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President-elect Donald J. Trump’s pick to be the director of national intelligence has raised alarms among national security officials.

The day after Vladimir V. Putin began a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Ms. Gabbard blamed the United States and NATO for provoking the war by ignoring Russia’s security concerns.

She has since suggested that the United States covertly worked with Ukraine on dangerous biological pathogens and was culpable for the bombing of the Nord Stream gas pipeline from Russia to Germany in September 2022. European prosecutors and U.S. officials say that sabotage was carried out by Ukrainian operatives.

Ms. Gabbard’s comments have earned her sharp rebukes from officials across the political spectrum in Washington, who have accused her of parroting the anti-American propaganda of the country’s adversaries. Her remarks have also made her a darling of the Kremlin’s vast state media apparatus — and, more recently, of President-elect Donald J. Trump, who this week picked her to oversee the nation’s 18 intelligence agencies and departments.

Her selection to be the director of national intelligence has raised alarms among national security officials, not only because of her lack of experience in intelligence but also because she has embraced a worldview that mirrors disinformation straight out of the Kremlin’s playbook.

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UNESCO has condemned Russia's overnight strikes on Odesa's historic center overnight on Nov. 15, which damaged numerous architectural monuments, according to a statement on its official website.

As a result of the Russian attack overnight on Nov. 15, a 35-year-old was killed. The strike also injured 10 people, with eight of them hospitalized with injuries of varying severity.

"UNESCO condemns these strikes, which contravene international law, and expresses its support for the victims, the population, and the local authorities," reads the statement published on Nov. 18.

The historical center of the southern city of Odesa was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in January 2023.

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UNRWA, the main U.N. agency aiding Palestinians, said its drivers were forced to unload supplies at gunpoint, in what it called one of the worst such incidents of the war.

A large convoy of trucks carrying aid was “violently looted” in the Gaza Strip over the weekend and its drivers forced at gunpoint to unload supplies, the main United Nations agency that helps Palestinians said on Monday, calling it one of the worst such incidents of the war.

The agency, known as UNRWA, said on Monday that the convoy of 109 trucks had been driving from the Kerem Shalom border crossing in southern Gaza when it was looted on Saturday. Nearly 100 of the trucks were lost, members of the convoy suffered unspecified injuries and other vehicles sustained extensive damage, the agency said.

The convoy — carrying food supplies from UNRWA and the U.N. World Food Program — had been scheduled to enter Gaza on Sunday, UNRWA said, but the Israeli military instructed it to leave a day earlier “at short notice via an alternate, unfamiliar route.”

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Two undersea fibre-optic communications cables in the Baltic Sea, including one linking Finland and Germany, have been severed, raising suspicions of sabotage by bad actors.

The episode on Monday recalled other incidents in the same waterway that authorities have probed as potentially malicious, including damage to a gas pipeline and undersea cables last year and the 2022 explosions of the Nord Sea gas pipelines.

The 1,200-kilometre (745-mile) cable connecting Helsinki to the German port of Rostock stopped working around 0200 GMT on Monday, Finnish state-controlled cybersecurity and telecoms company Cinia said.

A 218-km (135-mile) internet link between Lithuania and Sweden’s Gotland Island went out of service at about 0800 GMT on Sunday, according to Lithuania’s Telia Lietuva, part of Sweden’s Telia Company group.

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The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) confirmed on Nov. 18 that a riot control agent known as CS has been used in Ukraine, as evidence mounts that Russia has scaled up its attacks using chemical weapons in recent months.

The United Nations watchdog OPCW's first confirmation about the tear gas usage comes as Russia has intensified its use of chemical agents since the beginning of the year to advance forward across Ukraine's front line.

Russian drones throw gas grenades into dugouts or trenches in an attempt to force Ukrainian soldiers out into the open field, making them easy prey for drone or artillery attacks.

The U.S. and the U.K. have confirmed Russia's deployment of chemical weapons against Ukrainian soldiers, slapping sanctions on Russia's troops of Radiological, Chemical and Biological Defense, their chief, Russian Defense Ministry scientific centers, and companies involved.

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The strikes, the first in weeks inside Lebanon’s capital, forced residents to come to grips with another escalation of fighting between Israel and Hezbollah.

The typically congested streets of Beirut were unusually empty on Monday morning. Schools that had temporarily shuttered earlier this fall when war first escalated were closed again. Many people who had come back to Lebanon’s capital after fleeing to the northern mountains a month ago had headed north once more.

Since Israeli airstrikes hit two neighborhoods within Beirut on Sunday, a sense of disbelief and frustration has washed over the city. In recent weeks, the initial shock of the intensified war between Hezbollah and Israel had given way to a feeling that relative safety had returned to Beirut, as the pace of strikes slowed and the city center remained largely unscathed.

Now that tenuous sense of security has once again been shattered — and a city already weary from two months of war is coming to grips with yet another escalation of violence.

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The Kremlin has accused Joe Biden’s outgoing US administration of wanting to escalate the conflict in Ukraine by allowing Kyiv to use long-range missiles for strikes inside Russia, vowing an “appropriate and palpable” response.

The decision, first reported on Sunday, to allow Ukraine to conduct strikes with US-made weapons deep into sovereign Russian territory has not been formally announced by the White House, but a German government spokesperson said on Monday that Berlin had been informed.

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Russia’s foreign ministry said in a statement that the use of long-range US-supplied missiles against its territory would “represent the direct involvement of the United States and its satellites in hostilities against Russia.” It added: “Russia’s response in such a case will be appropriate and palpable.”

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The former acting director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has criticized Robert F Kennedy Jr’s nomination by Donald Trump as secretary of the country’s health and human services (HHS), calling his false vaccine theories “cruel”.

In a new interview on ABC, Richard Besser, who led the CDC during Barack Obama’s administration, called Kennedy’s push to falsely link vaccines to autism a “cruel thing to do”, adding, “There are things we do for our own health, but there are things we do that are good for ourselves, our families and our communities and vaccination falls into that category.”

“Having someone who denies that in that role is extremely dangerous,” Besser said about Kennedy.

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Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, on Nov. 7, looked confident.

Budapest was hosting the European Political Community gathering, with Orban hugging it out with the continent's leaders whose standing at home leaves them little leeway to challenge the Russian-friendly prime minister.

Orban's standing at home, practically unchallenged since 2010, has for quite some time allowed the prime minister to dictate his will to Brussels, Paris, and Berlin, with mixed success.

Yet, Orban's grip on Hungary looks weaker than ever, with a formidable challenger, Peter Magyar, set to pose a threat come election time in April 2026.

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The State Department said Israel needs to take more steps to improve the situation among Palestinians. The United States had given the country 30 days to meet aid criteria.

The State Department said on Tuesday that it did not plan to decrease weapons aid to Israel, as a 30-day deadline set by the Biden administration passed without the country substantially improving the humanitarian situation in war-devastated Gaza.

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III had warned in a letter dated Oct. 13 that the United States would reassess its military aid to Israel if it failed to increase the amount of aid allowed to enter Gaza within 30 days.

The letter said that the humanitarian situation for the two million residents of Gaza was “increasingly dire” and that the amount of aid entering Gaza had fallen by 50 percent since April.

By law, the U.S. government cannot give aid to foreign military forces deemed by the State Department to be committing “gross violations of human rights.”

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Ukrainian officials expect a counteroffensive in western Russia to begin in the coming days as North Korea’s troops train with Russian forces.

The Russian military has assembled a force of 50,000 soldiers, including North Korean troops, as it prepares to begin an assault aimed at reclaiming territory seized by Ukraine in the Kursk region of Russia, according to U.S. and Ukrainian officials.

A new U.S. assessment concludes that Russia has massed the force without having to pull soldiers out of Ukraine’s east — its main battlefield priority — allowing Moscow to press on multiple fronts simultaneously.

Russian troops have been clawing back some of the territory that Ukraine captured in Kursk this year. They have been attacking Ukrainian positions with missile strikes and artillery fire, but they have not yet begun a major assault there, U.S. officials said.

Ukrainian officials say they expect such an attack involving the North Korean troops in the coming days.

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Police in a southern Mexico region rife with drug cartel violence have found 11 bodies, including two of minors, dumped by a highway, prosecutors in the state of Guerrero said Thursday.

The bodies were found late Wednesday after police received a tip about an abandoned pickup truck on the main thoroughfare of the city of Chilpancingo, the state capital, prosecutors said in a news release. The city of 300,000 has been the scene of gruesome drug gang violence as two rival cartels fight for control of the area.

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In early October, the city's mayor was killed and beheaded just a week after he took office. Alejandro Arcos took office on Oct. 1 in Chilpancingo, and his beheaded body was found in a pickup truck a week later, his head placed on the vehicle's roof. Days later, four mayors asked federal authorities for protection.

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