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Ireland, the Netherlands, Slovenia and Spain have said they will boycott next year’s Eurovision Song Contest, following the decision to allow Israel to compete.

The response on Thursday came immediately after the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), which runs the competition, said there would not be a vote on whether to exclude Israel, despite calls from some countries to do so.

Opponents of Israel’s participation criticise it over its genocidal war on Palestinians in Gaza – which has so far killed at least 70,125 people – and over allegations that it unfairly intervened in the most recent competition to the benefit of its entrant.

In a statement which cleared Israel to take part, the EBU said on Thursday that its members had shown “clear support for reforms to reinforce trust and protect [the] neutrality” of the contest.

The changes, which include the reintroduction of an expanded professional jury at the semifinal stage, aim to discourage governments and third parties from disproportionately promoting songs to sway voters.

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Arafat Qaddous worked construction jobs in Israel.

He was one of around 130,000 Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank with permits from the Israeli authorities to cross the separation wall into Israeli territory as a laborer. With his lawful employment inside the Green Line, which separates the West Bank from Israel, he was able to go back and forth from his hometown of Iraq Burin, near Nablus in the north, to whichever Israeli city offered work.

Before the Covid pandemic, the 51-year-old Qaddous’s work in Israel sustained his wife and five children.

His brother Qusai said Arafat’s living conditions worsened over the years, as work opportunities dried up during the pandemic, his family’s needs grew, and the West Bank’s economy tanked.

“There are hardly any jobs in the West Bank,” Qusai said, “and prices of food and goods are extremely high.”

Things got even worse after October 7, 2023: Israel indefinitely paused Palestinian workers’ permits after Hamas’s attack, and Qaddous lost his permit. So when an opportunity presented itself — a job in Taybeh, inside Israel — he took a chance.

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Ukraine wants "real peace, not appeasement" with Russia, its foreign minister said on Thursday at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the security and rights body seeking a role for itself in a post-war Ukraine.

The path ahead for peace talks is currently unclear, U.S. President Donald Trump said on Wednesday, after what he called "reasonably good" talks between Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. envoys.

"We still remember the names of those who betrayed future generations in Munich. This should never be repeated again. Principles must be untouchable, and we need real peace, not appeasement," Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha told the OSCE's annual Ministerial Council.

He was referring to a 1938 agreement with Nazi Germany in which Britain, France and Italy agreed to Hitler's annexation of the Sudetenland in what was then Czechoslovakia. The agreement is widely used as shorthand for failing to confront a threatening power.

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A US appeals court on Thursday handed a victory to Donald Trump in his effort to keep national guard troops in Washington DC, pausing a lower court order that would have ended the deployment in the coming days.

In a written order, the US court of appeals for the District of Columbia circuit lifted an injunction that said the troops needed to leave the nation’s capital by 11 December.

The DC circuit’s order, while not a final judgment, allows Trump to continue a deployment he began this summer and has ramped up in response to a 26 November shooting of two national guard members near the White House.

The order came in a lawsuit filed by the DC attorney general, Brian Schwalb, a Democrat and the capital city’s top legal officer.

More than 2,000 national guard soldiers have been in Washington since Trump’s initial deployment in August, part of the president’s contentious immigration and crime crackdown targeting Democratic-orled cities.

The guard troops in the city include contingents from the District of Columbia, as well as Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio, South Carolina, West Virginia, Georgia and Alabama.

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Donald Trump has replaced the architect originally selected to oversee his $300m planned gilded ballroom.

According to the Washington Post, which first reported the news on Thursday and cited three people familiar with the matter, architect James McCrery II and his boutique firm had been leading the project for more than three months, up until late October.

The president and McCrery disagreed at times, particularly over Trump’s interest in expanding the 90,000-sq-ft ballroom’s size, the Washington Post reported. However, it was ultimately the firm’s limited staff and missed deadlines that prompted the change, one person said.

It is unclear whether McCrery chose to step aside voluntarily. However, one source noted that he and Trump parted on good terms.

Trump has now selected Shalom Baranes as the project’s new architect, which the White House confirmed. Baranes, whose previous work includes significant federal projects such as the main Treasury building near the White House, received strong praise in a written statement from the White House spokesperson David Ingle.

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The Pentagon announced on Thursday that the US military had conducted another deadly strike on a boat suspected of carrying illegal narcotics, killing four men in the eastern Pacific, as questions mount over the legality of the attacks.

Video of the new strike was posted on social media by the US southern command, based in Florida, with a statement saying that, at the direction of Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, “Joint Task Force Southern Spear conducted a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel in international waters operated by a Designated Terrorist Organization”.

“Intelligence confirmed that the vessel was carrying illicit narcotics and transiting along a known narco-trafficking route in the Eastern Pacific. Four male narco-terrorists aboard the vessel were killed,” the statement added.

The latest strike comes as the Pentagon and the White House have struggled to answer questions about the legal basis for the campaign to kill suspected drug smugglers with military strikes, with US lawmakers promising to investigate the first such attack, in September, in which two survivors clinging to wreckage were killed in a follow-on strike.

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Turning Point USA CEO Erika Kirk has some thoughts on New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the type of people who voted for him.

“You know, it’s so interesting, because I lived in Manhattan for a while, and I loved this city,” Kirk told The New York Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin at the Dealbook Summit on Wednesday.

Sorkin had pointed out that Mamdani, a democratic socialist and the city’s first Muslim mayor, was someone who had “captured younger voters” but was on the “complete opposite end” of where Kirk’s late husband, right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, would have stood politically. He then asked Kirk for her take on the new mayor.

Kirk answered that she wanted to approach the question “as a female voter,” due to the large number of women who voted for Mamdani.

“I think there’s a tendency, especially when you live in a city like Manhattan, where, again, you are so career-driven, and you almost look to the government as a form of replacement for certain things, relationship-wise, even,” she said. “You see things a little bit differently.”

“What I don’t want to have happen is women, young women, in the city look to the government as a solution,” she said. “To put off having a family or a marriage, because you’re relying on the government to support you, instead of being united with a husband, where you can support yourself and your husband can support [you], and you guys can all combine together.”

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The Supreme Court on Thursday came to the rescue of Texas Republicans, allowing next year’s elections to be held under the state’s congressional redistricting plan favorable to the GOP and pushed by President Donald Trump despite a lower-court ruling that the map likely discriminates on the basis of race.

The justices acted on an emergency request from Texas for quick action because qualifying in the new districts already has begun, with primary elections in March.

The Supreme Court’s order puts the 2-1 ruling blocking the map on hold at least until after the high court issues a final decision in the case. Justice Samuel Alito had previously temporarily blocked the order while the full court considered the Texas appeal.

The justices have blocked past lower-court rulings in congressional redistricting cases, most recently in Alabama and Louisiana, that came several months before elections.

The Texas congressional map enacted last summer at Trump’s urging was engineered to give Republicans five additional House seats.

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