand and the mud, sewage and stones on our legs.”

“The meeting of lips is the most perfect, the most divine sensation given to human beings, the supreme limit of happiness.”

So wrote the 19th century French author Guy de Maupassant in his 1882 short story, “The Kiss.” He wasn’t alone in his flowery thoughts about kissing. Romantic kisses have long been celebrated in songs, poems and stories, commemorated in art and film.

No one knows for sure when humans first figured out that mouth-to-mouth contact could be used for romance and erotic pleasure, but scientists reported in May 2023 that people were locking lips at least 4,500 years ago. The findings, published in the journal Science, pushed back the history of the practice by about 1,000 years.

“Kissing has been practiced much longer than perhaps a lot of us realized, or at least had thought about,” said lead study author Dr. Troels Pank Arbøll, an assistant professor of Assyriology — the study of Assyria and the rest of Mesopotamia — at the University of Copenhagen.

Thousands of clay tablets from Mesopotamia survive to the present; their references to kissing shed light on romantic intimacy in the ancient world, the researchers reported.

“This fascinating case study adds to a growing body of scientific research on romantic/sexual kissing, and helps us understand kissing’s origins in human social behavior and in intimate life specifically,” said evolutionary biologist Dr. Justin R. Garcia, a professor of gender studies at Indiana University in Bloomington. Garcia, who investigates the culture and evolution of human intimacy at the Kinsey Institute, was not involved in the research.

When de Maupassant wrote his heartfelt descriptions of loving kisses, he probably wasn’t thinking too hard about how kissing arose in the first place amid civilizations of the past. But the origins of this “most divine sensation” are deeply rooted in human history and evolution, and there is likely much about its role and significance in ancient cultures that is yet to be discovered, the study authors wrote.

Passionate kisses

Previously, the oldest recorded evidence of kissing was attributed to the Vedas, a group of Indian scriptural texts that date back to around 1500 BC and are foundational to the Hindu religion. One of the volumes, the Rig Veda, describes people touching their lips together. Erotic kissing was also featured in great detail in another ancient Indian text: the Kama Sutra, a guide to sexual pleasure dating to the third century AD. Modern scholars therefore concluded that romantic kisses likely originated in India.

“As an Assyriologist, I study cuneiform writing,” Arbøll said. Cuneiform, in which characters are pressed into tablets using cut triangular reeds, was invented around 3200 BC. Early cuneiform was used by scribes for bookkeeping, Arbøll explained. But around 2600 BC — perhaps even earlier — people began recording stories about their gods.

“In one of these myths, we get this description that these gods had intercourse and then kissed,” he said. “That’s clear evidence of sexual romantic kissing.”

Within a few centuries, writing had become more widespread across Mesopotamia. With that came more records of daily life, with mentions of kisses traded by married couples and by unmarried people as an expression of desire.

Some examples cautioned about the perils of kissing; to kiss a priestess sworn to a form of celibacy “was believed to deprive the kisser of the ability to speak,” according to the study.  Another prohibition addressed the impropriety of kissing in the street; that this warning had to be made at all, hinted that kissing was “a very everyday sort of action,” albeit one that was preferably practiced in private, Arbøll said.

Across thousands of cuneiform tablets kissing isn’t the most mentioned topic, “but it is attested regularly,” he said.

Don’t talk, just kiss

Humans aren’t the only animals that kiss — so do our closest primate relatives. Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) trade kisses as greetings. For bonobos (Pan paniscus), kissing is part of their very frequent sex play; they copulate face-to-face and often engage in “intense tongue-kissing,” wrote primatologist Frans B.M. De Waal, a behavioral biologist at Emory University in Atlanta.

It’s possible that romantic kissing evolved in primates as a way to evaluate fitness in a potential mate, “through chemical cues communicated in saliva or breath,” Arbøll and Rasmussen wrote.

But kissing isn’t all sociability, fun and pleasure. One less enjoyable side effect of kissing in humans is the spread of infectious disease. Another study, authored in July 2022 by more than two dozen researchers from institutions in Europe, the UK and Russia, stated that the rapid rise of a lineage of the herpes simplex virus HSV-1 in Europe about 5,000 years ago, was “potentially linked to the introduction of new cultural practices such as the advent of sexual-romantic kissing,” following waves of migration into Europe from the Eurasian grasslands.

But Arbøll and Rasmussen suspected that romantic kissing became accepted in Bronze Age Europe, and not because of migration alone. It’s more likely, they wrote, that the practice of kissing was already at least passingly familiar to people in Europe because it was common in Mesopotamia — and possibly in other parts of the ancient world — and wasn’t just restricted to India.

“It must have been known in a lot of ancient cultures,” Arbøll said. “Not necessarily practiced, but at least known.”

Kissing then and now

Unlike the kisses shared between parents and children, which are thought to be “ubiquitous among humans across time and geography,” romantic kisses are not common everywhere. Even today, many cultures shun romantic kissing, Arbøll and Rasmussen reported.

In a September 2015 study coauthored by Garcia, researchers surveyed 168 modern cultures worldwide, finding that only 46% of those societies practiced kissing that was sexual or romantic. Such kissing, the authors reported, was far less common in foraging communities, and was more likely to be found in societies that had distinct social classes, “with more complex societies being more likely to kiss in this manner.”

While Arbøll and Rasmussen’s study suggests that romantic kissing wasn’t unusual in ancient Mesopotamia, the authors point out that there were still taboos about who could kiss and where they could do it — and that romantic kissing was far from a universal experience across all cultures.

“This article is an important reminder that widespread kissing we see represented all around us in western society today was not always, and is still not always, a part of everyone’s displays of intimacy,” Garcia said.

It’s also possible that if kissing in the ancient world was more widely distributed than once thought, it was “perhaps more universal than in modern times,” Arbøll added. “It opens some questions that are interesting for future research.”

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

Two of Pakistan’s major political parties – the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PMLN) and the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) – say they will form a coalition government after last week’s inconclusive elections.

The move means the party of former Prime Minister Imran Khan will not be in power, despite independent candidates affiliated with it gaining the most votes.

At a press conference in Lahore Tuesday, former Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif from the PMLN and former President Asif Ali Zardari from the PPP, along with representatives from four other parties, announced they would be forming a government together.

The PMLN also released a statement that Shahbaz Sharif would be the party’s candidate for prime minister. Earlier on Tuesday, the PPP’s chairman Bilawal Bhutto Zardari had said his party would support the PLMN candidate for prime minister.

The PPP won 54 seats in last Thursday’s election, coming third behind independent candidates – most of whom were associated with former Prime Minister Imran Khan’s party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), which won 102 seats, and the PMLN, headed by former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, which won 73 seats, according to the country’s election commission.

None of the three major parties won enough seats to have a majority in parliament and, therefore were unable to form a government on their own.

Khan, who is currently in jail and was barred from running in the election, announced separately on Tuesday that the independent candidates associated with his party would join the lesser-known Majlis Wahdat-e-Muslimeen party (MWM), which won only one seat in parliament

Khan also ruled out the possibility of creating a coalition with the PPP or the PMLN.

Khan’s PTI party made claims of wide-scale rigging in the election and also released a statement from Khan saying: “I warn against the misadventure of forming a government with stolen votes. Such daylight robbery will not only be a disrespect to the citizens but will also push the country’s economy further into a downward spiral.”

Speaking at Tuesday’s press conference, Asif Ali Zardari explained how the coalition was formed.

“Looking at everything, we have thought and decided to sit together. We have contested elections against each other but despite that, it is not necessary that [we fight] forever,” Zardari said.

Sharif took a conciliatory tone saying, “Let’s move forward by eliminating mutual differences for the sake of the nation.”

Bhutto Zardari had also said that the PPP would form a committee to deliberate on the party’s vote on important issues such as the national budget, the prime minister’s election, and important legislation.

The party would also field its candidates for the National Assembly speaker, chairman of the Senate, and president, he said.

Under Pakistani law, parliament must convene within 21 days after an election has taken place so lawmakers can be sworn in and then elect a new prime minister.

Russian authorities on Tuesday launched unprecedented criminal proceedings against Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas, charges the leader of the Baltic state alleged were politically motivated.

The Kremlin accused Kallas, Estonian Secretary of State Taimar Peterkop and Lithuanian Culture Minister Simonas Kairys of destroying or damaging monuments to Soviet monuments in memory of Soviet soldiers, Russia’s state-run Tass news reported. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov confirmed the charges in a call with journalists but did not clarify when the supposed crime took place.

Shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine nearly two years ago, Kallas announced that Estonia would remove all of the country’s Soviet monuments from public spaces.

Kallas appears to be the first head of state placed on the Russian Interior Ministry’s wanted list by the Russian government since the full-fledged invasion began. The move, however, is likely symbolic.

On Tuesday, Kallas said on social media the move was unsurprising and proof that she was “doing the right thing” by supporting Ukraine in its war against Russia.

“Throughout history, Russia has veiled its repressions behind so-called law enforcement agencies,” Kallas said, citing the cases of her grandmother and mother, who she said were deported to Siberia after the KGB issued arrest warrants for them.

“The Kremlin now hopes this move will help to silence me and others – but it won’t. The opposite. I will continue my strong support to Ukraine,” she said.

Estonia, a former part of the Soviet Union, joined the European Union and acceded to NATO in 2004. NATO’s expansion to Russia’s border has long rankled with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who views the alliance as an existential threat.

Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine prompted deep concern in Estonia that it could be next.

A report by the Estonian Foreign Intelligence Service said Russia may consider doubling the number of troops stationed on its border with the Baltic countries and increasing those on its frontier with Finland, which joined NATO last year.

When introducing the report, the service’s leader, Kaupo Rosin, said that Russia probably anticipates a conflict with the alliance within the next decade, although he played down the likelihood that would come in the form of military action.

“Estonia needs to prepare itself together with our allies. Our security and safety can be best ensured by Ukraine’s victory, Russia’s defeat and the end of Putin’s regime,” Rosin said.

Tallinn has also been a strong proponent of Europe spending more on its own defense. Responding to former US President Donald Trump’s remarks that, if reelected, he would let Russia do “whatever the hell they want” to any NATO member that doesn’t meet spending guidelines, Kallas said ”we have been advocating for doing more in defense, and that means all NATO’s members do more in defense”

“I think what the presidential candidate in America says is also something to maybe wake up the allies who haven’t done that much, so hopefully we all do more and collectively we are stronger together,” she said at a news conference on Monday alongside European Parliament President Roberta Metsola.

Estonia’s defense budget is slated to rise to more than 3% of the country’s GDP for the first time this year, well above the 2% threshold target NATO has set for members of the alliance.

Tuesday also saw Estonian Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna deliver his annual foreign policy speech, which included fiery anti-Russian remarks and a full-throated backing for Ukraine.

“No one wants to live in a world where Putins roam, kidnapping and orphaning children, attempting to cancel their neighbors and mining nuclear power plants,” he said. “Aggression must not succeed; it must not become a new acceptable reality. Otherwise, the world will become the domain of force, arrogance, callousness, authoritarianism.”

White House spokesman John Kirby told reporters on Tuesday that the US government is “deeply concerned” by the arrest of activist and security analyst Rocio San Miguel in Caracas, Venezuela.

“This is a time when Mr. Maduro needs to meet the commitments that he made about how they’re going to treat civil society, political activists and opposition parties … I won’t go speculating about what happened here and what we might do as a result, but I can tell you we’re watching very closely,” Kirby also said.

On Tuesday, Venezuela’s Attorney General Tarek William Saab announced on X that San Miguel had been charged overnight with treason, conspiracy, terrorism and criminal association as part of an investigation into the “White Bracelet” plot.

“White Bracelet” is the name of an alleged plot to kill President Nicolas Maduro that the Venezuelan government denounced in January, and for which it has presented no evidence.

San Miguel’s ex-husband Alejandro Gonzales was also charged with revealing military secrets, while four other citizens were released, Saab said.

In recent weeks, several civilians and military personnel have been detained as part of the investigation, including at least three members of the opposition political party Vente Venezuela.

This week, the UN High Commission for Human Rights, the Interamerican Commission of Human Rights and Amnesty International have all expressed concern over San Miguel’s arrest.

In response to Kirby’s remarks, Venezuelan Foreign Minister Yvan Gil accused the United States of “plotting to murder Maduro, Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino and Tachira State Governor Freddy Bernal.”

“The US government supports terrorists who have confessed their crimes and the orders they received to attack our people. They are complicit in (terrorism) and interventionist actions against Venezuela,” Gil wrote on X.

The Israeli military released a video that purportedly shows the Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar inside a tunnel below the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, with his wife, children and his brother Ibrahim Sinwar.

Israel has publicly accused Sinwar of being the “mastermind” behind Hamas’ terror attack against Israel on October 7 – though experts say he is likely one of several – making him one of the key targets of its war in Gaza.

Unveiling the video at his daily press conference, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesman Daniel Hagari said the footage had been captured on a Hamas CCTV camera on October 10 and obtained by the IDF in recent days.

“That’s how he escaped with his family underground in a tunnel to one of the safe accommodation complexes he had built in advance,” Hagari continued.

Hagari added that the video was a “result of our hunt” for Sinwar and that “the hunt will not stop until he is captured, dead or alive. We are determined to capture him. We will capture him.”

Sinwar has been described as Israel’s most-wanted man in Gaza. The Israeli military has declared him a “dead man walking,” nicknaming him in one profile as “the Butcher from Khan Younis” for his alleged role in planning the October 7 attack.

In December, the IDF surrounded Sinwar’s house but did not find him, saying then that he was believed to be hiding underground. An adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said subsequently that it was “only a matter of time before we get him.”

However, Sinwar has remained elusive, despite an intensive Israeli assault on Khan Younis, his hometown.

On February 6, the IDF said it was still pursuing Sinwar’s whereabouts – and those of other leaders of the militant group in Gaza, with Brig. Gen. Dan Goldfuss, the commander of the IDF’s 98th Division, saying he was confident his troops would “get them.” At the time, he did not respond when asked whether he could say with confidence that Sinwar was still in Gaza.

The IDF also released a second video which they said showed Israeli forces in a section of the Hamas tunnels where they believe Sinwar was hiding.

In the video, a soldier whose face is blurred says that they are at the “main hiding place” of Sinwar and claims that the Hamas leader was there in “recent times.” The video also shows a bathroom, a kitchen and bedrooms, and the soldier says troops also found “millions of shekels and dollars in the safe and other funds that are scattered here outside.”

“They fled when they heard that the IDF was approaching them. They knew we were coming so they fled,” the soldier says in the video.

Longtime Hamas figure

A longtime figure in the Islamist Palestinian group, Sinwar was responsible for assembling Hamas’ military wing before forming important new ties with regional Arab powers as the group’s civilian and political leader.

He was elected to Hamas’ main decision-making body, the Politburo, in 2017 as the political leader of Hamas in Gaza branch. However, he has since become the Politburo’s de facto leader, according to research by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR).

He has been designated a global terrorist by the US Department of State since 2015, and has been recently sanctioned by the United Kingdom and France.

The IDF have intensified attacks on central and southern Gaza in recent weeks, including in Khan Younis – an area to which the Israeli military had previously urged large numbers of civilians to flee in the early days of the war, when northern Gaza was the focus of Israel’s operations.

The Israeli military has long claimed Khan Younis is a major Hamas stronghold, alleging that a tunnel network underneath civilian buildings in the city was likely where Hamas planned the October 7 attacks.

Israel launched its military campaign in Gaza after the Hamas attack on October 7, in which more than 1,200 people were killed and over 240 taken hostage. Netanyahu has previously said the campaign is needed to “destroy Hamas’ capabilities.”

Since then, Israel’s bombardment and besiegement of the enclave has razed entire neighborhoods, diminished critical supplies and left some 2.2 million Palestinians exposed to high levels of acute food insecurity or worse, dehydration and deadly disease.

At least 1.7 million people have been forcibly displaced, according to the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Israeli attacks on the enclave have killed at least 28,340 people and injured at least 67,984, according to the Ministry of Health in Hamas-run Gaza.

This is a developing story and will be updated.