Xi Jinping has a plan for how the world should work, and one year into his norm-shattering third term as Chinese leader, he’s escalating his push to challenge America’s global leadership — and put his vision front and center.

That bid was in the spotlight like never before last month in Beijing, when Xi, flanked by Russian President Vladimir Putin, United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres, and some two dozen top dignitaries from around the world, hailed China as the only country capable of navigating the challenges of the 21st century.

“Changes of the world, of our times, and of historical significance are unfolding like never before,” Xi told his audience at the Belt and Road Forum. China, he said, would “make relentless efforts to achieve modernization for all countries” and work to build a “shared future for mankind.”

Xi’s vision — though cloaked in abstract language — encapsulates the Chinese Communist Party’s emerging push to reshape an international system it sees as unfairly stacked in favor of the United States and its allies.

Viewed as a rival by those countries as its grows increasingly assertive and authoritarian, Beijing has come to believe that now is the time to shift that system and the global balance of power to ensure China’s rise — and reject efforts to counter it.

In recent months, Beijing has promoted its alternative model across hefty policy documents and new “global initiatives,” as well as speeches, diplomatic meetings, forums and international gatherings large and small — as it aims to win support across the world.

For many observers, this campaign has raised concern that a world modeled on Beijing’s rules is also one where features of its iron-fisted, autocratic rule — like heavy surveillance, censorship and political repression — could become globally accepted practices.

But China’s push comes as American wars overseas, unstable foreign policy election-to-election, and deep political polarization have intensified questions about US global leadership. Meanwhile pressing issues like climate change, Russia’s war in Ukraine and Israel’s assault on Gaza have sharpened discussion over whether the West is taking the right approach to respond.

All this coincides with longstanding calls from countries across the developing world for an international system where they have more say.

Many of those countries have substantially enhanced their economic ties with Beijing during Xi’s rule, including under a decade of his up to $1 trillion global infrastructure building drive, which leaders gathered to celebrate last month in the Chinese capital.

It remains to be seen how many would welcome a future that hews to China’s worldview — but Xi’s clear push to amplify his message amid a period of unrelenting tensions with the Washington elevates the stakes of the US-China rivalry.

And as the procession of world leaders who have visited Beijing in recent months, including for Xi’s gathering last month, make clear: while many nations may be skeptical of a world order pitched by autocratic China — others are listening.

‘Shared future’

A more than 13,000-word policy document released by Beijing in September outlines China’s vision for global governance and identifies what it sees as the source of current global challenges: “Some countries’ hegemonic, abusive, and aggressive actions against others … are causing great harm” and putting global security and development at risk, it reads.

Under Xi’s “global community of shared future,” the document says, economic development and stability are prioritized as countries treat each other as equals to work together for “common prosperity.”

In that future, they’d also be free of “bloc politics,” ideological competition and military alliances, and of being held responsible for upholding “‘universal values’ “defined by a handful of Western countries,” the document says.

“What the Chinese are saying … is ‘live and let live,’ you may not like Russian domestic politics, you might not like the Chinese political regime — but if you want security, you will have to give them the space to survive and thrive as well,” said Yun Sun, director of the China program at the Stimson Center think tank in Washington.

This vision is woven through three new “global initiatives” announced by Xi over the past two years focusing on development, security and civilization.

The initiatives echo some of Beijing’s long-standing talking points and are largely short on detail and heavy on rhetoric.

But together, analysts say, they present a case that a US-led system is no longer suited for the current era — and signal a concerted push to reshape the post-World War II order championed by it and other Western democracies.

That current international framework was designed to ensure, in theory at least, that even as governments have sovereignty over their countries, they also share rules and principles to ensure peace and uphold basic political and human rights for their populations.

China has benefited from that order, supercharging its economy off World Bank loans and expanded opportunities under the World Trade Organization, which Washington backed Beijing to join in 2001 in the hope it would help liberalize the Communist country.

Just over two decades later, Beijing is chafing under it.

The US and its allies have watched warily as Beijing has not only grown economically competitive, but increasingly assertive in the South China Sea and beyond and more repressive and authoritarian at home.

This has driven Washington’s efforts to restrict Chinese access to sensitive technology and impose economic sanctions, which Beijing sees as bald-faced actions to suppress and contain it.

The US and other nations have decried Beijing’s intimidation of the self-ruling democracy of Taiwan and tried to hold it to account for alleged human rights violations in Tibet, Hong Kong, and Xinjiang, the latter of which a UN human rights office last year said could amount to “crimes against humanity” — a charge Beijing denies.

In response, Xi has ramped up longstanding efforts to undercut the concept of universal human rights.

“Different civilizations” had their own perceptions of shared human “values,” Xi told leaders of political parties and organizations from some 150 countries earlier this year as he launched China’s “Global Civilization Initiative.” Countries wouldn’t “impose their own values or models on others” if China were setting the agenda, he implied.

This builds on Beijing’s argument that governments’ efforts to improve their people’s economic status equates to upholding their human rights, even if those people have no freedom to speak out against their rulers.

It also links to what observers say is growing confidence among Chinese leaders in their governance model, which they see as having played a genuinely positive role to foster economic growth globally and reduce poverty — in contrast to a US that has waged wars, sparked a major global financial crisis and faces fraught politics at home.

“All this makes China think America is quickly declining,” said Shanghai-based foreign policy analyst Shen Dingli, who says this feeds Xi’s drive not to overturn the existing world order, but revamp it.

Beijing, he added, sees the US as merely “paying lip service” to the “liberal order” to hurt other countries.

“(China asks) ‘who is more prone to peace and who is less capable of leading the world?’ This has beefed up China’s self-image, (and this idea that) ‘We are great and we should be greater — and we should let the world realize it’s our time,’” he said.

Who’s listening?

For strongmen leaders and autocratic governments, Xi’s vision has obvious appeal.

While Russia’s Putin, accused of war crimes and continuing his brutal invasion of neighboring Ukraine, and Afghanistan’s Taliban leaders are shunned in the West, both were welcomed to Xi’s table of nations in Beijing last month.

Just weeks earlier, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad — who has been accused of using chemical weapons against his own people — was feted at the Asian Games in Hangzhou, where he arrived on a Chinese-chartered jet and visited a famous Buddhist temple.

A headline in the state-run Global Times portrayed Assad’s visit as one from the leader of a “war-torn country respected in China amid Western isolation” — providing a glimpse into the through-the-looking glass scenarios that could become the norm if Xi’s world view gains traction.

But Beijing’s broader argument, which implies that a handful of wealthy, Western countries hold too much global power — resonates with a wider set of governments than just those at loggerheads with the West.

Those concerns have come into sharper focus in recent weeks as global attention has focused on Israel’s relentless assault on Gaza following the October 7 attack on its territory by Hamas. The US has been in the minority opposed to broad global backing for an immediate humanitarian truce — and its support of Israel is seen in much of the world as enabling the country to continue its retaliation, despite mounting civilian casualties.

In recent years, even some countries that have for decades embraced a close partnership with the US have drawn closer to China and its vision.

“Pakistan aligns with Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s view that a new global era is emerging, characterized by multipolarity and a departure from Western dominance,” said Ali Sarwar Naqvi, a former Pakistani ambassador, now executive director of the Center for International Strategic Studies in Islamabad.

But there are also many governments that also remain wary of its politics and ambitions, or of appearing to side with Beijing over the West.

“We relate to the West, we relate to the East … We maintain a straight line, we don’t compromise our friendship with all people,” he said.

And while others may be ready to back China in calling for a more representative international system — there are questions about what that means under Beijing’s leadership.

“China can count on Brazil day and night to say that multilateralism is important, and we have to revisit global governance … however, there’s a very important ‘but,’” according to Rubens Duarte, coordinator of LABMUNDO, a Brazil-based research center for international relations.

He points to questions circulating within some countries, like Brazil, about why China is now championing concepts promoted in the Global South for 70 years — and claiming them as its own.

“Is China really trying to promote multipolarity — or does China just want to (become a) substitute (for) US influence over the world?” he asked.

Expanding ambitions

For decades, China has built its international influence around its economic clout, using its own rapid transformation from a deeply impoverished country to the world’s second largest economy as a model it could share with the developing world.

It was in this vein that Xi launched his flagship Belt and Road financing drive in 2013, drawing dozens of borrowing nations closer to Beijing and expanding China’s international footprint a year after he became leader with the pledge to “rejuvenate” the Chinese nation to a place of global power and respect.

“China’s traditional (foreign policy) thinking was very heavily focused on economic capability as the foundation for everything else. When you become an economic power, you also naturally acquire greater political influence and soft power, et cetera — everything else will fall in line,” said Tong Zhao, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace think tank in Washington.

But as China’s economic rise has come alongside geopolitical friction with the US and its allies, Beijing has seen the need to expand its vision “and tackle geopolitical issues as well,” Zhao added.

The war in Ukraine has only heightened this dynamic. China’s key economic partners in Europe tightened ties with the US and reassessed their relationships with Beijing after it refused to condemn the Kremlin’s invasion, while at the same time Washington shored up relations with allies in Asia.

This “served as a wake-up call to the Chinese that the great power competition with the United States, ultimately, is about (winning over) the rest of the world,” said Sun from the Stimson Center in Washington.

Then, faced with mounting pressure from the West to condemn Moscow’s invasion of a sovereign country, Beijing instead used the moment to argue its own view for global security.

Two months after Russian troops poured into Ukraine, Xi announced China’s “Global Security Initiative,” declaring at an international conference that “bloc confrontation” and “Cold War mentality” would “wreck the global peace framework.”

It was an apparent reference not to the Russian aggressor, but to NATO, which both Moscow and Beijing have blamed for provoking the war in Ukraine.

Xi’s words were far from new for Beijing, but Chinese diplomats in the following months ramped up their promotion of that rhetoric, for example calling on their counterparts in Europe’s capitals, as well as the US and Russia, to build a “sustainable European security architecture,” to address the “security deficit behind the (Ukraine) crisis.”

The rhetoric appeared to catch on, with Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva days after returning from a state visit to China this spring calling on Washington to “to stop encouraging war.”

This gets to the heart of Beijing’s aims, which experts say are not to build its own alliances or use its military might to guarantee peace in volatile situations, as the US has done.

Rather, it looks to cast doubt on that system, while projecting its own, albeit vague, vision for countries ensuring peace through dialogue and “common interests” — a phrasing that again pushes back against the idea that countries should oppose one another based on political differences.

‘“If a country … is obsessed with suppressing others with different opinions it will surely cause conflicts and wars in the world,” senior military official Gen. Zhang Youxia told delegations from more than 90 countries attending a Beijing-led security forum in the capital last month.

Beijing has said its model is already successful, pointing to its role brokering a restoration of ties between longtime rivals Saudi Arabia and Iran in March. It also dispatched an envoy to the Middle East following the outbreak of the latest conflict, pledging to “make active efforts” to de-escalate the situation — though Beijing’s readouts of his trip made no mention of any stop in Israel or Palestine.

“If we don’t (push back), China is going to creep and creep into what is within our sovereign jurisdiction, our sovereign rights and within our territory,” he said.

Alternative architecture

Beijing’s effort to broadcast its vision to reshape the world order is enabled by an extensive network of international organizations, regional dialogues and forums that it has cultivated in recent decades.

Bolstering those groups — and positioning them as alternative international organizations to those of the West — has also emerged as a key part of Xi’s strategy to reshape global power, experts say.

This summer both the China and Russia-founded Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) security grouping and the BRICS group of emerging economies increased their numbers – and acted as a platform for Xi to promote his brand of geopolitics.

Countries should “reform global governance” and stop others from “ganging up to form exclusive groups and packaging their own rules as international norms,” Xi told leaders from Brazil, Russia, India, and South Africa after they invited Argentina, Egypt, Iran, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to join BRICS — the group’s first expansion since 2010.

Weeks later, he appeared to underline his preference for his own alternative architecture — skipping out on the Group of 20 summit hosted by New Delhi, where US President Joe Biden and other Group of Seven leaders were in attendance.

But besides the splashy, high-profile events on China’s diplomatic calendar, officials are also broadcasting China’s vision and pitching its new initiatives throughout ministerial or lower-level regional dialogues with counterparts from Southeast Asia to Latin America and the Caribbean — as well as topical forums on security, culture and development with international scholars and think tanks, official documents show.

So far, China has appeared to have little trouble getting dozens of countries to at least cursorily back aspects of its vision — even if it’s typically not clear who all these supporters are or whether their backing comes with any tangible commitment.

China’s Foreign Ministry earlier this year claimed more than 80 countries and organizations had “expressed approval and support” for the Global Security Initiative.

According to Beijing, the economic-focused “Global Development Initiative,” launched in 2021 to support United Nations sustainability goals, boasts some 70 countries in its “Group of Friends” — hosted under the auspices of the UN.

This chimes with China’s long-held strategy to win broad backing for its position against that of Western countries in the UN and other international organizations, where Beijing has also been pushing for a bigger role.

But in addition to how much tangible support Beijing can garner, a key hanging question also remains over whether Xi’s ambitions are limited to efforts to dominate the global narrative and shift the rules in China’s favor or if he wants to truly assume a role as the world’s dominant power.

There is a broad gap between China’s power and military capacity relative to that of the US — and the potential for an ailing economy to slow its rise.

For now, experts say, China appears focused on shifting the rules to undercut American credibility to intervene or hold countries to account for domestic issues — be they civil conflicts or human rights violations.

Success doing that could have implications for how the world responds to any potential future move it could take to gain control of Taiwan — the self-ruled, democratic island the Communist Party claims.

But China’s actions in Asia, where its military has become increasingly assertive, while decrying US military presence, suggest to many observers that Beijing does hope to dominate the region.

They also raise questions about how a more militarily and economically powerful China would behave globally, if left unchecked.

China, however, has denied ambitions of dominance.

“There is no iron law that dictates that a rising power will inevitably seek hegemony,” Beijing said in its policy document in September. “Everything we do is for the purpose of providing a better life for our people, all the while creating more development opportunities for the entire world.”

Then, in an apparent reference to its own belief, or hope, for the trajectory of the US, it added: “China understands the lesson of history — that hegemony preludes decline.”

Scientists based in China have created a monkey chimera with two sets of DNA, experimental work they say could ultimately benefit medical research and the conservation of endangered species.

The monkey, which lived for 10 days before being euthanized, was made by combining stem cells from a cynomolgus monkey — also known as a crab-eating or long-tailed macaque, a primate used in biomedical research — with a genetically distinct embryo from the same monkey species. It’s the world’s first live birth of a primate chimera created with stem cells, the researchers said.

A proof-of-concept study detailing the research, which published Thursday in the scientific journal Cell, said it was notable that the monkey was “substantially chimeric,” containing a varying but relatively high ratio of cells that grew out of the stem cells throughout its body.

“It is encouraging that our live birth monkey chimera had a big contribution (of stem cells) to the brain, suggesting that indeed this approach should be valuable for modeling neurodegenerative diseases,” said study coauthor Miguel Esteban, principal investigator at the Guangzhou Institute of Biomedicine and Health, Chinese Academy of Sciences and a researcher with BGI-Research Hangzhou, a nonprofit arm of Chinese genetics firm BGI.

“Monkey chimeras also have potential enormous value for species conservation if they could be achieved between two types of nonhuman primate species, one of which is endangered,” he added. “If there is contribution of the donor cells from the endangered species to the germ line, one could envisage that through breeding animals of these species could be produced.”

History of chimeras in research

The term chimera originated from the monstrous hybrid creatures that populate Greek myths, but chimeric mice were first created in the 1960s and have been commonly used in biomedical research.

Chimeric lab mice allow scientists to track how normal cells interact with genetically altered or mutated cells, which is useful for understanding biological processes and disease. But there are limitations with research on mice that make pursuing efforts with monkeys worthwhile, the scientists said.

“Mice don’t reproduce many aspects of human disease for their physiology being too different from ours. In contrast, human and monkey are close evolutionary, so human diseases can be more faithfully modeled in monkeys,” said senior study author Zhen Liu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

More controversial are human-animal chimeras, which contain some human cells, and some cells from other species. Scientists have created mouse embryos that are part human, and in 2021, scientists reported that they had grown human-monkey chimeric embryos.

Scientists hope that part-human chimeras may one day help to fill the demand for organ transplants. In September, researchers reported that they had grown kidneys containing mostly human cells inside pig embryos.

Liu said at a news briefing that it would be crossing an ethical red line to attempt to produce a monkey-human chimera beyond early embryonic stages of development.

Making a monkey chimera

The team cultured nine stem cell lines using cells removed from 7-day-old monkey embryos. The researchers made the cells pluripotent — giving them the ability to organize into all the different cell types needed to create a live animal.

Then they selected a subset of cells to inject into genetically distinct 4- to 5-day-old embryos from the same monkey species. The cells were also infused with a green fluorescent protein so the researchers would be able to determine which tissues had grown out of the stem cells.

The embryos were implanted into female monkeys, resulting in 12 pregnancies and six live births. One of the monkeys that was born and one fetus that was miscarried were “substantially chimeric,” containing cells that grew out of the stem cells throughout their bodies, according to the study.

“This is an important study, but I wouldn’t consider it’s a breakthrough as the chimeras generated are not viable,” said Jun Wu, an associate professor in molecular biology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.

He added that the team also hadn’t been able to demonstrate that the stem cells used to generate the chimeras were inheritable by offspring — something that would be necessary to generate monkey disease models for medical research. Wu wasn’t involved in the study but has worked on human-animal chimeras.

The percentage of stem cells in the monkey’s tissue ranged from 21% to 92%, with an average of 67% across the 26 different types of tissue that were tested, according to the study. The percentage was notably high in brain tissue.

“It is a very good and important paper,” said Jacob Hanna, a professor of stem cell biology and embryology at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel who was not involved with the study.

“This study may contribute to easier and better making of mutant monkeys, just like biologists have been doing for years with mice,” Hanna added. “Of course, work with (nonhuman primates) is slower and much harder but is important.”

The ethics of medical research on monkeys

The use of monkeys in scientific research is a contentious issue because of ethical concerns about animal welfare. The team said it followed Chinese laws and international guidelines governing the use of nonhuman primates in scientific research.

Penny Hawkins, head of animals in science at the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, said that she was “deeply concerned about the inherent animal suffering and wastage associated with the application of these technologies to sentient animals.”

She noted that 40 female macaque monkeys had embryos implanted, of which only 12 led to pregnancies. Six of these resulted in live births, but only one had the desired genetic makeup. A vet euthanized it after 10 days due to respiratory failure and hypothermia.

In the United States, research on nonhuman primates made up 0.5% of all animals used in scientific research, according to a report by the panel of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine released in May.

The panel found that research involving monkeys, because of their similarities to people, had been critical to lifesaving medical advances, including the creation of vaccines against Covid-19. The report also concluded that a shortage of nonhuman primates had negatively affected research necessary for both public health and national security.

A panorama of colliding galaxy clusters glimmers in a new image, captured by the combined forces of the two most powerful space observatories ever created.

The cosmic phenomenon, called MACS0416, is 4.3 billion light-years from Earth. Eventually, the merging pair of giant clusters will combine to form an even more massive collection of glittering galaxies.

New details of the celestial feature have emerged in the colorful image, which unites the observational powers of Hubble Space Telescope in visible light and the James Webb Space Telescope in infrared light, which is invisible to the human eye.

Together, the renowned observatories present a more comprehensive look at the universe. Hubble has long been used to search for faint, distant galaxies across different wavelengths of light. Webb’s infrared gaze enables that search to occur at even farther distances, detecting invisible light deeper into the early days of the universe.

A light-year, equivalent to 5.88 trillion miles, is how far a beam of light travels in a year. Given the distance between Earth and the objects from the early days of the universe, when telescopes such as Webb observe this light, it’s effectively like looking into the past.

“We are building on Hubble’s legacy by pushing to greater distances and fainter objects,” said Rogier Windhorst, regents professor in Arizona State University’s School of Earth and Space Exploration, in a statement.

Windhorst is the principal investigator of the PEARLS, or Prime Extragalactic Areas for Reionization and Lensing Science, program that conducted the Webb observations.

A ‘Christmas tree’ of galaxies

The colors in the new image, released Thursday, are used to indicate distance. Blue-hued galaxies are the closest, bursting with star formation and easily seen in visible light by Hubble. The red galaxies are more distant, best detected by Webb in infrared light.

“The whole picture doesn’t become clear until you combine Webb data with Hubble data,” Windhorst said.

The new Webb observations were used to search for objects that change in brightness over time, called transients.

Within the galactic clusters’ field of view, Webb helped astronomers identify 14 transients, all of which were visible due to gravitational lensing. This cosmic effect occurs when closer objects — such as the galactic clusters — act like a magnifying glass for distant objects. Gravity essentially warps and amplifies the light of distant galaxies in the background of whatever is doing the magnifying, enabling observations of otherwise invisible celestial features.

The transients include 12 stars or star systems and two supernovas in galaxies that were amplified using gravitational lensing.

“We’re calling MACS0416 the Christmas Tree Galaxy Cluster, both because it’s so colorful and because of these flickering lights we find within it. We can see transients everywhere,” said Haojing Yan, associate professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Missouri. Yan is lead author of one study describing the findings that has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal.

Spotting a stellar giant

One transient in particular captured the attention of astronomers, a star system they have nicknamed “Mothra,” the titular giant monster of a 1961 Japanese film. The stellar system, magnified by a factor of 4,000 due to gravitational lensing, was traced to a galaxy that existed 3 billion years after the big bang created the universe.

The team nicknamed the star system Mothra due to its extreme magnification and brightness.

Surprisingly, Mothra has appeared before, detected in Hubble observations nine years ago. Astronomers are stumped as to how this happened, because there must be a specific alignment between the galactic cluster and the more distant star to cause the magnification at a point in time. So how did Mothra also appear magnified in the new Webb observations?

“The most likely explanation is a globular star cluster that’s too faint for Webb to see directly,” said José Diego, researcher at the Institute of Physics of Cantabria in Spain and lead author of another paper describing the finding, published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. “But we don’t know the true nature of this additional lens yet.”

Three-year-old Joudi hasn’t uttered a word in 16 days, her father says. Wearing a gray dress adorned with a picture of an ice cream cone, she stares ahead, a vacant look in her eyes, while sitting in bed at al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City.

Her forehead is wrapped in bandages, a piece of shrapnel still lodged in her head.

She was injured when her family was fleeing their home in Al Karama Towers in northern Gaza City. They were trying to get to the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood, believing they would be safer there, when an airstrike hit a car next to theirs.  

Gaza, the Palestinian enclave of more than 2 million people, has been under bombardment by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) for more than three weeks, following the gruesome October 7 terrorist attacks in Israel by Hamas, the militant group that governs the territory.

More than 1,400 Israelis and foreigners, including dozens of children, were killed in that attack, with over 220 others taken hostage, according to Israeli authorities.

The civilian death toll from the ensuing Israeli airstrikes, which the IDF says are targeting Hamas, has been enormous.

Nearly 8,000 Palestinians, including around 3,300 children, have been killed so far, according to the Hamas-controlled Ministry of Health in Ramallah, which compiles figures from Gaza.

Save the Children, working off those numbers, says more children have been killed in the last three weeks in Gaza than during armed conflict worldwide each year since 2019.

More than 20,000 people are injured, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Ramallah.

The IDF has told civilians to leave northern Gaza, where much of the strikes are focused, and flee south. But not everyone is in a position to leave and the journey is dangerous, especially with Israeli bombardment in parts of the south as well as the north.

Civil order ‘starting to break down’

On Sunday, UNRWA, the United Nations relief agency that works with Palestinian refugees, said “thousands” of desperate people breached its warehouses and took basic items, including wheat, flour and hygiene products.

A warehouse in Deir al-Balah was one of those breached, UNRWA said.

“This is a worrying sign that civil order is starting to break down after three weeks of war and a tight siege on Gaza. People are scared, frustrated and desperate,” said Thomas White, director of UNRWA Affairs in Gaza.

He said that aid currently allowed into Gaza does not cover the basic needs of the communities that are fighting for survival.

The Palestinian Red Crescent said on Sunday that only 118 trucks loaded with supplies have reached Gaza since some aid was allowed through the Rafah border crossing with Egypt last week – the only way into the enclave at the moment.

Another 59 trucks arrived at the border on Monday morning.

But that amount is a drop in the ocean, aid groups say.

The UN said 455 trucks used to come to Gaza each day before the war. The IDF said Sunday that it expects more aid trucks to begin entering Gaza soon, and denied that there were shortages of food, water or medicine, despite the complete closure Israel imposed on the territory in response to the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel.

“We have established a joint mechanism with the U.N., the U.S. and Egypt to facilitate the access of humanitarian assistance from Egypt to Gaza,” Elad Goren, Head of Civil Affairs Department for COGAT (Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories), said in a briefing, adding: “We have a lot of concerns about what is on those trucks so we are inspecting…We will see more trucks and the amount will be much higher in the next few days.”

The already grim humanitarian situation was made worse by a near-total communication blackout that started on Friday and lasted into Sunday morning

“Even if they were subjected to shelling, or to be killed or wounded, I wouldn’t know anything,” he said.

Dahman said on Monday that his parents were safe.

Hospital urged to evacuate

Meanwhile, people being treated at al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, including 3-year old Joudi, have found themselves facing more risk.

The IDF on Friday accused the hospital of being the site of a major Hamas command and control center. The IDF said Hamas was directing rocket attacks and commanding operations from bunkers underneath the hospital building – a claim Hamas has denied.

“When medical facilities are used for terror purposes, they are liable to lose their protection from attack in accordance with international law,” Hagari said in a briefing, appearing to suggest al-Shifa Hospital was on Israel’s target list.

For now, Joudi and hundreds of other injured children are staying put in the hospital.

Doctors are trying their best to save as many people as possible, but the conditions are getting more difficult by the hour. The hospital, designed for 700 patients, has been treating 5,000 people every day, according to local health authorities.

Patients are lying on the floors and in the corridors as more casualties flood the hospital, officials say and videos from the hospital show. Fuel shortages and the communications blackout are making the situation even worse.

Joudi’s family has a short video of her, filmed not too long ago. It shows her wearing a pink, princess-like dress and a sparkling tiara. She looks shy at first, then puts on a broad smile for whoever is behind the camera.

Both Hamas and Israel have committed war crimes in the past month, the United Nations human rights chief said, as thousands of Palestinians fled south amid Israel’s intensifying offensive against the Islamist militant group.

“The atrocities perpetrated by Palestinian armed groups on October 7 were heinous, brutal and shocking, they were war crimes – as is the continued holding of hostages,” said Volker Türk, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

“The collective punishment by Israel of Palestinian civilians amounts also to a war crime, as does the unlawful forcible evacuation of civilians,” he added.

Israel declared war on Hamas on October 7 after militants killed 1,400 people in Israel and kidnapped about 240 others, according to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

The ensuing Israeli assault on Gaza has plunged the strip into crisis, with mass displacement and severe shortages of food, water, fuel and medical supplies.

The IDF has repeatedly called on civilians to move to the southern half of the strip to avoid the fighting, and has opened daily evacuation corridors to allow them to do so, as it intensifies attacks on Hamas in Gaza City and northern Gaza, saying it would strike the militants “wherever necessary.”

That has caused a growing exodus in the past week of Palestinians fleeing south; on Wednesday thousands of people, including women, children and the elderly, traveled miles on foot along the evacuation corridor announced by the IDF.

Speaking Wednesday, Türk urged both sides to agree to a ceasefire to allow the delivery of aid to Gaza, the release of hostages by Hamas, and “the political space to implement a durable end to the occupation.”

“Even in the context of a 56-year-old occupation, the current situation is the most dangerous in decades faced by people in Gaza, in Israel, in the West Bank but also regionally,” he said.

The Israeli military has pushed back against accusations of war crimes, saying its strikes on Hamas targets followed international law and sought to minimize civilian casualties.

Israel’s attacks have killed at least 10,515 people and injured more than 26,000 others in Gaza since the war began, according to a Wednesday report by the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Ramallah, drawing from sources in the Hamas-controlled enclave.

Türk delivered his comments after visiting the Rafah crossing on the Gaza-Egypt border – the only border crossing not controlled by Israel. In recent weeks, it has been opened to allow the limited entry of aid, and the exit of foreign nationals and severely injured Palestinians from Gaza.

He said the Rafah crossing is a symbolic lifeline for the more than 2 million people in Gaza and called for more aid to be delivered, saying: “The lifeline has been unjustly, outrageously thin.”

“In Rafah I have witnessed the gates to a living nightmare,” he said in a statement. “A nightmare where people have been suffocating, under persistent bombardment, mourning their families, struggling for water, for food, for electricity and fuel.”

The main UN agency operating in Gaza said Thursday it was able to deliver medical supplies to Al-Shifa hospital, Gaza’s largest medical facility, “despite huge risks to our staff and health partners due to relentless bombardments.”

The UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) described the conditions in the hospital as “disastrous,” saying there were almost two patients for every bed.

Hospital wards are overflowing, with patients being treated on the floor, and tens of thousands of displaced Gazans seeking shelter in the facility’s parking lots and yards, it said.

Aid organizations have also highlighted the dangers of delivering supplies within Gaza. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) on Tuesday said its convoy had come under fire but did not apportion blame. Two trucks were damaged in the attack and a driver sustained minor injuries, the ICRC said.

The Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) later said Israel was responsible for firing on the convoy.

A thick layer of toxic foam has once again coated parts of a sacred river near New Delhi as the Indian capital battles an acrid and noxious smog that has settled across the city.

The white froth, a mixture of sewage and industrial waste, has formed over sections of the Yamuna River – a tributary of the holy Ganges River – which flows about 855 miles (1,376 kilometers) south from the Himalayas through several states.

The pungent foam contains high levels of ammonia and phosphates, which can cause respiratory and skin problems, according to experts. Its latest arrival has coincided with hazardous levels of pollution that have sickened many of New Delhi’s more than 20 million residents and forced primary schools and some offices to close.

A similar looking mixture has appeared in a canal in India’s southern Tamil Nadu state, according to the Press Trust of India. Video published by the news agency on Thursday shows strong gusts of wind carrying the froth onto the roads and into the paths of cars and motorcycles.

For decades, sections of the Yamuna have been plagued by the dumping of toxic chemicals and untreated sewage. In several sections, the river appears dark and sludgy, while plastic waste lines its banks.

The river is most polluted in areas surrounding Delhi, owing to the area’s dense population and high levels of waste. Only 2% of the river’s length flows through the capital, but Delhi contributes about 76% of the river’s total pollution, according to a government monitoring committee.

The mixture is a regular sight on the Yamuna and despite its toxicity many villagers downstream continue to use the water to bathe and even drink, experts say. Pictures from September also showed toxic foam forming on the Yamuna.

Hindu devotees are often seen performing rituals in the river, surrounded by the dense foam. Every year, many gather on the Yamuna’s banks to celebrate Chhath Puja, a festival dedicated to the sun god Lord Surya, some wading through the foam to bathe and pray.

This week, the toxic foam in New Delhi was joined by a throat-searing blanket of smog that prompted many panicked residents to buy air purifiers and wear face masks to minimize exposure to the fumes.

New Delhi has ranked as the most polluted city in the world for several consecutive days this week, according to Swiss air quality company IQAir. On Thursday, the city had an air quality index (AQI) of 517 – a level considered hazardous, according to the company.

By comparison, the world’s least polluted city, Oslo, has an AQI of just three. China’s capital Beijing, which used to frequently feature on the world’s most polluted list, has in recent years taken big steps to clean its air and has a current AQI of 25 – a number considered “good.”

Two other Indian cities – Kolkata and Mumbai – both ranked on IQAir’s list of the world’s 20 most polluted cities, with AQI numbers of 205 and 102, both considered unhealthy.

Month after month since June, the world has been abnormally hot. Scientists have compared this year’s climate-change fallout to “a disaster movie” — soaring temperatures, fierce wildfires, powerful storms and devastating floods — and new data is now revealing just how exceptional the global heat has been.

Two major reports published this week paint an alarming picture of this unprecedented heat: Humanity has just lived through the hottest 12-month period in at least 125,000 years, according to one, while the other declared that 2023 is “virtually certain” to be the hottest year in recorded history, after five consecutive months of record-obliterating temperatures.

The period from November 2022 to the end of October 2023 was the hottest 12 months, with an average temperature of 1.32 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, according to an analysis of international data, published Thursday by the nonprofit research group Climate Central.

El Niño — a natural ocean and weather pattern in the tropical Pacific — is just beginning to boost temperatures, the report found. The strong, long-term trend of global warming is primarily driven by the burning of planet-heating fossil fuels.

“The key is this is not normal. These are temperatures we should not be experiencing,” Andrew Pershing, vice president for science at Climate Central, said on a call with reporters. “We are only experiencing them because we have put too much carbon dioxide onto the atmosphere.”

The vast majority of humanity was affected by unusual heat over this 12-month period, researchers found, with 7.3 billion people — 90% of the global population — experiencing at least 10 days of high temperatures “with very strong climate fingerprints.”

In India, 1.2 billion people — 86% of the population — experienced at least 30 days of high temperatures, made at least three times more likely by climate change. In the United States, that figure was 88 million people, or 26% of the population.

Some cities were particularly hard hit. In the US, these were concentrated in the South and Southwest. Houston experienced the longest extreme heat streak of any major city on Earth, according to the report, with 22 consecutive days of extreme heat between July and August.

Only two countries, Iceland and Lesotho, experienced temperatures that were cooler-than-average over this period, the report found.

Climate Central’s findings come on the heels of another analysis, published Wednesday by the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, which said that 2023 is “virtually certain” to be the hottest year on record.

The prediction follows the report’s finding that last month was the hottest October on record by a significant margin, beating the previous record set in 2019 by 0.4 degrees Celsius. The month was 1.7 degrees Celsius warmer than the pre-industrial average.

“October 2023 has seen exceptional temperature anomalies, following on from four months of global temperature records being obliterated,” Samantha Burgess, deputy director of Copernicus, said in a statement.

Every month since June has smashed monthly heat records and every month since July has been at least 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. The year to-date is averaging 1.43 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, according to Copernicus — perilously close to the internationally agreed ambition to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

While scientists are most concerned about long-term temperature trends, the past several months above that threshold have been an alarming taste of what the world can expect as global warming accelerates.

In addition to unprecedented land temperatures, ocean temperatures continued to soar. They have consistently been at record-high levels since the beginning of May, according to Copernicus, fueling an explosive development of hurricanes and tropical storms around the planet, including Hurricane Otis, which slammed into Southern Mexico last month.

Antarctic sea ice also remained at record-lows for the sixth consecutive month, according to the report.

“Laid out so starkly, the 2023 numbers on air temperatures, sea temperatures, sea ice and the rest look like something out of a disaster movie,” Reay said.

While the statistics in these reports are big and alarming, it’s what’s behind them that’s truly terrifying, said Friederike Otto, senior lecturer in climate science at the Grantham Institute, Imperial College London. “The fact that we’re seeing this record hot year means record human suffering,” she said in a statement.

Even as 2023 draws to a close, the extraordinary heat shows little sign of letting up.

China saw more than 12 monthly temperature records broken on Monday, with temperatures reaching 34 degrees Celsius (93 Fahrenheit) in some places. While in the US, multiple heat records have fallen this week, with parts of Texas reaching 93 degrees Fahrenheit on Wednesday, beating previous November records.

And records are predicted to continue to be broken next year. “El Niño is really going to bite next year and that’s going to lead to even more warming as we head into 2024,” Pershing said.

The unprecedented global heat adds extra urgency to the upcoming UN COP28 climate conference in Dubai this December, where countries will take stock of their progress towards meeting the Paris Climate Agreement goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees.

Scientists are clear that this means stopping burning oil, gas and coal. But a report published by the UN on Wednesday found that governments are planning to produce more than double the amount of fossil fuels than the limit that would cap global heating at 1.5C degrees.

“The only thing more remarkable than the magnitude of these increases in global temperature and sea ice loss,” Reay said, “is our continuing failure to put the world on track to meet the Paris climate goals.”

A new ruling by the Vatican’s doctrine department has opened the door to Catholic baptism for transgender people and babies of same-sex couples.

The new rules, dated October 31, come from a set of questions, or dubia, submitted to the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) by Brazilian bishop Giuseppe Negri. The answers to his questions about certain sacraments were published on the Vatican’s website in Italian on Wednesday evening.

Regarding transgender people, the document says a person who identifies as transgender can be baptized like any other adult, “as long as there is no risk of causing scandal or disorientation” to other Catholics.

Children who identify as transgender can also be baptized if “well prepared and willing,” it says. The document also states that transgender people, including those who have undergone gender reassignment procedures, can be godparents and witnesses in Catholic weddings under the right circumstances.

Children of same-sex couples can also be baptized, as long as there is a “well-founded hope that he or she will be educated in the Catholic religion.”

The document makes clear that people who live in homosexual relationships are still committing a sin, and that baptism must come with repentance for such sins. The document cites several sermons by Pope Francis for the ruling.

“The church is not a tollhouse; it is the house of the father, where there is a place for everyone, with all their problems,” the document states, quoting the pope’s 2013 apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium.

In each circumstance, the priest is asked to use “pastoral prudence” in deciding whether to allow a transgender person’s participation.

“It is necessary to consider the real value that the ecclesial community confers on the duties of the godfather and godmother, the role they play in the community, and the consideration they show toward the teaching of the Church.”

The document added that the priest should also take into consideration if there are other people in the extended family who can “guarantee” the “proper transmission of the Catholic faith” to the baptized person.

LGBTQ issues were a major area of discussion during the Vatican’s recent synod.

Francis DeBernardo, executive director of the New Ways Ministry, a Catholic LGBT advocacy group based in the United States, said in a statement that the “Vatican’s affirmation that transgender people should be welcomed in the church’s sacramental life signals Pope Francis’ desire for a pastorally-focused approach to LGBTQ+ issues is taking hold.”

However, the group warns that the ruling doesn’t go far enough.

“If church leaders do not employ pastoral prudence with this guideline, it could be used by other officials to establish other policies which would exclude such people from other areas of church life,” DeBernardo writes.

“Focusing particularly on the ineligibility of people in ‘stable, marriage-like relations’ who are ‘well known by the community’ suggests that the DDF remains more concerned about ‘causing scandal’ than about integrating LGBTQ+ Catholics in the lives of the church and of their families,” he continues.

“We hope that church leaders will apply these guidelines by following Pope Francis’ example of extravagant welcome, rather than using them to continue old restrictions.”

The group calls the affirmation a “reversal of a previous Vatican decision” and notes that ”not only does this doctrinal note, known as a responsum ad dubia, remove barriers to transgender people’s participation, it proves that the Catholic Church can—and does—change its mind about certain practices and policies.”

The Kenyan government has declared that Monday will be a “special holiday” in which people nationwide will be expected to plant trees to help with the country’s land restoration efforts.

Kithure Kindiki, cabinet secretary for the Interior and Administration of National Government in Kenya, made the announcement in a post on X on Monday in which he wrote, “the public across the Country shall be expected to plant trees as a patriotic contribution to the national efforts to save our Country from the devastating effects of Climate Change.”

Posting an official notice declaring November 13, 2023 to be National Tree Growing Day, Kindiki added that those with national exams that day “shall proceed normally.”

The exercise will form part of Kenya’s Landscape and Ecosystem Restoration Programme, which aims to grow and nurture 15 billion trees by 2032 to restore and conserve 10.6 million hectares of degraded landscapes and ecosystems, according to the notice.

There will be a national venue and 47 county venues dedicated to the tree planting, “where all Kenyan citizens and the general public will be expected to participate,” the notice said.

Kenya’s forest cover decreased from 12% to just 6% between 1990 and 2010, according to the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). In 2022, the figure went up to 9%, according to the Kenya Forest Service, which said in a post on X on Monday that it “welcomes all Kenyans to mark the celebration” by planting trees.

Yet rising demands for timber and charcoal to fuel infrastructure and population growth continue to contribute to the unsustainable harvesting of forests. Although the country depends on less biomass energy than neighboring Tanzania and Uganda, fuelwood still makes up around 70% of Kenya’s energy needs.

Deforestation and land degradation threaten vital ecosystems and lead to conflict and the loss of biodiversity, particularly amid increased droughts due to climate change and poor water management, according to FAO.

In May, ten lions were killed in human-wildlife conflict that worsened following Kenya’s worst drought in more than 40 years.

The Kenyan government wants forest cover to reach 30% in order to better conserve biodiversity, sustain livelihoods and the environment, improve climate resilience and improve social-economic development, according to the World Wildlife Fund.

At the two-day Kenya Restoration Forum in Nairobi last month, Martin Mulama, manager of the Southern Kenya Programme at WWF Kenya, said, “At the center of the ambitious 15 Billion Trees initiative are communities – the first-line custodians of our landscapes and ecosystems. They should be included, engaged, and involved in the implementation and benefit from the National Landscape and Ecosystem Restoration.”

Of all 14,669 varieties of plants and animals found in Europe that were registered on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species by the end of 2020, one-fifth of them face the risk of extinction, a new analysis has found.

Researchers also determined the largest threat associated with Europe’s declining biodiversity was changes in agricultural land use, which result in habitat loss and overexploitation of biological resources, according to a news release for the study published Wednesday in the journal Plos One.

“We thought it would be good to combine all these data to see … what are the major threats? Where are the regions where the most threatened species occur?” said lead study author Axel Hochkirch, head of the department of ecology at the National Museum of Natural History in Luxembourg. “Because only if we know the threats, we can do something about it.”

Analyzing the Red List

The IUCN Red List is considered the most comprehensive global source for threatened species and extinction information, and Europe has the most data included out of all regions represented in the index, Hochkirch said. The thousands of species found in Europe that appear on the Red List account for nearly 10% of the continent’s total biodiversity, according to the paper.

The index categorizes species by those that are of least concern, near threatened, vulnerable, endangered, critically endangered and extinct. In their analysis, researchers found 19% of all Red List species found in Europe — including 27% of plants, 24% of invertebrates and 18% vertebrates — to be “at risk of extinction.” 
The at-risk species could be found among the Red List’s vulnerable, endangered or critically endangered categories.

“One of the most interesting findings of the study is that plants and invertebrates are more endangered than vertebrates,” said Gerardo Ceballos, a professor at the Institute of Ecology at National Autonomous University of Mexico and one of the world’s leading ecologists, in an email. Ceballos was not involved in the study.

A 2019 global assessment by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, or IPBES, estimated that — based on “sparse data” available for insects — 10% of all insects across the world were threatened with extinction, according to the new study. But Hochkirch and his team found more than double that number of invertebrates at risk in Europe.

It is estimated that 95% of animals in the world are invertebrates, and 73% are insects, according to the IUCN.

IPBES originally estimated that 1 million plant and animal species across the world were at risk of extinction, including about half a million insect varieties, based on inferences from Red List data. The data on invertebrates provided by the new analysis suggests the number of species threatened with extinction globally is actually closer to 2 million, Hochkirch said.

“This is an interesting paper showing once again, that the extinction crisis is more severe than previously thought,” Ceballos said.

Major threats to European biodiversity

Besides agricultural land use, the analysis found several other major threats to Europe’s biodiversity, including pollution, climate change and severe weather, invasive species, and residential and commercial development.

The analysis reinforces the greater impact that agriculture has on global biodiversity, said Dr. David Williams, a lecturer on sustainability and the environment at the University of Leeds in the UK. He was not involved in the study.

“Agriculture primarily threatens biodiversity through expansion into natural habitats and intensification (increase in productivity). … The problem is that we cannot simultaneously reduce expansion and reduce intensification, because doing either of them (let alone both) will reduce the amount of food produced,” Williams said in an email.

“So what should Europe do? How do we safeguard the region’s biodiversity without simply offshoring the biodiversity cost of our food production? …  It is a very clear next question,” he said. Williams was the lead author of a 2020 study that found nearly 90% of land animals could be affected by loss of habitat by 2050 due to growing agriculture.

Hochkirch said he hopes the analysis will spur further conservation action for insects and other threatened species in Europe.