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Ukraine could be facing its biggest loss for months, if the key eastern city of Pokrovsk falls to Russian forces. The battle for this strategic point on a big road and rail artery in the Donetsk region has been going on for well over a year.

If Russia's Vladimir Putin were able to claim victory there, three years and 10 months into his full-scale war, he would be a step closer to his goal of controlling Ukraine's entire industrial east - the Donbas, made up of the neighbouring regions of Donetsk and Luhansk.

How close is Pokrovsk to falling?

Claims and counter-claims abound, so it is difficult to say.

But we do know Russia has amassed tens of thousands of troops in the area, and hundreds of its soldiers have infiltrated the city in the past few weeks, gradually taking over buildings and streets and overwhelming Ukrainian positions.

On Wednesday, Kyiv's General Staff denied its forces in and around the town had been encircled and maintained they were still involved in "active resistance" and blocking out Russian troops. One Ukrainian regiment said it had cleared the city council and posted a video of a Ukrainian flag hung on the building.

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President Donald Trump was permanently blocked from sending the National Guard to Portland by U.S. District Court Judge Karin Immergut, who delivered her final order in the case Friday.

The case has centered around whether ongoing protests outside the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement building in the city warrant a National Guard deployment. In her ruling, she acknowledged “violent protests did occur in June,” but law enforcement was able to address them.

“Since that brief span of a few days in June, the protests outside the Portland ICE facility have been predominately peaceful, with only isolated and sporadic instances of relatively low-level violence, largely between protesters and counter-protesters,” the judge wrote in her 106-page order, “this Court concludes that even giving great deference to the President’s determination, the President did not have a lawful basis to federalize the National Guard.”

The permanent injunction went into effect immediately.

The decision is a setback in the Trump administration’s effort to send National Guard members to the city, and

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The US supreme court on Friday is considering taking up a case that could challenge the legality of same-sex marriage across the country.

Hours after ruling that Donald Trump’s administration can block transgender and non-binary people from selecting passport sex markers that align with their gender identity, the justices are holding their first conference on the Davis v Ermold case. While their deliberations are typically kept private, the court may announce whether it will take the case as early as Monday.

The case involves Kim Davis, a former Kentucky county clerk who, in 2015, became a cause celebre for religious opposition to same-sex marriage after the US supreme court legalized the practice in the Obergefell v Hodges case. Davis repeatedly refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples and, at the height of her fame, was even briefly jailed for contempt of court.

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Students, faculty and staff at more than 100 campuses across the US rallied against the Trump administration’s assault on higher education on Friday – the first in a planned series of nationwide, coordinated protests that organizers hope will culminate in large-scale students’ and workers’ strikes next May Day and a nationwide general strike in May 2028.

The day of action was organized under the banner of Students Rise Up, a network of students including both local groups and national organizations such as Sunrise Movement and Campus Climate Network. Students were joined by faculty and educational workers’ unions like the American Association of University Professors and Higher Education Labor United.

Protesters called on university administrators and elected officials to denounce the president’s months-long effort to force US universities to abide by its ideological priorities and urged them to reject Trump’s “compact”, which would give universities preferential access to federal funding in exchange for a commitment to advance the administration’s conservative agenda. Only one university, New College of Florida – a public school that state legislators have turned into a bastion of conservatism – has so far accepted it..

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The Washington National Opera (WNO) is considering moving out of the Kennedy Center, the company’s home since the US’s national performing arts center opened in 1971.

The possibility has been forced on the company as a result of the “takeover” of the center by Donald Trump, according to WNO’s artistic director, Francesca Zambello. The president declared himself chair of the institution in February, sacking and replacing its board and leadership.

Leaving the Kennedy Center is a possible scenario after a collapse in box office revenue and “shattered” donor confidence in the wake of Trump’s takeover, said Zambello.

“It is our desire to perform in our home at the Kennedy Center,” she said. “But if we cannot raise enough money, or sell enough tickets in there, we have to consider other options.

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Donald Trump said Friday that no US government officials would be attending the Group of 20 summit this year in South Africa, citing the country’s treatment of white farmers.

The US president had already announced he would not attend the annual summit for heads of state from the globe’s leading and emerging economies. JD Vance had been scheduled to attend in Trump’s place, but a person familiar with Vance’s plans who was granted anonymity to talk about his schedule said Vance would no longer travel there for the summit.

Donald Trump said Friday that no US government officials would be attending the Group of 20 summit this year in South Africa, citing the country’s treatment of white farmers.

The US president had already announced he would not attend the annual summit for heads of state from the globe’s leading and emerging economies. JD Vance had been scheduled to attend in Trump’s place, but a person familiar with Vance’s plans who was granted anonymity to talk about his schedule said Vance would no longer travel there for the summit.

“It is a total disgrace that the G20 will be held in South Africa,” Trump said on his social media site. In his post, Trump cited “abuses” of Afrikaners, including violence and death as well as confiscation of their land and farms.

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Former White House senior adviser David Axelrod on Friday said the Anti-Defamation League’s response to Zohran Mamdani’s (D) mayoral win was “shockingly gratuitous.”

“As a Jew & son of a Jewish refugee, I’m alarmed by the rise of antisemitism. The ADL’s mission is to call it out when they see it,” Axelrod wrote in a statement on X.

“But I found their response to Mamdani’s election shockingly gratuitous, inflammatory and deeply irresponsible,” he added. 

Following Mamdani’s Tuesday win, the ADL launched the “Mamdani Monitor,” a public facing tracker to monitor policies, appointments and actions from his administration that they consider potentially harmful to the safety of the Jewish community.

“Mayor-Elect Mamdani has promoted antisemitic narratives, associated with individuals who have a history of antisemitism, and demonstrated intense animosity toward the Jewish state that is counter to the views of the overwhelming majority of Jewish New Yorkers,” Jonathan Greenblatt, ADL CEO and National Director said in a statement.

“We are deeply concerned that those individuals and principles will influence his administration at a time when we are tracking a brazen surge of harassment, vandalism and violence targeting Jewish residents and institutions in recent years,” he added.

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James D. Watson, the brilliant but controversial American biologist whose 1953 discovery of the structure of DNA, the molecule of heredity, ushered in the age of genetics and provided the foundation for the biotechnology revolution of the late 20th century, has died at the age of 97.

His death was confirmed by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, where he worked for many years. The New York Times reported that Watson died this week at a hospice on Long Island.

In his later years, Watson's reputation was tarnished by comments on genetics and race that led him to be ostracized by the scientific establishment.

Even as a younger man, he was known as much for his writing and for his enfant-terrible persona − including his willingness to use another scientist's data to advance his own career − as for his science.

His 1968 memoir, "The Double Helix," was a racy, take-no-prisoners account of how he and British physicist Francis Crick were first to determine the three-dimensional shape of DNA. The achievement won the duo a share of the 1962 Nobel Prize in medicine and eventually would lead to genetic engineering, gene therapy and other DNA-based medicine and technology.

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