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Leaders of some of the world’s most powerful countries pushed back on demands that Ukraine cede territory and limit the size of its army included in President Trump’s latest proposal to end the war with Russia. But they said they believed the plan provided a basis for further negotiations, according to a joint statement released after they met in Johannesburg on Saturday.

The proposal, a 28-point plan, calls for Ukrainian concessions already largely rejected by the country’s president and allies. Mr. Trump gave President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine until next week to agree to the plan, though he said Saturday the plan was “not my final offer” and suggested that the deadline could be extended should progress be made in negotiations.

It remained unclear Saturday how much wiggle room Ukraine and its European allies would have to change the proposal. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Steve Witkoff, Mr. Trump’s special envoy, will head to Geneva on Sunday, where they are expected to meet senior Ukrainian officials to discuss Kyiv’s response to the American proposal, a U.S. official said Saturday.

Even before the latest proposal was made public last week, Ukraine’s allies in Europe and across the globe faced pressure to show they could get Ukraine the economic and military support it needs to continue battling Russia should the United States cease its contributions. Germany, which is already Ukraine’s largest military backer in Europe, this month pledged an additional $3.5 billion in assistance for next year, and France and Sweden recently pledged hundreds of new fighter jets.

Though couched in diplomatic language, public statements from European leaders about the new proposal, including at Saturday’s G20 meeting, made clear that their support for Ukraine was unwavering, whatever the pressure from the White House. In a joint statement adopted Saturday the leaders of 11 nations — including Germany, France, Britain, Japan and Canada — and the European Union said the 28-point plan included “important elements that will be essential for a just and lasting peace.”

But they also made clear that they took issue with provisions of the plan that would strip Ukraine of territory and limit the size of its armed forces.

“What is at stake is Ukrainian sovereignty and European security,” President Emmanuel Macron of France said on Saturday, adding that European countries would work with the Ukrainians over the next two days to create a plan for the way forward.

“Our problem is not the U.S.,” Mr. Macron told reporters at the G20 summit. “Our unique problem — all of us — is Russia, who started this war, who refused to take the cease-fire proposals.”

How much influence European leaders might have at this point in the war is unclear. Together with Ukraine, they have been cut out of the deliberations that produced this latest proposal. In the past though, Europe’s unified support of Kyiv together with the stubborn refusal of President Vladimir V. Putin to back down from his maximalist demands have been enough to at least preserve the status quo and keep Ukraine in the fight.

Mr. Macron said negotiating teams from the European Union, Germany, Britain and France would meet with American and Ukrainian negotiators in Geneva “to be able to bring substance back to the table and reconcile all these views.” This will be followed by a meeting of the “coalition of the willing,” a group of more than 30 countries supporting Ukraine, he said.

In a video posted to social media on Saturday, Mr. Zelensky expressed a grim view of the proposal before him and expressed doubt that it could be a starting point to negotiate peace.

“Right now, this is about much more than any points in any document,” he said. “We must ensure that nowhere in Europe or the world does the principle prevail that crimes against people and humanity, against states and nations, can ever be rewarded in any way or forgiven.”

Saturday’s meeting took place on the sidelines of the Group of 20 heads of state summit, an annual gathering that brings together leaders of the world’s largest economies to try to agree on shared ambitions on the most pressing global issues. The United States did not send a delegation; Mr. Trump said he was boycotting it because of his belief that South Africa was persecuting its white minority.

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António Costa, president of the European Council, left, and Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, right, with President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa, in Johannesburg on Thursday.Credit…Joao Silva/The New York Times

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Roughly four and a half billion years ago, the planet Theia slammed into Earth, destroying Theia, melting large fractions of Earth’s mantle, and ejecting a huge debris disk that later formed the moon. Scientists have long wondered what Theia was made of and where it came from. Now they have evidence that it formed very close to home.

The original giant impact model of the moon’s creation, proposed in the 1970s, predicted the moon was made mostly of Theia’s material. This scenario implied there should be differences in the chemical composition of the moon and Earth, but research has found that the two are nearly identical—far more similar than two independent planetary bodies should be. A new study, published today in Science, took a close look at other things Theia gave us beside the moon: additional molybdenum and iron left behind in the collision.

Ancient Earth would have had these heavy elements accumulate in its core but not in the rocky mantle closer to the surface, so any iron present now in Earth’s mantle likely came from Theia and can tell us about that planet’s composition, says study co-author Thorsten Kleine, director of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Göttingen, Germany.

Kleine and his colleagues analyzed 15 terrestrial rocks and six lunar samples brought to Earth by Apollo missions. They focused first on iron isotopes: variations of the element with different numbers of neutrons. Rocks and planets in the Solar System share nearly identical distributions of these isotopes, but in the last few years, Kleine and some of the new paper’s co-authors discovered that certain very tiny deviations from the standard iron isotope ratio can reveal the sample’s place of origin. “The discovery of iron isotope anomalies is relatively recent, which I guess is why no one has done it for the moon so far,” Kleine says. “These analyses are difficult and the variations are small, so it is not an easy experiment to do.” The team combined the data on iron with isotope distributions of molybdenum and zirconium found in the same samples to reverse engineer Theia’s likely size and composition. The researchers also compared the measurements to those of samples from 20 meteorites that originated in both the inner and outer Solar System to determine Theia’s place of origin.

The new study reveals Theia as a rocky planet with a metallic core that most likely contained five to ten percent the mass of Earth and formed in the inner Solar System, closer to the sun than Earth is. This picture lines up with previous hypotheses for why the bodies were so similar, Kleine says; what we didn’t know was where it formed exactly.

Back in 2020, Kleine and other scientists demonstrated that celestial bodies that formed closer to the sun are richer in heavy elements such as molybdenum. Following this principle, Kleine and the new study’s co-authors estimated that Earth has a bit more molybdenum and zirconium than it should and figured these additional heavy elements must have been brought here by Theia. They combined that data with what they’d learned about the iron.

“The authors make new iron isotope measurements at exceptional levels of precision,” says planetary scientist Sara Russell, leader of the Planetary Materials Group at the Natural History Museum, London, who was not involved in the new study. For her, the study’s implications go beyond just the origins of Theia—they help us understand what eventually shaped the Earth-moon system into a cradle of life. “This careful work and insightful modeling help us better understand our origins,” she adds.

The team hasn’t yet run its proposed scenario through simulations of the giant impact, Kleine says, but he looks forward to running those simulations, as well as analyzing lunar samples to look for other element isotopes.

Russell hopes future sample-return missions can boost this type of analysis. “I find it amazing we are still learning new things about the moon and Earth over 50 years since the Apollo astronauts collected these rocks from the lunar surface,” Russell says. “Collecting samples in space and bringing them to curate on Earth means we can make much more detailed measurements than are possible in space and preserves them for future generations to make their own discoveries.”

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Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas has announced a flurry of steps this week aimed at thwarting Islamic groups in the state, moves that both worry and baffle Muslims and religious experts.

On Tuesday, he declared that the Council on American-Islamic Relations, one of the nation’s largest Muslim advocacy and civil rights groups, was a foreign terrorist organization, an accusation the group said had no basis in fact. The following day, he directed law enforcement officers to investigate an Islamic organization in Dallas, saying the group was illegally enforcing Islamic “Shariah law” in the state.

In a letter sent on Wednesday to district attorneys and sheriffs in two North Texas counties, Mr. Abbott suggested there were multiple entities in the state “masquerading” as legal courts, but he named only one: the Islamic Tribunal, an independent institution that has operated in the Dallas area for more than a decade.

The letter quoted from the tribunal’s website to suggest it was illegally posing as a rival court to the Texas judicial system and speculated that the court could recommend stoning as a punishment.

Other faith groups operate ecclesiastical tribunals in the United States that resolve spiritual matters and disputes that overlap with the traditional court system. In Judaism, rabbinical courts known as beth dins rule on the details of divorce agreements, among other issues. Catholic dioceses, including the diocese of Dallas and others throughout Texas, also operate courts to handle cases of church law, including marriage and annulment.

The governor’s statement said the Islamic Tribunal was different from other faith-based arbitration bodies because it was “purporting to replace actual courts of law to evade neutral and generally applicable laws.”

“The Constitution’s religious protections provide no authority for religious courts to skirt state and federal laws simply by donning robes and pronouncing positions inconsistent with western civilization,” the governor wrote in the letter. He offered no specific examples of resolved disputes that have violated U.S. law but urged the counties to work with the state’s Department of Public Safety and attorney general, Ken Paxton, who had “additional investigative tools at their disposal.”

For experts in Islamic law and culture, the move was puzzling.

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Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas in September. This week, he declared that a Muslim advocacy and civil rights group was a terrorist organization. The group said the statement had “no basis in law or fact.”Credit…Antranik Tavitian/Reuters

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On Tuesday night, sky watchers across the U.S. were treated to a phenomenal aurora display, the product of a severe geomagnetic storm triggered by a recent burst of solar activity.

Auroras were visible in areas that included Indiana, New Jersey, northern California, Florida, and Texas. That is remarkably far south for the northern lights, or aurora borealis, which are typically restricted to a doughnut surrounding the North Pole.

The southern lights, or aurora australis, were also visible in parts of Australia.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center, which forecasts the effects of solar activity on Earth and its surroundings, geomagnetic storm conditions are expected to continue at a somewhat lower level.

And the event isn’t over yet. Auroras occur after the sun emits what scientists call a coronal mass ejection, or CME, in the direction of Earth. A CME is essentially a blob of the plasma and magnetic field that makes up our star. When this material interacts with the gases in Earth’s atmosphere, the resulting energy transfers light up the skies.

Last night’s auroras were the result of CMEs released on Sunday and Monday, but Tuesday also saw such an outburst from the sun, and experts expect it will reach Earth in the coming hours. An initial aurora forecast for tonight suggests the spectacle could continue tonight only for a more northern portion of the country.

Auroras are part of a class of phenomena dubbed space weather and are both the prettiest and the least harmful example. Other types of space weather can be dangerous to technology in orbit and even to the power grids that sustain modern life on Earth. And the current space weather activity has had a perhaps surprising side effect: delaying today’s scheduled launch of a Blue Origin rocket that will carry a pair of NASA spacecraft bound to study space weather at Mars.

Whether or not you were able to catch sight of an aurora, consider submitting your observations to the volunteer science project Aurorasaurus. Through this program, scientists and sky watchers team up to understand the what the effects of specific space weather events are, as well as how auroras work more generally.

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The best habits aren’t about optimization. They’re about sustainability, resilience and showing up as the healthiest, happiest version of you

Last year, I shared 9 Habits to help you better succeed in business, life and relationships, and many of you wrote to tell me how small shifts completely changed your energy, focus and confidence. This year, I’m taking it a step further.

In 2026, the goal isn’t nonstop improvement. It’s building sustainability, resilience and a healthier, happier, more productive you. Over the past year, I’ve deepened many of these routines and noticed more energy, strength and joy.

At 49, I’m the healthiest and fittest I’ve ever been, and that says a lot coming from someone who used to race triathlons and Ironman.

1. Strength-train four times per week

Muscle is longevity currency. It supports your metabolism, hormones and confidence. As we age, resistance training is the single most effective way to stay strong, mobile and injury-free. Muscle also keeps your metabolism active, your hormones balanced, and your body resilient as you age.

You can get started on an app such as Peloton or Ladder, or if you have the means, invest in a trainer who fits your goals and lifestyle. Schedule your strength training the way you schedule important calls: non-negotiable.

2. Go Zone 5 heart rate once per week

Dr. Stacy Sims calls high-intensity training “brain fertilizer.” Pushing into Zone 5 (that super hard exertion effort that makes you breathless) improves cognition, bone density and mitochondrial function.

It teaches your body and mind to handle stress, including the stress that we as founders and leaders face daily. Sprint run, bike, ski-erg, or swing a kettlebell — just hit that threshold at least once per week. (Spoiler: You feel amazing afterwards.)

3. Walk 30 minutes every day

Over 50% of adults in America spend about 9.5 hours per day sitting, and roughly 25% report no leisure-time physical activity outside their jobs. Walking is the most underrated productivity tool there is. It supports creativity, clears your mind, improves digestion, circulation and overall mood.

Many of my best ideas happen mid-walk, not mid-meeting. Swap one Zoom for a walking meeting or pace while on calls. In their recent book, Built To Move: The Ten Essential Habits to Help You Move Freely and Live Fully, Kelly and Juliet Starrett explain: “Walking gets everything flowing in our body. It’s how we nourish all our tissues, how we decongest, how we stimulate the body to release waste.”

4. Protect your sleep like revenue

Sleep is the original performance enhancer. Seven to eight hours nightly fuels decision-making, emotional regulation and productivity. If you skip quality sleep, you’re essentially showing up jet-lagged to your work, your family and your health. Build a down-regulating evening routine and treat bedtime like a standing appointment with your future self.

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Great Habits

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