An emphatic election victory for Britain's environmentalist Green Party is a nightmare for Prime Minister Keir Starmer that raises questions about how long he will continue as leader.

Less than two years after winning power in a landslide, Starmer's center-left Labour Party not only lost a longtime stronghold in its northern England heartlands — it came third, finishing behind both the left-leaning Greens and the hard-right party Reform U.K.

Sweden's military has intercepted a suspected Russian drone off the south of the country as a French aircraft carrier was docked in the port of Malmö, officials said.

The armed forces said Thursday that a Swedish naval ship observed the suspected drone during a patrol in the Öresund, the strait that divides Sweden from Denmark. They said that unspecified countermeasures were taken to disrupt the drone, and that contact with it was then lost.

The imprisoned leader of a militant Kurdish group in Turkey on Friday urged for new legislation that would advance a peace initiative with the Turkish government in the wake of their decades‑long conflict.

The appeal by Abullah Ocalan came a year after his historic call for the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, to lay down its arms and dissolve itself.

China's legislature has dismissed 19 members, including nine who are military officers, one week ahead of the start of its annual meeting.

The late Thursday announcement did not say why the deputies had been removed, but such removals are generally tied to corruption investigations.

Iran said Friday that in order to reach a deal, the United States will have to drop its "excessive demands", tempering the optimism expressed after talks seen as a last-ditch bid to avert war.

The Oman-mediated talks follow repeated threats from President Donald Trump to strike Iran, and with the United States conducting its biggest military build-up in the region in decades.

Iran and the United States held hours of indirect negotiations Thursday over Tehran's nuclear program but walked away without a deal, leaving the danger of another Mideast war on the table as the U.S. has gathered a massive fleet of aircraft and warships in the region.

Oman's Foreign Minister Badr al-Busaidi, who mediated the talks in Geneva, said there had been "significant progress in the negotiation" without elaborating.

Pakistan's defense minister early Friday said that his country had run out of "patience" and now considers itself in an "open war" with neighboring Afghanistan after both sides launched strikes following what Islamabad described as an Afghan cross-border attack.

In a post on X, Defense Minister Khawaja Mohammad Asif said Pakistan had hoped for peace in Afghanistan after the withdrawal of NATO forces and expected the Taliban to focus on the welfare of the Afghan people and regional stability. Instead, he alleged, the Taliban had turned Afghanistan "into a colony of India," gathered militants from around the world and begun "exporting terrorism."

Iran's Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Thursday that the latest round of talks with the United States dealt with the nuclear program and the lifting of sanctions, adding that negotiators made "good progress".

"We made very good progress and entered into the elements of an agreement very seriously, both in the nuclear field and in the sanctions field," Araghchi told state TV after the talks in Geneva ended.

U.S. and Ukrainian officials were meeting in Geneva on Thursday to discuss advancing efforts to end Russia's four-year invasion of Ukraine, just as Moscow signaled it was in no hurry to sign a deal.

Cuba will defend itself against any "terrorist aggression," President Miguel Diaz-Canel declared Thursday, a day after a deadly shoot-out between gunmen on a U.S.-registered speedboat and Cuban coast guard vessels.

"Cuba will defend itself with determination and firmness against any terrorist and mercenary aggression against its sovereignty and national stability," the president said on X, denouncing Wednesday's confrontation as an attempted "infiltration."