The super El Niño has been a nonstop machine cranking out tropical storms that have seemingly rolled through the Pacific region like rush-hour traffic. Now, it's the U.S. Gulf Coast's turn.

One of the strongest El Niño years on record meant a quiet first four months of the Atlantic hurricane season, but that's no longer the case. Tropical Storm Isaias, which formed Wednesday, is expected to gain hurricane strength by Thursday before moving onshore. If that happens, it would tie a 121-year-old record for the latest-forming initial hurricane of the Atlantic season. That mark was set on Oct. 8, 1905, according to the National Weather Service.

When the decades-long civil war that forced Samantha Pushpakumara from his village in north-central Sri Lanka ended, he was finally able to return home to a life of farming that he thought would give his family a stable future. That was until the rains didn't come.

Sri Lanka has been mired in drought for months, leading to severe water shortages that have left reservoirs dry and strained farming communities that depend on seasonal monsoons. Making matters worse, temperatures in many parts of the country have been higher than usual and high humidity has exacerbated the heat stress.

EuroLeague basketball owners have rejected a formal offer from the NBA to merge into a single European operation following a meeting in Italy, Barcelona confirmed Wednesday.

The decision not to accept the NBA's proposal of a single Europe entity was made Tuesday in Cernobbio during a gathering of the EuroLeague's 13 shareholder clubs. They include Barcelona, Bayern Munich, Real Madrid, Olympiakos, Milan, Tony Parker -owned ASVEL in France and two Istanbul-based clubs.

Senegal and Morocco played a chaotic Africa Cup of Nations final in January and they contested the title again Thursday — this time at the Court of Arbitration for Sport which expects a verdict within days.

A turbulent match, provoking violent clashes between Senegal fans and Moroccan police, and a hugely controversial fallout is being re-litigated at sport's highest court in Switzerland nearly nine months after the referee's final whistle blew in Rabat.

European Union foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said Thursday that the bloc is preparing a "support mission" to train and advise Lebanon’s army and security forces, though that won't replace U.N. peacekeepers in southern Lebanon whose mandate expires at the end of the year.

Kallas said during a visit to Beirut that Lebanese authorities formally asked the EU for this. She added that she expects the mission to be set up by EU foreign ministers on Monday.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s former military secretary has accused the Israeli leader of altering official transcripts of phone calls from the morning of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attacks.

The accusations by Maj. Gen. Avi Gil came in a wide-ranging interview with the right-wing Israel Hayom newspaper.

Canadian poet and essayist Anne Carson won the Nobel Prize in literature Thursday "for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature."

Ingrid Carlberg, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, said the author was in Iceland "listening to the wind" when the academy reached her to notify her of the win.

Russia's public health watchdog on Thursday denied that a lab worker who died in Siberia had spread infection to another person, as global concerns swirled about suspected pneumonic plague.

Rospotrebnadzor has said that the lab worker at a plague research institute in Irkutsk in southeastern Siberia died of pneumonia of unknown origin. In tersely worded statements, it said that "extensive" testing found no evidence her illness was caused by any of the pathogens she worked with, and it informed the World Health Organization that no case of plague has been registered in the Irkutsk region.

The wife of former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was set to be back in court Thursday, where her lawyers will urge a judge to free her from jail and put her under house arrest because she has heart problems.

Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores have been behind bars in New York since early January when forces seized them from their Caracas home in a middle-of-the-night raid.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is in Portugal on the last leg of a three-nation tour of NATO allies.

Rubio arrived in Lisbon on Thursday for a brief stop on his return to Washington, a day after delivering a speech in the Greek capital of Athens urging European countries to save Western civilization by upholding the values and traditions of ancient Greece.