American, Netflix star among 10 climbers missing after reported avalanche in Pakistan, officials say
Undated photo of Karakoram Range, Pakistan (Photo by Uwe Steffens/ullstein bild via Getty Images)
(LONDON )– A team of 10 climbers, including one American, is missing after a reported avalanche on Broad Peak in Pakistan’s Karakoram mountain range, according to the Alpine Club of Pakistan.
The club said the avalanche was reported around midday Thursday and that it has lost contact with the expedition.
The team reportedly includes five Nepalese mountaineers led by climber Nims Dai, Pakistani climber Sohail Sakhi of Hunza, an Omani climber, American climber Mallory Geis, a Chinese climber and one other foreign climber, according to the Alpine Club of Pakistan. Renowned climber Nirmal Purja is also thought to be among the missing.
Broad Peak, where the climbers were traversing when the avalanche struck, is a 26,401-foot mountain in the Karakoram range in central Asia.
The Alpine Club of Pakistan said the entire team has been out of communication since the reported avalanche but confirmed that it is working with government authorities and relevant agencies to support an immediate search-and-rescue operation.
Two Pakistan Army aviation helicopters are carrying out rescue operations, while ground rescue teams are already searching the area.”Every possible effort is being made to ensure that helicopter support and all available rescue resources are mobilized at the earliest opportunity, subject to weather and operational conditions,” the club said in a statement.
The Alpine Club of Pakistan said it is continuing to monitor the situation and will provide updates as more information becomes available.
British police investigate the scene with the support of counterterrorism units after two people were injured in a stabbing attack in a neighborhood with a large Jewish community in Golders Green area of north London, United Kingdom on April 29, 2026. (Rasid Necati Aslim/Anadolu via Getty Images)
(LONDON) — A stabbing attack in London that officials said injured two Jewish men has been declared a “terrorist incident,” police said.
The suspect — a 45-year-old man — was arrested after trying to attack officers who responded to reports of people being stabbed in the Golders Green neighborhood in Northwest London, the Metropolitan Police said.
The incident took place at 11:16 a.m. local time in London on Wednesday.
“One male was seen running along Golders Green Road armed with a knife and attempting to stab Jewish members of the public,” Shomrim NW London, a charity that operates an emergency response team in the area, said on social media.
Two men — aged 76 and 34 — were treated at the scene for stab wounds before being taken to a hospital, where they are both listed in stable condition, police said.
The suspect was Tasered and arrested after allegedly trying to stab officers, police said. No officers were injured.
The suspect was arrested on suspicion of attempted murder and remains in custody, the Metropolitan Police said. He has a history of serious violence and mental health issues, according to Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley.
Specialist officers from Counter Terrorism Policing are leading the investigation. inquiry
“One of the lines of inquiry is whether this attack was deliberately targeting the Jewish community in London,” he added.
Mayor Sadiq Khan of London condemned the “appalling attack on two Jewish Londoners in Golders Green.”
“London’s Jewish community have been the target of a series of shocking antisemitic attacks,” Khan said in a statement. “There must be absolutely no place for antisemitism in society. The Met have stepped up high visibility patrols in the area.”
Sarah Sackman, a member of Parliament who represents the area, said she was aware of the “serious stabbing” in Golders Green.
“The attacks on British Jews are an attack on Britain itself,” she said in a statement posted on social media. “It is unconscionable that Jews are being targeted in this way.”
Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who was addressing questions in the House of Commons on Wednesday, said it was “deeply concerning to everyone in this House.” He added that a police investigation was underway.
Wednesday’s alleged stabbing was at least the third violent incident reported in the Golders Green area — which is well-known for its sizable Jewish community — in recent weeks.
In late March, four ambulances belonging to the Jewish community ambulance service, Hatzalah, were firebombed in a suspected antisemitic attack, according to the Met Police.
And on Tuesday, an arson attack was reported on a memorial wall in Golders Green, which is dedicated to thousands of protesters killed in an Iranian government crackdown on nationwide protests in January, police said.
The wall is located close to a local Jewish center, although police said the Tuesday alleged attack was “not being treated as a terrorist incident and officers are keeping an open mind about the motive behind the attack.”
ABC News’ Joe Simonetti and Zoe Magee contributed to this report.
Patriot launchers modules mounted on M983 HEMTT, part of the U.S.-made MIM-104 Patriot surface-to-air missile (SAM) system, are pictured on a open field on Feb. 18, 2023, in Zamosc, Poland. (Photo by Omar Marques/Getty Images)
(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump on Friday reversed course on his offer earlier this month to give Ukraine a license to produce Patriot air defense systems, saying during a Cabinet meeting that “we have not agreed to that.”
“We have to be very careful about letting somebody build them,” Trump said as he gathered his top officials at Camp David. “You have to be very judicious, but you have to be very careful. Now, we have not agreed to that. We’re talking about it. But it’s a hard thing to give away that kind of technology.”
The president’s remarks contradict Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s readout of their Tuesday meeting at the White House, in which Zelenskyy said Trump agreed to provide the license. Zelenskyy, while in Washington, met with executives at Lockheed Martin, the U.S. defense giant behind the Patriot missiles.
Trump’s Friday comments are also a departure from his own public message to Zelenskyy at the NATO summit in Turkey in early July.
“We’re going to give a license to you to make Patriots. That’s pretty cool, right?” Trump said to the Ukrainian president the time, adding: “This way he can’t complain that we’re not giving him enough. I said, ‘Make them yourself.'”
Zelenskyy has long raised alarm bells about the rapid depletion of U.S. Patriot missiles, which are widely considered to be the most effective tool to counter Russian missiles and drones.
Just as Trump’s Cabinet meeting was getting underway, Zelenskyy posted on X that he received a “good phone call” from Vice President JD Vance and reiterated that the Patriot missiles remain a “top priority.”
“He’d like to have some Patriots,” Trump said of Zelenskyy on Friday. “He’d like to have some Tomahawks, which are, you know, lethal. One offensive, one defensive.”
Trump called it a “big step” to provide such a license, and then suggested that Ukraine or any other nation given the sensitive technology could one day turn and use such weapons against the U.S.
“And I don’t think this would ever happen, but, you know, those people that you give that technology, they can someday turn on you. You know, that is possible,” Trump said.
“So, we have to be very careful,” he added.
Trump said he spoke to Zelenskyy, presumably during his visit to the White House earlier this week, about the weapons systems.
“I also spoke to him about let’s get this war over with,” Trump said.
Trump said both Ukraine and Russia will have to make concessions in order to end the yearslong war, which started when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.
“I said, ‘You got to get this war over.’ I think he wants to make a deal, and I think Putin wants to make a deal. But there’s a lot of dislike, as you probably notice,” Trump said. “Well, nobody wants concessions, but they’re both going to have to make some concessions. I mean, you got to make a deal.”
Former Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov attends a march in memory of Russian opposition leader and former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov on March 1, 2015 in Moscow, Russia. (Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images)
(LONDON) — Once one of the most powerful men in Russia, Mikhail Kasyanov now lives in exile in Latvia, his name on a list of “extremists and terrorists” that the Kremlin alleges are trying to overthrow the state.
Kasyanov first served as Russia’s finance minister before being elevated to prime minister under President Vladimir Putin from May 2000 to February 2004 — the early years of Putin’s time in office when the future strongman was embedding his control and beginning to formulate his vision of a revitalized Russia.
Putin’s decades-long project culminated in the February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a gambit now in its fifth year. Kasyanov told ABC News last week that the campaign has achieved none of Putin’s goals and could yet prove an existential challenge to the Kremlin regime.
In recent months, Kasyanov told ABC News on the sidelines of the Chatham House think tank conference in London, “the overall sentiment, overall attitude, to Putin started to change.”
Among the factors applying more pressure to the Kremlin are expanding Ukrainian long-range drone strikes on Russia’s oil production, refining and export facilities — plus on the capital Moscow and the so-called “second capital” St. Petersburg — apparent public concern about spreading fuel shortages, troubling macro-economic indicators and new restrictions on internet usage, Kasyanov said.
Putin, Kasyanov said, built his image around providing both stability and security. “There is nothing on this — no stability and no security,” he said, adding, “The situation now has started to change in the minds of people — not only the ruling group, but also just the middle class, who in fact, could in any country be a driving force for any changes.”
That middle class is a key constituency for the Kremlin. Concentrated in Russia’s largest cities, analysts have watched keenly for any hint of dissent from this social strata.
Putin’s continued refusal to order a general mobilization despite Russia’s enormous battlefield losses and reported manpower strains have been interpreted by some analysts as a tacit acknowledgement that the Kremlin does not want to risk urban, middle class ire. “Putin is very much concerned about this,” Kasyanov suggested.
In cities like Moscow, St. Petersburg and Yekaterinburg, Kasyanov said, it had until recently been possible to continue as if “nothing is happening.”
“But, in the spring and now, of course, Ukraine changed their attitude. They have an advantage in long-range missiles and they have an advantage in drones,” Kasyanov said.
“Gradually, they moved the war from being an ‘accident’ somewhere, an emergency case somewhere in the corner of Russia, to Russia — even to Moscow. And that is quite a significant change.”
‘He needs pressure’
Kayanov said Western powers should seek to exploit the growing pressure on Putin and force him back to the negotiating table with genuine concessions, not the same maximalist demands the Kremlin has long made of Ukraine.
“It could happen by the end of the year if consistent pressure continues,” Kasyanov said. Russia’s growing budget deficit — which as of last month reached 2.5% of GDP, according to preliminary Finance Ministry data — could prove a particular pain point, he added.
So too might international sanctions on — and long-range Ukrainian drone attacks on — Russia’s vital oil industry, Kasyanov added. “By the end of the year, he will face a big problem,” Kasyanov said of Putin.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov this week acknowledged some economic strains, telling reporters that Russia’s rate of growth is currently “insufficient.” But Peskov said the problems facing the country were not critical, but rather a reflection of the “rather dire state” of the global economy.
On the diplomatic front, Kasyanov said Moscow has largely failed to convert apparent diplomatic openings with Washington — for example its success at Putin’s summit with President Donald Trump in Anchorage in August 2025.
“What Putin wanted was to divide the transatlantic unity, dreaming of what they call the ‘Anchorage spirit,'” Kasyanov said, referring to the U.S.-Russian understanding that Moscow said was reached at the Alaska summit, which was widely interpreted as a diplomatic coup for the Kremlin.
Broadly, Kasyanov suggested that Washington had a “wrong understanding of the whole problem.” He added, “All those years, it was a useless undertaking trying to give a carrot to Putin. Because they don’t understand what the Putin regime is about.”
The negotiations, Kasyanov suggested, were interpreted by the Kremlin “as a demonstration of weakness.” Nonetheless, both Moscow and Kyiv have acknowledged that the current conflict can only end with a diplomatic settlement.
Trump has repeatedly said he is the only Western leader capable of pressuring Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to agree a deal to end the fighting. This week, Trump told Fox News he believes that Putin is “ready to make a deal,” possibly “soon.”
“I tell him the same thing all the time. I don’t want to go into great detail, but I say: ‘Vladimir, it’s time for you to stop. It’s time for this war to end,'” Trump said. “It takes two to tango. But I think he’s ready to make a deal,” Trump added.
Earlier this month, Trump told ABC News of a potential deal, “We’re getting much closer than people realize, and President Putin wants it to end.”
But for all the Russian maneuvers and White House criticism directed toward Kyiv, Western funds and weapons have continued to flow into Ukrainian hands.
Last week, during a warm face-to-face meeting with Zelenskyy, Trump said Ukraine would be allowed to produce key Patriot surface-to-air system interceptors.
“That is, I think, creating a shock in Moscow,” Kasyanov said of the resolute Western backing of Ukraine.
Life after Putin
Putin dismissed Kasyanov and his cabinet in early 2004, weeks before that year’s presidential election. In the years that followed, Kasyanov became a prominent opposition figure, faced fraud charges — which he denied — and was blocked from standing as a candidate in Russia’s 2008 presidential election.
After Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine In 2022, Kasyanov left Russia. He now leads the People’s Freedom Party from Riga — “temporarily,” according to his business card.
Kasyanov, 68, said he has no concrete political ambitions in a post-Putin Russia. Rather, he suggested that the best case scenario would be a “long process” of political normalization and eventual democratization.
A years-long “gray period,” he said, could see Putin’s successors allow “imitation” or “quasi” elections and the return of a true political opposition, which Kasyanov hopes will eventually give way to a genuine vote that draws real legitimacy from the population.
“If Putin stays in power, it means there will be another period in which Russia will represent a threat and there will continue to be some kind of negotiations and preparations for some kind of revanche, as we saw in previous years,” Kasyanov said.
For the time being, Kasyanov said he expects Putin to simultaneously seek to “destroy unity” within Europe and within the transatlantic system and seek negotiations.
On the domestic front, Putin will continue to keep a tight grip on the narrative, Kasyanov said, lionizing Russian achievements in the war like the retention of Crimea, further territorial gains in southern and eastern Ukraine and a supposed defeat of NATO.
In the long term, Kasyanov said he still hopes for Putin to leave the scene, one way or another. But he doubts Putin will be overthrown from the inside.
“I don’t think there will be a coup, because there are no such people. All those people inside who were capable, with strength, disappeared,” Kasyanov said. There are, he added, people in Russia who are “ready for changes, but they are not ready to fight, because they immediately will be in jail.”
“When the situation starts to change, some of us could come back to participate in quasi-elections, which will happen not in two years after Putin, maybe in three years, maybe in four years. And at that time, real change could start,” he said.
“I hope my country will be a normal European state,” Kasyanov said. “We’ll see.”
