Mecca Pact Activated Amid New Ukraine Strikes

Turkey and Pakistan began rushing troops to Saudi Arabia, activating the Mecca Defense Pact signed two months ago, after an emergency Riyadh summit called over a fresh wave of Houthi attacks — the pact's first real test and a sign of how fast Gulf security is hardening. Ukraine's war ground on overnight. Russian forces hit a hospital in Kryvyi Rih, wounding five, and sent FPV drones into ambulances in Kramatorsk, killing one person and wounding four, attacks Kyiv called deliberate war crimes. A strike on a Dnipro bridge in Zaporizhzhia injured five and halted traffic, a drone killed a civilian in the Kherson region, and overnight strikes hit Odesa infrastructure without casualties. Ukrainian forces struck back at Russian military targets. Diplomacy moved in parallel: seven NATO states met in Poland as the Bergen Group to coordinate support for Kyiv, while Ukraine's parliament passed an education law addressing Hungary's complaints about its minority's rights, aimed at unblocking Budapest's EU veto on Ukraine. Elsewhere, Germany arrested former BND chief August Hanning, 80, on suspicion of espionage and treason over roughly 2,000 leaked classified documents. Nepal closed its search-and-rescue operation with 56 Ukrainians still missing. And physicist Francis Halzen won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics for building the IceCube neutrino observatory in Antarctica.