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In a historic milestone for both Sino-Pakistani relations and global space cooperation, the China Manned Space Agency announced on Wednesday that two Pakistani nationals have become the first foreign astronaut candidates selected to participate in China’s crewed space mission training program.

The two selected candidates, Muhammad Zeeshan Ali and Khurram Daud, will travel to China in the near future to serve as reserve astronauts, according to an official statement from the agency. After they complete all mandatory training modules and passing rigorous comprehensive evaluations, one candidate is expected to be assigned to a future crewed mission as a payload specialist. If selected for the mission, this Pakistani astronaut will become the first international visitor to board China’s Tiangong Space Station, and also mark the first time any Pakistani national has reached Earth’s orbit, a first for the South Asian nation.

The CMSA framed the joint training initiative as a landmark achievement in international aerospace collaboration, and a tangible demonstration of the China-Pakistan all-weather strategic cooperative partnership extending into the cutting-edge space sector. “This fully showcases the Chinese government’s open commitment to sharing the achievements of its space program with the entire global community,” the agency noted.

China’s core guiding principle for its space exploration endeavors has long centered on the peaceful use of outer space for the collective benefit of all humanity, the statement added. The Chinese manned space program will maintain its open door policy, the agency confirmed, welcoming all nations across the globe to join in collaborative projects covering scientific experiments, technological trials conducted onboard the Tiangong Space Station, as well as joint astronaut selection and training. “Together, we will broaden humanity’s understanding of the cosmos, and join hands to contribute wisdom and strength to building a global community of shared future for humankind,” the statement read.

The groundwork for this collaborative program was laid in February 2025, when the Chinese space agency and Pakistan’s Space and Upper Atmosphere Research Commission signed a bilateral cooperation agreement in Islamabad, formalizing the framework for joint selection and training of Pakistani astronaut candidates.

Prior to this, the highest altitude reached by any Pakistani national was 87.4 kilometers above sea level, achieved by polar explorer and artist Namira Salim in October 2023 during a 55-minute suborbital flight operated by U.S. commercial space firm Virgin Galactic. By global convention, the Karman Line, located 100 kilometers above sea level, is recognized as the official boundary of outer space, the threshold for orbital spaceflight.

Wang Yanan, editor-in-chief of *Aerospace Knowledge* magazine, explained that the two Pakistani candidates will need to master a wide range of spaceflight-related knowledge and core skills, including Chinese language proficiency, foundational space science, spacecraft structure and functionality, space physics, and emergency response protocols. “Given that both candidates already have outstanding physical fitness and strong academic backgrounds, I am confident they will be able to master all the required knowledge and skills without major difficulty,” Wang said.

He added that for the Pakistani public, seeing one of their compatriots travel to space will be an unprecedented historic moment that fills the nation with pride. It is also expected to ignite greater interest in cutting-edge scientific research and space exploration among young Pakistanis, encouraging more of the next generation to pursue careers in aerospace.

Currently orbiting Earth, the Tiangong Space Station stands as one of the largest and most advanced space infrastructure ever deployed in low Earth orbit, and is the only active space station independently developed and operated by a single country.

A high-profile criminal trial unfolding at London’s Woolwich Crown Court this week has seen two Palestine Action defendants outline their motivations for a 2024 raid on an Israeli-owned arms factory near Bristol, as the prosecution detailed serious injuries sustained by a responding police officer.

Six activists — Charlotte Head, 29, Jordan Devlin, 31, Fatema Rajwani, 21, Zoe Rogers, 22, Samuel Corner, 23, and Leona Kamio, 30 — are currently facing joint charges of criminal damage linked to the August 2024 break-in at a facility owned by Elbit Systems, a major Israeli defense manufacturer. 23-year-old Corner faces an additional count of causing grievous bodily harm with intent, stemming from allegations that he struck a police officer with a sledgehammer during the incident.

Giving testimony under cross-examination from lead defense counsel Rajiv Menon KC on Tuesday, Head openly acknowledged her intentional participation in the raid, stating she entered the facility with the explicit goal to “destroy as many weapons as possible and shut the site down”. Jurors were shown photographic evidence of damaged military hardware, which Head identified as including a battle simulator and military quadcopter drones.

In a pre-trial statement recorded in December 2025, Head explained the group’s strategy: activists were instructed to target military equipment first, and flood restricted areas they could not access to inflict maximum damage within their available window. While Head confirmed she damaged property that did not belong to her, she emphasized that she and her co-defendants held a sincere belief their actions were legally justified on moral and political grounds.

Head went on to trace her activist roots back to volunteer work supporting refugees in Calais when she was 19, where she said she witnessed firsthand violent assaults on asylum seekers by French police, including an incident where a child was blinded by police fire. Raised with a core value of compassion instilled by her mother and grandmother, Head told the court she repeatedly tried to step away from the high-stakes work but could not abandon people in crisis. In the years following her Calais experience, she became deeply involved in anti-war organizing, describing her work not as ideological grandstanding, but as a necessary effort to prevent civilian harm.

Two months before the Elbit raid, Head joined a protest camp outside Hackney Town Hall calling on the local council to divest its pension fund from investments linked to Israel and the global arms industry. She told the court she participated in a formal deputation to push for the policy change, but labeled the entire process a “farce” that left her feeling completely powerless. Frustrated by years of incremental activism that she described as a “sticking plaster” that produced no tangible change, Head said she felt repeated, polite requests for action had been entirely ineffective, leaving her demoralized. By the time she agreed to join the August 6 raid, she told the court, “I had tried everything else. At this point, it felt like I was watching all this awful stuff happen online, and I can’t live with myself if I don’t do everything that I can.”

On Wednesday, the court heard testimony from Corner, an Oxford University linguistics and philosophy graduate who was preparing to apply for a master’s degree at the time of the incident. Like Head, Corner confirmed he entered the factory intending “to destroy weapons and things needed to make weapons, which we believed were going to be used to cause death and destruction” in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Corner, who has diagnosed autism spectrum disorder and ADHD, told the court he struggles to recall details of past events or his emotional state during high-stress, overwhelming situations, and struggles to think quickly under pressure.

Both Corner and Head told the court the group had been assured by experienced Palestine Action activists that security guards would not intervene during the raid, matching the pattern of previous protests the group has carried out. After the group rammed through the facility’s shutters with a stolen prison van to gain entry, Corner said he immediately felt out of his depth and underprepared for what he encountered inside.

The court then heard details of the confrontation with responding officers. Jurors were shown body-worn camera footage that captured PC Aaron Buxton firing Pava incapacitant spray directly at Corner, who told the court the chemical hit him square in the face. He described being blinded, suffering overwhelming pain across his face, eyes and hands as he tried to walk away from the confrontation, unable to open his eyes. Additional footage showed Buxton struggling to detain Devlin, with Corner appearing to approach the officer from above and swing a sledgehammer at him. Further footage captured PC Peter Adams tasering Kamio, who can be heard screaming that officers were hurting her severely.

Corner told the court he could only vaguely make out shapes and hear the screams of his co-defendants as they struggled with security and police, describing a chaotic scene full of loud alarms, strong chemical fumes, and overwhelming stress. He said he feared his co-defendants, particularly the smaller-built Rogers, were being seriously injured. When asked about the allegation that he struck PC Kate Evans twice in the back as she attempted to arrest Rogers, Corner said he has no memory of the incident. He flatly denied ever intending to use his sledgehammer against any person, telling the court: “I wasn’t trying to cause any serious harm to anyone. It wasn’t something I ever saw myself doing or being arrested for or associated with.”

Under cross-examination from prosecutor Deanna Heer KC, Corner acknowledged that before the raid, when he was calm and lucid, he understood that a sledgehammer strike against a person could cause severe injury. But he explained that during the confrontation, he was panicking, in severe pain from the Pava spray, and that the potential for harm to other people was not something he had capacity to think through in the moment. “That wasn’t the plan. That’s not something you do in a situation that isn’t absolutely desperate and when you don’t have time to think,” he said. Defense counsel Tom Wainwright noted that Corner told police after his arrest that he was only acting to protect his co-defendants.

The prosecution outlined the severe harm Evans sustained in the attack. She told the court last week that after being struck, she felt the impact radiate across her entire body, and feared she had been paralyzed. Colleague PC Adams testified that Corner struck Evans with significant force. Evans was unable to return to work for three months after the incident, and continues to experience daily chronic pain that requires her to work restricted duties. Heer confirmed Evans suffered a confirmed fracture to the transverse process of her fourth lumbar vertebra, with probable additional fractures to the second and third lumbar vertebrae on her right side.

The trial of the six Palestine Action activists remains ongoing, with more evidence expected to be presented in coming days.

For decades, the annual March of Return has served as a cornerstone of collective action for Palestinians residing within Israel, drawing tens of thousands of participants each year to honor displaced communities and reaffirm their ties to ancestral land. But in 2024, sweeping restrictions imposed by Israeli police forced organizers to completely reimagine the event, transforming the traditional large central gathering into a sprawling network of small, localized tours to dozens of depopulated Palestinian villages.

The annual commemoration marks the Nakba – Arabic for “catastrophe” – the 1948 displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians by Zionist militias during the establishment of the state of Israel, which left hundreds of Palestinian communities destroyed and emptied. For participating Palestinians, these annual gatherings are far more than a memorial: they are a deliberate act of resistance against ongoing efforts to erase Palestinian cultural and historical identity, organizers say.

Negotiations over the event began three months in advance, according to Khaled Awad, spokesperson for the Association for the Defence of the Rights of the Internally Displaced, one of the event’s lead organizing groups. Awad explained that Israeli police initially refused all dialogue with event organizers, issuing explicit warnings that the march would be forcibly dispersed if it moved forward in its traditional format. In response, the association partnered with legal rights group Adalah to file a petition with the Israeli Supreme Court, which ultimately compelled police to enter formal negotiations.

Even after talks began, Awad said organizers faced persistent bureaucratic delays and constantly shifting requirements from law enforcement. The final agreement imposed two major constraints: a hard cap of 1,000 total participants across the entire event – a limit Awad called deeply unreasonable, given that tens of thousands have attended in past years – and a total ban on all Palestinian flags and national symbols, with police justifying the ban on the grounds that such imagery could “provoke unrest.”

Organizers took the warnings of police intervention seriously, as the march has long drawn intergenerational crowds including young children and elderly participants. “We are talking about a space where people come with their children,” Awad noted, adding that organizers prioritized participant safety above all. By the time final approvals were issued, just days before the scheduled event, coordinating a large central gathering was no longer logistically feasible. The decision was made to shift to a decentralized model of small, location-specific tours.

In total, organizers arranged more than 30 separate tours to depopulated village sites across the Galilee and northern Israel, including the former communities of al-Damun, Miar, Maalul, al-Lajjun, and Miska. Turnout varied across locations, with some gatherings drawing only a few dozen participants while others attracted hundreds. The largest gathering, held at al-Damun, drew hundreds of attendees, while smaller sites like Miska hosted around 70 people, mostly family members and descendants of the villages’ original displaced residents.

Among the attendees at Miska was 88-year-old Abu Amjad Shbita, who was forced to flee the village as a child during the 1948 violence and now resides in nearby Tira. Shbita recalled that residents left after warnings from the Arab Liberation Army, as news of Zionist attacks on neighboring villages spread widespread panic. “We left thinking we would come back,” he told the gathered crowd. In the decades that followed, surviving residents of Miska were dispersed across Israel and the broader region, and the village was completely destroyed in the early 1950s. “There is no place without someone from Miska,” Shbita said, adding that the destruction of the village marked the permanent end of his childhood.

The annual commemoration of the Nakba falls each year at the same time as Israel’s celebration of its national independence, a juxtaposition that underscores the competing historical narratives at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For Palestinians, even small, scattered visits to destroyed village sites carry profound weight, serving as a way to preserve collective memory and pass intergenerational stories of displacement and connection to the land down to younger generations.

For Jasmine Shbita, a third-generation descendant of Nakba displaced persons, returning to the ruins of destroyed villages is both an act of memory and imagination. “I keep trying to imagine it as a living place,” she said, explaining that she often visualizes what the village would look like today if it had never been destroyed. Even without physically rebuilding Palestinian communities on the land, she noted, the act of returning and sharing stories holds lasting power. “Even if I don’t build a house, just passing this story to my children means I’ve done my part,” she said. “There is no complete destruction. There are always ruins, and people return to them and try to rebuild meaning from them.”

Though the format of the 2024 March of Return differs dramatically from traditional gatherings, organizers and participants agree that the core message of the event remains unchanged: the ancestral connection of Palestinians to the land of their former communities, and their longstanding demand for the right of return, endures regardless of the scale of the annual gathering.