FIFA deepened its ties to Saudi Arabia by confirming a sponsorship on Thursday with the kingdom's state oil firm Aramco which made a profit of $121 billion last year.

The deal was expected and became inevitable once Saudi Arabia was all but sealed last October as the 2034 host of the men's World Cup.

There could be a surprising team from each of Europe's "big five" leagues when the new-look Champions League debuts next season.

Aston Villa, Bologna, Brest, Girona and Stuttgart are all, remarkably, on course to qualify for Europe's elite competition going into the final few rounds of their national league.

Student protests over the Israel-Hamas war have popped up on an increasing number of college campuses following last week's arrest of more than 100 demonstrators at Columbia University.

The students are calling for universities to separate themselves from any companies that are advancing Israel's military efforts in Gaza — and in some cases from Israel itself.

A court on Friday sentenced a Syrian woman to life in prison for a deadly explosion on a busy shopping district in Istanbul in 2022, Turkey's state-run news agency reported.

Alham Albashir was given seven consecutive life sentences after being convicted on terrorism charges.

Flooding in Tanzania caused by weeks of heavy rain has killed 155 people and affected more than 200,000 others, the prime minister said.

That is more than double the number of deaths reported two weeks ago as the amount of rainfall increases, especially in the coastal region and the capital, Dar es Salaam.

Circumstantial evidence points to climate change as worsening the deadly deluge that just flooded Dubai and other parts of the Persian Gulf, but scientists didn't discover the definitive fingerprints of greenhouse gas-triggered warming they have seen in other extreme weather events, a new report found.

Between 10% and 40% more rain fell in just one day last week — killing at least two dozen people in the United Arab Emirates, Oman and parts of Saudi Arabia — than it would have in a world without the 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2 degrees Fahrenheit) warming that has come from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas since the mid-19th century, scientists at World Weather Attribution said Thursday in a flash study that is too new to be peer-reviewed.

Just like the animals on Noah's Ark, the corals arrived in a pair.

On Monday, divers with gloved hands gently nestled the self-bred corals from the World Coral Conservatory project among their cousins in Europe's largest coral reef at the Burgers' Zoo in the Netherlands.

The construction of a new port in Gaza and an accompanying U.S. military-built pier offshore are underway, but the complex plan to bring more desperately needed food to Palestinian civilians is still mired in fears over security and how the humanitarian aid will be delivered.

The Israeli-developed port, for example, has already been attacked by mortar fire, sending high-ranking U.N. officials scrambling for shelter this week, and there is still no solid decision on when the aid deliveries will actually begin.

Egypt sent a high-level delegation to Israel on Friday with the hope of brokering a cease-fire agreement with Hamas in Gaza, two officials said. At the same time, it warned that a possible Israeli offensive focused on Gaza's city of Rafah — on the border with Egypt — could have catastrophic consequences for regional stability.

Egypt's top intelligence official, Abbas Kamel, is leading the delegation and plans to discuss with Israel a "new vision" for a prolonged cease-fire in Gaza, an Egyptian official said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the mission freely.

Ukraine has sidelined U.S.-provided Abrams M1A1 battle tanks for now in its fight against Russia, in part because Russian drone warfare has made it too difficult for them to operate without detection or coming under attack, two U.S. military officials told The Associated Press.

The U.S. agreed to send 31 Abrams to Ukraine in January 2023 after an aggressive monthslong campaign by Kyiv arguing that the tanks, which cost about $10 million apiece, were vital to its ability to breach Russian lines.