Four people were killed in an “extremely violent” blaze seemingly caused by a battery-powered electric scooter that tore through a 10-story housing block in Reims, the capital of France’s Champagne region, authorities said Saturday.

A 13-year-old jumped to his death from the 4th floor apartment where the fire started in the early hours of Friday and a burned body found inside is believed to be that of his older brother, aged 15, said Reims prosecutor François Schneider.

An 87-year-old woman and her 59-year-old son who lived on the 8th floor suffocated to death in the smoke, he said.

Two people were seriously injured, including the dead boys’ stepfather who was badly burned, and 26 others were treated in hospital for lighter injuries, he said.

Schneider said there is “no doubt” that the blaze was accidental, spreading quickly from the scooter that caught fire for reasons unknown.

Battery fires “are extremely difficult to extinguish” and fire officers battled the blaze for more than three hours, the prosecutor said.

A planned exchange of Russian and Ukrainian prisoners of war failed to take place on Saturday, with Moscow accusing Kyiv of postponing the swap at the last minute, something Ukrainian officials dismissed as “dirty games” from the Kremlin.

Russia said Ukraine unexpectedly postponed a transfer involving prisoners of war and the bodies of dead soldiers, leaving more than 1,200 frozen Ukrainian bodies waiting in refrigerated trucks at an exchange point with no one to collect them.

Ukraine rejected Russia’s account of the events, saying that the two sides had agreed to exchange seriously wounded and young troops on Saturday but a date had not yet been set for the repatriation of soldiers’ bodies.

During a second round of direct peace talks in Istanbul on Monday, Russia and Ukraine agreed to exchange more prisoners this weekend. Vladimir Medinsky, the head of Russia’s delegation for peace talks with Ukraine, said this week that the exchange would be the largest since of the three-year war.

“In strict accordance with the Istanbul agreements, the Russian side began a humanitarian operation to transfer more than 6,000 bodies of killed Ukrainian servicemen,” as well as badly wounded soldiers under the age of 25, Medinsky said Saturday afternoon on Telegram.

He claimed that 1,212 bodies of killed Ukrainian soldiers were at the exchange point, with the rest “on their way.” He also said that Russia gave Ukraine the first list of 640 prisoners of war for exchange, listed as “wounded, seriously ill and young people,” in order to start the swap.

In a video posted by Russia’s Defense Ministry on Telegram, two men wearing hazmat suits are seen opening the doors to the back of a truck parked on the side of a road. Inside the truck were dozens of sealed white bags, which the ministry said contained the bodies of Ukrainian soldiers.

Medinsky said Russia’s Defense Ministry contact group was waiting at the border with Ukraine, but alleged that Kyiv had “unexpectedly postponed the transfer of bodies and the exchange of prisoners of war for an indefinite period” and had given “pretty weird reasons” for doing so.

Ukraine swiftly rejected the accusations, saying Medinsky’s claims “do not correspond to reality.” It said the exchange of prisoners of war and soldiers’ bodies were separate processes.

“Unfortunately, instead of constructive dialogue, we are again faced with manipulations and attempts to use sensitive humanitarian issues for informational purposes,” Ukraine’s Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War wrote on Telegram.

“We call on the Russian side to stop playing dirty games,” it added.

Ukraine’s Defense Ministry said Russia was creating “artificial obstacles” and making “false statements” to obstruct the exchange of living prisoners, reneging on what had been agreed in Istanbul.

“The Ukrainian side has faced yet another attempt to renege on the agreements after the fact,” the ministry said.

Although prisoner of war swaps had been a rare point of agreement between the warring countries, the unraveling of Saturday’s scheduled exchange underscores the lack of trust that has so far marred the peace talks.

The spat came soon after Russia launched another aerial assault on Ukraine, killing three people in the city of Kharkiv.

They know all about glory days on the Kop – the fabled terrace that is the spiritual home of fans of Liverpool – England’s Premier League champions.

But they’re more used to legends like Kenny Dalglish or Mohamed Salah banging in goals than political cries for help. So, it was surreal to watch alongside thousands of middle-aged Brits as Bruce Springsteen bemoaned America’s democracy crisis on hallowed footballing ground.

“The America that I love … a beacon of hope and liberty for 250 years, is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent and treasonous” administration, Springsteen said at Anfield Stadium on Wednesday night.

The Boss’s latest warnings of authoritarianism on his European tour were impassioned and drew large cheers. But they did seem to go over the heads of some fans who don’t live in the whirl of tension constantly rattling America’s national psyche.

Liverpudlians waited for decades for Springsteen to play the hometown of The Beatles, whose “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” set his life’s course when he heard it on the radio as a youngster in New Jersey.

Most had a H-H-H-Hungry heart for a party. They got a hell of a show. But also, a lesson on US civics.

“Tonight, we ask all of you who believe in democracy and the best of our American experiment to rise with us, raise your voices, stand with us against authoritarianism and let freedom ring!” Springsteen said.

His European odyssey is unfolding as Western democracies are being shaken again by right-wing populism. So, his determination to engage with searing commentary therefore raises several questions.

What is the role of artists in what Springsteen calls “dangerous times?” Can they make a difference, or should stars of entertainment and sports avoid politics and stick to what they know? Fox News polemicist Laura Ingraham once told basketball icon LeBron James, for instance, that he should just “shut up and dribble.”

Springsteen’s gritty paeans to steel towns and down-on-their-luck cities made him a working-class balladeer. But as blue-collar voters stampede to the right, does he really speak for them now?

Then there’s this issue that Springsteen emphatically tried to answer in Liverpool this week: Does the rough but noble America he’s been mythologizing for 50 years even exist anymore?

How Springsteen and Trump mine the same societal ground

Trump certainly wants to bring the arts to heel – given his social media threats to “highly overrated” Springsteen, Taylor Swift and other superstars and his takeover of the Kennedy Center in Washington. Any center of liberal and free thought from pop music to Ivy League universities is vulnerable to authoritarian impulses.

But it’s also true that celebrities often bore with their trendy political views, especially preaching at Hollywood awards ceremonies. Springsteen, however, has been penning social commentary for decades. And what’s the point of rock ’n’ roll if not rebellion? Rockers usually revolt in their wild-haired youth, rather than in their mid-70s, but desperate times call for desperate measures.

Oddly, given their transatlantic dialogue of recent weeks, Trump and Springsteen mine the same political terrain – globalization’s economic and spiritual hollowing of industrial heartlands.

“Now Main Street’s whitewashed windows, And vacant stores, Seems like there ain’t nobody, Wants to come down here no more,” Springsteen sang in 1984 in “My Hometown” long before Trump set his sights on the Oval Office.

The White House sometimes hits similar notes, though neither the Boss nor Trump would welcome the comparison. “The main street in my small town, looks a heck of a lot worse than it probably did decades ago before I was alive,” Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt said rather less poetically in March.

Political fault lines are also shifting. In the US and Europe, the working class is rejecting the politics of hope and optimism in dark times.

And the Democratic politicians that Springsteen supported – like defeated 2004 nominee John Kerry, who borrowed Springsteen’s “No Surrender” as his campaign anthem, and former President Barack Obama – failed to mend industrial blight that acted as a catalyst to Trumpism.

Shifting political landscapes in England and the US

There are warning signs in England too. The Boss’s UK tours often coincided with political hinge moments. In the 1970s he found synergy with the smoky industrial cities of the North. In his “Born in the USA” period, he sided with miners clashing with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. A new BBC documentary revealed this week he gave $20,000 in the 1980s to a strikers’ support group.

Liverpool, a soulful, earthy city right out of the Springsteen oeuvre is a longtime Labour Party heartland. But in a recent by-election, Nigel Farage’s populist, pro-Trump, Reform Party overturned a Labour majority of nearly 15,000 in Runcorn, a decayed industrial town, 15 miles upstream from Liverpool on the River Mersey. This stunner showed Labour’s working class “red wall” is in deep peril and could follow US states like Ohio in shifting to the right as workers reject progressives.

Labour Cabinet Minister Lisa Nandy, whose Wigan constituency is nearby, warned in an interview with the New Statesman magazine this month that political tensions were reaching a breaking point in the North.

“People have watched their town centers falling apart, their life has got harder over the last decade and a half … I don’t remember a time when people worked this hard and had so little to show for it,” Nandy said, painting a picture that will be familiar to many Americans.

In another sign of a seismic shift in British politics last week, Reform came a close third in an unprecedented result in a parliamentary by-election in a one-time industrial heartland outside Glasgow. Scotland has so far been immune to the populist wave – but the times are changing.

Still, there’s not much evidence Trump or his populist cousins in the UK will meaningfully solve heartland pain. They’ve always been better at exploiting vulnerability than fixing it. And Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” would hurt the poor by cutting access to Medicaid and nutrition help while handing the wealthy big tax cuts.

“When conditions in a country are ripe for a demagogue, you can bet one will show up,” Springsteen told the crowd in Liverpool, introducing “Rainmaker” a song about a conman who tells drought-afflicted farmers that “white’s black and black is white.” As the E Street Band struck up, Springsteen said: “This is for America’s dear leader.”

A battle for America’s soul

Springsteen has his “Land of Hope and Dreams.” But Trump has his new “Golden Age.” He claims he can “Make America Great Again” by attacking perceived bastions of liberal power like elite universities and the press, with mass deportations of undocumented immigrants and by challenging due process.

Springsteen implicitly rejected this as un-American while in Liverpool, infusing extra meaning into the lyrics of “Long Walk Home,” a song that predates Trump’s first election win by a decade: “Your flag flyin’ over the courthouse, Means certain things are set in stone. Who we are, what we’ll do and what we won’t.”

Sending fans into a cool summer night, the Boss pleaded with them not to give up on his country.

“The America I’ve sung to you about for 50 years now is real, and regardless of its many faults, is a great country with a great people and we will survive this moment,” he said.

But his fight with Trump for America’s soul will go on. The contrast would be driven home more sharply to Americans if he tours on US soil at this, the most overtly politicized phase of a half-century-long career.

Perhaps in America’s 250th birthday year in 2026?

The Israeli military says it has killed the leader of a Palestinian militant group that took part in the October 7, 2023, terror attacks on southern Israel.

Asaad Abu Sharia, who led the Palestinian Mujahideen Movement and its armed wing the Mujahideen Brigades, was killed in a joint operation with Israel’s Shin Bet security agency, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said on Saturday.

His death and that of his brother Ahmed Abu Sharia were confirmed by the militant group hours after Gaza’s Civil Defense reported that an Israeli airstrike had hit their family home in the Sabra area of Gaza City.

Hamas run Al-Aqsa TV said the strike killed at least 15 people and injured several. Video showed people searching through the debris of a demolished four-story house.

The Mujahideen Brigades took part in the October 7 attacks alongside Hamas and other Palestinian terror groups and took hostage some of the most high-profile captives, including a family whose suffering became a symbol of the attack.

According to the Israeli military, Sharia was among the militant leaders who stormed Kibbutz Nir Oz, a small Israeli community near the Gaza border where many residents were killed or taken hostage during the brutal terror assault that led to Israel’s war in Gaza.

Despite not being aware of Hamas’ plans in advance, fighters from the jihadist group joined in the cross-border assault “as an extension of the Hamas attack,” the Israeli military said.

According to Israel, Sharia was directly involved in the abduction and murders of Shiri, Ariel and Kfir Bibas – a family that became one of the most recognizable victims of the attack, partly because of the young ages of Kfir and Ariel, who were nine months and four years old respectively at the time.

Kfir was the youngest hostage kidnapped into Gaza and the youngest to have been killed. The boys’ mother, Shiri, was 32 at the time of her kidnap. Their father Yarden was also captured, but was released alive in February after 484 days in captivity.

Reacting to news of Sharia’s killing, the Bibas family expressed their “heartfelt gratitude” to the Israeli military, saying his death was “another step on the journey towards closure.”

“While Shiri, Ariel, and Kfir cannot be brought back, we find some measure of comfort knowing these despicable murderers will not harm another family,” the Bibas family said in a statement shared via the Hostages and Missing Families Forum.

Israel’s military said Sharia was also involved in the abduction of the Israeli-American couple Gad Haggai and Judi Lynn Weinstein Haggai and the abduction and killing of Thai national Nattapong Pinta.

The Israeli-American couple were killed near their home in Kibbutz Nir Oz during the attack in 2023. The body of Nattapong, an agricultural worker who was abducted alive on October 7, was recovered from southern Gaza in a military operation on Friday.

Israel said it believes the Mujahideen Brigades are still holding the body of an additional foreign national. The group has previously denied killing their captives.

Colombian senator Miguel Uribe, in the running to join next year’s presidential race, has been shot at an event in Bogota, according to national police.

The mayor of Bogota, Carlos Galán, said Uribe was receiving emergency care after being attacked in the Fontibon district on Saturday and that the “entire hospital network” of the Colombian capital was on alert in case he needed to be transferred.

The mayor added that the suspected attacker had been arrested.

Colombian President Gustavo Petro expressed his solidarity with the senator’s family in a tweet on X, saying, “I don’t know how to ease your pain. It is the pain of a mother lost, and of a wounded homeland.”

Colombia’s government has issued a statement condemning the attack on Uribe.

This is a developing story and will be updated.