Ukraine war briefing: Russian drones kill four in Kharkiv as officials discuss proposal to end war
A Russian drone strike on the major Ukrainian city of Kharkiv killed four people and wounded 17 on Sunday, its mayor said. Four people have died,” Igor Terekhov said, reporting the evening strike in a message on Telegram. The attack came as US, Ukrainian and European officials were in Geneva to discuss a proposal to end the nearly four-year-old war in Ukraine. The emergency services said the drone strike on two districts of Kharkiv had caused fires and the destruction of buildings. US secretary of state Marco Rubio said high-stakes talks in Geneva were “very worthwhile” and constituted the most productive day in “a very long time”.
Source:The Guardian
November 24, 2025 03:23 UTC
Ukraine war briefing: Macron says without deterrence in Ukraine plan, ‘Russians will come back’
Emmanuel Macron said on Saturday that Russia would “betray” its promise and “come back” if Ukraine was forced to reduce its army, as proposed under Donald Trump’s plan. He also said any plan “requires broader consultation” and had to allow for peace for Ukrainians and “security for all Europeans”. US senators critical of the plan said Saturday that US secretary of state Marco Rubio told them the peace plan Trump is pushing Kyiv to accept is a “wish list” of the Russians. Ukrainian and American officials will meet in Switzerland on Sunday for talks to discuss the plan, after Washington sent Kyiv the plan. “If Ukraine loses this war and possibly collapses, it will have an impact on European politics as a whole, on the entire European continent.
Source:The Guardian
November 23, 2025 12:36 UTC
‘Horribly wrong’: US veterans condemn Trump’s politicization of military
“I think the American people should say, ‘Wait, what, who’s looking out for the service members here?’ Not the Dems. What is unusual now is the heightened anxiety among service members who normally operate without questioning the legality of typical orders. Facing a questionable order, a service member’s first responsibility is to get clarification from their chain of command, she said. Kevin Courtney, an attorney with the Military Law Center and a former Marine captain, warns that the current political discourse around unlawful orders puts junior service members in a dangerous position. “The reason the public honors veterans and service members so highly and puts them in high regard is because they represent all of America.
Source:The Guardian
November 23, 2025 12:31 UTC
Trump blasts Ukraine for ‘zero gratitude’ as Germany says deal to end war unlikely to be reached by Thursday deadline – as it happened
From 3h ago 14.36 GMT Trump says Ukraine's 'leadership' has expressed 'zero gratitude' In a post on his Truth Social platform, the US president Donald Trump said the Ukrainian “leadership” has “expressed zero gratitude” for US efforts to bring an end to Russia’s war. Ukraine “leadership” has expressed zero gratitude for our efforts, and Europe continues to buy oil from Russia. The Ukrainian president wrote: There is an understanding that the American proposals may include a number of elements based on Ukrainian perspectives and critical for Ukrainian national interests. Share3h ago 14.26 GMT Germany 'sceptical' a deal to end war in Ukraine can be reached by Thursday German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has said he is “sceptical” a deal on Ukraine can be reached by Donald Trump’s Thursday deadline. View image in fullscreen German Chancellor Friedrich Merz is “sceptical” a deal on Ukraine can be reached by Thursday.
Source:The Guardian
November 23, 2025 12:10 UTC
Four ways AI is being used to strengthen democracies worldwide | Nathan E Sanders and Bruce Schneier
His new party, Team Mirai, is also an AI-enabled civic technology shop, producing software aimed at making governance better and more participatory. This is not AI replacing human journalists; it is a civic watchdog organization using technology to feed evidence-based insights to human reporters. Switzerland has recently released the world’s most powerful and fully realized public AI model. AI technology is not without its costs and risks, and we are not here to minimize them. Bruce: There is a real chance that AI technology will distribute power.
Source:The Guardian
November 23, 2025 12:04 UTC
‘The public has been lied to’: secretly made documentary insists that aliens exist
But there’s a reason why Farah gravitated towards Elizondo (who also serves as an executive producer on the film). “None of them would ever want to participate in a big commercial documentary,” Farah explained. “But that begins to ramp out of control,” he notes, leading to a lack of transparency that might give US adversaries a head start by analyzing UAP technology. The geopolitical arms race to reverse engineer UAP technology is, what Farah came to see, one of the biggest reasons behind the alleged cover-up. He says this race escalated when the US found out that other countries, like Russia, were capturing and retrieving UAP technology.
Source:The Guardian
November 23, 2025 12:04 UTC
Trump says Ukraine deal is not ‘final offer’ as officials gather for Geneva summit
Donald Trump said on Saturday that his “peace plan” was “not my final offer”, after a furious backlash from Ukrainians who described it as reminiscent of Neville Chamberlain’s 1938 Munich agreement with Adolf Hitler. Trump’s peace plan came from the same “recognisable genre”, with the victim invited “to formulate his own defeat so everyone else can live easier”. ‘I think that this peace deal is a try to break Ukraine and force unjust conditions on Ukraine,’ he said. It belongs to Ukraine.” She said Zelenskyy was a “smart person” and predicted he would not give up Ukrainian land. ‘I am very grateful to President Trump for him taking part in helping Ukraine and creating peace,’ she said.
Source:The Guardian
November 23, 2025 11:57 UTC
All the world loves a larva: the ‘amazing’ maggots at the centre of an agricultural revolution
Food waste collected from local markets is fed to the fly larvae, which can eat double their body weight in a single day. Luke Wheat is the founder and managing director of Arvela, a company that breeds black soldier fly larvae for the wider market. The target market for the dried larvae, Wheat say, is aquaculture, but live larvae can also be fed to poultry in some Australian jurisdictions. Dried larvae, marketed as BSF protein, has been approved for use in specialty dog food, which advertises it as a “hypoallergenic novel protein”. That company said its palatability testing showed “canine satisfaction” with the insect protein was equivalent to other animal protein sources.
Source:The Guardian
November 23, 2025 11:31 UTC
Cop30’s watered-down agreements will do little for an ecosystem at tipping point
“Right now, our people are losing their lives and livelihoods from storms of unprecedented strength which are being powered by warming seas. Our coral reefs, the lifeblood of our islands’ food systems, culture and economies are at a tipping point in dieback. “We are dangerously close to a 1.5C global warming overshoot, driven by the actions of bigger countries,” he said. The $120bn (£92bn) a year promised by 2035 must also be compared with the $360bn they are projected to need. That makes a huge difference to countries with overstretched budgets that are already spending on climate defence instead of health and education.
Source:The Guardian
November 23, 2025 11:30 UTC
US tells Nato if Zelenskyy does not sign peace deal Ukraine will face worse in future
US officials have told Nato allies they expect to push president Volodymyr Zelenskyy into agreeing to a peace deal in the coming days, under the threat that if Kyiv does not sign, it will face a much worse deal in future. “No deal is perfect, but it must be done sooner rather than later,” he told them, according to one person who was present. Trump is keen for Zelenskyy to agree to the deal by Thanksgiving, which is on Thursday. Earlier this week, Davis told reporters Trump was pursuing an “aggressive timeline” to get the deal agreed. They said they envisaged Trump and Zelenskyy sitting down together and signing a document “for peace”.
Source:The Guardian
November 23, 2025 11:29 UTC
What will a ban on most US hemp products mean?
The US hemp industry is preparing for a ban on most hemp products that Senator Mitch McConnell slipped into the spending bill just before the Senate voted to pass it and end the government shutdown. The US hemp industry generates $28bn a year in revenue and employs 300,000 people, according to Jonathan Miller, general counsel for the US Hemp Roundtable. Hemp products, on the other hand, are often available for purchase in liquor stores, grocery stores and online. If states are given autonomy over their hemp markets, hemp might continue to be available outside of cannabis dispensaries in those states. A total ban could mean that manufacturers will simply be forced to close or shift their focus to other kinds of products.
Source:The Guardian
November 23, 2025 10:32 UTC
TNT that Europe needs to defend itself is being used on Gaza, Polish MP claims
“Polish TNT is exported entirely abroad and the bombs produced from it fall on the heads of innocent civilians in Gaza and Yemen,” Konieczny told the Guardian. The Polish factory is estimated to produce between 10,000 and 12,000 tonnes of TNT a year. It is not known precisely what proportion of exported Polish TNT is being used in Ukraine or Gaza, or retained for use by the US army. The US is not permitted to buy TNT from China, and the environmental hazards involved in producing the explosive make building a TNT factory a formidable exercise. General Dynamics, the fifth-largest defence company in the world, has been producing the MK-80 series at its Garland Operations facility near Dallas, but the Garland facility was recently taken over by a US subsidiary of the Turkish defence company Repkon.
Source:The Guardian
November 22, 2025 00:15 UTC
Mind-altering ‘brain weapons’ no longer only science fiction, say researchers
Sophisticated and deadly “brain weapons” that can attack or alter human consciousness, perception, memory or behaviour are no longer the stuff of science fiction, two British academics argue. “It does sound like science fiction,” said Crowley. During the cold war and after, the US, Soviet Union and China all “actively sought” to develop CNS-acting weapons, said Crowley. The academics argue that the ability exists to create much more “sophisticated and targeted” weapons that would once have been unimaginable. after newsletter promotionDando is emeritus professor of international security at the University of Bradford and a leading expert on biological and chemical weapons control.
Source:The Guardian
November 22, 2025 00:15 UTC
Hundreds of English-language websites link to pro-Kremlin propaganda
Hundreds of English-language websites – from mainstream news outlets to fringe blogs – are linking to articles from a pro-Kremlin network flooding the internet with disinformation, according to a study released by a London-based thinktank. The disinformation operation – known as the Pravda network – was identified by the French government last year. “More than any other Russia-aligned operation, the Pravda network is playing a numbers game,” said Joseph Bodnar, a senior researcher at the ISD. after newsletter promotionThe ISD found that 40% of the Pravda network content picked up by mainstream websites appeared to be related to Russia’s war in Ukraine. As well as surfacing on news websites, the Pravda articles have also appeared on social media.
Source:The Guardian
November 22, 2025 00:09 UTC
Eleven injured after grizzly bear attacks schoolchildren and teachers in Canada
Eleven people were injured, two of them critically, when a grizzly bear attacked a group of schoolchildren and teachers on a walking trail in British Columbia, Canada. The Nuxalk Nation said the “aggressive bear” remained on the loose and police and conservation officers were on the scene. Conservation officers worked overnight to find the grizzly but have not yet located the bear. Grizzlies, which have coexisted with the Nuxalk Nation for generations, have a deep cultural significance for many of the First Nations along the Pacific coast. The Nuxalk bear safe program, which applies non-lethal approaches to preventing and mitigating conflict, also acknowledges that incidents need to be treated on a “case by case basis”.
Source:The Guardian
November 22, 2025 00:00 UTC