For three years he was the center of the room, but now is perhaps unsure if he is even in the right one.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has been a totemic figure of the West’s unified stance against a marauding, autocratic Russia. A Churchillian presence forcing Europe into a moral stance against a Kremlin head who had so successfully sought to divide and bribe them for years.

Yet Zelensky cut a reduced figure on stage alongside US Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent on Wednesday in Kyiv. He had hoped to meet US President Donald Trump in person to discuss a wide-ranging vision of peace, after the US president suggested Friday they might meet imminently, and his team immediately set about trying to schedule it. Instead he was presented with what Zelenksy called “serious people” – and a largely financial deal handed over by Bessent, the US billionaire turned money-man, which he didn’t sign.

It was during Bessent’s brief visit that news broke Trump had been busy elsewhere: holding perhaps his second phone call in recent days with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Trump had said Saturday they had spoken earlier, but the Kremlin declined to confirm it.

This time, the exchange had been sweetened by the unexpected release Tuesday of American prisoner Marc Fogel from Russian custody. Trump greeted the released 61-year-old wrapped in the Stars and Stripes, providing a perfect televised moment of rehabilitation for the Kremlin in the eyes of ordinary Americans. Why not make a decent deal with Moscow if they’re just good guys sending our guys home?

It’s been 48 hours of fever dreams, malarial night sweats and tremors for Zelensky. European leaders used to travel a day by rickety train for a photo op alongside him. Now he is second on Trump’s call sheet after Putin, a man under International Criminal Court indictment for alleged war crimes against Ukraine, who poisons his own people.

We simply do not know the details of what Trump and Putin spoke about. But we can be sure the Kremlin head has waited for this moment for three years – yearning for the time when his grotesque tolerance of hundreds of Russian daily dead can be converted into a crack in Western unity, or NATO’s European members being told by their American guarantor they are on their own.

Trump and Putin set the tone it seems, and Zelensky got the post-brief. Trump even gloated that Putin had used his campaign slogan of “common sense,” suggesting the Kremlin head continues to study his adversary carefully to flatter. Trump ended his second post about his call with Zelensky with the remarkable switcheroo of “God bless the people of Russia and Ukraine!”

Hours earlier, Zelensky’s hopes over the key tenets of a peace deal had been torn up by new US Secretary of Defense Peter Hegseth. Ukraine will not be part of NATO. Ukraine will never return to its 2014 borders. Any peacekeeping forces between Russia and Ukraine will not be American, but European or non-European. Europe must look after itself. The first two points we knew – Ukraine having failed to retake territory in its 2023 counteroffensive, and likely being too chaotic in the coming decade to make the grade for the world’s most sophisticated military alliance.

But the makeup of any future peacekeeping forces was crucial. Zelensky had openly demanded – in a stream of interviews in the past week that had begun to seem like negotiating a peace deal in the media – that Americans be involved with peacekeeping, as security guarantees without America were “worthless.” Hegseth was swift to burst that bubble, fanciful as the notion was that the US would insert its men and women as prime targets in the most brutal battlefield on earth.

Instead, we are seeing the bones of a peace plan emerge in public that is close to one posited by retired Gen. Keith Kellogg back in April, when he was a private citizen and not presidential envoy to Ukraine and Russia. Kellogg suggested a peacekeeping force manned by Europeans. He said Ukraine should give up on NATO membership. He proposed a ceasefire (and has since in interviews suggested elections might then follow in Ukraine). And importantly, he said Ukrainian aid should be turned into loans that Kyiv would one day repay. Perhaps this formed part of Bessent’s proposal to Zelensky on Wednesday.

Rare earth minerals were discussed in Kyiv on Wednesday too, although this is not necessarily great news based on precedent. When Trump was briefly enticed to support Afghanistan in 2017 because of its purported trillion dollars’ worth of minerals, he regardless signed a deal with the Taliban to let them take over just over two years later.

There are reasons to hope Trump’s approach is based on more immutable principles and sophisticated groundwork. He and his team have clearly had confidential discussions, and seem to be articulating a plan Kellogg formulated a while ago. That takes some discipline. But it also takes application, guile and patience to see it through. Putin has this in droves, and victory in Ukraine will dictate both his personal survival, legacy, and the balance of powers globally for decades. For Trump, the war in Ukraine is the thing he thought he could fix in 24 hours after coming to power, that would never have started had he been in office in 2022.

It is not his priority. Zelensky is not either. The man on top of his call sheet is Putin. He is who he seeks to make a peace with, even though the United States is not technically at war in Ukraine. And that is, for now, all we need to know.

A gas explosion at a shopping mall in Taiwan on Thursday killed at least five people and injured several others, according to authorities.

Dramatic videos of the explosion in the city of Taichung, on the island’s west coast, showed debris and large panels of a mid-rise building’s exterior blown out as a loud bang is heard. Footage shot by bystanders of the aftermath showed the street below littered with debris and two victims visible on the floor.

The blast took place midday on the 12th floor of a popular shopping mall, where a food court was under construction, according to Taiwan’s National Fire Agency.

At least five people have died and 20 others were injured, according to the fire agency. About 235 people were evacuated from the building and area.

Videos showed window panels falling onto the sidewalks and roads below, where cars stood in traffic, with smoke rising from the 12th floor. Other footage from inside the mall showed damaged walls in the aftermath of the blast, with water spraying from broken pipes.

When firefighters entered the building afterward, they found the floor where the explosion took place mostly reduced to rubble, according to video shared by the Taichung Fire Department. In the clip, broken structures and twisted metal dangled from the ceiling and covered the floor, with emergency workers using flashlights to navigate a field of debris.

Rescue operations are ongoing, with more than 130 firefighters on the scene, according to the National Fire Agency. Footage from local media showed ambulances and emergency personnel cordoning off the area and pushing stretchers.

In a Facebook post, Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te said several government agencies were activated to respond to the incident, including the health ministry to coordinate medical resources to those injured.

Lai urged authorities to investigate the cause of the accident as soon as possible, and asked the public not to go near the scene.

Taiwan has been struck by devastating gas explosions before. In 2014, a series of explosions triggered by underground gas leaks killed more than two dozen people and injured hundreds more in the southern city of Kaohsiung.

The blasts were so strong they tore trenches through main roads and overturned cars and trucks, with one vehicle found on the roof of a three-story building.

North Korea is dismantling a facility at its Mount Kumgang resort used for hosting meetings between families separated after the Korean War, South Korea said on Thursday, in the latest sign of strained tensions between the two Koreas.

Seoul’s Unification Ministry, which handles affairs between the two Koreas, urged in a statement North Korea to immediately stop the action at the site near the border.

The demolition of the facility is an “anti-humanitarian act that tramples on the wishes of separated families,” the ministry said, adding that it would consider legal measures over the action and a joint response with the international community.

North Korea has been escalating its rhetoric against its southern neighbor in recent years, designating South Korea as a “hostile state.”

Pyongyang also blew up sections of inter-Korean roads and rail lines on its side of the heavily fortified border last year, which prompted South Korea’s military to fire warning shots at the time.

In 2023, Pyongyang scrapped a 2018 military accord designed to curb the risk of inadvertent clashes between two countries that remain technically at war, prompting the South to take a similar step.

Nonetheless, there have been recent signs that North Korea may be prepared to reopen to some foreign visitors for the first time in more than five years since the closure of its borders to tourism due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Beijing-based Koryo Tours on Thursday said tours to North Korea were “officially back,” with some of its staff allowed to enter the Rason area in what it hoped would mark the relaunch of tourism.

The sewing machines and computers sit collecting dust in the dark. They were once tools of hope and empowerment, a promise for those seeking to build a life for themselves.

This abandoned workshop is no ordinary factory. It is a vocational school in Cali, southwest Colombia, run by local contractors of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and was once a route for Venezuelan migrants like Alexandra Guerra to develop the skills to join the shoemaking industry.

The school offered the 25-year-old single mother of two a way to provide for her children, younger sister, and mother. USAID was even going to pay Guerra a daily subsidy while she looked for work.

But she saw her hopes crushed when the White House halted foreign aid last month. Her classroom was shuttered. Courses ceased. And the prospects of staying in Colombia looked bleak once again.

US President Donald Trump’s sweeping changes to foreign assistance led to the rapid dismantling of USAID. A freeze was put on foreign aid, USAID staffers worldwide were recalled, and several were placed on leave in the president’s apparent attempt to shut down the agency — which he had declared a waste of money.

But in Latin America, USAID had helped create economic opportunities for people like Guerra, according to the agency’s website before it was taken offline, giving migrants a degree of stability and, often, a reason to stay.

Its proponents say USAID helped curb migration at its root – the same phenomenon the Trump administration wants to stop with policies like mass deportations from the US, ICE raids, and reinforcement at the southern border.

Gustavo Vivas, the project director of the USAID program Guerra was enrolled in, says the new policy of cuts is contradictory.

‘Any country will do’

Home to the largest Venezuelan migrant population in the world, Colombia is full of people with stories like Guerra’s.

In 2019, she left her village in Cojedes, Venezuela, and her family behind, making the trek to Colombia on foot. She was able to reunite with her family a year later after they joined her amid the pandemic lockdowns.

Last year, Guerra applied to the Safe Mobility Program as she set her sights on migrating to the United States legally.

Programs like Safe Mobility were Biden administration initiatives to offer legal routes for migrants in difficult situations to relocate safely in the US, such as Venezuelans and Nicaraguans fleeing authoritarian regimes.

But Guerra’s hopes were dashed when the program was shut down and her application was suspended last month, just a week before her classes were cancelled.

She has instead set her sights on migrating to Europe – where she would have to make the journey alone once again while her sons, aged four and eight, stay behind with their grandmother.

“Regardless that it’s not going to be the US, any country will do,” she said. “I want to work and earn enough to open my own business in Venezuela, one day… Right now, I’m a candidate for a job at an Italian airport. My doubt was that because Safe Mobility had shut, maybe the other [non-US] programs would also shut,” she said.

Guerra isn’t likely to be the only migrant in Colombia with dreams of leaving the country.

Colombian officials say closing USAID will push even more people to migrate as their country was one of the largest recipients of US aid funds in the world, with more than 82 programs worth almost $2 billion currently suspended because of Trump’s order.

‘Immigrants don’t leave their country just because they want to’

She credits the team at the Cali vocational center for providing guidance through psychologists, advisors and mentors to support her beyond the classroom.

Yet, almost five years after settling down in Cali, Olimpio hasn’t given up the dream of moving to another country that could offer more opportunities than Colombia. Moving to the US is on the cards, but Olimpio says she would only do it via legal channels.

“A migrant is not just a face on social media, we are people!” she said, tears welling in her eyes while pointing out that many Venezuelans are fleeing disastrous economic conditions and brutal repression back home.

“Immigrants don’t leave their country just because they want to,” she explained.

Aid workers in turmoil

It’s not just migrants who are at the receiving end of the gutting of USAID. Colombian aid workers employed by US-funded programs have also found their lives upended.

One aid worker described an email she received from her employer, an NGO, announcing the suspension of US funding for her program.

“In the email they said: ‘We understand you have questions, and most likely we don’t have answers for them…’ I think that sums everything up pretty well: nobody knows anything other than the funding has been frozen,” said the aid worker, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of possible repercussions.

At the shuttered Cali vocational center, Olimpio says it saddens her to know others cannot access what USAID offered her. These are people who she says: “literally depend on what they learn.”

“There are people right now who are waiting for their opportunity, just like I waited and got it,” she said. “They don’t know if they’ll get it.

Nights out drinking can often end badly. But in Japan, they have a habit of going spectacularly wrong for government employees – who on at least two occasions in recent years have lost sensitive personal data after a few too many beers.

An employee of the Finance Ministry’s customs and tariff bureau went drinking with a colleague after work last Thursday, in the city of Yokohama south of Tokyo, according to public broadcaster NHK.

Within five hours, the man had nine glasses of beer, it reported. It wasn’t until he had left the restaurant, gotten on a train and traveled home that he realized his bag – containing highly sensitive information – was missing.

The employee had received the documents at a meeting earlier that day, the ministry said. Also in the bag was the employee’s work laptop, containing personal information about the man and his colleagues.

The ministry apologized to the public for “damaging” their trust, promising to punish the employee, according to NHK. So far, there have been no reports that the lost information has been used illegally, it said.

It may sound like an astonishing blunder – but it’s not the first time something like this has happened.

In 2022, another government worker lost a USB flash drive containing the personal details of every resident of the city of Amagasaki, northwest of Osaka.

The man had fallen asleep on the street after drinking alcohol at a restaurant, and when he woke up, his bag containing the flash drive was gone, NHK reported at the time.

The flash drive contained the names, birth dates, and addresses of 465,177 people – the city’s entire population. It also contained sensitive information including tax details, bank account names and numbers, and information on households receiving public assistance such as childcare payments.

A culture of drinking, and retro tech

While these two incidents represent unusually embarrassing nights out, Japan has long been notorious for its heavy drinking work and office culture.

It’s not unusual to see groups of salarymen in business suits chugging beer at izakaya pubs late into the evening or slumped in the middle of the street after consuming too much.

Japan’s health ministry warned of the dangers of excessive drinking in 2021, calling it a “major social problem.”

These marathon drinking sessions serve to encourage business relations with colleagues and clients, often helping secure deals and curry favor in the workplace. But the heavy drinking habits are also a reflection of Japan’s grueling work culture – with employees traditionally working brutal hours under immense pressure with stagnant salaries.

Even as Japan’s government tries to ease the pressure – drafting legislation to prevent death and injury from excessive work hours, and introducing a four-day workweek for Tokyo government employees – old habits die hard.

Combine that drinking culture with Japan’s particularly old-fashioned preference for analog technologies and the risk increases of sensitive data going astray.

Japan’s bureaucratic systems are famously slow to change, with a reliance on technologies and systems that are obsolete in many other parts of the world – hence employees’ use of hard drives, paper documents and other easily-lost items.

This was highlighted in 2018 when the then cybersecurity minister shocked the public by saying he’d never used a computer – a claim he later walked back after it made international headlines.

The massive gap in modern technology became clear during the Covid-19 pandemic when the government’s efforts toward mass vaccination and testing revealed the inefficiencies of paper filing and other outdated systems, Reuters reported.

A digital agency was soon set up to overhaul the government’s internal systems. The new digital minister declared a “war on floppy disks” – which were only phased out across the government in 2024, long after other major economies and world leaders had stopped using them.

The agency has also targeted fax machines and traditional carved seals used instead of signatures to sign documents in Japan.

Clarity is beginning to form around US President Donald Trump’s plans for ending Russia’s war in Ukraine, with his administration appearing to accept some of the Kremlin’s key demands that Ukraine should not join NATO or return to its pre-2014 sovereign borders.

Amid the dust of what looks to be Trump’s blowing up of the previous US position on peace, another administration priority is also coming into focus: an attention shift away from Europe and toward China.

Speaking at a meeting in Brussels Wednesday, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said that “stark strategic realities prevent the United States of America from being primarily focused on the security of Europe.”

One focus needed to be US border security, he told counterparts gathering to discuss Ukrainian security – another was Beijing.

“We also face a peer competitor in the Communist Chinese with the capability and intent to threaten our homeland and core national interests in the Indo-Pacific,” Hegseth said. “The US is prioritizing deterring war with China in the Pacific, recognizing the reality of scarcity, and making the resourcing tradeoffs to ensure deterrence does not fail.”

Beijing is no doubt paying close attention to Hegseth’s pronouncement, which comes as the US earlier this month ramped up its economic competition with China, launching a blanket 10% tariff on all Chinese imports, with the potential of more to come.

China has welcomed what had been an unexpectedly warm start to the second round of a Trump administration, with the US leader repeatedly expressing positive views about Chinese leader Xi Jinping and the potential for cooperation between the two.

Officials in Beijing had also likely been hoping that Trump’s upending of US foreign policy would weaken American alliances in Asia. China has bristled at a tightening of relationships between the US and partners such as Japan, South Korea and the Philippines under former President Joe Biden.

Now, it’s clear they’ll be watching closely how the US may adjust its posture and its focus in a region where Beijing hopes to expand its influence and assert its claims over the South China Sea and the self-ruling democracy of Taiwan.

They’re also likely to have another pressing concern: whether Trump’s overtures to Russian President Vladimir Putin will pull Moscow – a critical ally for Xi in his rivalry with the West – away from Beijing and toward Washington.

Xi and Putin memorably declared a “no limits” partnership days before Russian tanks rolled over the border to Ukraine. The two have continued to tighten ties during the war, with China emerging as a key economic lifeline for Russia, including through the provision of dual-use goods that NATO leaders said were powering Russia’s defense industrial complex. Beijing has defended that as normal trade.

The relationship has long been predicated on the two leaders’ shared disdain for NATO and US alliances more broadly. Putin and Xi have worked in tandem to build out non-Western international groupings, while ramping up joint military drills and supporting one another in forums like the United Nations.

That means a warming of Putin’s ties with Washington could have a far-reaching impact on China’s ability to push back against pressure from the US and advance Xi’s vision for an alternative to an America-led world order.