U.S. President Donald Trump said Thursday it "certainly looks" as though Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi is dead, threatening "very severe" consequences if the Saudis are found to have murdered him.

Trump, who has insisted that more facts must be known before making assumptions about Khashoggi, did not say on what he based his statement on the writer's demise two weeks ago. He commented as he left Joint Base Andrews for a political trip to Montana.

European Union leaders are set to push ahead with plans to boost cooperation with North African countries and beef up the bloc's borders in an effort to stop migrants entering Europe.

A draft statement prepared for their summit Thursday emphasizes the need to step up cooperation with countries that people leave and transit through to seek shelter or better lives in Europe.

Cam Battley is a top executive at one of Canada's biggest marijuana companies, but he isn't sticking around to savor the country's historic pot legalization.

He's off to Germany on Friday and Australia next week — a sign of what a leader Canada has become in the global pot industry, and of the reverberations its decision to legalize could have internationally.

U.N. special envoy Staffan de Mistura said Wednesday that he will make a final effort before stepping down next month to advance toward a new constitution for Syria — a key step in ending the country's civil war.

De Mistura announced at the end of a Security Council briefing that he is leaving the job in late November for "purely, purely personal reasons" related to his family after four years and four months in one of the toughest U.N. jobs.

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex were jokingly thanked for bringing England's notoriously inclement weather to a drought-stricken Outback town on Wednesday in a rain-drenched visit to Dubbo during their Australian royal tour.

The former Meghan Markle brought banana bread that she baked in Sydney on Tuesday as a gift to a farming family outside Dubbo who were struggling to feed their cattle and sheep through two years of below-average rain.

Hurricane Michael killed at least 16 people in Florida, most of them in the coastal county that took a direct hit from the storm, state emergency authorities said Tuesday. That's in addition to at least 10 deaths elsewhere across the South.

The scope of the storm's fury became clearer after nearly a week of missing-persons reports and desperate searches of the Florida Panhandle neighborhoods devastated by the most powerful hurricane to hit the continental U.S. in nearly 50 years.

U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis is preparing to meet in Singapore with his Chinese counterpart just weeks after a meeting planned for Beijing fell apart amid growing friction between the U.S. and China.

Shortly after Mattis arrived in Singapore on Wednesday after a visit to Vietnam, a senior Mattis aide told reporters that the meeting is set to happen on Thursday.

President Donald Trump criticized rapidly mounting global condemnation of Saudi Arabia over the mystery of missing journalist Jamal Khashoggi, warning of a rush to judgment and echoing the Saudis' request for patience.

In an interview with The Associated Press on Tuesday, Trump compared the case of Khashoggi, who Turkish officials have said was murdered in the Saudis' Istanbul consulate, to the allegations of sexual assault leveled against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearing.

A high-level Turkish official said Tuesday that police have found "certain evidence" during their search of the Saudi Consulate showing that Saudi writer Jamal Khashoggi was killed there.

Yemeni President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi has fired the prime minister, accusing him of "negligence" in running the country.

In a decree late Monday, Hadi's office said Ahmed bin Dagher was guilty of poor economic performance and failure to avert a collapse of the currency.