Pope Francis remains in ‘critical but stable’ condition in hospital, Vatican says
Tiziana FABI / AFP via Getty Images
(ROME and LONDON) — Pope Francis’s condition remains “critical but stable,” Vatican officials said in a brief update on Tuesday.
“There have been no acute respiratory episodes and hemodynamic parameters continue to be stable. In the evening, he underwent a scheduled CT scan for radiological monitoring of the bilateral pneumonia. The prognosis remains uncertain,” the Vatican said Tuesday.
The pope resumed his work activities after receiving the Eucharist.
The pope “rested well, all night long,” sleeping without interruption, Vatican sources told ABC News. He woke up on Tuesday and continued his usual therapies, the sources said.
Francis, 88, has been hospitalized at Rome’s Gemelli Hospital since Feb. 14 following a bout with bronchitis.
Vatican officials said Sunday he remained in critical condition. Officials said on Monday that he had shown a “slight improvement.”
The pontiff, who has led the Catholic Church since 2013, was diagnosed with pneumonia last Tuesday, according to the Vatican.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
(LONDON) — Many residents of northern Gaza and southern Lebanon are expected to return to their homes in the coming days and weeks, with most of the fighting in both areas paused under Israeli ceasefire agreements with Hamas and Hezbollah.
Under Israel’s multi-phased deal with Hamas, some hostages held in the Gaza Strip and Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails have started to be released. Negotiations between Israel and Hamas are expected to continue amid the first phase of the deal, which was slated to last about six weeks.
Threats to ceasefire will ‘bear the full cost,’ Israeli minister says
Katz Israel, the Israeli defense minister, said on Monday that his country would “firmly” enforce the ceasefires that have paused fighting in Gaza.
“Anyone who violates the rules or threatens IDF forces will bear the full cost,” he said in Hebrew on social media. “We will not allow a return to the reality of Oct. 7.”
Tens of thousands trek into northern Gaza
Tens of thousands of people were marching and driving on Monday back to northern Gaza, after Israel allowed them to cross into the north for the first time in over a year.
Long lines of Palestinians — some singing, others smiling and some kneeling to kiss the soil as they stepped into the northern part of the strip — were seen making their way home.
Those returning home were moving along two main routes.
Many of those who were were walking home were moving along al-Rashid Street, a path expected to be taken by about 300,000 people.
Many of those who were driving north were doing so along Salah al-Din Road.
A line of cars could be seen stretching for about 8 miles on Monday morning, as they waited for permission to cross into the northern part of Gaza.
-ABC News’ Sami Zyara, Diaa Ostaz, Jordana Miller, Nasser Atta and Samayeh Malekian
1 dead, 4 injured after IDF fired at ‘dozens of suspects’ in central Gaza
The Palestinian Red Crescent Society said its team evacuated one person who was killed, and four people who were injured, after an attack by Israeli snipers near the Wadi Gaza Bridge on Sunday.
Israel Defense Forces said in a statement that troops fired “warning shots” at “several gatherings of dozens of suspects” who the IDF said posed a threat to them.
Additionally, a rocket was destroyed by Israeli troops in southern Gaza, according to the IDF’s statement.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had introductory call with Israel’s Netanyahu
Newly confirmed Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had an introductory call on Sunday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, according to a statement from a U.S. senior defense official.
“Both leaders discussed the importance of advancing mutual security interests and priorities, especially in the face of persistent threats,” according to the statement.
Hegseth, who won Senate confirmation after being selected by President Donald Trump for the role, stressed to Netanyahu that the U.S. is “fully committed” to ensuring that Israel “has the capabilities it needs to defend itself,” according to the statement.
Additionally, the defense official said that “both leaders agreed to remain in close contact.”
Israel-Lebanon ceasefire extended to Feb. 18
The White House announced Sunday that the ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon will be extended until Feb.18.
Lebanon, Israel and the U.S. will also begin negotiations for the return of Lebanese prisoners captured after Oct. 7, 2023.
(OTTAWA, Canada) — Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has announced that he intends to resign as Liberal Party leader and prime minister once a new party leader is determined.
“I intend to resign as party leader, as prime minister, after the party selects its next leader through a robust, nationwide, competitive process,” he said Monday from Rideau Cottage in Ottawa.
“I’m a fighter. Every bone in my body has always told me to fight because I care deeply about Canadians. I care deeply about this country, and I will always be motivated by what is in the best interest of Canadians,” the prime minister said.
The development comes a month after Canada’s deputy prime minister and finance minister, Chrystia Freeland, resigned from Trudeau’s Cabinet, a sign of apparent turmoil in his government. Trudeau, 53, the leader of the Liberal Party, began serving as the 23rd prime minister of Canada in 2015.
In a letter to the prime minister announcing her resignation, Freeland cited her differences with Trudeau over how to deal with President-elect Donald Trump’s tariff threat.
“Our country today faces a grave challenge,” Freeland wrote in the letter, which she shared on social media. “The incoming administration in the United States is pursuing a policy of aggressive economic nationalism, including a threat of 25 percent tariffs.”
“We need to take that threat extremely seriously,” she continued, with actions that included the need for Canada to push back and resist “costly political gimmicks” and “building a true Team Canada response.”
Trump has proposed new tariffs on imports from Canada — the United States’ third largest supplier of agricultural products, according to the Department of Agriculture — as well as China and Mexico.
Trudeau traveled to Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private club in Florida, last month to meet with the president-elect. Trudeau told reporters at the time that his conversation with Trump was “excellent” but did not respond to any additional questions.
In her letter last month, Freeland said Trudeau told her he no longer wanted her to serve as finance minister and offered her another position in the Cabinet.
“Upon reflection, I have concluded that the only honest and viable path is for me to resign from the Cabinet,” she said in the letter, which noted that she looks forward to continuing to work with her colleagues as a Liberal member of Parliament and plans to run again for her seat in Toronto in the next federal election.
Dominic LeBlanc, the minister of intergovernmental affairs, will now also serve as the new finance minister after Freeland stepped down from the role.
Her resignation comes as Trudeau’s housing minister, Sean Fraser, also announced he will not seek reelection for personal reasons, saying he wants to spend more time with his family.
The next federal election must be held by Oct. 20.
Support for Trudeau’s party has declined steadily for months, with the Liberals currently at their lowest level of support in years, according to CBC News. The Conservative Party holds a 21-point lead over the Liberals leading up to the federal election, according to CBC News.
Trudeau’s father, former Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, served as the prime minister of Canada from 1968 to 1979 and from 1980 to 1984, before retiring from politics before the next election.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
(LONDON) — A spate of alleged sabotage operations against undersea cables in the Baltic Sea has raised the prospect of a dangerous 2025 in NATO’s northern theater, with allied leaders vowing closer surveillance of and tougher action against Russian- and Chinese-linked and other ships accused of nefarious efforts there.
“NATO will enhance its military presence in the Baltic Sea,” alliance chief Mark Rutte said in late December, after the last such instance of suspected sabotage, condemning “any attacks on critical infrastructure.”
Rutte’s commitment came after the most recent of three alleged sabotage operations in the Baltic Sea — the damaging of the Estlink 2 power cable and four internet cables on Christmas Day. The Estlink 2 cable — along with the Estlink 1 cable — transfers electricity from Finland to Estonia across the Gulf of Finland.
Finnish authorities quickly seized control of the ship suspected of the damage to the Estlink 2 cable — the Eagle S. Though flagged in the Cook Islands, Finnish and European Union authorities said the Eagle S is part of Russia’s so-called “shadow fleet” of tankers.
On Jan. 3, Finnish authorities said repair work on the cable had begun and forensic samples would be taken as part of the investigation. Eight sailors were still under a travel ban as the probe continued, they added.
NATO accuses Moscow of using tankers and other vessels to evade an international sanctions campaign on its fossil fuel exports prompted by the Kremlin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The Atlantic Council described this “shadow fleet” as made up of ageing vessels often sailing without Western insurance, under opaque ownership and with regularly changing names and national registrations.
Allied officials say some of the ailing ships are doubling as low-tech saboteur vessels.
There may be as many as 1,400 ships in Russia’s shadow fleet, according to the Windward maritime risk management firm. In December 2023, the energy cargo tracking company Vortexa calculated that 1,649 vessels had operated in what the Atlantic Council called the “opaque market” since January 2021, among them 1,089 carrying Russian crude oil.
Cat-and-mouse at sea
December’s round of suspected sabotage prompted the UK-led Joint Expeditionary Force — a defensive regional bloc also including Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden — to launch an advanced AI-assisted reaction system to “track potential threats to undersea infrastructure and monitor the Russian shadow fleet.”
A Jan. 14 meeting of NATO’s Baltic states in Helsinki, meanwhile, will focus on “measures required to secure the critical underwater infrastructure,” Finnish President Alexander Stubb said, and the “strengthening of NATO’s presence in the Baltic Sea and responding to the threat posed by Russia’s shadow fleet.”
But allies face a major challenge in surveilling some 145,560 square miles of sea crisscrossed by as many as 4,000 ships per day.
NATO tracking efforts are complicated by “the sheer scale of the global commercial shipping sector and the fact that ownership structures are often quite opaque and complex,” Sidharth Kaushal — the sea power senior research fellow at the British Royal United Services Institute think tank — told ABC News.
“A vessel may have multiple beneficial owners, its owners may not necessarily be from the state where it’s registered and so actually attributing its activity to a given state becomes very difficult,” he explained.
Russian- and Chinese-linked vessels could play a role, but so could ships seemingly unconnected to Moscow or Beijing.
“The Russians have quite a broad spectrum of commercial vessels to choose from,” Kaushal said. “It’s actually quite odd, in some ways, that they opted for a vessel that’s associated with their shadow fleet.”
The Baltic Sea is also relatively shallow. Its average depth is around 180 feet, compared to 312 feet in the North Sea and 4,900 feet in the Mediterranean Sea.
Reaching cables or pipelines at the bottom of the Baltic is far easier than in the world’s largest bodies of water, like the Atlantic Ocean with its average depth of 10,932 feet or the Pacific Ocean at 13,000 feet.
“In the Atlantic, for example, one has to use some pretty specialized equipment to go after undersea infrastructure,” Kaushal said. In the Baltic, “much simpler tools — things like dragging an anchor — are perfectly feasible means of attack.”
NATO’s toolbox
Guarding specific sites appears more realistic than identifying and surveilling all potential saboteurs. After the damage to Estlink 2 was reported, for example, Estonia said it dispatched naval vessels to protect Estlink 1.
November’s Bold Machina 2024 naval exercise in Italy also saw special forces divers test underwater sensors that NATO said could one day be used to protect underwater infrastructure.
“That’s the only way to narrow the problem — to focus on the critical infrastructure, rather than trying to achieve wide area surveillance over an area like the Baltic,” Kaushal said.
But NATO ships will still be limited in what action they can take to stop damage occurring. “International freedom of navigation limits what navies can do on international waters, or even within their own exclusive economic zone,” Kaushal said.
The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea does note that freedom of navigation may be challenged if a ship’s passage “is prejudicial to the peace, good order or security” of coastal states.
Historic agreements — like the 1884 Convention for the Protection of Submarine Telegraph Cables — might also offer allies some latitude to act against suspect vessels.
But challenging the passage of civilian shipping might have unwelcome consequences elsewhere. More muscular policing by NATO in the Baltic might encourage more assertive Chinese naval activity in the South China Sea, for example, or encourage more Iranian interdictions in the Persian Gulf.
“I think that’s something that nations, particularly Western nations, have shied away from,” Kaushal said.
Local allied leaders, at least, appear to be clamoring for action. December’s alleged attack is only the most recent of a spate of suspected sabotage incidents in the Baltic.
In November, two intersecting submarine cables — the BCS East-West Interlink connecting Lithuania to Sweden and the C-Lion1 fiber-optic cable connecting Germany to Finland — were damaged in the Baltic Sea.
Authorities suspected the Chinese-flagged cargo ship Yi Peng 3 of causing the damage. German, Swedish, Finnish and Danish officials boarded the ship off the Danish coast to inspect the vessel and question the crew. The Yi Peng 3 later set sail for Egypt.
The first notable alleged cable sabotage incident in the Baltic Sea occurred in October 2023, when the Hong Kong-flagged Newnew Polar Bear vessel dragged its anchor across and damaged the Balticconnector gas pipeline linking Estonia and Finland. The nearby EE-S1 telecoms cable was also damaged.
Investigators recovered a damaged ship’s anchor from the seabed close to the damaged cables, with gouge marks on either side of the cables indicating its trajectory. Finland’s National Bureau of Investigation said the Newnew Polar Bear was missing one of its anchors.
In August, the Chinese government admitted that the vessel damaged the underwater infrastructure “by accident,” citing “a strong storm.”
2025 in the Baltic theater
Even before ships began damaging cables in the Baltic region, the strategic sea — referred to by some allied leaders as the “NATO lake” after the accession of Sweden and Finland to the alliance — played host to covert operations apparently linked to Russia’s war on Ukraine.
The Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines carrying natural gas from Russia to Germany were bombed in September 2022, marking the first notable incident of alleged sabotage in the Baltic Sea since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
The pipelines had long been fiercely criticized by those in North America and Europe skeptical of Berlin’s business dealings with Moscow, particularly leaders in Ukraine and the Baltic region who saw the pipelines as a plank of Russian hybrid warfare.
Investigators are yet to establish who was responsible for the apparent sabotage to the pipelines, with a series of unconfirmed reports variously accusing Russia, the U.S. and Ukraine for the blasts. All have denied involvement.
The Baltic, then, is already an important theater in the wider showdown between Russia and the West.
The potential value for Russia is clear. With a handful of tankers, Moscow can force its NATO rivals to commit significant time and resources to guarding undersea infrastructure. When sabotage does occur, the Baltic’s relative ease of access and the energy needs of regional nations might amplify its impact.
“The gas grid in the area is not particularly well integrated with the rest of the European grid,” Kashaul noted. “In much of Europe, this would be a bit of a nuisance, but in the Baltic Sea limited sabotage — particularly to the gas pipelines — can actually have some pretty disproportionate effects.”
European nations are highly sensitive to gas outages given the knock on economic — and thus polling — effects. Energy insecurity has been one of the major themes undermining the continent’s response to Russia’s war. Moscow has been keen to exploit this weak spot.
But undersea escapades in the Baltic are not necessarily a free hit for Russia.
Moscow’s shadow operators have “thus far enjoyed the freedom of navigation and the ability to move Russian oil at above price cap rates quite freely through NATO controlled waters,” Kashaul said.
If NATO nations can demonstrate that sanctions-busting vessels are involved in sabotage, the ghost ships might yet face more tangible retaliation.
But that too could prompt escalation. A Danish intelligence report cited by Bloomberg, for example, noted that Russia may begin attaching military escorts to tankers transiting the Baltics.
Such a development is “quite plausible,” Kashaul said, though noted the intensity of regular convoy operations may be beyond Russia’s relatively small Baltic Fleet.
A more militarized approach, he added, may also unsettle the non-Russian nationals crewing the vessels.
“Whether the people on those ships want to take the risk, even if the Russians are offering escorts and convoys, is another factor,” Kashaul said.
ABC News’ Zoe Magee and Ellie Kaufman contributed to this report.
