4-year-old boy accidentally smashes 3,500-year-old Bronze Age jar at museum
(HAIFA, Israel) — A 4-year-old boy accidentally smashed a Bronze Age jar during a visit to a museum in Israel on Friday, the museum said.
The ancient jar, which was on display at the University of Haifa’s Hecht Museum, dates back to between 2200 and 1500 B.C., making it at least 3,500 years old. It was especially rare due to it being fully intact — well, until recently.
The boy’s father — identified only by his first name, Alex — told the BBC the jar fell to the ground after his son “pulled the jar slightly” because he was “curious about what was inside.”
Alex was “in shock” when he saw his son next to the smashed artifact, and initially thought, “It wasn’t my child that did it,” but spoke to a security guard after calming the child down.
The museum’s director, Inbal Rivlin, told ABC News they understand it was an accident.
“There are instances where display items are intentionally damaged, and such cases are treated with great severity, including involving the police,” Rivlin said. “In this case, however, this was not the situation. The jar was accidentally damaged by a young child visiting the museum, and the response will be accordingly.”
The jar had been displayed at the museum’s entrance, without glass or barriers, which Rivlin said is a core tenet of the museum in order to make “archaeological items accessible to the public.”
“The museum believes that there is a special charm in experiencing an archaeological find without any obstructions, and despite the rare incident with the jar, the Hecht Museum will continue this tradition,” she said.
Rivlin said the jar was used to store and transport supplies, particularly wine and olive oil.
A conservation specialist has been selected to restore the jar, and Rivlin said it would be “returned to its place in a short time.”
The family was invited back to see the repaired artifact, Rivlin said, and are planning to visit again this coming weekend.
Alex told BBC he was “relieved” the jar would be repaired, but is “sorry” that “it will no longer be the same item.”
(WASHINGTON) — Following an election clouded by irregularities, the Biden administration on Monday called on Venezuela’s electoral authority to release detailed polling data to support its claim that the country’s autocratic leader Nicolas Maduro has secured a third six-year term — a contested outcome that could have significant ramifications for the region and fuel debate over immigration in the run-up to the U.S. presidential election.
“We have serious concerns that the result announced does not reflect the will or the votes of the Venezuelan people,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said during a news conference in Tokyo.
“It’s critical that every vote be counted fairly and transparently that election officials immediately share information with the opposition and independent observers without delay,” he continued.
Despite challenges from Maduro’s political opposition and unanswered questions from South American officials acting as impartial observers, Venezuela’s electoral council, which is aligned with Maduro’s regime, formalized the results of the vote, effectively handing the ruler another six-year term.
Maduro has responded with defiance.
“We have always been victims of the powerful,” Maduro asserted during a nationally televised ceremony on Monday. “An attempt is being made to impose a coup d’état in Venezuela again of a fascist and counterrevolutionary nature.”
María Corina Machado, the opposition popular leader, asserted that, despite Maduro’s claims, her party’s candidate had won an “overwhelming” victory and that the reported polling results were “impossible.”
In the weeks preceding the election, the prospect of Maduro clinging to power has stoked fears of increased economic turmoil and political violence that experts say could spark another exodus from the country.
Almost 8 million Venezuelans — roughly a quarter of the country’s population — have left the country over the last decade, according to the United Nations Refugee Agency.
That diaspora has exacerbated irregular migration to the U.S. In 2023, border patrol agents encountered Venezuelan migrants attempting to enter through the southern border nearly 335,000 times, data from the Department of Homeland Security shows.
The Biden administration has attempted to curb the number of crossings through multiple initiatives, including by introducing a new policy allowing Venezuelans to apply for entry to the U.S. from abroad, resuming deportations of Venezuelan migrants, and even using diplomatic leverage to push Maduro to hold the country’s most recent election.
Despite the changes and modest improvements to Venezuela’s economy, data shows that the number of the country’s nationals crossing between checkpoints on the U.S.-Mexico border has remained elevated. Polling conducted by a Venezuelan-based research firm earlier this year found that roughly a quarter of the country’s current population was considering emigrating if Maduro won the election.
Senior Biden administration officials defended their handling of Maduro’s government, including using economic incentives to entice Maduro to take steps aimed at moving the country towards democracy.
“That Venezuela did, in fact, hold an election yesterday, which allowed an opposition candidate to be on the ballot and for a voting process to unfold only came about as a result of the calibrations that we’ve done with our sanctions policy over the last year,” one official said.
The driving factors behind Venezuela’s immigration crisis are also complicated. A high-ranking State Department official who served under President Donald Trump told the Washington Post he warned the former administration that imposing hardline sanctions would “grind the Venezuelan economy into dust & have huge human consequences, one of which would be out-migration.”
The Biden administration has largely kept Trump’s economic penalties on Venezuela in place, but it has made some notable carveout, including granting authorizations to select companies permitting them to operate in the country’s lucrative oil sector.
In the wake of Maduro’s handling of the election, officials indicated that they would not revoke existing sanctions but that they would rethink their approach to Venezuela based on whether the government increases transparency surrounding the election.
“We’re watching. The world watching. I won’t get ahead of a decision hasn’t been made here in terms of consequences. We’re going to hold our judgment until we see the actual tabulation of the results,” National Security Spokesperson John Kirby said on Monday.
LONDON — Ukrainian forces are continuing to advance deeper into Russia’s Kursk region, expanding their area of control on the third day of their major incursion, with the situation worsening for Russian forces, according to a key pro-Kremlin Russian military blogger.
Rybar, a blog closely linked to Russia’s defense ministry, reported Thursday that Ukrainian armored units have reached the village of Bolshoe Soldatskoe, roughly 18.5 miles inside Russia’s border.
Heavy fighting is now also reported only 9 miles from the town of Lgov, which straddles a crucial highway.
“Despite the attempts of the Russian joint forces group to stop the advance of Ukrainian mobile groups, the scale of the crisis is widening,” Rybar wrote on Telegram.
Rybar and other pro-Kremlin military bloggers are contradicting the claims of Russia’s defense ministry that the Ukrainian advance has been stopped.
Ukraine’s attack appeared to be a large-scale offensive operation, involving at least two Ukrainian brigades, rather than a less significant cross-border raid. As the scale of the attack was becoming clearer on Thursday, it appeared to be one of the most significant military developments in the war in months.
At least 66 people have been injured as a result of shelling in the Kursk region since Tuesday, the Russian Ministry of Health reported Thursday.
The railway stations in three settlements in the Kursk region — Sudzha, Korenevo and Psel — are closed amid the invasion, the press service of the Moscow Railway reported.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has called for “courage” in the region.
“This requires you, and the current situation requires a certain amount of courage and concentration on ways to solve these complex, difficult, extraordinary tasks that are now facing all branches and all levels of government,” Putin said at a meeting with the acting governor of the region, Alexei Smirnov, on Thursday.
Mykhailo Podolyak, a Ukrainian adviser to the head of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s office, commented Thursday for the first time on the operation, saying one goal was to alter the Russian perception of the war, a shift that could potentially affect any eventual negotiations.
“This increases the cost of the war for Russia quantitatively. More armored vehicles have been destroyed, the Russian Federation has lost territories, and there have been more casualties. Will this affect how they perceive this war? Undoubtedly,” Podolyak said in a live discussion on Ukrainian TV.
Zelenskyy praised the Ukrainian army on Thursday for its ability “to surprise” and achieve results, though made no direct reference to the situation in Kursk.
“Everyone can see that the Ukrainian army knows how to surprise. And knows how to achieve results,” Zelenskyy said at an event in Kyiv. “This is demonstrated by the battlefield, where our soldiers not only withstood the overwhelming force of the occupiers, but also are destroying it in the way necessary to protect Ukraine — our state and independence.”
The Ukrainian incursion began on Tuesday when a Ukrainian force numbering in at least the hundreds crossed over the border near the village of Sudzha, with tanks and heavy weapons, according to official and unofficial Russian public sources. Catching Russia off-guard, Ukrainian soldiers quickly seized a handful of villages, advancing up to 6 to 9 miles, according to the pro-Kremlin Russian military bloggers.
Since then, Ukraine has moved in significant reinforcements and its forces were continuing to try to press forward but were being held on Thursday at the village of Korenovo, according to multiple pro-Kremlin bloggers, who are close to Russia’s military. Heavy fighting was also focused on Sudzha, which Ukrainian troops were reported to have largely surrounded.
Russia’s defense ministry on Thursday claimed to have halted the Ukrainian advance and to have inflicted hundreds of casualties on Ukrainian troops. But reports from the Russian military bloggers suggested a far more chaotic situation, with unconfirmed reports that Ukrainian forces had continued to reach deeper in some places into the Kursk region.
One of the best-known pro-Kremlin military bloggers, Two Majors, reported that six or seven Ukrainian tanks were fighting in the village of Ivnitsa, roughly 18.5 miles from the border.
He also reported gunfire, likely from Ukrainian reconnaissance special forces units, in the village of Anastasevka, more than 18.5 miles from the border and about 28 miles from the Kursk nuclear power station.
Multiple military bloggers also reported gunfire, likely from Ukrainian reconnaissance special forces units, in the village of Anastasevka.
They also reported Ukraine engineering equipment to try and dig in and hold ground.
Ukrainian officials have been almost entirely silent on the operation, with speculation swirling around its possible goals. Ukraine may be seeking to pull Russian forces from elsewhere in Ukraine, as Ukrainian troops are under intense pressure in the Donbas region near the key city of Pokrovsk, although most analysts believe Russia likely has sufficient forces to continue its operations there unchanged.
Russian analysts have also suggested that Ukraine could be seeking to seize the Kursk Nuclear Power Plant, which is located roughly 50 miles from the border, but most analysts were deeply skeptical that the Ukrainian force is large enough to reach it.
Podolyak’s comments on Thursday appeared to perhaps support another theory that Ukraine could be seeking to capture Russian territory with the goal of trading it for Ukrainian-occupied land in potential future peace negotiations. Podolyak said he expects the Kursk attack to impact Russian society, bringing clear signals of the ineffectiveness of Putin’s strategy closer to home, at the same time as potentially strengthening Ukraine’s position in negotiations.
“Do they respond to anything other than fear?” he told Ukrainian television. “No, we need to finally realize this. Any compromise is perceived by Russia as your weakness and readiness to kneel before them. When can they sit at the negotiating table, and can something be achieved? Only if they understand that the war is not going according to their plan.”
Some Ukrainian and independent military analysts have expressed doubts about the wisdom of such a risky operation when Ukraine is suffering from severe manpower shortages in Donbas, where Russia in recent weeks has been making rapid advances towards Pokrovsk, prompting fears Ukrainian lines near there are in danger of cracking. Russian forces overnight reportedly again made advances in that area, capturing another small village, according to Ukrainian military analysts.
ABC News’ Natalia Popova contributed to this report.
(KURSK, Ukraine) — Ukrainian troops have captured more than two dozen settlements in Russia’s western Kursk region since launching its incursion nearly a week ago, as thousands of residents have been ordered to evacuate, Russian officials said.
Alexey Smirnov, the acting governor of Kursk, said Monday the situation in the region remains “difficult.”
“As of today, the enemy controls 28 settlements, the penetration depth into Kursk Oblast is 12 kilometers, the width is 40 kilometers,” Smirnov said during an operational meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armed forces, Col. Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi, said Monday that Ukraine controls about 386 square miles of Russian territory as it continues its offensive operation in the Kursk Oblast.
Some 180,000 residents of Kursk have been ordered to evacuate and about 121,000 of them have left their homes in the areas near the border with Ukraine, Smirnov said.
At least 12 people have been killed and 121 others have been wounded in the Kursk region since the Ukrainian Armed Forces launched the cross-border offensive on Aug. 6, according to Smirnov.
Putin said Russia will give “an appropriate response” to Ukraine and that “all the goals facing us will be achieved, undoubtedly.”
“[It] looks like the enemy seeks to improve its negotiating positions in the future,” Putin said during the operational meeting. “But what kind of negotiations can we talk about with people who indiscriminately target civilians, civilian infrastructure, and try to create a threat to nuclear power facilities? What can we even talk about with them?”
The Russian Nuclear Agency Rosatom claimed that Ukrainian forces attacked the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in southeastern Ukraine on Sunday, hitting its cooling systems in drone strikes and causing a fire.
Ukraine, however, is claiming that Russia started the fire at the power plant. A Ukrainian intelligence source, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told ABC News the Russians set fire to a large pile of tires to create the fire. The source interpreted it as an attempt to frame Ukraine and to send a warning amid its ongoing incursion into Russia.
Amid the incursion, small Ukrainian units have been spotted in villages northeast toward the Kursk nuclear power station, which is located roughly 80 miles from the border, according to accounts from Russian military bloggers. Russia has beefed up security at the plant, though most analysts believe it is still too far for Ukrainian troops to reach.
The Russian Defense Ministry said Monday that additional forces and systems are being delivered to build up a Russian group of forces and form reserves in the Kursk region.
“The military communications service has organized the delivery of additional forces and systems to reinforce a group of forces and form reserves. Soldiers, military hardware, ammunition and other supplies required for combat operations and comprehensively supporting troops are being transported,” it said.
Specialists of the logistics units of the northern group of forces are working to “repel the attempted Ukrainian military incursion into the territory of the Russian Federation,” it said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy addressed the Kursk offensive on Monday.
“We are grateful to all soldiers and commanders for their resilience and decisive actions,” he said in a statement on social media. “Among other things, we have instructed the Minister of Internal Affairs, other Government officials, and the Security Service of Ukraine to prepare a humanitarian plan for the area of operation.”