Tokyo (AP) — Japanese Princess Yuriko, the wife of wartime Emperor Hirohito’s brother and the oldest member of the imperial family, has died after her health deteriorated recently, palace officials said. She was 101.

Yuriko died Friday at a Tokyo hospital, the Imperial Household Agency said. It did not announce the cause of death, but Japanese media said she died of pneumonia.

Born in 1923 as an aristocrat, Yuriko married at age 18 to Prince Mikasa, the younger brother of Hirohito and the uncle of current Emperor Naruhito, months before the start of World War II.

She has recounted living in a shelter with her husband and their baby daughter after their residence was burned down in the US fire bombings of Tokyo in the final months of the war in 1945.

Yuriko raised five children and supported Mikasa’s research into ancient Near Eastern history, while also serving her official duties and taking part in philanthropic activities. She outlived her husband and all three sons.

Her death reduces Japan’s rapidly dwindling imperial family to 16 people, including four men, as the country faces the dilemma of how to maintain the royal family while conservatives in the governing party insist on retaining male-only succession.

The 1947 Imperial House Law, which largely preserves conservative prewar family values, allows only males to take the throne and forces female royal family members who marry commoners to lose their royal status.

The youngest male member of the imperial family, Prince Hisahito — the nephew of Emperor Naruhito — is currently the last heir apparent, posing a major problem for a system that doesn’t allow empresses. The government is debating how to keep succession stable without relying on women.

Yuriko had lived a healthy life as a centenarian before suffering a stroke and pneumonia in March. She enjoyed exercise in the morning while watching a daily fitness program on television, the Imperial Household Agency says. She also continued to read multiple newspapers and magazines and enjoyed watching news and baseball on TV. On sunny days, she sat in the palace garden or was wheeled in her wheelchair.

Yuriko was hospitalized after her stroke and had been in and out of intensive care since then. Her overall condition deteriorated over the past week, the Imperial Household Agency said.

With thousands of extra security personnel deployed on the streets of Paris and a “double ring” of security thrown around the national stadium, France is taking no chances with Thursday’s soccer match with Israel.

After shocking scenes of violence in Amsterdam last week – with accusations of an organized “hunting” of Jews following days of unrest with fans of visiting Israeli club Maccabi-Tel Aviv – the French capital is determined to avoid a repeat.

Some 4,000 officers and 1,600 stadium staff will be deployed to police the game, with about 2,500 of those officers around the stadium itself, Paris police chief Laurent Nunez said.

The elite RAID police unit will be present inside the ground, according to France’s interior minister, and an “anti-terrorist security perimeter” will ensure two separate ID checks and searches for attendees.

This fixture comes just days after several nights of clashes in Amsterdam, when at least five people were treated in hospital and dozens were arrested after Israeli fans were attacked following Maccabi Tel Aviv’s 5-0 defeat to Ajax in violence condemned as antisemitic by authorities in the Netherlands and Israel.

Tensions had been rising ahead of last Thursday’s match in the Dutch capital. Multiple social media videos showed Maccabi fans chanting anti-Arab slurs, praising Israeli military attacks in Gaza and yelling “f**k the Arabs.” Maccabi supporters also tore down flags, vandalized a taxi and set a Palestinian flag on fire, Amsterdam police said.

This Thursday’s UEFA Nations League match between France and Israel will take place in the Stade de France, the centerpiece of Paris’ 2024 Olympic Games, and about 20,000 fans are expected to attend, according to Nunez. The police chief added that there was low demand for tickets to the game in a stadium that can accommodate some 80,000 spectators.

The supporters of the Israeli national side will likely differ from the fans at Amsterdam’s Maccabi match – some of whom have a reputation for hooliganism and violence.

On Sunday, Israel specifically warned its citizens against attending the match over fears for their safety. Even so, officials are determined for the game to go ahead.

French Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau has refused to cancel or move the match, telling parliamentarians that doing so would amount to “giving in to sowers of hate.” Instead, the country’s flagship stadium will be turned into a veritable fortress.

But the match won’t only be notable for its security.

Macron will be joined by his prime minister and two former presidents, Francois Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy, in a rare display of unity.

An iron-fisted response

This game comes at a particularly tense time for politics and sport in France.

Last week, Retailleau demanded answers from Paris Saint-Germain, the city’s main club, after fans unfurled an enormous “Free Palestine” display in the stands at a Champions League tie.

Following the match, Retailleau posted on X that clubs should be wary that, “politics does not come to damage sport, which must always remain a force for unity,” promising in a later radio interview that “nothing was off the table” in terms of sanctions against clubs that refuse to toe the line and police “political” banners.

The minister set an aggressive tone in his first months in office and his response to the Amsterdam attacks was no different. In a move unprecedented even since the Hamas-led October 7 assault on Israel last year and the ongoing war in Gaza that followed, Retailleau called for prosecutors to investigate a far-left lawmaker’s post about the violence in the Dutch capital.

Marie Mesmeur had posted that the Israelis attacked in Amsterdam, “were not lynched because they were Jewish, but because they were racist and supported genocide.”

The official French response could not be more different.

Macron said the incidents, “recalled the most shameful hours of history,” in sentiments mirrored by top French officials in a flurry of X posts.

France – like much of Europe and North America – has grappled with spiking antisemitism in recent years, which has only been accentuated by the October 7 attacks and Israel’s bloody campaigns in Gaza and Lebanon.

In France specifically, less than 1% of the French population is Jewish, yet Jews are victims of 57% of all racist and antireligious attacks in the country, Retailleau told lawmakers on Tuesday.

France is home to Europe’s largest Jewish population and one of the continent’s biggest Muslim populations. In recent years, French far-right politicians have clamored to claim the moral high ground around antisemitism.

All this comes amid a diplomatic spat between Paris and Tel Aviv. Just this week, the Israeli ambassador in Paris was summoned to the French foreign ministry after two French policemen were briefly detained in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem.

France’s government has attempted to tread a difficult path between responding to Hamas’ attacks on Israel and growing antisemitism at home, and outrage at Israel’s destruction in Gaza and elsewhere. Yet, in the light of recent events in Amsterdam, it is keen to show its commitment to protecting French Jews: Thursday’s match offers the perfect opportunity.

At least 15 people have been killed and 14 injured in clashes between inmates at one of Ecuador’s largest and most notorious prisons, local authorities say.

The violence broke out early Tuesday in one of the pavilions at Litoral Penitentiary in the coastal city of Guayaquil, according to national prison agency SNAI.

Both Guayaquil, Ecuador’s largest city, and the prison itself are notorious for violent confrontations between rival gangs.

By Tuesday afternoon, authorities said they had managed to regain control of the prison and carried out a large-scale search.

Murder charges will be filed against at least nine inmates, the Attorney General’s Office said.

Ecuador’s prison system has long been the main theater of violence in the country, with hundreds of inmates killed in recent years as members of competing criminal organizations square off.

Security forces have often struggled to confront the gangs inside the overcrowded facilities, where inmates have been known to take control of branches of the penitentiaries and run criminal networks from behind bars, according to Ecuadorian authorities.

This is just the latest violent episode at Litoral Penitentiary, which has seen riots and massacres in recent years and is widely considered the country’s most dangerous prison.

Last year, more than 30 people were killed, some of them beheaded, during a multi-day uprising at the prison, while in September 2021, clashes between rival gangs left more than 100 people dead.

Two months ago, the penitentiary’s director María Daniela Icaza was killed in an armed attack while she was driving home.

Litoral Penitentiary is among five facilities that make up a major prison complex in Guayaquil.

In January, notorious gang leader José Adolfo “Fito” Macías escaped from one of those facilities, in a jailbreak that kicked off a wave of violence across the country.

Following the escape, President Daniel Noboa declared a state of emergency, deploying the armed forces across the country to crack down on gangs and criminal groups.

New Zealand’s Prime Minister Christopher Luxon made a “formal and unreserved” apology in Parliament on Tuesday for the widespread abuse, torture and neglect of hundreds of thousands of children and vulnerable adults in care, many of them Indigenous.

“It was horrific. It was heartbreaking. It was wrong. And it should never have happened,” Luxon said, as he spoke to lawmakers and a public gallery packed with survivors of the abuse.

An estimated 200,000 people in state, foster and faith-based care suffered “unimaginable” abuse over a period of seven decades, a blistering report released in July said at the end of the largest inquiry ever undertaken in New Zealand.

“For many of you it changed the course of your life, and for that, the government must take responsibility,” Luxon said.

“Words do matter and I say these words with sincerity: I have read your stories, and I believe you,” he added. The Prime Minister was apologizing on behalf of previous governments too, he said.

The results were a “national disgrace,” the inquiry’s report said, after a six-year investigation believed to be the widest-ranging of comparable probes worldwide. Of 650,000 children and vulnerable adults in state, foster, and church care between 1950 and 2019 — in a country that today has a population of 5 million — nearly a third endured physical, sexual, verbal or psychological abuse. Many more were exploited or neglected.

They were disproportionately Maori, New Zealand’s Indigenous people.

In response to the findings, New Zealand’s government agreed for the first time that historical treatment of some children in a notorious state-run hospital amounted to torture, and pledged an apology to all those abused in state, foster and religious care since 1950.

Luxon’s government was decried by some survivors and advocates earlier Tuesday ahead of the apology for not yet having divulged plans for the financial compensation of those abused.

Since September 1, the Ukrainian capital Kyiv has been spared from Russian drone attacks on just one night – October 14.

Every other night, many of its 4.5 million residents have been woken by sirens and rushed to some form of shelter or hidden in their bathrooms.

In the first week of November alone, sirens blared for 43 hours.

The onslaught is just one indicator of Russia’s ability to prosecute its assault at full throttle, even as Ukraine faces deep uncertainty about future support from the US and Europe.

The cities of Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia and Odesa have also suffered frequent drone and missile strikes in recent weeks in what appears to be a renewed Russian effort to break the resolve of Ukrainian civilians.

On Saturday night, Ukrainian air defenses detected a record 145 incoming Shahed drones.

The spike in attacks on cities comes as Russian forces continue to make incremental gains in Donetsk, while Ukrainian units suffer from manpower shortages and are increasingly stretched along the vast front line.

‘Constant anxiety’

Viktoria Kovalchuk said that after debris from a drone fell close to her home last week her 6-year-old son Teo was “very scared and grabbed onto me.”

Kovalchuk said Teo was in a state of constant anxiety. “For the past two months, when the shelling has become more frequent, we have been hiding in the bathroom or going down to the shelter in the basement,” Kovalchuk said.

“I don’t remember when we had a proper night’s sleep.”

“We will restore everything on our own and continue to work as we have been doing,” he insisted.

Alarms alone are hugely disruptive to the city’s life. Bridges close, public transport is halted, and the two parts of the capital either side of the Dnipro river are effectively cut off.

Many children don’t come to school during alerts, Usov said.

Many air defense batteries are run by volunteers from all walks of life – among them one of the judges on Ukraine’s Supreme Court, Yuriy Chumak.

“We have been doing this for over two years,” he said, but the intensity of drone attacks had peaked over the past two to three months.

Their equipment is low-tech – machine-guns on the roofs of eight high-rise buildings. “Drones were flying low, (so) it was realistic and cheap to shoot them down with a machine gun.”

“At night, we are on duty continuously. There are attacks every day now,” Chumak added.

The drone attacks seem calculated to instil fear rather than cause mass casualties, but several people have been killed in recent weeks. Among them was 15-year-old Mariya Troyanivska, described by her Kyiv school as an inspiration “who loved life and gave joy to everyone around her.”

The relentless attacks do appear to be eroding morale. The Kyiv International Institute of Sociology regularly asks people whether Ukraine should continue fighting for as long as it takes. The number saying yes has fallen from 73% in February to 63% last month.

‘Difficult’ front lines

That perception is likely fed by news from the front, where Russian assaults continue to erode Ukrainian defenses, especially close to the key hub of Pokrovsk in Donetsk.

The commander in chief of the military, Oleksander Syrskyi, said Saturday that, “the situation remains difficult and tends to escalate. The enemy, taking advantage of its numerical superiority, continues to conduct offensive actions and focuses its main efforts on the Pokrovsk and Kurakhove directions.”

After a two-week trip to Ukraine last month, analyst Konrad Muzyka of Rochan Consulting said the key problem is to integrate newly mobilized troops.

Muzyka posted on X that the Ukrainian incursion into the Russian region of Kursk “has stretched the already small Ukrainian forces even further.”

The Ukrainians are using a variety of battlefield drones to inflict losses on the Russians. Syrskyi said more than 52,000 enemy targets were destroyed or damaged by drones in October alone.

But drones cannot compensate for a shortage of infantry, Muzyka reflected. Despite a law passed earlier this year to improve mobilization, “the presence of newly mobilized units/soldiers is practically imperceptible.”

“We have a situation in which the Ukrainians not only cannot keep up with replacing losses, but also lose soldiers at an increasingly rapid pace due to falling morale,” Muzyka said on X.

Russian forces have become more adept at exploiting weaker points on the front line, enabling them to eat away at Ukrainian defenses within 6 miles (10 km) of Pokrovsk.

On many other parts of the 600-mile frontline, the Ukrainians are also on the defensive, with some analysts expecting another Russian push in the south. The only gains for the Ukrainians this year have been inside Russia, where they launched a surprise incursion in the Kursk region in August.

The negative outlook has darkened the mood among Ukraine’s allies, who talk much less about Kyiv prevailing on the battlefield – and much more about it holding enough ground to force the Kremlin to negotiate.

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin implied as much. “No single capability will turn the tide. No one system will end Putin’s assault. What matters is the combined effects of Ukraine’s military capabilities — and staying focused on what works.”

Rym Montaz of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, assesses that there is a “growing, quiet consensus that negotiations, which will entail accepting at least a temporary loss of sovereignty over territories, are the only way to end this war.”

“Kyiv is at one of its weakest points since February 2022, and the prospect of selling such a negotiation is a political minefield” for Zelensky, Montaz says.

Victory, defined by the Ukrainian government as ousting Russian troops from all its territory, is widely seen as unattainable.

In a new essay in Foreign Affairs, Richard Haass says that “Washington must grapple with the grim reality of the war and come to terms with a more plausible outcome.”

“There is no game-changing weapon or lifted restriction that would allow Ukraine to simultaneously defend what it already controls and liberate what it does not,” Haas writes.

Ukrainian officials are putting a brave face on a gloomy outlook.

Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said Saturday: “I am convinced that we are all united by the goal of achieving a just peace for Ukraine and stopping Russian aggression … We are talking about a just peace, not appeasement.”

The path to any negotiation is – to put it mildly – unclear. The Kremlin says its goals in Ukraine are unchanged: the annexation of four eastern and southern Ukrainian regions. Russian forces already occupy almost all of Luhansk and substantial parts of Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson – altogether some 20% of Ukraine.

“If Ukraine wants to persuade Russia to join peace talks, it must first stabilize the front and rebuild its forces enough to be able to conduct offensives,” says Muzyka.

Talk of how to end the conflict will now go into overdrive with Donald Trump’s election triumph. Trump has previously said he could end the war in 24 hours and in September he declared: “I think it’s in the US’ best interest to get this war finished and just get it done.”

One option favored by his vice president-elect, JD Vance, is to freeze the conflict on its current lines with a heavily fortified demilitarized zone to deter future Russian aggression. Along a poorly defined front line hundreds of miles long, that would be a daunting and perhaps impossible task.

It would reward the Kremlin with control of territories already seized. Moscow would also demand guarantees of Ukraine’s neutrality or at least the indefinite suspension of its drive to join NATO.

Even if on the backfoot, this would be impossible for President Volodymyr Zelensky to swallow without guarantees of Ukraine’s future security. And after the sacrifices of the past 1,000 days, it would also be unpalatable to many Ukrainians.

But the destination may be changing.