VATICAN CITY, April 26 (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump and Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in Rome for the funeral of Pope Francis, met one-on-one in a marble-lined Vatican basilica on Saturday to try to revive faltering efforts to end Russia's war with Ukraine.

Zelenskiy said the meeting could prove historic if it delivers the kind of peace he is hoping for, and a White House spokesman called it "very productive".

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The two leaders, leaning in close to each other with no aides around them while seated in St Peter's Basilica, spoke for about 15 minutes, according to Zelenskiy's office, and images of the meeting released by Kyiv and Washington.

After Pope Francis's funeral service, Trump boarded Air Force One and departed Rome. While in the air he published a social media post in which he took a tough tone on Russian President Vladimir Putin.

"There was no reason for Putin to be shooting missiles into civilian areas, cities and towns, over the last few days," Trump posted on Truth Social. Twelve people were killed on Thursday when a missile fired by Russia hit a Kyiv apartment block.

"It makes me think that maybe he doesn’t want to stop the war, he's just tapping me along, and has to be dealt with differently, through 'Banking' or 'Secondary Sanctions?' Too many people are dying!!!" Trump wrote.

Trump's post was a departure from his usual rhetoric which has seen the toughest criticism directed at Zelenskiy, while he has spoken positively about Putin.

In a post on social media platform Telegram, Zelenskiy wrote: "Good meeting. One-on-one, we managed to discuss a lot. We hope for a result from all the things that were spoken about."

He said those topics included: "The protection of the lives of our people. A complete and unconditional ceasefire. A reliable and lasting peace that will prevent a recurrence of war."

Zelenskiy added: "It was a very symbolic meeting that has the potential to become historic if we achieve joint results. Thank you, President Donald Trump!"

NO AIDES IN SIGHT

In one photograph released by Zelenskiy's office, the Ukrainian and U.S. leaders sat opposite each other in a hall of the basilica, around two feet apart, and were leaning in towards each other in conversation. No aides could be seen in the image.

In a second photograph, from the same location, Zelenskiy, Trump, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron were shown standing in a tight huddle. Macron had his hand on Zelenskiy's shoulder.

After Trump and Zelenskiy met in the basilica, the two men joined other world leaders outside in Saint Peter's Square at the funeral service for Pope Francis, who made the pursuit of peace, including in Ukraine, a motif of his papacy.

Italian Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, who gave the sermon at the funeral service, recalled how Pope Francis did not stop raising his voice to call for negotiations to end conflicts.

"War always leaves the world worse than it was before: it is always a painful and tragic defeat for everyone," the cardinal said.

DIFFERENCES OVER TERRITORY

Trump has been pressing both Moscow and Kyiv to agree a ceasefire and peace deal. He had previously warned his administration would walk away from its efforts to achieve a peace if the two sides do not agree a deal soon.

After a round of shuttle diplomacy this week, differences have emerged between the position of the Trump White House on peace talks and the stance of Ukraine and its European allies, according to documents from the talks obtained by Reuters.

Washington is proposing a legal recognition that Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula annexed by Moscow in 2014, is Russian territory, something that Kyiv and its allies in Europe say is a red line they will not cross.

There are also differences on how quickly sanctions on Russia would be lifted if a peace deal was signed, what kind of security guarantees Ukraine would have, and how Ukraine would be financially compensated.

Trump and Zelenskiy have had a rocky personal relationship. At their Oval Office meeting, Trump accused the Ukrainian leader of "gambling with World War Three".

Since then, Kyiv has tried to repair relations, but the barbs have continued. Zelenskiy has said Trump was trapped in a "disinformation bubble" that favoured Moscow, while the U.S. leader accused Zelenskiy of foot-dragging on a peace deal and making "inflammatory" statements.

But the two men need each other. Trump requires Zelenskiy's buy-in to achieve his stated ambition of bringing a swift peace between Russia and Ukraine, while Kyiv needs Trump to pressure Moscow into diluting some of the more onerous conditions it has set for a truce.

At the Oval Office meeting in February, a reporter who was present from a conservative U.S. news network accused Zelenskiy of disrespecting the occasion by not wearing a suit.

Zelenskiy, since the start of Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022, has eschewed suits in favour of military-style attire, saying it is his way of showing solidarity with his countryman fighting to defend Ukraine.

In Rome on Saturday, Zelenskiy again decided against a suit, and instead wore a dark shirt, buttoned up to the neck with no tie, and wore a dark military-style jacket over the top of that.

Reporting by Steve Holland and Angelo Amante; Additional reporting by Christian Lowe and Andrii Pryimachenko in Kyiv and Alistair Smout in London; Writing by Christian Lowe; Editing by Alexandra Hudson

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CNN  — 

Moscow has inflicted another round of deadly strikes on Ukraine despite US President Donald Trump’s plea for Russian President Vladimir Putin to “STOP!” attacking its neighbor.

At least eight people were killed in drone strikes across the country, a night after Russia launched its deadliest bombardment of Ukraine since the middle of last year.

A drone attack on the eastern city of Pavlohrad on Friday killed three people, including a 76-year-old woman and a child, and injured 10 others, Dnipropetrovsk Governor Serhiy Lysak said.

In southern Ukraine, two people were also killed in strikes on Kherson, the region’s governor, Oleksandr Prokudin, said, adding the strikes targeted critical infrastructure and residential buildings. Two more people died in attacks on Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region, and one person was killed in Kharkiv in the northeast of the country, regional leaders said.

Ukraine’s capital Kyiv was the main target of Russia’s massive bombardment on Thursday, which hit several locations across the city, killing 12 people and wounding 87 others. Ukraine’s emergency services said on Friday that it had completed the search for survivors in the rubble of one residential block, hit by what Ukrainian authorities said was a North Korean ballistic missile.

The fresh round of attacks come after President Trump vented his frustration over the lack of progress on a peace deal on Thursday, saying he is “not happy” and urging Putin to “STOP!” the attacks, in a post on his Truth Social platform. Hours later, however, Trump said he believed both Russia and Ukraine want peace.

On Friday, Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff is expected to arrive in Moscow for further talks with Putin on reaching an agreement.

Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Moscow was “ready to reach a deal,” in an interview with CBS News on Thursday, but added that there were still some specific points that needed to be “fine-tuned.”

Earlier this week, Trump launched a new tirade against Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, accusing him of harming peace negotiations, after Zelensky said it was against his country’s constitution to recognize Russian control of Crimea, which was illegally annexed by Russia in 2014.

Any move to recognize Russia’s control of Crimea would reverse a decade of US policy and could upset the widely held post-World War Two consensus that international borders should not be changed by force.

As part of its mission to seal a peace deal to end the three-year war, the US administration has proposed recognizing Crimea as part of Russia, a move which diplomatic sources have told CNN has highly alarmed US allies in Europe.

The spat over Crimea is the latest in a series of very public disagreements between Trump and Zelensky.

Trump has insisted he has been equally as tough on Putin, but got defensive on Thursday when asked by White House reporters what concessions Russia had made in the conflict.

“Stopping the war, stopping taking the whole country. Pretty big concession,” Trump said.

“We’re putting a lot of pressure on Russia, and Russia knows that, and some people that are close to it know or he wouldn’t be talking right now.”

Jennifer Hansler, Alex Marquardt and Kylie Atwood contributed reporting

WASHINGTON — A survey of more than 500 political scientists finds that the vast majority think the United States is moving swiftly from liberal democracy toward some form of authoritarianism.

In the benchmark survey, known as Bright Line Watch, U.S.-based professors rate the performance of American democracy on a scale from zero (complete dictatorship) to 100 (perfect democracy). After President Trump's election in November, scholars gave American democracy a rating of 67. Several weeks into Trump's second term, that figure plummeted to 55.

"That's a precipitous drop," says John Carey, a professor of government at Dartmouth and co-director of Bright Line Watch. "There's certainly consensus: We're moving in the wrong direction."

Carey said the decline between November and February was the biggest since Bright Line Watch began surveying scholars on threats to American democracy in 2017. In the survey, respondents consider 30 indicators of democratic performance, including whether the government interferes with the press, punishes political opponents and whether the legislature and the judiciary can check executive authority.

Not all political scientists view Trump with alarm, but many like Carey who focus on democracy and authoritarianism are deeply troubled by Trump's attempts to expand executive power over his first several months in office.

"We've slid into some form of authoritarianism," says Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard, and co-author of How Democracies Die. "It is relatively mild compared to some others. It is certainly reversible, but we are no longer living in a liberal democracy."

Kim Lane Scheppele, a Princeton sociologist who has spent years tracking Hungary, is also deeply concerned: "We are on a very fast slide into what's called competitive authoritarianism."

When these scholars use the term "authoritarianism," they aren't talking about a system like China's, a one-party state with no meaningful elections. Instead, they are referring to something called "competitive authoritarianism," the kind scholars say they see in countries such as Hungary and Turkey.

In a competitive authoritarian system, a leader comes to power democratically and then erodes the system of checks and balances. Typically, the executive fills the civil service and key appointments — including the prosecutor's office and judiciary — with loyalists. He or she then attacks the media, universities and nongovernmental organizations to blunt public criticism and tilt the electoral playing field in the ruling party's favor.

"The government would still have elections and would nominally be democratic," says Rory Truex, a political scientist at Princeton who focuses on China. "But those elections would no longer be free and fair."

While the vast majority of scholars surveyed say Trump is pushing the country toward autocracy, other professors strongly disagree. James Campbell, a retired political scientist at the University at Buffalo, SUNY, says Trump is using legitimate presidential powers to address long-standing problems. Campbell points to Trump's use of tariffs to try to push companies to bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States. In recent decades, economic globalization led to catastrophic layoffs of everyone from furniture makers in North Carolina to auto assembly-line workers in the Midwest as firms sent work overseas, especially to China.

"I think they've done an excellent job," Campbell says of the Trump administration.

Campbell adds that he thinks many political scientists may see Trump as autocratic because they don't like him or his politics.

"I think most of them are coming from the political left," he says. "There's a comfort in all of them getting together and saying, 'Oh, Trump's a bad guy. He's authoritarian.' "

NPR reached out to the Trump administration, which has yet to respond.

But many democracy scholars say the Trump administration is using tactics employed by autocrats, and they point to specific actions. For instance, Trump's Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is investigating all the major broadcast outlets — except for Rupert Murdoch's Fox, which owns the pro-Trump Fox News Channel.

The FCC is questioning how CBS edited an interview of Trump's 2024 rival, Kamala Harris, and whether NPR and PBS are complying with regulations on corporate underwriting spots. The FCC can revoke local broadcast licenses, which could damage the networks financially.

Princeton's Scheppele says this is reminiscent of Hungary under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. Orbán took aim at the business model of Hungarian media, which heavily relied on state advertising.

"Overnight, [Orbán] cuts all the advertising to the independent and opposition media," Scheppele says. "They all have a hole blown in their budget."

In another example, Trump has withheld or threatened to withhold billions of dollars from universities, including Harvard, Princeton and Columbia, citing concerns about antisemitism. Scheppele says Orbán also targeted universities that had been critical of his government.

"In the first two years, Orbán cut the university budgets by 40%," she says.

Another way to measure authoritarianism, according to Levitsky, is whether publicly opposing the government comes with a cost. He says — under Trump — it does. For instance, Trump has issued executive orders barring lawyers with firms he doesn't like from entering government buildings and representing government contractors.

Fear of government retribution is now spreading through society. A scholar who spoke to NPR for this story later asked not to be quoted, saying he feared the Trump administration might try to punish him by slashing research grants he's working on. In a recent NPR series on free speech, many people did not want to be identified by name.

But even some scholars who say Trump has autocratic tendencies think the American system should be able to withstand them.

Kurt Weyland, a political scientist at the University of Texas at Austin, says that so far the lower courts are checking Trump. He also says Trump does not have the overwhelming popular support that autocratic leaders such as Venezuela's Hugo Chávez and El Salvador's Nayib Bukele enjoyed and that was crucial to their ability to change their country's political systems.

For instance, Bukele, who met with Trump at the White House last week, has seen approval ratings over 90% and won reelection last year by a landslide. By contrast, a recent poll showed Trump's approval rating falling to 43% and he was reelected with just under half the popular vote.

"These populist leaders managed to engineer new constitutions that seriously concentrated power and that were the breakpoint that put those countries on the path toward competitive authoritarian rule," says Weyland, who wrote Democracy's Resilience to Populism's Threat: Countering Global Alarmism. "In the United States, that is out of the question."

Bright Line Watch conducted its survey in early February. It plans to put another in the field soon. Carey, one of the co-directors, expects political scientists to downgrade America's democracy even further.

(TJV NEWS) Pressure is intensifying on Shin Bet Director Ronen Bar as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and key government officials move to oust him following deepening allegations of negligence and political misuse of his office. At the heart of the storm are the devastating failures that led to the October 7 Hamas invasion and the unfolding “Qatargate” scandal involving foreign money and influence in Israel’s political sphere.

Netanyahu’s spokesperson  Omer Dostri previously accused Bar of failing to act on critical intelligence that could have prevented the massacre. “Ronen Bar had the opportunity to retire with honor after his searing failure on October 7, as the outgoing Chief of Staff did,” Dostri said. “But he preferred not to attend the government meeting dealing with his case simply because he was afraid of giving answers.”

“Why, after you knew about the Hamas attack many hours before it happened, did you do nothing and not call the Prime Minister – something that would have prevented the disaster?” Dostri added.

The Prime Minister himself has reportedly lost all confidence in Bar, who remains in office despite calls for his dismissal from bereaved families, security officials, and senior lawmakers.

The government has filed a petition with the High Court to lift a temporary order blocking Bar’s removal, arguing that continued immunity for the Shin Bet head undermines Israel’s democratic structure and civilian control over security institutions.

“A period of immunity for the head of the service, during which the clear directive of the legislator is suspended, severely harms the realization of the goals of the Shin Bet,” said a statement from the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), as reported by <a href="http://AllIsrael.com" rel="nofollow">AllIsrael.com</a>.

October 7: A Catastrophic Security Breakdown

The failure of Israel’s domestic intelligence agency to anticipate or thwart the October 7 attack is now central to calls for Bar’s resignation. Families of soldiers killed in the war say accountability must start at the top.

In a raw and emotional interview with 103FM, Tzik Bonzel, father of Sgt. Amit Bonzel who was killed in Gaza, spoke out after a face-to-face meeting with Bar:

“Had he lived up to his responsibilities and dealt with things properly, today Amit would be alive—and with him, hundreds, if not thousands, of Israelis.”

Bonzel described the encounter as deeply painful and said Bar appeared unprepared for the intensity of the criticism. “I demanded to know when he would resign and stop harming this holy organization,” Bonzel said.

“Qatargate” and Political Weaponization

Fueling the storm is the so-called “Qatargate” affair, in which Shin Bet allegedly uncovered that advisers to Netanyahu received funds from Qatar, a nation widely known for financing Hamas. Critics claim the prime minister is attempting to silence Bar to derail the investigation.

Left-leaning NGOs, including the Movement for Quality Government (MQG), have accused Netanyahu of politicizing the ISA and attacking law enforcement institutions. But the Prime Minister’s allies argue that Bar has weaponized his position, using the hostage crisis and sensitive information to shield himself from criticism.

“The Israeli government, which is in charge of the Shin Bet, has lost all confidence in Ronen Bar, who continues to cling to his seat while cynically using the families of the kidnapped,” said Dostri, according to The Jerusalem Post.

Netanyahu’s Approach: Soft Pressure, Hard Questions

Though Netanyahu has largely refrained from personal attacks, his decision to invite Bar to join a security briefing this week was widely seen as a final olive branch amid rising tensions. That same day, the government formally requested the High Court lift its hold on Bar’s dismissal.

“If Ronen Bar had carried out his role as he is currently clinging to his seat, we would not have reached October 7,” Dostri concluded.

For many Israelis, the question is no longer whether Ronen Bar should go—but why he hasn’t already. As <a href="http://AllIsrael.com" rel="nofollow">AllIsrael.com</a> notes, the ongoing court wrangling and political defense of Bar are delaying overdue accountability at a time when public trust in the Shin Bet—and the entire security establishment—is at historic lows.

 In the eyes of Netanyahu, grieving families, and a growing number of lawmakers, Ronen Bar’s continued leadership is incompatible with national recovery, operational reform, and trust in Israel’s most vital security institutions. The question is whether Israel’s legal system will let the government act—or let this crisis fester furthe