UKHSA warns vulnerable and elderly people may be at risk with temperatures to drop severely overnight Amber cold health alerts have been issued for northern England, with low temperatures predicted to cause a “rise in deaths” among vulnerable and elderly people. The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) has issued two amber warnings for north-east and north-west England, which will be in place between 8pm on Sunday until midday on Monday 5 January. The agency warned that expected low temperatures would probably result in the increased use of healthcare services by vulnerable people and could lead to a rise in the number of deaths, particularly among those aged 65 and over or those with pre-existing health conditions, such as respiratory and cardiovascular diseases. Vulnerable younger people and those sleeping rough may also be affected. All other regions in England will be under a less serious yellow alert for this period, indicating that there is still potential for a significant impact on the health services in these regions. The agency also warned of staffing issues owing to external factors such as travel delays and said infrastructure sectors, such as transport and energy, could be affected. The Met Office forecast that most of England will be cloudy overnight, and there will be patches of frost and fog also, bringing “tricky travelling conditions” on Monday morning. There will be a “brisk northerly breeze” along the north-east coast of England. “The forecasted temperatures can have a serious impact on the health of some people, leading to increased risk of heart attacks, strokes and chest infections, particularly for individuals over the age of 65 and those with pre-existing health conditions,” he said.

Clashes broke out on Syria's coast between protesters from the Alawite religious minority and counterdemonstrators on Sunday, killing at least three people and injuring dozens of others, health officials said. The clashes came two days after a bombing at an Alawite mosque in the city of Homs killed eight people and wounded 18 others during prayers. Officials have said that preliminary investigations indicate that explosive devices were planted inside the mosque in Homs, but authorities haven't publicly identified a suspect yet in Friday's bombing. Funerals for the dead were held on Saturday. A little-known group calling itself Saraya Ansar al-Sunna claimed responsibility for the attack in a statement posted on its Telegram channel, in which it indicated that the attack intended to target members of the Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam whom hard-line Islamists consider to be apostates. Sunday's demonstrations were called for by Ghazal Ghazal, an Alawite sheikh living outside of Syria who heads a group called the Supreme Alawite Islamic Council in Syria and the Diaspora. An Associated Press photographer in Latakia saw pro-government counterprotesters throw rocks at the Alawite demonstrators, while a group of protesters beat a counterdemonstrator who crossed to their side. Security forces tried to break up the two sides and fired into the air in an attempt to disperse them. Demonstrators were injured in the scuffles, but it wasn't immediately clear how many. Syria's state-run television reported that two members of the security forces were wounded in the area of Tartous after someone threw a hand grenade at a police station, and cars belonging to security forces were set on fire in Latakia. Later, state-run news agency SANA reported that a member of the security forces was killed by gunfire. Local health officials said that three people were killed and 60 others wounded. The country has experienced several waves of sectarian clashes since the fall of former President Bashar Assad in a lightning rebel offensive in December 2024 that brought to an end nearly 14 years of civil war. Since then, although the situation has calmed, Alawites have been targeted sporadically in sectarian attacks. They have also complained of discrimination against them in public employment since Assad's fall and of young Alawite men detained without charges. Government officials condemned Friday's attack and promised to hold perpetrators accountable, but haven't yet announced any arrests.

For nearly two years, I couldn't go inside one room in my house. If you had come over and cracked the door, you'd be met with stale air, a changing table and a tiny, crib-size mattress still ensconced in its brown cardboard shipping package. I was 18 weeks' pregnant nearly four years ago when I learned of my miscarriage during a routine ultrasound. I saw the image of my baby boy on the screen floating inside me, with no telltale flicker of a heartbeat. I fished the handful of gifted onesies and baby blankets from their places nestled in colorful tissue paper and celebratory gift bags. I shoved all that evidence of our baby and the life we were planning into one of those gift bags, before my brain had time to fully register the pain radiating through my body. I pushed past the feeling that my body was collapsing, sweeping up all these items and depositing them into the would-be nursery, alongside the changing table and crib mattress. I closed the door and didn't go back in that room for months. Being pregnant is hard work — even metabolically, study shows After we made it past the first trimester mark, I thought I had nothing to worry about. By that afternoon, I was scheduled for surgery to remove the fetal tissue the next day. But I just lost my baby today. I felt so deeply connected to the tiny body growing within me. Not having him as a part of me anymore felt unfathomable. I cried, not speaking, for 45 minutes after scheduling the surgery. As I got into bed that night, an overwhelming sense of dread gripped me. I had the realization that my dead child was inside of me. I didn't sleep that night, not at all. They shouldn't be told to ‘just try again,' new research says I can't remember much about that winter. I do know there were many days when it felt impossible to get out of bed. But I did, often getting dressed and putting on makeup, hoping that would make me feel some sense of normalcy. Every pillowcase I had at the time was streaked with mascara stains from my tears that winter. It took months to get the stains out. Part of my pain came from the blame around pregnancy loss. Although 15% of respondents in one 2015 study reported that “they or their partner suffered at least one miscarriage,” most of those surveyed said they thought miscarriage happened in just 5% or fewer pregnancies. “Commonly believed causes of miscarriage included a stressful event (76%), lifting a heavy object (64%), previous use of an intrauterine device (28%), or oral contraceptives (22%),” according to the study. It's no surprise that I felt guilty, a feeling widely shared by loss parents. I also questioned the validity of my own pain. Without the physical evidence of a living, breathing baby to lose, many well-meaning people who had not experienced loss brushed off the impact of miscarriage with comments such as “you can try again” or “trying is the fun part” or the cliché “everything happens for a reason.” Yet studies have found more than half of women report exhibiting symptoms of depression following a miscarriage. I found myself falling into that category but felt at times that my grief was unearned, leading to feelings of shame and isolation. After a couple of weeks, all I could think about was getting pregnant again. I began going on daily walks, envisioning myself sitting in the nursery, rocking a baby in my arms. Surely those who espouse the benefits of manifesting had to be onto something. Sure enough, the first month we were cleared to try again, the pregnancy test turned positive. Within a week of the positive test, I was bleeding, and with the blood went the first ounce of hope and happiness I had felt in months. As someone who always looks for the silver lining, it was an especially trying time. I often had trouble believing one existed. How men hurt and grieve over miscarriage, too But if there was a silver lining to be found, it was the support my husband and I eventually discovered. The pregnancy loss community is a hellish club to join, but the most loving and supportive group I have ever been a part of. I had tearful conversations with so many women about miscarriage and pregnancy loss and infertility that, while heartbreaking, filled me up and gave me the fuel to keep going. I am forever grateful for these women, the love they showed me and the strength they displayed, convincing me I could find my strength, too. That's the only reason I'm writing this for you now, really. Because if one person can feel seen, if one person can feel validated in their experience, it is worth it. Pregnancy loss is an isolating experience, but for better or worse, none of us have to go through it alone. A couple tried for 18 years to get pregnant. But while we're playing on the playground or reading stories before bedtime, the pain of losing my first baby never goes away. I still think about him every day. One prompt suggested writing a letter to your child. So how can anyone deal with pregnancy loss? With the support of my loved ones and this new community, I learned to find grace there, and maybe an unsettled peace. I think I found a secret reserve of strength my body's been saving or borrowed some from another loss mama who has been there before. Get inspired by a weekly roundup on living well, made simple. Sign up for CNN's Life, But Better newsletter for information and tools designed to improve your well-being.

Nor is it similar to companies such as Lucent or Worldcom that folded during the dotcom bubble. Now worth more than $4tn (£3tn), Nvidia makes the specialised technology that powers the world's AI surge: silicon chips and software packages that train and host systems such as ChatGPT. Its products fill datacentres from Norway to New Jersey. This year has been an exceptional one for the company: it has struck at least $125bn in deals, ranging from a $5bn investment into Intel – to facilitate its access to the PC market – to $100bn invested in OpenAI, the startup behind ChatGPT. But even as those deals have fuelled surging stock prices and paved the way for chief executive Jensen Huang's energetic world tour, doubts have emerged about how Nvidia does business, especially as it has become increasingly central to the health of the global economy. These arrangements resemble vendor financing: Nvidia lending money to customers so they can buy its products. Another is its arrangement with CoreWeave, a company that provides on-demand computing capacity to big AI firms, essentially leasing out Nvidia's chips. The circularity of these deals has drawn comparisons with Lucent Technologies, a telecoms company that also aggressively lent money to its customers, only to overextend itself and unravel in the early 2000s. Nvidia has aggressively rebutted suggestions of any similarity, saying in a leaked recent memo that it “does not rely on vendor financing arrangements to grow revenue”. James Anderson, a renowned tech investor, describes himself as a “huge admirer” of Nvidia, but said this year that the OpenAI deal presented “more reason to be concerned there than before”. I don't think it makes me feel entirely comfortable from that point of view.” There is also a deal with CoreWeave where, along with a commitment to buying $22bn of data centre capacity from the cloud provider, OpenAI is receiving $350m in CoreWeave stock. Asked this month about circularity in the AI industry, the chief executive of CoreWeave, Michael Intrator, said: “Companies are trying to address a violent change in supply and demand. All these moves form part of OpenAI's $1.4tn bet on computing capacity to build and operate models that, it argues, will transform economies – and make back that expenditure. OpenAI argues that, while the Nvidia and AMD deals have an investment component, it only kicks in once the chips have been bought and deployed, while the investments themselves create aligned incentives to build out AI infrastructure at huge scale. Nvidia has also used structures called special-purpose vehicles (SPVs) in financing deals. The best-known example is the SPV linked to Elon Musk's xAI: an entity into which Nvidia invested $2bn, money that will be used to buy Nvidia's chips. This drew comparisons with Enron, which used SPVs to keep debts and toxic assets off its balance sheets, convincing investors and creditors that it was stable while concealing ballooning liabilities. Unlike Lucent, it does not appear to be taking on a great deal of debt to finance its circular deals, he says, and most of the customers it is supporting are not as obviously risky as Lucent's dotcom bubble partners. Nvidia “is not hiding debt, but it is leaning heavily on vendor-financed demand, which creates exposure if AI growth slows,” says Charlie Dai, an analyst at the research firm Forrester. Essentially, whether Nvidia is able to stick the landing depends on whether AI really takes off, generating billions for its corporate users and putting companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic and CoreWeave – Nvidia's customers – firmly in the black, and able to keep buying its systems. Approached for comment, an Nvidia spokesperson referred the Guardian to remarks its chief financial officer, Colette Kress, made to investors in early December. Kress said they were not seeing an AI bubble, instead gesturing at trillions of dollars of business that lie ahead for Nvidia in the next decade. There is another complexity, which is that Nvidia's health – and therefore the health of the entire global economy – also depends on whether AI takes off in time for Nvidia and its customers to service the debt from their huge datacentre buildouts and significant capital expenditures. Add to this a final category of concern: recent, big-ticket deals with countries such as South Korea and Saudi Arabia, worth multiple billions of dollars, whose terms are opaque. Its government-owned AI startup, Humain, has committed to deploying up to 600,000 Nvidia chips: when that deployment will involve actual purchases, and at what price, is again undisclosed. There's nothing circular about a sovereign partnership with Germany. “They concentrate risk in a few big customers,” says Dai. “If execution delays occur, Nvidia's revenue recognition and cashflow could be affected.”

Crucial power line repairs have begun near the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant following a localalized ceasefire to allow technicians to carry out repairs, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said on Dec. 28. IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi thanked both sides for agreeing to this new temporary “window of silence,” which is “part of ongoing efforts to prevent a nuclear accident during military conflict.” The Zaporizhzhia plant has faced repeated safety concerns since Russia's invasion, including power outages, nearby shelling and staffing shortages. A monitoring mission from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has been stationed at the ZNPP since September 2022, but Russian authorities have frequently restricted its access. Located in the occupied city of Enerhodar, the plant produced around 20% of Ukraine's electricity before Russia launched its full-scale invasion. Ukraine fears that a trilateral management model would effectively legitimize Russia's occupation of the facility. Linda is a Ukrainian junior reporter investigating Russia's global influence and disinformation. She has over two years of experience writing news and feature stories for Ukrainian media outlets. Russian troops opened artillery fire against the Kherson Thermal Power Plant (TPP), causing significant damage, head of Ukraine's Naftogaz said on Dec. 28. IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi thanked "both sides" for agreeing to a temporary "window of silence," which is "part of ongoing efforts to prevent a nuclear accident during military conflict." In this year-end wrap-up of Ukraine This Week, the Kyiv Independent's Anna Belokur looks back at the moments that defined 2025, the fourth year of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine — from stalled peace efforts and escalating Russian attacks to mass anti-corruption protests and political upheaval at home. Russia has lost around 1,204,510 troops in Ukraine since the beginning of its full-scale invasion on Feb. 24, 2022, the General Staff of Ukraine's Armed Forces reported on Dec. 28. Without security guarantees, Ukraine cannot take any steps towards peace or hold presidential elections, which Trump's administration has pressured Zelensky to implement. Myrnohrad in Donetsk Oblast and Huliaipole in Zaporizhzhia Oblast are not under Russian control, Ukraine's General Staff said, dismissing the Kremlin's claims as "the weapon of disinformation." Canada will provide Ukraine with $2.5 billion Canadian dollars ($1.8 billion) in economic aid to Ukraine, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced on Dec. 27. Russia has fulfilled its mobilization goals in 2025 and has set its mobilization target to recruit 409,000 Russian soldiers in 2026, Ukraine's military intelligence chief, Kyrylo Budanov, told Suspilne in a year-end interview.

Residents in Kyiv salvage what they can from an apartment that was badly damaged during Russian air strikes on Saturday.Elise Blanchard/Getty Images Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and U.S. President Donald Trump will meet in Florida on Sunday to hammer out a plan ​to end the war in Ukraine, but face major differences on crucial issues and ‍provocations from Russian air attacks. Trump ‍said ​on Sunday he ⁠had “a good and very productive” ‌phone call ‍with ‍Russian President ‌Vladimir ⁠Putin ​before his meeting Zelensky in Florida later ⁠in the ⁠day. Zelensky called it Russia's response to the ongoing U.S.-brokered peace efforts. Moscow has repeatedly insisted that Ukraine yield all of the Donbas, even areas still under Kyiv's control, and Russian officials have objected to ⁠other parts of the latest proposal, sparking doubts about whether Putin would accept whatever Sunday's talks might produce. Putin said on Saturday Moscow would continue waging its war if Kyiv did not seek a quick peace. The Ukrainian president told Axios on Friday he hopes to soften a U.S. proposal for Ukrainian forces to withdraw completely from the Donbas. UN human rights worker Danielle Bell on a career in conflict zones, from Iraq to Ukraine A recent poll suggests that Ukrainian voters may reject the plan. Zelensky's in-person meeting with Trump, scheduled for 1 p.m. (1800 GMT), follows ‍weeks of diplomatic efforts. Trump and Zelensky were also expected to hold a phone ​call with European leaders during their Florida meeting, a spokesperson for the Ukrainian president said on Sunday. But the issue of what territory, if any, will be ceded to Russia remains unresolved. The United States, seeking a compromise, has proposed a free economic zone if Ukraine leaves ​the area, although it remains unclear how that zone would function in practical terms. Zelensky, whose past meetings with Trump have not always gone smoothly, worries along with his European allies that Trump could sell out Ukraine and leave European powers to foot the bill for supporting a devastated nation, after Russian forces took 12 to 17 square km (4.6-6.6 square miles) of its territory per day in 2025. Putin said on December 19 that a peace deal should be based on conditions he set out in 2024: Ukraine ‌withdrawing from all of the Donbas, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions, and Kyiv officially renouncing its aim to join NATO. Ukrainian officials and European leaders view the war as an imperial-style land grab by Moscow and have warned that if Russia gets its way with Ukraine, it will one day attack NATO members. The 20-point plan was spun off from a Russian-led 28-point plan, which emerged from talks between U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff, Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner and Russian special envoy Kirill Dmitriev, and which became public in November. Subsequent talks between Ukrainian officials and U.S. negotiators ‌have produced the more Kyiv-friendly 20-point plan. Authors and topics you follow will be added to your personal news feed in Following.

Ranchers praise US president for crackdown on illegal migrants Sue Chilton was home alone last year when a group of four migrants with sinister face tattoos appeared on her doorstep. “Sue hosted MS-13 for lunch,” howled Jim, her husband, referring to the brutal Salvadorian gang. Throughout last year, 2,000 people came across the Chiltons' land – sometimes hundreds a day – many of them wearing camouflage, carpet-shoes to hide their footprints and large backpacks stuffed with methamphetamine, fentanyl and cocaine. But since Donald Trump returned to the White House and pledged to close the border, encounters are down 90 per cent while just 155 have been caught on the Chiltons' ranch, all of whom were sent back to Mexico. “We're no longer worried about riding through this country. We're no longer worried about running into a group with an AK-47. Entering their Thunderbird lair of a house which presides over the rugged terrain, a taxidermied mountain lion, shot by Mr Chilton himself, crouches menacingly in the entranceway. A few feet away, his Ruger Mini-14 ranch rifle leans against the wall. But illegal migration has forced them to contend with a whole new set of risks. Last year, a group apprehended by border patrol while crossing their land was caught with an assault rifle and 100lb of cocaine. One of Mr Chilton's cowboys was riding along 18 months ago when he discovered a decapitated body with its head lying around 10ft away. From employing an extra cowboy to check for migrants and repairing damaged water pipes and fences through which cattle escape, to cows dying from eating plastic left behind by those crossing the ranch, Mr Chilton estimates illegal crossings cost him around $100k a year. “Who wants to buy into this border issue?” Brandishing a series of poster boards, Mr Chilton claimed Joe Biden's “outrageous” decision to scrap Mr Trump's border wall the day he entered office led to cartels bringing in groups of people around the end of the wall through their land. “Druggers bringing goods into the United States through my ranch were killing people in DC, New York, Detroit and Minnesota,” Mr Chilton said. Critics have accused the Biden administration of operating an “open border” policy that allowed more than eight million migrants into the country. “I really praise President Trump for taking existing law and shutting the border down,” he said. “Immigrants are wonderful, but they need to come in legally,” said Mr Chilton. Sixty miles away outside Nogales, the border force has beefed up security. Now, agents in SUVs perch on hilltops for miles around, surveying the 30ft-border wall: a double-layered sheath of rust-brown metal reinforced with concertina wire that stretches as far as the eye can see. The station, one of nine in the Tucson sector, has dramatically reduced crossings over the past year by implementing a “layered approach”, deploying drones and cameras, as well as more agents travelling by quad bike, mountain bike, helicopter and horseback. The local force has benefited from the administration's recruitment drive to hire 3,000 new border patrol agents, while front-line staff have been reassigned from processing migrants to making arrests. But agents say the most important factor has been Mr Trump's decision to implement tough consequences for migrants, who now face being permanently barred if they cross into the country illegally. “When you implement consequences, you change behaviour, and that's the baseline of why we've had such a reduction,” said agent Teresa Fast. Since returning to office, Mr Trump has declared an “invasion” on the southern border, halted all asylum claim decisions apart from for white Afrikaners, imposed travel bans on 19 countries, ramped up deportations, deployed the military to the southern border and resumed construction of the border wall. But a 30-mile stretch of the border remains unfenced, which ranchers and immigration hawks would like to see blocked off. In the sun-scorched hills near Arivaca, Tim Foley has just finished fixing the fence to his plot of land after it had been cut by migrants travelling across. With his leathery brown skin, sparkling white veneers and a handgun strapped to his leg, Mr Foley leads a team of volunteers called Arizona Border Recon, a vigilante group of mostly military veterans who have made it their business to stop people coming into the country. Marching along the border in November, he stumbled across a migrant stopping point littered with hundreds of square yards of trash from mobile phones to passports “from every freaking country you can think of”. “Things are changing, but there's always going to be people crossing.”

MOSCOW, December 28. /TASS/. The European Union makes no secret of its plans to prepare for war with Russia and Brussels has become the main obstacle to peace, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an interview with TASS on 2025 results. "After a new administration came to power in the United States, Europe and the European Union emerged as the main obstacles to peace," Lavrov stated. "They are making no secret of the fact that they are getting ready to fight it out with Russia on the battlefield." "The other day, there was an effort to force the European Union to approve a decision for handing over Russia's foreign exchange reserves to the Vladimir Zelensky regime. This effort failed," Russia's top diplomat added.

Italian authorities have arrested nine people on suspicion of financing Hamas through a network of charities operating in Italy, prosecutors and police said on Dec. 27, in an investigation that uncovered what officials described as a large-scale diversion of donations meant to help the Palestinian people but that instead flowed to terrorists. Prosecutors in the northern city of Genoa said the suspects are accused of “belonging to and having financed” Hamas. The arrests followed a two-year investigation that traced the alleged diversion of funds raised for ostensibly humanitarian purposes to entities linked to the terror group.

Editor's note: The story has been updated with confirmation from the General Staff of Ukraine's Armed Forces. Ukrainian drones attacked the Syzran Oil Refinery in Russia's Samara Oblast and a number of Russian military facilities in temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine overnight on Dec. 28, the General Staff of Ukraine's Armed Forces said. Locals posted videos of fire trucks heading to the refinery after explosions. An electrical substation in Syzran was also reportedly targeted overnight. The Russian Defense Ministry later reported that 12 Ukrainian drones were shot down over Samara Oblast overnight. Moreover, the Ukrainian military successfully struck a storage and maintenance facility for uncrewed boats in the area of Chornomorske in Russian-occupied Crimea, a repair unit from the 1435th Motor Rifle Regiment near the settlement of Antratsyt in Luhansk Oblast, a pontoon crossing near Nikonorivka, and a storage facility for Shahed-type UAVs in Makiivka, Donetsk Oblast. Opened in 1942, the facility belongs to the Russian state oil giant Rosneft and has an annual processing capacity of 7 to 8.9 million tons of oil. The refinery has been targeted in previous drone attacks as part of Ukraine's campaign against the Russian oil industry, which provides funding and fuel for Moscow's war effort. Kyiv has also carried out strikes against electrical substations and other infrastructure facilities in Russia and Russian-occupied regions of Ukraine. Russian troops opened artillery fire against the Kherson Thermal Power Plant (TPP), causing significant damage, head of Ukraine's Naftogaz said on Dec. 28. IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi thanked "both sides" for agreeing to a temporary "window of silence," which is "part of ongoing efforts to prevent a nuclear accident during military conflict." In this year-end wrap-up of Ukraine This Week, the Kyiv Independent's Anna Belokur looks back at the moments that defined 2025, the fourth year of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine — from stalled peace efforts and escalating Russian attacks to mass anti-corruption protests and political upheaval at home. Ukrainian and Russian troops have been publishing conflicting claims and videos about who controls the front-line town of Myrnohrad, located just northeast of the embattled town of Pokrovsk. A source close to the Ukrainian delegation told the Kyiv Independent that they don't know how the meeting will unfold and are ready for "all scenarios." Russia has lost around 1,204,510 troops in Ukraine since the beginning of its full-scale invasion on Feb. 24, 2022, the General Staff of Ukraine's Armed Forces reported on Dec. 28. Without security guarantees, Ukraine cannot take any steps towards peace or hold presidential elections, which Trump's administration has pressured Zelensky to implement. Myrnohrad in Donetsk Oblast and Huliaipole in Zaporizhzhia Oblast are not under Russian control, Ukraine's General Staff said, dismissing the Kremlin's claims as "the weapon of disinformation." Canada will provide Ukraine with $2.5 billion Canadian dollars ($1.8 billion) in economic aid to Ukraine, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced on Dec. 27. Russia has fulfilled its mobilization goals in 2025 and has set its mobilization target to recruit 409,000 Russian soldiers in 2026, Ukraine's military intelligence chief, Kyrylo Budanov, told Suspilne in a year-end interview.

MOSCOW, December 28. /TASS/. Russia continues to advocate a just settlement of the conflict between Palestine and Israel and one of the key factors in this regard is the establishment of a viable Palestinian State, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an interview with TASS on 2025 results. "No matter how the situation in and around Gaza unfolds, we reaffirm our commitment to a just settlement of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict on the basis of the universally recognized legal framework," he stated. "The main thing here is to remedy the historical injustice and provide for establishing a viable Palestinian State, which would coexist with Israel," Lavrov pointed out adding that "the instability of what is happening on the ground is exacerbated by the uncertainty regarding further steps in implementing peace agreements." "Without solving this issue, it is difficult to imagine what could guarantee lasting peace for Palestinians and Jews, and indeed for all other nations in the Middle East.