China’s ongoing investigation into alleged lip-synching by a popular Taiwanese rock band may be linked to attempts by Beijing to influence the island’s upcoming election, Taiwan security officials have claimed.

Mayday, one of the most prominent rock groups in the Chinese-speaking world, has been under an official probe in China since early December over alleged lip-synching during their recent Shanghai shows. The band’s label has repeatedly denied the accusations.

In a recent briefing on security affairs, two Taiwanese intelligence officials claimed that Chinese authorities had for months pressured Mayday to publicly declare that both China and Taiwan belong to the same country. The repeated requests coincided with the start of the band’s China tour in May, claimed the Taiwanese officials, who asked not to be named for security reasons.

The Taiwanese officials claimed that when Mayday refused to comply, the Chinese Communist Party’s powerful propaganda department coordinated with state media to generate widespread public discussions about alleged lip-synching at their concerts to pressurize them.

“We have decided to publicize the incident because it is the first time they have gone after (Taiwanese artists) on such an unprecedented scale,” the officials said.

The Taiwanese officials said they suspected the Chinese investigation into Mayday could be related to Taiwan’s presidential election in January. Taiwan has previously accused Beijing of employing a range of disinformation, military and economic operations to influence the race.

Tensions across the Taiwan Strait have been on the rise in recent years, with China’s ruling Communist Party ramping up military and political pressure on Taiwan, where parties’ differing views on relations with China often make elections a litmus test for public sentiment on Beijing. Taiwan’s current ruling party is loathed by Beijing’s leaders.

But three sources familiar with Taiwan’s pop music scene said it is not uncommon for Taiwanese artists to face political restrictions in exchange for permission to perform in mainland China, a highly lucrative market because of its huge population.

The allegations

Some artists from Taiwan have encountered difficulties in China for being outspoken about the self-governing island, which China’s Communist Party leaders view as their own territory despite never having controlled it.

But Mayday – sometimes dubbed the “Asian Beatles” – has largely steered clear of politics and maintained huge popularity among mainland Chinese fans.

The lip-synching accusations centered on Mayday’s recent shows in Shanghai, where it performed eight times over 10 days in mid-November, to a combined audience of more than 360,000.

The controversy began in late November when a music vlogger on Bilibili, one of China’s biggest video-sharing platforms, posted a video in which he used computer software to analyze the vocals of 12 songs recorded live by a fan at Mayday’s concert in Shanghai on November 16.

The vlogger claimed his analysis found the band’s lead singer, Ashin, lip-synched at least five songs during the three-hour gig, saying the vocalist’s singing was precisely in tune for those numbers, while drifting in and out of pitch drastically in the other songs.

The vlogger’s allegations quickly gained traction on social media platform Weibo, becoming the top trending topic and garnering hundreds of millions of views.

The Shanghai Culture and Tourism Bureau, a municipal government department overseeing commercial performances, announced an investigation on December 3 – in a move widely reported by major Chinese state media.

In a statement earlier this month, Mayday’s record company B’in Music dismissed the lip-synching accusations as “malicious attacks, rumors and slander,” saying they had seriously damaged the band’s image.

On Monday, the Shanghai Culture and Tourism Bureau said the investigation was ongoing, according to Chinese media.

Shifting red lines

Taiwanese artists have previously found themselves in hot water for crossing political red lines while performing in China, even with seemingly innocuous comments.

In August, a Taiwanese indie band faced significant backlash after telling a crowd in Shanghai they were delighted to be holding their first-ever performance in China – a slip of the tongue that seemed to infer Taiwan is not part of the country. They subsequently apologized and offered refunds.

In 2000, popular Taiwanese singer A-mei faced a year-long ban after she performed the island’s official anthem at the inauguration ceremony of former President Chen Shui-bian. Chen represented the Democratic Progressive Party, which is ostracized in Beijing for its pro-independence leanings.

“Many Taiwanese artists have to engage in self-censorship,” said a veteran Taiwanese music producer, who asked not to publish his name because he is still working in the industry.

“They often cannot say anything related to Taiwan’s politics, or they could easily lose their opportunity to perform [in China].”

The producer also noted that it was unusual for lip-synching allegations to make big headlines in China.

“There are so many similar allegations against different artists every year, and it is really unusual for it to blow up like this,” they said.

Lin Chen-yu, a lecturer at Cardiff University who specializes in China’s censorship of Taiwanese music, said the pressure facing Taiwanese artists has increased in recent years.

While simply not making pro-Taipei statements used to be enough, Taiwanese artists have increasingly faced pressure from Chinese authorities to declare support for “the motherland,” Lin said.

For example, a number of Taiwanese artists have posted on social media to celebrate China’s national day in recent years, while remaining silent on Taiwan’s own national day, she said.

“The pressure is especially bigger for mega stars,” she added.

Satellite images have revealed severe damage caused to the Russian tank landing ship Novocherkassk following Ukrainian strikes on a port in Crimea on Tuesday.

In images taken by Maxar, the ship can be seen burnt out and detached from the port, seemingly partially submerged, with smoke billowing from the vessel.

Ukraine claimed to have destroyed the ship in its attack on the port of Feodosia in Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula illegally annexed by Russia in 2014. Moscow claimed the ship had been “damaged.”

The image, when compared with a previous image showing the ship before the strike, suggests a successful Ukrainian operation targeting the port.

The number of those who may have been killed in the strike may become more clear over time as the peninsula is currently under Russian control, a Ukrainian Navy spokesperson said Wednesday.

“This territory, unfortunately, is occupied now, and it’s not an easy thing to do the relevant intelligence. And I think that over time, we will get at least approximate figures [of casualties] of what happened in reality,” Ukrainian Navy Spokesman Dmytro Pletenchuk said in an interview with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

“Nevertheless, these ships are usually not left without a crew. And, accordingly, even though it was in port at the time, a fairly large part of the crew had to be on board, and the total crew there is about 80 people,” he said.

According to a US military fact sheet on the Novocherkassk and the other vessels in its Ropucha class, the 369-foot (112.5-meter) vessel displaces about 3,450 tons, making about the same size as a US Navy littoral combat ship.

The Novocherkassk carries a crew of around 87 with capacity for 237 troops, according to the US military. It was not known how many personnel may have been aboard in the alleged Ukrainian attack.

The ship is designed for beach landings with bow and stern doors and the ability to accommodate up to 25 armored personnel carriers on its vehicle deck.

Ukrainian Air Force commander Mykola Oleshchuk, who said in a Telegram post after the attack that the ship had been destroyed, also claimed the vessel had been carrying Iran-made Shahed attack drones.

He said the Novocherkassk had “followed” the Moskva, the guided-missile cruiser that was the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet before it sank in April 2022 after being struck by Ukrainian missiles.

The Russian Defense Ministry meanwhile said the Novocherkassk had been “damaged” in a Ukrainian attack in a statement reported by the state-run TASS news agency.

Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu reported the strike and the damage to Novocherkask to President Vladimir Putin, according to TASS, quoting Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov.

In an update on Wednesday, the Crimea Health Ministry said that one person died and four were injured as a result of the attack, according to Russian state news agency RIA Novosti.

If confirmed, the Novocherkask alleged destruction would be the third instance of major losses of Russian military hardware in less than a week. In September, Ukraine also claimed that the Novocherkask’s sister ship, the Minsk, had been destroyed in an attack on the Sevastopol naval base in Crimea.

Sigrid Kaag, a Dutch politician and veteran United Nations diplomat, will take charge of the international body’s effort to bring humanitarian relief to war-ravaged Gaza, the UN Secretary General announced Tuesday, filling a position created this month in a breakthrough UN Security Council resolution.

In a post on X, Kaag said that she would resign her position as finance minister and deputy prime minister of the Netherlands to take on the role of UN Senior Humanitarian and Reconstruction Coordinator for Gaza.

“Peace, security, and justice have always been my motivations,” Kaag said in a statement. “I have accepted this special assignment in the hope to contribute to a better future.”

The appointment, which is set to take effect on January 8, comes as conditions in the besieged Palestinian enclave reach “nightmare” levels, as the chief of the World Health Organization put it after a recent visit. Shortages of power and medicine have stripped hospitals of most functioning, and the risk of famine looms over Gaza’s population, humanitarian organizations have said.

Since war began on October 7 following Hamas’ terror attacks, Israel has allowed a limited number of trucks to bring humanitarian aid into Gaza through Egypt’s Rafah crossing. The UN has described this amount as a trickle that fails to come close to meeting the needs of the population of over 2 million.

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres has also accused Israel’s tactics in Gaza, which include intensive aerial bombardment, as “creating massive obstacles to the distribution of humanitarian aid inside Gaza.

Kaag will now be responsible for creating a mechanism to accelerate the movement of aid into Gaza and for “facilitating, coordinating, monitoring, and verifying” the relief effort, according to the UN, including the complex process of ensuring aid trucks are screened before they enter the enclave to ensure they’re not carrying non-humanitarian material.

The Security Council resolution creating the position, which called for immediate, safe and unhindered delivery of humanitarian assistance throughout Gaza, passed last week with the abstention of the US after several days of negotiations and delays.

Seasoned diplomat, Arabic speaker

In a speech last month, Kaag stressed the need for “adequate humanitarian aid” to reach Gaza.

“Israel’s right to exist and its right to defend itself is self-evident to us. But in these dark times, it is important that acts of war comply with international law and the humanitarian law of war in order to avoid innocent civilian victims and enable adequate humanitarian aid to be provided in time,” she said.

Kaag previously worked on Palestinian issues as a senior official at the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. She later went on to serve as an Assistant Secretary‑General with the United Nations Development Programme and, from 2015 to 2017, as the United Nations Special Coordinator for Lebanon, according to a biography provided by the UN.

“She is a very experienced diplomat who knows the Middle East well and also speaks Arabic. Before she went to the Netherlands for a political career, she was also a UN envoy who negotiated with Assad about giving up Syria’s chemical weapons,” the official said.

The Syria effort, the result of a last-minute US-Russia plan that staved off a US military intervention, was considered a success, with then US President Barack Obama hailing the destruction of Syria’s declared chemical weapons stockpile as an “important achievement.”

“The almost impossible deadlines,” meant “we couldn’t waste a second,” Kaag told a Harvard interviewer in 2014. “We were on message, on mission, looking for results that you can measure.”

Kaag later held various positions in Dutch electoral politics, leading the social liberal party D66 to victory in a 2021 vote, and serving in various cabinet positions, including as minister of foreign affairs and minister of trade and development cooperation.

Her tenure as foreign minister lasted only a few months; she resigned in September 2021 after a majority of the Dutch parliament said she had mishandled the evacuation of Kabul that summer after the Taliban seized control of the country.

In her statement Tuesday, Kaag called her work with the Dutch cabinet “special and challenging,” citing progress on climate change and support for Ukraine amid its war with Russia.

She had said in July that she was planning to leave politics, describing a “toxic” environment of online intimidation and threats, according to Reuters.

“It becomes a battery of so-called slurs that are meant to demonize you, to deconstruct you,” she said at a Council on Foreign Relations event in September. “It erodes the value of our democracy if this persists and is condoned.

Global diplomats celebrated the announcement in statements Tuesday, following months of division and deadlock in the UN Security Council about how to get aid to Gaza civilians.

Dutch Minister of Foreign Affairs Hanke Bruins Slot called her “the right person for this challenging role” given her “extensive knowledge” and “very broad (diplomatic) experience.”

“Look forward to working closely with @SigridKaag in this new role – and to supporting her efforts to streamline and accelerate the UN’s life-saving work in Gaza. There is no time to lose,” US Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield wrote on X.

In the age of open-source intelligence, one main way for Western experts to keep tabs on China’s military is by analyzing photos of new People’s Liberation Army equipment posted online by amateur enthusiasts.

Posting photos of military ships or aircraft captured from outside PLA installations or from commercial flights near sensitive areas has become a common sight in recent years as China rapidly modernized its forces. And “military fans” have spread the word to the larger population on social media sites like Weibo, with hundreds of millions of active users.

But not anymore.

In a WeChat post Saturday titled: “This is a cool hobby, but you must be very careful,” the Ministry of State Security said: “Some individual military enthusiasts severely endanger national military security by illegally obtaining information regarding national defense and disseminating them on the internet.”

“With a focus on military airports, ports, national defense and military industrial units, they drove to or took ferries or planes that pass by designated routes, and clandestinely photographed with telephoto lenses or drones,” said the post from the highly secretive civilian spy agency.

Repeat violators could be imprisoned for up to seven years, although “first-time or occasional offenders” may only receive a warning, according to the agency, which oversees intelligence and counterintelligence both within China and overseas.

The warning comes as Chinese leaders have becoming increasingly focused on ensuring national security across a range of sectors, especially as tensions rise with the United States.

For example, the agency only earlier this year launched its social media account – dedicated to warning citizens about the risks of exposing China’s secrets to the outside world and calling on them to join its fight against espionage.

The case of the carrier

According to the spy agency’s post Saturday, images posted online can show the progress of construction on warships or aircraft while also disclosing operational and technical details of Chinese military hardware. The post specifically mentioned aircraft carriers as one area where security could be compromised.

China’s newest aircraft carrier, the Fujian, has been a frequent target of amateur spotters as it is fitted out at a Shanghai shipyard. The Jiangnan shipyard where the work is being done is close to flight paths of Pudong Shanghai International Airport.

In November, Paris-based defense news site Naval News reported that the Fujian had begun testing its advanced electromagnetic catapult system, based on videos posted on Weibo apparently taken from a passenger plane out of Pudong.

“Related imagery taken from passenger planes has become a common source to follow the progress of several major (PLA Navy) programs,” Naval News reported.

The Fujian is certainly a marquee program for the PLA Navy. The 80,000-ton warship, the largest military vessel ever made in China, is considered a rival to the newest US Navy carriers in the Gerald R Ford-class, one of the few other carriers to use electromagnetic catapults to launch aircraft.

The photos of the suspected catapult test gave Western analysts an idea of how the PLA Navy is progressing in getting the carrier ready for commissioning and active service.

And that imagery isn’t the first of the Fujian to find its way online.

In April 2023, state broadcaster CCTV disclosed in a news report that in November 2021, Mr. Luo, a “fairly renowned” military enthusiast, was sentenced to one year in prison following his arrest by the Shanghai national security bureau for photographing the Fujian carrier.

Luo had used a drone capable of filming long-range high-resolution photos, the report said.

How the US handles images

It’s not just China that’s wary of what amateur military spotters might do that could reveal sensitive information.

US law says the President can designate certain military installations and equipment as off-limits to image makers.

“It shall be unlawful to make any photograph, sketch, picture, drawing, map, or graphical representation of such vital military and naval installations or equipment,” unless proper permission is obtained beforehand, the US Code states. Violators could face up to a year in prison.

Of course, militaries can sometimes use open-source intelligence to their advantage, said Carl Schuster, a former director of operations at the US Pacific Command’s Joint Intelligence Center.

Perched up against the edge of a cliff in China’s southwest Guizhou province is the bamboo shack 21-year-old “retiree” Liu Youwen built from scratch.

Three years ago, Liu left his rural hometown Xiaxixiang, Guizhou, for the city of Shantou in Guangdong, China’s richest province, joining a decades-long nationwide migration of workers from the countryside that has fueled the country’s enormous growth and created some of the world’s largest megacities.

But as a junior high dropout, it was tough for Liu to find a job. He said he was turned down by many factories due to his lack of credentials, before eventually finding work as a car mechanic, then a construction worker, and finally at a clothing factory.

Disillusioned by the grind of city life, at the end of 2022 he decided to call it quits and return to the rolling hills and rivers of Guizhou. Liu’s parents and older brother protested the move – but he wanted a “simple life,” he said, and to escape the high-pressure rat race.

Liu’s frustrations reflect a growing sense of disenchantment among young people in China, many of whom face a dire job market, burnout after years of grueling academic and work pressure, plus the traumatic impact of the country’s draconian former pandemic policies.

According to the National Bureau of Statistics, China’s youth unemployment rate in cities and towns hit a record-high 21.3% in June – before the government stopped releasing the uncomfortable data.

In response, authorities have encouraged urban youth to head to the countryside instead – a controversial proposal.

Last December, Chinese leader Xi Jinping urged young people to make the move to “revitalize the rural economy,” a call that has drawn comparisons with a previous campaign launched decades ago by former leader Mao Zedong in which tens of millions of urban youths were effectively exiled to remote areas.

Xi was himself a member of the “sent-down youth” and has depicted his time in rural central China as a rewarding, life-changing experience that toughened his body and mind.

The entire village where the leader once lived has been turned into a Communist shrine dedicated to him, attracting officials and tourists from across the country.

Authorities in Guangdong, one of China’s most densely populated provinces and a major factory hub, said earlier this year they hope to send 300,000 unemployed young people to the countryside to find work.

Living in the mountains has its challenges, as Liu discovered.

At first, his parents worried about his safety, being alone in the woods, so they installed CCTV around the area to keep tabs on him.

Then, to solve the problem of no electricity, Liu installed numerous solar panels around the shack.

But he has also found an unconventional path to success – and a starkly different one than the farm work and blue-collar jobs Chinese authorities have encouraged urban youth to seek out.

Inspired by Chinese vlogger and influencer Li Ziqi, whose videos about life in rural China have earned her 18 million subscribers on YouTube, Liu now uploads weekly vlogs of his days in the mountains.

And he isn’t alone. Dianxi Xiaoge, another Chinese food vlogger, teaches her more than 10 million YouTube subscribers how to cook healthy food from a village in southwest Yunnan province. Another pair of Gen Z “retirees,” Xiao Chun Zi and Xin Xin’s Rural Life from Sichuan province, also post content similar to Liu’s.

YouTube is among a number of social media sites behind China’s Great Firewall, meaning it isn’t accessible to most people in the country.

Liu’s videos range from him building a pig pen to his interactions with his furry companions, two dogs named Lucky and Flower. Armed with just a phone and a tripod, his one-man production begins as he works in the field to grow vegetables such as Chinese cabbage and garlic, and as he prepares mashed up sweet potatoes and ragweed for his piglets.

He says he never feels lonely, with access to a television and his animals keeping him company. Since September, he has quickly garnered attention online, with more than 350,000 likes combined across his social media accounts.

Some online users voiced admiration, with one commenting: “He clearly knows what he’s doing, has a healthy lifestyle, unlike some other Gen Z’ers who are addicted to video games.”

Another lamented, “The 00’s are starting to retire, what about those of us born in the 80s?” – referring to Liu’s “retirement” from the traditional workforce at just 21 years old.

However, some were more skeptical, “Do you have nothing to do at home? Doing all this meaningless stuff and ‘lying flat’?” a commenter wrote.

The “lying flat” movement – “tangping” in Chinese – exploded in popularity among young people in 2021, calling on them to reject social pressures to work hard, get married, have children and buy property.

Instead of endlessly laboring toward those traditional goals – which many now say offer diminishing returns – people should pursue a simple life, the philosophy suggests.

Liu has pushed back on his critics.

“Perhaps those who don’t know me would see it as a form of ‘lying flat’, but I would disagree,” he said. “I’ve built my entire home from scratch … life in the mountains isn’t that much easier than working in the city.”

To sustain his rural lifestyle, he incorporates advertising and product placement into his videos. From selling hand cream, facial cleansers to hot and sour noodles, he’s making a small income to improve his living conditions, he said.

In the future, Liu is also planning to expand his home to build a chicken pen, so he can sell meat online. And, he said, he encouraged those who wanted to move to the countryside to start their own business ventures there.

“Life in the mountains is much better than city life – even drinking water costs money in the city,” he said.

Ukraine claimed on Tuesday to have carried out an airstrike in Crimea that destroyed a Russian Navy tank landing ship in what would be, if confirmed, the third instance of major losses of Russian military hardware in less than a week.

In a post on Telegram, Ukrainian Air Force commander Mykola Oleshchuk thanked personnel involved in “the destruction of the Novocherkassk large landing ship” while it was in the port of Feodosia in Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula illegally annexed by Russia in 2014.

The Russian Defense Ministry said the Novocherkassk had been “damaged” in a Ukrainian attack in a statement reported by the state-run TASS news agency.

The Russia-appointed head of Crimea, Sergey Aksyonov, earlier acknowledged via a statement that there had been “an enemy attack in [the] Feodosia area,” adding that “detonation has stopped and the fire has been localized.”

One person was killed and two injured in the Ukrainian strikes, Aksyonov said in an update on Telegram, though he did not mention the Novocherkassk.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky congratulated his military Tuesday for striking the Russian warship.

“I am grateful to our Air Force for the spectacular replenishment of the Russian Black Sea submarine fleet with another vessel. There will be no peaceful place for the occupiers in Ukraine,” Zelensky said in a statement.

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu “reported to [President Vladimir Putin] about the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ attack on Feodosia and the damage to the large landing ship Novocherkassk,” a statement released by the Kremlin said Tuesday.

According to a US military fact sheet on the Novocherkassk and the other vessels in its Ropucha class, the 369-foot (112.5-meter) vessel displaces about 3,450 tons, making about the same size as a US Navy littoral combat ship.

The Novocherkassk carries a crew of around 87 with capacity for 237 troops, according to the US military. It was not known how many personnel may have been aboard in the alleged Ukrainian attack.

The ship is designed for beach landings with bow and stern doors and the ability to accommodate up to 25 armored personnel carriers on its vehicle deck.

Oleshchuk, the Ukrainian commander, said the vessel had been carrying Iran-made Shahed attack drones.

He said the Novocherkassk had “followed” the Moskva, the guided-missile cruiser that was the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet before it sank in April 2022 after being struck by Ukrainian missiles.

Ukraine also claimed in September that the Novocherkassk’s sister ship, the Minsk, had been destroyed in an attack on the Sevastopol naval base in Crimea.

The British Defense Ministry reported that an analysis of open-source intelligence found the Minsk was “almost certainly functionally destroyed” and the Russian submarine Rostov-on-Don also suffered catastrophic damage in that attack.

If the destruction of the Novocherkassk is confirmed, it could be the third instance in the past week of the Russian military suffering losses of important hardware in combat, according to Ukrainian claims.

On Christmas Eve, the Ukrainian Air Force said it destroyed an Su-24 fighter jet in the eastern Donetsk region and an Su-30SM fighter jet over the Black Sea.

And on Friday, Zelensky said the country’s forces had downed three Russian Su-34 warplanes.

Ukrainian Air Force spokesperson Yurii Ihnat told Ukrainian media on Friday that Su-34 jets “are one of the newest aircraft” in service with the Russian army and are used to carry out aerial bomb and missile strikes.

According to Ihnat, each aircraft can cost “at least $50 million.”

But they would be welcome successes for Ukraine after a period when the almost two-year-old war has not been going Kyiv’s way.

Walsh noted Ukraine was facing stepped up Russian attacks from the air and on the ground while international support for its war effort was flagging, including Zelensky’s failure to convince the US Congress to continue funding military hardware past the end of the year while on a visit to Washington.

Shoigu, in his final conference call of the year on Tuesday, declared what he claimed was the successful completion of the main objective for Russia’s war effort in 2023, emphasizing what he considered the disruption of the Ukrainian counter-offensive.

Meanwhile, the Ukrainian military has requested 500,000 additional troops, David Arakhamia, leader of the parliamentary majority said via Telegram on Monday.

The government is drafting a bill on mobilization of troops to address the question of troop recruitment, he added.

This year held some truly out-there moments in the world of science and space travel.

With SpaceX’s Mars rocket erupting into a ball of flames over the ocean (twice) and a spacecraft swinging by Earth to drop off pieces of an asteroid that could contain solar system secrets — some events felt ripped from the pages of a science fiction novel.

These moments came as humanity embarks on a new push to explore the cosmos, both with scientific instruments on the ground and spacecraft among the stars.

The renewed effort not only comes from NASA and the US government but also from countries such as India and China. And there’s massive investment from private-sector businesses across the globe as well, a unique feature of the 21st century space race.

Here’s a look back at some of the biggest pinch-me moments in outer space from 2023.

The most powerful rocket ever constructed launches and explodes. Twice

SpaceX’s Starship, the rocket and spacecraft system that CEO Elon Musk envisions will carry the first humans to Mars, made two historic flight attempts this year.

The first, in April, ended when the vehicle began tumbling out of control, and SpaceX was forced to destroy it.

The second attempt, in November, saw the 400-foot (120-meter) vehicle make it much farther into flight — successfully firing all its engines and reaching outer space. But both the Starship spacecraft and rocket booster ultimately exploded.

The test launch mishaps weren’t huge setbacks for SpaceX. The company is known to embrace fiery failures in the early stages of rocket development.

But a lot is riding on Starship’s eventual success.

SpaceX is racing to get the vehicle ready to land astronauts on the moon for NASA as early as 2025. And Musk envisions Starship will put boots on Mars by 2029.

Starship remains controversial among some local residents in South Texas, where SpaceX has a private spaceport, after the company’s operations raised concerns about its environmental impact. Meanwhile, Musk — the owner and face of SpaceX — has found himself steeped deeper in unrelated controversy in 2023.

Moon landings: Failures and successes

A new moon race is underway, and the participants so far have been robotic.

Mad dashes for the lunar surface kicked off in April when a private Japanese company, Ispace, attempted to land the first commercial vehicle — the Hakuto-R lander — on the moon. It ultimately crash-landed.

Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos, followed with yet another blunt force impact when its Luna-25 mission crashed into the moon’s surface in August.

India’s space agency then swooped in days later with the successful touchdown of the Chandrayaan-3 lunar lander on August 23.

India became the fourth county to successfully land a spacecraft on the moon, following the United States, the former Soviet Union and China. India also became the first country to land a spacecraft in the moon’s south pole region.

So far in the 21st century, only China and India have had successful lunar landings. (Russia and the United States haven’t been back to the moon since the 1970s.)

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, also has a spacecraft headed for the lunar surface, with a landing attempt expected early next year.

Leaking spacecraft forced an astronaut to spend a year in space

NASA astronaut Frank Rubio expected to spend six months on the International Space Station.

But the Russian Soyuz spacecraft that carried him and two cosmonauts to the orbiting outpost in September 2022 sprang a coolant leak late that year. Russia was forced to send a replacement ride, and it delayed Rubio’s return by six months.

He touched back down on terra firma in September, logging 371 days in orbit — longer than any US astronaut has ever stayed in microgravity.

Rubio was candid about the arduous journey, noting that he “probably would have declined” the mission if he had known he would be stuck in space so long. But he said he spent only one day mourning the lost time on Earth before refocusing on the mission.

Now part of US space travel history, Rubio was also at the center of a lighthearted “scandal.” In the spring, he harvested one of the first tomatoes ever grown in orbit. After losing it on board the station, he faced some suspicion about whether he had eaten the valuable produce.

Colleagues exonerated Rubio in December, months after his departure, when they revealed they had located the missing tomato.

Space tourism kicks into high gear

The world has rapidly entered an era in which a trip to space is possible for anyone who can afford it.

Space tourism kicked off in 2023 with the Axiom-2 mission, which launched in May, carrying decorated former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson and three customers to the International Space Station. The crew included two astronauts from Saudi Arabia, which financed their travel, as well as John Shoffner, an American who made his fortune in the international telecom business.

It marked the private sector’s second mission to the orbiting laboratory. And similar trips — estimated to cost about $55 million per seat — are expected in upcoming years.

Meanwhile, Virgin Galactic, the space tourism venture founded by British billionaire Richard Branson, began offering regular trips to the edge of space for wealthy thrill seekers — finally delivering on its promises after two decades.

In 2023, Virgin Galactic made six trips to the edge of space with its suborbital rocket-powered space plane, carrying company employees, test pilots and customers. Its flights cost about $450,000 per seat (though some early ticket purchasers spent less).

Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos’ space tourism company, Blue Origin, just got its suborbital rocket back in the air after the 2022 failure of an uncrewed rocket on a science mission.

NASA picked astronauts who will fly by the moon

The four astronauts who will helm the first crewed moon mission in five decades were revealed in April. The historic Artemis II lunar flyby is set for takeoff in November 2024.

The astronauts are NASA’s Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch and the Canadian Space Agency’s Jeremy Hansen.

“It’s so much more than the four names that have been announced,” Glover said during an April 3 announcement ceremony at NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston. “We need to celebrate this moment in human history. … It is the next step in the journey that will get humanity to Mars.”

The Artemis II lunar flyby is expected to be the first crewed journey in a long line of missions that NASA has planned, including the establishment of a permanent outpost on the moon where astronauts can live and work. Eventually, the space agency hopes those efforts will pave the way for crewed missions to Mars.

NASA releases its first UFO report

The US space agency made history when it set up a team of experts to study unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAPs — more commonly referred to as UFOs. And the group revealed its first findings in a September report.

The group sought to determine whether and how the mysterious phenomena can be studied scientifically.

“Recently, many credible witnesses, often military aviators, have reported seeing objects they did not recognize over U.S. airspace,” the report noted. “Most of these events have since been explained, but a small handful cannot be immediately identified as known human-made or natural phenomena.”

The group found no hard evidence that the unexplained occurrences come from intelligent alien life.

But the report said that NASA should use satellites and other instruments — including artificial intelligence and machine learning — to seek more information about the phenomena.

In response, NASA announced it was appointing its first director of UAP research, with the agency’s chief saying the move was the first concrete step NASA had ever taken to seek an explanation for UFOs.

These developments came as the US Defense Department races to get a handle on the phenomena, with the Pentagon receiving dozens of UFO reports each week.

OSIRIS-REx’s special delivery

In September, an out-of-this-world delivery landed in the Utah desert, and the contents of the capsule have presented astronomers with a cosmic puzzle they will be piecing together for years.

After successfully collecting a sample from the near-asteroid Bennu in 2020, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission safely dropped off the capsule containing the precious rocks and dust within as it flew by Earth on September 24. It wasn’t long before scientists realized the capsule contained a wealth of material that exceeded their goals.

A preliminary analysis revealed that the rocks and dust contain water and a large amount of carbon, suggesting that asteroids may have delivered the building blocks of life to Earth.

And it’s just the first of many insights waiting to be teased from the asteroid sample. The interior of the canister contains “a whole treasure chest of extraterrestrial material,” said OSIRIS-REx principal investigator Dante Lauretta.

Meanwhile, the newly named OSIRIS-APEX mission continues flying through space, ready to rendezvous with the asteroid Apophis during the space rock’s close approach of Earth in 2029.

Space rock surprise

The small asteroid Dinkinesh was only meant to test the systems aboard NASA’s Lucy spacecraft as the mission zooms on its way to survey the swarms of Trojan asteroids around Jupiter in the late 2020s. But the space rock was full of surprises that continue to intrigue astronomers.

Lucy flew by Dinkinesh, located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, on November 1. In the days following the flyby, images captured by the spacecraft were returned to Earth — and they revealed that Dinkinesh is orbited by a smaller asteroid that is a contact binary, or two small space rocks that touch each other.

“It’s truly marvelous when nature surprises us with a new puzzle,” said Tom Statler, Lucy program scientist at NASA, in a statement. “Great science pushes us to ask questions that we never knew we needed to ask.”

Dinkinesh, which means “marvelous” in the Amharic language of Ethiopia, is truly living up to its name.

Former European Commission President Jacques Delors, a key figure in the creation of the euro currency, has died aged 98 on Wednesday, according to a statement from the Jacques Delors Institute, a think tank he founded.

Delors, a Socialist, had a high-profile political career in France, where he served as finance minister under President François Mitterrand in the early 1980s, before becoming president of the EU Commission in 1985.

His 10-year presidency remains the longest in the institution’s history and shaped the outlines of modern-day Europe.

Under Delors, the European Union changed considerably, introducing a number of key reforms including the Single European Act, the Schengen Agreement, the Erasmus student exchange program, an overhaul of the Common Agricultural Policy and the Economic and Monetary Union, which later led to the creation of the Euro currency.

In March 2020, he called on EU heads of state and government to show greater solidarity at a time when they were squabbling over a common response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Current Commission President Ursula von der Leyen paid tribute to Delors on X, calling the late statesman a “visionary who made our Europe stronger.”

“His life’s work is a united, dynamic and prosperous European Union. It has shaped entire generations of Europeans, including mine,” the Commission President added.

French President Emmanuel Macron called Delors “a statesman with a French destiny, inexhaustible architect of our Europe” and “a fighter for human justice.”

“His commitment, his ideals and his righteousness will always inspire us. I salute his work and his memory, and share the grief of his loved ones,” the French President added on X.

Delors began his career at the Banque de France — where his father had also worked – in 1945 and was later awarded an economics degree by Paris’ prestigious Sorbonne university. He became involved with the Christian Trade Union Confederation and was made its economic adviser in 1950.

Delors left the Banque de France, where he had reached the executive ranks, after 17 years. He went on to head the social affairs division of the state’s General Planning Commission. He served as chief adviser on social affairs to Prime Minister Jacques Chaban-Delmas from 1969 to 1972 and was a member of his cabinet. He was also an associate professor at the University of Paris-Dauphine from 1974 to 1979.

Delors joined France’s Socialist Party in 1974 and was elected to the European Parliament five years later. He chaired its economic and monetary affairs committee until May 1981, when he was appointed French Finance Minister by the then-President Francois Mitterrand. He also served as Mayor of Clichy from 1983 to 1984.

UK tabloid newspaper The Sun famously published an “Up Yours Delors” headline in 1990 in opposition to Delors’ plans for greater European Union integration.

When his term at the European Commission came to an end in 1995, Delors was considered as a serious contender for the French presidency. However, he chose not to run and, in 1996, founded his think tank. His only daughter, Martine Aubry, is a prominent French politician and former leader of the French Socialist Party.

US warships in the Red Sea have been battling a growing number of weapons fired by Houthi forces in Yemen over the past several weeks, including 17 drones and missiles during a 10-hour period on Tuesday alone.

Yahya Sare’e, a spokesman for Houthi forces, said on X, formerly Twitter, that the latest launches were in “continued support and solidarity with the Palestinian people.” The group had previously said it was targeting ships headed for Israel following Israeli forces’ invasion of Gaza.

The Iran-backed Houthis have launched at least 100 attacks against 14 different commercial and merchant vessels in the Red Sea over the past month, a senior US military official said last week.

The strikes prompted US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to announce the formation of a coalition of at least 10 countries to focus on security in the Red Sea.

The coalition involves member ships being available near the Red Sea to respond to attacks. A goal of the initiative was to deter future Houthi attacks, but the militants have nevertheless continued targeting ships operating near Yemen.

The Red Sea is home to one of the most important maritime trade routes in the world, and the attacks have had far-reaching reverberations. At least 44 countries are connected to vessels attacked by the Houthis and the attacks have disrupted wider international trade.

The 17 drones and missiles launched by the Houthis on Tuesday were brought down with weapons carried by the guided-missile destroyer USS Laboon and by F/A-18 fighter jets flying off the aircraft carrier USS Eisenhower, the US Central Command said.

The US Navy has not said exactly what weapons its ships are using against the Houthi attacks, but analysts said a US destroyer has a range of arms systems at its disposal.

These include surface-to-air missiles, explosive shells from the destroyer’s 5-inch main gun and close-in weapons systems, the experts said. They also said US ships have electronic warfare capabilities that could sever the links between drones and their on-shore controllers.

Whatever systems US destroyer captains use, they face decisions on cost, inventory and effectiveness as the mission grows, the experts said.

“The drones are slower and can be hit with the cheaper missiles or even the ship’s gun. Faster missiles must be intercepted with more sophisticated interceptor missiles,” said John Bradford, Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs fellow.

US Navy’s main asset – the guided-missile destroyer

The main US asset involved in the Red Sea to counter the attacks on shipping is the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer, like the USS Laboon. The missiles in its magazine include:

• The Standard Missile-6 (SM-6), an advanced weapon that can shoot down ballistic missiles high in the atmosphere, other lower trajectory missiles and target other ships with a range of up to 370 kilometers, according to the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). These cost more than $4 million each.

• The Standard Missile-2 (SM-2), less advanced than the SM-6 with a smaller range of 185 to 370 kilometers, depending on the version, according to the CSIS. They cost about $2.5 million each.

• The Evolved Sea Sparrow Missile (ESSM), designed to hit anti-ship cruise missiles and lower speed threats like drones or helicopters at a range of up to 50 kilometers, the CSIS says. Each one costs more than $1 million.

Experts said last week they think the US is using the SM-2 and/or ESSM missiles against the Houthi threats so far.

Pricey munitions and the cost-benefit ratio

But as they are facing drones that can be produced and deployed in large numbers for unit prices well under $100,000, a prolonged campaign could eventually tax US resources, the experts say.

“These are advanced air intercept capabilities with an average cost of around $2 million – making the intercept of drones not … cost effective,” said Alessio Patalano, professor of war and strategy at King’s College in London.

Houthi forces are funded and trained by Iran, so they have resources for an extended fight, the experts point out.

It’s also a question of to what lengths the US wants to go to protect merchant shipping, the analysts said.

A US destroyer’s Phalanx close-in weapons system – Gatling guns that can fire up to 4,500 rounds a minute – could handle drone or missile threats that get within a mile of the warship, said Carl Schuster, a former US Navy captain and a former director of operations at the US Pacific Command’s Joint Intelligence Center in Hawaii.

That’s a relatively low-cost defense. But if drones do get that close, it is the last line of defense and a miss could cost US lives.

“A single missile or single drone does not sink a US warship, but it can kill people and/or do damage that required the ship to withdraw for repairs in port,” said Bradford, from the Council on Foreign Relations.

Defense of warships vs. protection of merchants

And the Phalanx system can’t protect merchant ships the US destroyer may be watching over, sailing miles away from the warship.

“To provide wide area air defense (as opposed to self-protection) vessels rely primarily on anti-air missiles,” said Sidharth Kaushal, research fellow for sea power at the Royal United Services Institute in London.

Kaushal said US anti-aircraft interceptor missiles on US warships are fired from vertical launch system (VLS) cells on the deck.

Each cell can contain a mix of armaments (exact numbers are classified), but the number aboard any one vessel is finite, Kaushal said.

And if the Houthis can deplete a ship’s inventories with successive attacks, the warship could find itself short on munitions to protect the merchant vessels it’s watching over, said Salvatore Mercogliano, a naval expert and professor at Campbell University in North Carolina.

“While the navies are well equipped to swat down what the Houthi are currently throwing, the fear is that the scope and scale increase and the escorts cannot keep up a level of defense to protect commercial shipping,” he said.

The Houthis have not yet tried a true drone swarm attack – similar to what Russia has deployed repeatedly in Ukraine – one that could involve dozens of incoming threats at one time, the experts said.

“A swarm could tax the capabilities of a single warship, but, more importantly, it could mean weapons get past them to hit commercial ships,” Mercogliano said.

US warships also face the question of how to replenish missile inventory in the region, he said.

“The only site to reload weapons is at Djibouti (a US base on the Horn of Africa) and that is close to the action,” he said.

Possible threats in an evolving battlespace

The experts said deployment of anti-ship cruise or ballistic missiles presents a potentially more difficult challenge. Houthi forces fired three anti-ship ballistic missiles, and two land-attack cruises missiles on Tuesday, US Central Command said.

Anti-ship cruise missiles “can come in low and penetrate a ship’s hull above the waterline.  These are the type of weapons that sunk several British ships during the Falklands War and hit USS Stark (in the Persian Gulf) in 1987,” Mercogliano said.

Ballistic missiles could present an even greater danger, he said.

“The terminal velocity of the weapon and its payload could inflict serious damage” on a warship or commercial vessel, he said, and may need the best US interceptors, like the SM-6, to shoot it down.

Mercogliano said the battlespace is not static and the Houthis will have something to say about what they will deploy.

“The Houthi are watching and seeing how the navies are responding to these attacks,” he said.

And the experts say the US may at some point decide it has to go on offense.

“There is another course of action which is striking at the source. This would shift the emphasis from intercepting the capabilities once they’re in the air to strike them at the source to prevent their use in the first place,” Patalano said.

“Given a choice and capability, it is always cheaper to take out the archers than to intercept the arrows,” Schuster said.

Standing on the deserted streets of Nagorno-Karabakh on the 20th anniversary of his inauguration, Azerbaijan’s Ilham Aliyev said he had achieved the “sacred goal” of his presidency: reclaiming the land taken from his father.

Azerbaijan had for decades been haunted by the loss of Nagorno-Karabakh, a tiny Caucasian enclave home to one of the world’s most protracted conflicts. Armenians herald it as the cradle of their civilization, but it lies within Azerbaijan’s borders, like an island in unfriendly seas.

As separate Soviet republics, Azerbaijan and Armenia played nice under Moscow’s watchful eye. But as that empire crumbled, Armenia, then the ascendant power, seized Nagorno-Karabakh from its weaker neighbor in a bloody war in the 1990s.

The defeat became a “festering wound” Aliyev promised to heal. But he grew frustrated by diplomatic talks that he believed aimed only “to freeze the conflict.” After decades of “meaningless and fruitless” summits, from Minsk to Key West, he changed his tack.

Brute force stepped in where diplomacy had failed. While the conflict remained frozen, Azerbaijan had transformed. Now oil-rich, backed by Turkey and armed to the teeth, it reclaimed a third of Nagorno-Karabakh in a 44-day war in 2020, stopped only by a Russian-brokered ceasefire.

But the agreement proved brittle and, in September, Azerbaijan struck again. Unable to resist its military might, the Karabakh government surrendered in just 24 hours. The region’s ethnic Armenian population fled within a week, an exodus the European Parliament said amounted to ethnic cleansing – an allegation Azerbaijan denies. “We brought peace by war,” Aliyev told a forum this month.

Whether that peace will be a lasting one is unclear. In Azerbaijan, many fear that the ethnic nationalism and vow of territorial reunification on which Aliyev built his legitimacy is more likely to find new targets than to dissipate.

And in Armenia, which was left exposed by its weak military and absent allies, the state is struggling to absorb more than 100,000 Karabakh refugees, many of whom say they cannot adjust to their new lives.

Life in limbo

Nonna Poghosyan fled her home in Stepanakert, Karabakh’s capital, with her husband, twin children and elderly parents. They now rent a small apartment in Yerevan, Armenia’s capital. But Poghosyan, who worked as the American University of Armenia’s program coordinator in Stepanakert, said her mind is still in Karabakh.

Aliyev said the abandoned houses had remained “untouched,” but videos on social media show Azerbaijani troops vandalizing homes.

“I don’t want to imagine it’s been taken by someone else. That’s the house we built for our kids,” said Poghosyan.

Her children were walking home from school when Azerbaijani rockets struck Stepanakert on September 19. Her husband found them on the roadside and took them to a bomb shelter. When they woke the next day, the government – the self-styled Republic of Artsakh – surrendered. Their lives had unraveled overnight.

They fled their home the next week, along with almost all of the population. By then they were starved and exhausted: Nagorno-Karabakh had been blockaded for 10 months after Azerbaijan cut off the Lachin corridor – the only road linking the enclave to Armenia proper – preventing the import of food, medicine and other supplies.

Now, the road along which necessities were stopped from entering was opened to allow the population to flood out. As tens of thousands fled at once, it took Poghosyan four days to drive from Stepanakert to Yerevan, she said – a journey that ordinarily took four hours.

As Armenian citizens, the government in Yerevan welcomed the refugees. But the support it can provide is meager. Poghosyan received a one-off payment of 100,000 Armenian dram (about $250), but she pays 300,000 dram (about $750) in rent. Her family lives off the savings they had put aside for their children’s education, money that will only last a few months.

The dissolution of the Karabakh government has left Poghosyan without child benefits, her parents without their pensions, her husband – a former soldier – without his salary. But she considers herself lucky to have an apartment. “There are people living in cars. There are people living in school basements, playgrounds,” she said.

‘We left our souls there’

Gayane Lalabekyan said she wakes every morning to her new apartment in Yerevan and asks herself if she did the right thing. Many Karabakh Armenians, struggling to come to terms with their new lives, wonder what, if anything, they could have done differently.

“When I see my daughter, her little son; when I see my mother, she’s 72; when I see my son and his wife, they married in July; I see that, if we stayed there, maybe I wouldn’t have them,” she said.

Aliyev said Armenians wishing to remain in Karabakh would have to accept Azerbaijani citizenship. “They had two chances: Either to integrate with the rest of Azerbaijan or to go to history,” he said.

But, after generations of violence, few Armenians believed they could live safely in Azerbaijan and almost none would submit to rule by the government in Baku, despite Azerbaijan’s insistence that no civilians had been harmed in what it called its “anti-terror measures” in the territory.

“Aliyev isn’t a real man, he’s a devil. We can’t trust their promises,” said Lalabekyan. “We can’t live together.”

Karabakh Armenians were supposed to be protected by Russian peacekeepers, which deployed to the region under the terms of the Moscow-brokered ceasefire in 2020.

But the attack came on the heels of a rupture in Armenia’s relations with Russia, after Yerevan grew frustrated that its longtime ally was failing to defend it against Azerbaijani aggression. Feeling it had no choice but to diversify its security apparatus, Armenia began to forge fledgling partnerships with Western countries.

To Russia, the move was a betrayal. It used the opportunity to wash its hands of its needy neighbor. Unable to funnel resources from its military campaign in Ukraine, and unwilling to anger Azerbaijan and Turkey, Russia stood by as the ceasefire it negotiated was shattered – though the Kremlin later rejected criticism of its peacekeeping contingent.

With Russia’s protection absent and Western support merely rhetorical, Karabakh Armenians felt they had no choice but to flee. But accepting this offers scant consolation to Lalabekyan, who said she feels like a stranger in her own country.

“What will we do next? We don’t know who we are. Are we Artsakh citizens or Armenian citizens? We can’t answer this question. We left everything there. We left our souls there.”

The prospect of peace

Some cold-eyed observers argue the plight of the Karabakh refugees may be the tragic price of regional peace. As Nagorno-Karabakh is internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan, Armenia’s relinquishment of the enclave was a prerequisite for reconciliation.

But Aliyev has shown little magnanimity in victory. On his first visit to the enclave, he trampled on the Karabakh flag and mocked the Karabakh politicians he had imprisoned as they attempted to flee.

“If we really want peace in the region between Azerbaijan and Armenia, you can’t have political prisoners still being in jail while a peace agreement is signed,” he said.

In the weeks after the reconquest of Karabakh, Baku canceled peace talks in Brussels and Washington, citing Western bias against Azerbaijan. Meanwhile, its rhetoric around its territorial ambitions has sharpened. Government documents have referred to Armenia as “western Azerbaijan,” a nationalist concept alleging Armenia is built on Azerbaijani land.

Some hope, however, came on December 7 when Azerbaijan and Armenia agreed to a prisoner exchange – a deal brokered without Brussels or Washington, but which was welcomed by both. The US said it hoped the exchange would “lay the groundwork for a more peaceful and prosperous future.” Armenia also removed its block on Azerbaijan’s candidacy to host the COP29 climate conference next year.

The biggest sticking point, however, will likely be Nakhchivan, an Azerbaijani exclave separated from the mainland by a sliver of southern Armenia. Aliyev hopes to build a “land corridor” that would slice through Armenia, connecting Nakhchivan to Azerbaijan proper.

Aliyev described the so-called “Zangezur” corridor as a “historical necessity” that “will happen whether Armenia wants it or not.”

Armenia is not wholly opposed to the idea, but is refusing to relinquish control over parts of its territory. Last month, it presented a plan to revive the region’s infrastructure, restoring derelict train lines to better connect Armenia with Azerbaijan, Turkey, Georgia, Iran and elsewhere. It hopes to benefit from trade that could not happen during the lengthy hostilities, calling the project the “Crossroads of Peace.”

But Armenia’s preferences may count for little. Aliyev said in December “there should be no customs duties, no checks, no border security, when it goes from mainland (Azerbaijan) to Nakhchivan,” adding that the Armenians should begin construction “immediately at their own expense.”

Aliyev said he had no plans to occupy Armenian territory, stressing “if we wanted, we would have done it.” But, at the same event, he said that the territory had been “taken” from Azerbaijan in 1920 under Soviet rule, and warned Armenia “we have more historical, political and legal rights to contest your territorial integrity.”

Anna Ohanyan, a senior scholar in the Russia and Eurasia program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said Aliyev’s rhetoric had been tempered since the announcement of the prisoner exchange, but “this is largely due to a strong pushback from the US.”

Karabakh Armenians always knew they were caught in the crosshairs of great-power conflict. But, after 30 years of relative peace, they were not expecting things to fall apart so quickly. As a new year beckons, they look ahead to an uncertain future, bereft of homes, possessions, and livelihoods.

“I understand it’s a big game with big countries involved: Russia’s interests, Turkey’s interests, Azerbaijan being a player between all these, Armenia being too weak to withstand. I understand it globally,” said Poghosyan. “But on the level of 100,000 people, it’s a tragedy.”