As Serhiy Ostapenko hunkered down in his pickup truck, hiding under trees for cover in the dead of night, the crashing booms of Russian bombardment rumbled around him.

“The enemy is shelling us 24 hours a day. I don’t remember the last time there was silence for more than an hour,” said the 32-year-old Ukrainian drone pilot, speaking from the right bank of the Dnipro River in southern Ukraine – one of the new frontlines in a grinding war that’s now entering its second winter.

Ostapenko is a member of the “Sons of Thunder” drone unit, part of Ukraine’s operation to cross the Dnipro, pushing back Russian forces and establishing a sustained presence on the left bank. Earlier this month, Ukraine said it had “gained a foothold” on the bank, a potentially significant advance in what has so far been a lackluster counteroffensive.

Advancing on the Dnipro

The 2,200 kilometer (1,400 mile) long Dnipro is Europe’s fourth longest river, flowing from Russia, through Belarus and Ukraine to the Black Sea.

It winds through the marshlands of Russian-occupied Kherson region – with Russian troops forced to retreat across the river last November after being pushed out from Kherson city by Ukrainian fighters.

The liberation of the city, after eight months of brutal occupation, was a euphoric victory and a key moment in Ukraine’s war effort. But the year since has brought little relief, with Kherson city and its surrounding region still under relentless bombardment by Russian forces across the river.

The Dnipro, which at some points stretches a mile wide, serves as a natural defensive barrier for Russian troops – which is partly why it has become a major target for Kyiv. Ukrainian forces have previously staged cross-river raids, but establishing a firm bridgehead across the river and pushing back the Russians could help better protect Kherson city by putting more distance between civilians and enemy artillery.

And – at least theoretically – an advance on the left bank could give Kyiv a launching place to push further south toward occupied Crimea, the peninsula Russia illegally annexed in 2014.

Ukrainian armed forces say they’ve pushed back Russian troops 3 to 8 kilometers (2 to 5 miles) back from the river.

“Now our (troops) are advancing on the other side of the Dnipro. It is very difficult, we are making a lot of effort to make it possible and to build up our strength on the other side of the Dnipro,” said Ostapenko.

He added that “certain connections” had been established across the river, allowing Ukrainian troops to transport “weapons, ammunition, food, fuel” to their partners “on the other side.”

His aerial reconnaissance unit, meanwhile, works to provide cover for soldiers crossing the river, to surveil Russian troops and movements, and to help mask the locations of Ukrainian troops and equipment.

It’s dangerous work; Ostapenko described facing a daily barrage of “kamikaze drones, I think it’s Shaheds, rockets, most likely Grad rocket launcher, mortars, and tanks.”

But, he added, the bombardment could be seen as a good sign: “The enemy is trying to resist as much as possible, which indicates that we are doing everything right. We are causing them many problems, and (they are) trying to fight it.”

‘We have to survive’

All the while, in Kherson city, the jubilation of last year’s liberation has faded for some residents as they focus on just getting through each day.

“When it is quiet, it is even scarier than when there is shelling,” said 54-year-old Inna Balyoha. “You’re waiting, you’re constantly listening, turning the radio down. So that you can hear the sounds outside the window, so that you can react in time to the shelling.”

She’s one of roughly 73,000 residents still in Kherson – less than a quarter of its original population of 300,000. Between having to care for her 4-year-old grandson and frail 87-year-old mother, “the decision not to leave was made a long time ago,” she said.

But living in the midst of war has taken its toll. One of her grandson’s first words was “alarm,” she said. “He knows how to react if there is an air raid siren. He knows where to go. If explosions are heard outside the window, he has a little hiding place in the hallway.”

The shelling has gotten so bad that they’ve stopped going outside for short walks, mostly staying at home now. “Right now, I’m doing everything that depends on me to keep the child safe,” she said. “Our main task is to survive. That was the main task during the occupation. And it is now. We have to survive.”

Attacks on Kherson have intensified in the past month, at one point reaching 700 incoming rounds in one day, according to Oleksandr Prokudin, the head of Kherson region’s military administration.

Russian troops are “hitting residential areas more often because our defenders are advancing, and they are trying to intimidate ordinary citizens in places close to the Dnipro River,” said Prokudin. “This is revenge, and now it is felt more, because our soldiers are already on the left bank of the Kherson region. The civilians of the Kherson region feel this revenge more.”

But, he added, each Kherson resident was an “example of courage.” As tough as conditions are, Kherson is still free from Russian occupation – meaning people can “communicate freely, walk freely on our land,” he said. “Home gives people strength. They are holding on because they are at home.”

The incident happened in July 2018 over the small town of Bouloc, near the city of Toulouse in the country’s southwest, according to an investigation report published by the French Bureau of Enquiry and Analysis for Civil Aviation Safety in 2020.

“A collision occurred between the first wingsuit skydiver and the aircraft’s left wing, a few seconds after he jumped out of the plane. The wingsuit skydiver died upon impact,” the report said.

The Swiss-made Pilatus PC-6 aircraft was carrying 10 skydivers and one coach, and the 40-year-old male victim was the first to jump out of the plane, according to the report.

The pilot thought he had moved away from the skydivers’ descent path after doing a left turn, but only seconds later, he felt a heavy shock “and realized that he had hit one of the skydivers,” the report said.

The second skydiver was wearing a camera, which filmed the whole process of the crash, according to the report.

Several factors could have contributed to the crash, including a lack of on-board briefing between the skydivers and the pilot, and the aircraft’s immediate steep descent, controlled by the pilot who did not have visual contact with the wingsuit skydivers.

The pilot, who was 58 years old at the time of the accident, was flying alone that day, in breach of his medical certificate, which prohibited him from flying solo, according to the report.

The Midi-Pyrénées Skydiving School Association, which organized the event and employed the pilot at the time, told the Bureau of Enquiry and Analysis for Civil Aviation Safety that they had amended their documentation and applied recommended measures, record shows.

The pilot has also been given a one-year flying ban by the court.

Between 2015 and 2020, 13 people died during wingsuit skydives in France, according to a report by the National Mountain Safety Observation System.

When the Seychelles government announced it would allow a Canadian company to explore for oil in its waters in September 2022, it said it hoped it would never have to extract the oil.

“We’re hoping that whilst we do the exploration, all these promises will be fulfilled,” Ramkalawan said, meaning they could leave the oil in the ground. But, he added, “at the end of the day, it’s about survival.”

While not among the poorest developing countries, the Seychelles highlights a paradox faced by many in the Global South: How to grow their economies and cope with the expenses of climate-fueled disasters they did least to cause, while also responding to international pressure to stop burning fossil fuels.

It’s into this space that Sultan Al Jaber has stepped — the Emirati minister and businessman who will preside over the UN-backed COP28 climate talks in Dubai starting on November 30.

Al Jaber’s appointment as COP28’s leader has been met with fierce criticism among some media organizations, civil society groups and even politicians in the Global North. That’s because, while he serves as the UAE’s climate envoy and head of its renewables company, he also runs the state-owned Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC). More than 100 members of the US Congress and the European Parliament in May called for him to be replaced as COP28 president-designate.

But Al Jaber’s decision to focus on increasing finance to help developing countries shift to renewable energy is helping his popularity in the Global South.

“The money must flow smoothly and fast to where it needs to go so that the Global South does not have to choose between climate action and development,” Al Jaber told delegates at a pre-COP opening ceremony in Dubai, in October.

For some leaders, this contrasts with a string of broken promises on finance from developed countries.

Countries in the West “promise and don’t deliver, but yet they tell you ‘you have to keep protecting the planet,’” Ramkalawan said. He said the UAE has funded wind and solar plants in the Seychelles, adding, “I think the commitment of the UAE speaks volumes.”

Under Al Jaber’s leadership at the pre-COP28 talks, countries reached an agreement on how to run a “loss and damage” fund that would provide some money to developing countries to pay for the outsized impacts of climate change they have experienced.

It was a welcome development for some after the rich world had for two years failed to deliver the annual $100 billion to developing nations that it agreed back in 2009. That money was supposed to reach the most climate-vulnerable countries by 2020 to help them tackle and adapt to the climate crisis. Even though the goal was finally reached in 2022, developing nations say it’s nowhere near enough.

But many critics have cited the UAE’s plans to expand production of planet-heating fossil fuels as a conflict of interest in the COP28 talks.

ADNOC plans to invest $150 billion into scaling up its operations over the next five years. It is currently expanding its production capacity, aiming for 5 million barrels of oil a day by 2027, while the UAE government has said it plans to extract its very last barrel of oil 50 years from now, when its reserves are projected to dry up. That’s despite scientists saying society should be winding down oil and gas use now.

Struggling to keep up

Like the Seychelles, Kenya too is facing the challenge of how to cope with the expenses of climate-fueled disasters and rapidly scale up renewable energy without adequate funding.

The UAE recently pledged $4.5 billion to finance clean energy projects across Africa. And in June, Masdar — the state-owned renewables firm founded by Al Jaber — was part of a group that signed a deal worth $10 billion to develop a 10GW wind farm in Egypt, billed as the biggest on the continent.

“We are spending inordinate resources to try and manage the effects of climate change,” Ruto said. He referred to Kenya’s catastrophic multi-year drought, which scientists found was made 100 times more likely by the burning of planet-heating fossil fuels.

Even if the Global North has finally delivered the promised $100 billion of annual funding, it’s still a drop in the ocean compared to what some experts say is needed to help developing countries cope with the escalating impacts of the climate crisis and transform energy systems. A 2022 UN-backed report calculated developing countries will need about $2 trillion a year by 2030.

Harjeet Singh, the head of global political strategy for the Climate Action Network, said the reality is Western nations have not delivered.  “We have seen the West only being extractive and very opportunistic, and actually kept developing countries dependent on fossil fuels,” he said.

But others are more skeptical.

Sanim Vakil, the director of the Middle East North Africa Program at Chatham House, said ultimately, the UAE is looking to protect its interests in the energy transition.

The spokesperson said the COP28 team was committed to “ambitious, achievable, and substantial action,” which means, “holding back emissions, not progress, by ensuring energy security, accessibility, and affordability. Otherwise, we risk slowing down socio-economic progress and undermining support for ambitious climate action.”

Violent clashes broke out between police and “far-right” protesters in the central part of Dublin, Ireland, on Thursday after a knife attack in the capital city earlier in the day left three children and two adults injured.

Irish police said they arrested 34 people after the riots. Speaking during a press conference Friday, Garda (police) Commissioner Drew Harris said police could “not have anticipated” that the stabbings would have triggered “such disorder.”

Harris told journalists that a 5-year-old child remains in a “very serious condition” and a female teacher is in a “serious condition.”

“These are scenes that we have not seen in decades. But what is clear is that people have been radicalized through social media,” he said. On Thursday, Harris described the rioters as “a complete lunatic hooligan faction driven by far-right ideology.”

Video on social media earlier Thursday appeared to show a group of men clashing violently with officers in Dublin and setting a police car on fire. A man could also be seen in the footage holding a sign reading, “Irish Lives Matter.” Some protesters can be heard on video chanting anti-immigrant slogans, including: “Get them out.”

The clashes came after a man in his 50s was detained by police after he allegedly stabbed several people, including the girl who is receiving emergency treatment. Police have not revealed the nationality of the suspect. The incident took place in Parnell Square, in the city’s center, according to police.

The Irish police said they weren’t considering terrorism as a motive for the violence.

Speaking Friday, the police chief detailed the extent of the “huge destruction” caused by what he said was a “riotous mob,” with video showing rioters looting shops including one of Dublin’s major department stores.

According to Harris, four buses and one tram were destroyed and 11 police vehicles damaged. Thirteen shops in the city center were also seriously damaged, according to the police chief. One police officer was seriously injured in the clashes, Harris said.

A large number of rioters also tried to smash through the police cordon and “disrupt” the crime scene, he said.

A large police presence will be deployed in Dublin city center on Friday, with Harris encouraging shoppers and workers to come into the city as normal.

“We cannot allow the city to be given over to the thugs, the looters and the arsonists,” the police chief said.

European Union Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said she was “shocked” by the knife attack, according to a statement on X. Similarly, Ireland’s deputy prime minister said he was “deeply shocked by the serious incident in Dublin.”

In a statement on X shortly after the incident, Sinn Fein Leader Mary Lou McDonald said the violent attack “has sent shock and horror throughout the community.”

Ireland’s Justice Minister Helen McEntee described the protesters as “thugs” and “criminals” who were “using this appalling attack to sow division and wreak havoc in the city.”

A truce between Israel and Hamas that was scheduled to begin at 7 a.m. local time (12 a.m. ET) Friday is believed to be holding, with civilian hostages held captive by militants expected to be released in the coming hours as part of a breakthrough diplomatic deal following an uneasy day-long delay.

The pause in fighting, part of the carefully negotiated agreement announced Wednesday, appeared to be taking effect despite what sounded like sporadic Israeli artillery fire and sirens warning of rockets from Gaza in the minutes after it was due to begin.

They heard what sounded like small arms fire inside Gaza about 20 minutes later, but artillery fire, airstrikes and rockets appear to have stopped.

Two hundred trucks “loaded with food, medicine and water,” as well as others transporting fuel would cross into the Gaza Strip each day starting Friday, Diaa Rashwan, the chairman of Egypt’s State Information Service said that morning.

Sixty-seven Palestinians who got stuck in Egypt during the war traveled back into Gaza via the Rafah border crossing on Friday, hours after the truce went into effect. More Palestinians will be allowed to cross into the Strip starting Saturday if they wish to do so, the Palestinian embassy in Cairo said.

The first hostage release from Gaza is scheduled to take place later Friday, when 13 women and children held captive in Gaza are expected to be freed, mediators in Qatar said the previous day. Thirty-nine Palestinian prisoners would also be released by Israel Friday as part of the deal, according to an Israeli official.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it has completed preparations for receiving hostages released from Gaza back into Israel, including readying several locations with medical provisions and support for their initial reception.

The implementation of the four-day truce would mark the first sustained break in hostilities after nearly seven weeks of conflict – and the first expected large-scale release of hostages.

The agreement followed mounting pressure on the Israeli government from the families of the hostages, who have demanded answers and action from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

It also comes amid growing international pressure for more humanitarian support for the people of Gaza, where the number of people killed since October 7 now stands at 14,854, according to information from Hamas authorities in the Strip.

Israel declared war on Hamas following the militant group’s bloody October 7 terror attack on its territory, in which more than 1,200 people were killed – the largest such attack on Israel since the country’s founding in 1948.

Militants are holding more than 200 people captive inside Gaza from mass abductions that day, according to figures from the Israeli military.

The IDF said Friday that they destroyed a number of tunnels underneath the Al-Shifa Hospital area in Gaza City they believe are used by Hamas and completed “operational preparations” according to the agreed truce, ahead of its anticipated start.

Israel’s defense minister said he expects the military operation against Hamas will continue “forcefully” after the truce.

Expected hostage release

Under terms previously announced by Qatar, a total of 50 of those hostages, women and children, are expected to be freed over a four-day humanitarian pause in fighting.

The first batch of hostages is expected to be released from Gaza at around 4 p.m. local time Friday and handed to the International Committee of the Red Cross, Qatar Foreign Ministry spokesperson Majid Al-Ansari said Thursday ahead of the pause.

Israel’s Ministry of Welfare and Social Affairs has released detailed instructions on how to care for released hostages who are children, advising IDF troops on how to interact with them in the moments following their release.

“Children will ask questions such as, ‘Where’s Mum? Where’s Daddy?’ Soldiers should not answer these questions, even if they know the answers. Any questions should be answered along the lines of, ‘Sweetheart, I’m sorry, I don’t know. My job is to bring you to Israel to a safe place, where people you know will be waiting for you and will answer all your questions,’” the advice says.

The deal also includes the further release of 150 prisoners during the four-day period, according to Israel. There is also the potential for an extension and more releases in the days following the currently agreed pause. Most of the prisoners concerned are male teenagers, along with some women, according to an Israeli government list of those who could be released.

The total number of Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails is approximately 8,300, according to Qadura Fares, the head of the Palestinian Prisoners Club, a non-governmental organization.

Of those, more than 3,000 are being held in what Israel calls “administrative detention,” which Amnesty International says can be extended indefinitely.

Humanitarian aid

The truce has been seen as an opportunity to ramp up humanitarian support to Gaza, though Qatari foreign ministry spokesperson Al-Ansari on Thursday warned “it would be a fraction of the need.”

The enclave has been struggling with severe shortages of basic supplies, food and fuel amid power outages and bombardment, with humanitarian groups and governments saying the levels of aid allowed in in past weeks were insufficient.

Israel has been highly reluctant to allow fuel into Gaza since October 7, citing concerns Hamas will use it to power its operations, even as aid groups say it’s critical for cooking food and maintaining operations at hospitals. Last week it agreed to allow minimal deliveries.

Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, said in a statement Friday that four fuel tankers and four tankers of cooking gas crossed into Gaza through the Rafah Crossing.

“The fuel and cooking gas are designated for operating essential humanitarian infrastructure in Gaza” and was approved by the Israeli government as part of the truce, the statement said.

Oscar Pistorius will be released on parole in January, prison authorities said Friday, nearly 11 years after the former South African Paralympic sprinter murdered his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp.

Pistorius shot Steenkamp four times through the bathroom door of his house in 2013, denying that he killed her in a fit of anger and saying instead he had mistaken her for an intruder. He was originally sentenced to 13 years and five months imprisonment.

The athlete – known as the “Blade Runner” for his carbon-fiber prosthetic legs and once feted as an inspirational figure after competing in the 2012 Olympics – became the center of a trial that was followed around the world.

During the trial, Pistorius pleaded not guilty to one charge of murder and a firearms charge associated with Steenkamp’s killing.

Prosecutors argued her killing was deliberate and that the shooting happened after the couple had an argument.

He frequently broke down in court and his past behavior was closely scrutinized.

Pistorius was convicted of manslaughter in 2014 and sentenced to five years. But a higher court overturned the conviction and changed it to murder a year later, increasing his sentence to six years in prison.

The ruling was appealed by prosecutors who claimed the sentence was too lenient. Pistorius’ sentence was increased to 13 years and five months by South Africa’s Supreme Court of Appeal in 2017.

Nimi Princewill and Niamh Kennedy contributed to this report.

This is a breaking news story and will be updated.

It began with a law about heat pumps. It ended with stones being thrown at politicians and a surge in popularity for the far right.

For an example of how climate change is increasingly becoming a flashpoint in the culture wars, Germany is a good place to start.

A proposed law — championed by the Green Party, part of the coalition government — aimed to ban almost all new heating systems that run on oil and gas in favor of more energy-friendly heat pumps.

The backlash was swift and severe. Already stretched by soaring food and energy prices, many Germans feared the law would translate to huge upfront costs for homeowners — fears stoked and weaponized by the populist far right-party Alternative for Germany, or AfD.

Dubbing it Heizhammer — “heating hammer” — they framed the law as an unaffordable luxury pushed by the out-of-touch elite “moving into your house and deciding what you can and can’t do,” said Miranda Schreurs, professor of environment and climate policy at the Technical University of Munich.

Anger morphed into protests, then violence. In September, Green politicians were pelted with stones during an election event in southern Germany. The next month, the AfD surged in the state elections. Despite eventually pushing through a weakened version of the law, it was a disaster for the government.

As climate solutions and policies move from the abstract to the personal — our cars, our food and how we keep our homes warm — it has created fertile ground for anger and fear, and has fanned the flames of a culture war long in the making.

Those who push these narratives often divide the world into “virtuous” ordinary people on one side, and corrupt, indifferent “elites” on the other, said Stephan Lewandowsky, professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Bristol.

As British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak watered down key climate targets in September, for example, he rebranded himself a defender of motorists against the “ideological zeal” of climate advocates.

“I am slamming the brakes on the war on motorists,” Sunak said in a video posted on X, as he delayed a ban on selling new gas and diesel cars.

Similar rhetoric has been used in other parts of Europe. In the run-up to Poland’s recent elections, the populist right-wing Law and Justice party claimed the opposition wanted to ban meat and force people to eat worms.

Meanwhile, Spain’s far-right Vox party vowed to defend the country against “the new climate religion.”

But to understand why climate change and the culture wars have become so enmeshed globally, experts say the United States probably holds the key.

‘An agenda to control you’

Standing in front of a West Texas oil rig in September, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican candidate for president, described the Democrats’ climate and clean energy policies as an all-out assault on freedom.

“This is all part of an agenda to control you; and to control your behavior,” DeSantis said. “They are trying to limit your choices as Americans, they’re trying to circumscribe your ambitions.”

This rhetoric is dark, but it’s not new. The same speech could have been made by an American conservative decades ago, said Michigan State University sociologist and climate expert Aaron McCright. “And why has it stuck around? It’s effective, it does scare people.”

The origins of the climate culture war in the US lie in the early 1990s, when a new push for global climate action collided with big geopolitical change, McCright said.

In 1992, more than 100 countries agreed to tackle planet-heating pollution in a treaty which was extended by the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, compelling major developed nations to lower their climate pollution from coal, oil and gas.

Around the same time, the Soviet Union collapsed, leaving a vacuum for a common enemy among Americans.

“The communist menace that people on the American right have railed against for decades is gone, and there’s no more boogeyman,” McCright said. The environmental agenda was, in many ways, a perfect replacement.

Climate “became the stand-in for everything that’s wrong with the government,” he said. “‘You can’t tell me what I can and can’t do on my land. Federal government — stay away from me.’”

At the same time, fossil fuel companies, which knew about the climate impact of their products as early as the 1970s, according to a slew of studies, pumped huge amounts of money into undermining climate science, Lewandowsky said. “They started a propaganda campaign very early.”

These events shattered a brief moment of bipartisan consensus on climate. Republican politicians — who had previously been mostly aligned with Democrats on these issues — started to vote en masse against climate action.

The public followed In 1992, there was a gap of just 5 percentage points between Republicans and Democrats on support for environmental protection, according to a 2012 study from Pew Research Center. By 2012, that gap had ballooned to 39 percentage points.

“If you went into a coma in ’88 and you woke up in ‘95,” McCright said, “you’d probably wake up going ‘what the heck happened?’”

In December 2022, a Democratically controlled Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act, the largest climate bill in US history. It was largely a tax incentive package to encourage people to buy discounted electric cars, electric stoves, solar panels and energy-efficient heating and cooling systems — all carrot and no stick.

Not one Republican voted for it.

Lightning rod for right wing media

Conservative media has played an outsized role in fueling culture war narratives, according to experts.

When progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts introduced the Green New Deal in 2019, a nonbinding resolution aimed at tackling the climate crisis, it became a lightning rod for right-wing media.

“The most radical, dangerous policy proposal offered in modern history,” “economic enslavement,” an “eco-fascist” proposal — these were just some of the responses in right-wing publications and on TV networks.

Watching Fox News’ coverage of the Green New Deal, you would think “you were going to not be able to have hamburgers, your travel was going to be radically restricted, your freedom of movement was getting taken away,” said Allison Fisher, director of the climate and energy program at progressive media watchdog group Media Matters.

Fox has “been laying the groundwork necessary for positioning climate policies as a culture war issue for a long time,” she said. The network’s message has been simple and effective, she added — the “idea that the radical left has manufactured the climate crisis to seize control of every aspect of American life.”

This narrative taps into a defining fear of people on the political right, said Lewandowsky, the psychology professor. “If you’re a conservative or libertarian, then climate change is hell,” he said, because dealing with it means taxes, regulation and bigger government, and for some, “that is extremely challenging at a deep, emotional and intellectual level.”

Even in countries like the UK, which tend to be less polarized and hostile toward big government, the conservative media has also been whipping up division over climate, said Ed Matthew of climate think tank E3G.

The aim is to make climate action controversial, Matthew said, “and that’s a very dangerous game to play.”

Winning social acceptance

While there is plenty of polling in the US and Europe that shows most people believe climate change is a threat and that they are broadly supportive of climate action, there is still an “incredible gulf” between recognizing the problem and doing something substantive about it, said Jennie King, a climate disinformation expert at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue think tank.

This chasm has become wider as the cost of living soars, with many countries teetering on the brink of recession and there are genuine fears about who will pay for climate action.

Governments trying to pass climate laws find themselves in a bind: Push bold agendas at the risk of backlash — fueled by those who gain from stoking fear and opposition — or go slowly and put the world even more off track to limit catastrophic global warming and secure a livable climate.

Germany — where, for a moment, a heat pump threatened to tear apart the government — is something of a cautionary tale, said Matthew of E3G. The country tried “bringing in regulation really so fast that people just weren’t ready,” he said, giving far-right parties the chance to exploit it and garner support.

The key to rapidly transforming economies to slash planet-warming pollution will be “bringing society along and winning social acceptance,” Schreurs said. But, she added, “it’s not going to be easy.”

Betar, who works at the local polytechnic college, said those restrictions became a chokehold the day Hamas militants from Gaza attacked Israel, killing at least 1,200 people. The 47-year-old is one of thousands of Palestinians living in nearly a dozen neighborhoods in Israeli-controlled areas of Hebron, who have been effectively “imprisoned at home” by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) since October 7, according to Israeli human rights group B’Tselem.

A full curfew was imposed that day on those neighborhoods, which surround Hebron’s old city, where Palestinians were not allowed to leave their homes, according to B’Tselem and other residents. It was partially lifted two weeks later, allowing Palestinians to leave the area between 8 and 9 a.m. and return home between 4 and 5 p.m. on Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday, said Betar.

Residents and activists have complained about running out of food, adults missing work, of being fearful and facing threats from settlers for opening their windows or letting their children out onto the street, and being prevented from returning home in time for curfew as they attempt to pass some of the dozens of checkpoints that populate the area.

When Betar’s wife fell ill and was struggling to breathe last week, the curfew prevented the couple from walking out to see a doctor, so an ambulance had to be called. “I am not allowed to open my door or my window… I called the ambulance, and they arrived after two hours and 57 minutes exactly,” he said, explaining that the medics had to gain Israeli permission to enter the area and navigate a series of checkpoints to get to his home.

The IDF said there had been “a significant increase in terrorist attacks” in the West Bank since the war began and that its troops had been conducting “nightly counterterrorism operations to apprehend suspects, some of them are part of the Hamas terrorist organization.”

While it did not address the curfew directly in the statement, the IDF said that “as part of the security operations in the area, dynamic checkpoints have been put up over different places. The mission of the IDF is to maintain the security of all residents of the area, and to act to prevent terrorism and activities that endanger the citizens of the State of Israel.”

Increased separation

Israel has occupied the West Bank since seizing the territory from Jordanian military occupation in 1967. It later agreed to transfer limited control over parts of the territory to the Palestinian Authority, after agreements signed in the 1990s. But Israel has continued to build settlements there, considered illegal under international law, encroaching into land that Palestinians and the international community view as territory for a future Palestinian state. Israel views the West Bank as “disputed territory,” and contends its settlement policy is legal.

The West Bank has seen a surge in settler attacks this year, including one that an Israeli military commander called a “pogrom.” The issue has concerned United States officials, with President Joe Biden saying that the US was prepared to issue visa bans against “extremists attacking civilians in the West Bank,” in a Washington Post op-ed over the weekend.

Even by the standards of the West Bank, the situation in Hebron is complicated. A predominantly Palestinian city, it has Israeli settlements right in the center. The result is both a physical and legal segregation between the hundreds of Jewish settlers and the thousands of Palestinians who live on the streets around the old city.

As Betar’s home is meters away from one of the West Bank’s most contested and holiest places, known to Jews as the Cave of the Patriarchs and to Muslims as the Ibrahimi Mosque, he is restricted from turning right when he exits his front door.

His neighborhood began to hollow out after a 1994 massacre when a Jewish settler walked into the Ibrahimi Mosque and killed 29 people, say residents, prompting Israel to introduce a policy of separation in the area, according to a 2019 United Nations report.

That policy hardened following the second Palestinian intifada between 2000 and 2005 and increasing Jewish settler-Palestinian violence that saw the deployment of new checkpoints, restrictions on the movement of Palestinians and closure of shops.

Thousands of Palestinians have since been forced to leave the area amid the settler attacks and “constant raids and incursions into their homes by Israeli forces, which often include the temporary takeover of parts of the homes,” the report added.

The old city is now a warren of restrictions and limits for the Palestinians living there. Some areas around Israeli settlements and the Jewish side of the Cave of Patriarchs, close to Betar’s home, have been entirely closed off to Palestinians for decades, according to a map by B’Tselem and conversations with residents.

The Palestinian population in the area has meanwhile shrunk to an estimated 33,000 people, says Sadot, B’Tselem’s spokesperson, and she and other activists worry restrictions are being used as a pretext to push Palestinians out altogether.

The post-October 7 restrictions are “not happening in a political vacuum,” Sadot said. Last year, Israel gained its most right-wing government in history, with some government ministers, like National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, supporting the annexation of the West Bank. Ben Gvir himself lives in Kiryat Arba, a settlement on the outskirts of Hebron.

‘An unannounced war’

The restrictions on Palestinians’ movement are in stark contrast to the freedoms afforded an estimated 700 hardline Jewish settlers, living in areas of the old city and still free to move about with the military’s protection. They are also accused of behaving with impunity and violence towards Palestinians and their property.

“They were IDF soldiers,” he said, adding that Amro “should be behind bars, he’s a criminal of the worst kind – just happens to be a front, a slick with liberal language.”

Amro’s attorney, Sfard, said in the statement that “if there was a shred of evidence that he has been engaging in any criminal activity he would immediately be sent for a long time in prison. The fact that Issa is not in prison means that all the efforts by the settlers and their supporters and by the occupation to frame him have all failed. All they have left is to incite and spread lies about Issa.”

The West Bank has thousands of years of Jewish history and many Jewish holy sites; religious-national settlers, like those in Hebron, believe these have always been part of the Land of Israel, as promised to the Jewish people in the Old Testament. Settlers believe Hebron should be under Israeli sovereignty as “it is an integral part of Jewish history,” Fleisher said.

About 500,000 Jewish settlers now live in the West Bank, according to Peace Now, an Israeli group that advocates for peace and monitors settlements. Many of these settlements are heavily guarded, fenced-off areas that are completely off limits to Palestinians.

Most of the world considers these settlements illegal under international law and Israel has been criticized for allowing their expansion – and, in some cases, supporting them with tax breaks and state-funded security.

A ghost town

The once-bustling market streets and thoroughfares now stand empty, apartment windows are closed and covered in metal grates, and a dead cat lies decomposing on a road.

Palestinian resident Ahmad, who declined to provide his last name for fear of repercussions, says his family moved to the area when he was seven. Even back then, it was too dangerous for Palestinian children to play outside, he said, adding: “It was not a childhood.”

In “normal” times, the threat of settler attacks was high, but now his family is too scared to leave their home, he said. “It’s a really dangerous thing, the settlers really hate us,” he said.

The curfew introduced after October 7 left him unable to work until November, depleting his savings, he said. He now stays with relatives in the Palestinian-controlled side of Hebron during the week, so he can earn an income as a barista, and bring home food when the checkpoints open on Sunday.

Betar grew up in the home he currently lives in, as did his father and grandfather. It is why he is refusing to leave. The past month has however pushed him to the brink.

His house has no yard, so he had fenced up the roof so his five children could run around. But since the Hamas attacks, soldiers on roof positions have told them to remain inside the house.

It now takes him hours to do a simple supermarket shop due to the three checkpoints he has to pass to get home, in narrow timeslots.

He could instead walk across the road from his house to the café and souvenir shop. But Betar is not allowed in as the road itself is closed to Palestinians. Meanwhile, visitors, settlers and soldiers freely use the cafe.

“We’ve had enough ­­–– we want to enjoy our lives as any person in the West,” he said.

The shock election results in the Netherlands have taken Europe by surprise, and left many onlookers unsure exactly what happens next.

Far-right populist Geert Wilders and his Freedom Party (PVV) are now seeking to form a government after an unexpectedly big win in Wednesday’s national vote.

Wilders and the PVV might have won the most seats (a forecast 37 out of a total 150), but it’s unclear if they have enough support to form a coalition government.

While the results show an overall victory for parties on the right, Wilders’ anti-Islam, anti-immigration, anti-European Union and Ukraine-skeptic manifesto was widely perceived to be beyond the pale for the center-right Freedom and Democracy Party (VVD) of outgoing Prime Minister Mark Rutte.

The most obvious path to office for Wilders is a coalition with the VVD, which came third with 24 seats, and New Social Contract, a Christian conservative party that followed with 20 seats, according to a provisional forecast based on 98% of the votes counted. A joint Labour/Green ticket finished second in the election, with 25 seats.

What that potential coalition government would actually look like is also unclear. It would be very unusual for a party that comprehensively won the most seats to be locked out of government. It is possible that Wilders could take a job that doesn’t place him at the head of the government, though that would presumably mean some serious compromises on his policy platform.

Beyond those immediate concerns, there are questions as to what Wilders’ victory means for the direction of Dutch and European politics more broadly.

The rise of European populism is not exactly new. Italy currently has its most right-wing government since the end of the Second World War and Slovakia re-elected the left-wing populist Robert Fico to office in September.

The EU is generally good at containing these sorts of leaders. In some cases it can soften their impact by dangling financial carrots or assistance with policies aimed at domestic audiences, such as border control.

However, having them inside the tent can also lead to problems.

The EU tends to make decisions by unanimous votes, meaning every member state has a veto. This allows countries to whack the rest of the bloc over the head over very domestic matters, in some cases blocking the whole EU budget – over a trillion euros.

Having more than one delinquent in the club also means they can gang up. This can happen both in the Council – which is made up of ministers and leaders from national governments – and in the European Parliament, where parties on the right or left from different countries form alliances.

The right in particular is very good at this and has increased its influence at a Brussels level considerably in recent years. This is partly why Wilders’ threats of leaving the EU might not actually be Brussels’ biggest headache.

Euroskeptics these days, as a whole, don’t want to leave the EU – they want to run it instead. Partly, it’s because they like the economic benefits of being in the EU. And if they continue increase their political power within the European bloc, they will have a lot of very big toys to play with on the world stage.

Other Euroskeptic leaders have already congratulated Wilders with speed and obvious joy.

“The winds of change are here! Congratulations to Geert Wilders on winning the Dutch elections,” Hungarian PM Viktor Orban said late on Wednesday.

“It is because there are people who refuse to see the national torch extinguished that the hope for change remains alive in Europe,” French far-right leader Marine Le Pen said.

Even if Wilders is unable to implement the more radical parts of his manifesto and is contained by Europe more broadly, concerns remain about what his success does the rest of European politics. Populist victories tend to drag others further to the right.

The most obvious examples of this are in France, where President Emmanuel Macron has aped anti-Islam rhetoric in order to not be outflanked by Le Pen, and in the United Kingdom, where the center-right Conservative Party is almost unrecognizable after 13 years in power and the influence of Brexit.

The other concerns are that Wilders is somehow locked out of government or decides to martyr himself, rather than sell out in office. In Italy, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has not been quite the radical right-wing firebrand some feared when she took power in 2022, and has to some extent been contained by the EU. She is, therefore, seen as a sellout by others on the right.

It’s often those who don’t hold office who can be the biggest influence in politics. Nigel Farage, the man who played a huge role in dragging the British Conservatives to the right and taking the UK out of the EU, has never been in parliament, let alone government. He is still threatening to eat the anti-immigration vote.

At the annual Conservative Party conference earlier this year, Farage was greeted like a hero by a number of delegates, despite being arguably the biggest threat to the party.

It’s very hard to predict what will happen in the coalition talks taking place in the Netherlands, or what the next Dutch government might actually look like. But these results really are a shock to many Europeans and we really are in new territory.

Space scientists seeking to understand the enigmatic origins of powerful cosmic rays have detected an extremely rare, ultra-high-energy particle that they believe traveled to Earth from beyond the Milky Way galaxy.

The energy of this subatomic particle, invisible to the naked eye, is equivalent to dropping a brick on your toe from waist height, according to the authors of new research published Thursday in the journal Science. It rivals the single most energetic cosmic ray ever observed, the “Oh-My-God” particle that was detected in 1991, the study found.

Cosmic rays are charged particles that travel through space and rain down on Earth constantly. Low-energy cosmic rays can emanate from the sun, but extremely high-energy ones are exceptional. They are thought to travel to Earth from other galaxies and extragalactic sources.

“If you hold out your hand, one (cosmic ray) goes through the palm of your hand every second, but those are really low-energy things,” said study coauthor John Matthews, a research professor at the University of Utah.

“When you get out to these really high-energy (cosmic rays), it’s more like one per square kilometer per century. It’s never going through your hand.”

Despite years of research, the exact origins of these high-energy particles still aren’t clear. They are thought to be related to the most energetic phenomena in the universe, such as those involving black holes, gamma-ray bursts and active galactic nuclei, but the biggest discovered so far appear to originate from voids or empty space — where no violent celestial events have taken place.

Tracking high-energy cosmic rays

The recently discovered particle, nicknamed the Amaterasu particle after the sun goddess in Japanese mythology, was spotted by a cosmic ray observatory in Utah’s West Desert known as the Telescope Array.

The Telescope Array, which started operating in 2008, is made up of 507 ping-pong table-size surface detectors covering 700 square kilometers (270 square miles).
It has observed more than 30 ultra-high-energy cosmic rays but none bigger than the Amaterasu particle, which struck the atmosphere above Utah on May 27, 2021, raining secondary particles to the ground where they were picked up by the detectors, according to the study.

“You can look …(at) how many particles hit each detector and that tells you what the energy of the primary cosmic ray was,” Matthews said.

The event triggered 23 of the surface detectors, with a calculated energy of about 244 exa-electron volts. The “Oh My God particle” detected more than 30 years ago was 320 exa-electron volts.

For reference, 1 exa-electron volt equals 1 billion gigaelectron-volts, and 1 gigaelectron volt is 1 billion electron volts. That would make the Amaterasu particle 244,000,000,000,000,000,000 electron volts. By comparison, the typical energy of an electron in the polar aurora is 40,000 electron volts, according to NASA.

An ultra-high-energy cosmic ray carries tens of millions of times more energy than any human-made particle accelerator such as the Large Hadron Collider, the most powerful accelerator ever built, explained Glennys Farrar, a professor of physics at New York University.

“What is required is a region of very high magnetic fields — like a super-sized LHC, but natural. And the conditions required are really exceptional, so the sources are very very rare, and the particles are dissipated into the vast universe, so the chances of one hitting Earth are tiny,” said Farrar, who wasn’t involved in the study, via email.

The atmosphere largely protects humans from any harmful effects from the particles, though cosmic rays sometimes cause computer glitches. The particles, and space radiation more broadly, pose a greater risk to astronauts, with the potential to cause structural damage to DNA and altering many cellular processes, according to NASA,.

Mysterious source

The source of these ultra-high-energy particles baffles scientists.

Matthews, a co-spokesman for the Telescope Array Collaboration, said the two biggest recorded cosmic rays appeared “sort of random” — when their trajectories are traced back, there appears to be nothing high-energy enough to produce such particles. The Amaterasu particle, specifically, seemed to originate from what’s known as the Local Void, an empty area of space bordering the Milky Way galaxy.

“If you take the two highest-energy events — the one that we just found, the ‘Oh-My-God’ particle — those don’t even seem to point to anything. It should be something relatively close. Astronomers with visible telescopes can’t see anything really big and really violent,” Matthews said.

“It comes from a region that looks like a local empty space. It’s a void. So what the heck’s going on?”

An expansion to the Telescope Array may provide some answers. Once completed, 500 new detectors will allow the Telescope Array to capture cosmic ray-induced particle showers across 2,900 square kilometers (about 1,120 square miles) — an area nearly the size of Rhode Island, according to the University of Utah statement.