What happened
Russian glide bombs yesterday killed at least 33 people in two passenger buses in Kramatorsk, one of the largest cities in Ukraine’s eastern frontline “fortress belt.” Including an attack on an apartment complex in Pryluky that killed 22 people on Wednesday, Russian strikes killed 78 Ukrainians and wounded 215 in the past two days, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said yesterday evening. 

Who said what
As Russia and Ukraine “remain largely deadlocked on the front line,” The Associated Press said, Moscow has “escalated its aerial attack in recent weeks,” targeting civilian infrastructure. The “dramatic surge in Russian attacks” has come with a “heavy increase in civilian casualties,” the BBC said. Yesterday’s bus strike was the “deadliest single attack this year,” CNN said. The precision targeting of buses, bridges and trains is “reminiscent of Russia’s larger strikes earlier in the war,” The Washington Post said. 

What next?
Zelenskyy said Ukrainian negotiators would meet in the U.S. with Trump envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff today and tomorrow to discuss increasing air defense and other issues. Kushner and Witkoff have also held talks with Russia “about bringing a U.S. investor into the Nord Stream pipelines,” Reuters reported yesterday.

What happened
An ICE agent yesterday shot and injured a Dominican immigrant in his car in New York City’s heavily Latino Marble Hill neighborhood. The Homeland Security Department said the “criminal illegal alien” was shot during a “targeted enforcement operation,” but provided no details about what precipitated the shooting. New York officials said a 5-year-old boy was in the car when an agent fired multiple shots inside.

Who said what
The agents who surrounded the man’s vehicle “wore construction vests and masks that concealed their faces,” New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani told reporters last night. “There was no reasonable way to identify them as ICE agents.” New York Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch identified the injured man as Oscar Belgal, 28, and said the child was believed to be his son. “Thank God that child is physically unharmed,” Mamdani said. 

ICE agents have “fired their guns during more than a dozen vehicle stops since last year, killing at least four people,” The Associated Press said. After a shooting in Austin last month, “ICE ordered its officers” to “make vehicle stops only if they have completed specific training.” But the agency this week also “told agents to increase arrests by 1,000 more people daily,” CNN said.

What next?
Mamdani and Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) both said they had spoken with President Donald Trump and DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, expressing outrage, requesting details and any body camera footage, and demanding a halt to ICE enforcement in New York. Tisch said federal agents had taken over the investigation.

An unnamed exoplanet formed from the remnants of a dying star — a phoenix planet — has been found circling a white dwarf for the first time, according to a study published in the journal Nature Astronomy. White dwarfs are created when stars “exhaust the hydrogen in their cores needed to fuel nuclear fusion,” said Space.com.

The atmosphere of this white dwarf, HS 0209+0832, had an “unusual chemical signature” with “oddly heavy elements including zinc, copper and, most notably, niobium,” that are “created during the death of a star,” the European Research Council said in a news release. This signature is likely the white dwarf “feeding off a newly formed second-generation giant planet” that “condensed out of a new disc of material formed during the star’s death.” Scientists suspect that the atmosphere of the phoenix planet is “being stripped by the white dwarf’s stellar winds, causing the rare elements to fall back onto the zombie star,” said Live Science.

There may be more phoenix planets circling white dwarfs. “Over 95% of stars in the Milky Way will evolve to become a white dwarf,” said lead study author Jamie Williams to Reuters. In the future, our own solar system could “host a second-generation planet formed from the ashes of our sun,” the ERC said.

While this is a gas planet, other phoenix planets could be rocky or even hold life. White dwarfs “cool predictably over time,” said Williams. If a “second-generation rocky planet formed close enough to the white dwarf,” it could “remain in the habitable zone for billions of years.”