The US envoy Amos Hochstein has said there is “positive progress” towards a ceasefire in Lebanon after talks in Beirut aimed at ending 13 months of fighting between Israel and Hezbollah.

Hochstein has met Lebanese officials over the past two days after Hezbollah indicated it had agreed to the text of a US ceasefire proposal, although with some comments. He said on Tuesday that the gaps between Hezbollah and Israel had “narrowed”, raising optimism about a deal between the two parties.

Hochstein will meet Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, on Thursday.

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The U.S. Embassy in Kyiv said it had received "specific information" about a possible major Russian aerial attack on Nov. 20, urging U.S. citizens to be ready to take shelter.

"Out of an abundance of caution, the Embassy will be closed, and Embassy employees are being instructed to shelter in place," the statement read.

The warning comes shortly after Russia launched one of its largest combined missile and drone attacks on Nov. 17, firing 210 drones and missiles.

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Ukraine’s power network is at “heightened risk of catastrophic failure” after Russia’s missile and drone attack on Sunday, Greenpeace has warned, raising fears about the safety of the country’s three operational nuclear power stations.

The strikes by Moscow were aimed at electricity substations “critical to the operation of Ukraine’s nuclear plants” and there is a possibility that the reactors could lose power and become unsafe, according to a briefing note prepared for the Guardian.

Shaun Burnie, nuclear expert at Greenpeace Ukraine, said: “It is clear that Russia is using the threat of a nuclear disaster as a major military lever to defeat Ukraine. But by undertaking the attacks Russia is risking a nuclear catastrophe in Europe, which is comparable to Fukushima in 2011, Chornobyl in 1986 or even worse.”

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The US state department said it was “incredibly” concerned about Russia’s campaign of hybrid warfare against the west, amid fears it will escalate following Ukraine’s first use of US-made long-range missiles on targets inside Russia, after the Biden administration lifted restrictions on their use.

Russia has promised an “appropriate” response to the new policy, and has engaged in nuclear sabre-rattling by changing its nuclear doctrine in recent days. However, western officials believe the thrust of the Russian response may come not on the battlefield in Ukraine but elsewhere in the world.

Potential hybrid attacks could span a wide menu of options, including expanding its campaign of sabotage and assassinations in Europe or further arming US adversaries in the Middle East and Indo-Pacific regions, according to people briefed on the discussions about a potential Russian response.

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G.O.P. lawmakers whose leaders have pressed to roll back transgender rights around the country moved to bar Sarah McBride, the first transgender member of Congress, from women’s rooms on Capitol Hill.

In Washington this week for new member orientation, Ms. McBride was still sitting through mandatory cybersecurity trainings, setting up her payroll, selecting district offices and learning how to introduce a bill when her new Republican colleague, Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina, announced plans to introduce a measure to bar transgender women from using women’s restrooms and changing rooms in the Capitol complex.

Ms. Mace did not try to pretend that she was doing anything other than targeting one individual with her resolution, even though it would apply to all employees and officers of the House.

“Sarah McBride doesn’t get a say,” she told reporters on Monday night. “I mean, this is a biological man.” She said that Ms. McBride “does not belong in women’s spaces, women’s bathrooms, locker rooms, changing rooms — period, full stop.”

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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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