Ukraine’s capital Kyiv came under a large-scale Russian drone and missile attack overnight into Saturday, just hours after Russia and Ukraine began a major prisoner exchange.

At least eight people were injured in the attacks, which triggered fires and left debris strewn in districts throughout the city, the city’s mayor Vitali Klitschko said in a post on Telegram.

Klitschko said two residents had required hospital treatment and that air defense units were in action, Reuters reported, adding that fragments from one drone struck the top floor of an apartment building.

Explosions and loud sirens could be heard blaring across the capital in video shared by Reuters news agency. Several fires could be seen against the nighttime skyline.

Timur Tkachenko, head of Kyiv’s military administration, said a fire had broken out on two floors of an apartment building in Dniprovskyi district, according to Reuters.

Officials also reported a fire in Obolon in the city’s northern suburbs and fallen debris on a shopping center in the same area, Reuters reported. They also said drone fragments hit the ground in a number of other widely separated neighborhoods.

The nighttime attack came after Russia and Ukraine completed the first phase of what is expected to be the biggest prisoner exchange since the start of the war.

The swap started on Friday and will continue on Saturday and Sunday, with Kyiv and Moscow expected to swap 2,000 people – 1,000 from each side.

The agreement to release 1,000 prisoners on each side was the only significant outcome of the meeting between Kyiv and Moscow in Istanbul last week, which marked the first time the two sides have met directly since soon after Russia’s full-scale unprovoked invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

The Istanbul meeting was initially proposed by Russian President Vladimir Putin in response to a ceasefire-or-sanctions ultimatum given to Moscow by Kyiv’s European allies – which many saw as a clear attempt by the Kremlin leader to distract and delay.

Ukraine and its allies demanded that Russia agree to an immediate and unconditional ceasefire in Istanbul, but that did not happen.

Neither Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky nor Russian President Vladimir Putin attended the talks in Istanbul.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

The Trump administration issued orders Friday to begin easing sanctions on Syria, marking a major policy shift after US President Donald Trump pledged earlier this month to roll back the measures during a trip to the Middle East.

Trump administration officials had been carrying out quiet engagements for months to pave the way for sanctions relief to help the nation recover from years of a devastating war and rebuild after the toppling of ousted leader Bashar al-Assad.

On Friday, the US Treasury Department said Syria has been issued a general license that authorizes transactions involving the interim Syrian government, as well as the central bank and state-owned enterprises.

The GL25 license “authorizes transactions prohibited by the Syrian Sanctions Regulations, effectively lifting sanctions on Syria,” and “will enable new investment and private sector activity consistent with the President’s America First strategy,” it said in a press release.

The US State Department concurrently issued a 180-day waiver under the Caesar Act to ensure sanctions do not impede investment, and advance Syria’s recovery and reconstruction efforts, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement.

Rubio said the waivers will facilitate the provision of electricity, energy, water, and sanitation, and enable a more effective humanitarian response across Syria.

“Today’s actions represent the first step in delivering on the President’s vision of a new relationship between Syria and the United States,” Rubio said.

While in Saudi Arabia last week, where he met with Syria’s interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa, Trump announced that sanctions on Syria would be swiftly removed, taking some officials by surprise and triggering a scramble across the US government to implement the decision,

Rubio said shortly after that the US would issue waivers to Syria sanctions, which are currently required by law. Meanwhile, the administration is engaged in a complicated technical review of the sanctions, which is expected to take weeks, officials said at the time.

“If we make enough progress, we’d like to see the law repealed, because you’re going to struggle to find people to invest in a country when any in six months, sanctions could come back. We’re not there yet. That’s premature,” Rubio said.

Speaking in Saudi Arabia, Trump said he made the decision to lift sanctions after speaking with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Saudi officials had coordinated behind the scenes on the topic for months, making the case that removing sanctions would boost the Syrian economy and help to stabilize the entire region.

The Turkish government also had contacts with the US about Syria and knew about the work being done to see if the lifting of sanctions was possible, a source familiar with the matter said. The Turkish government expressed support for those efforts.

But not all US allies in the region were in favor of where Trump was headed: Israel had opposed the move and Trump ignored their objections.

Trump acknowledged last week that he “didn’t ask” Israel about the Syria sanctions relief.

“I thought it was the right thing to do,” he said as he wrapped up his tour of the Middle East.

The British government is to rollout the use of medication to suppress the sex drive of sex offenders, as part of a package of measures to reduce the risk of reoffending and alleviate the pressures on the prison system, which is running out of space.

In a statement to Parliament Thursday following the release of an independent sentencing review, Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood said so-called chemical castration would be used in 20 prisons in two regions and that she was considering making it mandatory.

“Of course, it is vital that this approach is taken alongside psychological interventions that target other causes of offending, like asserting power and control,” she said.

Though the review highlighted the treatment would not be relevant for some sex offenders such as rapists driven by power and control, rather than sexual preoccupation, Mahmood said studies show that chemical castration can lead to a 60% reduction in reoffending.

It’s been used in Germany and Denmark on a voluntary basis, and in Poland as mandatory for some offenders.

The recommendation was part of a wide-ranging review led by former justice secretary, David Gauke. As well as looking at ways to cut reoffending, Gauke recommended reforms to overhaul the prisons system, which is running at near-capacity.

One of the first things Mahmood did as justice minister after Labour returned to power after 14 years last July was sanction an early-release program for prisoners to free up space. She says she inherited a judicial system that had been neglected for years by the previous Conservative government and set up the review as a means to stabilize it.

“If our prisons collapse, courts are forced to suspend trials,” she said. “The police must halt their arrests, crime goes unpunished, criminals run amok and chaos reigns. We face the breakdown of law and order in this country.”

The review recommended that criminals could be released from prison earlier than currently, while judges could be given more flexibility to impose punishments such as driving bans. It also recommended that sentences of less than 12 months would also be scrapped, apart from exceptional circumstances such as domestic abuse cases. It also called for the immediate deportation for foreign nationals handed a three-year sentence or less.

The review called for higher investment in the probation service to allow officers to spend more time with offenders for their rehabilitation and extra funding for the many more being tagged in the community.

Mahmood responded by giving a 700 million-pound ($930 million) a year for probation within years.

“If the government doesn’t put the resources into probation that is necessary, then the risk here is that we won’t make progress on rehabilitation that we need, and there will be a public backlash against it,” Gauke said.

The prison population in England and Wales has doubled over the past 30 years or so to nearly 90,000. That’s despite a fall in crime rates and is driven in part by the fact that longer sentences are being handed out amid pressure to be tough on crime.

Robert Jenrick, the justice spokesman for the Conservatives, warned that scrapping short sentences would be effectively “decriminalizing” offenses like burglary, theft and assault. And tags, he said, are as useful as “smoke alarms putting out bonfires” in stopping reoffending.

In response, Mahmood said she was clearing up the mess left by the Conservatives and that the government has also embarked on the largest expansion of the prison estate since Victorian times in the 19th century.

Organized crime and violence in the Mexican state of Sinaloa has forced a local sanctuary to close and transfer at least 700 animals – including elephants, tigers, lions, ostriches, chickens, monkeys, crocodiles, and hippos – to a new location 212 kilometers (approximately 131 miles) away.

The animals were relocated from the Ostok Sanctuary in Culiacan, a city in the Mexican state of Sinaloa, to Mazatlan, in the southern part of the state, due to ongoing violence, according to sanctuary director Ernesto Zazueta.

In recent months, violence between rival factions of the Sinaloa cartel has surged across the state in northwestern Mexico, particularly in Culiacan.

According to Zazueta, this is the largest relocation of wildlife in Mexico ever carried out due to violence.

Zazueta stated that the sanctuary closed due to threats to staff, robberies, and extortion attempts from criminal groups.

“Culiacan is the toughest area. We had never had problems in other occasions, but nowadays it became very difficult for us to even reach the sanctuary. They practically chased us out of the place because there were people who wanted to extort us,” Zazueta said.

Zazueta said the sanctuary came to its decision after one of its elephants, named Viki, had a problem with her leg and the staff realized that no veterinarian was willing to make the trip to Culiacan due to safety concerns.

Fifty-five men from across France were arrested between Monday and Thursday morning as part of a large-scale operation to dismantle a pedophile network operating through the messaging service Telegram, according to France’s Office for the Protection of Minors.

“These 55 individuals all exchanged CSAM imagery (Child Sexual Abuse Material) with the dangerous pedophile, so we had digital evidence implicating all of them,” said Bevan.

Bevan said that the arrests are “the fruit of a ten-month long investigation.”

“It was a major investigation and infiltration operation on this Telegram group,” Bevan said. “We had to follow the exchanges, analyze them, and identify the individuals hiding behind these Telegram pseudonyms — especially those who had children, had criminal records, or worked in sensitive professions involving contact with children.”

Bevan said the men are from all ages and backgrounds: fathers, civil servants, military personnel, and paramedics.In France, the possession and distribution of child sexual abuse material is punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a €100,000 ($112,747) fine.

French authorities indicted Durov on August 28, 2024 on several charges, including money laundering and spreading child sex abuse material. Durov said in a statement soon afterwards that he was committed to improving his app’s moderation and that authorities were trying to hold him “personally responsible for other people’s illegal use of Telegram.”