A new prisoner swap between Ukraine and Russia has begun, officials in both countries said Monday, with Ukrainian soldiers who have spent nearly the entire duration of the war in captivity among those returning home.

The exchange, agreed last week during talks in Turkey, involves detained people under the age of 25, as well as those who are seriously wounded, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky confirmed on Telegram.

It follows a dispute at the weekend during which Moscow accused Ukraine of holding up the exchange — a claim that Kyiv denied.

“Our people are home,” Zelensky wrote. “Ukrainians are returning home from Russian captivity. The exchange began today and will continue in several stages over the next few days.”

Among those being released are Ukrainian soldiers who defended the city of Mariupol, which suffered a brutal Russian assault in the first few weeks of the war, the Ukraine Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War said.

The vast majority of those being released have been in captivity since 2022, according to Dmytro Lubinets, Ukraine’s parliamentary commissioner for human rights.

Russia’s Ministry of Defense also confirmed that the exchange is underway. “The Russian servicemen are currently in the Republic of Belarus, where they are receiving the necessary psychological and medical assistance,” the ministry said.

Vladimir Medinsky, the head of Russia’s delegation for peace talks with Ukraine, said last week that the exchange would be the largest since the start of the three-year war. He said Russia would transfer the bodies of more than 6,000 killed Ukrainian troops, plus an unspecified number of wounded servicemen.

Monday’s news comes after a weekend of accusations being hurled between both Moscow and Kyiv in relation to the exchange.

Russia accused Ukraine of unexpectedly postponing the transfer of dead Ukrainian soldiers’ bodies, leaving hundreds of body bags inside refrigerated trucks waiting at an exchange point it said Kyiv had agreed to.

Ukrainian officials rejected Russia’s account of events, saying that the two sides had agreed to exchange seriously wounded and young troops on Saturday, but a date had not yet been set for the repatriation of soldiers’ remains.

The prisoner swap was a result of a second set of direct peace negotiations that took place last Monday in Istanbul. Though the exchange was agreed upon, there were no major breakthroughs, with talks lasting a little over an hour.

As the prisoner exchange will last multiple days, and is “quite complex,” negotiations between Russia and Ukraine will “continue virtually every day,” Zelensky said Monday.

“We count on the full implementation of the humanitarian agreements reached during the meeting in Istanbul. We are doing everything possible to bring back every single person. We are working toward this at every level,” he added.

China said that by the end of this year all tertiary level hospitals must offer epidural anesthesia during childbirth, a move it said would help promote a “friendly childbearing environment” for women.

Tertiary hospitals – those with more than 500 beds – must provide epidural anesthesia services by 2025 while secondary hospitals – those containing more than 100 beds – must provide the services by 2027, China’s National Health Commission (NHC) said in a statement last week.

Authorities are struggling to boost birth rates in the world’s second largest economy after China’s population fell for a third consecutive year in 2024 with experts warning the downturn will worsen in the coming years.

Around 30% of pregnant women in China receive anesthesia to relieve pain during childbirth, compared with more than 70% in some developed countries, the official China Daily said.

The World Health Organization recommends epidurals for healthy pregnant women requesting pain relief and it is widely utilized in many countries around the world, including France, where around 82% of pregnant women opt to have one, and in the United States and Canada where more than 67% do.

The move will “improve the comfort level and security of medical services” and “further enhance people’s sense of happiness and promote a friendly childbearing environment,” the NHC said.

A growing number of provinces across China are also beginning to include childbirth anesthesia costs as part of their medical insurance schemes to encourage more women to have children.

High childcare costs as well as job uncertainty and a slowing economy have discouraged many young Chinese from getting married and starting a family.

In June, health authorities in China’s southwestern Sichuan province proposed to extend marriage leave up to 25 days and maternity leave up to 150 days, to help create a “fertility-friendly society.”

Canada will meet NATO’s military spending guideline by early next year and diversify defense spending away from the United States, Prime Minister Mark Carney said Monday, asserting that Washington no longer plays a predominant role on the world stage.

The announcement means Canada will achieve NATO’s spending target of 2% of gross domestic product five years earlier than previously planned.

“Our military infrastructure and equipment have aged, hindering our military preparedness,” Carney said. “Only one of our four submarines is seaworthy. Less than half of our maritime fleet and land vehicles are operational. More broadly, we are too reliant on the United States.”

According to NATO figures, Canada was estimated to be spending 1.45% of GDP on its military budget, below the 2% target that NATO countries have set for themselves. Canada previously said it was on track to meet NATO’s target by the end of the decade.

“Our goal is to protect Canadians, not to satisfy NATO accountants,” Carney said in a speech at the University of Toronto.

Canada is about to host US President Donald Trump and other leaders at a summit of the Group of Seven leading industrialized nations in Alberta on June 15-17, and before the NATO summit in Europe. NATO allies are poised to increase the commitment well beyond the 2% target.

NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte said last week that most US allies at NATO endorse Trump’s demand that they invest 5% of gross domestic product on their defense needs and are ready to ramp up security spending even more.

“We are meeting 2%. And that is the NATO target as it is today,” Carney said at a later news conference. “We will need to spend more.” He said there will be discussions on the increased spending amount and its timeline at the NATO summit.

Carney has said he intends to diversify Canada’s procurement and enhance the country’s relationship with the EU.

“We should no longer send three-quarters of our defense capital spending to America,” Carney said in a speech at the University of Toronto. “We will invest in new submarines, aircraft, ships, armed vehicles and artillery, as well as new radar, drones and sensors to monitor the seafloor and the Arctic.”

Canada has been in discussions with the European Union to join an EU drive to break its security dependency on the United States, with a focus on buying more defense equipment, including fighter jets, in Europe. Carney’s government is reviewing the purchase of U.S. F-35 fighter jets to see if there are other options.

“We stood shoulder to shoulder with the Americans throughout the Cold War and in the decades that followed, as the United States played a predominant role on the world stage. Today, that predominance is a thing of the past,” Carney said in French, one of Canada’s official languages.

He added that with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the United States became the global hegemon, noting that its strong gravitational pull became virtually irresistible and made the US “our closest ally and dominant trading partner.”

“Now the United States is beginning to monetize its hegemony: charging for access to its markets and reducing its relative contributions to our collective security,” Carney said.

Trump’s calls to make Canada the 51st US state have infuriated Canadians, and Carney won the job of prime minister after promising to confront the increased aggression shown by Trump.

The prime minister said “a new imperialism threatens.”

Carney said the long-held view that Canada’s geographic location will protect Canadians is increasingly archaic. The government is adding $9 billion Canadian (US$6.6 billion) in spending this year and Carney said the Canadian Coast Guard will be now be a part of the military.

European allies and Canada have already been investing heavily in their armed forces, as well as on weapons and ammunition, since Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022.

Russia launched a drone attack on Kyiv overnight into Tuesday, with air raid sirens blaring for hours and residents hearing regular explosions, and local officials reporting damage to residential buildings and at least two people wounded.

A large number of unmanned aerial vehicles are still reaching the capital, said Kyiv mayor Vitaliy Klitschko in a post on Telegram. At least two people have been wounded so far in the capital, Klitschko added.

Preliminary damage was reported in the Desnianskyi, Obolonskyi and Shevchenkivskyi districts, according to Tymur Tkachenko, head of the Kyiv city military administration.

In the southern port city of Odesa, Russian attacks struck a maternity ward, according to Andriy Yermak, Chief of Presidential Staff. A residential building was also hit, according to Odesa mayor Hennadiy Trukhanov, adding at least one person was killed based on preliminary reports.

The overnight attacks follow Russia’s biggest drone strike on Ukraine on Monday, where Russia fired 479 UAVs at Ukraine in an overnight aerial assault, surpassing the highest number of drones Moscow has launched in a single day for the second consecutive weekend.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

When Sana Yousaf turned 17, she posted a video of her birthday celebrations to more than a million followers on TikTok.

They saw her cutting a pink and cream cake beneath a matching balloon arch, the June breeze ruffling her long hair as she beamed against the backdrop of the cloud-covered Margalla Hills in Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad.

Less than 24 hours later, Sana was dead, a bullet through her chest and graphic images of her dead body going viral on Pakistani social media, outraging women across the country, who fear there are no safe spaces for them anymore – in reality, or online.

As Sana’s family prepared for her funeral, disturbing comments started popping up on her TikTok and Instagram posts, most in Urdu, celebrating her killing. “Happy to see these things happening,” read one. Another stated, “My heart is happy today, I’m going to turn on music and dance with joy.”

Under a picture of Sana wearing traditional Pakistani clothes covering her entire body, a comment said, “encouraging young women to seek attention or expose themselves can have serious negative consequences.”

The Digital Rights Foundation (DRF), a women-led nonprofit that promotes online safety, said such rhetoric “dangerously links a woman’s online presence or perceived morality to justifications for violence.”

“This form of digital vigilantism contributes to a broader culture of victim-blaming, where abuse is normalized and accountability is shifted away from the perpetrator,” the DRF said in a report released soon after Sana’s death.

Alongside toxic online comments, rage has simmered among women across Pakistan, who are demanding justice for Sana, pointing to a crisis of masculinity in the South Asian nation.

And Pakistan is far from alone in seeing heated debates over the prevalence of violence against women.

Recent multiple murders in Latin America, including a Mexican influencer who was shot dead while livestreaming, has sparked indignation and highlighted the high rates of femicide across the continent.

British miniseries“Adolescence” became a global hit this year with its raw depiction of the damage caused by online misogyny while a recent largescale Australia study found one in three men saying they have committed intimate partner violence at some point in their lives.

Few safe spaces online

Sana’s TikTok content would be familiar to any teenager online. Her recent shorts included showing off her fashionwear, singing songs while driving, and filming a blowdry at the salon.

But for prominent women’s rights campaigners, Sana’s death was the ultimate outcome of unrestricted online abuse of women in a patriarchal country.

Amber Rahim Shamsi, a prominent journalist and Pakistan editor of a news digital platform, Nukta, says she was relentlessly harassed online in 2020 for a variety of issues, including her views on women’s rights.

Shamsi agrees that there is a crisis in masculinity, “especially in how it plays out in our digital spaces.” And that it needs to be talked about “not just for women’s sake, but for men’s, too.”

According to Shamsi, “social media has amplified women’s voices – especially those of young women – who are increasingly educated, politically aware, and unafraid to own their choices. That visibility, that confidence, is unsettling for some men who have grown up believing their authority, their control, is a given.”

“It’s an identity crisis,” says Shamsi. “A subset of men is reacting with anxiety and aggression to this shift in gender dynamic as though the solution is to shrink women’s spaces, rather than question why so many boys are being raised to feel threatened by equality.”

The DRF’s report stated that since 2017 its helpline “has documented over 20,000 cases of technology-facilitated gender-based violence and online threats, numbers that have only grown.”

Kanwal Ahmed, a Pakistani social entrepreneur and storyteller, runs Soul Sister Pakistan, a Facebook group created in 2013 with over 300,000 followers. For years, it’s operated as a popular safe digital space for Pakistani women online, but Ahmed says the criticism of her page has been unrelenting.

“We have been called a man-hating, trauma-bonding club where all women do is gossip,” said Ahmed, who works with volunteers to help women in need who post on the page.

Sana is not alone when it comes to unwanted online attention that’s moved to real life. Ahmed recalled a case in 2019 of a young woman who had been stalked by a man after her friend leaked her number online.

“The only difference between her and Sana is that she wasn’t killed, the stalker turned up at her door,” said Ahmed. “You don’t have to be an influencer to face this, it can happen to anyone.”

There’s a perception in Pakistan that “violence that takes place online is not ‘real’ and is therefore less harmful,” Tariq said. But she added that what are sometimes seen as “merely virtual” online threats can often turn to physical violence.

Putting the focus on men

Much praise has been heaped on Pakistani authorities for their sensitive and swift handling of Sana’s murder, but some commentators say that’s missing the point.

Usama Khilji, the director of Bolo Bhi, a digital rights advocacy group Bolo Bhi, says Pakistan should be talking about educating boys about online harassment.

“Men in leadership positions need to be talking about these issues,” according to Khilji.

Khilji said hate speech against women in Pakistan is still “not a priority, and he’s called on the government to “show leadership in combatting online crimes against women.”

Sana’s murder comes less than two weeks after a landmark ruling by the country’s Supreme Court upheld the death penalty for Zahir Jaffer, who murdered Noor Mukkadam, the daughter of a distinguished diplomat, in 2021.

The brutal beheading horrified the country and renewed calls for better protection for victims of gender-based violence.

Noor’s father, Shaukat Mukadam, has been lauded for his relentless campaign for justice for his daughter. After the ruling, Noor’s family issued a statement saying the verdict was a “powerful reminder that women’s lives matter.”

“Every moment with her was unforgettable,” he said.

French 7’3” NBA star Victor Wembanyama may have just unlocked a new position: Shaolin monk.

Wembanyama, who ended last season early due to a rare blood clot in his right shoulder appeared to be looking for some off-season spiritual peace and strength at a Shaolin Temple in central China.

A widely circulated image showed the San Antonio Spurs center with a freshly shaven head, sitting pensively in front of small Budda statues inside a room typically used by abbots to receive guests.

Chinese state media reports confirmed on Monday that he was indeed at the temple.

NBA said on its official Weibo page on Monday that “according to reports” Wembanyama has shaved his head and begun a 10-day retreat in the Shaolin Temple.

In a separate video on Douyin, China’s version of TikTok, a bystander spotted the towering basketball player at the temple.

The 1,500-year-old monastery, nestled deep in the forested mountains of central China’s Henan province, is known for Zen Buddhism and the Chinese martial art of kung fu.

Retreats at the temple focus on discipline, meditation and inner harmony and aim to help disconnect from real-world distractions.

The 21-year-old Wembanyama – a 2024-25 NBA All-star and 2023-24 Rookie of the Year, just went through a tough season.

He had been out since February following a rare deep vein thrombosis diagnosis and several weeks later the Spurs were officially eliminated from playoffs.

Wembanyama seemingly wanted to stay low-key on his journey at the monastery.

But a state-owned outlet of Henan province, where the temple is located, reportedly learned from people at the temple that “Wembanyama is indeed currently in the Shaolin Temple, but the relevant matters are not convenient to be disclosed to the public”.

Right before the spiritual tour, the French basketballer spent a couple of fun days in Beijing. Locals spotted him shopping, playing basketball, walking in a park, and even visiting the Greal Wall, as shown in their social media footage.

The San Antonio Spurs on Friday shared a video on Instagram of Wembanyama as he visited the Great Wall of China in Beijing.

“It’s Victor Wembanyama. Life in China on the Great Wall itself, having an amazing time. It’s crazy,” he said.

The Shaolin temple often attracts well known figures. Prominent US YouTuber IShowSpeed visited to the same temple back in March, training with a kung fu master and generating millions of views on his social media accounts.