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.”

South Korean actor Lee Sun-kyun, known internationally for his role in the Academy Award-winning film “Parasite,” has died while being investigated for illegal drug use, police confirmed Wednesday. He was 48.

Police in the capital Seoul said in a statement they had received a missing person report from Lee’s manager on their hotline. Lee was found in his car on Wednesday morning.

The cause of death is “presumed to be suicide,” police said.

Photos from the scene on Wednesday show personnel in forensic outfits investigating a car cordoned off by police tape.

Police in the city of Incheon confirmed that Lee had been questioned three times since October as part of an investigation into alleged drug use.

Lee had been summoned by police most recently on December 23 and held for 19 hours before he was released the following day.

Throughout the investigation, Lee’s drug tests had all come back negative, Incheon police said, without specifying how many tests he had taken.

Lee had claimed he was tricked into using drugs and subsequently blackmailed by the same individual, police said. Lee filed a lawsuit against the alleged blackmailer, according to police, who added they had received a tip about his alleged drug use before he filed suit.

One man and one woman have been arrested in relation to the drug investigation, police said. On December 26, he had requested police through his lawyers to conduct a polygraph examination of himself and two other people police apprehended.

The police also offered their condolences to the actor’s bereaved family, saying they had tried to prevent media leaks about his drug investigation before its completion – in accordance with South Korean law, which prohibits those involved in a criminal investigation from releasing facts about the suspect before a public indictment is released.

A funeral for Lee will be held “quietly” with family members and colleagues in attendance, South Korean news agency Yonhap reported Wednesday, citing his agency, Hodu & U Entertainment.

“Actor Lee Sun-kyun passed away today,” the company said, according to Yonhap. “There is no way to contain the sorrow and devastated feelings.”

“Please refrain from spreading false information based on speculation or assumption,” the company added.

Lee received acclaim for his role as Park Dong-ik, the father of the wealthy Park family in “Parasite.”

He also won praise for his roles in the 2007 television series “Behind the White Tower,” the 2010 series “Pasta,” and the sci-fi thriller series “Dr. Brain,” for which he was nominated for an International Emmy Award.

How to get help: Help is available if you or someone you know is struggling with suicidal thoughts or mental health matters. In the US: Call or text 988, the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.
Globally: The International Association for Suicide Prevention and Befrienders Worldwide have contact information for crisis centers around the world.

Ali Hajimiri has spent a decade researching how to put solar panels in space and beam the energy down to Earth. Yet when the Caltech electrical engineering professor talks about his work, people always have three questions, usually in this order: Why not just put solar panels on Earth? Are you going fry birds in the sky? Are you building a Death Star?

Hajmiri jokes he plans to have the answers printed on a card. “I’m going to have it in my wallet to show people,” he said.

This year, Hajimiri and his team made a step towards making space-based solar a reality.

In January, they launched Maple, a 30-centimeter-long space solar prototype equipped with flexible, lightweight transmitters. The aim was to harvest energy from the sun and transfer it wirelessly in space, which they did, managing to light up a pair of LEDs.

But the “stretch goal” was to see if Maple could also beam down detectable energy to Earth. In May, the team decided to launch a “dry run” to see what would happen. On a rooftop on the Caltech campus in Pasadena, California, Hajimiri and the other scientists were able to pick up Maple’s signal.

The amount of energy they detected was tiny, too small to be useful, but they had succeeded in wirelessly beaming down power from space. “It was only after the fact that it dawned on us a little bit that, OK, well, this was something very special,” said Hajimiri.

Space-based solar may sound a wild, futuristic idea, but it is not new. As far back as 1941, it was described in a short story by science fiction writer Isaac Asimov. In the decades since, countries including the US, China and Japan have explored the idea — but for years it was written off. “The economics were just way out,” said Martin Soltau, CEO of the UK-based company Space Solar.

That may now be changing as the cost of launching satellites falls sharply, solar and robotics technology advances swiftly, and the need for abundant clean energy to replace planet-heating fossil fuels becomes more urgent.

There’s a “nexus of different technologies coming together right now just when we need it,” said Craig Underwood, emeritus professor of spacecraft engineering at the University of Surrey in the UK.

The problem is, these technologies would need to be deployed at a scale unlike anything ever done before.

What is space-based solar?

At its heart, space-based solar is a fairly straightforward concept. Humans could harness the enormous power of the sun in space, where it’s available constantly — unaffected by bad weather, cloud cover, nighttime or the seasons — and beam it to Earth.

There are different concepts, but it would work roughly like this: huge solar power satellites, each more than a mile long in diameter, would be sent into a very high orbit.

The satellite’s solar cells would capture the sun’s energy, convert it into microwaves and beam it down to Earth wirelessly via a very large transmitter, able to hit specific points on the ground with precision.

The microwaves, which can easily travel through clouds and bad weather, would be directed to a receiving antenna (or “rectenna”) on Earth made of mesh — “think of a sort of fishing net hung on bamboo poles,” Soltau said — where the microwaves would be converted back into electricity and fed into the grid.

The rectenna, approximately 6 kilometers (3.7 miles) in diameter, could be built on land or offshore. And because these mesh structures would be nearly transparent, the idea is the land underneath them could be used for solar panels, farms or other activities.

A single space solar satellite could deliver up to 2 gigawatts of power, roughly the same amount as two average nuclear power plants in the US.

An idea whose time has come?

Over the last decade, that has begun to change as companies such as SpaceX and Blue Origin started developing reusable rockets. Today’s launch costs at around $1,500 per kilogram are about 30 times less than in the Space Shuttle era of the early 1980s.

And while launching thousands of tons of material into space sounds like it would have a huge carbon footprint, space solar would likely have a footprint at least comparable to terrestrial solar per unit of energy, if not a smaller, because of its increased efficiency as sunlight is available nearly constantly, said Mamatha Maheshwarappa, payload systems lead at UK Space Agency.

Some experts go further. Underwood said the carbon footprint of space-based solar would be around half that of a terrestrial solar farm producing the same power, even with the rocket launch.

But that doesn’t mean space-based solar should replace terrestrial renewables, he added. The idea is that it could provide “baseload” power that can be called upon around the clock to fill in the gaps when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine on Earth. Currently, baseload power tends to be provided by power plants running on fossil fuels or nuclear energy, which are able to operate with little interruption.

The power would be “very portable,” said Peter Garretson, a senior fellow in defense studies at the American Foreign Policy Council. It could be beamed from space to the top of Europe, for example, and then to the bottom of Africa.

Many advocates point to the potential it could offer developing countries with deep energy needs but a lack of infrastructure. All they would need is a rectenna. “It will provide real democratization of abundant affordable energy,” Soltau said.

Space-based solar could also help power remote Arctic towns and villages that lie in almost complete darkness for months each year, and could beam power to support communities experiencing outages during climate disasters or conflict.

The challenges

There is still a huge gulf between concept and commercialization.

We know how to build a satellite, and we know how to build a solar array, the UK Space Agency’s Maheshwarappa said. “What we don’t know is how to build something this big in space.”

Scientists also need to figure out how to use AI and robotics to construct and maintain these structures in space. “The enabling technologies are still in a very low technology readiness,” Maheshwarappa said.

Then there’s regulating this new energy system, to ensure the satellites are built sustainably, there’s no debris risk, and they have an end-of-life plan, as well as to determine where rectenna sites should be located.

Public buy-in could be another huge obstacle, Maheshwarappa said. There can be an instinctive fear when it comes to beaming power from space.

But such fears are unfounded, according to some experts. The energy density at the center of the rectenna would be about a quarter of the midday sun. “It is no different than standing in front of a heat lamp,” Hajimiri said.

And to build a satellite capable of doing harm to people, it would have to be many times bigger than the concepts currently being developed, Hajimiri said. “Anyone who tries to start building that, everyone else would know.”

That doesn’t mean questions shouldn’t be asked, he said. The idea is “to benefit humanity, and if it doesn’t, there’s no point.”

For some, however, the whole concept of space-based solar is misplaced.

For Lovins, promises that the system would be a great source of baseload power don’t hold up either. There are techniques to match energy demand to supply, rather than the other way around, without consumers even noticing. Having a huge power source that is producing all the time is “undesirably inflexible,” he said.

“Why spend money on something that has no chance of a business case if you succeeded, whose need will have been met before you could build it and whose most optimistic future cost estimates are the same as the current price of terrestrial solar power plus batteries?” he asked.

The future

But governments and companies around the world believe there is huge promise in space-based solar to help meet burgeoning demand for abundant, clean energy and tackle the climate crisis.

A development program able to demonstrate proof of concept is about five or six years away, Soltau said. It will then take another five or six years to industrialize and scale up the gigawatt-scale system to be fully operational.

Strong government support will be key, he said. “It’s an ambitious thing to create a brand new energy technology.”

In the US, the Air Force Research Laboratory has plans to launch a small demonstrator called Arachne in 2025, and the US Naval Research Laboratory launched a module in May 2020 aboard an orbital test vehicle, to test solar hardware in space conditions.

The China Academy of Space Technology, a spacecraft designer and manufacturer, is aiming to send a solar satellite into low orbit in 2028 and into high orbit by 2030, according to a 2022 South China Morning News report.

There’s been a burst of activity from the UK government. It commissioned an independent study which reported in 2021 that space-based solar was technically feasible, highlighting designs such as the UK-led CASSIOPeiA, a satellite 1.7 kilometers (1 mile) in diameter that aims to deliver 2 gigawatts of power. In June this year, the government announced nearly $5.5 million in funding to universities and tech companies “to drive forward innovation” in the space-based solar sector.

And Europe has its Solaris program, to establish the technical and political viability of space-based solar, in preparation for a possible decision in 2025 to launch a full development program.

“Obviously, before you build something, everything is speculation,” said Garretson, “but there are strong reasons to think that this might actually be economically possible and viable.”

Back in California, Hajimiri and his team have spent the last six months stress testing their prototype to extract data to feed into the next generation of design.

Hajimiri’s ultimate vision is series of lightweight, flexible sails, that can be rolled up, launched and unfurled in space, with billions of elements working in perfect synchronization to send energy where it is needed

He views their project as “part of this long chain of people who build upon each other’s work and help each other,” he said. “So we are taking an important step, perhaps, but it is not the last step.”

In Tijuana, Mexico, across the border from San Diego, California, an estimated 3,800 migrants from countries like Mexico, Cuba, Haiti, and Venezuela are staying in shelters, according to municipal migration affairs director Enrique Lucero. In Reynosa, Mexico, across the border from McAllen, Texas, another 3,273 migrants are waiting at Senda De Vida shelters, according to pastor Hector Silva, who runs the facilities. And in nearby Matamoros, Mexico, about 4,000 migrants are living in camps, shelters, and abandoned homes, says Glady Cañas who runs nonprofit Ayudandoles a Triunfar.

The waiting migrants feel “desperate,” according to Cañas – but many have put trust in mechanisms like the CBP One app, which automates scheduling appointments to claim asylum with border patrol, she said.

According to Cañas, three migrants drowned in the Rio Grande in the Matamoros area December, but people continue to try to cross the river despite the lethal dangers. Migrants who choose not to wait for a legal pathway are often blinded by hope, boosted by video and voice messages they receive from migrants who have been processed by US immigration authorities and have been released into American communities, she said.

“The migrants are only sharing the beauty, but they are not sharing the reality… that’s what worries me,” Cañas said.

Their chances are slim. Since May, the US Department of Homeland Security has deported or returned over 445,000 migrants – the vast majority of whom had crossed the US Southern border, the agency said online.

The federal government has also closed ports of entry in multiple states and reassigned personnel to transport and process migrants as it grapples with ways to maximize its limited resources. The Biden Administration also temporarily suspended rail operations in Eagle Pass and El Paso, but those services resumed Friday.

Despite the improved scene in Eagle Pass, illegal crossings continue, the same official said, and are being fueled by bad actors who push migrants to enter the US southern border between ports of entry, including rural areas of Arizona.

On Wednesday, Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is set to meet with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, US Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, and President Biden’s Homeland Security Adviser Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall in Mexico City.

The Hubble Space Telescope captured a newly revealed image of the mysterious, ghostly shadows on Saturn’s rings — the latest sighting of the so-called “spokes” that continue to baffle scientists.

The composite photo, released Thursday by NASA, was taken by Hubble on October 22 as Saturn was about 850 million miles (1.37 billion kilometers) away, according to the space agency. The space observatory has been orbiting Earth just a few hundred miles above the surface for more than three decades.

Astronomers have long known about the perplexing spokes on Saturn’s rings, which look like apparitions skating along the rings and can be spotted in various locations depending on where the planet is in its orbital cycle.

Over time, observations have revealed that the number and appearance of the spokes can vary depending on Saturn’s seasonal cycle. Similar to Earth, the planet has an axis with a tilt that causes seasonal changes, though each season on Saturn lasts about seven years, according to NASA.

Hubble is set to observe the unexplained phenomenon at peak activity as researchers aim to unravel its secrets.

“We are heading towards Saturn equinox, when we’d expect maximum spoke activity, with higher frequency and darker spokes appearing over the next few years,” said Amy Simon, the lead scientist of Hubble’s Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy, or OPAL, program, in a statement. Simon is based at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center  in Greenbelt, Maryland.

Saturn’s autumnal equinox is expected to occur on May 6, 2025.

Spying Saturn’s spokes

The NASA Voyager 2 spacecraft captured the first evidence of the spokes in the 1980s. And the Cassini mission, a dedicated Saturn probe, made observations of the spoke phenomenon during its seasonal peak in the late 2000s.

More recent observations from Hubble occurred earlier this year as part of a renewed push to identify what causes the spokes’ appearance.

The spokes may appear small in images, but they can actually be larger than Earth in width and diameter, according to NASA.

Scientists will continue studying Saturn’s mysterious spokes through the 2025 equinox in an attempt to finally unlock an explanation for the apparitions.

“The suspected culprit for the spokes is the planet’s variable magnetic field,” NASA said in a February news release. “Planetary magnetic fields interact with the solar wind, creating an electrically charged environment.

“On Earth, when those charged particles hit the atmosphere this is visible in the northern hemisphere as the aurora borealis, or northern lights.”

Essentially, astronomers suspect that tiny particles can become charged by this activity, causing them to briefly rise higher than surrounding material and create an apparent bulge.

Researchers hope that Hubble data will prove or disprove the theory once and for all, building on observations collected by Voyager 2 and the Cassini mission.

Video caption: Seven Hubble Space Telescope images, each taken about four minutes apart, were stitched together to show “spoke” features rotating around Saturn.

The “Moon Sniper” lander developed by Japan’s space agency successfully entered lunar orbit on Christmas Day. The milestone brings the nation a step closer to achieving its goal of landing a robotic explorer on the moon’s surface for the first time.

On its current path, the lander is completing one loop of the moon roughly every 6.4 hours. But over the next few weeks, the vehicle will slowly tighten its orbit, diving closer to the moon’s surface as it prepares for its historic touchdown attempt, slated for mid-January.

If successful, Japan would become only the fifth country to accomplish such a feat and only the third country to do so in the 21st century.

China and India are currently the only nations to safely land a vehicle on the moon in this century, marking the advent of a new race for the lunar surface characterized in part by efforts to identify and harness the moon’s natural resources for future long-term crewed missions.

Japan’s robotic explorer will attempt to demonstrate a “pinpoint” landing, aiming to touch down with extreme precision, and gather data about lunar rocks that could help scientists better understand the moon’s formation.

Heading in for landing

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, announced on December 25 that the lunar lander was placed into an elliptical orbit, sending it on a path that passes over the moon’s north and south poles at altitudes ranging from about 370 miles (600 kilometers) to 2,500 miles (4,000 kilometers).

Over the next 3 ½ weeks, the spacecraft’s orbit will take it as close as 9 miles (15 kilometers) above the surface as it begins its final descent.

The Moon Sniper lander — also referred to as SLIM, or Smart Lander for Investigating Moon — will attempt its soft touchdown at 10:20 a.m. ET January 19, or 12:20 a.m. January 20 Japan Standard Time.

About SLIM, aka the Moon Sniper

The SLIM lightweight lander will target a landing zone that stretches about 328 feet (100 meters), rather than the typical kilometer range.

The precision led to the mission’s nickname, Moon Sniper.

If it reaches the lunar surface, SLIM is expected to explore a site near a small impact crater called Shioli — near the Apollo 11 landing site where NASA astronauts first touched down in 1969.

Race for the moon

The United States remains the only country that has landed humans on the moon, but NASA has not soft-landed astronauts or robotic vehicles on the lunar surface since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972.

Both a privately developed spacecraft from a Japan-based company, Ispace, and a lunar lander launched by Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos, made a touchdown attempt in 2023 that ended in failure.

Each robotic craft crash-landed after experiencing navigation issues.

A lunar lander developed by India’s space agency, the Indian Space Research Organisation, successfully touched down in August — making it only the fourth country to do so after the United States, China and the former Soviet Union.

India’s spacecraft landed near the lunar south pole, where scientists believe there are valuable stores of water ice, making it the first nation to send a vehicle in close proximity to the region.

A year of lunar landing missions

After Japan’s Moon Sniper spacecraft makes its landing attempt, the United States aims to launch as many as three robotic vehicles to the moon’s surface in the coming year.

And NASA intends to send astronauts into orbit around the moon in late 2024.

If successful, the Artemis II mission would pave the way for another mission that could land humans on the moon later this decade.

The crewed NASA Artemis III mission could mark the first time that astronauts have returned to the lunar surface since the 1970s.

Kremlin critic Alexey Navalny has been located at a penal colony in Siberia, his team said Monday, two weeks after they lost contact with him.

“We have found Alexey,” his spokesperson Kira Yarmysh said in a statement on X, formerly Twitter. “He is now in IK-3 in the settlement of Kharp in the Yamal-Nenets Autonomous District.”

She said Navalny’s lawyer had visited him earlier Monday and that the jailed activist was “doing well.”

Navalny’s lawyers said on December 11 they had lost contact with him. Until then, he was imprisoned in a penal colony about 150 miles east of Moscow.

Navalny had “never been hidden for so long,” his team said after he was absent from two scheduled court hearings last week. They warned he had been in poor health before his disappearance after being “deprived of food” and “kept in a punishment cell without ventilation.”

His disappearance, which came just days after Russian President Vladimir Putin announced he will run for re-election in March 2024, had sparked concerns for his well-being and safety.

Ivan Zhdanov, director of Navalny’s anti-corruption foundation, said the IK-3 penal colony in Kharp where Navalny is now being held, known as “Polar Wolf,” is “one of the northernmost and most remote colonies.”

“The conditions there are harsh, with a special regime in the permafrost zone. It is very difficult to get there, and there are no letter delivery systems,” Zhdanov wrote on X.

Zhdanov said Navalny’s lawyer had not been allowed into the penal colony “right away.”

“It seems that the colony was prepared for his arrival in advance. The head of the Federal Penitentiary Service, Arkady Gostev, was there in April, and perhaps it was then that they decided to transfer Alexey there,” he added.

Kharp is almost 2,000 miles from Moscow, where Navalny had previously been held.

He had been sentenced to 19 years in prison in August after being found guilty of creating an extremist community, financing extremist activities and numerous other crimes. He was already serving sentences of 11-and-a-half years in a maximum security facility on fraud and other charges he denies.

Supporters of Navalny claim his arrest and incarceration are a politically motivated attempt to stifle his criticism of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Navalny has posed one of the most serious threats to Putin’s legitimacy during his rule. He used his blog and social media to expose alleged corruption in the Kremlin as well as Russian business, and organized anti-government street protests.

In 2020, Navalny was poisoned with Novichok, a Soviet-era nerve agent, and airlifted from the Siberian city of Omsk to a hospital in Berlin, where he arrived comatose.

Navalny was immediately incarcerated upon his return to Russia in January 2021, on charges of violating the terms of his probation related to a fraud case brought against him in 2013, which he also dismissed as politically motivated.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

Britain’s King Charles III has used his second Christmas broadcast as monarch to call for compassion in the face of world conflict, as the war between Israel and Hamas rages in Gaza and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine continues.

The Christmas message – a royal tradition which goes back over 90 years – was filmed in the Centre Room in Buckingham Palace, which leads onto its famous balcony overlooking the Queen Victoria Memorial and The Mall.

As the King reflected on the past 12 months, he leaned on the core element of the Christian faith of treating others as you would want to be treated.

“At a time of increasingly tragic conflict around the world, I pray that we can also do all in our power to protect each other,” Charles said. “The words of Jesus seem more than ever relevant: ‘do to others as you would have them do to you.’”

The 75-year-old sovereign, who has been a passionate advocate of green issues for much of his life and recently spoke at the COP28 climate summit, also touched upon the environment while delivering his address.

He told the nation and Commonwealth that after his decades of environmental campaigning, he took “great inspiration” at seeing “a growing awareness of how we must protect the Earth and our natural world as the one home we all share.”

As he relayed his festive message, a replantable Christmas tree – adorned with sustainable decorations made using wood, glass, paper, pinecones and dried oranges – could be seen over the monarch’s shoulder.

“Over this past year my heart has been warmed by countless examples of the imaginative ways in which people are caring for one another – going the extra mile to help those around them simply because they know it is the right thing to do: at work and at home; within and across communities,” King Charles said.

The monarch also paid tribute to the “selfless army” of volunteers who support their communities, calling them the “essential backbone of our society.”

Charles added that he and his wife were “delighted” by the presence of community representatives among the coronation congregation in May. “Their presence meant so much to us both and emphasized the meaning of Coronation itself: above all, a call to us all to serve one another; to love and care for all,” he said.

Footage of the coronation service and balcony appearance was shown alongside the King’s message. Other highlights from the year showed members of the royal family at various engagements.

King Charles and Queen Camilla were shown touring a surplus food distribution center outside London as they launched the Coronation Food Project in November. The Prince and Princess of Wales, and their children, were seen helping scouts during celebrations over coronation weekend. Prince Edward and his wife, Sophie, were seen at events in Scotland while Anne, Princess Royal, was shown visiting the Household Division of Coldstream Guards at Wellington Barracks following overnight rehearsals for the coronation weekend.

The King’s Christmas message also acknowledged other faiths, highlighting that many of the “great religions of the world” celebrate festivals with a special meal. He added that they are “a chance for family and friends to come together across generations; the act of sharing food adding to conviviality and togetherness.”

Charles ended his festive broadcast by thanking “all who are serving one another” and all who are “caring for our common home.”

Earlier on Monday, the King led the royal family as they walked to St. Mary Magdalene Church on the Sandringham estate in Norfolk for their annual Christmas Day service.

Meanwhile, the Prince and Princess of Wales marked Christmas Day by released a new photograph of their three children.

Wishing everyone a very Merry Christmas, from our family to yours! W & C

Josh Shinner pic.twitter.com/7qyMlMTvVG

— The Prince and Princess of Wales (@KensingtonRoyal) December 25, 2023

A beaming Princess Charlotte is seen with her arms wrapped around her brothers, Princes George and Louis in the black and white snap taken by British photographer Josh Shinner.

Similar to the family’s Christmas card portrait, the three children are dressed casually and seated on a wooden bench in the photograph posted to the couple’s social media accounts on Monday.

Thousands gathered in Belgrade on Sunday in an anti-government protest to demand the annulment of Serbia’s general election last week that was deemed “unjust” by international observers.

At least 35 people were arrested Sunday, according to N1, in what was the sixth straight day of protests since the parliamentary and local elections.

The ruling Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) won 47% of the votes after President Aleksandar Vucic called a snap election, cementing his decade-long grip on power in the Balkan nation that is seeking membership of the European Union while retaining close ties to Russia.

An international monitoring mission said the elections were held under “unjust conditions,” citing media bias, Vucic’s improper influence and “intimidation and pressure on voters, including cases of vote buying.”

Members of the center-left Serbia Against Violence coalition – a nascent opposition movement founded after months-long anti-government protests this summer – attended Sunday’s protest and accused Vucic of election theft.

“Vucic, you have stolen not one but thousands and thousands of votes,” Marinika Tepic, who has been on hunger strike since the elections, said at the protest. She called for the election to be annulled.

Srdjan Milivojevic, also a member of the opposition coalition, called Vucic a “thief like the world has never seen before.” He was seen attempting to open the door to the city hall, but was unable to enter.

“Vucic, go away,” the crowd chanted outside the building.

Responding to the protests in an address to the nation Sunday evening, Vucic told Serbs not to worry “because there is no revolution happening.”

“They won’t be able to accomplish anything with this, and let us try not to hurt any of the random demonstrators by reacting mildly, peacefully,” Vucic said, according to Radio Television of Serbia.

The protests come as Vucic’s government is facing growing international pressure to investigate reports of electoral irregularities during last week’s vote.

The OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) said the election day had been “marked by numerous procedural deficiencies.” The German Foreign Office said the findings were “unacceptable for a country with EU candidate status.”

The CRTA Election Observation Mission, an independent organization based in Belgrade, reported that “voter migration” – whereby people were transported “from other regions in Serbia and from abroad” to vote in specific municipalities – “might have been used on a large scale to influence the outcomes of the local elections.”

Andreas Schieder, an Austrian member of the European Parliament, said “the news about buses of non-residents coming to vote in Belgrade is shocking. Theft of votes, bribery and corruption must not be allowed in a democratic world.”

Student groups in Belgrade announced they will stage a six-hour blockade of traffic in two parts of the city on Monday, as they continue to demand the annulment of the elections.

Without providing evidence, the Kremlin alleged that the protests were being stirred by unnamed foreign entities hoping to incite unrest in Serbia.

“There are processes and attempts by third forces, including from abroad, to provoke such unrest in Belgrade. This is what we are seeing,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters Monday.

Separately, Vucic met with Russian Ambassador Aleksandar Bocan-Harchenko in Belgrade. According to Russian state media TASS, the Russian ambassador said after the meeting that Vucic has “irrefutable data that there is incitement and support from the West.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday sent a message of congratulations to Vucic, extending his wishes for “peace and prosperity” for the people of Serbia.

Israeli soldiers raiding a hospital in northern Gaza desecrated the bodies of dead patients with bulldozers, let a military dog maul a man in a wheelchair, and shot multiple doctors even after vetting them for terror links, according to allegations by staff and patients.

The claims relate to an eight-day operation by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) at the Kamal Adwan Hospital last week, which the military alleges was being used as a command and control center by Hamas.

They paint a disturbing picture of how the IDF carried out the operation, as doctors were interrogated for their connections to Hamas and staff struggled to treat patients trapped inside.

The IDF says that Hamas hides terrorist infrastructure in and around civilian institutions in Gaza, such as hospitals, and that targeting them is essential as it works to eliminate Hamas from the Gaza Strip. But its operations are contentious, with humanitarian organizations saying that medical facilities in Gaza are rendered unable to provide basic services.

Among the most serious allegations relating to the IDF’s operations at Kamal Adwan is that, as troops were leaving the hospital complex, they used bulldozers to dig up bodies that had recently been buried in makeshift graveyards in the hospital’s courtyard.

“The soldiers dug up the graves this morning and dragged the bodies with bulldozers, then crushed the bodies with the bulldozers,” said the hospital’s head of pediatric services, Hossam Abu Safiya, in a phone interview on Saturday. “I have never seen such a thing before.”

The allegation was supported by the hospital’s head of nursing, Eid Sabbah, and another nurse, Asmaa Tanteesh.

Satellite imagery taken on December 15 – right before the IDF withdrew from the hospital area – shows razed grounds outside the hospital complex.

Earlier this week, the IDF released a video of the interrogation of the hospital’s director and published an accompanying statement saying he admitted it was being used for military purposes. It was unclear whether the statement was elicited under duress.

Abu Safiya, the pediatrics director, and Sabbah, the chief nurse, countered that the hospital only provided medical services and that the arrestees were civilians and medical workers.

What we know about the operation at Kamal Adwan

The Israeli military’s focus on Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza appears to have begun over a week ago, with strikes and shelling in the area of the hospital, whose Facebook page says it falls under the administration of the Ministry of Interior, which in Gaza is run by Hamas.

Since the Israel-Hamas war began, the hospital has also sheltered and treated wounded and displaced Gaza civilians, according to its social media pages and eyewitnesses

The next day, Israeli forces demolished the hospital complex’s western wall, according to Abu Safiya, who said soldiers addressed the hospital with loudspeakers, instructing any men sheltering inside to come out.

What happened after that was “beyond nightmares” for those who remained in the hospital, he said.

According to Abu Safiya, he and four other doctors were allowed to remain and care for 62 people at the hospital, including several infants. As he described the week, he rushed to speak, fearing that the cell phone signal might drop as it often does in Gaza these days.

Surrounded by Israeli troops, and with parts of the complex badly damaged by shelling, there was no care he could offer, he said. The hospital was out of food, water, electricity, and milk for children and had hardly any medicine left to give.

Tanteesh, the nurse, recalls begging for water to no avail, she said. Israeli troops were “half a meter away from us and surrounding us in the courtyard. We had no water, our throats were dry and we were thirsty and begging them just for a glass of water from the morning till evening,” she said.

Some children died during the Israeli operation at the hospital, she said, adding that nurses tried diluting milk with a salt solution to try to feed more of the hospital’s youngest patients.

The Hamas-controlled Ministry of Health in Gaza demanded that human rights organizations urgently open an investigation into what it called the “massacre of Kamal Adwan Hospital, where children were besieged without water, food, electricity, and water for extended periods.”

World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on Sunday alleged that Israeli forces’ “effective destruction” of Kamal Adwan over the last several days had caused the deaths of at least eight patients, including a 9-year-old child.

Why Israel carries out operations at hospitals

Israel has focused enormous attention on Gaza’s hospitals since it began its ground offensive at the end of October. In justification, it has sought to present what it says is proof of Hamas’s use of medical facilities as military centers and has invited news media to film tunnels with underground rooms located beneath Gaza’s largest hospital, Shifa. It has also shown journalists weapons it says were found at other hospitals.

Evidence of militant activity found at Kamal Adwan, according to the IDF, included “numerous weapons including AK-47s, RPGs, explosive devices, Nukhba (Hamas commando) military equipment, technological equipment, and Hamas intelligence documents.”

On Tuesday, the IDF and Israel’s security service released an edited interrogation video of Kamal Adwan’s director Al Kahlot in Israeli custody. A statement accompanying the video said Al Kahlot admitted that Hamas uses hospitals for military purposes and to being a part of the organization. However, it is unclear how Israeli officials elicited Al Kahlot’s statement, and whether it was truthful or made under duress.

The International Committee of the Red Cross generally considers the release of interrogation footage of prisoners of war to be a violation of the Geneva Convention’s statue on protecting POWs from “public curiosity.”

“We told them there weren’t any resistance fighters in the hospital, and no one listened to us,” Tanteesh said.

The guns that they were pictured with had belonged to hospital security guards, according to Abu Safiya and Sabbah. “I saw with my own eyes that the army asked the displaced civilian youth and the medical team to carry the weapons of the security guards that were left in the hospital guard room, and they took pictures of them in front of me,” Abu Safiya said.

“They shot at me and laughed”

Abu Safiya also described multiple incidents where he alleges Israeli troops deliberately tormented people they knew were not suspects.

Trapped inside Kamal Adwan, Abu Safiya says he watched both wounded colleagues and his son crawl along the road until an ambulance made its way to them and carried them to a different hospital, he said.

In another instance, Abu Safiya alleges that he himself became a target after soldiers called him in the early morning hours on Friday to check on some movement outside the hospital for them.

Following their orders, he found a wounded elderly man lying on the ground in front of the building. But as Abu Safiya tried to approach the man, he says, the watching soldiers started firing. “They shot at me and laughed and jeered,” he said.

“I escaped their gunfire, but they called me again and asked me to take him inside again,” he said. He finally brought the man inside, but it was too late. The man could not be treated in the hospital due to lack of medical resources, and later died from his injuries, Abu Safiya said.

And in another incident, Israeli military dogs wearing cameras were sent into the hospital for reconnaissance, according to Abu Safiya. One of the dogs “attacked and mauled” a wheelchair-bound elderly man before being called off, he said.

“The man screamed in pain. Children and women cried from the horror of the scene. I couldn’t help anyone. This scene was beyond nightmares,” he said. “One of their soldiers came to take the dog and was laughing at the old man and what the dog did to him.”

The IDF did not address those claims in its statement but said that its operation around the hospital was targeted on Hamas.

Another hospital under siege

While hospitals as a category are protected by international law, they may be viewed as legitimate military targets if found to be housing able-bodied combatants and weapons.

But even when that’s the case, soldiers have ethical and legal constraints in their handling of civilians. The presence of weaponry or wounded combatants at a hospital do not necessarily make it a legal military target.

Article 19 of the Geneva Convention states that “the fact that sick or wounded members of the armed forces are nursed in these hospitals, or the presence of small arms and ammunition taken from such combatants which have not yet been handed to the proper service, shall not be considered to be acts harmful to the enemy.”

In its statement, the IDF said it had questioned workers at the hospital. “The workers confessed that weapons were hidden in incubators in the NICU, incubators that were supposed to be used to treat premature babies. Following the questioning, IDF troops located weapons, classified documents, and tactical communications equipment.”

As Israel’s repeated military action in and around hospitals in Gaza continues, it faces increasingly fierce criticism, with medical workers and NGOs warning that the raids endanger patients and leave hospitals nonfunctional.

“Gaza’s health system was already on its knees, and the loss of another even minimally functioning hospital is a severe blow. Attacks on hospitals, health personnel and patients must end,” Ghebreyesus, the WHO chief, said Sunday of Kamal Adwan.

Despite growing international criticism from some of Israel’s staunchest allies over the growing civilian toll in the hospitals and anywhere else in Gaza, Israel has not changed course in its military pursuit of Hamas. On Tuesday, medical charity Doctors Without Borders said that another hospital in northern Gaza, Al-Awda, was under siege by Israeli troops with patients still inside.