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ROME — An Italian referendum on granting faster citizenship to certain immigrants and seeking to strengthen labor rights failed because of low turnout, after Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and leading right-wing political parties urged Italians to boycott the democratic process.

In conceding defeat, Maurizio Landini, the secretary-general of the powerful CGIL trade union federation that helped bring about the referendum, said it still was a “starting point” on important issues that remain “on the table” for Italy. This includes heated debates over how many immigrants should be welcomed to Italy, as the country suffers a demographic crisis with an aging population and one of the lowest birthrates in the world.

As well as asking Italians to vote to liberalize the labor market, the referendum sought to reduce the time it takes to become a naturalized citizen from 10 years to five years. Campaigners for the change said this would help second-generation Italians born in the country to non-European Union citizens. They can spend years, often long into adulthood, battling to get full citizenship rights from the only country they know to be their home.

Italian economists have said the change could also be a useful measure to address the problems resulting from Italy’s aging society and low birthrate — just 12% of the population is younger than 14.

On Sunday and Monday, the two days of referendum voting, turnout was low and thus the referendum was declared void. Partial data from Italy’s Interior Ministry published Sunday showed national turnout of just 22.7%, far below the 50% participation by eligible voters that is required for referendums in Italy to be valid. After polls closed on Monday, the YouTrend polling agency estimated voter participation to have been around 30% of eligible voters. In his concession speech, Landini said it was clear from the results that “there is an obvious crisis of democracy.”

Right-wing parties urged voters to stay home

According to the Associated Press and Reuters, the new citizenship rules could have allowed some 2.5 million foreign nationals, about half of Italy’s foreign population, to apply for citizenship.

This change was vehemently opposed by Meloni’s right-wing Brothers of Italy party and other right-wing political parties, who have campaigned on reducing the number of foreign migrants in Italy and often see Italian identity as intimately linked with blood ancestry.

In the weeks leading up to the referendum, these politicians did not campaign for their supporters to vote “no” but simply called on them to boycott the process. Senate speaker Ignazio La Russa, from Brothers of Italy, said in May that he would “campaign until people stay home.”

The Italian newspaper La Repubblica reported that Brothers of Italy circulated a memo to party members saying it was “absolutely against” the questions in the referendum and was therefore encouraging members to abstain from voting.

On Sunday, Meloni visited a polling station, but pointedly did not cast a vote.

Referendums have long been an important part of Italy’s democracy. Brought in as part of a system of checks on power after the fascist rule of Benito Mussolini, some have resulted in a high turnout and consequential decisions, including the end of Italy’s monarchy and confirming that divorce be allowed.

While Meloni’s government is not the first to try to quash a referendum with a boycott — left-wing Italian leaders have done the same in the past — civil rights activists and opposition parties expressed outrage, saying this strategy violates “the foundation of democracy.”

Elly Schlein, the leader of the center-left Democratic Party, said it was a “betrayal of the constitutional principles that establish voting as a civic duty.”
 
Between 1974 and 1995, eight of nine referendums reached the quorum for voter participation. But since then, according to the Italian newspaper Il Post, only four of 34 referendums have had enough voters to be valid.

JERUSALEM — Israeli forces seized a Gaza-bound aid boat and detained Greta Thunberg and other activists who were on board early Monday, enforcing a longstanding blockade of the Palestinian territory that has been tightened during the war with Hamas.

The activists had set out to protest Israel’s ongoing military campaign in the Gaza Strip, which is among the deadliest and most destructive since World War II, and its restrictions on the entry of humanitarian aid, both of which have put the territory of some 2 million Palestinians at risk of famine.

The Freedom Flotilla Coalition, which had organized the voyage, said the activists were “kidnapped by Israeli forces” while trying to deliver desperately needed aid to the territory.

“The ship was unlawfully boarded, its unarmed civilian crew abducted, and its life-saving cargo — including baby formula, food and medical supplies — confiscated,” it said in a statement. It said the ship was seized in international waters some 200 kilometers (120 miles) from Gaza.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry portrayed the voyage as a public relations stunt, saying in a post on X that “the ‘selfie yacht’ of the ‘celebrities’ is safely making its way to the shores of Israel.”

It said the activists would return to their home countries and the aid would be sent to Gaza through established channels. It circulated footage of what appeared to be Israeli military personnel handing out sandwiches and water to the activists, who were wearing orange life vests.

Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, an Israeli military spokesperson, said the ship was still en route to Israel around midday Monday. It was expected to dock at the port of Ashdod.

Thunberg, a climate campaigner, was among 12 activists aboard the Madleen, which set sail from Sicily a week ago. Along the way, it had stopped on Thursday to rescue four migrants who had jumped overboard to avoid being detained by the Libyan coast guard.

“I urge all my friends, family and comrades to put pressure on the Swedish government to release me and the others as soon as possible,” Thunberg said in a pre-recorded message released after the ship was halted.

Rima Hassan, a French member of the European Parliament who is of Palestinian descent, was also among the volunteers on board. She has been barred from entering Israel because of her opposition to Israeli policies toward the Palestinians.

She was among six French citizens aboard the boat. French President Emmanuel Macron asked Israel to allow them to return to France as soon as possible, his office said in a statement.

Adalah, a rights group in Israel that said it was representing the activists, said Israel had “no legal authority” to take over the ship because it was in international waters and because it was headed not to Israel but to the “territorial waters of the state of Palestine.”

“The arrest of the unarmed activists, who operated in a civilian manner to provide humanitarian aid, amounts to a serious breach of international law,” Adalah said in a statement.

After a 2½-month total blockade aimed at pressuring Hamas, Israel started allowing some basic aid into Gaza last month, but humanitarian workers and experts have warned of famine unless the blockade is lifted and Israel ends its military offensive.

An attempt last month by Freedom Flotilla to reach Gaza by sea failed after another of the group’s vessels was attacked by two drones while sailing in international waters off Malta, organizers said. The group blamed Israel for the attack, which damaged the front section of the ship.

Israel and Egypt have imposed varying degrees of blockade on Gaza since Hamas seized power from rival Palestinian forces in 2007. Israel says the blockade is needed to prevent Hamas from importing arms, while critics say it amounts to collective punishment of Gaza’s Palestinian population.

Israel sealed Gaza off from all aid in the early days of the war ignited by the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, but later relented under U.S. pressure. In early March, shortly before Israel ended a ceasefire with Hamas, the country again blocked all imports, including food, fuel and medicine.

Hamas-led militants killed around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, in the Oct. 7 attack and abducted 251 hostages, most of whom have since been released in ceasefire agreements or other deals. Hamas is still holding 55 hostages, more than half of them believed to be dead.

Israel’s military campaign has killed more than 54,000 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which doesn’t distinguish between civilians and combatants but has said women and children make up most of the dead.

The war has destroyed vast areas of Gaza and displaced around 90% of the territory’s population, leaving people there almost completely dependent on international aid.

Efforts to broker another truce have been deadlocked for months. Hamas says it will only release the remaining hostages in exchange for a lasting ceasefire and an Israeli withdrawal, while Israel has vowed to continue the war until all the captives are returned and Hamas is defeated or disarmed and exiled.

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Follow AP’s war coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/israel-hamas-war

Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has still yet to agree a deal with the Treasury before Wednesday’s Spending Review, despite an offer of above inflation increases to police funding in each of the next three years.

Ministers have been locked in talks with Rachel Reeves and her team ahead of the major financial statement, which sets out how much money the Chancellor has chosen to give departments for day-to-day spending, and investment.

Cooper is the sole remaining cabinet minister yet to settle her department’s budget through to 2029.

Housing Secretary Angela Rayner reached a deal with Reeves and the Treasury on Sunday evening.

The Home Office are arguing privately that police numbers must at the very least be maintained for the government to deliver its policy commitments on neighbourhood policing, but that under the current spending proposals this would not be possible.

A string of police chiefs including Sir Mark Rowley, the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, have been publicly lobbying the government for more money in recent weeks.

A Treasury source said that the proposal for real-terms increases in police spending preceded Rowley’s interventions, however.

The impasse raises the possibility that the Treasury may have to “impose” a settlement on the Home Office prior to Wednesday.

Some in government argue that Cooper would have received a better deal had she settled earlier, pointing to the early deal struck by Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, who secured more money for prisons than the Treasury had originally proposed.

An ally of Cooper said that she had followed the Treasury’s timetable for negotiations and that “it should not be first up, best dressed”.

On Monday, the heads of the two bodies representing ordinary police officers warned the police service is “broken” as forces lose officers to budget cuts.

In a joint article for The Telegraph, President of the Police Superintendents’ Association Nick Smart, and Tiff Lynch, acting national chairman for the Police Federation of England and Wales, said police morale has been “crushed”.

“Police forces across the country are being forced to shed officers and staff to deliver savings,” they wrote.

Technology Secretary Peter Kyle has said police needed to “do their bit” towards reforming public services.

Kyle told the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg that “every part of society was struggling” and that the chancellor was facing pressure from all departments for additional funding.

He said the review would boost spending for schools and scientific research but declined to rule out a squeeze on policing.

The last-minute talks come ahead of what is set to be a highly significant week for every part of government.

It is expected there will be extra money for the NHS, with reports the Department for Health will receive increased funding.

But a substantial increase in funding for the NHS would come at the expense of other parts of government, as the chancellor seeks to meet her own fiscal rules, which are not to borrow to fund day-to-day spending, and for debt to be falling as a share of national income by 2029/30.

Further elements of what will be included in the statement have emerged in recent days.

On Sunday night, the government announced £24m funding to boost artificial intelligence lessons in schools, as part of a wider £187m package to boost tech skills across the economy.

Earlier on Sunday, the government announced an £86bn package for science and technology to help fund drug treatments and longer-lasting batteries.

And on Wednesday, the chancellor unveiled a £15.6bn package to fund extensions to trams, trains and buses in Greater Manchester, the Midlands and the North East.

Spending decisions come against the backdrop of a broad commitment to increase defence spending further to 3% by 2034.

The government has already committed to increasing defence spending from 2.3% of gross domestic product (GDP) to 2.5% by 2027 – an extra £5bn a year – funded by a cut in the overseas aid budget.

Reeves has previously confirmed the government will revise its controversial decision to limit Winter Fuel Payments to those in receipt of means-tested benefits.

While the government is expected to share some information about who will receive the payment as part of the Spending Review, full details will not be released until the Budget later in the year.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies has said “relatively modest” growth rates mean “sharp trade-offs are unavoidable”.

The think tank said the level of spending on health would dictate whether cuts were made to “unprotected” areas – those outside the NHS, defence and schools.

Conservative shadow home secretary Chris Philp said the government needed to reconsider.

“They have chosen to prioritise spending on Ed Miliband’s mad green projects, on inflation-busting pay rises for their trade union paymasters and spending £100bn a year – five times the police budget – on debt interest payments,” Philp said.

Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey has urged the chancellor to rule out cuts to social care, which is financed through local councils.

“You won’t get NHS waiting lists down, people out of hospital back in to social care or their own homes unless you have that investment in care,” he told the BBC’s Today programme.

He also said the government would have “more money in the pot, more growth, more revenue” if it pursued closer trading ties with Europe.

Ukrainian special forces claim to have damaged two fighter jets in a night-time raid on an airfield deep inside Russia as Kyiv seeks to disrupt Vladimir Putin’s steady advances on the frontline.

A week after the spectacle of Operation Spiderweb, when drones struck the Kremlin’s nuclear-capable bombers, the general staff of the Ukrainian army claimed a fresh success.

Special operations forces were said to have launched an assault on the Savasleyka airfield, located in the Nizhny Novgorod region of Russia, about 400 miles from the Ukrainian border.

The army did not provide any details about the nature of the operation and questions remain about the extent of the damage inflicted.

The airfield is used by Russia to deploy MiG-31K fighters carrying Kinzhal ballistic missiles that have been used against Ukrainian armed forces and its cities.

“According to preliminary information, two units of enemy aircraft were hit (probably MiG-31 and Su-30/34 aircraft),” the general staff said in a statement. “The results of the combat operation are being clarified.”

The covert operation did not upset plans for a prisoner exchange involving younger and injured soldiers.

After a nervous 48 hours for prisoners’ relatives, during which both sides accused the other of backtracking on a deal made during the peace talks in Istanbul, the first stage was completed with those under the age of 25 and severely wounded exchanged.

Should the agreement be implemented in full, with a swap of 1,200 prisoners from each side along with bodies of the dead, it would be the largest of the war.

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said in a statement on social media: “This process is very complex and sensitive. Negotiations are ongoing almost every day. We are doing everything we can to bring our people home.”

Video footage also emerged on Monday of a successful Ukrainian drone strike on a factory in Cheboksary, about 800 miles from the Ukrainian border, which makes components crucial to the targeting mechanisms in self-propelled howitzers, Iskander missile systems and Lancet and Shahed kamikaze drones.

Ukraine’s armed forces said the attack on the VNIIR-Progress plant, which is under US sanctions, had led the authorities in Russia to halt commercial flights in the region.

They said: “At present, the destruction of the facility by at least two UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones] and the subsequent large-scale fire have been confirmed. The results of the destruction are being clarified.”

Oleg Nikolayev, the regional governor, said in a statement that production at the factory had been suspended but that the strikes had not caused any casualties.

The operations inside Russia came as the Kremlin stepped up its night-time missile and drone strikes and made progress in pushing back the frontline in the north-east Sumy region and in Donetsk in the east.

On Sunday night and in the early hours of Monday morning, Russia launched 479 drones at Ukraine in the war’s biggest overnight drone bombardment, the Ukrainian air force said.

About 20 missiles were also fired into Ukraine, targeting mainly central and western regions. The operational command of the Polish armed forces said it scrambled fighter jets in response to the aerial attacks in western Ukraine.

The Rivne region, in western Ukraine, sustained the largest attack since the full-scale war began. One person had been confirmed dead, according to the chief of the regional military administration, Oleksandr Koval.

Video footage shared on social media suggested the Dubno airbase may have been struck. It has been claimed that this is the home of Ukraine’s F-16 fighter jets although this could not be independently verified.

Explosions were also heard in Kyiv, where Tymur Tkachenko, the head of the Kyiv city military administration, reported that an office building in the capital’s Darnytsia district had been damaged.

The Ukrainian authorities claimed that their air defences destroyed 277 drones and 19 missiles in mid-flight, with only 10 drones or missiles successfully striking their targets.

In recent weeks, Russian forces have made significant advances in the Sumy region, pushing within 18 miles of the eponymous regional capital, three years after Ukraine’s counteroffensive pushed the Kremlin’s forces out of the area.

The region’s governor, Oleh Hryhorov, said there was no need yet to evacuate Sumy city, describing the situation as “tense but under control of the defence forces”.

Ukraine has denied Moscow’s claims that Russian forces have pushed through the western border of Donetsk into the eastern Dnipropetrovsk region for the first time in the three years of the full-scale war.

Maj Andrii Kovalev, a spokesperson for Ukraine’s general staff, said: “The information is not true. Fighting is ongoing in Donetsk oblast. The enemy did not enter Dnipropetrovsk oblast.”

KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza — The Israeli army said Sunday that it had retrieved the body of Hamas’ military chief Mohammed Sinwar in an underground tunnel beneath a hospital in southern Gaza, following a targeted operation last month.

Another senior Hamas leader, Mohammad Shabana, commander of the Rafah Brigade, was also found dead at the scene along with a number of other militants, who are still being identified, said IDF spokesperson Brigadier General Effie Defrin.

Israeli forces gave a small group of foreign reporters a tour of the tunnel that had been uncovered beneath the European Hospital in Khan Younis, which Defrin said was a major command and control compound for Hamas.

“This is another example of the cynical use by Hamas, using civilians as human shields, using civilian infrastructure, hospitals, again and again,” Defrin said.

“We found underneath the hospital, right under the emergency room, a compound of a few rooms. In one of them we found, we killed Mohammed Sinwar,” he said.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced Sinwar’s death last month, but Defrin said they now had his DNA which proved beyond doubt it was him.

Hamas has not commented on reports of the death of either Sinwar or Shabana.

Sinwar was the younger brother of Yahya Sinwar, the Palestinian militant group’s deceased leader and mastermind of the October 2023 terrorist attack on Israel that killed 1,200 people according to Israeli tallies, and which triggered the Israeli invasion of Gaza.

Shabana was one of Hamas’s most senior and battle-hardened commanders in southern Gaza. He played a central role in constructing the network of tunnels under the southern city of Rafah, which were used for ambushes and cross-border raids.

The drive to Khan Younis in Israeli military vehicles showed widespread devastation, with countless buildings lying in ruins, and piles of rubble collected at the roadside.

The Israeli military has raided or besieged numerous hospitals during the war, alleging that Hamas uses them to conceal fighters and orchestrate operations — a charge Hamas has repeatedly denied. While Israel has presented evidence in certain cases, some of its assertions remain unverified.

Defrin said the army had carefully planned the strike near the European Hospital in order not to damage it.

A large trench dug in front of the Emergency Room entrance led down to a hole in the claustrophobic, concrete tunnel that was used as a hideaway by Hamas fighters, the army said.

During the search of the site, Israeli forces recovered weapon stockpiles, ammunition, cash and documents that are now being reviewed for intelligence value.

“We will dismantle Hamas because we cannot live with this terror organization right in our backyard, right across our border,” Defrin said.

More than 54,000 Palestinians have died during the ongoing Israeli assault, according to Gaza health authorities. The U.N. has warned that most of Gaza’s 2.3 million population is at risk of famine.