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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Mitch Marner played his best game of the season for the Toronto Maple Leafs on Saturday.

He logged a team-high 24 minutes. He scored the overtime winner moments after he disrupted hockey’s most inevitable two-on-one by somehow batting down Leon Draisaitl’s passing attempt to Connor McDavid. He became the 16th Leaf to score 200 goals.

. . .

The Leafs have somehow won five of six games without Auston Matthews. Marner has multi-point games in all five wins. In addition to Saturday’s OT winner, Marner scored the game-tying goal with less than a minute left in regulation when the Leafs beat the Washington Capitals, also in OT.

Marner is on pace for what would be a career-best 104 points.

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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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Save for a few security guards at the Hindu temple, it would be hard to tell that this quiet residential neighbourhood was recently the site of violent clashes between Sikh activists and nationalist counterprotesters.

The confrontation drew condemnation from the city’s mayor, the premier of Ontario and Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau – and also from India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, who described the incident as an attack on the Hindu temple.

So far, local police have made five arrests and say more may come.

But as the dust settles, members of the local community say they fear further violence between Sikh separatist activists and Modi supporters, some of whom espouse Hindu nationalist ideologies.

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Toronto Maple Leafs forward Ryan Reaves has been suspended five games for an illegal check to the head against Edmonton Oilers defenseman Darnell Nurse, the NHL Department of Player Safety announced Sunday.

Nurse was knocked out of Saturday’s game after taking the hit from Reaves early in the second period.

After seeing their teammate bloodied and dazed by the hit, multiple members of the Oilers questioned why Reaves didn’t do more to ensure the collision was delivered more safely.

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Speed and pace were the themes of this game. The Edmonton Oilers had the edge with their top line getting big minutes in the Toronto Maple Leafs’ end while also scoring the night’s first goal thanks to Adam Henrique. Not only did the Leafs keep up with the Oilers, they pushed the pace themselves. Bobby McMann tied the game off a heavy shift with John Tavares and Mitch Marner while the top power-play unit built up on more scoring chances.

. . .

The Leafs found the luck they needed with two unassisted goals in the third period from Matthew Knies and McMann’s second of the game. Leon Draisaitl secured a point for the Oilers as his 13th of the season tied it with a minute and a half to go in regulation. After a failed two-on-one and a huge stop on Connor McDavid by Anthony Stolarz, Marner ended the game with his 200th career goal.

This was a well-fought and deserved 4-3 overtime win for the Leafs. They defended well at five-on-five and made the Oilers pay for the opportunities they gave up. The energy of this game was playoff-like and the Leafs coming away with the win, again without Auston Matthews, is another chapter in their book of “If you play this way, you win.” The Leafs brought their A-game, their grade for the night.

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