Guerre en Ukraine: des frappes russes font deux morts et plusieurs blessés à Kharkiv
Christmas in Kyiv, destruction in the West Bank, the funeral of Mani and the winter solstice at Stonehenge: the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists
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© Photograph: Isabel Infantes/Reuters

© Photograph: Isabel Infantes/Reuters

© Photograph: Isabel Infantes/Reuters
European leaders may take part online as Zelensky looks to ‘finalise’ an agreement he says is ‘90% completed’

© AFP/Getty
Meeting on Sunday will follow flurry of US, Russian and Ukrainian talks, but Putin has shown little sign of softening
Volodymyr Zelenskyy is to travel to the US for a planned meeting with Donald Trump on Sunday, as Washington continues to push for a possible peace deal between Kyiv and Moscow.
The Ukrainian president said the visit would take place at a location in Florida – widely expected to be Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort – in what would be the latest development in a diplomatic push that began in November with the circulation of a 28-point US plan shaped with input from Russian officials.
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© Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

© Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

© Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Feted birth of bambina Lara in Pagliara dei Marsi highlights sticky national debate over country’s ‘demographic winter’
In Pagliara dei Marsi, an ancient rural village on the slopes of Mount Girifalco in Italy’s Abruzzo region, cats vastly outnumber people.
They weave through the narrow streets, wander in and out of homes, and stretch out on walls overlooking the mountains. Their purrs are a consistent hum in the quiet that has come with decades of population decline.
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© Photograph: Roberto Salomone/The Guardian

© Photograph: Roberto Salomone/The Guardian

© Photograph: Roberto Salomone/The Guardian
Russian state has tolerated parallel probiv market for its convenience but now Ukrainian spies are exploiting it
Russia is scrambling to rein in the country’s sprawling illicit market for leaked personal data, a shadowy ecosystem long exploited by investigative journalists, police and criminal groups.
For more than a decade, Russia’s so-called probiv market – a term derived from the verb “to pierce” or “to punch into a search bar” – has operated as a parallel information economy built on a network of corrupt officials, traffic police, bank employees and low-level security staff willing to sell access to restricted government or corporate databases.
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© Photograph: Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP

© Photograph: Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP

© Photograph: Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP
Cláudio Valente and one of victims, Nuno FG Loureiro, both studied at notoriously challenging Técnico in Lisbon
As investigators in Massachusetts work to piece together a motive for the murders of two Brown University students and an MIT physics professor, former classmates of the suspected gunman and one of the victims have been asking if the roots of the tragedy lie in their shared experience at a top university in Portugal.
The suspected gunman, Cláudio Valente, and one of those killed, Nuno FG Loureiro, studied at the prestigious and notoriously challenging University of Lisbon engineering and technology school, known locally as Técnico, both graduating in 2000.
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© Photograph: AP

© Photograph: AP

© Photograph: AP
René Groebli took portraits of Charlie Chaplin and Walt Disney and pioneered new modes of photography. But it was his tender, erotic pictures taken in a Paris hotel room in the 50s that really caused a stir
In 1952, two young honeymooners checked into a small hotel in Montparnasse. An everyday story in the City of Light, perhaps. But the Swiss photographer René Groebli and his wife, Rita Dürmüller, spent their time in Paris cocooned in their room producing a series of photographs – sensual, intimate, enigmatic – that would first shock then beguile viewers, works that can now be seen in a new exhibition in Zurich.
In the honeymoon pictures, Groebli’s camera traces Dürmüller’s movements – as a shirt drops from her shoulders, the turn of her neck – which, he explains, was a deliberate “artistic approach not only to intensify the depiction of reality but to make visible the emotional involvement of my wife and of me.” Dürmüller is often nude, but not solely, and never explicitly posed. It is clear that she is playing with her husband, that this is fun. And we explore their shared space: the bed curved like a cello, the windows with their opaque lace curtains. There is one graceful snap of Dürmüller hanging up her laundry like a ballerina at a barre.
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© Photograph: René Groebli Courtesy of Bildhalle

© Photograph: René Groebli Courtesy of Bildhalle

© Photograph: René Groebli Courtesy of Bildhalle
Ukrainian president will discuss peace agreement with Trump at Mar-A-Lago on Sunday

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Zelensky has said that he is open to creating a demilitarised zone in Ukraine’s east as a proposed peace deal edges forward

© ZelenskyyUa
Retirees with ‘fantastic hunger for education’ taking part in university organised events in record numbers
Record numbers of Swedish retirees are enrolling in a university run “by pensioners for pensioners” amid increased loneliness and a growing appetite for learning and in-person interactions.
Senioruniversitet, a national university that collaborates with Sweden’s adult education institution Folkuniversitetet, has about 30 independent branches around the country which run study circles, lecture series and university courses in subjects including languages, politics, medicine and architecture.
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© Photograph: DCPhoto/Alamy

© Photograph: DCPhoto/Alamy

© Photograph: DCPhoto/Alamy
Sergei Udaltsov, Putin critic affiliated with the Communist party, convicted of justifying terrorism
A court in Russia on Thursday convicted a pro-war activist and critic of Vladimir Putin of justifying terrorism and sentenced him to six years in prison.
Sergei Udaltsov, the leader of the Left Front movement that opposes Putin and is affiliated with the Communist party, was arrested last year.
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© Photograph: Pavel Bednyakov/AP

© Photograph: Pavel Bednyakov/AP

© Photograph: Pavel Bednyakov/AP
