A key Israeli opposition party has backed a unity government that would bring to an end to Benjamin Netanyahu's time as the country's longest serving prime minister.
The ultra-nationalist leader Naftali Bennett said his party would join talks to form a governing coalition with centrist party leader Yair Lapid.
Mr Lapid has until Wednesday to announce the result of his efforts.
Mr Netanyahu, meanwhile, said the proposed deal would "weaken Israel".
The prime minister, who is on trial for fraud, fell short of a decisive majority at a general election in March. It was the country's fourth inconclusive vote in two years - and again Mr Netanyahu failed to secure coalition allies.
Mr Bennett, 49, who leads the Yamina party, made his announcement in a televised address.
"Mr Netanyahu is no longer trying to form a right-wing government because he knows full well that there isn't one. He is seeking to take the whole national camp, and the whole country, with him on his personal last stand," he said.
"I will do everything to form a national unity government with my friend Yair Lapid."
Before the announcement, Israeli media reported that under the proposed terms of the deal, Mr Bennett would replace Mr Netanyahu, 71, as prime minister and later give way to Mr Lapid, 57, in a rotation agreement. The arrangement has not been officially confirmed.
The proposed coalition would bring together factions from the right, the left and the centre of Israeli politics. While the parties have little in common politically, they are united in their desire to see Mr Netanyahu's time in office come to an end.
Speaking shortly after Mr Bennett's announcement, the prime minister accused Mr Bennett of carrying out "the fraud of the century" - a reference to the Yamina leader's previous public promises not to join forces with Lapid.
Mr Netanyahu said Mr Bennett's approach would be "a danger for the security of Israel". He did not elaborate.
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Mr Lapid, a former finance minister, was given until 2 June to form a new coalition government after Mr Netanyahu failed to do so. His Yesh Atid party came second to Mr Netanyahu's right-wing Likud at the last election.
Mr Bennett's party holds a crucial six seats in the 120-member parliament that would help give the proposed opposition coalition a clear majority.
Netanyahu fights on
After an evening of high political drama, Israel is much closer to a new coalition that will unseat its long-time prime minister. But Benjamin Netanyahu should not be written off.
He was quick to respond to the latest announcement with his own appeal to right-wing members of Naftali Bennett's Yamina party - and those of Gideon Saar's New Hope - to not join the agreement.
He taunted them by asking: "Who will take care of settlements?" and suggested the proposed unity government would offer a weak security cabinet that would be unable to stand up to Israel's rival, Iran.
If he chips away just a couple of members of parliament with these attacks, then the prospective government could tumble.
And even if this coalition does get sworn in, it will be a fragile one - bringing together parties from across the political spectrum with stark ideological differences. To stay in power, it will be forced to kick many sensitive issues into the long grass.
On Saturday night, Mr Netanyahu's Likud party made an offer to Mr Bennett and the leader of another potential coalition party to share the premiership in a three-way split.
However, his offer was rejected. But the prime minister repeated the same option on Sunday.
Under Israel's electoral system of proportional representation, it is difficult for a single party to gain enough seats to form a government outright. Smaller parties are usually needed to make up the numbers needed for a coalition.
Mr Lapid was initially given a 28-day mandate to form a government, but this was interrupted by the recent 11-day conflict in Gaza.
One of his potential coalition partners, the Arab Islamist Raam party, broke off talks because of the violence. There were also clashes in Israeli cities between mixed Arab and Jewish populations.
Media reports say opposition leader Yair Lapid close to establishing a coalition that would end Netanyahu’s 12-year reign as prime minister.
Israel was gripped by political drama on Sunday over the possible imminent end of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s record run as the country’s leader.
After four inconclusive parliamentary elections in two years, a 28-day mandate for opposition leader Yair Lapid to form a new government runs out on Wednesday, and media reports said he was close to putting together a coalition that would end Netanyahu’s 12-year stretch as prime minister.
Lapid’s chances of success rest largely with far-right politician Naftali Bennett, a kingmaker whose Yamina party has six key seats in parliament.
Bennett, 49, was widely expected to announce, possibly as early as Sunday, whether he would team up with Lapid, who leads the Yesh Atid party.
But first, Bennett would have to rally his own party’s legislators behind joining what Netanyahu’s opponents have described as a government of “change” comprising factions from the left, centre and right.
Still short of a parliamentary majority after a March 23 election that ended in impasse, such a diverse grouping could be fragile, and would require outside backing by Arab members of parliament (Palestinian citizens of Israel) whose political views differ sharply from Yamina’s.
Bennett has maintained public silence in recent days, with Likud party chief Netanyahu fuelling speculation his own tenure was about to end in a tweet and video on Friday. “Real Alert,” he wrote, warning a dangerous “left-wing” administration was in the cards.
Yamina announced late on Saturday that Bennett would meet and update its legislators on Sunday, after reports emerged he had agreed to a deal in which he would serve first as prime minister before handing over to the centrist Lapid.
A former defence minister, Bennett has reversed course before over removing Netanyahu, 71, a right-wing leader in power consecutively since 2009, and now on trial on corruption charges that he denies.
With an agreement with Lapid widely reported to have been finalised just before fighting erupted on May 10 between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, Bennett said during the hostilities he was abandoning efforts to form a coalition with the centre and left.
But a ceasefire is holding, a recent wave of street violence in Israel between Palestinian citizens and Jews has ebbed, and a Lapid-Bennett partnership could be back on course.
Israeli political commentators, however, are taking nothing for granted.
“The anti-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu government of change is still not an accomplished fact,” political columnist Yossi Verter wrote in the left-wing Haaretz newspaper on Sunday.
“It’s premature to pop open the champagne, and also too early to wear sackcloth,” he said, questioning whether Yamina’s lawmakers could withstand pressure from the right against a deal with Lapid.
If Lapid, 57, fails to announce a government by Wednesday, a fifth Israeli election since April 2019 – a prospect Bennett has said he wants to avoid – is likely.
Thousands of people have gathered across Brazil to protest at President Bolsonaro's management of the COVID-19 pandemic.
People turned out in at least 16 Brazilian cities on Saturday, including the capital Brasilia and Rio de Janeiro, calling for his impeachment and demanding more coronavirus jabs.
Mr Bolsonaro's popularity has plummeted in the past year, with more than 460,000 people dying during the COVID pandemic.
Image:Protesters in Sao Paulo burned a figure of Mr Bolsonaro
Image:A banner in the capital Brasilia reads 'Bolsonaro virus out'
This weekend's protests were organised by left-leaning political parties, unions and students' associations.
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Most people wore masks and tried to observe social distancing as they called for a faster vaccination programme.
Image:Mr Bolsonaro has consistently downplayed the crisis
Brazil's population is 211 million but according to official figures only 66.4 million doses of a vaccine have been administered, with about 10% - or 21.9 million people - fully vaccinated.
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In Sao Paulo, Brazil's largest city, thousands of people blocked one of the largest avenues in the city.
Protests in Brasilia and Rio were peaceful but police in the northeastern city of Recife used tear gas and rubber bullets on demonstrators.
Some people also carried images of former leftist President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva wearing the presidential sash.
Image:In Recife, the police fired tear gas at protesters
Earlier in May, the former leader met centrist Fernando Henrique Cardoso, also a two-term former president, for lunch in a public show of their common purpose to block Mr Bolsonaro from gaining a second term in next year's election.
Meanwhile, Brazil reported another 2,012 deaths on Saturday, its health ministry said.
Cases also remain high, with 79,670 new infections - taking the total since the start of the pandemic to 16.47 million.
Scotland Yard is hunting a masked extremist who called for “Jewish blood” at a pro-Palestinian demonstration next to the Israeli embassy in west London.
The youth was filmed telling an Islamist mob: “We’ll find some Jews here ... We want the Zionists, we want their blood!”
The comments were made last weekend within earshot of two police officers, who appeared to do nothing to challenge the remarks. Minutes earlier, a firebrand speaker and YouTuber called Mohammed Hijab had whipped up the crowd against the “terrorist apartheid state of Israel” by declaring: “We love death.”
The incident follows claims of antisemitism at a rally in support of Gaza at which protesters carried placards referring to Hitler, the Nazis and the Holocaust. Jeremy Corbyn, the former Labour
MYSTERY surrounds a bat infested cave in China where a Covid-like virus may have killed three miners in 2012 before the sample was sent to the Wuhan lab at the centre of the leak allegations.
Guarded by Chinese police and sealed off from the outside world, this former copper mine in Mojiang some 1118 miles away from Wuhan could be a smoking gun on the origin of the pandemic.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) - a high security bio lab specalising in coronaviruses - is in the eye of the storm as questions rage whether Covid could have originally emerged from escaped from its campus.
However, the story of Covid may go back the best part of a decade - potentially to a copper mine in the mountainous and forested region of Yunnan in April 2012.
A team of miners were given the job of cleaning out the abandoned shaft which was infested with roosting horseshoe bats.
The men found themselves shoveling knee-deep piles of guano - a repulsive combination of bat faeces and urine.
And within weeks, three of the men were dead.
The miners succumbed to a mystery infection which made them develop pneumonia-like symptoms, hacking coughs and high temperatures - chillingly similar symptoms to what we now know as Covid.
The fatal infection mostly flew under the radar beyond a smattering of reports in the West, such as an article in 2014 in Science which asked "New Killer Virus in China?".
The deaths didn't really get much attention beyond that, until suddenly Covid emerged as a once-in-a-century global pandemic that has so far killed 3.5million people.
Questions begun to be asked about where the new coronavirus came from as China reported the first cases in Wuhan to the World Health Organisation in December 2019.
It turns out virus samples from bats roosting in the cave were sent to WIV, and one of the nine viruses identified was a 96.2 per cent march for SARS-CoV2.
The virus - recovered from the anus of a horseshoe bat - is around ten mutations away from Covid, and is by far its closest known relative.
While nothing is proven as the politically mired investigation trudges on, it raises questions between the link between the Mojiang miners and Covid.
Chinese scientiss recovered samples from the Mojiang mine which were studied at WIVCredit: EcoHealth Alliance
Chinese scientist Shi Zhengli is known as 'Bat Woman' for her studies
The Sunday Times reported researchers in China have been unable to dig out any media reports on the miners deaths - suggesting a media blackout or a cover up.
But one piece of key evidence exists, a thesis by a young medic Li Xu.
Li wrote a paper on the infections, and while he was unable to say exactly what killed them, he argued it was most likely a coronavirus from a bat.
"This makes the research of the bats in the mine where the six miners worked and later suffered from severe pneumonia caused by unknown virus a significant research topic," he said.
And it is exactly this type of research which was undertaken when the samples were sent to WIV.
The virus that may have killed the miners is just one of 100 believed to be stored in the lab, but with key databases are still missing the world does not know for sure what else they were up to.
What do we know about the Wuhan Institute of Virology?
THE WUHAN Institute of Virology is the highest security lab of its kind in all of China - and can be found right at the heart of the origins of the global pandemic.
Various theories have been swirling about the lab, which is headed up by Chinese scientist Dr Shi Zhengli, known as “Bat Woman”.
Most scientists do not believe the virus leaked from the lab, and the lab itself has categorically denied the claims.
The lab specialised in bat-borne viruses and had been carrying out experiences on them since 2015.
Airlocks, full body suits, and chemical showers are required before entering and leaving the lab - the first in China to be accredited with biosafety level 4 (BSL-4).
BSL-4 labs are the only places in the world where scientists can study diseases that have no cure.
Scientists from the lab even tested mysterious
virus which killed three miners 1,000 miles away in Yunnan province back in 2012.
It has been suggested this fatal mystery bug may have been the true origin of Covid-19.
Experts at the lab also engineered a new type of hybrid 'super-virus' that can infect humans in 2015, according to medical journal Nature Medicine
Despite fears surrounding the research, the study was designed to show the risk of viruses carried by bats which could be transmitted to humans.
There is no suggestion the facility's 2015 work is linked to the pandemic.
The lab was also recruiting new scientists to probe coronaviruses in bats just seven days before the outbreak.
China has began tightening security around its biolabs with President Xi Jinping saying it was a “national security” issue to improve scientific safety at a meeting last February.
WIV is known to have been carrying out gain-of-function research - experiments designed to soup up viruses to make them more infectious - alongside the US-funded EcoHealth Alliance.
The theory goes: could the virus that killed the men in Mojiang have been manipulated and transformed into what we know as Covid, before being accidentally allowed to escape in a lab accident?
The world does not know for sure.
But scrutiny is ratcheting up on China, with questions over lab safety at the facility as researchers previously admitted being bitten and sprayed with bat blood.
Despite being condemned as a "conspiracy theory" for the last year, the possibility that the pandemic was caused by a lab leak has become increasingly mainstream in recent weeks.
Dr Shi has denied all allegations about a lab leakCredit: AFP
And the answers may be hard to come from at the Mojiang mine, with reporters who visited the site being tailed by Chinese government agents and being turned away by police.
Associated Press reporters who visited the site in November 2020 were met with roadblocks as the mine has become a black hole of information.
BBC News also saw their journalists stopped by police as they were told to turn back as they approached Yunnan.
The extraordinary revelation shows how seriously the West is taking the possibility, despite the narrative being firmly dismissed in the early days of the pandemic by scientists and politicians.
Questions are being asked of WIV as circumstantial evidence mounts for the lab leakCredit: AFP
China has long been accused of covering up or distorting its role in the early days of the pandemic, with claims the Communist Party manipulated case and death figures while withholding information from WHO.
But circumstantial evidence is mounting, and even WHO have ordered a fresh probe after a its first effort was derided and accused of being a "whitewash".
Beijing hit back as US President Biden this week as it accused him of playing politics by indulging the idea of a lab leak.
His predecessor Donald Trump repeatedly suggested in the final months of his term that the virus came from WIV - and insisted the US had concrete evidence.
And his former medical adviser Dr Anthony Fauci made his own admission that he is now no longer convinced the Covid originated naturally and called for a full investigation.
It emerged this week Wuhan lab staff became sick and needed hospital care weeks before China admitted it was facing an outbreak.
Citing a previously undisclosed US intelligence report, the Wall Street Journal said the dossier revealed fresh details and claimed the lab workers fell ill in November.
A National Security Council spokeswoman said the Biden administration continued to have "serious questions about the earliest days of the pandemic, including its origins within the People's Republic of China".
Russia has agreed to release $500m in credit to Belarus and look to increase the number of flights between the two countries as the Kremlin doubled down on its support for Alexander Lukashenko after his forced landing of a passenger flight that has sparked western condemnation.
Russian president Vladimir Putin hosted Lukashenko in Sochi on Saturday, treating his guest to a yacht trip on the Black Sea a day after the two men held talks for more than five hours.
The two-day summit has underscored Moscow’s position as the embattled autocrat’s closest and most reliable foreign ally, and took place as the US joined the EU in imposing sanctions against Minsk.
Russia’s support for Lukashenko was in stark contrast to US and EU condemnation and could complicate preparations for a summit between Putin and US president Joe Biden in Geneva next month, which has been billed as an effort to normalise relations between Moscow and the west.
Belarusian authorities used a bomb threat and a fighter jet to force a Ryanair flight travelling between Greece and Lithuania to divert to Minsk on May 23, where police then detained Roman Protasevich, a leading dissident journalist, who was on board.
That brazen move, described by Ryanair as “state-sponsored piracy”, provoked condemnation from western countries.
The EU has banned Belarus state airline Belavia from its airports and pledged to impose additional sanctions against the country, while Biden on Friday reimposed “full blocking sanctions” against nine Belarus state-owned companies.
The Kremlin has criticised the west’s response and, announced that a delayed $500m loan to Minsk would be released by the end of June.
The money represents the second tranche of a $1bn financial package Moscow agreed in December to bolster Lukashenko’s finances, which have been hit by the fallout from mass protests against his fraudulent election victory last year, and the impact of Covid-19.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the transport ministries of Russia and Belarus would work together to “organise air transportation” that would allow Belarusians to travel to Russia for summer vacations and to fly home from European countries via Russia, offsetting the impact of the EU’s flight ban.
“President Lukashenko informed [Putin] in detail about what happened to the Ryanair plane,” Peskov told reporters, adding that the talks were “very constructive, rich in content”.
The Kremlin has dismissed as “Russophobia” western claims that Moscow assisted Minsk in the operation to arrest Protasevich or was given advance warning.
The dissident founded a media channel that reported on and helped co-ordinate protests against Lukashenko.
Russia this week forced at least two European airlines to cancel flights to Moscow after it failed to approve new flight plans involving a detour around Belarus.
Scientists in Vietnam have discovered a new coronavirus variant that is a hybrid of strains first found in India and the UK.
The country's health minister said lab tests suggested it might spread more easily than other versions of the virus.
Nguyen Thanh Long said scientists examined the genetic make-up of the virus that had infected some recent patients, and found the new version of the virus.
It comes as cases of the Indian variant have risen across the country, with Scotland recording 808 cases of it up until May 27.
Viruses often develop small genetic changes as they reproduce, and new variants of Covid-19 have been seen almost since it was first detected in China in late 2019.
Scientists in Vietnam have discovered a new coronavirus variant (Image: Getty Images)
The World Health Organisation has listed four global "variants of concern" - the two first found in the UK and India, plus ones identified in South Africa and Brazil.
Mr Long said the new variant could be responsible for a recent surge in Vietnam, which has spread to 30 of the country's 63 municipalities and provinces.
Vietnam was initially a standout success in battling the virus - in early May, it had recorded just over 3,100 confirmed cases and 35 deaths since the start of the pandemic.
But in the last few weeks, Vietnam has confirmed more than 3,500 new cases and 12 deaths, increasing the country's total death toll to 47.
It comes as Uk Government Health Secretary Matt Hancock said the number of cases of the Indian variant has doubled in the UK in the past week.
Areas including Bolton, Bedford and Blackburn with Darwen have all seen spikes in cases over the past few weeks, with large numbers of the Indian variant identified.
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While Scotland has not published local data on the Indian variant, Glasgow has seen a spike in cases and remain at lockdown Level 3.
The city has had surge testing and more vaccines deployed as a result of rising infections.
