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Russia must be pushed toward peace. The key to this, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said, is unified action by Europe and the US, including sanctions and tariffs.

The Ukrainian president spoke about his recent meetings and visits, noting that 26 countries are now prepared to guarantee Ukraine’s security through concrete measures.

However, Zelenskyy emphasized that before peace can be secured, the Russian Federation must be compelled to move in that direction. He stressed the need to ensure Moscow stops rejecting all peace initiatives and fully understands the consequences of prolonging the war.

“Strong sanctions and tariffs — combined European and American efforts — are key to this. No opportunity to fund Russia’s war machine can remain. Next comes even more transatlantic work to ensure the pressure is truly tangible,” the president concluded.

Security guarantees for Ukraine and Putin’s withdrawal from talks

Since August 18, when US President Donald Trump hosted Zelenskyy and European leaders at the White House, the parties have actively discussed security guarantees for a postwar Ukraine.

On September 4, the Coalition of the Willing met in Paris. Following the meeting, French President Emmanuel Macron said the countries had completed preparations for Ukraine’s security guarantees. He later clarified that 26 states are ready to either send soldiers to Ukraine or support such a mission

Commenting on the potential deployment of foreign troops, Zelenskyy said the plan would involve thousands of soldiers.

Yesterday, the Ukrainian president stressed that security guarantees must take effect immediately, without waiting for the cessation of hostilities. He clarified that these measures include not only military support but also economic guarantees.

Zelenskyy added that the Ukrainian army is the strongest safeguard for the country and for all of Europe. He noted that it numbers 800,000 personnel, making it one of the largest and most capable forces on the continent.

US President Trump has also expressed readiness to provide Ukraine with security guarantees. However, he has repeatedly clarified that American troops will not be deployed in Ukraine. He emphasized that Europe should play the primary role in delivering security guarantees.

While security discussions continue, talks between Zelenskyy and Putin have stalled.

After the Washington meeting on August 18, Trump announced plans for a bilateral meeting between the leaders of Ukraine and Russia. However, Russia began denying that Putin had promised to meet Zelenskyy, and the situation has since remained stalled. The US president stated that the leaders are not yet ready to hold the meeting.

On September 3, Putin publicly said he does not rule out meeting with Zelenskyy. However, he added that Zelenskyy would need to travel to Moscow if he is ready for the talks.

In a recent interview with ABC News, Zelenskyy said Putin could come to Kyiv. He explained that he cannot travel to Moscow, the capital of this terrorist, while Ukraine faces daily attacks.

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University students might soon have something other than black-light posters to brighten their dorm rooms. Researchers have created glow-in-the-dark plants by injecting succulents with materials similar to those that make the posters light up. The fleshy plants shine as brightly as a night light, and can be made to do so in a wide variety of colours — a first for glowing houseplants, according to the team.

The researchers, led by Xuejie Zhang, a materials scientist at the South China Agricultural University in Guangzhou, describe today how they produced the plants in the journal Matter. They have applied for a patent on the technology, which they hope will lead to decorative installations and living lighting.

The idea of making glowing plants has captivated scientists since the late 1980s, when researchers made the first bioluminescent plant by inserting a gene from a firefly (Photinus pyralis) into a type of tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum). This work laid the foundation for the first genetically engineered luminescent houseplant to come on the market in the United States, last year. The biotechnology firm Light Bio in Sun Valley, Idaho, sells the petunia (Petunia hybrida), which glows a very faint green thanks to genes from a light-emitting mushroom.

Leafy greens … and blues and reds

Unlike the petunia, which emits light through chemical reactions in its cells, the succulent glows because of materials injected into its leaves. These materials — phosphor particles made of strontium and aluminium dosed with other metals — absorb energy from light at one wavelength, store some of that energy and then slowly re-emit it at a different wavelength for several hours. For instance, one material the scientists injected into their succulents absorbs ultraviolet and blue light, and re-emits it as green light.

This type of ‘afterglow’ phosphor is used in glow-in-the-dark toys and paints, and as an imaging tracer for laboratory animals. Whereas genetically engineered bioluminescent plants are, so far, limited in the range of colours they emit, afterglow phosphors span a wide variety of hues, including red and blue, and they can be combined to produce a white glow

The researchers purchased phosphors containing strontium aluminate and ground them down to particles of various sizes before injecting them into an assortment of plants. They found that particles around 7 micrometres in diameter glowed more brightly than did nanoparticles in plants, and were able to fill up the interior tissues of succulent leaves for a stronger, more uniform glow. By contrast, plants with simple leaf structures, such as tobacco plants and pak choi, emitted a more patchy glow.

The plant favoured by the team is the succulent Echevaria ‘Mebina’, a common houseplant that grows rosettes of dense, fleshy leaves. To make every leaf glow, the researchers had to inject each one with phoshor particles, a process that takes about ten minutes. The luminescence — which the team generated in hues of blue-green, blue-violet, green, red and white — lasted as long as 120 minutes after exposing the plant to tailored wavelengths of light or sunlight, and could be triggered again and again over the 10 days of the study.

The researchers estimate that the cost of materials to create one plant is about 10 yuan (US$1.40).

Co-author Shuting Liu, also at the South China Agricultural University, says that the team hopes to move away from injecting each leaf by using smaller particles, which can spread more readily throughout plants. But the team will need to overcome an obstacle: the smaller the particle, the dimmer the glow

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A sprawling Hyundai manufacturing plant in a quiet southeast Georgia community became ground zero on Thursday for one of the most extensive immigration raids in recent US history. The operation, months in the making, ended with 475 arrests, most of them Korean nationals.

As state troopers blocked roads leading to the plant and set up a security perimeter, nearly 500 federal, state, and local officers poured into the sprawling battery production facility, still under construction.

Agents moved swiftly, lining up workers along the walls. Word of the raid spread across the property, triggering a scramble among workers who attempted to flee, with some running to a sewage pond and others hiding in air ducts.

The officers spoke with each worker, one by one, working to determine which were in the US legally, allowing some to leave and taking the rest into custody, moving them off-site and transporting them to the Folkston ICE Processing Center, officials said.

By 8 p.m., their work was done.

The high-stakes raid in Ellabell, about 25 miles west of Savannah, Georgia, was the result of what authorities characterized as a meticulously coordinated investigation involving multiple federal and state agencies and weeks of intelligence gathering, all converging in a pivotal day, marking the largest sweep yet in the current Trump administration’s immigration crackdown at US worksites.

Workers describe tense, chaotic scene

Federal agents descended on the Hyundai site Thursday morning like it was a “war zone,” a construction worker at the electric car plant told CNN Friday.

The worker, who asked not to be named to protect his privacy, said he was part of the first group of people rounded up by federal agents.

“They just told everybody to get on the wall. We stood there for about an hour and were then taken to another section where we waited. Then we went in another building and got processed,” the employee said.

Masked and armed agents gave orders to construction workers wearing hard hats and safety vests as they lined up while officers raided the facility, video footage obtained by CNN showed.

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Discovery of vast natural hydrogen reserves could fuel clean energy and reshape Earth’s future power supply.

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Like many other meteorologists around the U.S. Gulf Coast on the morning of August 26, 2005, Alan Gerard was monitoring the latest computer model forecasts for Hurricane Katrina, which had just emerged over the Gulf of Mexico after striking South Florida as a Category 1 storm. Gerard, then meteorologist in charge at the National Weather Service’s (NWS’s) office in Jackson, Miss., saw that the newest projections indicated that Katrina would track farther south than previous model runs had predicted. “It was a big change,” he says—and a concerning one because it meant that the storm would have more time over warm water to strengthen and that Katrina’s path had shifted westward, toward Mississippi.

With the weekend fast approaching and several hours before the official forecast would be updated, Gerard quickly e-mailed Mississippi’s emergency management agency to warn them that the state was facing a worse hit and that they needed to start preparing right away.

Just three days later, on August 29, Katrina rammed into the coast at the Louisiana-Mississippi border with a 20-mile-long wall of storm surge estimated at 24 to 28 feet high. (The exact heights that the surge reached aren’t known because most of the gauges, buildings, and other structures that would provide evidence of a high-water mark were obliterated.) In the subsequent hours, the levees around New Orleans failed, releasing torrents of water into the city and making Katrina the deadliest storm to hit the U.S. in nearly 80 years.

Despite the disaster that unfolded because of human mistakes, Katrina had been a well-predicted hurricane; the forecast errors involved were lower than the average at the time. But Katrina, along with the rest of the blockbuster 2004 and 2005 hurricane seasons, helped spark a dedicated, government-funded effort to make hurricane forecasts even better. Over the past 20 years, that project has nearly halved the error in predictions of where a storm will go and has given communities an extra 12 hours of warning time. By one estimate, these and other improvements have saved the nation up to $5 billion for each hurricane that hit the U.S. since 2007—3.5 times as much as the NWS’s budget for 2024. The resounding success is an example of “how this can all work when it’s done right,” Gerard says.

But that success, he and other hurricane experts warn, is under threat as the Trump administration is chopping away parts of the research staff and infrastructure that made such remarkable, lifesaving progress possible.

How Hurricane Forecasts Have Improved

When Frank Marks began forecasting hurricanes in the 1980s, it was only really possible to try to roughly predict the track that a storm would take. “Intensity was a wing and a prayer,” he says. Back then, a storm similar to Hurricane Erin, which parallelled the East Coast in mid-August 2025, would have likely prompted meteorologists to warn the entire coast of a possible hurricane hit because of the inherent uncertainty in forecasts. But this year, forecasters were able to tell that Erin would stay well out to sea; they only issued warnings for rip currents, heavy surf, and some storm surge in coastal areas. “To me, that is astounding, to see that evolution,” says Marks, who became director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Hurricane Research Division in 2002 and is now retired.

By the time Katrina formed near the Bahamas on Aug. 23, 2005, increased computing power, a better understanding of the physics of hurricanes, and more detailed observations of storms had substantially improved forecasts. But after the Gulf was battered by storms throughout 2004 and 2005, Vice Admiral Conrad Lautenbacher, then administrator of NOAA, thought there was still plenty of room for improvement, Marks says.“If you eliminate all of that research, you’re basically creating a stagnant weather service and a stagnant weather community in general.” —Alan Gerard, former National Weather Service meteorologistWhat grew out of that initial request was a fairly revolutionary effort that was eventually dubbed the Hurricane Forecast Improvement Project (HFIP). (The full name was subsequently changed to the Hurricane Forecast Improvement Program.) Its first step was to ask forecasters what problems they faced—and to bring together NOAA’s hurricane researchers and modelers, as well as academic scientists, to solve those issues.

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