The Vatican issued an update Saturday on the health of Pope Francis, who remains in Rome’s Gemelli hospital under the care of doctors, saying that while his prognosis remains “complex,” the pope is no longer in “imminent danger” of death.
On Friday, the Vatican’s Holy See Press Office announced that since Francis’ condition is now considered stable, barring any major developments, updates on his health will be less frequent. The 88-year-old pontiff has spent four weeks in the hospital and is receiving treatment for double pneumonia.
Medical bulletins from the pope’s doctors, which had been almost a daily occurrence since his admission to Gemelli hospital on Feb. 14, will be issued only when there is new information, the press office said Friday. The office emphasized that Francis’ recovery is progressing, but that it will require time to make sure the improvements continue.
This also means the Holy See’s daily morning update about how the pope spent the night will no longer be issued, which leaves only the evening news briefing for journalists.
The Vatican said that this is a “a positive sign” for the Catholic faithful, meaning that no news is essentially good news.
Francis is continuing his prescribed medical treatments, which included motor physiotherapy Friday. He alternates between noninvasive mechanical ventilation at night and high-flow oxygenation with nasal cannulas during the day, according to the Vatican.
Francis had part of a lung removed as a young man after a pulmonary infection and has in recent years battled recurring bouts of bronchitis.
On Thursday, the press office said Francis celebrated the 12th anniversary of his papal election surrounded by health care staff.
Part of the pope’s hospital stay comes during the Christian season of Lent. It is the annual 40-day period of prayer, fasting and almsgiving that begins on Ash Wednesday and ends at sundown on Holy Thursday. Lent began on March 5.
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Relations between Russia and China are indeed closer than at any point since the 1950s, but they are shaped more by pragmatism, economic necessity and shared opposition to Western influence than by deep trust or historical affinity.
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CHARLEVOIX, QUEBEC, CANADA — Top diplomats from the Group of Seven leading democracies urged Russia on Friday to accept a U.S.-proposed ceasefire in the Russia-Ukraine war or face the possibility of additional sanctions.
“We called for Russia to reciprocate by agreeing to a ceasefire on equal terms and implementing it fully,” the diplomats said in a joint statement from the site of their talks talks in Canada. “We discussed imposing further costs on Russia in case such a ceasefire is not agreed, including through further sanctions, caps on oil prices, as well as additional support for Ukraine, and other means.”
The statement said the G7 countries affirmed their “unwavering support for Ukraine in defending its territorial integrity and right to exist, and its freedom, sovereignty and independence.”
The statement comes as the Kremlin said that much remains to be done on a Ukraine ceasefire deal, signaling its reluctance to fully endorse the U.S. proposal.
The White House said U.S. President Donald Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday.
On Friday, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters that U.S. officials would convene this weekend after Witkoff returns to Washington to closely examine Russia’s position and determine the next steps.
“Suffice to say, I think there is reason to be cautiously optimistic. But by the same token, we continue to recognize a difficult and complex situation,” Rubio told reporters following his meetings with counterparts.
On Friday, Canadian Foreign Minister Malie Joly said, “All G7 foreign ministers agree with the U.S. proposal of a ceasefire that is supported by Ukrainians,” and the focus now is on Russia’s response.
She added, “The ball is now in Russia’s court when it comes to Ukraine.”
British foreign minister David Lammy echoed this sentiment during interviews with the media, saying, “there is unity that now is the time for a ceasefire with no conditions. Ukraine has set their position out. It is now for Russia to accept it.”
Lammy also noted that a “coalition of the willing” is forming to provide Ukraine with the necessary “security architecture” and monitoring mechanisms to support the ceasefire.
The G7 joint statement comes as the Kremlin said that much remains to be done on a Ukraine ceasefire deal, signaling its reluctance to fully endorse the U.S. proposal.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said that Putin still awaits answers after raising several questions about the ceasefire’s implementation.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy dismissed Putin’s response as “deliberately” setting conditions that complicate and “drag out the process.”
“An unconditional 30-day interim ceasefire is the first crucial step that could bring us significantly closer to a just and lasting peace,” Zelenskyy wrote Wednesday in a post on the social media platform X.
The G7 talks in Charlevoix, Quebec, brought together ministers from Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States.
Position on China
Beyond Ukraine, G7 foreign ministers also discussed China’s role in global security, stability for the Indian and Pacific Ocean regions, and maritime security behind closed doors.
On Friday, G7 foreign ministers held a session focused on strategic challenges posed by China, North Korea, Iran and Russia. Many foreign policy analysts and military officials refer to these four nations as the “Axis of Upheaval,” describing their growing anti-Western collaboration.
The G7 joint statement said the group remains “concerned with China’s military build-up and the continued, rapid increase in China’s nuclear weapons arsenal.” They called on China “to engage in strategic risk reduction discussions and promote stability through transparency.”
The foreign ministers also reaffirmed their serious concerns over the situations in the East and South China Seas, strongly opposing any unilateral attempts to alter the status quo, particularly through force or coercion.
G7 members also emphasized the importance of peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait, reiterating their opposition to any unilateral attempts to change the status quo by force or coercion.
On Friday, Secretary of State Rubio told VOA during a press gaggle that he believes leaders from the U.S. and China will meet at some point.
“Whether they agree on things or not, they should communicate for the safety and well-being of the world,” Rubio said after wrapping up meetings with G7 foreign ministers.
A potential ceasefire in the Russia-Ukraine war could affect the U.S. presence in the Indo-Pacific, as officials and analysts suggest that ending the conflict would allow Washington to redirect resources toward addressing challenges in the region.
“I don’t think an endless, ongoing conflict in Europe or in Ukraine is good for the Indo-Pacific region. It diverts a lot of the world’s attention, time and resources away from areas where we continue to see growing threats,” Rubio told VOA earlier this week during a briefing aboard a military plane.
“In many ways, we could be spending even more time focused on the Indo-Pacific if somehow we could bring peace to the European continent,” the top U.S. diplomat noted.
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Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday that Russia had trapped the remaining Ukrainian soldiers in its western Kursk region, where they have held on for more than seven months in one of the most important battles of the war.
Putin told reporters in Moscow that the situation in Kursk was “completely under our control, and the group that invaded our territory is in isolation,” according to Reuters.
Ukraine launched a surprise incursion into Kursk last August to divert Russian forces away from the front lines and grab land to trade for its own occupied territory. Ukraine’s top commander denied this week that his men were being encircled.
Putin on Wednesday made a surprise visit to troops in Russia’s western Kursk region Wednesday, ordering soldiers to swiftly retake the region from Ukrainian forces.
“If a physical blockade occurs in the coming days, then no one will be able to leave at all, there will be only two ways — to surrender or die,” Putin said at the Thursday press conference, according to Reuters.
At the press conference, Putin also offered his qualified support for a U.S. ceasefire plan.
Putin’s comments came after Russian aerial attacks overnight killed at least two people in the southern Ukrainian region of Kherson, officials said Thursday.
Kherson Governor Oleksandr Prokudin said on Telegram that his region came under attack by Russian drones and shelling, and that one other person was injured.
In the neighboring Dnipropetrovsk region, Governor Serhiy Lysak said at least three people were hospitalized after a Russian attack hit the city of Dnipro.
Lysak said on Telegram the attack damaged multiple apartment buildings, including blowing out windows.
Officials in the Sumy region reported Thursday that Russian drones fell on a set of garages, setting about 20 of them on fire.
Ukraine’s military said Thursday it shot down 74 of the 117 drones that Russian forces launched overnight.
The intercepts took place over the Chernihiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkiv, Khmelnytskyi, Kyiv, Mykolaiv, Odesa, Poltava, Sumy, Vinnytsia and Zaporizhzhia regions, the military said.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said it shot down 77 Ukrainian drones, most of them in regions located along the Russia-Ukraine border.
Vladislav Shapsha, governor of the Kaluga region, said the attacks injured one person and damaged an industrial building, a communication tower and a power line.
The Russia military said it destroyed 30 of the drones over Bryansk, while officials in the region reported no damage or casualties.
Russian air defense also shot down drones over Kursk, Voronezh, Rostov and Belgorod, the military said.
The daily aerial attacks continue amid a U.S. push to secure a cease-fire in the conflict. The U.S. has proposed a 30-day halt in fighting, which Ukraine has said it would accept.
U.S. officials are expected to discuss the plan with Russian officials in the coming days.
Some information for this report was provided by Agence France-Presse and Reuters.
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The national assembly of Bosnia’s Serb-controlled Republika Srpska on Thursday adopted the draft of the new Republic Constitution, introduced by the autonomous republic’s president, Milorad Dodik, that includes articles that violate Bosnia’s constitution.
Bosnian state prosecutors on Wednesday had ordered the arrest of Dodik and his aides for ignoring a court summons for allegedly trying to undermine Bosnia’s constitution. Republika Srpska is an entity within Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Last month, a Bosnian court sentenced Dodik to one year in prison and banned him from politics for six years over his separatist activities and for defying decisions by the international High Representative that oversees the 1995 Dayton Accords.
That agreement ended an ethnically rooted war that lasted more than three years and killed 100,000 people.
Dodik rejected the arrest warrant, telling journalists in the regional capital, Banja Luka, on Wednesday that it was politically motivated and that he would ask Russia to veto an extension of the presence of EUFOR, the European Union’s peacekeeping force in Bosnia, at the U.N. Security Council.
In an interview Thursday with VOA’s Bosnian Service, Dodik’s lawyer, Anto Nobilo, said Dodik does not recognize either the Bosnian court or state prosecutor’s office, and thus does not need legal defense.
“I do not believe there will be Dodik’s arrest,” Nobilo said. “Mr. Dodik will not cooperate, or name his defense team, because he does not consider the proceedings legitimate. … Bosnia needs this situation defused immediately. This is a huge constitutional and legal and political crisis and has to be resolved politically.”
Nenad Stevandic, president of Republika Srpska’s national assembly and a close ally of Dodik, denounced the moves against the Serb-controlled autonomous republic as an attack on the constitutional order.
“We are absolutely right,” he said Wednesday. “However, to be right in Bosnia and Herzegovina means to be persecuted.”
Meanwhile, in Washington, three members of the U.S. Senate — Chuck Grassley, Jeanne Shaheen and Jim Risch — led a group of nine other members of the U.S. Congress in calling on Secretary of State Marco Rubio to prevent further deterioration in Bosnia.
“We are deeply concerned about the recent actions of Milorad Dodik, the leader of the Republika Srpska entity within Bosnia and Herzegovina,” they wrote in a letter to Rubio. “For years, he has engaged in secessionist activity, challenging Bosnia and Herzegovina’s state institutions, undermining the constitution and threatening the territorial integrity of the country.”
The U.S. imposed sanctions on Dodik and his “patronage network” in 2023 and again in January of this year.
Asked by VOA while en route Monday to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, if the U.S. was considering “any punitive action against Dodik,” Rubio said the Trump administration did not want to see a partition of Bosnia.
“The last thing the world needs is another crisis, and we’ve spoken out about that already,” he said. “As far as what we maybe do next, we’re reviewing those options. But it’s been abundantly clear that whatever differences may exist internally there, this cannot lead to a country breaking apart, and it cannot lead to another conflict.”
Experts say the actions of Dodik and the Republika Srpska national assembly have precipitated Bosnia’s most serious constitutional crisis since 1995.
“First of all, it is a reflection of [Dodik’s] disrespect for fundamental state institutions, meaning, the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina and all those fundamental postulates on which the constitutional-legal order rests,” Milos Davidovic, professor of law at the University of Sarajevo, told VOA’s Bosnian Service.
Ahmed Kico, a political and security expert, told VOA the actions of Dodik and the Republika Srpska national assembly were among “hybrid operations … realized at the behest of the Russian Federation and Serbia … therefore, it is a really dangerous situation where they are trying to show and prove that Bosnia and Herzegovina’s survival is not possible as a democratic state.”
Amid the growing crisis, additional European peacekeepers arrived in Bosnia on Wednesday to bolster those of EUFOR.
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PARIS — On the way to investigate the scene of a historic asteroid collision, a European spacecraft swung by Mars and captured rare images of the red planet’s mysterious small moon Deimos, the European Space Agency said Thursday.
Europe’s HERA mission is aiming to find out how much of an impact a NASA spacecraft made when it deliberately smashed into an asteroid in 2022 in the first test of our planetary defenses.
But HERA will not reach the asteroid — which is 11 million kilometers from Earth in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter — until late 2026.
On the long voyage there, the spacecraft swung around Mars on Wednesday.
The spacecraft used the planet’s gravity to get a “kick” that also changed its direction and saved fuel, mission analyst Pablo Munoz told a press conference.
For an hour, HERA flew as close as 5,600 kilometers from the Martian surface, at a speed of 33,480 kilometers an hour.
It used the opportunity to test some of its scientific instruments, snapping around 600 pictures, including rare ones of Deimos.
The lumpy, 12.5-kilometer-wide moon is the smaller and less well-known of the two moons of Mars.
Exactly how Deimos and the bigger Phobos were formed remains a matter of debate.
Some scientists believe they were once asteroids that were captured in the gravity of Mars, while others think they could have been shot from a massive impact on the surface.
The new images add “another piece of the puzzle” to efforts to determine their origin, Marcel Popescu of the Astronomical Institute of the Romanian Academy said.
There are hopes that data from HERA’s “HyperScout” and thermal infrared imagers — which observe colors beyond the limits of the human eye — will shed light on this mystery by discovering more about the moon’s composition.
Those infrared imagers are why the red planet appears blue in some of the photos.
Next, HERA will turn its focus back to the asteroid Dimorphos.
When NASA’s DART mission smashed into Dimorphos in 2022, it shortened the 160-meter-wide asteroid’s orbit around its big brother Didymos by 33 minutes.
Although Dimorphos itself posed no threat to Earth, HERA intends to discover whether this technique could be an effective way for Earth to defend itself against possibly existence-threatening asteroids in the future.
Space agencies have working to ramp up Earth’s planetary defenses, monitoring for potential threats so they can be dealt with as soon as possible.
Earlier this year, a newly discovered asteroid capable of destroying a city was briefly given a more than 3% chance of hitting Earth in 2032.
However further observations sent the chances of a direct hit back down to nearly zero.
Richard Moissl, head of the ESA’s planetary defense office, said that asteroid, 2024 YR, followed a pattern that will become more common.
As we get better at scanning the skies, “we will discover asteroids at a higher rate,” he said.
The ESA is developing a second planetary defense mission to observe the 350-metre-wide asteroid Apophis, which will fly just 32,000 kilometers from Earth on April 13, 2029.
If approved by the ESA’s ministerial council, the Ramses mission will launch in 2028, reaching the asteroid two months before it approaches Earth.
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U.S. and Russian officials are expected to meet in Moscow to discuss a U.S. proposal for a 30-day ceasefire in Russia’s war in Ukraine.
The Kremlin said Thursday that U.S. negotiators were on the way to Russia. That followed comments Wednesday from the White House saying special envoy Steve Witkoff would head to Moscow.
“People are going to Russia right now as we speak,” U.S. President Donald Trump told reporters Wednesday. “And hopefully we can get a ceasefire from Russia.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told Fox News that national security adviser Mike Waltz spoke to his Russian counterpart on Wednesday.
U.S. officials met earlier this week with Ukrainian officials in Saudi Arabia to present the ceasefire plan.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy welcomed the U.S. effort, saying Wednesday Ukraine is “ready for a ceasefire for 30 days as proposed by the American side.”
Zelenskyy said the halt in fighting could be used to create a broader peace deal for the conflict, which began with Russia’s February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Some information for this report was provided by The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters.
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VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis marks 12 years as head of the Catholic Church on Thursday, seemingly out of danger after a month in hospital but with his health casting a shadow over his future.
The 88-year-old was, for a time, critically ill as he battled pneumonia in both lungs at Rome’s Gemelli hospital, where he was admitted on Feb. 14.
The Argentine’s situation has markedly improved since then, with the Vatican confirming his condition as stable on Wednesday evening, and talk is now turning to when he might go home.
But his hospitalization, the longest and most fraught of his papacy, has raised serious doubts about his ability to lead the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Catholics.
Slowing down
Francis had before now refused to make any concessions to his age or increasingly fragile health, which saw him begin using a wheelchair three years ago.
He maintained a packed daily schedule interspersed with frequent overseas trips, notably a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region in September, when he presided over huge open-air masses.
But experts say his recovery could take weeks given his age and recurring health issues, not helped by having part of one lung removed as a young man.
“The rest of his pontificate remains a question mark for the moment, including for Francis himself,” said Father Michel Kubler, a Vatican expert and former editor in chief of the French religious newspaper La Croix.
“He doesn’t know what his life will be like once he returns to the Vatican and so, no doubt, reserves the option of resigning if he can no longer cope,” he told AFP.
Francis has always left the door open to resigning were his health to deteriorate, following the example of Benedict XVI, who in 2013 became the first pope since the Middle Ages to voluntarily step down.
But the Jesuit has distanced himself from the idea more recently, insisting the job is for life.
While in hospital, Francis has delegated masses to senior cardinals but has kept working on and off, including signing decrees and receiving close colleagues.
But he has missed a month of events for the 2025 Jubilee, a holy year organized by the pope that is predicted to draw an additional 30 million pilgrims to Rome and the Vatican.
And it is hard to imagine he will be well enough to lead a full program of events for Easter, the holiest period in the Christian calendar that is less than six weeks away.
Many believe that Francis, who has not been seen in public since he was hospitalized, has to change course.
“This is the end of the pontificate as we have known it, until now,” Kubler said.
Unfinished reforms
Francis struck a sharp contrast to his cerebral predecessor when he took office, eschewing the trappings of office and reaching out to the most disadvantaged in society with a message that the Church was for everyone.
A former archbishop of Buenos Aires more at home with his flock than the cardinals of the Roman Curia, Francis introduced sweeping reforms across the Vatican and beyond.
Some of the changes, from reorganizing the Vatican’s finances to increasing the role of women and opening the Church to divorced and LGBTQ members, have been laid down in official texts.
But a wide-ranging discussion on the future of the Church, known as a Synod, is not yet finished.
And there are many who would happily see his work undone.
Traditionalists have strongly resisted his approach, and an outcry in Africa caused the Vatican to clarify its authorization of non-liturgical blessings for same-sex couples in 2023.
“Whether we like him or not, he has shifted the dial, but many things are still pending,” a Vatican source said.
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