Britain’s Conservative Party will introduce mandatory national service for 18-year-olds if it wins the national election on July 4, comprising military or community participation, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said on Sunday.

Young adults will be able to choose between spending one weekend a month volunteering over the course of a year, or take up one of 30,000 spaces to spend a year in the armed forces, Sunak said.

The announcement followed Labour Party leader Keir Starmer’s comments on Saturday that he was in favour of allowing 16 and 17-year-olds to vote.

Sunak’s Conservatives lag Labour by a wide margin in opinion polls, which have shown little change in fortunes for the prime minister since his surprise election call last Wednesday.

“Britain today faces a future that is more dangerous and more divided. There’s no doubt that our democratic values are under threat. That is why we will introduce a bold new model of national service for 18-year-olds,” Sunak said in a statement.

The Conservative Party said the proposal would be funded by cracking down on tax avoidance and evasion, and by diverting money from the UK Shared Prosperity Fund, which existed to reduce regional economic inequality.

Labour politicians derided the announcement.

“The national service we need from our young people is to vote for change on July 4,” said Andy Burnham, mayor of Greater Manchester.

Interior minister James Cleverly told broadcasters there would be no criminal sanctions for skipping mandatory service but that people will be compelled to do it, without providing further details.

Asked by the BBC if forcing adults to volunteer was at odds with the Conservative Party’s liberal tradition, Cleverly said: “We force people to do things all the time.”

He cited compulsory education or training for teenagers until the age of 18 as an example.

As Russian forces rolled over the Ukraine border in the first moments of their invasion, another, less visible onslaught was already underway – a cyberattack that crippled internet linked to a satellite communications network.

That tech offensive – conducted by Russia an hour before its ground assault began in February 2022 – aimed to disrupt Kyiv’s command and control in the pivotal early moments of the war, Western governments say.

The cyberattack, which hit modems linked to a communication satellite, had far-reaching effects – stalling wind turbines in Germany and cutting the internet for tens of thousands of people and businesses across Europe. Following the attack, Ukraine scrambled for other ways to get online.

For governments and security analysts, the cyberattack underscored how satellites –– which play an increasingly critical role helping militaries position troops, run communications, and launch or detect weapons – can become a key target during war.

As countries and companies build out satellite constellations, a growing number of governments are vying for technology that could disrupt or even destroy adversaries’ assets – not just on land, like Russia’s alleged cyberattack – but in space too.

Enter signal jamming and spoofing, high-powered lasers to dazzle imaging sensors, anti-satellite missiles and spacecraft with the capacity to interfere with others in orbit – counterspace technologies that analysts say leading powers like the United States, Russia and China could use to target each other’s satellites.

Far from only affecting military-use satellites, such a weapon could have broad, devastating impacts – for example, upending satellites the world relies on to predict the weather and respond to disasters, or even potentially affecting global navigation systems used for everything from banking and cargo shipping to hailing a ride share and ambulance dispatch.

Last week, the US accused Russia of launching a satellite “presumably capable of attacking others in low Earth orbit,” with American officials saying it follows prior Russian satellite launches of likely “counterspace systems” in 2019 and 2022.

Tracking countries’ development of counterspace capabilities is difficult, given their closely guarded nature and the dual use ambiguity of many space technologies.

Both Russia and China have advanced their development of tech that could be used for such purposes in recent years, while the US builds on related space research and capabilities, according to experts and open-source reports.

Development of counterspace technologies is playing out amid a new era of focus on space – where the US and China are competing to put astronauts on the moon and build research bases there and advances in satellite launch technology mean a growing number of actors, including US adversaries like North Korea and Iran, are putting assets in orbit.

And as geopolitical rivalries mount on Earth, experts say Beijing and Moscow are increasingly interested in finding ways to deny the US – as the country with the most ground-based capabilities linked to space – the ability to use them.

Counterspace race

The idea of weapons aimed at or positioned in space remains highly controversial, but it isn’t new.

Decades ago, the US and the Soviet Union vied for technologies to knock-out each other’s satellites, with Russia’s 1957 launch of Sputnik – the world’s first artificial satellite – quickly followed by US counterspace tests.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, America has become the pre-eminent power when it comes to capabilities in space linked to conducting military operations on Earth, analysts say – a strength Russia and China have hoped to turn against it to even the battlefield.

“Developing counterspace capabilities such as (anti-satellite) weapons provides a means to disrupt your adversary’s space-based capabilities, whether it is communication, navigation, or command and control systems and logistics networks that rely on space-based systems,” said Rajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan, director of the Center for Security, Strategy & Technology at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi.

“Denying the US any advantage it may have from the use of space in a conventional military conflict is what is driving Russia and China in terms of their capability development and strategies,” she said.

To this end, Russia is believed to have dusted off Cold War-era anti-satellite research programs, such as for the development of an “aircraft-borne laser system” to disrupt imagery reconnaissance satellites, according to an annual report by the independent US-based Secure World Foundation (SWF) released in March.

New evidence suggests Russia may also be working to expand on its ground-based electronic warfare capabilities with the development of space-based technology for jamming satellite signals in orbit, said the report, which is compiled using open-source intelligence.

In recent years, Russia has also launched spacecraft that appear able to surveil foreign satellites – with the high velocity of two of these devices and suggestions others were able to release aerosols indicating they could be weapons tests, according to SWF.

China announced its own counterspace ambitions in 2007 when it launched a missile some 500 miles into space to take down one of its own aging weather satellites. The move broke a decades-long, post-Cold War lull in such destructive, “direct ascent” anti-satellite missile testing, and was followed by similar operations from the US, India and Russia.

Since then, China is believed by analysts to have conducted multiple, nondestructive missile tests that could advance its ability to target satellites. The most recent of those was last April, according to SWF, though, like others, that was described by Beijing as a missile intercept technology test.

China is also believed by the US Space Force to be “developing jammers to target a wide range of satellite communications” and to have “multiple ground-based laser systems.”

Other Chinese operations in space are difficult to explicitly classify as weapons research but could have a military purpose, experts say. Those include satellites that can approach or rendezvous with others in orbit, such as for support and maintenance purposes, like the Shiyan-7, launched in 2013 and likely equipped with a robotic arm.

There is suggestion from within China of the potential dual use of such technology. In a 2021 state media interview, Zang Jihui, a People’s Liberation Army (PLA) engineer, described China’s experiments with a satellite “equipped with a robotic arm, able to change orbit and conduct all-round detection of other satellites” as part of its “anti-satellite capabilities.”

Beijing included safeguarding its “security interests in outer space” as among its national defense goals in a 2019 white paper, but has long said it stands “for the peaceful use of outer space” and opposes an arms race there. SWF says there is no confirmed public evidence of China using counterspace capabilities against any military targets.

Russia has also said it opposes weapons in space. Both countries in recent years have established military forces dedicated to aerospace, as has the US, which launched its Space Force in 2019 as the first new military branch since 1947.

US officials have described America as a leader in advancing the “responsible and peaceful use” of outer space. And given its reliance on space for its defense, experts say the US military has the most at stake when it comes to ensuring countries don’t use technologies against satellites there – one reason analysts say the US policy community has long shunned placing weapons in space.

Among all nations, only non-destructive capabilities like signals jamming have been actively used against satellites in current military operations, according to SWF.

‘Deny’ China

Since it took down one of its own malfunctioning satellites with a missile in 2008 after China’s test, Washington has pledged to no longer conduct such destructive, direct-ascent anti-satellite missile tests, which can generate dangerous space debris, and is not believed to have an operational program for such capabilities.

It also doesn’t have an acknowledged operational program to target satellites from within orbit using other satellites or spacecraft, though it could likely quickly field one in the future, according to SWF.

That’s because the US has done extensive non-offensive testing of technologies to approach and rendezvous with satellites, including close approaches of its own military satellites and several Russian and Chinese military satellites, SWF says.

The US only has one acknowledged, operational counterspace system – electronic warfare capabilities to interfere with satellite signals – and its army is widely seen to have advanced abilities to jam communications and capabilities to interfere with certain navigation satellites. It also has considerable research on ground-based lasers that could be used to dazzle or blind imaging satellites, according to SWF, which says there’s no indication those have become operational.

Speaking in Washington in November, US Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman explained why the US felt it needed to be able to counter other countries’ space capabilities. He pointed to what he described as a “kill web” strategy used by China’s PLA to enhance the range and accuracy of its weapons within the strategically important “second island chain,” running from Japan to Guam.

“That is all a space-enabled capability,” Saltzman said.

And should Beijing decide to use those weapons, “We have to be able to deny (China) access to the information to break that kill chain so that our joint forces are not immediately in target and in range inside the second island chain,” he said.

Meanwhile, concerns about potential adversaries’ space activities have pushed US allies, including France and Australia, to seek counterspace abilities – often non-destructive ways to interfere with enemy satellites, known as “soft-kill” capabilities, such as lasers to disrupt surveillance and jamming.

Israel has also said it used GPS jamming in its war in Gaza to “neutralize” threats, likely ground-based efforts to avert missiles that reach their target using GPS tracking.

More broadly, there has been a trend toward shorter-term-impact measures like jamming, spoofing and cyberattacks that don’t permanently damage or destroy a target, according to Juliana Suess, a research fellow for space security at London-based defense think tank RUSI.

“(Actors) don’t need to invest a whole lot of money into manufacturing these big sci-fi sounding anti-satellite weapons – they can just disrupt a whole network through a cyberattack,” she said.

‘Wipe out’

More than 7,500 operational satellites are orbiting the Earth, according to the most recent figures from the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) in May 2023.

Of those satellites, more than 5,000 were US-owned, with most of them commercial. Nearest competitor China – which has been increasing its satellite launches – had 628, followed by Russia with fewer than 200, according to UCS.

Since it invaded Ukraine, Moscow has accused the West of using commercial satellite systems for military purposes and warned that “quasi-civil infrastructure may become a legitimate target for retaliation.”

Russia has also been accused of mounting cyberattacks against the largest commercial satellite constellation, American company SpaceX’s Starlink, which has been an asset for the Ukrainian military.

When it comes to allegations of developing a nuclear space-based weapon, Moscow has slammed the West as attempting to “assign to us a certain plan of action which we do not have.”

A nuclear weapon in space would be a potential last-resort option – or hanging sword – for its potential to wipe out a wide swath of satellites, albeit indiscriminately.

If Russia is developing such a weapon, its concerns about American constellations like Starlink that have shown military utility are “likely a key motivating factor,” according to Tong Zhao, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace think tank in Washington.

One reason is that as satellite constellations proliferate – aided by advances that have made launches in low Earth orbit (no more than 1,200 miles above the planet) cheaper and easier – it could be difficult for an attacker to cause an impact by simply targeting a single satellite.

By contrast, “employment of such (nuclear) weapons in space could wipe out large satellite constellations, potentially creating long-lasting debris and radioactive remnants that render orbits unusable for military and civilian purposes,” Zhao said. That, he added, could also inflict “an inconceivable setback on the preservation of space as a common domain for future human development.”

Chinese scientists have expressed concern about a potential national security risk of Starlink, with a group writing in the peer-reviewed domestic publication “Modern Defense Technology” in 2022 that “a combination of soft and hard kill methods should be adopted to incapacitate some Starlink satellites functioning abnormally and destroy the constellation’s operating system.”

It’s unclear whether this view reflects thinking within the Chinese government.

Chinese researchers have also considered the ramifications of nuclear detonation in space, with a separate group at a nuclear technology institute publishing research last year on computer simulations of the impact of such blasts at different altitudes, in which they noted there could be potential effects on satellites and other aircraft.

Space treaty

Nuclear weapons already have a controversial history linked to space.

America’s 1962 Starfish Prime nuclear test some 250 miles over Earth damaged at least a third of the 24 satellites operating around that time, according to military documents. It also knocked out powerlines in Hawaii and turned the sky above it a violent shade of orange for hours. The test, launched from Earth, was part of series to evaluate the effect of such explosions, including against ballistic missiles.

Five years later, countries concerned about the heating space race and nuclear standoffs banned the stationing of weapons of mass destruction in space with the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which doesn’t explicitly ban conventional weapons in orbit or missiles launched from Earth.

Though decades old, experts say that treaty – which affirms that space should be used for the benefit of all countries and is endorsed by Washington, Beijing and Moscow – remains a bedrock for a domain that lacks extensive international norms to ensure peace.

Its tenets may be more relevant now than ever – but potentially under greater threat amid a new focus on military and space.

Last month, Russia vetoed an effort in the United Nations Security Council led by the US and Japan to reaffirm the Outer Space Treaty principles, including the obligation not to place nuclear weapons in space. The resolution would have been the council’s first on outer space and was supported by all other members besides China, which abstained.

Instead, China and Russia, which have long worked together to shape rules around weapons in outer space, pushed for that resolution to be broadened to ban the placement of any weapons in space.

Using language that appeared to target the US, it called on “all states, and above all those with major space capabilities” to prevent the “threat or use of force” in space. A second draft resolution backed by Russia that included that amendment, was rejected by the council last week, with the US calling it “disingenuous.”

Any future efforts to agree on rules for space face a complicated outlook, experts say.

For example, placement in space of a nuclear weapon like the one Russia is reportedly considering would have far-reaching implications on how space is used – and how weapons are controlled, according to RUSI’s Suess.

“If the Outer Space Treaty was broken in such a way, it would make it even harder to imagine where multilateral efforts can go from here,” she said.

More than 670 people are feared dead following a devastating landslide in a remote region in northern Papua New Guinea, a UN official said, as rescuers continue to scramble to find survivors.

More than 150 houses in Yambali village are buried in debris, Chief of Mission for the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in the country Serhan Aktoprak said on Sunday.

The new estimate is a sharp increase from earlier in the week, when the UN initially said it believed more than 100 people had died.

The population of the village was first reported to be about 4,000 people, but new estimates found the actual number of residents to be much higher, Aktoprak added.

More than 250 houses have been evacuated with an estimated 1,250 people displaced, and many locals have taken up temporary accommodation with relatives and friends nearby, according to the official.

The area continues to pose an “extreme risk” as rocks continue to fall and the ground soil is exposed to a constant increased pressure, Aktoprak said. People are removing bodies buried under the soil with digging sticks, spades, and agricultural forks, he added.

The disaster hit the remote village of Kaokalam, about 600 kilometers (372 miles) northwest of the capital Port Moresby, at approximately 3 a.m. local time on Friday, leaving a scar of debris that humanitarian workers say is as big as four football pitches.

Footage of the aftermath carried by AFP showed a wide scar of mud and rocks on a steep mountainside slope and locals clambering to look for survivors.

A Pacific nation home to around 10 million people, Papua New Guinea is rich in resources. But its economy has long trailed those of its neighbors, and it has one of the highest crime rates in the world.

Hundreds of tribes are spread across the country’s remote and often inaccessible terrain. But its vast and diverse mountainous landscape, as well as a lack of roads, has made it difficult and costly to upgrade basic services like water, electricity and sanitation.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

Twelve people were injured after a Qatar Airways flight from Doha to Dublin was hit with turbulence on Sunday.

The flight, which landed in Dublin shortly before 1pm local time, was met by emergency services, including airport police and the fire and rescue department.

According to a statement from Dublin Airport, six passengers and six crew members were injured in the incident, eight of which were taken to hospital following assessment. The Qatar Airways flight QR107 experienced turbulence while flying over Turkey, the statement said.

Dublin Airport said it was assisting passengers and staff and that operations were unaffected. The plane’s return flight to Doha, flight QR018, is scheduled to go ahead as expected, though its departure will be delayed, the airport said.

“The matter is now subject to an internal investigation,” the statement continued. “The safety and security of our passengers and crew are our top priority.”

It comes days after 104 passengers were injured and a man with a heart condition was killed on a Singapore Airlines flight that was hit with severe turbulence.

Flight SQ321 from London to Singapore was cruising at 37,000 feet on Tuesday when the plane dropped sharply before climbing several hundred feet, according to flight tracking data. It then repeatedly dipped and ascended for about a minute.

Is turbulence on the rise?

About 65,000 aircraft suffer moderate turbulence every year in the US, and about 5,500 run into severe turbulence. These numbers, however, might be destined to grow.

“We ran some computer simulations and found that severe turbulence could double or triple in the coming decades,” Williams said.

The findings, which were later confirmed by observations, highlight a type of turbulence called “clear air turbulence,” which isn’t connected to any visual clues such as storms or clouds. Unlike regular turbulence, it hits suddenly and is hard to avoid.

It is not yet known what kind of turbulence the Qatar Airways plane experienced.

CORRECTION: This article has been updated to reflect that the cause of the turbulence that hit the Singapore Airlines is yet to be determined and that investigations are ongoing.

At least six newborn babies died in a fire at a children’s hospital in the Indian capital of New Delhi on Saturday, local officials said.

One of the rescued babies is in a serious condition, and the five others are receiving medical attention, Garg said.

The rescued babies have not been identified as authorities have yet to find their birth records, Garg said. It is unclear whether the birth records have been destroyed in the fire.

Delhi Fire Services said it received a call at 11:32 p.m. local time and nine fire trucks were rushed to the site.

Rescue operations remain underway, Garg said, adding that the fire started in a neighboring building, but the exact cause of the fire is yet to be determined. Video footage from the fire service showed flames engulfing the ground and upper floors of the hospital.

In 2021, 10 newborn babies died in a hospital fire in the western Indian state of Maharashtra.

A right-wing German lawmaker made comments seen as so explosively outside the mainstream of acceptable political discourse, that his party was disowned by other far-right leaders, breaking a major coalition in the European Parliament.

Maximilian Krah, of the Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) party, told an Italian newspaper that he didn’t view all members of a notorious Nazi paramilitary group automatically as criminals. He claimed that some in the SS, whose primary role was guarding concentration camps during World War II, were in fact just farmers.

“Before I declare someone a criminal, I want to know what he did. Among the 900,000 SS men there were also many farmers: there was certainly a high percentage of criminals, but not all of them were. I will never say that anyone who wore an SS uniform was automatically a criminal,” Krah told La Repubblica last weekend.

The AfD have since banned the 47-year-old Krah, their leading candidate in next month’s European elections, from making public appearances. Experts say his remarks have also caused reverberations across Europe’s far-right, shining a light on how the continent’s far-right parties view themselves and their associations.

After Krah’s interview was published on Saturday, his party suspended him on Wednesday, and said that he had taken ”full responsibility” for his actions and agreed to step down from its federal executive board with immediate effect.

In a scathing statement, the AfD accused Krah of having caused “massive damage to the party in the current election campaign, for which the candidate had provided the pretext.”

It is not immediately clear if Krah remains the AfD’s official lead candidate for the upcoming European election.

“The only time when there exists this red line is when they feel like it’s hurting their voting result. And that’s the only time when they will act or whether they fear that it will basically change the way German security forces perceive them as the AfD.”

Kicked out of a far-right coalition

On Thursday, a far-right coalition of parties in the European Parliament expelled the AfD from the group.

The Identity and Democracy (ID) bloc said in a statement, they had decided to exclude the AfD, “with immediate effect,” adding that “the ID Group no longer wants to be associated with the incidents involving Maximilian Krah, head of the AfD list for the European elections.”

In Paris, the leaders of French right-wing party National Rally (RN) – the successor to the Front National led by Marine Le Pen, and part of the ID alliance – also dissociated themselves from the AfD.

RN President Jordan Bardella said in a French TV debate on Tuesday that the AfD had “crossed red lines.”

“We will have new allies after the European elections and will no longer be in the same group as the AfD,” Bardella added.

“Far-right populists are always trying to appeal to a broad voter base and they are always trying to give themselves an image that seems cleaner than they actually are. We know that Le Pen’s party has been trying to clean up their image in the past couple of years. She broke with her father, the founder of that party, because of that.”

Blumenthaler described this image cleansing as the “most absurd dynamic that we have, a new far-right self-consciousness all over Europe.”

That sense of self-awareness doesn’t seem to extend to the AfD, though.

There have been a series of incidents where AfD members have expressed far-right ideologies openly in Germany. Recently scandals have also seen members accused of spying for China and accepting bribes from Russia.

Höcke, a former history teacher, intends to run as the lead candidate for the AfD in the upcoming state elections in September, and is currently the clear favorite to win.

According to Blumenthaler, these incidents don’t appear to hurt the party, especially in Germany.

“After basically crashing the (far-right) European coalition, that really hurts the AfD on a European level, but I don’t really think that it will affect their electoral base here in Germany that much,” he added.

Expect more of the same

The AfD’s open radicalism is an interesting phenomenon for Blumenthaler too, especially when compared to its European allies.

The AfD is under domestic surveillance for the threat it poses to Germany’s democracy and despite a recent dip is currently polling higher than each of the three parties in the coalition now governing the country.

Düker noted a similarity between the AfD and Donald Trump, adding that: “The more scandals and the more outrageous things the ex-President said, the more his followers seemed to commit to him even more. And something similar appears to be going on with the AfD.”

Barbie Nadeau in Rome and James Frater in London contributed to this report.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s signaling this week that he is open to peace talks should be viewed with vast, overshadowing caveats, and the weight of Ukraine’s – and the West’s – past experience of Russian diplomacy.

Friday saw a wealth of noise about negotiation, in the same month Moscow launched a third invasion of Ukraine from the north of Kharkiv.

The Reuters news agency cited four sources, in a report from two deeply experienced and connected Russia reporters, that Moscow was willing to consider peace talks which would freeze the current Russian occupation of about a fifth of Ukraine.

Putin responded to that report by suggesting Russia was willing to talk peace, based on earlier agreements. He hinted at an aborted deal in Istanbul, just after the war began, in 2022, which fell apart, mostly because Moscow’s forces were still rampaging across Ukrainian territory, and massacres around Kyiv had come to light.

The idea floated in the Reuters report would stop short of Moscow’s stated goal of capturing all of eastern Donetsk, but also eradicate Kyiv’s insistence it should not surrender any territory.

The context of Putin’s remarks was key. They came during a visit to Belarus’ President Alexander Lukashenko – something which in the past occurred moments before the Kremlin used Belarusian territory for military moves into Ukraine, while on Friday took place during joint tactical nuclear weapons drills between the two countries. Putin was talking peace with a backdrop that was anything but.

Putin questioned the legitimacy of Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, who Moscow has repeatedly assailed, after Kyiv had to delay elections because of the very war Putin started. At the same time, there were unconfirmed reports that the private jet of former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich had landed in Belarus. The pro-Russian Yanukovich fled Ukraine in 2014 after forces loyal to him shot dead dozens of protestors in central Kyiv. The mere possibility of his presence while Putin and Lukashenko met led to speculation Moscow was again hoping to engineer the return of a proxy to power in Ukraine.

The Kremlin’s less brutal goal in Ukraine – short of full or partial occupation – has involved a president in Kyiv it considers loyal, who will stop the country’s march towards the European Union and NATO. It was fanciful before the 2022 invasion, and came up during the aborted 2022 Istanbul talks. But now it would likely need an occupying Russian force to impose it on a population seething at the Kremlin’s brutality.

So why the talk of peace, particularly when Russia appears to be having its most successful moment on the frontlines in months, if not since the invasion?

Diplomacy has always been a military tool for the Kremlin. It talked peace over Syria in 2015, as their jets pounded civilians in rebel-held areas. It talked peace in 2015 with Ukraine, while Russian troops and their proxies were in the throes of a full assault against the strategic Ukrainian town of Debaltseve.

It is not cynical to distrust Russia’s sincerity when it negotiates, but a practical necessity. Experience shows it considers talks worth pursuing in case they unexpectedly produce a useful outcome without violence, or give their opponent cause for pause in fighting to try and encourage a deal.

Moscow may also be talking peace again now for two reasons. Firstly, Ukraine and its allies are convening a peace summit in Switzerland in June, where it will discuss, without Russia, what sort of deal it might accept. It is likely aimed at building momentum for an off-ramp the Kremlin can take when its forces are finally militarily exhausted or in a stalemate.

Zelensky has said he hopes China – Russia’s most potent ally but only partial supporter in the Ukraine war – will attend. Putin may be talking peace now to suggest to Beijing to not be involved in diplomacy about Russia without Russia present. There is little serious chance the Switzerland summit will end the war, but it might concretize minds in the West as to how serious a threat Moscow poses to an actual peace deal by laying out the bones of what damage Ukraine might have to absorb to its territorial integrity to stop the bloodshed.

Ukraine’s Foreign Minister, Dmytro Kuleba, said Friday that Putin’s hints at peace talks were directly aimed at sabotaging the summit. “Putin currently has no desire to end his aggression against Ukraine”, he wrote on X, adding “this is why he is so afraid of” the Switzerland summit.

Secondly, and most importantly, Putin is messaging governments in the West and the current American presidential campaign. He is trying to opaquely suggest – perhaps to populists in Europe, or MAGA Republicans in the United States – that a simple deal is in hand, one in which frontlines, on which Ukraine is currently losing with significant casualties, can suddenly freeze.

Western support for the war is costly, and increasingly unpopular – although the recent $61 billion passed by Congress has perhaps given the issue a reprieve from being at the mercy of electoral opinion for about a year.

The Reuters report permits those in the West who want to see an end to the war to believe the Kremlin could stop the war, as it stands, immediately. Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov made the report sound like it reflected Russia’s permanent position. But ultimately it may sound new and interesting to key Western figures: Donald Trump – who has failed to explain how he would enact his claim he could stop the war in 24 hours – and other NATO members who are less bullish than France, the UK and the Baltic states, about the need to never trust Russia at the negotiating table.

Putin is a pragmatist. He started the war thinking it would be easy. He continued it thinking his tolerance for pain, autocratic security, and patience for victory would triumph. He might be right, just now. He now sees a moment of electoral weakness in the US, and other European states, which he has met with a vague, opaque signal that there might be a time for diplomacy.

It will likely gain some traction among those who desperately hope the war in Ukraine will just go away, and who are less mindful of the existential threat a victorious and hyper-militarized Moscow poses to NATO’s eastern members. But it should be viewed through the lens of the deep cynicism of Moscow’s earlier diplomacy in Syria and Ukraine: used as a time to ferociously pursue the same military objectives, but with the illusory backdrop that peace might be just around the corner.

Police and protesters clashed in Tel Aviv on Saturday night after a day of rallies calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and for the return of all hostages, according to several videos posted on social media.

In the videos, horse-mounted police and water cannons can be seen in Tel Aviv’s Democracy Square attempting to disperse crowds refusing to leave, resulting in violent clashes.

At a separate protest, police said they arrested two people “for disorderly conduct” after they allegedly left the approved demonstration site at the Kaplan intersection, headed to the Azrieli intersection and “lit fires and began to break the order, not obeying the police’s instructions.”

“A police officer declared the demonstration illegal and warned that if they did not disperse the police would be forced to use measures,” police added in a statement.

The clashes followed anti-government protest marches that took place in several cities across Israel, calling for the release of hostages taken during Hamas’ surprise attack on Israel on Oct 7, and for a general election.

Around 250 people were taken hostage during Hamas’ surprise October 7 attack on southern Israel, in which 1,200 people were killed, according to Israeli officials. Since then, Israel’s retaliatory war on Hamas in Gaza has killed more than 35,000 Palestinians, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza.

Many of the protesters in the streets of Tel Aviv, Haifa, Rehovot and beyond on Saturday took aim at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, accusing his government of corruption and criticizing his handling of the war against Hamas.

Families of current and past hostages also held a rally calling for an immediate resumption of negotiations with Hamas to “advance a deal that will bring them all back.”

Israel’s Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) believes 125 hostages are still being held in Gaza, following the release deal in November that freed more than 100.

Of those still in Gaza, 121 were kidnapped on Oct 7; the four others were already being held before the attacks.

The PMO believes that at least 37 of the hostages still in the Gaza Strip are dead.

The Egyptian official said the talks would take place in Cairo.

Chilean authorities have arrested a volunteer firefighter and a former forestry official on suspicion of starting devastating wildfires that killed more than a hundred people earlier this year.

The two suspects were charged with arson resulting in death on Friday, according to the National Prosecutor’s Office. A court in the city of Valparaíso ordered that they be put in pre-trial detention on Saturday, the office said.

At least 137 people were killed in the fires that tore across large parts of central and northern Chile in February, leaving 16,000 people displaced and damaging more than 9,800 buildings, according to government figures.

It was one of the largest disasters recorded in the country in the last 30 years, according to estimates by the Research Center for Integrated Disaster Risk Management in Chile.

Investigators have evidence the two men agreed “in advance to carry out this type of conduct when the meteorological conditions were precisely adequate to ensure that a fire of this proportion would occur,” regional prosecutor Claudia Perivancich said on Saturday.

Perivancich told local media that one of the suspects said there was a financial motive behind the plot. She also said prosecutors have requested a six-month investigation period and that they had not ruled out the possibility of more people being involved.

At least 10 people, including children, died in Gaza on Saturday after a drone strike hit the school they were sheltering in, according to local health workers.

The Al-Nazla school in Saftawy, on the outskirts of Jabaliya, was being used as a temporary shelter by people fleeing violence when the strike took place.

He added that a “man making bread for his children, thinking this was a safe space” was killed along with his daughter, Afnan, and his son, Mohamed.

One health worker shows the body of the deceased toddler Mohamed with injuries to his face.

Healthcare system ‘on its knees’

News of the strike comes as the humanitarian situation in Gaza continues to deteriorate.

In a statement on X Saturday morning, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) warned that Gaza’s healthcare system “is on its knees” as access to hospitals and facilities shrink further amid supply shortages and Israeli attacks.

As of Friday, 15 out of 36 hospitals in Gaza were only partially functional, 21 hospitals were out of service, and there were six functional field hospitals, OCHA’s report said, citing the WHO. Existing hospitals are operating at more than four times their bed capacity, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health, the agency said.

“Shortages in fuel, medical supplies and equipment are threatening the ability of the remaining health facilities to operate,” it added.

So dire has the situation become that the director of the Kuwait hospital in Rafah posted a video plea on WhatsApp, to “sound the alarm to the WHO to keep this hospital operational and to guarantee it doesn’t shut down by providing it with the necessary fuel.”

In his video appeal, Dr. Suhaib al-Homs says the Kuwait Hospital is now the only functioning hospital in central Rafah injured members of the public can reach “around the clock,” as the surrounding field hospitals are difficult to access without an ambulance.

“We are warning of the mounting health crisis as hospitals are going out of service and the collapse of the health sector,” he says.

“We will keep on working and the medical teams will keep doing their job. What’s happening now makes us more steadfast and adamant to fulfill our duty to serve our people.”

The UN aid agency has warned that some displaced people in central Gaza are now surviving on 3% of the minimum standard for daily water needs and that communicable diseases, including diarrhea and suspected Hepatitis A, continue to increase with children under the age of five being particularly affected.

Earlier this week, the head of the WHO called on Israel to ease all restrictions on aid entering the Gaza Strip, saying the primary route for vital medical aid to enter Gaza from Egypt had been cut off amid an ongoing Israeli army operation on the southern Gaza city of Rafah.