The bodies of six Israeli hostages have been retrieved from Gaza during an overnight military operation in Khan Younis, Israeli authorities said Tuesday, as the latest ceasefire negotiations continue. In a joint announcement, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and the Israeli Security Agency (ISA) named them as Yoram Metzger, Alexander Dancyg, Avraham Munder, Chaim Peri, Nadav Popplewell and Yagev Buchshtab. All but Munder had been announced dead in recent months by the Israeli military. Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said the IDF and ISA had entered Hamas tunnels in a “complex operation” to retrieve the bodies. “We will continue working to achieve the goals of this war – returning the hostages to Israel and dismantling Hamas,” Gallant said on X. A joint statement by the ISA and IDF said the operation was “enabled by precise intelligence” from the two agencies’ intelligence units, and the IDF Intelligence Directorate Hostage Headquarters. There are currently 109 Israeli hostages being held in Gaza, including 36 believed to be dead, according to data from the Israeli Government Press Office. Munder, 79, Metzger, 80, and Peri, 80, were all residents of Kibbutz Nir Oz, near the Gaza border, where they were captured during Hamas’ October 7 attacks, according to statements from the kibbutz. Munder was taken along with his wife, daughter and grandson, who were later freed during a temporary truce between Israel and Hamas in November. Munder’s son, Roee, was killed during the attack. Nine-year-old Ohad Munder told Israel’s public broadcaster Kan 11 on Tuesday that the death of his grandfather and the other hostages “shouldn’t have happened.” “There have already been many times when there were negotiations for (a) deal… and then they say no – and in the end they don’t want it, and always regret it at the last minute. All the hostages could have returned alive even on the first day. They could have brought back grandfather and all the other hostages,” Ohad said. Metzger’s wife Tami was also kidnapped and later released in the November truce. Popplewell, who was 51 when abducted, and Buchshtab, 35, were taken from Kibbutz Nirim, the kibbutz said in a statement. In May, Hamas’ military wing, the Al-Qassam Brigades, claimed Popplewell, a dual British-Israeli citizen, had died more than a month earlier of wounds he sustained after an Israeli airstrike hit the place where he was held. CNN was not able to independently verify the claim by Hamas. The IDF said in July that Buchshtab was believed to have been held in Khan Younis and died several months ago, while the IDF was operating there. It did not detail the circumstances of the death at the time. In a statement Tuesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu thanked those involved in the retrieval operation for their “bravery and determined action.” “Our hearts ache for the terrible loss,” he said. IDF to probe cause of deaths The chief spokesperson of the IDF said Tuesday it was investigating what caused the deaths of the hostages. Earlier on Tuesday, a report in the Israeli media had claimed that some of the fatalities may have been linked to an Israeli military operation in Khan Younis. Israeli outlet Ynet had reported that an IDF preliminary assessment was that the hostages may have died due to suffocation after the IDF hit a nearby Hamas target and carbon dioxide flooded the tunnel where they were being held. Asked in a news conference whether the IDF had killed the hostages, spokesperson Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari referred back to a statement he made in June, when he had said the “the hostages were killed while our forces were operating in Khan Younis.” However, he did not confirm that the hostages had been killed as a result of Israeli military action. Hagari said the IDF would need to “find out all the details and these bodies are in Israel, they will be brought for burial but were also examined at the Institute of Forensic Medicine.” The IDF would inform the families and the public of its findings, Hagari said. The chief spokesperson also said the IDF would not be able to return all hostages through rescue operations, which is why Israel is active “on all channels.” About 1,200 Israelis were killed and some 250 others kidnapped during Hamas’ October 7 attacks on Israel, according to Israeli authorities. More than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed and more than 92,000 injured during Israel’s war in Gaza, according to the health ministry in the enclave. Ceasefire talks The news comes as negotiations for a ceasefire continue, with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken saying that Netanyahu agreed on Monday to a US “bridging proposal” for a deal after the pair met in Tel Aviv. Mediators presented the bridging proposal to Israel and Hamas last week to close the remaining gaps of disagreement between both sides, a joint statement between the United States, Qatar and Egypt said. Blinken said the next step in the ceasefire talks “is for Hamas to say yes.” He arrived in Egypt on Tuesday for talks with top officials to “get the latest from them on what they are hearing” from Hamas, Blinken said. Further high-level negotiations are expected to resume as soon as this week in either the Egyptian or Qatari capital. The same day, representatives of an Israeli hostage family forum said Netanyahu told them that Israel would not leave the Philadelphi Corridor, a 14-kilometer strip of land that serves as a buffer zone on the border between Egypt and Gaza, and had also appeared to cast doubt on a hostage and ceasefire deal. Netanyahu said in the meeting that there “might not be a deal,” but the remark came in the context of Hamas potentially ruling out an agreement, the Tikva forum’s Zvika Mor, father of hostage Eitan Mor, told CNN. Mor added that Netanyahu had insisted on maintaining Israeli control over the Philadelphi corridor, but had not committed to maintaining control over the Netzarim corridor — which intersects one of Gaza’s two main north-south roads to create a

Scientists have found that human beings age at a molecular level in two accelerated bursts – first at the age of 44, and then again at 60. In a study published in the journal Nature Aging, scientists at Stanford University and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore followed 108 participants over several years to observe aging changes in their molecules — RNA, proteins and participants’ microbiomes. The scientists found that human aging does not happen in a gradual, linear way. Rather, the majority of the molecules they studied showed accelerated, non-linear changes at the ages of 44 and 60. Xiaotao Shen, an assistant professor in microbiome medicine at Nanyang Technological University and first author of the study, told CNN that the results show “we are not becoming old gradually.” Some points in time are particularly important for our aging and health, he added. For example, the ability to metabolize caffeine notably decreases – first around the age of 40 and once more around 60. Components involved in metabolizing alcohol also diminish, particularly around the age of 40, Michael Snyder, chair of the department of genetics at Stanford and an author of the study, told CNN, referring to the two waves of aging. Snyder added that, anecdotally, “people often get muscle injuries and see their fat accumulation hit in their 40s (related to lipid metabolism), and definitely sarcopenia (muscle loss) hit people in their 60s — this is a very big deal.” Both age groups experienced changes in proteins which hold tissues together, which likely helps explain skin, muscle and cardiovascular changes, he added. Disease risks also rise faster, particularly after the age of 60. The study found that people age 60 or older are more susceptible to cardiovascular disorders, kidney issues and type 2 diabetes. Finding patterns like these can help with the diagnosis and prevention of diseases, according to the study, which said it had also identified “clinically actionable markers” that can be used to improve health-care management and the well-being of aging populations. The study focused on participants between the ages of 25 and 75 for nearly two years, on average. Participants all lived in California, were healthy and came from diverse ethnic backgrounds. Samples of blood, stool, skin and nasal and oral swabs were taken from them every three to six months. Since accelerated aging in women could have been attributed to menopause (which is typically between ages 45 and 55), the researchers performed analysis on separate male and female datasets. To their surprise, they found the results were similar – suggesting a transition point around 55 could be a common phenomenon for both sexes. A previous study by researchers in Germany and the United States had found that there is another “wave” of aging around 75, but the latest research was not able to confirm those findings because of the limited age range of the cohort in the trial, Shen told CNN. As for what to take away from their findings, the researchers advise making lifestyle changes such as drinking less alcohol and exercising more when nearing these pivotal years in your 40s and 60s. Snyder advised people approaching their 60s to watch their carb intake and drink plenty of water to aid kidney function. “Take care of yourself more closely at specific time points during your life span,” advised Shen.

Emergency workers in southern Italy are still hunting for at least one person who remains missing after a tornado sank a luxury yacht early Monday – prompting an air and naval operation off the coast of Sicily. Twenty-two people are thought to have been on the yacht when the tragedy struck. Fifteen people were rescued from the wreckage, according to Italy’s Coast Guard. One body was recovered on Monday and five more were found on Wednesday, after divers struggled to reach deep inside the yacht around 50 meters underwater (approximately 150 feet). Two Americans and four Britons were among the six initially reported missing – including British tech tycoon Mike Lynch, Jonathan Bloomer, chairman of Morgan Stanley International, and Chris Morvillo, a prominent lawyer. The five bodies found Wednesday have not been identified, while the body recovered Monday is thought to be that of the onboard chef Ricardo Thomas. What happened? A small waterspout – a type of tornado – spun over the Mediterranean island early Monday, likely capsizing the sailing boat amid lashings of rain and strong thunderstorms. The British-flagged yacht, called the “Bayesian,” was anchored about a half a mile from the port of Porticello, on Sicily’s northern coast. The vessel sank after its mast broke in half in the storm, Salvatore Cocina, head of Sicily’s Civil Protection, told CNN on Tuesday. Eyewitnesses described furious gales and hurricane-like winds that left an avalanche of debris near the pier. More than a dozen survivors were spotted in the area hanging onto life rafts, according to the captain of a nearby boat, who steadied his ship to avoid colliding with the Bayesian. “We got this strong hurricane gust and we had to start the engine to keep the ship in an angled position,” Karsten Bower told reporters in Palermo on Monday. “After the storm was over, we noticed that the ship behind us was gone.” Bower and his crew rescued four injured people, he said, before calling Italy’s Coast Guard – who later rescued the remaining survivors. One of those rescued – a child – was airlifted to the children’s hospital in Palermo. Eight people were hospitalized in total, according to the mayor’s office. The girl’s mother, Charlotte, described how she battled to hold onto Sofia, her 1-year-old daughter, as reported by Italian news agency ANSA. “In two seconds I lost the baby in the sea, then I immediately hugged her again amidst the fury of the waves. I held her tightly, close to me, while the sea was stormy,” she told journalists. “Many were screaming.” The mother and daughter were later reunited with the father, James, according to a doctor at the local children’s hospital in Palermo. “The survivors are very tired and are constantly asking about the missing people,” the doctor, Domenico Cipolla, said Monday. “They are talking and crying all the time because they have realized that there is little hope of finding their friends alive.” Divers jump into the sea to search for six people missing in Sicily, southern Italy, on Monday. Handout/Vigili del Fuoco/Reuters Italy’s fire brigade dispatched helicopters to aid in the search, officials said Monday. After an unsuccessful attempt on Monday, the brigade sent divers to try and enter the sunken ship Tuesday, recommencing the operation on Wednesday. The depth of the wreck means divers can only work there for limited periods of time, according to Marco Tilotta, an inspector for the diving unit of Palermo’s local fire brigade. The Italian fire brigade said Monday its divers had reached the yacht’s hull 49 meters (160 feet) below sea level. The United Kingdom’s Marine Accident Investigation Branch (MAIB) said it has deployed a team of four inspectors to Palermo which is conducting a preliminary assessment of the scene. Who was on board? Twenty-two people were on board the Bayesian, which was flying under a British flag and had mostly British passengers and crew, in addition to two Anglo-French, one Irish and one Sri Lankan person, a spokesperson for Italy’s Coast Guard told CNN. A troupe of high-profile guests are among those missing, including Lynch, the 59-year-old British tech investor who fought a fraud case earlier this year in the United States – which spiraled from the disastrous $11 billion sale of his company to tech firm Hewlett-Packard (HP) in 2011. His 18-year-old daughter was also named missing. Lynch’s wife, Angela Bacares, survived the accident. Bacares told Italian daily newspaper La Repubblica that she woke up at 4 a.m. local time, as the boat tilted. She and her husband were not initially concerned, she said, but became worried when the windows of the yacht shattered and chaos erupted. Bacares spoke to the newspaper while sitting in a wheelchair, at a hospital in the Sicilian town of Termini Imerese. She had abrasions on her feet and bandages on other parts of her body, it reported. Bloomer, the finance tycoon, and Morvillo, a prominent lawyer – and both their wives – are also among the missing, according to Salvatore Cocina, head of Sicily’s Civil Protection. Morvillo, an American partner at Clifford Chance, was involved in successfully defeating the US fraud case against Lynch in June. Another employee of the firm, Ayla Ronald, and her partner, survived the incident, according to a spokesperson for Clifford Chance. The body that was recovered from the vessel on Monday was identified as the onboard chef Ricardo Thomas, an Antiguan citizen, Reuters reported. British tech mogul Mike Lynch, pictured in November 2014, is among the missing. Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg/Getty Images What do we know about the boat? Built in 2008, the 56-meter (184-foot) yacht was manufactured by Italian company Perini Navi, Reuters reported. According to the Associated Press, the boat has been available for charter for $215,000 (€195,000) per week. Lynch’s wife is linked to the yacht. The Bayesian is held by the company Revtom Limited, according to records from the maritime information service Equasis. The company’s latest annual return from April lists Bacares as the proprietor. “Bayesian,” the name given to the vessel, is linked to the statistical theory on which Lynch built his fortune, according

Scientists have found that human beings age at a molecular level in two accelerated bursts – first at the age of 44, and then again at 60. In a study published in the journal Nature Aging, scientists at Stanford University and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore followed 108 participants over several years to observe aging changes in their molecules — RNA, proteins and participants’ microbiomes. The scientists found that human aging does not happen in a gradual, linear way. Rather, the majority of the molecules they studied showed accelerated, non-linear changes at the ages of 44 and 60. Xiaotao Shen, an assistant professor in microbiome medicine at Nanyang Technological University and first author of the study, told CNN that the results show “we are not becoming old gradually.” Some points in time are particularly important for our aging and health, he added. For example, the ability to metabolize caffeine notably decreases – first around the age of 40 and once more around 60. Components involved in metabolizing alcohol also diminish, particularly around the age of 40, Michael Snyder, chair of the department of genetics at Stanford and an author of the study, told CNN, referring to the two waves of aging. Snyder added that, anecdotally, “people often get muscle injuries and see their fat accumulation hit in their 40s (related to lipid metabolism), and definitely sarcopenia (muscle loss) hit people in their 60s — this is a very big deal.” Both age groups experienced changes in proteins which hold tissues together, which likely helps explain skin, muscle and cardiovascular changes, he added. Disease risks also rise faster, particularly after the age of 60. The study found that people age 60 or older are more susceptible to cardiovascular disorders, kidney issues and type 2 diabetes. Finding patterns like these can help with the diagnosis and prevention of diseases, according to the study, which said it had also identified “clinically actionable markers” that can be used to improve health-care management and the well-being of aging populations. The study focused on participants between the ages of 25 and 75 for nearly two years, on average. Participants all lived in California, were healthy and came from diverse ethnic backgrounds. Samples of blood, stool, skin and nasal and oral swabs were taken from them every three to six months. ging Since accelerated aging in women could have been attributed to menopause (which is typically between ages 45 and 55), the researchers performed analysis on separate male and female datasets. To their surprise, they found the results were similar – suggesting a transition point around 55 could be a common phenomenon for both sexes. A previous study by researchers in Germany and the United States had found that there is another “wave” of aging around 75, but the latest research was not able to confirm those findings because of the limited age range of the cohort in the trial, Shen told CNN. As for what to take away from their findings, the researchers advise making lifestyle changes such as drinking less alcohol and exercising more when nearing these pivotal years in your 40s and 60s. Snyder advised people approaching their 60s to watch their carb intake and drink plenty of water to aid kidney function. “Take care of yourself more closely at specific time points during your life span,” advised Shen.

A Milwaukee woman who argued she was immune from prosecution because the man she fatally shot was sexually trafficking her was sentenced Monday to 11 years in prison, according to Kenosha County Court documents. Chrystul Kizer – who earlier this year pleaded guilty to reckless homicide in the case – will also serve five years parole, Kenosha County District Attorney Michael Graveley told CNN in an email Monday. “The 11 years is minus … 570 days because she has served those awaiting trial,” said Graveley. Kizer shot Randall Volar, 34, at his Kenosha, Wisconsin, home in 2018 when she was 17 years old, Kenosha County Court prosecutors said. Kizer shot Volar in the head, burned his house down and stole his BMW, The Associated Press reported. She initially was charged with multiple counts, including first-degree intentional homicide, arson, car theft and being a felon in possession of a firearm. Kizer, who is Black, argued she was trafficked by Volar, who was White, beginning when she was 16. Wisconsin’s Supreme Court ruled in 2022 a state law absolving trafficking victims of criminal liability for offenses committed as a direct result of being trafficked extends to first-degree intentional homicide. The court ruled Kizer’s legal team should have the opportunity to present evidence at trial that the crimes she was charged with were “a direct result of the violence she experienced,” according to a statement from the Chicago Community Bond Fund. The ruling allowed Kizer to argue she was justified in the killing. But it also said Kizer must first provide evidence for a trial judge her decision to kill Volar was connected to being trafficked before she could invoke immunity, the AP reported. Kizer maintains Volar’s death was the result of self-defense, the bond fund said, but in May this year she pleaded guilty to a reduced count of reckless homicide, court documents state. Kizer, 17 at the time, put a gun in her bookbag in June 2018 and traveled from Milwaukee to Volar’s home in Kenosha after telling her boyfriend she was going to shoot him because she was tired of him touching her, the AP reported, citing court documents.

Emergency workers in southern Italy are still hunting for six people missing after a tornado sank a luxury yacht early Monday – prompting an air and naval operation off the coast of Sicily. Fifteen people were rescued from the wreckage on Monday, according to Italy’s Coast Guard. One body was later recovered from the hull of the stricken vessel. Two Americans and four Britons are among those missing – including British tech tycoon Mike Lynch, Jonathan Bloomer, chairman of Morgan Stanley International, and Chris Morvillo, a prominent lawyer. Here’s what we know. What happened? A small waterspout – a type of tornado – spun over the Mediterranean island early Monday, likely capsizing the sailing boat amid lashings of rain and strong thunderstorms. The British-flagged yacht, called the “Bayesian,” was anchored about a half a mile from the port of Porticello, on Sicily’s northern coast. The vessel sank after its mast broke in half in the storm, Salvatore Cocina, head of Sicily’s Civil Protection, told CNN on Tuesday. Eyewitnesses described furious gales and hurricane-like winds that left an avalanche of debris near the pier. More than a dozen survivors were spotted in the area hanging onto life rafts, according to the captain of a nearby boat, who steadied his ship to avoid colliding with the Bayesian. “We got this strong hurricane gust and we had to start the engine to keep the ship in an angled position,” Karsten Bower told reporters in Palermo on Monday. “After the storm was over, we noticed that the ship behind us was gone.” Bower and his crew rescued four injured people, he said, before calling Italy’s Coast Guard – who later rescued the remaining survivors. One of those rescued – a child – was airlifted to the children’s hospital in Palermo. Eight people were hospitalized in total, according to the mayor’s office. One survivor, Charlotte, 35, described how she battled to hold onto her 1-year-old daughter, Sofia, as reported by Italian news agency ANSA. “In two seconds I lost the baby in the sea, then I immediately hugged her again amidst the fury of the waves. I held her tightly, close to me, while the sea was stormy,” she told journalists. “Many were screaming.” The mother and daughter were later reunited with the father, James, according to a doctor at the local children’s hospital in Palermo. “The survivors are very tired and are constantly asking about the missing people,” the doctor, Domenico Cipolla, said Monday. “They are talking and crying all the time because they have realized that there is little hope of finding their friends alive.” Divers jump into the sea to search for six people missing in Sicily, southern Italy, on Monday. Handout/Vigili del Fuoco/Reuters Italy’s fire brigade dispatched helicopters to aid in the search, officials said Monday. The brigade also said they would send divers to try and enter the sunken ship Tuesday, after an unsuccessful attempt on Monday. The depth of the wreck means divers can only work there for limited periods of time, according to Marco Tilotta, an inspector for the diving unit of Palermo’s local fire brigade. The Italian fire brigade said Monday its divers had reached the yacht’s hull 49 meters (160 feet) below sea level. The United Kingdom’s Marine Accident Investigation Branch (MAIB) will also deploy a team of four inspectors to Palermo to conduct a preliminary assessment of the scene, a source familiar with the operations told CNN, on the condition of anonymity. Who was on board? Twenty-two people were on board the Bayesian, which was flying under a British flag and had mostly British passengers and crew, in addition to two Anglo-French, one Irish and one Sri Lankan person, a spokesperson for Italy’s Coast Guard told CNN. A troupe of high-profile guests are among those missing, including Lynch, the 59-year-old British tech investor who fought a fraud case earlier this year in the United States – which spiraled from the disastrous $11 billion sale of his company to tech firm Hewlett-Packard (HP) in 2011. His 18-year-old daughter was also named missing. Lynch’s wife, Angela Bacares, survived the accident. Bloomer, the finance tycoon, and Morvillo, a prominent lawyer – and both their wives – are also among the missing, according to Salvatore Cocina, head of Sicily’s Civil Protection. Morvillo, an American partner at Clifford Chance, was involved in successfully defeating the US fraud case against Lynch in June. British tech mogul Mike Lynch, pictured in November 2014, is among the missing. Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg/Getty Images What do we know about the boat? Built in 2008, the 56-meter (184-foot) yacht was manufactured by Italian company Perini Navi, Reuters reported. According to the Associated Press, the boat has been available for charter for $215,000 (€195,000) per week. The name given to the vessel is linked to the statistical theory on which Lynch built his fortune, according to Reuters. The yacht’s mast stood 72.27 meters (237 feet) high above the designated water line, just short of the world’s tallest mast which is 75.2 meters, according to Guinness World Records. It was the tallest aluminium mast in the world, the Perini Navi website said. Dangerous weather conditions Strong storms across Sicily brought torrential rainfall late Sunday. Initial reports suggest a small waterspout, which developed over the area Monday morning, could have been behind the yacht’s sinking. Waterspouts – one of several types of tornadoes – are spinning columns of air that form over water, or move from land out to water. They are often accompanied by high winds, high seas, hail and dangerous lightning. While they are most common over tropical oceans, they can form almost anywhere. Waterspouts rely on warm waters to gain energy and the Mediterranean Sea has been very hot, reaching a record daily median of 28.9 degrees Celsius (84 Fahrenheit) last week, according to preliminary data from researchers at the Institute of Marine Sciences in Spain. Local temperatures have been even higher, with waters around Sicily reaching almost 30 degrees Celsius (86 Fahrenheit), almost 3 degrees more than normal, Italian climatologist Luca Mercalli told CNN. “Warmer oceans have more energy and more

The bodies of six Israeli hostages have been retrieved from Gaza during an overnight military operation in Khan Younis, Israeli authorities said Tuesday. In a joint announcement, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and the Israeli Security Agency (ISA) named them as Yoram Metzger, Alexander Dancyg, Avraham Munder, Chaim Peri, Nadav Popplewell and Yagev Buchshtab. All but Munder had been announced dead in recent months by the Israeli military. “Tonight our forces returned the bodies of six of our hostages who were held by the murderous terrorist organization Hamas,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement on Tuesday, thanking those involved in the operation for their “bravery and determined action.” “Our hearts ache for the terrible loss,” he said. Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said that the IDF and ISA had entered Hamas tunnels in a “complex operation” to retrieve the hostages’ bodies. “We will continue working to achieve the goals of this war – returning the hostages to Israel and dismantling Hamas,” Gallant said on X. A joint statement by the ISA and IDF said the operation was “enabled by precise intelligence” from the two agencies’ intelligence units, and the IDF Intelligence Directorate Hostage Headquarters. There are currently 109 Israeli hostages being held in Gaza, including 36 believed to be dead, according to data from the Israeli Government Press Office. Munder, 79, Metzger, 80, and Peri, 80, were all residents of Kibbutz Nir Oz, near the Gaza border, where they were captured during Hamas’ October 7 attacks, according to statements from the kibbutz. Munder was taken along with his wife, daughter and grandson, who were later freed during a temporary truce between Israel and Hamas in November. Munder’s son, Roee, was killed during the attack. Metzger’s wife Tami was also kidnapped and later released in the November truce. Popplewell, who was 51 when abducted, and Buchshtab, 35, were taken from Kibbutz Nirim, the kibbutz said in a statement. In May, Hamas’ military wing, the Al-Qassam Brigades, claimed Popplewell, a dual British-Israeli citizen, had died more than a month earlier of wounds he sustained after an Israeli airstrike hit the place where he was held. CNN was not able to independently verify the claim by Hamas. The IDF said in July that Buchshtab was believed to have been held in Khan Younis and died several months ago, while the IDF was operating there. It did not detail the circumstances of the death at the time. About 1,200 Israelis were killed and some 250 others kidnapped during Hamas’ October 7 attacks on Israel, according to Israeli authorities. More than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed and more than 92,000 injured during Israel’s war in Gaza, according to the health ministry in the enclave. Ceasefire talks continue The news comes as negotiations for a ceasefire continue, with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken saying that Netanyahu agreed on Monday to a US “bridging proposal” for a deal after the pair met in Tel Aviv. Blinken said that the next step in the ceasefire talks “is for Hamas to say yes.” He arrived in Egypt on Tuesday for talks with top officials to “get the latest from them on what they are hearing” from Hamas, Blinken said. Further high-level negotiations are expected to resume as soon as this week in either the Egyptian or Qatari capital. Mediators presented the bridging proposal to Israel and Hamas last week to close the remaining gaps of disagreement between both sides, a joint statement between the US, Qatar and Egypt said. Hamas said the latest proposal doesn’t include a permanent ceasefire and introduced new conditions in the prisoner exchange, among other issues. In a statement on Sunday, the militant group placed blame on Netanyahu for “obstructing” a deal from being reached. The Hostage and Missing Families Forum said Tuesday that the recovery of hostage bodies provided “necessary closure,” and called for urgency to finalize a deal. “The Israeli government, with the assistance of mediators, must do everything in its power to finalize the deal currently on the table,” it said in a statement. Meanwhile, Israel’s military operation in Gaza continues, with at least seven people killed and 15 injured on Tuesday after an Israeli airstrike targeted a school where Gazan authorities said thousands of displaced people were sheltering from violence. Gaza Civil Defense Spokesperson Mahmoud Basal told CNN that the majority of those killed and injured in the strike on the Mustafa Hafez school were women and children and that a number of people were still under the rubble. The IDF said in a statement that the Israeli Air Force had “conducted a precise strike on terrorists who were operating within a Hamas command and control center” inside the school and that “numerous steps were taken to mitigate the risk of harming civilians, including the use of precise munitions, aerial surveillance and additional intelligence.” Israeli forces have repeatedly targeted schools used as shelters for civilians in Gaza, claiming that Hamas is operating inside the compounds. This is a developing story and will be updated. CNN’s Kareem Khadder and Jennifer Hansler contributed to this report. Khader Al-Za’anoun of Wafa, the official Palestinian news agency, contributed reporting from Gaza.

Amateur fossil hunter Eddie Templeton usually knows when he’s onto something. Having scoured creek banks in Mississippi since he was a kid, Templeton has made several stunning extinct mammal finds, including a mastodon mandible, numerous bones from a giant armadillo-relative, and even a saber-toothed cat’s foot bone. But his latest discovery may be the most unexpected. Templeton was wading through around 3 feet (almost 1 meter) of water in a creek in Madison County on August 3 when he stumbled across a giant tusk partially exposed from the mud bank. The conditions weren’t great for fossil hunting, he said — the water had been blocked from draining downstream and there were no exposed gravel bars — so he hadn’t anticipated making a find of any particular importance that day. Coming across the 7-foot-long (2.1-meter-long) tusk, which turned out to be completely intact, and sharing it with George Phillips, the curator of paleontology at the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science, proved him wrong. Phillips confirmed the tusk belonged to a Columbian mammoth, a distant relative of the woolly mammoth. Columbian mammoths lived during the end of the Pleistocene Epoch, making the fossil anywhere from about 11,700 to 75,000 years old, Phillips said. The tusk, which could be anywhere from 11,700 to 75,000 years old, was found partially exposed from the mud bank. Courtesy Eddie Templeton “It was exciting to find a big piece of a tusk, certainly. But it was particularly exciting that it was a mammoth,” Templeton told CNN. “After the geologists got there, and we started uncovering it and realized that it was the entire tusk, from tip to base, it was even more exciting. So things just got better as the day went on.” Prior to Templeton’s discovery, only isolated teeth of the Columbian mammoth had been unearthed in Mississippi, making it a first-of-its-kind find for the region and offering a “rare window” into the giant ice age mammals that once roamed the area, according to a statement from the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality. how Discovering Mississippi mammoths While the massive Columbian mammoth — which weighed over 22,000 pounds (10 tons) and could grow to be over 13 feet (4 meters) tall — lived across North America alongside the mastodon, its diet largely consisted of grasses found in grassland biomes, which were rare on what’s now the East Coast of the United States during that period, Phillips said. As a result, its fossils are much harder to come by in the area. “For every, say, 25 fragments or whole teeth of American mastodon, we find maybe one mammoth tooth at best. So, mammoths are proportionally rare, not just with respect to mastodons, but to everything else,” Phillips said. When Templeton first came across the giant tusk, he assumed it was from a mastodon, having found several remnants of the creature on his prior hunts. It was after the local museum and state office of geology helped him unearth the massive remains that Templeton began to have second thoughts — mostly due to the fossil’s telltale curve. The Columbian mammoth’s tusks are so curved that two could almost make a complete circle, whereas common mastodons’ tusks do not curve nearly as much, Phillips said. The museum has numerous tooth fragments and even several complete teeth from the mammoth — there may even be some fragments of tusks from the giant mammal that cannot be distinguished from the mastodon without having the rest of the tusk — but a complete, intact tusk like the one discovered is especially rare, he added. “I was kind of open mouthed when I saw the picture,” Phillips said. “I thought, ‘OK, well, cool, a tusk. Wait a second … it’s so curved. Holy cow, this is a mammoth tusk.’” While unearthing the fossil, the field scientists simultaneously covered the exposed bits with plaster to keep the fossil protected during extraction. The tusks grew in rings, similar to how trees grow, Templeton said, which causes the fossils to be more likely to fragment once they dry up after being taken from the moist deposits where they are found. The field scientists covered the fossil with plaster in an attempt to keep the tusk from drying out and fragmenting. Courtesy Eddie Templeton The tusk — which weighed 600 pounds (272 kilograms) with the plaster jacket — is currently at the museum, where experts will closely monitor it while it dries out and then treat it with a cohesive for preservation. Scientists will also need to reassemble the fragile fossil, which broke into two pieces during transportation. Phillips said he hopes to have the tusk on display in time for the museum’s annual Fossil Road Show during the first week of March next year. “I think most people are curious about the past, and these megafauna that existed during the ice age fascinate people,” Templeton said. “I’m sure there have been pieces of mammoth tusk found in Mississippi, but probably not positively identified as mammoths just because they’re fragments. But this is the first complete mammoth tusk found in Mississippi. And so that’s pretty cool.”

Tears streamed down Bisan Abuaita’s face as she reunited with her teammates at Jordan’s Queen Alia Airport in May. It was the first time members of the Palestinian women’s soccer team had met since the start of the war in Gaza, an ongoing trauma for Palestinians inside and outside the enclave. The team was en route to Dublin, Ireland – the first time a senior Palestinian women’s team had ever played in Europe. “Everyone was crying at the airport because that’s literally the only way for we sisters to meet. No one is playing. People are dying,” the 26-year-old – who plays as a winger for the team – later told CNN on the phone from her home in the West Bank. This season’s Palestinian-based women’s league was slated to start on October 9, 2023, two days after Hamas’ devastating assault on Israel, that prompted a military campaign that has so far killed tens of thousands of people and displaced more than a million more. After months of fearing for their relatives and friends inside Gaza, the team finally got their 90 minutes of solace, kicking off against local Irish club Bohemians FC in May.           Palestinian soccer player Bisan Abuaita  Palestinian Football Association Adding extra significance to the match, it was played on the 76th anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba, or catastrophe, during which approximately 700,000 Palestinians fled their homes or were expelled by Jewish militia groups, in violence that accompanied the founding of the state of Israel in 1948. Thousands of Palestinian flag-waving fans filled Dalymount Park, with the proceeds going to charitable organizations to help refugees back home. Irish President Michael Higgins was among those in attendance. Just two weeks after the match was played, Ireland would go on to recognize Palestinian statehood, in a coordinated move with two other European nations, Spain and Norway, a decision that was condemned by Israel. Ireland is considered one of the most pro-Palestinian nations in Europe, and earlier this year filed an intervention in the genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. The Palestinian side won the match 2-1, but the result was less important than the game itself. “Leading the team out was unforgettable,” said 25-year-old captain Mira Natour, a doctor who will soon return to her native Bethlehem in the West Bank, where she works in a government hospital. “It was a moment that filled me with enormous pride and a heavy sense of achievement. Not just for me, but the entire team and our nation. It was a symbol of our resilience; representing Palestine on the international stage despite all the challenges we face.” Palestinian women’s team captain Mira Natour Palestinian Football Association Teammate Abuaita, who travels between Bethlehem and France to help displaced Palestinian women and children, described the “surreal” moment of being able to return to competitive soccer. She had barely kicked a ball since her local club won the Palestinian Cup the previous year. “It felt amazing,” she said. “Wearing the kit gives me goosebumps. With what’s happening lately, it’s like double the goosebumps. “Everyone was crying when we heard the national anthem (pre-match) because you remember everything and everyone that you’re playing for. Each one of us knows people who are suffering, who (have been) martyred.” ‘Sisters’ assemble The Palestinian players traveled to Ireland from far and wide – some from their homes in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, and others from the global diaspora living thousands of miles from the site of the conflict. Five players from the West Bank, including Abuaita, had to drive to Jordan and fly from Amman. There are no airports in the Palestinian territories and the women would have needed a permit to fly from Israel’s Tel Aviv airport. Even though the distance to Jordan’s Queen Alia Airport is relatively short, three separate security checkpoints along the way meant the trip took around 10 hours, Abuaita said. But at least they could travel. Since the team’s establishment in 2013, there has yet to be a Palestine women’s team member from Gaza, due to Israel’s blockade of the enclave. “Unfortunately, we don’t have players from Gaza on our team. One of the main reasons why is the blockade that was forced upon Gazans since 2007,” said team manager Deema Yousef. “This means citizens cannot leave the strip without a permit granted by the Israeli government, which is extremely hard to obtain,” said Yousef, a representative of the Palestinian Football Association. Other players came from the Palestinian diaspora in Germany, Sweden, Canada and Saudi Arabia. Palestinian women’s team goalkeeper Charlotte Phillips with her grandparents George and Odette Dabit after the game at Dalymount Park in Dublin, Ireland. Stephen McCarthy/Sportsfile/Getty Images Eighteen-year-old goalkeeper Charlotte Phillips was born in Canada to a Bahamian father and Palestinian mother. Phillips’ grandparents, George and Odette, are Nakba survivors whose family members were killed in front of them, she said. They left Jerusalem in the mid-70s and moved to Canada and went on to open a successful Palestinian restaurant in Toronto, said Phillips, now a university student in Toronto. “I can’t always fully relate to the struggles,” Phillips said. “I know what it means to be Palestinian in Canada, but I don’t know what it means to be Palestinian living in occupied Palestine. So, playing in a game like that in front of my teta (grandmother) and sidi (grandfather) was so significant to our family history.” Nonetheless each meetup of the team, like the match in Ireland, is charged. “It was so incredibly emotional,” Phillips recalled. ‘We are still fighting’ Both Natour and Abuaita described the team’s bittersweet feeling of clocking valuable minutes on the field, while remembering those struggling in war-torn Gaza. Abuaita said her team plays as a mark of respect for those killed in the conflict, and as a reminder to the world that Palestinians are still fighting. “We play for all those people who were killed, for those footballers and athletes who were murdered. And for those athletes who are still unable to play, because in Gaza now there’s zero

August continues to be an exciting month for sky-gazers. Closely following the peak of the Perseid meteor shower last week, the first of the year’s four consecutive supermoons is set to rise on August 19. The rare cosmic combination of a supermoon and blue moon peaks at 2:26 p.m. ET Monday. The last time this lunar event occurred was August 2023, and the next super blue moons are projected for January and March of 2037. Approximately one-quarter of all full moons are supermoons, while a mere 3% of full moons are blue moons. So-called supermoons appear as the biggest and brightest lunar events of the year. The moon’s orbit around Earth is not a perfect circle but an elliptical path. Scientists refer to the moon’s nearest point to Earth — an average distance of about 226,000 miles (363,300 kilometers) — along its 27-day journey as the satellite’s perigee, according to NASA. There are varied definitions for supermoons, said Noah Petro, lab chief of NASA’s Planetary Geology, Geophysics and Geochemistry lab. However, a full moon within 90% of perigee is often described as a supermoon, he said. When the moon is closest to Earth in its orbit, it can appear up to 14% larger and 30% brighter than when it’s at its farthest point from the planet, known as apogee, about 251,000 miles (405,500 kilometers) from Earth. While this perceived size increase might be subtle, NASA describes a supermoon as noticeably brighter than other full moons throughout the year. It may be challenging to see the difference, but a supermoon significantly impacts Earth, leading to higher-than-normal tides due to its proximity. Supermoon visibility Supermoons are observable to the naked eye and do not require a particular location for viewing. Throughout the night, the moon will rise higher until just before sunrise. Shannon Schmoll, director of Abrams Planetarium at Michigan State University, said if the sky is free of clouds and you have a clear view, you will be able to see the moon. “It’s bright enough that you don’t need to go anywhere special,” and visible right after the sun sets, she said. Petro said the joy of these full moons is that if cloud coverage obscures visibility, you can look any night before or after the full moon peaks. “So there’s really three days where the full moon is going to be most beautiful,” he said. “The thing about these super moons is because they’re so much closer, they’re also brighter.” He noted that if it’s a clear night, you may notice the shift in brightness outside. “You’ll be treated to this beautiful sight in the sky, which is our moon hovering off in the distance.” Because supermoons are 30% brighter than average full moons, they are more easily detectable. “It’s going to be a little bit brighter, and it’s always a good excuse to go outside and appreciate the universe, and our place in it, and what we can see from the Earth,” Schmoll said. What are blue moons and sturgeon moons? Despite the name dating from 1528, the moon will not appear blue in color, NASA’s Gordon Johnston wrote. “Only when there’s a lunar eclipse does the moon appear to change color,” Petro said. As with supermoons, there are varying definitions for blue moons — monthly and seasonal. Schmoll explained that “on average, we have one full moon, per month, but because most of our months are slightly longer than a lunar cycle, that means if we end up with a moon right at the beginning of a month, we might have another full moon again at the very end of the month. So sometimes that’s called a blue moon.” A seasonal blue moon is often defined as the third full moon of an astronomical season with four full moons. People view the moon as it rises, with a red glow attributable to smoke particles in the upper atmosphere from North American wildfires, a day ahead of the super blue moon, at Parliament Hill in London, August 18. Toby Melville/Reuters “If you take a season, a season is about three months long. So in that time, you would normally have three full moons in a single season, and if you end up with four in a season, the third one of the four would be the blue moon, and that’s what this blue moon is,” Schmoll said. In the 1930s, the Maine Farmer’s Almanac started applying names corresponding to events in nature for the full moons, Petro said. These names have since become widely used and recognized. “Sturgeon moon originates from indigenous observations within the environment,” he said. Maine Farmer’s Almanac states that the Algonquin tribes, who once lived in what is now the northeastern region of the United States, referred to the full moon in August as the sturgeon moon, named after the large fish caught more readily during this season. Upcoming celestial events Keep an eye out for Jupiter and Mars while peering at the moon, Schmoll said. Last week, the two planets were aligned in conjunction, reaching their closest proximity to each other from Earth’s viewpoint since 2018. Jupiter and Mars will likely remain fairly close to one another in the sky during the supermoon’s peak, Schmoll said. And in the next month or so, anticipate a brightening event, known as a nova, that will occur in the Milky Way’s Corona Borealis, or Northern Crown constellation. Astronomers expect T Coronae Borealis, nicknamed Blaze Star, to explosively burst as a binary system of a dead white dwarf star and an aging red giant star violently collapse. “There’ll be what looks like a new star in the constellation for a few days to a week before it fades from view. And this is something that happens every 80 years or so,” Schmoll said. “That’s something that we don’t know exactly when it’s going to happen, but we are expecting it to happen.” Schmoll said. Remaining supermoons of the year The remaining supermoons of 2024 will occur on September 18, October 17 and November 15. The September supermoon will

At the mouth of the Motagua, Guatemala’s longest river, 40 million pounds (18 million kilograms) of trash pours into the ocean each year. It is one of the most polluted rivers in Central America, winding 302 miles (486 kilometers) through Guatemala before flowing into the Gulf of Honduras and, ultimately, the Caribbean Sea. By some estimates, the trash carried downstream by the Motagua River makes up roughly 2% of the total plastic waste that enters the world’s oceans each year. “Every 60 seconds, a dump truck full of plastic is entering the ocean (globally),” Alex Schulze, co-founder and CEO of 4ocean, a US-based startup that wants to end plastic pollution, told CNN. Schulze founded 4ocean in 2017 along with his friend Andrew Cooper following a surfing trip in Bali, Indonesia, where they were shocked by the overwhelming quantity of plastic pollution in the ocean. The company collects trash from oceans, rivers and coastlines and converts it into products such as bracelets, building materials or fuel, which it then sells. Whatever the company cannot recycle, it sends to a landfill. Today, it has teams in Guatemala, the US state of Florida, and Indonesia and estimates it has collected more than 37 million tons of trash since 2017. In Guatemala, in addition to trash-collecting missions undertaken by locally hired crews, the company installed a boom, a floating fence-like barrier, 30 miles (48 kilometers) upstream from the mouth of the Motagua River. Made of a durable fabric, the boom is designed to catch debris before it enters the bay, without disturbing wildlife. 4ocean’s containment boom collects waste in the Motagua River. 4ocean/Clynton Guzman “We hope to stop most of the trash and plastic that’s coming down the Río Motagua from inland during the rainy season before it reaches the ocean,” said Kevin Kuhlow, 4ocean’s country manager for Guatemala. But the rainy season initially took a toll on the boom itself. Last year, a heavy storm dislodged the boom and fragments of it washed away downstream. To prevent this from happening again, 4ocean dug holes into the riverbed to securely anchor the system. The company estimates that the boom has captured 100,000 pounds (45,000 kilograms) of trash since its installment in 2023. While that number is only a fraction of the total trash that flows downriver, 4ocean hopes that it can make a difference by raising awareness about plastic pollution in the local community. A lack of waste disposal infrastructure in Guatemala, combined with a lack of awareness of the causes of plastic pollution, means that many dispose of trash improperly, according to 4ocean. This not only has an impact on the environment, but it endangers the livelihoods of locals who depend on fishing, which is why the company hires local people to work on the project. Already, some of its Guatemalan employees say they have noticed a change in how they and the people in their community treat the environment. “(We’re) not contributing by throwing out more plastic, but instead telling people ‘Please don’t pollute the environment,’” 4ocean employee Cristina Ramírez told CNN. Local employees gather the trash in large blue sacks. 4ocean/Clynton Guzman 4ocean is not the only company working to pull plastic from the Motagua River. In 2023, non-profit organization The Ocean Cleanup erected its own barricade in Las Vacas, a tributary of the Motagua River, located close to Guatemala City, the country’s capital. It recently announced it would be deploying another of its interceptors in the basin of the Motagua. Other organizations, both local and international, came together this year to form the Alliance for the Motagua River, which aims to restore and clean up the river basin. One of the member organizations, Fundación Crecer, creates accessible educational programs for children that teach them how to recycle and compost. Schulze recognizes that pulling trash from the ocean won’t solve the issue alone. It starts, he said, with education and changes in the way people and corporations use and produce plastic. “We say it a lot that cleaning the ocean alone will not solve the ocean plastic crisis. We have to stop it at the source and turn off the tap,” he said.

When billionaire Jared Isaacman self-funded a mission to orbit Earth in 2021, the project was billed as a childhood cancer fundraiser — and made for an eye-popping entrance into the private space tourism world. The four-person crew of people from various backgrounds with no prior spaceflight experience spent three days orbiting Earth together in a 13-foot-wide SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule. Upon his return, Isaacman imagined he likely would not go to space again. “We kind of checked every one of the boxes we set out to achieve,” Isaacman told CNN, saying that Inspiration4 showed how people from various walks of life can train for and execute a mission to orbit. ”(I thought) that maybe I wouldn’t go back, that maybe the bar was set sufficiently high that this was a good time to stop.” That assessment of his future in spaceflight, however, did not stick. On Monday, Isaacman and three crewmates — including his close friend and former Air Force pilot, Scott “Kidd” Poteet, as well as two SpaceX engineers, Anna Menon and Sarah Gillis — will arrive at Kennedy Space Center in Florida to prepare for the launch of a far grander, more dangerous, and experimental trip to space. Polaris Dawn crew members — including, from left, Anna Menon, Scott Poteet, Jared Isaacman and Sarah Gillis — are seen inside a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule. Polaris Program/John Kraus The mission, called Polaris Dawn, is slated to take off no earlier than 3:30 a.m. ET on August 26. While prior missions to space that were funded by wealthy businesspeople may have conjured images of self-indulgent joy rides, Polaris Dawn is a test mission designed to push boundaries. Isaacman, Menon, Gillis and Poteet will spend five days aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule that will soar to altitudes higher than any human has traveled since NASA’s Apollo program ended in the 1970s. Their orbital path will extend high enough to plunge the vehicle and crew into a radiation belt, adding another element of peril to the already treacherous experience of spaceflight. This crew of private citizens will also open the hatch of their spacecraft and expose themselves to the vacuum of space, marking the first time such a feat has been attempted by non-government astronauts. During this endeavor, the astronauts will be protected solely by brand-new Extra-Vehicular Activity (EVA) suits, which SpaceX designed and developed in just two and a half years. With Polaris Dawn, Isaacman — the founder of payment services company Shift4, who is also a jet pilot with lifelong dreams of space travel — is making clear he is not just interested in duplicating what professional astronauts have experienced. He is seeking to advance space technology, helping to fund the development of new hardware as well as personally exposing himself to the risks of testing out that technology where it matters most: in the unforgiving void of outer space. “What Jared is doing — he’s not just going for a joyride,” said Garrett Reisman, a former NASA astronaut who serves as a SpaceX consultant and helped lead the development of Crew Dragon. “Jared (wants) do things that SpaceX wasn’t necessarily doing on its own, to increase their capabilities, to get them to move the ball further downfield.” An unprecedented mission First announced in 2022, Polaris Dawn is the first of three testing and development missions under the Polaris Program that Isaacman said he will jointly execute and fund alongside SpaceX. He declined to say how much this mission cost. The end goal of the Polaris Program is to take the first steps toward validating technology that SpaceX will one day need if it carries humans deeper into the cosmos — including spacesuits, EVA and life-support technologies. After launch, the Polaris Dawn crew will travel into an oval-shaped orbit that extends as high as 870 miles (1,400 kilometers) from Earth. That’s well into the inner band of Earth’s Van Allen radiation belts, which begin at around 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) in altitude. The belts are areas where concentrations of high-energy particles that come from the sun and interact with Earth’s atmosphere are trapped, creating two dangerous bands of radiation, according to NASA. 1) The International Space Station orbits about 250 miles (400 kilometers) above Earth. 2) The Hubble Space Telescope, which NASA astronauts have conducted spacewalks to repair, orbits about 320 miles (515 kilometers) high. 3) The innermost of two bands that make up the Van Allen radiation belts begins at about 600 miles (1,000 kilometers). 4) The Polaris Dawn mission will reach a maximum altitude of 870 miles (1,400 kilometers) before lowering its apogee for the spacewalk. CNN/Getty Images/Space X/Adobe Stock Almost immediately after reaching space, the Polaris Dawn crew will begin a “pre-breathe” process to prepare for the spacewalk. It’s akin to what scuba divers do to avoid decompression sickness, otherwise known as “the bends.” The crewmates must purge nitrogen from their blood so that when the Dragon capsule is depressurized and exposed to the vacuum of space, the gas doesn’t form bubbles in their bloodstream — a potentially lethal condition. “We don’t have an airlock on this mission,” Gillis told CNN, referring to the areas on board the International Space Station (ISS) that serve as special decompression chambers for astronauts heading out for a spacewalk. Polaris Dawn will instead take “a really novel and different approach” to the pre-breathing process that involves “slowly decreasing cabin pressure and raising oxygen concentration.” Unlike any pre-breathe attempted on the International Space Station, the process will take roughly 45 hours — nearly two days, said Gillis, who works as a lead space operations engineer at SpaceX and trained the Inspiration4 crew for their mission. Finally, to kick off their third day in space, the Polaris Dawn crew will open the Crew Dragon’s hatch as they’re about 435 miles (700 kilometers) above Earth. All four of the crew members and the entirety of the spacecraft’s interior will be exposed to the expansive void. Only Isaacman and Gillis will actually exit the spacecraft, however, tethered by a couple of

The safety situation at Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant is deteriorating after a drone strike on a nearby road, the United Nations’ energy watchdog warned Saturday. The plant, in southern Ukraine, has been under Russian control since March 2022. “Yet again we see an escalation of the nuclear safety and security dangers facing the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant. I remain extremely concerned and reiterate my call for maximum restraint from all sides and for strict observance of the five concrete principles established for the protection of the plant,” the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi said in a press release Saturday. The power plant informed the IAEA that a drone struck just outside the plant’s protected area near the “essential cooling water sprinkler ponds and about 100 meters from the Dniprovska power line, the only remaining 750 kilovolt line providing a power supply to (the power plant),” an IAEA statement said. The IAEA team visited the area and reported that the damage seemed to have been caused by a drone. There were no casualties and no damaged equipment, but the road was damaged between the two main gates to the plant. Russian state media outlet TASS claimed that staff at the power plant had accused Ukraine of the drone strike. “At 7 a.m. Moscow time, the Ukrainian drone dropped a shell on the road that runs along the power units outside the perimeter. Personnel use this road all the time. No one was injured, but once again a direct threat to the safety of personnel and the plant was created,” it said. Ukraine has not yet publicly commented on the strike. However, Russia and Ukraine have blamed previous incidents at the plant on each other. Last weekend, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that Russian forces started a fire at the plant, showing a video of a large plume of smoke coming out of one of the towers on the plant’s territory, but several Russian officials said Ukraine was behind the incident. The IAEA team reported Saturday that there has been heavy military activity in the area for the last week. “A significant fire at one of the (Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant) cooling towers earlier this week resulted in considerable damage, although there was no immediate threat to nuclear safety,” the IAEA added. There were also air raid alarms and drone attacks at the Khmelnytskyy, Rivne and South Ukraine nuclear power plants, as well as at the Chernobyl site, according to the IAEA. “Nuclear power plants are designed to be resilient against technical or human failures and external events including extreme ones, but they are not built to withstand a direct military attack, and neither are they supposed to, just as with any other energy facility in the world,” Grossi said. “This latest attack highlights the vulnerability of such facilities in conflict zones and the need to continue monitoring the fragile situation.” Grossi added that he was willing to visit the Zaporizhzhia plant. Meanwhile, TASS reported that Grossi had also been invited to visit a nuclear power plant in Kursk, the region of southern Russia where Ukrainian forces have launched a growing incursion. “An invitation to visit the Kursk Nuclear Power Plant and its satellite city of Kurchatov in the nearest future has been relayed to the head of the IAEA. It is an uncommon, but a very timely and important step,” Russian Permanent Representative to international organizations in Vienna Mikhail Ulyanov said on his Telegram channel Saturday. Andrii Kovalenko, head of the Countering Disinformation Center of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, said on Friday that “Russia may be preparing a nuclear provocation. Their scenario of accusing us of terrorism and an offensive on the Kursk Nuclear Power Plant did not work, and now they are lying about a ‘dirty bomb’ and our possible provocation.”

Russia is scrambling to shore up its defenses more than a week into Ukraine’s shock, lightning attack across the border on the southern Kursk region. US officials told CNN that Russia has diverted thousands of troops from occupied territory inside Ukraine to counter the threat. Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has had to bring in conscripts, backpeddling on a promise he made not to use them on the frontline. A sizeable trench has been dug across countryside near the town of Selektsionnyi, around 45 kilometers (about 28 miles) from the border, in Kursk, satellite imagery showed. Online job adverts for trench diggers have emerged. “Payment every week,” promised one. Trenches, west of Lgov, Russia Maxar Technologies Experts told CNN that Ukraine’s bold gambit to breach Russia’s border, planned in complete secrecy, had stunned even Kyiv’s closest allies, including the United States, shifting the playing field of a more than two-year-old war. But after months on the backfoot, losing ground in grinding battles in their own territory, just how were the Ukrainians able to catch Moscow by surprise and penetrate the Russian homeland? First: superb operational security. Nothing about the operation leaked. Based on videos from the ground and satellite imagery of their advance, the troop movements almost seemed like an exercise or a defensive reinforcement. “[Ukraine has] demonstrated that they can pull off such a secretive and significant operation successfully, they can penetrate Russian territory so this is no longer the red line, and they … are still very much committed to fight for their country, that there is no such thing as war fatigue, and they’re willing to take these, in a way, extreme measures for the sake of defending their country,” Natia Seskuria, an associate fellow at the UK’s Royal United Services Institute for Defense and Security Studies (RUSI), told CNN. The force was built up under cover of thick summer foliage along the rural roads of Sumy region, in northeast Ukraine. Experienced, battle-hardened units were brought up or diverted from other areas. Units such as the 82nd Air Assault Brigade, which had until recently been fighting in nearby Kharkiv region, were pulled into the mission to breach the border, according to multiple videos and social media accounts. Among the detailed preparations was precise intelligence on the readiness and ability of Russian units on the border, and the number of obstacles that lay ahead, from minefields to tank traps. There weren’t many. Ukrainian forces also used detailed knowledge of the geography to launch the attack, using forest belts for cover and roads for speed. It was only in the last days before the incursion began that commanders were briefed on the mission. “The key, in terms of Ukraine’s success, [was that] they managed to penetrate Russian territory quite easily with little to no resistance. It was a complete surprise for the Russians, and it demonstrates that Russian intelligence services really failed to foresee any sort of Ukrainian incursion into the region,” said Seskuria. Having established weak points in Russian defenses, the first Ukrainian units stormed into Kursk on the afternoon of August 6. Videos on social media, which were geolocated by CNN, appear to show dozens of Russian soldiers immediately surrendering at the heavily damaged border crossing south-west of the town of Sudzha, located 105 kilometers (65 miles) southwest of the city of Kursk. Dozens of Russian soldiers appear to surrender in videos geolocated by CNN to a border crossing south-west of Sudzha, Russia. Social media Serhii Sternenko, a Ukrainian vlogger who shared the video on his Twitter and Telegram channels, said it showed at least 22 Russian soldiers “surrender” in the Kursk region. CNN was unable to confirm the identity of those shown in the footage. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Thursday that Ukrainian forces had taken control of Sudzha – the first official confirmation that the troops, which have been in the town since last Wednesday, had captured it. The town is an important transit point for gas supples from Russia to Europe via Ukraine. Satellite images showed a gas terminal at a nearby border point in ruins. In their charge across the border, Ukrainians have used fast, resilient western-made armored vehicles: Strykers and Marders. Small mobile groups of special forces swiftly fanned out to dozens of locations as the Russian military scrambled to assess the strength of the assault. Key to their success: air defenses and supporting artillery, as well as jamming to prevent the Russian military from communicating. Thermal protection for their body armor also helped soldiers evade heat-detecting drones. Within hours of crossing the border, the Ukrainians were close to Sudzha. Many of its residents were sent scrambling on hair-raising escapes, some cursing the Russian military for abandoning them. As the operation unfolded, Ukrainian soldiers posted video of themselves in front of village signs before vanishing, part of a parallel campaign of psychological warfare. CNN geolocated numerous videos showing Ukrainian forces posing in front of road signs and taking down Russian flags at village halls across the Kursk region, including in Porozovsky, Plekhovo, Sverdlikovo, Guyevo and Sudzha. “I think that has a great value in terms of information warfare because these images, videos that we see … that is a really good morale boost for Ukrainians,” said RUSI’s Seskuria. Rather than confront Russian units head-on, advanced Ukrainian units bypassed them, cutting them off. The Russian military command struggled to keep up with where the threat was emanating from. At the same time, the Ukrainians trained their attention on Russian reinforcements, wiping out one convoy of 14 Russian military vehicles near Rylsk with a missile attack. Video shared on social media, which CNN geolocated to the village of Oktyabr’skoe in the Kursk region, showed the dead bodies of Russian soldiers in destroyed and burned-out trucks along a section of road. More than a week after the incursion began, the Ukrainians were still probing for weaknesses, consolidating their hold on a band of territory 35 kilometers (about 22 miles) deep – even providing Russian civilians with emergency food

One body has been recovered and six people are missing, according to Italian authorities, after a luxury yacht sank off the coast of Sicily. A tornado hit the vessel around 5 a.m. Monday, according to a spokesperson for Italy’s Coast Guard. The yacht was anchored about a half a mile from the port of Porticello on the Mediterranean island. Rescue workers near Palermo, Italy, close to the scene of the incident. Igor Petyx/Reuters Fifteen people have been rescued from the scene and one child was airlifted to the children’s hospital in Palermo. The captain is among the survivors, according to the Coast Guard spokesperson for Italy’s Coast Guard. The 56-meter yacht called the “Bayesian,” which flies under a British flag, had mostly British passengers and crew, in addition to two Anglo-French, one New Zealander, one Irish and one Sri Lankan, the spokesperson told CNN. The Italian fire brigade said its divers had reached the yacht’s hull 49 meters (160 feet) below sea level, according to a press statement. The brigade also dispatched helicopters to bolster the search operation.

Democrats this week will enshrine one of the most audacious power plays in modern political history as they gather for a convention that was hastily reconfigured to try to vault Kamala Harris to a historic presidency. It begins with adulation for President Joe Biden, who will speak Monday night to a crowd grateful that he belatedly agreed to pass the torch. But the moment will be bittersweet for the 81-year-old president, who, despite a productive tenure, was pressured by his own party leaders to end his reelection bid when a 50-year career succumbed to the ravages of age. Biden told Americans last month when he announced his departure from the race that “History is in your hands. The power’s in your hands. The idea of America lies in your hands.” The response from his party was a swift coalescing behind Harris, 59, as hopes of some activists for a multi-candidate race among Democratic rising stars were dashed. With Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz leading their new ticket, Democrats now hope to thwart a White House comeback by Donald Trump amid panic over the prospect of a second term he plans to devote to “retribution.” Republicans left their convention in Milwaukee a month ago, convinced they were heading for a landslide victory under a candidate who emerged bloodied but defiant from an assassination attempt. At that point, the Democratic National Convention was shaping up as a grim valediction for an aging president who was losing to Trump in key states. But Harris has sent a jolt of electricity and joy through her party, mending some of the potentially catastrophic splits in Biden’s coalition. She’s pulled into a narrow lead over Trump in some national polls, reestablishing a neck-and-neck race with the former president in survey averages. And she’s restored multiple paths for Democrats to secure the 270 electoral votes needed to win the White House. The mood shift in the party is astonishing, even if Harris’ biggest tests still lie ahead. “First of all, you were talking about a reelection nomination, a renomination. And now you’re talking about something completely different,” J.B. Pritzker, the Democratic governor of Illinois, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday. “This is a candidate who’s energized the party in a way that I haven’t seen certainly since ’08.” The refashioning of the race has left Trump — seeking to become only the second one-term president to win a non-consecutive second term — disoriented and pining for his matchup against Biden, whose hopes dissolved after his disastrous performance at the CNN debate in June. The Republican nominee has raged through a string of unhinged campaign events that have left party strategists despairing and pleading with him to focus. Harris hasn’t faced tough questions yet in an unscripted event, but she has been successful in styling herself as the change agent in the race despite spending four years playing a key role in Biden’s unpopular presidency. Democrats know ‘history’ is in their hands The party’s late attempt to save what many officials believe is the most critical election in a generation is fraught with risk. Democrats have put their fate in the hands of a vice president who was not seen as one of her party’s strongest political forces. Remarkably for a party nominee, Harris has yet to earn a single vote for president. She ended her first campaign in 2019 before the Iowa caucuses and claimed the nomination this time by acclamation after a virtual roll call of delegates rather than in a primary contest. She faces a critical debate clash with Trump on September 10, and her capacity to maintain the momentum of the campaign could be tested in future television interviews. Democrats are meeting under the historic shadow of the 1968 convention in Chicago, when activist violence sparked by the war in Vietnam transmitted an unflattering picture of the party to Americans who eventually embraced a right-wing Republican law-and-order message. There are other parallels to that fateful convention — it featured a Democratic vice president, Hubert Humphrey, who was trying (and ultimately failed) to win the election after the sitting president (Lyndon B. Johnson) was forced to pull out of his reelection race. Demonstrations are again expected in the week ahead, especially among pro-Palestinian supporters who have hounded Biden over his support for Israel after tens of thousands of civilians have been killed in the war in Gaza. It is not, however, clear whether progressive and Arab American voters who registered protest votes against Biden in the primaries — especially in the key swing state of Michigan — will pose a similar threat to Harris’ hopes in November. Harris will be under extraordinary pressure with her speech Thursday night to introduce herself to Americans still unfamiliar with her life story and ideas. This is where Biden’s Monday address will be especially crucial as he hands over the political reins of the party to Harris, even while he’s still president. Harris turns the Democratic campaign from one focused on the past to the future To reinforce the pivot, Democrats will turn to former President Barack Obama on Tuesday night. Twenty years after he burst onto the scene as an unknown Illinois legislator with an electrifying convention speech, and nearly eight years since he left the White House, the party will again rely on the 44th president’s rhetorical skill. Harris has barely put a foot wrong in infusing her party with a spirit of Obama-style optimism and hope. A rocking convention could project a spirit of unity and give her a polling bounce heading into the final stretch of the race. Harris, benefiting from the generational comparison to Biden, 81, and Trump 78, is styling her new campaign as a fight for America’s future against a backdrop of historic possibility: If elected in November, she’d be the first Black female president and first Indian American president. At a rowdy rally in Philadelphia earlier this month at which she introduced Walz as her running mate, Harris rooted her appeal to voters in freedom — of economic opportunity, reproductive and voting rights, and the right to be

Ukraine’s military incursion into Kursk aims to create a “buffer zone” to prevent cross-border attacks by Moscow’s forces, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky confirmed Sunday, as his troops blew up a second bridge in the Russian border region. Ukrainian forces are inching forward in Kursk amid fighting following the launch of their surprise military operation there nearly two weeks ago. But Ukraine also remains under pressure in its occupied east as Russian forces advance toward a key military hub. The Kursk offensive has left Russia struggling to shore up its own territory. Kyiv seems to have multiple goals with the assault, from boosting morale after a torrid few months to stretching Russia’s resources. A Ukrainian presidential aide said the incursion aimed at ensuring a “fair” negotiation process. For the first time, Zelensky on Sunday stated the strategic ambitions of the operation, saying, “It is now our primary task in defensive operations overall: to destroy as much Russian war potential as possible and conduct maximum counteroffensive actions.” Those include “creating a buffer zone on the aggressor’s territory,” the president said in his latest address. “Everything that inflicts losses on the Russian army, Russian state, their military-industrial complex, and their economy helps prevent the war from expanding and brings us closer to a just end to this aggression,” Zelensky said. Kyiv’s foothold in Kursk is “getting stronger” with troops reinforcing their positions, according to Zelensky. Kyiv says it controls nearly 1,000 square kilometers (about 621 square miles) of Russian territory, and both Russia and Ukraine have urged residents to evacuate from areas where heavy fighting is ongoing. As part of efforts to cripple Moscow’s logistical capabilities and disrupt supply routes, Ukrainian forces said Sunday they blew up another bridge over the Seym river in the Kursk region, with “precision airstrikes.” “The Air Force aviation continues to deprive the enemy of logistics capabilities with precision airstrikes, which significantly affects the course of combat operations,” Ukrainian Air Force commander Lt. Gen. Mykola Oleshchuk said in a social media post that included a video showing plumes of smoke engulfing parts of the bridge. The attack comes two days after Ukrainian forces destroyed a first bridge over the Seym. Russia’s foreign ministry said Ukraine had used Western rockets to carry out that attack, which were likely US-made HIMARS. HIMARS, or the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, has perhaps been the most revered and feared piece of weaponry in Kyiv’s fight and since arriving have helped Ukraine to take back significant swaths of territory from Russia. The Ukrainian monitoring group DeepState said Sunday that Kyiv is making further gains in Kursk and shared a still image from a video, also geolocated by CNN, of what it said was a Ukrainian Defense Forces tank in the village of Olgovka, about 20 kilometers (12 miles) north of the town of Sudzha. Kyiv’s forces took control of Sudzha last week and established a military commandant’s office there, according to Ukrainian military officials. A satellite image shows a bridge collapsed over the Seym river in the Glushkovo district, following a Ukrainian strike in the Kursk region, Russia, on August 17, 2024. Planet Labs/Handout/Reuters On Sunday, Ukrainian armed forces published a video of what they said were “Sivalka” flamethrower systems “engaged in active combat operations” in the Kursk direction. Russia appears to have diverted several thousand troops from front line fighting in occupied Ukraine to address the territorial loss in Kursk. And residents who fled the area due to the fighting have been warned not to go back. “The operational situation on the territory of our district remains complicated. Some citizens are not giving up their attempts to return home, thus hindering the work of our military,” said the head of Kursk’s Korenevsky district, Marina Degtyareva, on Sunday. “Returning to the area so far is impossible for local residents, and sometimes results in terrible tragedies.” Authorities would tell residents when it is safe to return, she added. “I appeal to all residents of Korenevsky district, let’s be patient and let our military deal with the enemy, let’s not interfere with our defenders,” she said. A Ukrainian soldier stands near used shell cartridges as he patrols an area in Ukraine’s Donetsk region. Oleksandr Klymenko/Reuters Russians reach outskirts of key city Despite Kyiv’s push further into Kursk, Russian forces are also advancing in eastern Ukraine. Russia’s army has moved closer to the city of Pokrovsk in the Donetsk region, which serves as a key hub for the Ukrainian military because of its easy access to the town of Kostiantynivka, another military center. Ukraine uses the road connecting the two to resupply the front lines and evacuate casualties. “The Russians are close, up to 11 kilometers (7 miles) from the outskirts of the town. The town is getting ready,” said Serhii Dobriak, head of the Pokrovsk city military administration, on Sunday. “Every town in Donetsk region has a combat unit assigned to it, and defense plans have been developed. We are working with the military to build fortifications. This is a continuous process.” Zelensky said Sunday that Ukrainian units “are doing everything to hold the positions” amid dozens of attacks on the front lines in Donetsk. The evacuation of civilians from Pokrovsk has been accelerated because of the approach of Russian troops. Nearly 1,800 people have been evacuated from the city over the past week alone; until recently 450-500 residents were being evacuated every month. “The Russians are destroying our towns and villages, killing civilians, so we need to think about our safety and evacuate,” Dobriak said. “Currently, the town is being hit by missiles, MLRS, and there have been several guided aerial bomb attacks.” A woman walks past a house that was destroyed after a Russian strike on a residential area in Pokrovsk on August 3. Thomas Peter/Reuters Ukraine’s Vice Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk on Sunday urged residents of Pokrovsk and other settlements “in the immediate vicinity of the front line” to evacuate and “leave for safer regions.” Vereshchuk said she understood residents would have to leave their jobs, homes and property, but “nevertheless, the lives and health of you and your children are more

  A beautiful, remarkably well-preserved mosaic that was “hidden for thousands of years” has been uncovered by archaeologists in northwestern England. The mosaic, which features fish and dolphins, was discovered in Wroxeter Roman City. The fourth largest city in Roman Britain that was almost as big as Pompeii during its heyday, its ruins now survive as an archaeological and educational site about 50 miles west of Birmingham. Still displaying its bright white, red, blue and yellow colors, the mosaic is the first to be discovered at Wroxeter since 1859, according to a press release from Vianova Archaeology, which was involved in the dig. It was likely in the dining room of a wealthy person or city official used to “entertaining wealthy guests” who was “determined to impress people with this fine mosaic,” Win Scutt, senior properties curator at English Heritage, which runs the site, told CNN. Scutt added that archaeologists can’t be completely sure of its function because they have only had a “glimpse” of it. “It’s not just a self-indulgent thing,” Scutt added of the mosaic. “I think a lot of it is about outward display, about your position,” he said, adding the mosaic was “meant to be seen by other people.” A mosaic featuring six colors, requiring stones to be imported from outside the local area, and one that depicts designs like this has never been found in Wroxeter before, said Roger White, an archaeologist at the University of Birmingham. “It’s very much in line with the taste of the time so this is someone who knows about fashion and what to put on your mosaics, they’re culturally attuned,” White added. The mosaic likely dates to the 2nd century. Courtesy English Heritage Discovering such a mosaic, particularly one that dates back to the early 2nd century, was an unexpected boon for the archaeologists. When they began excavating, they expected to uncover only 4th century finds as they’re prohibited from digging through remains due to the historical significance of the site, Scutt said. “(The archaeology) will be multi-layered,” he explained. “There will be city upon city because the city lasted for 300 years at least so there are lots of levels and we’ve only been able to come down to the top level.” The mosaic likely only survived for all this time because the room was filled in with building debris to raise up its interior, likely sometime in the 3rd or 4th century, which also allowed archaeologists to reach it without digging through any other layers. “Our excavations were in hope of discovering the walls of this building, but we never suspected we would find a beautiful and intact mosaic, which had lain hidden for thousands of years,” Scutt added in a press release from charity English Heritage. Huge monumental building The excavation, run jointly by Vianova Archaeology, Albion Archaeology, the University of Birmingham and English Heritage, also uncovered a small square shrine or mausoleum as well as an enormous 50-meter (164-foot-) long monumental building that was situated on one of Wroxeter’s main streets. The monumental building measures 8m wide and is 50m long. Paul Belford/Heritage Innovation So far, archaeologists haven’t been able to precisely date the monumental building as they haven’t excavated the trenches it sits in and have no clear theories to explain the presence of such a large building, although Scutt speculates that perhaps it was a ceremonial structure at first and perhaps later became shops. “It’s a bit early to say the exact dating but it was clearly a massive building that must have dominated the center of the city for hundreds of years,” he adds. These newest discoveries add to the history of Wroxeter, which researchers have established contained more than 200 houses, a civic bath house, forum, county hall and judicial center. It was founded in the mid- 1st century as a legionary fortress before the soldiers moved away and the old fortress continued to grow into a thriving city. An illustration shows a reconstruction of Wroxeter in its heyday in 200 AD. Illustration/JR. Casals/Historic England/English Heritage Trust Today, its position in the countryside has shielded it from modern development meaning that “you’ve got a terrific level of preservation in the middle of a Roman city which you don’t find anywhere else in the country,” said Scutt. “So Wroxeter was special even before the mosaic was found,” he added.

When astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore left Earth for International Space Station two months ago, they ditched their bags for a key piece of equipment. Helming the inaugural crewed flight test of Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft, they departed without their own toiletries and other personal comforts — expecting to return to Earth within a week or so. They’ve now been on the space station more than 60 days, however, and NASA raised the possibility this week that they may remain there through early 2025 because of ongoing issues with their Starliner capsule. Such an extension is not certain, with NASA officials hoping to resolve some disagreements within the space agency about Starliner’s safety. A decision, according to NASA, must be made by the middle of August. But NASA indicated a monthslong continuation may be necessary if Starliner is deemed unsafe and they need to fall back on Plan B, with the astronauts coming home aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule instead. So what exactly would Williams and Wilmore do for another six months in space? Currently the two are guests. They’re not part of Expedition 71, the international crew of seven astronauts serving as the space station’s official staff. Nevertheless, NASA has said they’ve seamlessly integrated with the group, picking up everyday tasks aboard the orbiting laboratory. But if their stay is extended through February, as NASA said may happen if Starliner can’t bring them home, Williams and Wilmore would transition to be full-time expedition crew members. They would take up typical crew tasks, such as conducting spacewalks outside the space station, maintaining the orbiting laboratory and carrying out a tight schedule of science experiments. And NASA confirmed the Starliner astronauts are prepared to make such a shift. “A couple years ago, we made the decision — knowing that this was a test flight — to make sure that we had the right resources, supplies and training for the crew, just in case they needed to be on ISS, for whatever reason, for a longer period of time,” Dana Weigel, NASA’s manager of the International Space Station Program, said during a Wednesday briefing. “Butch and Suni are fully trained,” Weigel added. “They’re capable and current with EVA (spacewalks), with robotics, with all the things we need them to do.” Joining Crew-9 Nothing is certain, but NASA indicated on Wednesday for the first time that it is considering flying the Boeing Starliner spacecraft home empty. But that wouldn’t leave Wiilliams and Wilmore in space indefinitely. They would be assigned a ride home on SpaceX’s Crew-9 mission. Crew-9 — a routine trip to the space station to replenish expedition staff — is currently slated to fly with four astronauts: NASA astronauts Zena Cardman, Nick Hague and Stephanie Wilson, and cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov of the Russian space agency Roscosmos. Under NASA’s contingency plan for Starliner, two of those astronauts would be booted off that mission, though officials did not reveal which of the four crew members that might be. The Crew Dragon spacecraft would then fly with two empty seats to the International Space Station — taking off no earlier than September 24, based on the most recent dates shared by NASA. NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore are greeted by the crew of the International Space Station on June 6, 2024. NASA/AP Ballast, or hunks of metal that serve as dead weight, would fly alongside the two empty seats on Crew-9 to maintain the Crew Dragon’s center of gravity. The two Crew-9 astronauts would then join Williams and Wilmore aboard the space station, and all four would round out the cast of Expedition 72, which will include additional Russian cosmonauts and is slated to begin in September after a handover period. As is typical for missions to the space station that join an expedition, the Crew-9 astronauts will stay on board for roughly five or six months — leaving Williams and Wilmore in space for another half year in addition to the two months they’ve already spent in space. Once part of Crew-9, they’ll fall into a structured routine, with their days mapped out hour by hour. Olympics in orbit Already, the astronauts have fallen into some of that day-to-day labor. Recent updates from NASA said Williams and Wilmore have used their time so far for space station upkeep, inspecting hardware, organizing cargo, performing checks on Starliner, and assisting with science experiments and tech demonstrations. Williams and Wilmore, however, have also had opportunities for some fun in microgravity. NASA shared footage of the astronauts on July 26 as they passed around a plastic torch on the space station and mimicked Olympic events, including discus and pommel horse. (Working out is a key task for astronauts to avoid losing too much muscle and bone density while in space.) Williams, for the record, has already proven her chops as a standout space athlete. In 2012, during an earlier trip to the International Space Station, she became the first person to finish a triathlon in space. Williams used a stationary bike, simulated swimming with a weightlifting machine and ran on a treadmill while strapped in by a harness so she wouldn’t float away. Expedition 33 Commander Sunita Williams competes in the Malibu triathlon from space in 2012. NASA That feat came after she ran along with the Boston Marathon from the space station in 2007. Williams and Wilmore logged a combined total of 500 days in space before launching on the Starliner test flight. Williams even said that she cried after she left the space station following her last mission in 2012, unsure if she would ever return. “This flight is a dream for her,” one NASA commentator said during a June 5 livestream of the Starliner launch. Extended stays in space It’s not uncommon for astronauts to unexpectedly extend their stay aboard the space station — for days, weeks or even months. NASA astronaut Frank Rubio, for example, was slated to spend about six months aboard the International Space Station for his inaugural trip to low-Earth orbit that kicked off

Real Madrid star Vinícius Jr. has been offered a lucrative deal worth more than $1 billion to play in Saudi Arabia, according to multiple reports including Reuters and ESPN. Citing anonymous sources, Reuters reported that Vinícius was approached by Saudi officials and offered a five-year contract worth around 200 million euros (roughly $218 million) per season, plus bonuses, to join the Saudi Pro League (SPL). CNN Sport has contacted Vinícius’ representatives and the SPL for further comment. According to Reuters and ESPN, the deal also includes a separate 10-year contract to be an ambassador ahead of the 2034 World Cup, which is set to be held in Saudi Arabia. Vinícius has not yet rejected the possibility of leaving the Spanish capital, Reuters reported, and is studying the offer with his team. The 24-year-old Vinícius joined Los Blancos from Brazilian club Flamengo in 2018 and has been one of the club’s standout players in recent years. Last season, he scored 24 goals and recorded 11 assists in 39 matches as Real won the Champions League and La Liga titles, the second and third times respectively that the Brazilian has won those trophies. A potential move to Saudi Arabia would see Vinícius, one of the favorites to win the Ballon d’Or award for the best men’s player, become arguably the most high-profile soccer player in the country. Other global superstars – including Cristiano Ronaldo, Neymar, and Karim Benzema – currently play in the SPL, but Vinícius would be making the switch at a younger age with the best years of his career still ahead of him. Last year, French striker Kylian Mbappé reportedly rejected a $775 million salary packet to join Saudi club Al-Hilal. The four founding teams of SPL – Al-Ahli, Al-Ittihad, Al-Hilal, and Al-Nassr – are majority owned by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, the nation’s sovereign wealth fund.

George Clooney has some choice words for Quentin Tarantino, who said he doesn’t think Clooney is a movie star   George Clooney has a profanity-laced bone to pick with director Quentin Tarantino. “Quentin said some s—t about me recently, so I’m a little irritated by him,” Clooney said in an interview with GQ published on Tuesday, which he did alongside his “Wolfs” costar Brad Pitt. Clooney went on to say that Tarantino “did some interview where he was naming movie stars” and that when Clooney’s name came up, the “Pulp Fiction” director said, in his opinion, that Clooney is “not a movie star.” “All right, dude, f—k off,” Clooney playfully continued, with Pitt – a frequent Tarantino collaborator – laughing in the background. “I don’t mind giving him s—t. He gave me s—t,” Clooney added. The “Gravity” star is presumably referring to a conversation that Deadline columnist Baz Bamigboye had with Tarantino at the Cannes Film Festival, which the journalist recalled in a 2023 column. Tarantino and Bamigboye were discussing who Tarantino considered to be a movie star, with actors like Julia Roberts, Leonardo DiCaprio, Charlize Theron and Denzel Washington, among others, named as people who fit the bill. (From left) Quentin Tarantino and George Clooney on the set of ‘From Dusk Till Dawn.’ Dimension Films/Miramax/Corbis/Getty Images But when it came to Clooney, Tarantino said, “Well, it’s been a long while since I think George Clooney has drawn anybody to an audience… When was his last hit where he drew an audience?” Clooney – who was directed by Tarantino in an early episode of “ER” in 1995 before the pair went on to costar in the Tarantino-penned “From Dusk Till Dawn” one year later – in recent years has opted to produce and direct more projects, as opposed to act in them. But with films like “Wolfs,” premiering in September, and an upcoming Noah Baumbach-directed movie that he just finished filming, Clooney acknowledged the reason he’s shifted back to acting. “It is a year on the road to direct, and now my kids are of a certain age. We’re not going to uproot our kids out of school and run around,” he said in this week’s interview. “Before that, they could just come with us and we would all go. But that’s different now. So now I’m going to just probably focus on other things, like acting.” Clooney shares seven-year-old twins Ella and Alexander with his wife, human rights lawyer Amal Clooney. In the end though, Clooney also made sure to assert there’s no bad blood between him and Tarantino, as he stated further down in the GQ interview how “lucky” he and Pitt have been to have repeatedly worked with some of the best filmmakers in Hollywood, Tarantino included. “But no, look, we’re really lucky we got to work with these great directors,” Clooney said. “Director and screenplay is what keeps you alive.”

The moment Kenneth Harl first saw Sema Tekgul, everything changed. “I was instantly struck with love at first sight,” Kenneth tells CNN Travel today. “This was very strange for me, because I had been single all my life, very much dedicated to my teaching and my research, and never really thought I was ever going to get married.” Kenneth and Sema crossed paths on June 15, 2011, in Malatya, Turkey. Kenneth, then a 60-year-old professor of classical and Byzantine history at Tulane University in New Orleans, was traveling with his former graduate student turned close friend Jason, and their mutual acquaintance Yasmine, another Tulane professor with links to the country. The trio planned to spend several weeks exploring, with Kenneth focused on tracking Roman military routes and researching his next history book. The group was especially excited to marvel at the imposing, mysterious stone faces carved into the rock at Nemrut Dağ, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In the lead up to the trip, Yasmine mentioned the plan to an old friend of hers, Sema Tekgul, a teacher from Izmit, Turkey. When Sema expressed interest in Nemrut Dağ, Yasmine invited her to join the excursion. Kenneth welcomed this suggestion, despite knowing next to nothing about Sema. “I agreed because four is an ideal travel group,” he recalls today. Kenneth’s attention was on Nemrut, his book proposal and his research. Nothing could have prepared him for the moment he locked eyes with Sema in the lobby of a Malatya hotel. He was taken aback and captivated. It was a “remarkable feeling,” says Kenneth, one he’d never experienced before. “And when she looked at me, Sema seemed to have a similar electric feeling,” Kenneth says. “At dinner in that hotel, we were just sort of looking at each other. Sema at the time spoke no English, and I have only rudimentary Turkish … but there was something magical that happened.” An intriguing proposition Back in 2011, Sema was in her early 50s. She was content with her life in Izmit, a city in the northwest of Turkey, focused on work, family and friends. She’d never married – she’d been in love only once, as a younger woman, and it hadn’t worked out. “I never expected marriage,” Sema tells CNN Travel today. When Yasmine invited her to join the road trip across Turkey, Sema happily accepted. She was intrigued – not just by the prospect of Nemrut Dağ’s stone faces but also at the prospect of meeting the visiting Americans. “It would be the first time I would meet Americans,” says Sema. “I knew nothing about them.” And then, when she was introduced to Kenneth, Sema also felt an instant connection to him. “I saw his soul through his eyes, and I was interested in him,” she recalls. “I showed with my eyes how much I like him.” Sema wondered what Kenneth’s story was. “I did not know if he was married,” she says. “I was very curious about him, but it would have been impolite to ask about his marital status.” Kenneth wanted to know more about Sema, but was similarly cautious and polite, worried he might overstep a line. “I thought she was too young for me. I thought, ‘Here is someone so nice, but too late in my life.’ And then I found out her age when we were at Nemrut.” There were only eight years between them: Sema was 52 to Kenneth’s 60. “Then I thought ‘Well, maybe …’ ” recalls Kenneth. Growing closer Sema and Kenneth grew closer as they spent more time together in Turkey. Kenneth Wayne Harl Over the next few days, as Kenneth, Sema and their friends Jason and Yasmin drove across Turkey, Kenneth and Sema grew closer. “I was constantly looking at her and she was looking at me, we’re making eye contact. And it’s as if I could see into her soul. And I was just overwhelmed, it was completely unexpected and unplanned,” recalls Kenneth. It was Sema who first voiced her feelings out loud. “Do you believe in love at first sight?” she asked him. They were on a ferry boat, crossing the Euphrates River, standing side by side. “Yes,” said Kenneth, smiling at her, finding himself almost unable to speak. “I like you very much,” said Sema. I was instantly struck with love at first sight. This was very strange for me, because I had been single all my life. Kenneth Harl There wasn’t much more to say. Kenneth and Sema spent the rest of the ferry crossing basking in the glow of each other’s affection. “I just felt that I wanted to be near her and learn about her,” says Kenneth. “And I just felt this was right. I had been alone for so long.” Nemrut Dağ was as impressive and striking as the group had hoped. There were other highlights, too. “At Malatya, Jason and I explored the Roman legionary camp, Hittite excavations and the archaeological museum,” Kenneth recalls. Then the group traveled to Urfa, a city in southeast Turkey. “In Urfa, the four of us attended a dinner and traditional dance performance in the evening,” recalls Kenneth. Kenneth wasn’t usually a dancer, but he found himself swaying to the music with Sema at his side. “We got up and were dancing together,” he says. “Something I’d never done before. It was a lot of firsts.” After Urfa, Yasmine went her own way, while the rest of the group headed to Harran. Once they got there, Jason – who’d sensed the connection between Sema and Kenneth from the beginning – encouraged the two of them to eat dinner alone while he made himself scarce. Kenneth and Sema viewed the evening as their first official date. “We spent the time in Urfa. We went to the beautiful gardens there and wandered around,” recalls Kenneth. “And when I came back to the hotel, Jason looked at me and said, ‘You know, I’ve known you a long time. If you were any other American,

During China’s go-go years, young couples holding enormous bouquets of roses were a familiar sight during the Qixi Festival, an ancient holiday celebrating love and loyalty. People would flock to social media to show off brand-new iPhones and Louis Vuitton handbags gifted by their partners, as well as photos of dinners at fancy restaurants, during the Chinese version of Valentine’s Day, which typically falls in July or August each year. That was when China’s economic growth was the envy of the world. This year’s festival was on Saturday, and it was a very different story. People went online to complain about the lack of gift giving and festive spirit, citing a sluggish economy and tough job market. The hashtag “consumption plummets on Chinese Valentine’s Day. Are young people unwilling to pay the love tax?” became the No 1 trending topic on the Weibo platform on Saturday, drawing 200 million views. “The Qixi Festival is not as robust as previous years. It feels almost desolate,” one user wrote. Owners of some flower shops took to Xiaohongshu, another popular platform, to bemoan the lack of customers, posting images of unsold roses lining their stores. CNN was not able to independently confirm their claims. Other posts recalled forlornly that couples used to have money to spend when the world’s second largest economy was doing well. China is currently plagued by a litany of woes from sluggish consumer spending  to a persistent property slump and a mounting debt crisis. A red rose installation is on display at a commercial street ahead of Qixi Festival, or Chinese Valentine’s Day, on August 20, 2023 in Shenyang, Liaoning province. Huang Jinkun/VCG/Getty Images Alfred Wu, an associate professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, said that young people, who used to be big spenders during Qixi, are struggling to find jobs. “I think the overall sentiment is very bad and consumers are very conservative,” he said, adding that the negative sentiment has become “the overall pattern” and “not just one festival.” The anecdotal drop in spending appears to align with the “weak-consumption trend witnessed over the past two years,” said market strategist Yeap Jun Rong from trading provider IG, adding that China’s consumer confidence is “hovering around its record low.” How China’s lovers behave is an issue for global businesses — and the government in Beijing. In recent weeks, a number of Western multinationals, from cosmetics giant L’Oreal to carmaker Volkswagen, have sounded the alarm over weak demand in China as consumer confidence remains in the doldrums. A government push The lackluster mood is also affecting the Chinese government’s efforts to encourage marriage as a way of addressing falling birth rates and an aging population. A shrinking population is likely to be a drag on economic growth. In the first half of 2024, just 3.43 million couples got married, half the number recorded for the same period 10 years ago, according to the Ministry of Civil Affairs. On Saturday, state broadcaster CCTV released a video featuring rare family portraits of a young Chinese leader Xi Jinping, his wife Peng Liyuan and their baby daughter to celebrate their marriage, which spanned more than three decades. But the message failed to convince, with people complaining on social media about not being able to start a family because they owed money or have to work long work hours. “When people born after 1990 are now in [tens of thousands of yuan of] debt, as ‘996007’ becomes the norm, where do people find the mood to date?” the Weibo user asked. “996” and “007” refer to the notorious work hours demanded by some of China’s biggest conglomerates. The former refers to workers toiling away from 9am to 9pm, six days a week. Some are in a “007” situation, meaning they work every day. Couples attend a kissing contest during the traditional Qixi festival in Shenyang, northeast China’s Liaoning province, on August 13, 2013. Stringer/AFP/Getty Images The general pessimism is showing up in trade and other data. According to a CNN calculation based on official customs data, imports of jewellery-grade diamonds in the first half of this year declined by 28% compared to the same period in 2023. Diamond supplier De Beers said in its 2024 semi-annual report that “ongoing economic challenges” in China have delayed the expected recovery from a sharp decline in 2023. And according to data released last Friday by the State Administration of Foreign Exchange, China’s direct investment liabilities, a measure of foreign direct investment into the country, dropped by almost $15 billion in the April to June quarter. That’s only the second time this has happened since 1998, underscoring the country’s failure to stem an outflow of capital. Sounding the alarm Qixi, which has been celebrated for thousands of years, falls on the seventh day of the seventh month in the lunar calendar. (Most of the world uses the solar, or Gregorian, calendar.) According to legend, it is the one day a year that mythical lovers Niulang, a cow herd, and Zhinu, a weaver, are able to meet on a celestial bridge. In previous years, it was a fertile opportunity for Chinese and Western companies to market their wares. But that has changed. Global CEOs are no longer able to count on China as a commercial stalwart. “The only part of the world where consumer confidence remains very low is China,” L’Oreal CEO Nicolas Hieronimus told analysts on an earnings call late last month. He cited the weak job market and real estate woes as reasons for the malaise. Lower-than-expected growth in the global beauty sector this year is largely a consequence of low consumer confidence in China, he added. Advertising agency WPP (WPP) said last week that second-quarter revenue in China plunged almost a quarter on the previous year — and the outlook is not much better. People take photos at a bus stop decorated with flowers during Qixi Festival, or Chinese Valentine’s Day, on August 22, 2023 in Chongqing, China. He Penglei/China News Service/VCG/Getty Images “I’m expecting the second half to remain very challenging in China,”

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has announced he will step down next month and will not run for a second term as leader of the long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party, following a series of political scandals that fueled calls for him to resign. In a press conference on Wednesday, Kishida said it is necessary to present the LDP as a “changed party.” “Transparent and open elections and a free and vigorous debate are more important than ever. The most obvious first step, to show that the LDP will change, is for me to step aside,” he said. “I have made the heavy decision with a strong desire to move forward with political reform, because the people’s trust is what makes politics work.” The LDP, which has held power almost continuously since its founding in 1955, has in recent months been embroiled in one of Japan’s biggest political scandals in decades. Two of the most influential factions in the LDP have been accused of failing to properly declare their income and expenditure and, in some instances, allegedly rerouting political funds to lawmakers as kickbacks. Scandals surrounding several high-ranking officials haven’t helped, with some accused of involvement with election law violations or of offensive past comments against minorities. Kishida had tried to contain the damage, replacing several cabinet ministers last year. But that hasn’t done much to restore public support; one survey by the Mainichi Shimbun newspaper showed a historic high in public disapproval toward the cabinet, at 79%. Some respondents who reported low approval of Kishida and the LDP also pointed to the party’s close links with the Unification Church religious group, which were revealed after the 2022 killing of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Kishida took office in October 2021, replacing Yoshihide Suga – who occupied the role for a year after Abe stood down with ill health in 2020. During nearly three years in office, Kishida has vowed to take anti-corruption measures and institute party reforms, including dissolving factions and taking disciplinary action against any corrupt lawmakers. Concerns about Japan’s economy, including the weakening of the yen against the US dollar, have also undermined confidence in Kishida’s economic policies. He had previously denied he would step down as party leader despite public criticism and sinking ratings. His decision to quit comes a month before LDP elections are slated, with the date in September yet to be announced. His successor will be tasked with leading the world’s fourth-largest economy at a time of increasing living costs, which have been exacerbated by the weak yen. Japan has been at the center of US President Joe Biden’s alliance-building in the Asia-Pacific region. American officials have seen a willing partner in Kishida, who has significantly shifted the country’s defense posture in recent years and provided ongoing support to Ukraine amid Russia’s invasion of its neighbor. In April, Biden hosted Kishida for a state visit, with the Japanese leader addressing a joint session of Congress and lauding their bilateral ties. Kishida worked with Biden to write “the first chapter of a new era in the US-Japan relationship,” US Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel told CNN. “They laid the foundation for the future of bilateral cooperation in all areas, including diplomatic, security, economic, and political sides, that establishes the lattice work of an Indo-Pacific strategic vision.”

It is another coin-flip in a conflict punctuated with at least annual reminders of how frail Vladimir Putin’s Russia truly is. Two months ago, as Russian troops poured into Kharkiv region, Kyiv was eyeing its borders, concerned at where else Russia might find vulnerabilities. Yet instead, Ukraine appears to have looked at the map, decided Russia was equally exposed, and turned Moscow’s gambit on its head. A week in, and whatever the final outcome of Ukraine’s invasion of Russia, Kyiv’s initially perplexing, perhaps even rash, decision to send thousands of troops into the Kursk region and beyond is paying stark dividends. For the second time in just over a year, the Kremlin has a hostile force marching in its south, and very little it can do about it. Last June, it was the homegrown rogue mercenaries of Wagner, headed to Rostov and on, to decapitate Russia’s top brass. Now, it is Ukraine’s own military, scything off what they claim is 1,000 square kilometers of border territory. Some analysis at the weekend put the figure at about a third of that. Nevertheless, the ability of Ukraine’s commander Oleksandr Syrskyi to even float this claim is a remarkable win in the information war for Kyiv, even if Moscow severely limits what information Russians are exposed to. “Bold, brilliant, beautiful,” was what veteran US Republican Senator Lindsey Graham called Ukraine’s cross-border operation during a visit to Kyiv Monday. Meanwhile, US Democrat Senator Richard Blumenthal called it “historic” and a “seismic breakthrough.” The events are remarkably similar in how they expose the gulf between the veneer of impregnability the Kremlin tries to portray, and the ramshackle reality of its power. And while Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin’s march on Moscow fell apart when the former chef finally seemed to realize he was on his own – and had enraged Putin, rather than gaining his approval for tackling the failing top brass head-on – Ukraine’s forces seem to have little but their own supply lines and ambition holding them back. Ukraine’s lightning advance is another example of their forces’ dexterity and mobility in warfare, over Moscow’s preference for slow, months-long grinding attacks on the same place. It is purposefully unclear exactly where Ukraine’s forces are. Videos pop up from towns far inside Russia, but without context. One overnight emerged from Lgov, about 26 miles from the border, with a soldier saying he promised his mother he would not go far. It is also unclear where Ukrainian forces are digging in and where they are just racing through. The lack of transparency in the Russian system – where mistakes and problems are hidden rather than addressed head-on – works in Kyiv’s favor. It is unlikely Moscow, or even Kursk’s governor, knows the full picture of the mess they are in. Oleksandr Syrskyi, commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Andrew Kravchenko/Bloomberg/Getty Images And the news the Kremlin is getting is uncharacteristically dire. When Kursk acting governor Alexei Smirnov told Putin on state TV on Monday that 28 settlements were under Ukrainian control, with 2,000 people’s fate unclear, and 121,000 residents evacuated, it’s likely the moment was staged and pre-recorded, like most of Putin’s televised meetings. But to what avail? Putin turned the question towards his military chiefs, who he’s slowly decimated over the 30 months of this war’s ebb and flow. They clearly do not have the solution yet. But still Putin tries to play the role of the tsar adjudicating between chaotic and failing departments, despite on Wednesday being assured by his chief of staff, Valery Gerasimov, that the Ukrainian advance had been halted. The last time this sort of invasion of Russia happened, Joseph Stalin was in charge, and he did something other than televise his failing leadership. Two questions remain. The first regards the ultimate fate of Ukraine’s incursion. Do they intend to try and hold even the smallest amount of terrain? Do they intend to keep raging across undefended spaces? And how much firepower, manpower, and precious Western-supplied equipment is Ukraine happy to indulge this effort with? The merits of the assault are less in doubt than a week ago when it was first launched. Putin has a bloody nose. But the Ukrainian endgame needs to be as carefully engineered as the invasion to capitalize on Kyiv’s success. The second is what impact does this have on Ukraine’s more challenged frontline in Donbas? During the past week, the successes of Kursk region have been peppered with worse news from Toretsk, or near Pokrovsk, as Russian forces continue their costly, bloody, yet inexorable advance. No matter how small the village, Moscow just keeps attacking. So far, Ukraine’s hope the Kursk operation would lead better units to be withdrawn from Donbas to support Russia’s borders has yet to bear major fruit. As images continue to pour in of poorly trained Chechen troops being taken prisoner en masse by advancing Ukrainians in Kursk, it is clear Russia has sent its less effective units into the fight. They may choose to change that approach. Putin has also entrusted the operation to the FSB, the internal security service that also controls the border guard, which has instituted a “counter-terror operation.” This has previously been used to tackle Islamist insurgencies, not columns of Ukrainian armor. That, too, may have been very short-sighted. Manpower crunch But soon the crunch for Kyiv emerges. Where does this leave its forces a month from now? Has the talk of a manpower crunch over the past months been because they were secretly holding forces in reserve for this assault? Do they extract a strategic advantage great enough from these advances that Moscow’s view of them as a defeated adversary changes? Does the advance make their Western supporters decide the support is truly paying off? Regardless of how efficiently Ukraine answers these questions, Russia has for the second time in 15 months been rudely humiliated. Firstly it was by Putin’s own loyalists, egotistically turning on corruption and mismanagement. This time it is Putin’s own FSB, who couldn’t keep control of the

Data from a retired NASA mission has revealed evidence of an underground reservoir of water deep beneath the surface of Mars, according to new research. A team of scientists estimates that there may be enough water, trapped in tiny cracks and pores of rock in the middle of the Martian crust, to fill oceans on the planet’s surface. The groundwater would likely cover the entirety of Mars to a depth of 1 mile (1.6 kilometers), the study found. The data came from NASA’s InSight lander, which used a seismometer to study the interior of Mars from 2018 to 2022. Future astronauts exploring Mars would encounter a whole host of challenges if they tried to access the water, because it’s located between 7 and 12 miles (11.5 and 20 kilometers) beneath the surface, according to the study published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. But the finding uncovers new details about the geological history of Mars — and suggests a new place to search for life on the red planet if the water could ever be accessed. NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter took an image of InSight sitting on the Martian surface on February 2, 2019. The lander was located in a flat plain called Elysium Planitia. NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona “Understanding the Martian water cycle is critical for understanding the evolution of the climate, surface and interior,” said lead study author Vashan Wright, assistant professor and geophysicist at the University of California, San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, in a statement. “A useful starting point is to identify where water is and how much is there.” The search for ‘lost’ water on Mars Mars was likely a warmer, wetter place billions of years ago, based on the evidence of ancient lakes, river channels, deltas and rocks altered by water studied by other NASA missions and observed by orbiters. But the red planet lost its atmosphere more than 3 billion years ago, which effectively ended the wet period on Mars. Scientists still aren’t sure why Mars lost its atmosphere, and a multitude of missions have been developed to learn about the history of the planet’s water, where it went, and whether water ever created habitable conditions for life on Mars. While water remains trapped as ice at the planet’s polar ice caps, researchers don’t believe that can account for all the planet’s “lost” water. Existing theories offer a few likely scenarios for what happened to Martian water after Mars lost its atmosphere: Some hypothesize it became ice or was lost to space, while others suggest it was incorporated into minerals beneath the planet’s surface or trickled into deep aquifers. The new findings suggest that water on Mars filtered down into the Martian crust. Related articleMars gets hit by hundreds of basketball-size space rocks every year InSight, short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport, was a stationary lander. But it collected unprecedented data about the thickness of the red planet’s crust and the temperature of its mantle, as well as the depth and composition of the core and atmosphere. The lander’s seismometer detected the first quakes on another planet, dubbed marsquakes. While earthquakes occur when tectonic plates shift, move and grind against one another, the Martian crust is like one giant plate with faults and fractures as the planet continues to shrink and cool over time. As the Martian crust stretches, it cracks, and InSight’s seismometer was able to detect more than 1,300 marsquakes as they rumbled from hundreds and thousands of miles away. Scientists studying InSight’s data were able to study the speed of marsquakes as they traveled through the planet, which can serve as an indicator of what substances exist beneath the Martian surface. The speed of seismic waves depends on what the rock is made of, where it has cracks and what fills those cracks, Wright said. The team used this data and fed it into a mathematical model of rock physics, which is used on Earth to map underground oil fields and aquifers. The results showed that InSight’s data best matches up with a deep layer of igneous, or volcanic, rock that is filled with liquid water. Seismic data collected by InSight helped researchers determine more information about Mars’ upper and mid-crust. James Tuttle Keane/Aaron Rodriguez/Courtesy Scripps Institute of Oceanography “Establishing that there is a big reservoir of liquid water provides some window into what the climate was like or could be like,” said study coauthor Michael Manga, a professor of earth and planetary science at the University of California, Berkeley, in a statement. “And water is necessary for life as we know it. I don’t see why (the underground reservoir) is not a habitable environment,” Manga added. “It’s certainly true on Earth — deep, deep mines host life, the bottom of the ocean hosts life. We haven’t found any evidence for life on Mars, but at least we have identified a place that should, in principle, be able to sustain life.” If Mars’ crust is similar across the planet, there may be more water within the mid-crust zone than the “volumes proposed to have filled hypothesized ancient Martian oceans,” the authors wrote in the study. Rocks help trap information about the history of a planet, and understanding the water cycle of a planet can help researchers unlock the evolution of Mars, Wright said. While the analysis of the data can’t reveal any information about life, past or present, if it existed on Mars, it’s possible that wet Martian crust could be habitable in the same way that deep groundwater on Earth is hospitable for microbial life, he said. But even drilling holes just half a mile (1 kilometer) or deeper on Earth is a challenge that requires energy and infrastructure, so a massive number of resources would need to be brought to Mars to drill to such depths, Wright said. An artist’s concept shows a cutaway of Mars along with the paths of seismic waves from two separate quakes detected by

Three-time WNBA all-star Dearica Hamby filed a discrimination and unlawful retaliation lawsuit Monday against the league and her former team, the Las Vegas Aces, accusing the team of treating her unfairly because she was pregnant, according to a public relations firm hired by her attorneys. The federal lawsuit comes after Hamby was subjected to “repeated acts of intimidation, discrimination, and retaliation that culminated in January 2023 with the Aces trading Hamby (to the Los Angeles Sparks) because the star forward was pregnant,” the firm said in a release. The lawsuit seeks unspecified compensatory and punitive damages. The WNBA “took no steps to correct or address a clear-cut violation” of Hamby’s “rights under federal and state anti-discrimination law,” the lawsuit, filed in district court in Nevada, says. The WNBA is “aware of today’s legal filing” and officials are “reviewing the complaint,” a WNBA spokesperson said. The team, which moved to Las Vegas from San Antonio in 2018 after being sold, has not replied to CNN’s request for comment. Hamby played for the organization from 2015 to 2022, winning a WNBA title in her last season. She signed a two-year contract extension in June 2022, just seven months before she would be traded, according to the lawsuit. Hamby first accused the Las Vegas Aces of wrongdoing shortly after she was traded in January 2023, claiming on social media that she’d been “lied to, bullied, manipulated, and discriminated against” by the team before it traded her. Hamby believes she was traded because of her pregnancy. According to the lawsuit, Hamby discovered she was pregnant in mid-July 2022 – about three weeks after she signed her extension with the Aces – and then informed head coach Becky Hammon and other team staff about the pregnancy in early August 2022. She kept playing, won the WNBA championship with the Aces in September 2022, and two days later during a public celebration in Las Vegas announced she was pregnant, according to the lawsuit. “After making her pregnancy public, plaintiff Hamby experienced notable changes in the way she was treated by Las Vegas Aces staff,” the lawsuit says. Around January 15, 2023, according to the suit, Hammon told Hamby in a phone call that Hamby was a “question mark,” that the Aces “needed bodies,” and that Hamby would not be ready to play in time for the 2023 season, for which preseason play would begin in April. “In response, Hamby assured Hammon that she was committed to the team, would be giving birth during the offseason, and anticipated being fully ready to play by the start of the preseason,” the lawsuit says. Also during the call, Hammon “accused plaintiff Hamby of signing her contract extension knowingly pregnant, a false accusation which Hamby denied,” and said Aces staff believed “that Hamby would get pregnant again,” according to the lawsuit. According to the suit, Hamby asked Hammon two times on the call, “You’re trading me because I’m pregnant?” Hammon responded, according to the suit: “What do you want me to do?” “Hammon did not deny the accusation that Hamby was being traded because she was pregnant,” the lawsuit says. CNN has sought comment from Hammon. In May 2023, Hammon told reporters: “(Her pregnancy) wasn’t a problem, and it never was why we made the decision to move Hamby. “We made the decision to move Hamby because we could get three bodies in for her one contract … It was never an issue, and it was never the reason she was traded. It just wasn’t.” Coach penalized by WNBA for policy violations Hamby gave birth to her son, Legend, on March 6, 2023, the lawsuit says, and reported for training camp with the Sparks on April 28, 2023. She played in all 40 of the team’s regular season games, the suit says. The WNBA investigated Hamby’s claims after she filed a complaint in January 2023 and later suspended Hammon for two games for violating league and team workplace policies. The WNBA also stripped the Aces of their 2025 first round draft pick for impermissible benefits in connection with Hamby’s contract, but Hamby’s attorneys say the league has declined to release the details of its investigation. A 2023 news release from the league said Hammon was suspended for “comments made by Hammon to Hamby in connection with Hamby’s recent pregnancy.” “The WNBA is, at its core, a workplace, and federal laws have long shielded pregnant women from discrimination on the job. The world champion Aces exiled Dearica Hamby for becoming pregnant and the WNBA responded with a light tap on the wrist,” Hamby’s attorneys said in Monday’s statement. “Every potential mother in the league is now on notice that childbirth could change their career prospects overnight. That can’t be right in one of the most prosperous and dynamic women’s professional sports leagues in America.” The WNBPA –- the WNBA players’ union -– said in 2023 that the WNBA’s handling of the situation “misses the mark.” When asked for a statement on Hamby’s lawsuit on Monday, WNBPA executive director Terri Carmichael said: “We reiterate our previous position that in the 2020 Collective Bargaining Agreement, player parents gained protections that ensured becoming a parent did not mean the end of a career. “Obviously, these protections did not change the nature of this business. Any team can trade any player for any legitimate reason or no reason at all. But that reason can never be on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, parental status, or pregnancy status.” Hamby, who is also a two-time WNBA Sixth Woman of the Year, is averaging 19.2 points and 7.4 rebounds per game this season – both top 10 stats – and was voted into the all-star game for the third time. Hamby recently won a bronze medal at the Olympics as a member of the US women’s 3×3 basketball team. In June, she signed an extension with the Sparks, keeping her with that team through 2025. “I’m grateful for finding a home in LA with an ownership group and organization that believes in me and has been nothing but supportive since the day I got here,” Hamby said in a Sparks news release about the extension.

A young Shaolin monk runs horizontally across a wall, intense concentration, and perhaps a hint of astonishment, visible in his face. Four other trainees at a martial arts academy near the Shaolin Temple in China’s Henan province lounge nonchalantly, seemingly unaware of the gravity-defying action taking place above their heads. Their bright orange robes and Feiyue sneakers stand in contrast to the earthen wall behind them. The blurred back of a man on the left side of the image highlights the sharp movement at its center. A monk stretching in the background demonstrates his dexterity in a split-like stance. “There’s this high-level action,” photographer Steve McCurry told CNN of the photo’s composition in a video call from his home in Philadelphia. “And these other boys are just hanging out.” The image was recently featured in Magnum’s Square Print Sale in May, alongside other photographers’ works. He shot it back in 2004, as part of a personal project, while traveling the world to document various forms of Buddhism. While he doesn’t consider himself to be Buddhist, McCurry has long been interested in the religion and applies some of its principles to his own life. The Shaolin Temple – which was founded in AD 495 on the slopes of the sacred Mount Song – is said to be the home of Chan Buddhism. Although the religion emphasizes nonviolence, the temple’s warrior monks initially practiced martial arts to defend themselves from bandits. Over time, their rigorous physical training became inexorably linked with their quest to achieve enlightenment. Today, Shaolin kung fu is widely known, and the monks’ feats in athleticism have been emulated in popular movies. The 1982 movie “The Shaolin Temple,” which launched Jet Li’s career and was filmed on location, was one of the films that brought renewed interest in the monastery. By the time McCurry visited in 2004, dozens of martial arts schools had sprung up on the road leading up to the temple. “It’s incredible to watch them perform and train,” he said. “You can’t imagine that people can actually do that with their bodies.” A career on the road McCurry started his career working at a local newspaper after graduating from Pennsylvania State University. He then started traveling abroad as a freelance photographer, shooting images of people in some of the world’s most dangerous and remote places. His career took off in earnest after he snuck across the border from Pakistan into Afghanistan in 1979, right before the Soviet invasion. He smuggled film out by hiding it in his clothing, providing the world some of the first photos of the conflict that left at least 500,000 Afghans dead and millions displaced. His 1984 “Afghan girl” photograph – which captured the piercing green eyes of a 12-year-old refugee in Peshawar, Pakistan and was featured on National Geographic magazine’s June 1985 cover – is one of the world’s most famous photos. Over the course of his 50-year career, McCurry, now 74, has filled more than 20 passports, snapping animals and festivals, worshippers and fighters, conflicts and catastrophes in destinations from Niger to India. He captures the ancient against the modern, the curious amid the day-to-day and accentuates the familiarity of strangers. In 2016, McCurry came under fire when one of his photos in an exhibition was discovered to be digitally altered. He said it had happened in his studio while he was out traveling, but more images that appeared to be manipulated began surfacing, igniting a debate around the ethics of photojournalism. In response to the allegations, the photographer told Time magazine later that year that beyond the brief stint at the local newspaper in Pennsylvania, he had never been employed by a newspaper, news magazine or news outlet. As a freelancer, he had taken on various assignments, including advertising campaigns. He said his work had “migrated into the fine art field” and that he considered himself a “visual storyteller.” He added that he understood it could be “confusing … for people who think I’m still a photojournalist,” and that going forward, he would only use Photoshop “in a minimal way, even for my own work taken on personal trips.” Shaolin Monastery or Shaolin Temple, a Chan Buddhist temple on Mount Song in Dengfeng, Zhengzhou.. Jeremy Horner/LightRocket/Getty Images ‘Going back again and again’ Before shooting the photograph of the wall-running monk, McCurry had already paid a visit to the Shaolin Temple two decades earlier. He says it was “really empty” during that first trip, and he saw only “bicycles and people in these Mao suits.” By the time he returned, a kung fu craze had gripped the nation. The area felt more commercial, he recalled. Tens of thousands of (mostly) Chinese boys and men were inspired by a wave of kung fu movies, and were training at the dozens of schools in the area. The photographer was granted permission at one of the academies and spent a few days with the monks as they went about their daily routine, which included practicing acrobatics on repeat. Some of the boys ate with McCurry at a noodle joint across the street, sharing their hopes to eventually land jobs in security services, performance troupes, as well as the entertainment industry. “They were normal kids,” he said. “But they were very, very dedicated and serious about this practice.” He captured other photographs of monks’ intense training regimes during his stay, including several hanging upside down by their feet, hands calmly pressed into a prayer pose. McCurry sought to find the right combination of variables like the subject, angle, light, and background, as the monks perfected their moves. “It’s a (matter) of photographing and going back again and again.” His perseverance paid off. “It’s a picture that evokes a lot of emotion,” he said of the final shot of the wall-running monk. “It either brings a smile to people’s faces, or they’re kind of in awe of the physicality of these young boys.”

Cruise ships have doubled in size over the past two decades, a precedent that could lead to even bigger vessels plying our oceans in the future and bringing potential problems, a new report has warned. The largest passenger vessels today are twice as large as they were in 2000, says a study conducted by European clean energy lobby group Transport and Environment (T&E), which warns of the environmental impact of the “rapidly” growing global cruise industry. The report suggests that the biggest cruise ships setting sail in 2050 could be nearly eight times larger than the Titanic, the largest passenger ship in service when it set sail in 1912 (measuring 269 meters or about 883 feet), if the growth rate continues as it is. “Today’s cruisezillas make the Titanic look like a small fishing boat,” Inesa Ulichina, sustainable shipping officer at T&E, said in a statement. “How much bigger can these giants get? The cruise business is the fastest growing tourism sector and its emissions are quickly getting out of control.” Cruise industry group takes issue with report Disney’s Wonder cruise ship and Carnival’s Fantasy taking to the waters in 2004. Bruce Weaver/AFP/Getty Images Cruise Lines International Association, the largest cruise industry trade association, takes issue with “multiple claims in the report which conflict with verified data,” the group said in a statement. “Notably the size of ships (most are small- to mid-size) and the emissions data as published on the EU (MRV) database, which show that cruise lines have reduced emissions by 16% on average per ship over the past five years.” The number of cruise ships has increased by 20-fold from 21 in 1970 to 515 today, according to T&E. On its launch in 1999, Royal Caribbean’s Voyager of the Seas, which has a gross tonnage (GT) of 137,276, was the biggest cruise ship in the world. The cruise line brand’s 1,198-foot Icon of the Seas, which has seven swimming pools and a record-breaking 17,000-square-foot water park, became the world’s biggest cruise ship — with a gross tonnage of 248,663 — when it launched in January 2024. But the speed at which the cruising industry has boomed in recent years has come at a price, T&E says in its report. Global emissions It notes that CO2 emissions from cruise ships in Europe were almost 20% higher in 2022 than in 2019. Cruise ships and other maritime vessels are thought to be responsible for nearly 3% of global greenhouse gas emissions each year, according to the International Maritime Organization. While cruise ships are exempt from fuel duties, along with most corporate and consumer taxes, at present, the report points out that a possible 50 euros (about $54) tax on a “typical cruise journey ticket” could potentially bring in 1.6 billion euros (around $1.75 billion) globally. CLIA added in its statement that “the majority (60%) of all cruise ships sailing today – and scheduled to be in service well into the next decade – are small- to- mid-size ships and are part of a global fleet that is more energy efficient than ever.” CLIA has committed its members to reaching net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. The industry plans to achieve that goal, it says, by “increasingly using more sustainable fuels as they become available in addition to investing billions in ships with cutting-edge technologies that make them the most environmentally focused ships in history — and that’s regardless of the size of the ship.”

For six months in 1181, a dying star left a mark in the night sky. The striking object appeared as bright as Saturn in the vicinity of the constellation Cassiopeia, and historical chronicles from China and Japan recorded it as a “guest star.” Chinese astronomers used this term to signify a temporary object in the sky, often a comet or, as in this case, a supernova — a cataclysmic explosion of a star at the end of its life. The object, now known as SN 1181, is one of a handful of supernovas documented before the invention of telescopes, and it has puzzled astronomers for centuries. Now, a new study has for the first time described SN 1181 in detail by creating a computerized model of the supernova’s evolution from immediately after the initial outburst appeared until today. The research team compared the model with archival telescope observations of its nebula — the giant cloud of gas and dust, visible to this day, that is the remnant of the monumental event. The researchers said the analysis strongly suggested that SN 1181 belongs to a rare class of supernovas called Type Iax in which the thermonuclear flare-up could be the result of not one but two white dwarfs that have violently collided yet fail to detonate completely, leaving behind a “zombie star.”  “There are 20 or 30 candidates for Type Iax supernovas,” said Takatoshi Ko, lead author of the study published July 5 in the The Astrophysical Journal. “But this is the only one that we know of in our own galaxy.” Ko is a doctoral student of astronomy at the University of Tokyo. What’s more, the study also found that, inexplicably, high-speed stellar wind, detected in past studies, started to blow from the surface of the zombie star as recently as 20 years ago, adding to SN 1181’s mysterious aura. Unlocking the mechanism behind this supernova event could help astronomers come to a better understanding of the life and death of stars and how they contribute to planetary formation, experts say. Failed detonation of a supernova It took astronomers 840 years to solve SN 1181’s first great riddle — pinpointing its location in the Milky Way. The dying star was the last pre-telescopic supernova without a confirmed remnant, until in 2021 Albert Zijlstra, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Manchester in England, traced it back to a nebula in the constellation Cassiopeia. Amateur astronomer Dana Patchick discovered the nebula in 2013 when searching the archive of NASA’s Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE. But Zijlstra, who was not involved with the new study, was the first to make the connection to SN 1181. “During (the height of) Covid, I had a quiet afternoon and was sitting at home,” Zijlstra said. “I matched the supernova to the nebula using records from ancient Chinese catalogs. I think that has been now generally accepted — a lot of people have looked at it and they have agreed that it seems to be correct. This is the remnant of that supernova.” The nebula is about 7,000 light-years away from Earth, and at its center there is a fast-spinning, Earth-size object called a white dwarf — a dense, dead star that has depleted its nuclear fuel. The feature is unusual for a supernova remnant because the explosion should have obliterated the white dwarf. Zijlstra and his coauthors wrote a September 2021 study about the discovery. The report suggested that SN 1181 might belong to the elusive Type Iax category of supernova due to the presence of this “zombie” white dwarf. X-ray observations by the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton telescope show the extent of the supernova’s nebula — a giant cloud of gas and dust — and NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory pinpoints its central source, a white dwarf star that curiously contains no hydrogen or helium. NASA/CXC/ESA In the more common Type Ia supernova, a white dwarf that forms when a sunlike star has exhausted its fuel begins to accumulate material from another nearby star. Many stars exist in pairs, or a binary system, unlike the sun. The white dwarf accumulates material until it collapses under its own gravity, reigniting nuclear fusion with a massive explosion that creates one of the brightest objects in the universe. The rarer Type Iax is a scenario in which this explosion, for some reason, is halted. “One possibility is that the Type Iax is not so much an explosion, but a merger of two white dwarfs,” Zijlstra said. “The two come together, hitting each other at full speed, and that can generate a lot of energy. That energy causes the sudden brightness of the supernova.” That massive collision might explain another curious aspect of the SN 1181 zombie star. It contains no hydrogen or helium, which is highly unusual in space, Zijlstra said. “About 90% of the universe consists of hydrogen and the rest is almost exclusively helium. Everything else is pretty rare,” he said. “You need to look up 10,000 atoms before you find one that isn’t hydrogen or helium. But our star (the sun at the center of our solar system) only has (primarily) those. So, clearly, something extreme has happened to (the zombie star).” Unexplained stellar wind Armed with the knowledge of where to look for SN 1181, and the suggestion that it could be a Type Iax remnant, Ko and his colleagues got to work to uncover its remaining secrets. “By accurately tracking the time evolution of the remnant, we were able to obtain detailed properties of the SN 1181 explosion for the first time. We confirmed that these detailed properties are consistent with a Type Iax supernova,” Ko said, adding that the computer model in the study is consistent with past observations of the remnant from telescopes, including the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton space telescope and NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. Ko’s analysis shows that two distinct shock regions make up the remnant of SN 1181. An outer one formed when material was ejected by the supernova explosion and met interstellar space. An

As tremors shook the ground in parts of western Japan last Thursday, local and national government bodies leapt into action. Meteorologists gathered and issued a temporary tsunami advisory. A special committee warned that another “major earthquake” could hit in the coming week – the first time in its history the body had issued this type of nationwide advisory. High-speed trains slowed down as a precaution, causing travel delays, and the country’s prime minister canceled his overseas trips. In the end, the government lifted most advisories and reported no major damage from the 7.1-magnitude quake. But much of the country remains on high alert, preparing for a potential emergency during what is normally peak travel season during summer holidays – reflecting Japan’s laser-focus on earthquake preparedness. However, some experts have cast doubt on whether such an advisory is necessary, or even accurate – and whether it risks pulling resources away from communities deemed lower risk. Japan is no stranger to severe earthquakes. It lies on the Ring of Fire, an area of intense seismic and volcanic activity on both sides of the Pacific Ocean. “Japan sits on the boundaries of four tectonic plates, which makes it one of the most earthquake-prone areas in the world,” said Shoichi Yoshioka, a professor at Japan’s Kobe University. “About 10% of the world’s earthquakes of magnitude 6 or higher occur in or around Japan, so the risk is much higher than in places like Europe or the eastern United States, where earthquakes are rare,” Yoshioka said. Residents pass through a devastated street in Ishinomaki, Miyagi prefecture, after Japan was hit by a devastating earthquake and tsunami, on March 15, 2011. Kim Jae-Hwan/AFP/Getty Images The worst quake in recent Japanese history was the 9.1 magnitude Tohoku earthquake in 2011 that triggered a major tsunami and nuclear disaster. About 20,000 people were killed. Then there’s the looming threat of the Nankai Trough megathrust earthquake – the most powerful of its kind, with magnitudes that can exceed 9. Seismologists say this could come potentially within a few decades, though the science remains disputed. Japan’s government has warned of the possible Nankai Trough quake for so many years that the possibility of it occurring has become common knowledge. But it’s also controversial – with some scientists arguing it’s ineffective to focus solely on the slim odds of a hypothetical earthquake in a specific part of Japan, especially when other parts of the country face similar threats but receive far less attention. The ‘big one’ The Nankai Trough is a 700-kilometer long (435-mile) subduction zone, which refers to when tectonic plates slip beneath each other. Most of the world’s earthquakes and tsunamis are caused by the movements of tectonic plates – and the most powerful often occur in subduction zones. In this case, the tectonic plate under the Philippine Sea is slowly slipping beneath the continental plate where Japan is located, moving several centimeters each year, according to a 2013 report by the government’s Earthquake Research Committee. At the Nankai Trough, severe earthquakes have been recorded every 100 to 200 years, according to the committee. The last such quakes took place in 1944 and 1946, both measuring 8.1 in magnitude; they devastated Japan, with at least 2,500 total deaths and thousands more injured, as well as tens of thousands of homes destroyed. By calculating the intervals between each major quake, the Japanese government has warned there is a 70% to 80% chance that Japan will be rocked by another Nankai Trough earthquake within 30 years, expected to be between magnitude 8 and 9. But these forecasts, and the utility of even making long-term imprecise predictions, have faced strong pushback from some quarters. Yoshioka, from Kobe University, said the 70%-80% figure was likely too high, and that the data drew from one specific theory, making it potentially more prone to errors. However, he had no doubt that “a major earthquake will occur in this area” in the future. “I tell (my students), the Nankai Trough earthquake will definitely come, whether it’s your generation or your children’s generation,” he said. Robert Geller, a seismologist and professor emeritus at the University of Tokyo, was more skeptical, calling the Nankai Trough earthquake a “made-up construct” and a “purely hypothetical scenario.” He also argued that earthquakes don’t occur in cycles, but can take place at any place and time – meaning there’s little point calculating when the next quake will come based on when previous ones have occurred. It’s a point of contention in the scientific community; seismologists have long relied on the idea that stress accumulates slowly along a fault between two tectonic plates, then is suddenly released in earthquakes, a cycle known as the “stick-slip” process – though more recent studies have shown that’s not always the case. Even if there is a potential threat on the horizon, the odds are extremely low, with both Yoshioka and Geller calling the public safety measures taken in the past week excessive or unnecessary. It is true that after one earthquake, a second, larger one can follow – which is why authorities issued the unprecedented warning last Thursday, Yoshioka said. But even then, the probability of the Nankai Trough earthquake happening the next day is low – perhaps increasing from the typical risk of one in 1,000 to one in a few hundred. That’s still less than a 1% chance, he said. The danger of overblowing these low odds is that, “You would be like the boy who cried wolf,” Geller said. “You’d be issuing these warnings of a slightly larger than normal probability over and over and over again, and the public would get tired of you in a big hurry.” A notice at a railway station announces that trains would operate at reduced speeds after an earthquake advisory on August 9, 2024 in Tokyo. The Asahi Shimbun/Getty Images The public prepares However, there are no signs of public fatigue yet, with people nationwide on high alert. Yota Sugai, a 22-year-old college student, said seeing the warning on television “made me feel a sense of urgency and fear,

Thousands of doctors have gone on strike across India to demand better protection for health workers after a trainee medic was raped and murdered in eastern West Bengal state. The resident doctor’s body was found last Friday with multiple injuries and signs of sexual assault in a seminar hall at the RG Kar Medical College and Hospital in the city of Kolkata, local police said. One suspect has been arrested. CNN has reached out to Kolkata police for comment. On Monday, medical associations in multiple states urged doctors at government hospitals to stop providing all elective services indefinitely as they called for the case to be fast-tracked through the courts and for the establishment of a protective committee for health workers. “Around 300,000 doctors across the country have joined the protest and tomorrow we expect more to join,” said Dr. Sarvesh Pandey, general secretary of the Federation of Resident Doctors Association (FORDA). Images showed doctors in Kolkata and the capital Delhi holding signs reading: “Save our doctors, save our future.” In the southern city of Hyderabad, doctors held a candlelight vigil. Many of the doctors also highlighted incidents of violence toward health workers and threats of physical abuse by angry patients or their family members. A survey in 2015 by the Indian Medical Association found 75% of doctors in India had faced some form of violence, local media reported at the time. “The murder of this young lady doctor is not the first, neither it would be the last if corrective measures are not taken,” the association said in a letter to the health minister, posted on X on Tuesday, as it called for an enquiry into doctors’ working conditions and an impartial investigation of the brutal murder case. Police officers stand outside the emergency ward during a doctors’ strike to protest the rape and murder of a medic at RG Kar Medical College and Hospital in Kolkata, India, on August 11, 2024. Sudipta Das/NURPHO/AP West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee said she was shocked to learn the trainee doctor had been killed in the hospital and backed protesters’ calls for the case to be fast tracked. India has struggled for years to tackle high rates of violence against women, with a number of high-profile rape cases drawing international attention to the issue. According to India’s National Crime Records Bureau, a total of 31,516 rape cases were recorded in 2022, an average of 86 cases per day. And experts warn that the number of cases recorded are just a small fraction of what may be the real number, in a deeply patriarchal country where shame and stigma surround rape victims and their families. Perhaps India’s most infamous case in recent years was the 2012 gang-rape of a medical student who was beaten, tortured and left to die following a brutal attack on a public bus in New Delhi. The case and ensuing nationwide protests drew international media scrutiny – and prompted authorities to enact legal reforms. The rape law was amended in 2013 to broaden the definition of the crime and set strict punishments not only for rape but also for sexual assault, voyeurism, and stalking. Despite these changes, rape cases remain prevalent in the country – with victims and advocates saying the government is still not doing enough to protect women and punish attackers.

As a venture capitalist, JD Vance repeatedly touted his guiding principles for investing in a company: A business should not only turn a profit, it should also help American communities. That’s why, he said, he invested in AppHarvest, a startup that promised a high-tech future for farming and for the workers of Eastern Kentucky. Over a four-year span, Vance was an early investor, board member and public pitchman for the indoor-agriculture company. “It’s not just a good investment opportunity, it’s a great business that’s making a big difference in the world,” Vance proclaimed in a Fox Business interview on the day the company went public in February 2021. Last year, facing hundreds of millions of dollars in debt, AppHarvest declared bankruptcy. The rise and fall of the company, and Vance’s role in it, cuts against his image as a champion for the working class — an image that helped catapult him to the top of the Republican ticket as Donald Trump’s running mate. A CNN review of public documents, and interviews with a dozen former workers, shows that AppHarvest not only failed as a business after pursuing rapid growth, but also provided a grim job experience for many of the working-class Kentuckians Vance has vowed to help. AppHarvest employees said they were forced to work in grueling conditions inside the company’s greenhouse, where temperatures often soared into the triple digits. Complaints filed with the US Department of Labor and a Kentucky regulator between 2020 and 2023 show that workers alleged they were given insufficient water breaks and weren’t provided adequate safety gear. Some workers said they suffered heat exhaustion or injuries, though state inspectors did not find violations. Despite promising local jobs, the company eventually began contracting migrant workers from Mexico, Guatemala and other countries, numerous former employees told CNN. While Vance stepped down from AppHarvest’s board and launched his political career in 2021, he remained an investor and supporter of the company. By the time he was sworn in to office last year, the company he’d hailed as a great opportunity was mired in lawsuits filed by shareholders angry over its plummeting stock price and allegations of fraud. Several former employees told CNN they thought Vance and other board members should have recognized and responded to warning signs that company officials were misleading the public and their own investors. To some, Vance’s enthusiastic promotion of the company followed an all-too-familiar story line in the region. “Eastern Kentucky is well-known for people coming and going. They start up companies, then they disappear,” said former AppHarvest worker Anthony Morgan. “They didn’t care about us.” A spokesperson for Vance, Luke Schroeder, said in a statement that the Ohio senator “was not aware of the operational decisions regarding hiring, employee benefits, or other workplace policies which were made after he departed AppHarvest’s board. Like all early supporters, JD believed in AppHarvest’s mission and wishes the company would have succeeded.” Early investor This photo posted to LinkedIn by AppHarvest founder Jonathan Webb shows JD Vance, middle, and Webb, right. From Jonathan Webb/LinkedIn With the blockbuster success of his 2016 memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance was riding high. He had learned how to invest in startups in Silicon Valley, where he worked at PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel’s firm. Thiel would later bankroll Vance’s own VC fund and Ohio senatorial run. AOL co-founder Steve Case hired Vance in 2017 to expand his seed fund Rise of the Rest, which sought to invest in underserved markets. Vance, whose book aimed to explain the plight of America’s forgotten heartland, seemed like the perfect fit. After about a week on the job, Vance took a meeting with AppHarvest founder Jonathan Webb, as Webb later recounted in a Fox News podcast interview. Webb, a Kentucky native, had created the company because he saw in his state the potential to build an indoor vertical farming hub growing fruits and vegetables, one that was within a day’s drive of most of the US population, and where water and land were abundant. But he needed money and was running out of time. Webb had drained his savings and maxed out his credit cards running AppHarvest. As he told Fox News, Webb convinced Vance “to write a $150,000 check” to invest in AppHarvest, alongside a few other investors, who invested $50,000 each. Vance was named to the board of directors in March 2017, according to his Senate disclosures, though company security filings stated that he joined in 2020. When Vance opened his own Ohio-based VC firm, Narya, with $93 million in funds, one of its earliest publicly disclosed investments was in AppHarvest. In just a few years, Vance helped steer millions of dollars in capital to the company and proved himself an invaluable asset to Webb as a pitchman. ‘Talk of the town’ Back in Kentucky, Anthony Morgan left his job at a local automobile parts plant in October 2020 to join AppHarvest as a crop care specialist, pruning tomatoes at the company’s new 60-acre mega greenhouse in the Eastern Kentucky city of Morehead. The company’s health care benefits attracted Morgan, a single father, who told CNN he took a pay cut to join the startup. He was also drawn to the larger promise that Webb sold in frequent interviews in the media: a company committed to Appalachia. “AppHarvest was the talk of the town,” Morgan said. “A major emphasis with them was ‘we want to bring work to Eastern Kentucky. This is why we are here.’” Anthony Morgan, a former crop care specialist at AppHarvest. CNN The company had pledged thousands of jobs for “high unemployment areas,” according to a 2020 investor presentation. Much of Eastern Kentucky at the time had been designated as economically distressed. Things started out well, Morgan said. The hours were manageable, and the benefits were better than anything he could hope to get from other employers in the area. Then, a few months in, Morgan recounted a noticeable shift in the company’s culture. Production fell behind and workers got the message that they needed to pick up the pace, Morgan said. The company cut costs, including the employer-paid health care benefits, and managers were tasked with meeting far higher production quotas. That meant longer hours for workers and fewer

What happiness means is different for each individual and may shift over a lifetime: joy, love, purpose, money, health, freedom, gratitude, friendship, romance, fulfilling work? All of the above? Something else entirely? Many have even suggested that while we may think we know what will make us happy, we are often wrong. One man may have cracked the code for what makes a happy and healthier life — and he has the data to back him up. Dr. Robert Waldinger is the director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development — possibly the longest-running longitudinal study on human happiness, which started back in 1938. (The original study followed two groups of males, Harvard College students and adolescents in Boston’s inner city. It was expanded in recent decades to include women and people of more diverse backgrounds.) Plenty of components are at play in the quest for a happier life, but the key comes down to one main factor: quality relationships. “What we found was that the important thing was to stay actively connected to at least a few people, because we all need a sense of connection to somebody as we go through life,” Waldinger told CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta recently on his podcast Chasing Life. “And the people who were connected to other people lived longer and stayed physically healthier than the people who were more isolated,” he said. “That was the surprise in our study: not that people were happier but that they lived longer.” Waldinger, who shares many of the study’s lessons in the book he coauthored, “The Good Life: Lessons From the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness,” is a psychiatrist, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and a Zen priest. You can listen to the full episode of the podcast here. Why would having quality relationships help people live happier and longer lives? “The best data that we have, and other studies have, has to do with stress and relief of stress,” Waldinger said. “If I have something upsetting happen today, I can literally feel my body rev up into fight-or-flight mode. … That’s not a problem, that’s normal, the fight-or-flight response. But what we’re meant to do is go back to equilibrium when the stress is removed. And if I can go home and complain to my wife or call up a friend, I can literally feel my body calm down.” He said neuroscience research suggests that people who are isolated or feel lonely stay in a low-level, fight-or-flight mode, which means they have higher levels of circulating stress hormones. “They have immune systems that don’t function as well, so they get infections more easily,” he said. “And that chronic inflammation breaks down body systems.” Additionally, people who are isolated don’t have anyone looking out for them, Waldinger said, ensuring they eat well, visit the doctor and engage in other behaviors that lead to better health. It doesn’t mean introverts or people without partners are doomed to short, miserable lives. Having one or two good friends — someone you can count on — is enough, he added. What can you do to live your happiest life? Waldinger has these five tips. Don’t neglect the basics Optimize your physical health. “On the one hand it sounds obvious, but we find that the people in our study who took care of their health lived longer and had more years when they were free of illness as they got older,” Waldinger said. “It means, exercising regularly. It means eating well. It means not becoming obese. It means not abusing alcohol or drugs. It means getting a reasonable amount of sleep,” he said. “Those things matter a lot.” If you don’t know where to start, sign up for these newsletters on exercise, eating right and sleep. Level up your social life Invest in your personal relationships. “Take care of your social fitness, if you will,” Waldinger said. “If you feel that you need more connection with people, be active in working on that.” Improving your social fitness can be done in two different ways. The first is quantity. “If you feel you don’t have enough people in your life to whom you’re connected,” Waldinger said, “you can take active steps to make more relationships, to bring more people in your life.” Get involved in activities you enjoy alongside others. “It could be volunteering for a community activity that you enjoy or care about. … It could be joining a club. It could be being involved in a religious community,” he said. “If you go to the same group of people again and again, you’re likely to strike up conversations around the thing that you all care about and that you’re there to do.” Doing so, he said, is an easy way to introduce new people into your life. Strengthen existing relationships The second way to improve your social fitness is quality. “What if I have enough people in my life, but I don’t feel connected enough to them; I have let my friendships go,” Waldinger said. “What we find in our study is that people who take small actions, day-to-day, to stay in touch and to connect with people are the people who keep their relationships strong.” This effort doesn’t necessarily require heavy lifting. It means taking small but consistent actions. “It means you could just make it a point on your commute to work every day to call somebody or to text or email somebody, just to stay in touch with a friend,” he said. “It means actively reaching out to go take a walk together or have coffee or have a meal together.” These small but regular actions will keep the relationships you care about more active and more vibrant, he said, “rather than letting them wither away from neglect.” Express yourself Another tip, Waldinger said, is to consider the values that are most important to you and express them. “It might be that what you value the most is authenticity — and so, think about where do I get to express that in my life and are there ways I can do more of that?”

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ordered a guided-missile submarine to the Middle East and accelerated the arrival of a carrier strike group to the region ahead of an anticipated Iranian attack against Israel, the Pentagon said in a statement Sunday evening. The USS Georgia, a nuclear-powered submarine armed with cruise missiles, was operating in the Mediterranean Sea in recent days, according to the Navy, having just completed training near Italy. Austin ordered the submarine into the waters of the Middle East, the Pentagon said. The movement of US missile submarines is rarely revealed publicly, and the nuclear-powered vessels operate in near-complete secrecy. The announcement of a submarine’s movement is a clear message of deterrence to Iran and its proxies, who the US and Israel believe are preparing for a potential large-scale attack on Israel. Video Ad Feedback ‘Extremely unusual’: Retired US general reacts to Defense Sec. Austin announcing guided-missile submarine to the Middle East 00:48 – Source: CNN The looming Iranian attack would come in response to Israel last month killing the top military commander for Iran’s most powerful proxy, Hezbollah in Lebanon. The next day, Israel is widely believed to have assassinated Hamas’ political leader in Tehran, which Israel has not admitted to carrying out. The Israel Defense Forces reported Sunday evening that around 30 rockets were launched from Lebanon, though some fell into open areas and no injuries were reported. Hezbollah said overnight that the rockets were in support of “steadfast Palestinian people” in Gaza and in retaliation to Israeli strikes in southern Lebanon. Austin’s announcement came in a readout of a call between the defense secretary and his Israeli counterpart, Yoav Gallant. The two spoke about “efforts to deter aggression by Iran, Lebanese Hizballah, and other Iran-aligned groups across the region,” the readout said. Austin also ordered the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group to accelerate its transit to the Middle East, the Pentagon said. The defense secretary had ordered the Lincoln strike group to the Middle East on August 2, but its ships carried out port calls in Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands along the way, according to the Navy. The Lincoln strike group consists of the carrier, which operates with stealth F-35C fighter jets, as well as several destroyers. The USS Theodore Roosevelt carrier strike group has been operating in the waters of the Middle East for several weeks, giving the US a formidable presence in the region. The USS Wasp amphibious ready group, which includes a force of thousands of Marines capable of special operations, is already operating in the Mediterranean Sea.

Russian President Vladimir Putin promised to “kick the enemy out” of his country’s territory after it emerged that Ukrainian troops were in control of dozens of Russian villages and large swathes of land a week into Kyiv’s surprise cross-border incursion. The scale of the incursion became clearer on Monday when Putin held a meeting with local officials from the border regions as well as some of Russia’s top security, government and law enforcement personnel. The acting head of the Kursk region, Aleksey Smirnov, told Putin that 28 settlements in his region were now under Ukrainian control, adding that Ukrainian troops had managed to advance some 7.5 miles (12 kilometers) into the territory across a 25-mile (40-kilometer) wide stretch of the border. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian military chief Oleksandr Syrskyi said on Monday that some 386 square miles (1,000 square kilometers) of Russian territory were now under Ukrainian control. Putin said the incursion was an attempt by Ukraine to “improve its negotiation position.” “But what kind of negotiations can we even talk about with people who indiscriminately strike at civilians, at civilian infrastructure, or try to create threats to nuclear power facilities. What can we even talk about with them?” Putin said. CNN cannot independently verify Putin’s claims that Ukraine has struck civilians in the incursion. Over the course of the war, Russia has been repeatedly accused of targeting Ukrainian civilians and civilian infrastructure by Kyiv, its Western allies and by international bodies, including the International Criminal Court and the United Nations. Russia has denied the accusations, despite evidence. Putin went on to tell his security chiefs to expel the Ukrainian forces: “The main task is certainly before the Ministry of Defense: to squeeze out, knock out the enemy from our territories and, together with the border guard service, ensure reliable protection of the state border.” The Ukrainian advances have sparked a large wave of evacuations from the border regions. Smirnov said 180,000 people had been told to evacuate and that 121,000 have left already. Vyacheslav Gladkov, the governor of the neighboring Belgorod region in southern Russia, said people living in the Krasnoyaruzhsky district were being moved to safer places. “We’re having a disturbing morning – enemy activities on the border of Krasnoyaruzhsky district. I am sure that our military will do everything to cope with this threat. But to protect the life and health of our people, we are beginning to relocate people who live in the Krasnoyaruzhsky district to safer places,” he said in a statement posted on his official Telegram channel. About 11,000 residents from Krasnoyaruzhsky district were evacuated, the head of the district administration, Andrey Miskov, said later. A photo provided by the government of Russia’s Kursk region shows people from the border districts of the region boarding evacuation buses. Government of Kursk/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock The incursion, which is now affecting two Russian regions, is seen as something of a game-changer in the conflict. The Ukrainian military has in the past regularly attacked targets inside the Belgorod region with drones and missiles, but until last week Kyiv had not launched any official ground incursions across the border in the two and half years since the start of the full-scale war. The extent of the operation remains unclear. An influential Russian military blog Rybar said on Monday that “apparently the (Armed Forces of Ukraine) is not shying away from plans to stretch our defensive formations, create the maximum number of points of tension, and attempt to break through in the east to cut Belgorod off from the north.” Related article‘Doing the least obvious thing’: Ukraine embarrasses Putin with surprise assault on southern Russia Ukrainian officials are yet to comment on the current operations in Belgorod and CNN is unable to independently confirm Rybar’s claim. A video geolocated by CNN posted on social media over the weekend shows Ukrainian soldiers holding their flag outside a rural social club in Poroz, a village that sits in Belgorod region about a mile from the international border. Several Russian military bloggers reported an attempt by Ukrainian armed forces to attack a border crossing in the Belgorod region Monday morning, in the district that Russian authorities say is being evacuated. CNN has reached out to the Ukrainian Defense Ministry for comment. The operation, which started last Tuesday, has been shrouded in mystery. Ukrainian officials for days remained silent, refusing to comment on reports of Ukrainian troops operating inside Russia. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky finally confirmed Kyiv’s troops had crossed into Russia on Saturday, saying in his nightly address to the nation that “Ukraine is proving that it really knows how to restore justice and guarantees exactly the kind of pressure that is needed – pressure on the aggressor.” Diversionary tactic? The reason for the attack is also unclear. Ukraine has been under increased pressure along the 600-mile front line as Moscow continues its slow, grinding offensive, inching towards several strategically important towns and roads in eastern Ukraine. The Ukrainian General Staff said Russia was targeting Toretsk, a strategic town just north of Donetsk. Toretsk lies on the southern end of a key road that connects Kostyantynivka, Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, three Ukrainian cities that form the backbone of Ukraine’s defenses of the region. According to two Ukrainian military bloggers, Russian forces are pushing into Toretsk from several locations, trying to outflank Ukrainian forces. One blogger said Russian forces were already operating within the city. Russian military bloggers suggested a similar strategy, claiming Moscow’s armies had advanced in several locations around the town. CNN could not independently verify their accounts but video geolocated by CNN showed Russian forces operating just south of the city. The Ukrainian cross-border attack could be an attempt by Kyiv to divert Russian resources elsewhere. Given the spate of more negative developments from the front lines, the news of a successful incursion may help Kyiv boost the morale of its troops and civilian population. Moscow has been scrambling to contain the attack. Russian authorities imposed a sweeping counter-terror operation in three border regions – Belgorod, Bryansk and Kursk – but

Rachael Gunn arrived in Paris as a competitive breaker excited to make her Olympic debut. She leaves an internet sensation, her performances viewed by millions across social media. Gunn – also known as B-girl Raygun, or simply Raygun – is a 36-year-old university lecturer from Sydney, Australia, who balances her day job with her breakdance career, competing at events around the globe. Recently, that took her all the way to the Paris Olympics, where 32 athletes – known as B-boys and B-girls – were competing at the Games for the first time. And at the Place de la Concorde on Saturday, Raygun, kitted out in the green and gold tracksuit of Australia, showcased some of her moves across three round-robin battles: a kangaroo hop, a backwards roll and various contortions with her body while lying or crawling on the floor. She failed to register a point in her battles against USA’s Logistx, France’s Syssy and Lithuania’s Nicka, losing 18-0 on each occasion. It’s fair to say that subsequent commentary on the internet wasn’t entirely polite about Raygun’s performances. One user on X, formerly known as Twitter, called her routines “hilariously ridiculous,” while another questioned how she had made it this far. Even singer Adele took time out of her concert in Munich to question whether the whole thing was a “joke,” adding that it was “the best thing that’s happened in the Olympics.” But Raygun is completely serious. A lecturer at Sydney’s Macquarie University, her research interests include breaking, street dance and hip-hop culture, while her PhD thesis focused on the intersection of gender and Sydney’s breaking culture. Raygun competes against Logistx at the Paris Olympics. Harry Langer/DeFodi Images/Getty Images She has represented Australia at the world championships in 2021 and 2022 before earning a spot at the Olympics via the Oceania championships last year. “All my moves are original,” Raygun said after competing in Paris. “Creativity is really important to me. I go out there and I show my artistry. Sometimes, it speaks to the judges, and sometimes, it doesn’t. I do my thing and it represents art. That is what it is about.” Many people have jumped to defend the Australian’s performances as unique and creative, despite not necessarily being rewarded by the judges. “It’s all about originality and it’s all about bringing something new to the table and representing your country or region,” said Martin Gilian, the chief breaking judge at the Olympics, also known as MGbility. “This is exactly what Raygun was doing, she got inspired by her surroundings, which in this case, for example, was a kangaroo … She created some original moves which could be maybe funny or entertaining for others, but for us, she basically represented breaking and hip hop. She was trying to be original and bring something new to the table. From our perspective, that was nothing really shocking.” Sergey Nifontov, general secretary of the World DanceSport Federation, said that he was “worried” by the response on social media, adding: “That should not happen in our world. Something is going in the wrong direction.” Gunn started breaking competitively in her mid-20s having grown up practicing other forms of dance, including ballroom, jazz, tap and hip-hop. She was up against B-girls about half her age in Paris, explaining how it was an “amazing experience” and “a privilege to get this opportunity.” That was evident based on her arrival at Sunday’s closing ceremony, where she received huge support from teammates and supporters during an impromptu performance on the street. Raygun said that all of her breaking moves are original. Ezra Shaw/Getty Images “If you don’t know Rachael’s story, in 2008, she was locked in a room crying being involved in a male-dominated sport as the only woman, and it took great courage for her to continue on and fight for her opportunity to participate in a sport that she loved,” Anna Meares, a former professional cyclist and Australia’s chef de mission, told reporters. Related articleAs the Olympic flame heads for Los Angeles, what can we expect from the 2028 Games? “That got her to winning the Olympic qualifying event to be here in Paris. She is the best breakdancer, female, that we have in Australia … She has represented the Olympic team, the Olympic spirit, with great enthusiasm and I absolutely love her courage. I love her character, and I feel very disappointed for her that she has come under the attack that she has.” Breaking emerged on the streets of New York City in the 1970s and has since grown in popularity across the US and around the world. It started as a form of creative expression among Black and Latino youth and is considered one of the key elements of hip-hop, along with rapping, DJing and graffiti art. While many don’t view breaking strictly as sport, more an artistic expression, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) had been searching for ways to attract younger audiences to the Games, adding skateboarding, sport climbing and surfing to the Olympic program. However, breaking will not be staged at the 2028 Games in Los Angeles, and it remains unclear whether the discipline will ever make a return at future Olympics.

A fast-spreading wildfire tore through several neighborhoods close to the Greek capital of Athens on Monday, prompting authorities to urge residents to evacuate their homes. Some 685 firefighters and 32 water-bombing aerial units have been deployed to extinguish the blaze that began Sunday near the town of Varnavas, north of Athens, local authorities said. Emergency crews have been tackling “an extremely dangerous fire” for more than 20 hours, under “dramatic conditions” exacerbated by strong winds, prolonged drought and impenetrable terrain in dense, unburnt forest, according to the climate crisis and civil protection minister, Vassilis Kikilias. The blaze showed no sign of subsiding, with 40 flare-ups recorded since the early hours of Monday morning, the fire services said. Officials have not said how big the fire is, but Greek public broadcaster ERT estimates it exceeds 30 kilometers (about 19 miles). Fires could be seen raging near houses on Greek TV. Some yards were burning. Not all residents have left affected areas, instead staying behind in an effort to save their homes. Authorities warned Monday that the wildfire was raging towards Penteli, around 16 kilometers (about 10 miles) northeast of Athens, with “great momentum.” The area lies at the foot of Mount Penteli, which is surrounded by swathes of wooded terrain, according to Reuters. The wildfires also threatened the premises of the National Observatory of Athens – an institute founded in 1842 – Theodore Giannaros, a researcher, said on Facebook. Although wildfires are common in Greek summers, climate scientists say that unusually hot and dry weather linked to global warming make the blazes fiercer and more common. Greek authorities have battled dozens of blazes already this summer after enduring its hottest June and July on record. Kikilias warned over the weekend that “extremely high and dangerous weather conditions” would continue through Thursday. © Mapbox © OpenStreetMap © Mapbox © OpenStreetMap Improve this map Athens Penteli Varnavas ‘You couldn’t breathe’ Locals in Greece described terrifying scenes of animals struggling to escape the turbulent wildfires, as officials called on European allies to support rescue efforts. One local said the sight of flames across her local forest “hurts,” according to Reuters. “We have grown up in this forest. We feel great sadness and anger,” said Marina Kalogerakou, 24. “We are at God’s mercy,” Dimitris, a local who did not give his surname, told Greek TV. The breeder was worried about the fate of his 100 goats and five dogs. “I could hear them dying,” he said, adding that he and his son were trying to put out the fires using buckets. “Things are very difficult and there is constant resurgence, raining ashes,” one visibly exhausted firefighter told Greek TV. Another resident crashed their car into a pine tree while trying escape the blaze, Reuters reported. “I couldn’t see,” said Pantelis Kyriazis, as he pointed to his bleeding elbow. Further south, in the area of Dioni, a resident faced “suffocating” clouds of smoke, as he doused his home with water, according to the Associated Press. “The wind would go in one direction and then in the other. The smoke was suffocating. You couldn’t see. Your eyes teared up. You couldn’t breathe,” said Spyros Gorilas. Officials also said that homes have been damaged, without specifying how many. Emergency service personnel work to rescue people during wildfires in Varnavas, north of Athens, August 11, 2024. Angelos Tzortzinis/AFP/Getty Images Since Sunday, health and emergency workers have treated 13 citizens and two firefighters with burn and respiratory injuries, fire services said. Three hospitals in the Attica region were on heightened alert. Two dozen children were evacuated from a hospital in Penteli, according to the health minister, Adonis Georgiadis. Meanwhile, residents near the capital of Athens were asked to evacuate their homes on Monday. The Greek government on Monday urged the European Union to bolster air and ground operations. France, Italy, the Czech Republic, Spain and Turkey have reportedly responded to calls for assistance. Crews in France have been battling their own blaze after a fire in southwestern Lot-et-Garonne ravaged 44 hectares of forest, according to French broadcaster, France 3. More than 150 firefighters were deployed on Monday. A house burns during a blaze in Varnavas, on Sunday. Angelos Tzortzinis/AFP/Getty Images The wildfire has raised fears that Greece could be heading for a repeat of last summer, when blazes scorched through several regions and islands, including its heavily-forested national park, known as the “lungs of Athens.” CNN has reported that a recent spike in the number of disappearing people in Greece could be linked to extreme heat in the country. In June, several tourists disappeared after going for a walk and were later found dead in several locations across the country. Authorities have warned people not to underestimate the impacts of searing temperatures. The story has been updated with developments.

Using his sleeve to wipe tear gas from his burning eyes, 25-year-old Mugdho weaves through the crowd, handing out bottles of water to the protesters whose demands for reform would soon topple Bangladesh’s leader. Fifteen minutes later, the university student would become a martyr of the protest movement, when a bullet pierced his forehead as he paused to rest during the searing afternoon heat in the capital Dhaka. Mugdho – whose full name was Mir Mahfuzur Rahman – was rushed to hospital by his friend and fellow protesters, but it was too late, his twin Snigdho – Mir Mahbubur Rahman – told CNN. “I just hugged him, and I cried.” The video of Mugdho handing out water before his death on July 18 punctured the social news feeds of millions across Bangladesh, galvanizing more people to take to the streets calling for justice for the lives lost. What began as peaceful protests against a quota system for government jobs spiraled into a nationwide movement to push longtime Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina out of office, resulting in a deadly crackdown and clashes which killed at least 300 people, according to analysis by local media and agencies. Using his sleeve to wipe tear gas from his burning eyes, 25-year-old Mugdho weaves through the crowd, handing out bottles of water to the protesters whose demands for reform would soon topple Bangladesh’s leader. Fifteen minutes later, the university student would become a martyr of the protest movement, when a bullet pierced his forehead as he paused to rest during the searing afternoon heat in the capital Dhaka. Mugdho – whose full name was Mir Mahfuzur Rahman – was rushed to hospital by his friend and fellow protesters, but it was too late, his twin Snigdho – Mir Mahbubur Rahman – told CNN. “I just hugged him, and I cried.” The video of Mugdho handing out water before his death on July 18 punctured the social news feeds of millions across Bangladesh, galvanizing more people to take to the streets calling for justice for the lives lost. What began as peaceful protests against a quota system for government jobs spiraled into a nationwide movement to push longtime Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina out of office, resulting in a deadly crackdown and clashes which killed at least 300 people, according to analysis by local media and agencies.

Jen Barnett has wanted to live abroad since first grade, when cafés lined her Birmingham, Alabama, school’s hallways during a week dedicated to all things French. She and her husband started talking about it soon after they met in 2015 and batted the idea around through two stressful US presidential election cycles. Add a pandemic, coding bootcamp and a career change for her husband, Brett Andrews, and a new remote-work lifestyle for them both, and the time started to feel especially right to take the plunge. Little did they know that researching their move would eventually lead to a new business venture that would include organizing scouting trips for other aspiring expats. Their winding route to Expatsi — their business aimed at helping others sort through the complicated process of moving abroad — involved trips to Canada and Mexico, a well-researched top 10 list of contenders and a willingness to revise their plan on the fly. So what can other people thinking about a move learn from their experiences and those of the guests on their inaugural scouting trips to Portugal and Spain? One of the keys, Barnett says, is to lean on the community of people who are doing the same thing. “The secret is that we encourage everyone to rely on each other,” Barnett said about the dynamics of Expatsi’s scouting trips. “And you know a lot of us are moving abroad because we’re trying to regain some sense of community that we feel like we’ve lost.” A winding road to Mexico For Barnett, 52, and Andrews, 44, their move-abroad journey really revved up at the end of 2020. They spent a New Year’s Eve cabin weekend drilling down on exactly what they’d be looking for in a new place. They drew on a fact-finding trip they had taken several years prior to Vancouver, Canada, which didn’t feel like home to them. “You know, obviously Canada had not been a good fit, so why wasn’t it, and what were we really looking for, and what would make us happy? And so we started listing out, like this is the kind of weather I want, and this is the kind of … vibes I want, and this is what I want to be legal, and this is how concerned I am with safety or the Wi-Fi signal or whether or not there’s a big airport, or health care and so on,” said Barnett, whose background is in marketing and product development. Andrews moved into software development during the pandemic and oversees Expatsi’s technology. Once they had their criteria, they spent months researching countries, sifting and scoring on a spreadsheet to arrive at a top 10 list of contenders. They had planned to visit one country a year over 10 years. But thanks to TikTok, things didn’t go according to plan. TikTok videos featuring Mérida, Mexico, caught their attention. “And Mexico was like 10th on our list, and so we decided to move it up and visit Mérida first, and we just fell in love with it immediately,” Barnett said. That visit was in January 2022. So what if, instead of waiting another nine years, they took all the research they’d compiled on various countries and created a test that other people considering a move abroad could take to narrow their own choices? And then they could turn that into a company, work for themselves and possibly go ahead and move to Mérida? They officially incorporated their company in 2023. And In April of this year, they made their way from Alabama to their new home in Mérida. The couple moved right after they launched Expatsi’s first scouting trips in March to Spain and Portugal – two destinations they were visiting for the first time themselves. The trips help participants explore neighborhoods and link them up with local immigration, finance and housing experts. Expatsi had one more trip scheduled for the fall, but things were fairly quiet after that first trip. And then the US presidential debate in June created a crisis for President Joe Biden’s struggling campaign. “Aaaaannnnnnd, ever since it’s been completely insane,” Barnett said, with a huge spike in interest in Expatsi and the scouting trips. The company has added 10 trips to their calendar since then, although the frenzy has subsided somewhat in recent weeks. Most of the people in the company’s community are seeking countries that are more progressive, Barnett said, and are far more likely to view the United States as too conservative than they are to say it’s too liberal. The test and the scouting trips About 100,000 people have taken the 20-question Expatsi test since the couple created it in 2022, Barnett said. It covers topics such as reasons for moving abroad, how prospective expats envision securing health care, what level of infrastructure they’d be comfortable with and the types of things they’d want to be legal there – with same-sex marriage, gambling, guns and abortion among the options. The top answers to the reasons-for-moving question: 1) For adventure/enrichment/growth; 2) The US is too divided; 3) To avoid the threat of gun violence. The Portugal scouting group toured the town of Setúbal, located south of Lisbon. Courtesy Jen Barnett Gun violence is a big reason that Michelle Pomladé, a cybersecurity program manager who lives just north of Seattle, is determined to leave the United States. “The fact that kids’ No. 1 reason for death is by guns, and we don’t do anything about it as a country, is just sickening to me,” Pomladé said. She and her mother participated in the first Expatsi scouting trip to Portugal in March, and Pomladé had an experience there that cemented her decision to move. She went to a pharmacy in Portugal to get an eczema cream that her mother ran out of while they were away. The cost? 7 euros (about $8). The same cream in the United States cost her mother $78. “You know, I’m only 48 right now, so when I start to need things like

As Deadpool breaks records at the box office with “Deadpool & Wolverine,” cover art depicting the of superhero’s first ever comic book appearance could sell for a record $7.5 million. Designed by writer and artist Rob Liefeld in 1991, it would become the most valuable comic book cover art ever sold if it fetches its asking price, according to Heritage Auctions, which is handling the sale. Ever since Deadpool’s first appearance, fans have embraced the mercenary supervillain turned witty and unfiltered antihero, played by Ryan Reynolds in the movie adaptations of the comic books. Deadpool became one of Marvel’s most popular comic book characters. Handout/Rob Liefeld/Reuters “Marvel contacted me and said, this is the most fan mail we’ve had on a new character in 15 years,” Liefeld said, according to Reuters. “They were flooded with letters, fan letters, which they sent me. And the box that that mail arrived in … I thought I was getting a washer and dryer.” When Liefeld began working on “The New Mutants” – the series in which he and scripter Fabian Nicieza introduced Deadpool – it was Marvel’s lowest selling mutant title. But the increasing popularity of Deadpool, alongside other new characters like Cable, transformed it into a more successful series, even outselling X-Men. And similarly, the recently released “Deadpool & Wolverine” has smashed expectations at the box office, raking in $211 million domestically on its first weekend, making it the biggest opening of 2024, the biggest opening ever for an R-rated film, and the sixth biggest opening of all-time. A poster of Deadpool hangs at the David H. Koch Theater during the premiere of “Deadpool and Wolverine” in New York City on July 23. Caitlin Ochs/REUTERS/REUTERS With Deadpool now firmly established as a lucrative franchise in pop culture, the cover art’s owner approached Heritage Auctions saying “the time is right” to sell it, the auction house said in a statement. The owner acquired it almost 20 years ago, after Liefed had sold it, but refused any offers to sell. In the years since then, Deadpool has migrated from the comic book to the silver screen, making his debut appearance in the 2009 movie “X-Men Origins: Wolverine,” and his first lead appearance in 2016’s “Deadpool.” If the cover art fetches $7.5 million, it will surpass the current record held by a 1938 comic that features Superman’s first appearance and sold for $6 million at an auction in April.

There are two rather different perceptions of the Balearic island of Ibiza near Spain. One is as a nightlife and party destination; home to beach clubs, world-class DJs and all-night long raves for which the island became world-renowned, particularly from the late 1980s onwards. Another provides a counterpoint to these fevered nights — a sense of tranquillity and breeziness, a yogic haven of calm and counter culture nestled in the Mediterranean sea. That mood can be seen through the lens of Ibizan style, characterized by bohemian inspired white dresses, airy fabrics, lingerie-like garments, linens and earthy colours. This look originated in the 1960s and 1970s, explained journalist Gala Mora, when Ibiza became “the center of (Europe’s) hippy universe,” playing host to celebrities including Freddie Mercury, Grace Jones and Bob Marley. “A mix of people from all walks of life gathered here, finding a refuge on the island and discovering a place with rich artisan traditions,” Mora, co-author of a new coffee table book “Ibiza Interiors,” told CNN in an interview. “Today, (Ibizan style) still persists and is absolutely recognizable anywhere in the world.” Fashion brand Reformation dedicated their latest summer collection to Ibiza. Reformation As well as on-island boutiques such as Annie’s Ibiza and Vicente Ganesha, Ibiza style is celebrated by Loewe’s creative director Jonathan Anderson, who grew up vacationing in Ibiza, and since 2017, has spearheaded a high end collaboration between the luxury house and another legendary local institution Paula’s boutique. Together the brands produce a much-anticipated annual collection of womenswear, menswear and accessories capturing the bohemian essence of Balearic style. Summer 2024 also saw clothing brand Reformation launch an Ibiza collection, styled for going between the club and the beach (and the club on the beach). But fashion is just one aspect of Ibiza’s growing international reputation as a creative hub once again. Shane Fonner, senior vice president at L.E.R. public relations who represent chic agrotourism hotel Cas Gasi in the island’s center said the area is becoming increasingly popular with travellers from North America, many of whom are attracted by Ibiza’s reputation for allowing people to slow down, switch off and provide space to look inwards. “When the pandemic happened, there was a chance to reframe what Ibiza was about: slow travel, wellness and mindfulness,” Fonner said. “The pandemic, alongside increasing geopolitical turmoil and the fast pace of (lives lived on) social media means Ibiza is (returning to) the place it was in the 1960s… In Ibiza, people are asking those questions of, ‘who are we? Who do we think we are? How do we want to live? Are there better ways to live?’ Ibiza serves as a template for this exploration, or a modern version of this exploration.” A spate of new photobooks only endorse this view — Mora’s “Ibiza Interiors,” “Ibiza Bohemia” published by Assouline, and “Oriol Maspons Ibiza,” all celebrate the island’s long history as a hub for creativity, design and bohemian living. Agrotourism hotel Cas Gasi is becoming increasingly popular with North American travellers for allowing people to slow down and switch off. Enric Curto Maspons’ book showcases the work of the acclaimed Spanish photographer who spent summers on the island from the late 1960s to the late 1980s, making hundreds of photographs showing Ibiza’s distinct aesthetic. The images capture the dichotomy of languid days spent lounging on beaches alongside riotous, glitzy club nights and evoke a sense that Ibiza was the place to be — and to be seen. The island has a long tradition of being home to, or hosting, forward thinking creatives. The “Ibiza 59” group, so called for the year it was founded, was a collective of countercultural artists from different countries and with different styles who all coalesced on the island at the same time. This set the scene for the 1960s; the island’s first art biennal was held in 1964, and five years later, Ibiza’s Contemporary Art Museum opened in the town’s historic quarter. The island is returning to the art scene that played such a part in it’s history, thanks in part to the Contemporary Art Now (CAN) Art Fair, bringing more than 30 national and international art galleries to the island to showcase the latest in contemporary and avant-garde art. “Ibiza reinvents itself, and I think this is a new wave in arts and culture for the island,” CAN Art Fair’s founding director Sergio Sancho told CNN in an interview. The images capture a sun-soaked, bohemian spirit of the Island’s hippy days. Oriol Maspons Hot and heavy nightclub scenes are rife in Oriol Maspon’s book on the Spanish island. Oriol Maspons Sancho is looking to highlight local creatives and craftsmanship as part of CAN Art Fair. An avid art collector, Sancho founded the UVNT Art Fair in Madrid in 2017, but during a visit to Ibiza during the pandemic, he found the unusually quiet atmosphere enabled him to truly see the island’s cultural offering, and the potential it had to host an international art fair. CAN also hosts an OFF Program to accompany the main art fair which in 2024 comprised six exhibitions around the island showcasing the work of Balearic artists. “I think it’s important to give visibility to these local artists; I think this is one of the highlights of this year,” said Sancho. One such artist is Irene de Andres, who is from Ibiza and showcased a project called “Where nothing happens,” a series of video works, photographs, sculptures and models based on the memory of abandoned or temporarily disused discos and nightclubs on the island. Related articlePeer inside this tiny art fair, where major artists present at miniature scale In some ways, “Where nothing happens,” alludes to the broader sense of change on the island and a movement away from the famed hard-partying lifestyle. Sancho attributes this shift to the pandemic: “It changed the vibe of the island, because a lot of people started moving (to Ibiza) and basing their first residence there,” he said. While the island was once a party

Team USA on Thursday had to produce a breathtaking comeback to defeat Serbia 95-91 and advance to the men’s basketball gold medal game. Serbia — led by three-time NBA MVP Nikola Jokić — led by 17 points at one stage during the second quarter but saw its lead evaporate against the supercharged offense of the US. Two of the sport’s biggest names, LeBron James and Steph Curry, led the comeback with some clutch buckets down the stretch as the defending Olympic champion avoided what would have been an all-time upset. Team USA will take on host nation France in the gold medal game on Saturday. James posted only the fourth triple-double in Olympic history, while Curry had by far his best performance of the Games, leading all scorers with 36 points. After failing to medal at the World Cup last year, the US assembled a roster that can be considered a “who’s who” of NBA players; the squad features four NBA MVP winners and 11 All-Stars. Team USA has occasionally showed a lack of cohesion on both sides of the ball that might be expected from a team full of ball-dominant superstars. However, it has been able to blow away opponents so far thanks to its incredibly talented and deep offense. It appeared as though the US would streak ahead in the first quarter, as Golden State Warriors star Curry drained five triples and scored 17 points in only eight minutes. Serbia, though, had other plans and also came out on fire from behind the arc, making five threes and shooting 65% from the field as a team in the opening period. It also frustrated Team USA with swarming defense throughout the game, forcing the stars to settle for deep attempts and keeping them out of the paint. The American squad is full of scorers who thrive in isolation and it failed to generate many clean looks during the first half, struggling to keep up with a Serbian side that was shooting lights out at the other end. The Europeans’ lead had ballooned to 17 midway through the second quarter and Team USA was firmly on upset watch. Late USA comeback Some good shotmaking from the likes of Curry, Jrue Holiday and Joel Embiid – still receiving large boos from the Paris crowd after opting to play for the US over France – cut the lead to six in the third, but Jokić and company were determined to keep their opponents at an arm’s length. A huge and-one on a three-pointer from guard Marko Gudurić highlighted another strong period for the Serbs, who headed into the fourth with a 13-point lead. However, this American squad of “Avengers” might just be inevitable. An Embiid bucket made it a one-possession game with just over four minutes to go, before a vintage driving layup for James tied the game at 84. James and Curry celebrate after Team USA’s dramatic comeback win over Serbia. Gregory Shamus/Getty Images Soon after, a clutch Curry three gave the US its first lead since the fourth minute of the matchup. Bogdan Bogdanović converted an and-one to keep things interesting in the closing stages, but Kevin Durant, now Team USA’s all-time leading Olympic scorer, iced the game with a crucial midrange shot with 34 seconds left. James posted 16 points, 12 rebounds and 12 assists, while Embiid scored 19. Bogdanović led the way for Serbia with 20, with Jokić close behind with 17. A battle for the ages ended in heartbreaking defeat for Serbia, who will take on Germany for the bronze medal. For Team USA, it was an almighty scare that might have proved that this team of superstars isn’t unbeatable after all. For France and its home support, that might be all it needs to believe.

Pakistan partied late into the night after javelin thrower Arshad Nadeem won the country’s first ever Olympic track and field medal with a Games record throw of 92.97 meters to take gold in Paris. The normally cricket-mad nation stayed up late Thursday night to watch Nadeem clinch Pakistan’s first Olympic medal since the men’s field hockey team won bronze in Barcelona 32 years ago. “Our brother has won the gold medal and I’ve lost my voice because I’ve been celebrating all night,” his brother Shahid Nadeem told CNN on Friday from the family’s home in Mian Channu, in Pakistan’s Punjab state. “When he gets home we will celebrate him in such a way that the world will never forget! We are simple people and will celebrate with kheer (local rice pudding) and whatever Allah gives us, we are happy!” he said. Supporters and family members of Pakistani athlete Arshad Nadeem celebrate after his Olympic victory at Mian Channu in Khanewal district, Pakistan on August 9, 2024. Shahid Saeed Mirza/AFP/Getty Images People danced to drums on the streets outside Nadeem’s home, and his mother told local outlet Geo News: “I am so happy, what can I tell you? I want to hug him and kiss him. He has made Pakistan’s name proud, earned Pakistan a medal and made its flag fly proudly.” Nadeem shattered the Olympic record of 90.57 meters, set by Norway’s Andreas Thorkildsen at Beijing 2008, with his second throw that almost made 93 meters. Nadeem threw his arms into the air in celebration as the board confirmed the record-breaking throw, eliciting gasps of amazement from spectators. “When I threw the javelin, I got the feel of it leaving my hand, and sensed it could be an Olympic record, inshallah (God willing),” Nadeem said later. In winning gold, Arshad defeated India’s sporting hero and reigning world champion Neeraj Chopra, who took silver with a throw of 89.45, ahead of Grenada’s Anderson Peters, who threw 88.54 meters for bronze. The friendship between the top two medalists, Nadeem and Chopra, has defied the historic animosity between Pakistan and Indian sporting teams, and when the results were confirmed the two embraced each other, their flags wrapped around their shoulders. Pakistan’s Arshad Nadeem competes in the men’s javelin throw final of the athletics event at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games at Stade de France in Saint-Denis, north of Paris, on August 8, 2024. Andrej Isakovic/AFP/Getty Images Triumph for the nation Pakistan is now waiting for the moment that Nadeem stands atop the podium to receive his gold medal — the country’s first Olympic gold since its men’s field hockey team won in Los Angeles in 1984. Pakistan sports journalist Altamish Jiwa told CNN that Nadeem’s gold was a “humungous victory for all of Pakistan” and one that had buoyed the nation’s spirits. “Nadeem has delivered the perfect gift which the nation has been waiting for quite some time, the feeling of triumph and collective joy which the country has been deprived of for many years, not just on the sporting front, but simply in everyday walk of life,” Jiwa said. Arshad Nadeem of Pakistan and Neeraj Chopra of India embrace after their gold-silver medal finish at the 2024 Summer Olympic Games. Tim Clayton/Corbis/Getty Images Nadeem finished fifth at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, with a throw of 84.62 meters, then won silver in the 2023 world championships, and became the first athlete from Pakistan to reach the final of any track and field event at the Olympic Games. He has previously spoken about his difficulties in competing on the world stage as he had no state-of-the-art grounds or training facilities in a country not known for its track and field athletes. Nadeem once aspired to be a cricketer before picking up javelin in 2015, describing the decision as “the best thing that happened” to him. “I wouldn’t be in the Olympics otherwise,” he said. Cricket holds an unofficial but prominent position as the national sport of Pakistan, resulting in increased funding and support. Nadeem’s win has shifted some focus from cricket to athletics in Pakistan and has sparked discussion on social media over the lack of resources for athletes competing internationally. Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif congratulated Nadeem on his achievement, commenting on X, “You’ve made the whole nation proud young man.”

The Middle East, and indeed much of the world, is bracing for Iran to carry out a revenge attack on Israel over the assassination of Hamas’ political leader. But could Tehran instead be prepared to pull back in exchange for progress on Gaza peace talks? That was the hope among regional leaders gathered at an emergency summit in Jeddah. It was Wednesday and the world was on edge. Flights across Iran and its neighbors were cancelled amid fears that missiles could fly any moment, triggering a much-feared escalation of Israel’s war in Gaza. With his country on the brink of triggering a regional war, Iran’s Acting Foreign Minister Ali Bagheri whispered to an aide bending close to catch his words. Cameroon’s foreign minister sat to Bagheri’s right, Yemen’s to his left, along with a room full of other foreign ministers from Muslim-majority countries, all there to help prevent the situation from spiraling into a wider conflict. Since Hamas’s political chief Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated in Tehran last week, the Islamic Republic’s leaders have vowed vengeance against Israel, whom they claim was responsible. Israel hasn’t confirmed or denied responsibility. The unassuming venue for such a last-ditch effort to quell Iran’s seething rage was the headquarters of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation’s (OIC), modest by Saudi Arabia’s rapidly modernizing and glitzy standards. It sits in a dusty, nondescript corner of the Red Sea city of Jeddah. The play in the room, if it can be called that, was carefully articulated to CNN by Jordan’s foreign minister, Ayman Safadi, who stepped out of the high stakes talks to promote the initiative his vulnerable kingdom is championing: “The first step toward stopping the escalation is ending its root cause, which is the continued Israeli aggression on Gaza.” The thrust, to convince Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to soften his stance in ceasefire negotiations with Hamas, isn’t new. But the payoff this time may be much more attractive than previous attempts. United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken says the US and its allies have communicated directly to both Israel and Iran that  “no one should escalate this conflict,” adding that ceasefire negotiations have entered “a final stage” and could be jeopardized by further escalation elsewhere in the region. Safadi was in Tehran over the weekend and met both Bagheri and Iran’s new President Masoud Pezeshkian, and appears to believe that Iran may be looking for an off ramp to escalation. Iran needs diplomatic cover to back away from its hasty threats against Israel in the immediate aftermath of Haniyeh’s killing: a Gaza ceasefire that would allow Tehran to claim it cares more for the lives of Palestinians in the Palestinian enclave than it does for taking revenge would fit the bill. But the payoff needs to be big enough for Iran as its honor and deterrence are at stake. France’s President Emanuel Macron is adding his diplomatic heft, declaring in a phone call with Pezeshkian Wednesday, retaliation against Israel “has to be abandoned”. Pezeshkian’s response suggests he is listening. “If America and Western countries really want to prevent war and insecurity in the region, to prove this claim, they should immediately stop selling arms and supporting the Zionist regime and force this regime to stop the genocide and attacks on Gaza and accept a ceasefire,” he said. Could Hezbollah act alone Nearly ten months since Israel’s war in Gaza, triggered by Hamas brutal October 7 attack which saw around 1200 people in Israel killed and at least 250 others taken hostage, almost 40,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to Palestinian health officials – and there is still no end in sight to the conflict The catch in the Gaza ceasefire escalation off-ramp play is that it is heavy on hope and short on substance. For it to work, Netanyahu will have to buy in to it too. Hamas just made this harder by replacing Haniyah with his tougher counterpart inside Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, an architect of the October 7 attacks, and anyway, right now they are in no mood for meaningful talks. The change, if it’s going to come, according to the consensus at the OIC  has to be from the outside, from the only person who remotely has the clout to temper Netanyahu – US President Joe Biden. Iranians attend the memorial procession of assassinated Hamas chief, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran, Iran, August 1, 2024. Majid Asgaripour/Reuters But almost a year into the conflict, Biden refuses a showdown with Israel’s most hardline, right-wing government in its history, that also adding to the frustrations in Jeddah. Riyad Mansour, Palestine’s Permanent Observer at the UN, was in the room with Bagheri and the others. “The region does not need escalation,” he said  “What the region needs is a ceasefire. What the region needs to address legitimate rights. I have a feeling that Prime Minister Netanyahu wants to drag President Biden into a war with Iran” What Bagheri did get in Jeddah was the kind of diplomatic support intended help get them off the ledge, with Mansour saying “With regard to what Iran wanted about, you know, the respecting its territorial integrity and its sovereignty, there was, you know, a strong support to this sentiment.” As the acting Iranian foreign minister left for Tehran following the four-hour emergency meeting, focus shifted slightly back to Iran’s Lebanese proxy Hezbollah, which is also intent on retaliation for the assassination of its top military commander Fu’ad Shukr in Beirut hours before Haniyeh’s killing. One US official and one western intelligence official told CNN that fears are higher now about Hezbollah taking action than Iran, raising the prospect that the Lebanon-based militia group may act without them. For Netanyahu this may look like semantics intended to blunt Israel’s desire for an overwhelming response against either aggressor. He views Iran and Hezbollah as different hands of the same theological head. With the exception of direct IranianIsraeli exchange of fire in April, Hezbollah has always landed the punches on Israel Iran hesitates to take, and may this time throw a