Archaeologists in Germany have uncovered a centuries-old skeleton complete with a metal prosthetic hand to replace four missing fingers.

The Bavarian State Office for Monument Preservation said in a statement published last week that archaeologists used carbon dating to estimate that the man died some time between 1450 and 1620, aged between 30 and 50 years old. This would make the prosthetic hand potentially almost 600 years old.

The fingers on the man’s left hand appear to have been amputated and the remains of the hand were surrounded in a hollowed-out case wrought from iron and other metal, revealing the advanced state of medicine at the time, archaeologists said.

“The hollow hand prosthesis on the left hand added four fingers,” Walter Irlinger, head of the Bavarian archaeological monument conservation department, said in the statement.

“The index, middle, ring and little fingers are individually formed from sheet metal and are immobile. The finger replicas lie parallel to each other, slightly curved. Presumably the prosthesis was attached to the stump with straps,” he added.

A bandage-like fabric was found inside the prosthetic hand, suggesting that it was used to cushion the stump.

The remains were found in a grave near a church in the Bavarian town of Freising, about 40 kilometers (25 miles) north of Munich, during utility work.

Freising was the site of several battles during the Middle Ages and during the Thirty Years’ War of 1618-1648. This probably increased the number of amputations and consequently led to more prostheses, the statement said.

About 50 similar prostheses dating from the same time period have been uncovered in Central Europe, ranging in complexity from an immobile one like the one found in Friesing to an intricate, moving prosthetic hand famously worn by the knight Götz von Berlichingen after 1530, archaeologists added.

And an even older, 3,000-year-old prosthetic wooden toe was uncovered by archaeologists in Egypt in 1997.

Worn by a priest’s daughter, the toe was made to both enable walking and look aesthetically natural, archaeologists later discovered.

Scientists widely agree that an ancient planet likely smashed into Earth as it was forming billions of years ago, spewing debris that coalesced into the moon that decorates our night sky today.

The theory, called the giant-impact hypothesis, explains many fundamental features of the moon and Earth.

But one glaring mystery at the center of this hypothesis has endured: What ever happened to Theia? Direct evidence of its existence has remained elusive. No leftover fragments from the planet have been found in the solar system. And many scientists assumed any debris Theia left behind on Earth was blended in the fiery cauldron of our planet’s interior.

A new theory, however, suggests that remnants of the ancient planet remain partially intact, buried beneath our feet.

Molten slabs of Theia could have embedded themselves within Earth’s mantle after impact before solidifying, leaving portions of the ancient planet’s material resting above Earth’s core some 1,800 miles (about 2,900 kilometers) below the surface, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

A bold new idea

If the theory is correct, it would not only provide additional details to fill out the giant-impact hypothesis but also answer a lingering question for geophysicists.

They were already aware that there are two massive, distinct blobs that are embedded deep within the Earth. The masses — called large low-velocity provinces, or LLVPs — were first detected in the 1980s. One lies beneath Africa and another below the Pacific Ocean.

These blobs are thousands of kilometers wide and likely more dense with iron compared with the surrounding mantle, making them stand out when measured by seismic waves. But the origins of the blobs — each of which are larger than the moon — remain a mystery to scientists.

But for Dr. Qian Yuan, a geophysicist and postdoctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology and the new study’s lead author, his understanding of LLVPs forever changed when he attended a 2019 seminar at Arizona State University, his alma mater, that outlined the giant-impact hypothesis.

That’s when he learned new details about Theia, the mysterious projectile that presumably struck Earth billions of years ago.

And, as a trained geophysicist, he knew of those mysterious blobs hidden in Earth’s mantle.

Yuan had a eureka moment, he said.

Immediately, he began perusing scientific studies, searching to see whether someone else had proposed that LLVPs might be fragments of Theia. But no one had.

Initially, Yuan said, he only told his adviser about his theory.

“I was afraid of turning to other people because I (was) afraid others would think I’m too crazy,” Yuan said.

Interdisciplinary research

Yuan first proposed his idea in a paper he submitted in 2021. It was rejected three times. Peer reviewers said it lacked sufficient modeling from the giant impact.

Then he came across scientists who did just the type of research Yuan needed.

Their work, which assigned a certain size to Theia and speed of impact in the modeling, suggested that the ancient planet’s collision likely did not entirely melt Earth’s mantle, allowing the remnants of Theia to cool and form solid structures instead of blending together in Earth’s inner stew.

“Earth’s mantle is rocky, but it isn’t like solid rock,” said Dr. Steve Desch, a study coauthor and professor of astrophysics at Arizona State’s School of Earth and Space Exploration. “It’s this high-pressure magma that’s kind of gooey and has the viscosity of peanut butter, and it’s basically sitting on a very hot stove.”

In that environment, if the material that makes up the LLVPs was too dense, it wouldn’t be able to pile up in the jagged formations that it appears in, Desch said. And if it were low enough in density, it would simply mix in with the churning mantle.

The question was this: What would be the density of the material left behind by Theia? And could it match up with the density of the LLVPs?

(Desch had authored his own paper in 2019 that sought to describe the density of the material that Theia would have left behind.)

The researchers sought higher-definition modeling with 100 to 1,000 times more resolution than their previous attempts, Yuan said. And still, the calculations lined up: If Theia were a certain size and consistency, and struck the Earth at a specific speed, the models showed it could, in fact, leave behind massive hunks of its guts within Earth’s mantle and also spawn the debris that would go on to create our moon.

“That was very, very, so very exciting,” Yuan said. “That (modeling) hadn’t been done before.”

Building a theory

The study Yuan published this week includes coauthors from a variety of disciplines across a range of institutions, including Arizona State, Caltech, the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory and NASA’s Ames Research Center.

When asked whether he expects to encounter pushback or controversy over such a novel concept — that slabs of material from an ancient extraterrestrial planet are hidden deep within the Earth — Yuan replied: “I also want to stress this is an idea; this is a hypothesis.

“There’s no way to prove this must be the case,” he added. “I welcome other people to do this (research).”

Desch added that, in his view, “this work is compelling. It makes a very strong case.” It even seems “sort of obvious in hindsight.”

Dr. Seth Jacobson, an assistant professor of planetary science at Michigan State University, acknowledged that the theory may not, however, soon reach broad acceptance.

“These (LLVPs) — they’re an area themselves of very active research,” said Jacobson, who was not involved in the study. And the tools used to study them are constantly evolving.

The idea that Theia created the LLVPs is no doubt an exciting and eye-catching hypothesis, he added, but it’s not the only one out there.

One other theory, for example, posits that LLVPs are actually heaps of oceanic crust that have sunk to the depths of the mantle over billions of years.

“I doubt the advocates for other hypotheses (about LLVP formation) are going to abandon them just because this one has appeared,” Jacobson added. “I think we’ll be debating this for quite some time.”

When NASA’s Lucy mission flew by its first asteroid this week, its cameras captured a surprise.

The Lucy spacecraft zoomed by the small asteroid Dinkinesh, located in our solar system’s main asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. But what astronomers thought was one asteroid is really a binary pair of space rocks.

Hal Levison, principal investigator for Lucy at the Southwest Research Institute, said Dinkinesh, which means “marvelous” in the Amharic language of Ethiopia, “really did live up to its name.”

“This is marvelous,” Levison said in a statement. “When Lucy was originally selected for flight, we planned to fly by seven asteroids. With the addition of Dinkinesh, two Trojan moons, and now this satellite, we’ve turned it up to 11.”

Astronomers had their first hints that Dinkinesh might be a duo when Lucy’s instrument suite detected changes in brightness in the weeks leading up to the spacecraft’s close approach on Wednesday.

What the Dinkinesh duo could reveal

The Lucy team believes the larger asteroid is a half-mile (805 meters) wide and the smaller space rock is 0.15 miles (220 meters) across.

Lucy came within 265 miles (425 kilometers) of the asteroid’s surface during its closest approach Wednesday afternoon.

The close approach was designed to help the Lucy spacecraft test its suite of equipment, including its terminal tracking system, which allows the spacecraft to locate the space rock autonomously and keep it within view while flying by at 10,000 miles per hour (4.5 kilometers per second).

“This is an awesome series of images. They indicate that the terminal tracking system worked as intended, even when the universe presented us with a more difficult target than we expected,” said Tom Kennedy, guidance and navigation engineer at Lockheed Martin, in a statement. (Lockheed Martin is a NASA partner on the Lucy mission.)

“It’s one thing to simulate, test, and practice,” Kennedy added. “It’s another thing entirely to see it actually happen.”

The data collected during the flyby will also offer insight into small asteroids, providing a comparison with others that previous NASA missions have observed.

“We knew this was going to be the smallest main belt asteroid ever seen up close,” said Keith Noll, Lucy project scientist from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, in a statement. “The fact that it is two makes it even more exciting. In some ways these asteroids look similar to the near-Earth asteroid binary Didymos and Dimorphos that DART saw, but there are some really interesting differences that we will be investigating.”

In September 2022, NASA’s DART mission intentionally slammed into Dimorphos, a small moon orbiting the near-Earth asteroid Didymos, to demonstrate the technology needed to alter the trajectory of a space rock.

Preparing for future flybys

The data collected during the Lucy mission flyby will continue to return to Earth over the next week. This information will help the mission team prepare for the spacecraft’s future asteroid flybys, including a close encounter with another main belt asteroid called Donaldjohanson in 2025.

Lucy’s main goal is to explore Jupiter’s Trojan asteroid swarms, which have never been explored. The Trojan asteroids, which borrow their name from Greek mythology, orbit the sun in two swarms — one that’s ahead of Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system, and a second one that lags behind it.

So far, scientists’ main glimpses of the Trojans have largely been artist renderings or animations because the space rocks are too distant to be seen in detail with telescopes. Lucy will provide the first high-resolution images of what these asteroids look like.

Lucy is scheduled to reach the Trojan asteroids in 2027. Each of the asteroids Lucy is set to fly by differ in size and color.

The mission borrows its name from the Lucy fossil, the remains of an ancient human ancestor discovered in Ethiopia in 1974. The skeleton has helped researchers piece together aspects of human evolution, and NASA Lucy team members hope their mission will achieve a similar feat regarding the history of our solar system.

There are about 7,000 Trojan asteroids, and the largest is 160 miles (257 kilometers) across. The asteroids are like fossils themselves, representing the leftover material hanging around after the formation of giant planets in our solar system, including Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

The mission will help researchers peer back in time to learn how the solar system formed 4.5 billion years ago and unlock how planets ended up in their current spots.

Israel has claimed responsibility for an attack on an ambulance outside Gaza City’s Al-Shifa Hospital, the largest medical facility in the enclave, which witnesses say killed and wounded dozens of people.

At least 15 people were killed and 50 others wounded, the Hamas-run health authorities said Friday. Footage from the scene showed at least a dozen bloodied casualties strewn across the ground near an ambulance. There appears to be some shrapnel damage to at least one of the cars on the scene.

Israel said it had targeted the ambulance because it was being used by Hamas, according to a statement from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). “An IDF aircraft struck an ambulance that was identified by forces as being used by a Hamas terrorist cell in close proximity to their position in the battle zone,” it wrote.

“A number of Hamas terrorist operatives were killed in the strike… We have information which demonstrates that Hamas’ method of operation is to transfer terror operatives and weapons in ambulances,” the statement said.

A spokesperson for the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza, who was at Al-Shifa Hospital, said that Israel was responsible for the attack.

The Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) said one of its ambulances was in the convoy but that none of its team members were injured in the strike.

The ambulance was damaged when a shell fell near it, the PCRS said. “Upon arrival at Al-Shifa hospital’s gate, the gate was targeted again,” PRCS said, adding that a separate Ministry of Health ambulance was then directly hit and dozens of civilians in the area were killed and injured.

Dr. Ashraf Al-Qidra said that authorities had organized the medical convoy from the hospital and had informed the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) about the move.

He said the convoy was traveling to the Rafah Crossing – the border in the south of the besieged enclave has been seen as the last hope for Gazans to escape as Israel’s bombs rain down on the strip.

“When the ambulances moved towards the south, the occupation [Israel] targeted the ambulances in multiple locations, including on the gate of Al-Shifa medical compound,” he said. “The Israeli occupation targeted intentionally those ambulances.”

“Even if we were not present, this is still medical convoy, and any violence towards medical personnel is unacceptable,” the ICRC said “No doctors, nurses, or any medical professionals should ever die while working to save lives.”

Besieged hospitals

Al-Shifa Hospital has increasingly found itself part of the frontline as Israel last week claimed that the facility is the site of a significant Hamas command and control center.

Hamas also rejected the claim, calling on “the United Nations, Arab and Islamic countries to immediately intervene to stop the madness of bombing and destroying the medical system.”

It is located in one of the most densely populated areas on earth, the 140-square-mile Gaza Strip, which is being pounded and encircled by the Israeli military.

Calls for a ceasefire by Hamas, aid organizations, and much of the global community have been rejected categorically by Israel’s government, which has vowed to wipe out Hamas after its terror attack last month, which massacred more than 1,400 Israelis, most of them civilians.

In Gaza, the civilian casualties have continued to rise as Israel strikes large residential neighborhoods, schools, and some areas immediately around hospitals, in what it says are military target strikes. More than 9,100 people have been killed in Israeli attacks is the Strip since October 7, according to the latest figures from the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Ramallah, which drew from sources in the Hamas-controlled enclave.

The bombardment has overwhelmed Gaza’s medical institutions, now struggling to run amid dwindling supplies and fuel.

Doctors at Al-Shifa are seeing children with the majority of their body and faces burned, missing limbs and other “catastrophic injuries,” said Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan, a pediatric intensive care and humanitarian doctor with the aid group Doctors Without Borders, also known as Médecins Sans Frontières.

An enormous sea snake from Norse legend that was fathered by the trickster god Loki and grew big enough to circle the globe is now the namesake for a different type of “monster” — a newly discovered species of a massive, meat-eating marine reptile known as a mosasaur, which lived about 80 million years ago.

Paleontologists recently described the previously unknown mosasaur from fossils found near the North Dakota town of Walhalla. The town’s name comes from Valhalla, the feasting hall of Norse mythology where dead heroes gather, so the scientists dubbed the mosasaur Jormungandr walhallaensis. Its name references Norse myths of Jǫrmungandr, the Midgard Serpent, as well as the site of the fossil’s discovery, the researchers reported Monday in the journal Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History.

The fossil itself has a somewhat less poetic name: NDGS 10838. It includes a near-complete skull with a bony ridge over the eyes as well as jaws and some skeletal parts, including 11 ribs and 12 vertebrae. In life, the animal would have measured about 24 feet (7.3 meters) long and had a long face slimmer than those of its mosasaur cousins, said lead study author Amelia Zietlow, a paleontologist and doctoral candidate at the American Museum of Natural History’s Richard Gilder Graduate School in New York City.

Yet in other ways, the animal was one of a kind. A mix of features in the bones of its skull made it unexpectedly challenging for the scientists to classify the newcomer and hinted that the mosasaur group includes more diverse forms than expected, the study authors reported.

An unusual specimen

The fossil was collected in 2015 by the North Dakota Geological Survey, a state agency dedicated to geology and public education about minerals and fossils. In fact, Zietlow said, NDGS 10838 was discovered in a hillside by someone who had participated in one of the agency’s programs, and who was therefore able to recognize the object as a fossil and knew to alert agency officials.

When the scientists examined the skull, they quickly realized they had something unusual on their hands. Its ear bones, which were somewhat rectangular, resembled those of Mosasaurus, the genus of mosasaur giants. But the shape and high number of its teeth were a closer match to a genus of smaller mosasaurs: Clidastes. Meanwhile, the angle and number of teeth on a bony palate at the roof of its mouth were unlike anything seen in either of those two mosasaur groups.

“He’s got features that look in some ways like Mosasaurus, in some ways like Clidastes. And then in other ways, they’re completely unique to this individual,” Zietlow said. This combination of traits convinced the researchers that what they were looking at was a new genus and species.

However, fossilization often distorts bone, and it’s possible that oddities in the fossil were shaped by natural processes after the animal’s death, said paleontologist Takuya Konishi, an associate professor in the department of biological sciences at the University of Cincinnati. (The authors acknowledged this possibility; their study includes idealized illustrations of the intact skull showing what it may have looked like before it fossilized.)

When the researchers analyzed the data, their evolutionary tree showed an outcome called a polytomy — “when a bunch of different species kind of blur together into a single spot” — with Jormungandr walhallaensis and Clidastes, Zietlow said. “They’re closer to each other than they are to anything else. But within that group of things, it’s not quite sure how they’re related.”

Additional fossils of the newfound species could help fine-tune Jormungandr walhallaensis’ position on the mosasaur family tree, said Konishi, who studies mosasaur evolution and was not involved in the study.

Other unusual details in the fossil are punctures and scratches scarring the vertebrae; the researchers identified these as bite marks. The marks do not appear to have healed, suggesting that they happened toward the end of the animal’s life or were the work of a scavenger that ripped the mosasaur apart after it was dead.

“This might be why we don’t have the rest of the skeleton,” Zietlow said.

Further questions about what made the marks — and whether it was an attack that Jormungandr walhallaensis survived — will be addressed in future research by study coauthor Clint Boyd, a senior paleontologist with the North Dakota Geological Survey and a curator of the North Dakota State Fossil Collection, Zietlow said.

Mosasaurs and evolutionary enigmas

Mosasaurs were a diverse group of apex predators that swam the world’s oceans during the latter part of the Cretaceous Period, about 98 million to 66 million years ago. They lived alongside dinosaurs but are more closely related to modern lizards and snakes.

Some mosasaurs measured just a few feet long, while the largest — in the genus Mosasaurus — was nearly 60 feet (18.2 meters) long, and while mosasaur fossils are relatively plentiful, scientists “have just only scratched the surface of the ‘true’ mosasaur diversity,” Konishi said. New mosasaur specimens, such as NDGS 10838, help experts to unravel “the rich evolutionary history of these rather charismatic apex predators of the Cretaceous seas,” he said.

To that end, the new study makes a significant contribution by supplying “rich anatomical detail documented by a very able mosasaur worker, Ms. Zietlow,” he added.

“The authors clearly provided a very thorough and careful osteological description of the new specimen,” creating a treasure trove of exceptional data, Konishi said.

Though mosasaurs were aquatic, their ancestors lived on land and then evolved to return to the sea. They weren’t the only animal group to do so; many types of reptiles and mammals — including plesiosaurs, whales, sea turtles and seals — adapted to ocean life from terrestrial ancestors, long after their even more distant tetrapod ancestors left the seas for land. And mosasaurs are an important animal group for studying this transition because their fossils are so abundant, Zietlow said.

“There are a lot of them, literally thousands of specimens in the United States alone,” she said. “That makes them good for studying big picture, statistical-type evolutionary questions.”

Despite the plentiful pool of specimens, many mosasaur fossils were not documented as exhaustively as Jormungandr walhallaensis was (and in some cases, were barely illustrated at all when they were first described, Zietlow said).

Addressing this discrepancy in newfound fossils — and revisiting known specimens — will play a big part in helping scientists solve these evolutionary riddles.

“I spent a lot of time putting together these figures, showing the bones in every view and showing all of the little lumps and bumps and things, so that future people can look at these figures and recognize the anatomy and then apply that to making new characters and spotting new differences between this animal and other animals,” Zietlow said. “That just helps everyone overall to understand the anatomy of these things a little bit better.”

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

Earlier this week Nasim was leaving the only home he’s ever known, trudging toward Pakistan’s border alongside tens of thousands of fellow Afghan refugees who like him have been given a deadline to depart the country.

“I was born in Pakistan, I’ve lived here for 42 years, I went to school in Pakistan,” said Nasim, who had traveled to the Torkham border crossing from the northern city Peshawar. “I’ve never been to Afghanistan.”

In a move that has upturned countless lives, Pakistan ordered all Afghan refugees and migrants without official identity documents to leave the country by November 1 – and vowed to deport any who remain after that date.

That has left Nasim, who only uses one name, and many others like him facing the grim prospect of a new life under the repressive rule of the Taliban.

Since seizing control of Afghanistan in August 2021, the radical Islamist group has cracked down on women’s rights, closed secondary schools for girls, banned women from attending university or entering many public spaces, and prohibited them from working in most sectors. Under its watch the country has also been grappling with widespread hunger, disease and lack of clean water.

But Nasim and other migrants have little choice but to head back. On Thursday, Pakistani authorities began rounding up those who remained, with more than 100 arrested in the city of Quetta and taken to holding centers.

“We didn’t have money, we left our business, our homes, it was difficult for us to get here. There is no water here,” said Nasim.

“My children have been pulled out of school – the day my children didn’t go to school was like a day of dying for me,” Nasim added. “In Afghanistan there is no school for girls.”

Located at the western edge of the famed Khyber Pass, Torkham has seen generations of Afghans flee and return during the tumultuous four decades of war that have blighted the nation.

Many fled the Soviet invasion in the 1980s and the mujahideen’s long, eventually successful fight back. Others took flight during the civil war that erupted following the Soviet retreat that led to the Taliban’s initial rise.

A new generation went to Pakistan in the aftermath of September 11 attacks, ebbing and flowing during the near two decades of conflict that followed. The Taliban’s return to power in 2021 following the United States’ chaotic withdrawal sparked another wave of some 600,000 refugees.

Now Afghans from all those different generations are being told to go back.

Security concerns

Pakistan’s caretaker Interior Minister Sarfraz Bugti has previously said security concerns were behind the deportation order, claiming that Afghan nationals had carried out 14 of the 24 major terrorist attacks that have taken place in Pakistan this year.

But the order has been criticized by international rights groups both for its massive scope and for the way it is being carried out, with many Afghans alleging mistreatment by Pakistani authorities.

Pakistan is home to more than two million undocumented Afghans. Their presence has long been controversial, and this is not the first time they have faced police crackdowns and threats of deportation. Authorities announced the latest mass deportation movement on October 3, giving migrants less than a month to pack up their lives and leave.

International bodies and human rights groups have warned of a looming humanitarian disaster as they return.

“We urge the Pakistan authorities to suspend forcible returns of Afghan nationals before it is too late to avoid a human rights catastrophe,” said Ravina Shamdasani, spokesperson for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), in a statement ahead of the deadline.

“We believe many of those facing deportation will be at grave risk of human rights violations if returned to Afghanistan, including arbitrary arrest and detention, torture, cruel and other inhuman treatment,” she added.

They have also criticized Pakistan for its methods of enforcing the order.

Human Rights Watch claimed on Tuesday the Pakistani government was using “threats, abuse, and detention to coerce Afghan asylum seekers without legal status to return to Afghanistan or face deportation.”

“Police would catch us and ask us for money, we didn’t have money to pay them,” he said. “I’ve lived here for over 40 years … I’ve grown old in Pakistan, but we’ve been told to go so we’re going.”

Nearly 60,000 Afghans left Pakistan within the first half of October, with the majority citing fear of arrest, according to the UN refugee agency and the International Organization for Migration.

A little over 129,000 have fled from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa as of Thursday, according to the provincial home department. Some 38,000 have crossed through the Chaman border crossing further west in Balochistan.

Raza Muhammad, a father of 10, was one of those preparing to leave through Chaman this week.

Muhammad said he had toiled for years as a domestic worker and said harassment from local police was routine. He hoped the Taliban would greet those forced out of Pakistan and help them find new jobs.

“There is no other choice for me, we are at the mercy of new people,” he said.

Akhtar Muhammad, 22, said he was born and had lived his whole live in Quetta, Balochistan’s largest city.

“My father has lived here for 40 years, we don’t know how to speak Pashto properly,” he said, referring to the language spoken by the Pashtun tribes that live along the Afghan-Pakistan border.

“We don’t know what kind of environment there will be there (in Afghanistan),” he added.

In a statement on Monday, a spokesperson from Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs responded to the OHCHR saying the country “takes its commitments towards protection and safety needs of those in vulnerable situations with utmost seriousness. Our record of the last 40 years in hosting millions of our Afghan brothers and sisters speaks for itself.”

Even the Taliban has been critical, urging Pakistan to “stop the process of one-time deportation of Afghan immigrants,” saying it was “against neighborliness customs and Islamic and humanitarian standards.”

“Afghans have not created problems for the security of the countries in which they live, nor are they involved in instability,” the Taliban said in a statement.

The group said some of its officials had visited the Torkham crossing on Tuesday to oversee the return of migrants from Pakistan and ordered temporary camps to be set up in the area.

Some can’t risk going back

Many Afghan migrants in Pakistan had been awaiting resettlement to other countries like the United States, United Kingdom and Canada, but those hopes are now in limbo as they return instead to the conflict-wracked nation they once fled.

For some, it’s a matter of life and death.

Afghan journalist Zahid Bahand gave up everything to flee with his family after the Taliban took power – selling his car, his home and other possessions to make the escape. Surviving in Pakistan was another challenge as the Pakistani government did not grant their applications for official documents, without which his children can’t go to school, he said.

The harassment by police got so intense he was afraid to leave his residential area. But, he said, returning to Afghanistan would be far worse.

“If I’m deported, there will be lots of problems, the Taliban will kill me,” he said. “I have left everything. I have no home. I was in jail in Afghanistan under the Talibs for three months, there is no place for me there.”

In the first weeks after the 2021 takeover, harrowing accounts emerged of the Taliban detaining and brutally assaulting reporters covering a protest in Kabul – heightening anxiety in a country already dangerous for journalists.

The steady deterioration of human rights under the Taliban since its return to power have only confirmed the worst fears of many Afghans.

The Islamist group has since ordered judges to impose a strict interpretation of Sharia law that includes public executions, amputations and flogging.

The prospect of returning to Afghanistan, and the pressures of providing for his children in Pakistan as the walls close in, have left Bahand too afraid to sleep.

“I am ashamed, what kind of man am I that I can’t help my family?” he said, visibly emotional. “I die every minute … My fault is that I’m a human? That I’m an Afghan, that I’m a journalist?”

A Palestine TV correspondent and 11 members of his family were killed Thursday in southern Gaza, according to the Palestinian Authority-run television network, in what it described as an Israeli airstrike.

Mohammad Abu Hattab had been reporting live on-air Thursday night outside of Nasser hospital in Gaza; thirty minutes later, when he had returned home, the correspondent was killed, his network reported. News agency WAFA also reported his death and that of his family.

Hattab’s death sent shockwaves through his newsroom, with Palestine TV journalist Salman Al Bashir making an emotional on-air report that reduced a television anchor to tears.

“We can’t bear this anymore. We are exhausted, we are here victims and martyrs awaiting our deaths, we are dying one after the other and no one cares about us or the large scale catastrophe and the crime in Gaza,” he said.

“No protection, no international protection at all, no immunity to anything, this protection gear does not protect us and not those helmets,” Al Bashir continued, as he removed his own helmet and protective vest, which had “PRESS” inscribed in bright letters.

“These are just slogans that we are wearing, it doesn’t protect any journalist at all,” he said, his voice cracking.

Al Bashir also said Israel’s weeks-long bombardment of the enclave had become unbearable for Palestinians in Gaza. “Live on air, we lose souls one after the other, without any price, we pass as martyrs, we await our turn one after the other,” he said.

“Our colleague Mohammad Abu Hattab was standing here only 30 minutes ago, and now he left us, along with his wife, his brother, and many members of his family are now victims here inside the hospital.”

Israel’s aerial attacks on the isolated territory, which it says target Hamas militants and infrastructure, have killed at least 9,025 people and injured over 22,000, according to the latest figures released by the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Ramallah, drawn from sources in the Hamas-controlled enclave.

The strikes began after Hamas militants rampaged through Israel on October 7, killing more than 1,400 Israelis and capturing over 220 hostages. Israeli warplanes have since hit large residential areas, schools, and hospitals in Gaza, sparking outcry in the region and beyond.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has repeatedly told Gazans to move to the south of the enclave, but that area has also been pummeled with deadly strikes. Humanitarian groups say nowhere is safe to flee in Gaza.

Hattab’s last on-air report was about Israeli airstrikes on neighborhoods in the southern city of Khan Younis and the number of casualties, according to a Palestine TV video.

Israel’s war with Hamas, which controls Gaza, has been the most deadly for journalists in decades, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). At least 33 journalists have been killed since October, the journalist advocacy organization said Thursday, including 28 Palestinians, four Israelis and one Lebanese citizen.

Last week, Al Jazeera’s Gaza bureau chief returned to air less than 24 hours after his family was killed in what the television network said was an Israeli airstrike on Wednesday.

A Chinese warplane fired flares in front of a Canadian military helicopter over international waters of the South China Sea last Sunday, an operation that Canadian military officers said was reckless and could have resulted in the downing of the aircraft.

“The risk to a helicopter in that instance is the flares moving into the rotor blades or the engines so this was categorized as both unsafe and non-standard, unprofessional,” said Maj. Rob Millen, air officer aboard the Royal Canadian Navy frigate HMCS Ottawa, the warship from which the Sikorsky Cyclone helicopter was flying.

He said that Canada and other nations have seen Chinese aircraft get close to fixed-wing aircraft on numerous occasions, but it was rare to see such action taken against a helicopter.

The first incident was over international waters outside of 34 miles from the Paracel Island chain in the northern part of the South China Sea. The second was also over international waters outside of 23 miles from the Paracels. The warship was operating in international waters 100 miles (160 kilometers) east of the Paracels at the time.

The Canadian helicopter was searching for a previously detected submarine when the incidents occurred, officers aboard the Ottawa said.

Millen said he was piloting the Canadian helicopter earlier in the day, when Chinese J-11s intercepted it at close range while it flew straight and level at 3,000 feet above the water back toward the Ottawa, a signal to that it had no hostile intent.

In that earlier encounter, Millen said the Chinese fighters flew in circles around his helicopter.

“When the intercepting aircraft was closer and closer, at a certain point it became unsafe,” he said.

His helicopter experienced turbulence coming off the Chinese jets, also posing a danger to the copter, Millen said.

“I certainly am not as comfortable as you can be based on the fragility of the rotor system,” he said.

Millen said he ended that encounter by descending to 200 feet, an area where the helicopter can operate but is “very uncomfortable for fast air fighter jets.”

The Canadian air force major said his military’s air crews train on how to respond to such intercepts as occurred on Sunday and will continue to fly over the international waters of the South China Sea.

Asked about the interception at a regular press briefing on Friday, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin replied: “I’m not aware of the situation you mentioned.”

“We have reiterated many times our firm position on Canadian warplanes conducting reconnaissance near China’s territorial airspace,” he told reporters. “We hope Canada will refrain from its inappropriate behavior to avoid the situation from becoming more complicated.”

China claims historic jurisdiction over almost the entirety of the vast South China Sea, and since 2014 has built up tiny reefs and sandbars into artificial islands heavily fortified with missiles, runways and weapons systems – sparking outcry from the other claimants. The Paracels, called the Xisha Islands by China, are in the northern part of the South China Sea, east of Da Nang, Vietnam, and south of China’s Hainan Island.

The 1.3-million-square-mile waterway is vital to international trade, with an estimated third of global shipping worth trillions of dollars passing through each year. It’s also home to vast fertile fishing grounds upon which many lives and livelihoods depend.

In 2016, an international tribunal in The Hague concluded that China has no legal basis to claim historic rights to the bulk of the South China Sea. China has ignored the ruling.

Freedom of navigation

Major western powers frequently conduct passage across the sea in order to assert that the region is international waters, sparking Beijing’s ire.

The Ottawa had been patrolling the waterway since last Monday, at times operating with United States, Australian, Japanese and New Zealand naval vessels and aircraft in a multinational exercise dubbed Noble Caribou. However, it was operating alone when the encounters with the Chinese jets.

The Ottawa and the US Navy destroyer USS Rafael Peralta overnight Wednesday into Thursday local time continued their deployment into the Taiwan Strait, another international waterway and vital shipping channel that has seen tense
encounters between PLA and allied vessels.

Last June, the US Navy reported a close encounter between the destroyer USS Chung-Hoon and a Chinese warship during a Taiwan Strait transit, in which the US warship slowed down to avoid colliding with the Chinese navy vessel that cut in front of it. The Canadian frigate HMCS Montreal was accompanying the US ship at the time, and a news crew aboard it recorded the incident.

Then Chinese Defense Minister Li Shangfu blamed the US for ratcheting up tensions in the region when questioned by reporters at a defense conference in Singapore.

“They are not here for innocent passage, they are here for provocation,” Li said of US warships.

Li said if the US and other foreign powers did not want confrontation, they should not send their military assets near China.

“Mind your own business,” Li said, adding, “Why did all these incidents happen in areas near China, not in areas near other countries?”

This week’s passage of the allied warships through the strait was uneventful, however, with no contact reported.

Sunday’s incidents come after other reports of unsafe intercepts of allied aircraft in the recent days.

On Tuesday, a PLA fighter jet came within 10 feet of a US Air Force B-52 bomber flying over the South China Sea, the US military said.

And earlier in October, a Chinese fighter jet came within five meters (16 feet) of a Canadian CP-140 reconnaissance and surveillance plane over the East China Sea.

That incident was recorded by news crews aboard the Canadian aircraft and witnessed by Maj. Gen. Iain Huddleston, the commander of Canada’s 1st Air Division, who was also on the plane.

Huddleston called the intercept “unprofessional” and “very aggressive” in a report from Radio Canada, which was on the plane.

“The Canadian aircraft was subject to multiple close-proximity manoeuvres by a PLAAF aircraft that put the safety of all personnel at risk,” Canada’s Defense Ministry said in a statement.

China’s Foreign Ministry said the Canadian plane illegally entered Chinese airspace and accused the Canadian military of sending “warplanes halfway around the world to stir up trouble and make provocations at China’s doorsteps.”

Earlier this month, the Pentagon’s top official in charge of security in the Indo-Pacific, Ely Ratner, said that the US has seen more instances of “coercive and risky” behavior from Chinese pilots against US aircraft in the last two years over the East and South China Seas than in the entire decade before that.

“Since the fall of 2021, we have seen more than 180 such incidents,” Ratner said. “It’s a centralized and concerted campaign to perform these risky behaviors in order to coerce a change in lawful US operational activity.”

Blackpink star Lisa’s Weibo page appears to have been taken down, weeks after she performed a burlesque routine in Paris that sparked a huge debate on China’s tightly regulated internet.

On Wednesday afternoon, the Thai star’s verified account @lalalalisa_m was no longer searchable on the site, one of China’s most popular social media networks.

“The account can longer be viewed because it has received complaints of breaches of law and regulations, as well as relevant rules from the Weibo Community Management Regulations,” her replacement page stated.

It is not clear what types of complaint she has received but China’s web companies routinely suspend or remove pages that breach the country’s myriad censorship rules – or that simply generate too much controversy.

The suspension of her account comes after Lisa performed five shows in September at the Crazy Horse Paris, one of the French capital’s top burlesque venues.

Videos of her performances shared on social media stirred controversy however in some parts of Asia, such as China, where more conservative attitudes often prevail.

Weibo accounts of Blackpink’s other members – Jisoo, Jennie, and Rose – remain online.

K-Pop supergroup Blackpink rose to international fame after debuting in 2016. The group headlined Coachella this year and has collaborated with US singers such as Lady Gaga and Selena Gomez.

Lisa – the only girl in the group without Korean heritage – has gained a large following in China, having appeared as a coach in a Chinese reality dance show.

In China there was a fierce debate on Weibo between users who questioned Lisa’s decision to associate herself with Crazy Horse and those who supported her show.

“Lisa is given very good resources. Why did she choose the Crazy Horse show?,” one Weibo user wrote.

Another said her account should have been taken down sooner. “She was still very high-profile on Weibo after attending the Crazy Horse show,” the user wrote.

Others lamented the disappearance of her Weibo page.

“I may have also criticized her for the Crazy Horse show. But that doesn’t mean she should be banned,” another user wrote.

Dozens of Palestinian workers in Israel returned to besieged Gaza on Friday following an Israeli government decision to expel Gazan laborers from the country.

The workers were among the Gazans who were in Israel early last month, when Hamas launched a brutal assault on the country, killing 1,400 people and kidnapping more than 200. Israel retaliated with an unrelenting bombing campaign on Gaza.

Prior to the October 7 attacks, about 18,000 Gazans had permits to cross into Israel and work, where they could earn significantly more than in Gaza.

“Israel is severing all contact with Gaza. There will be no more Palestinian workers from Gaza. Those workers from Gaza who were in Israel on the day of the outbreak of the war will be returned to Gaza,” the government press office said Thursday.

The cabinet also said it would deduct funds that are designated for Gaza, including funding from the Palestinian Authority – a separate government body with limited self-rule in the Israeli-occupied West Bank – that would go to the strip.

Over the past few years, Israel began issuing thousands of work permits for Gazans to cross into Israel as part of an economic incentive strategy Israeli authorities had hoped would encourage Gazans to distance themselves from Hamas. The enclave is home to more than two million people, most of them refugees.

Following Hamas’ terror attacks, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) shut all access to the enclave and many Gazans working in Israel became stuck.

Unemployment levels in Gaza are among the highest in the world, with nearly half of the population out of work, according to 2022 UN data. More than than 80% of the population lives in poverty.

“For at least the last decade and a half, the socioeconomic situation in Gaza has been in steady decline,” UNRWA, the UN’s main aid agency in the enclave, said in August.

For nearly 17 years, Gaza has been almost totally cut off from the rest of the world, with severe restrictions on the movement of goods and people.

The 140-square-mile enclave is ruled by Hamas but blockaded by Israel and Egypt, since 2007, and relies heavily on imported fuel and electricity to run all its services.

In response to Hamas’ terror attacks, Israel imposed a “complete siege” on the enclave and stopped all food, water, medicine, and fuel supplies from entering Gaza, deepening a humanitarian crisis.

Israeli airstrikes have killed over 9,000 people, half of them children, and injured about 22,000 others, according to figures released Thursday by the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Ramallah, which draws from sources in the Hamas-controlled enclave.

Humanitarian organizations have described catastrophic conditions where civil order is starting to break down, and have issued increasingly urgent calls for a ceasefire to allow desperately needed aid into Gaza. UNRWA Commissioner General Philippe Lazzarini said on Wednesday after his return from Gaza that “the scale of the tragedy is unprecedented.”

“The levels of distress and the unsanitary living conditions were beyond comprehension,” he said. “Everyone was just asking for water and food.”

On Thursday, the Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS) confirmed that it received fresh food, water, relief and medical supplies from 106 aid trucks from the Egyptian Red Crescent that crossed into Gaza from the Rafah Crossing. The PRCS said that this brings the total number of trucks that have crossed successfully from Egypt into Gaza to 374.

Before the war began on October 7, Gaza received about 455 aid trucks per day, according to the United Nations.

But aid agencies warned the aid trickling into Gaza is vastly insufficient to stave off the dire humanitarian crisis.