Lionel Messi and Luiz Suárez, close friends and former teammates at Barcelona, will renew their on-the-field rivalry on Thursday in World Cup qualifying.

Messi, who appears to have recovered from a muscle injury in his leg, led Argentina to its third World Cup title last year and has his team in first place in the South American qualifying group for the 2026 tournament. The 36-year-old Suárez has just returned to Uruguay's national team as he nears the end of a high-scoring season in the Brazilian league.

When World Cup qualifying starts in Africa on Wednesday, Morocco will be a hub of football action a year after the national team's historic run to becoming the continent's first semifinalist.

Seven teams will play "home" games in Morocco over the next week, but Africa's standout team will not be among them. Morocco's first home game in qualifying for the 2026 tournament is in June.

Japan's economy contracted at a 2.1% annual pace in July-September as consumption and investment weakened, the government said Wednesday.

Weak wage growth in the world's third-largest economy also sapped its vitality, the Cabinet Office said. In quarterly terms, the economy contracted by 0.5%.

The European Union's executive commission lowered its growth forecast for this year and next, saying the economy "has lost momentum" in 2023 as inflation weighs on consumer spending and higher central bank interest rates deter borrowing for purchases and investment.

The outlook for this year was lowered to 0.6% from 0.8% for the 20 countries that use the euro currency, and to 1.2% from 1.3% for next year, the commission said Wednesday in its autumn economic forecast, which revised figures from its previous forecast in September.

European Union negotiators reached a deal on Wednesday to reduce highly polluting methane gas emissions from the energy sector across the 27-nation bloc.

According to experts, one of the biggest causes of climate change is methane gas emissions — second only to carbon dioxide. The gas also causes serious health problems.

Inflation in the U.K. dropped sharply in October to its lowest level in two years, largely because last year's steep rise in domestic energy bills following Russia's invasion of Ukraine dropped out of the annual comparison, official figures showed Wednesday.

The Office for National Statistics said consumer prices in the year to October were 4.6% higher than the year before, much lower than the 6.7% recorded in the previous month.

The latest honor for Salman Rushdie was a prize kept secret until minutes before he rose from his seat to accept it.

On Tuesday night, the author received the first-ever Lifetime Disturbing the Peace Award, presented by the Vaclav Havel Center on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Only a handful of the more than 100 attendees had advance notice about Rushdie, whose whereabouts have largely been withheld from the general public since he was stabbed repeatedly in August of 2022 during a literary festival in Western New York.

The Biden administration has extended by four months a sanctions waiver that will allow Iraq to continue to purchase electricity from Iran and gives Iran limited access to the proceeds to buy humanitarian goods.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken signed the 120-day waiver extension and it was transmitted to Congress on Tuesday, U.S. officials said. The move is likely to draw criticism from Iran hawks on Capitol Hill and elsewhere who believe the extension will reward Iran at a time when it is coming under increasing pressure to end its support for proxy groups, including Hamas, that are destabilizing the Middle East.

President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping are expected to agree Wednesday to restore some military-to-military communications between their armed forces when they meet on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in San Francisco.

The plan is to revive the regular talks under what's known as the Military Maritime Consultative Agreement, which until 2020 had been used to improve safety in the air and sea, said a U.S. official, who requested anonymity to preview the leaders' expected announcement.

Ahead of the highly anticipated meeting on Wednesday between U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, Chinese state media have taken a new tone toward the U.S. with less negative coverage, calls for a return to warmer ties and stories of Americans with positive connections to the country.

The messaging follows several years of unprecedented tensions between the two countries over issues including trade and technology, the status of Taiwan and Hong Kong and the origins of COVID-19.