Hundreds of boys are missing from a Syrian Kurdish prison that held members of the Islamic State group and their families, after the U.S.-backed Kurdish forces fought IS militants for 10 days to retake the facility, an international human rights group said Friday.

The report by Human Rights Watch came a day after IS's top leader, Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi, was killed in a U.S. raid on his safehouse in northwest Syria. President Joe Biden said al-Qurayshi had been responsible for the Syria prison assault, as well as genocide against the Yazidi people in Iraq in 2014.

Shares in Europe and Asia were mostly higher Friday after a historic plunge in the stock price of Facebook's parent company yanked other tech stocks lower on Wall Street.

Shares rose in Paris, London and Tokyo. Hong Kong jumped 3.3% after reopening from Lunar New Year holidays. Trading in Shanghai will resume on Monday.

Two weeks before he was supposed to get married, Bakr Seif told his mother he was going out to see his fiancee and would be back for lunch. When he did not show up by nighttime, his mother called the fiancee, who said he had not been to visit her.

That day, Dec. 8, was the last time Seif's mother saw him. Last week, he was among nine people killed in an Iraqi army airstrike targeting suspected militants in eastern Iraq. At least four of them were Lebanese, all from this small, impoverished village near the northern city of Tripoli.

French President Emmanuel Macron will head to Moscow and Kyiv next week as part of his push to try to deter Russian President Vladimir Putin from launching an invasion of Ukraine and find a diplomatic way out of the growing tensions.

The visit Monday and Tuesday comes after the U.S. accused the Kremlin on Thursday of an elaborate plot to fabricate an attack by Ukrainian forces that Russia could use as a pretext to take military action. The U.S. has not provided detailed information backing up the claims.

FIFA's fading plan for biennial World Cups was labeled a threat from soccer to all other sports by the International Olympic Committee on Thursday.

IOC President Thomas Bach chided FIFA counterpart Gianni Infantino, an IOC member for the past two years, for not being in Beijing to hear the criticism.

Britain's energy regulator announced Thursday that a cap on energy prices is going up by a record 54% because of the soaring costs of wholesale natural gas, a change that will significantly burden millions of households already squeezed by rapidly climbing bills.

The Office of Gas and Electricity Markets, known as Ofgem, said the new price cap — the maximum amount that gas suppliers can charge customers — will rise by 693 pounds ($940) per year in most parts of the U.K. starting in April. That will cause the annual bill for the average customer to go up to 1,971 pounds ($2,670).

Nintendo's profit for the nine months through December slipped 2.5%, as shortages of computer chips hurt production, the Japanese video game maker behind the Super Mario and Pokemon franchises said Thursday.

Kyoto-based Nintendo Co. recorded a 367 billion yen ($3.2 billion) profit for the period, down from 377 billion yen the previous year. Its sales in the same period fell 6% to 1.3 trillion yen ($11 billion).

Novak Djokovic described his detention and deportation from Australia that prevented him from defending his Australian Open title as an "unfortunate event" and thanked the Serbian president for his support.

An 11-day saga over Djokovic's entry visa ended with the Serb being deported for failing to meet Australia's strict COVID-19 vaccination requirements.

Long before the global pandemic upended sports and the world in general, the 2022 Winter Olympics faced unsettling problems.

It started with the fact that hardly anybody wanted to host them.

The director of the World Health Organization's Europe office said Thursday the continent is now entering a "plausible endgame" to the pandemic and that the number of coronavirus deaths is starting to plateau.

Dr. Hans Kluge said at a media briefing that there is a "singular opportunity" for countries across Europe to take control of COVID-19 transmission due to three factors: high levels of immunization due to vaccination and natural infection, the virus's tendency to spread less in warmer weather and the lower severity of the omicron variant.