What happened
Joint US and Saudi Arabian air strikes on Iran-backed militia positions in Iraq have intensified fears that the Middle East conflict is entering a more dangerous phase. At least 20 fighters from Iraq’s Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF) were killed in the attacks, while Iran responded by firing missiles at US military bases in Jordan, signalling an end to the latest brief lull in hostilities.

Who said what
Chatham House analyst Sanam Vakil said the conflict was becoming increasingly difficult to predict and that “everyone is trying make sense of something that is increasingly senseless”.

While Saudi Arabia has previously been involved in only a few covert strikes on Iran as part of the war, Riyadh’s “overt involvement” now marks a “new turning point in the conflict”, said Peter Beaumont in The Guardian.

The “scope of the war” in the Middle East “widened” yesterday, agreed Max Bearak in The New York Times. Iran-linked groups across the region have now “opened new fronts and reopened old ones, embroiling forces in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Lebanon and Jordan in the war that, until recently, had been contained to countries along the Persian Gulf”.

What next?
H.A. Hellyer, of the Royal United Services Institute, warned that the region had entered “uncharted territory” and it was now impossible to know how Tehran would respond because it views the conflict as an existential struggle.

What happened
England’s Football Association is under mounting pressure to consider boycotting future World Cups amid a widening backlash against a Fifa proposal to hand the commercial rights to its biggest men’s and women’s tournaments to a private investment group.

The plan – reportedly worth about £15 billion and championed by Fifa president Gianni Infantino (pictured above) – has prompted an emergency meeting of Uefa’s 55 member associations as European football seeks a united response.

Who said what
Former FA chair David Bernstein said the proposal “stinks” and argued that England should be prepared to boycott the World Cup alongside other European nations. The FA said it had been “completely unaware of this proposal” and was “deeply concerned about the lack of process and governance” surrounding it.

“Behind the scenes, there is astonishment about Infantino blindsiding many senior figures close to Fifa as well as across the game,” said Tom Morgan and Sam Dean in The Telegraph.

What next?
Uefa members are due to discuss a co-ordinated response. Any boycott would require broad European support and could affect the upcoming women’s, club and men’s World Cups. Fifa member associations have been given 53 days to decide whether to back the investment plan.

A super-Earth, 48 light-years away – approximately 1.7 times the diameter and 5.6 times the mass of our planet – may be capable of sustaining life. The exoplanet, LHS 1140 b, was found to be leaking helium, which could be indicative of the presence of an atmosphere, a necessary factor for life to flourish.

LHS 1140 b likely has an “upper atmosphere dominated by helium and depleted in hydrogen, with other volatile species trapped at lower altitudes”, said a study published in the journal Science. The exoplanet, discovered in 2017, was found to share many qualities with Earth. Although its temperatures are colder than our planet’s, it “orbits a red dwarf star within the star’s habitable zone”, which is the sweet spot “where temperatures and environmental conditions are within the range that could support liquid water on the planet’s surface”, said a news release about the study.

The question remains whether LHS 1140 b is a “bare rock with no atmosphere”, Jason Dittmann, an assistant professor of astronomy at the University of Florida and the one who first found the planet, told The Independent.

An atmosphere helps a planet hold water, regulate climate and protects it from space radiation. To determine whether the helium leak is from an atmosphere, Nasa’s James Webb Space Telescope will be used to “look for water, and if there’s water in the atmosphere, then it’s probably a stable atmosphere that will persist”, added Dittmann. Even if this exoplanet is not the next Earth, “if one potentially organic world is out there, countless others could be, too”, said Time. The existence of viable planets “dramatically” boosts the odds of alien life.