President Volodymyr Zelensky worked to shore up U.S. support for Ukraine on a whirlwind visit to Washington on Thursday, delivering an upbeat message on the war's progress while facing new questions about the flow of American dollars that for 19 months have helped keep his troops in the fight against Russian forces.

The Ukrainian leader received a far quieter reception than the hero's welcome he was given last year from Congress, but also won generally favorable comments on the next round of U.S. aid he says he needs to stave off defeat.

Firefighters on Thursday were battling flames in Brazil's northeastern Bahia state, fanned by strong winds and abnormally high temperatures for the season, authorities said.

While it is still technically winter in Brazil, with spring due to start in a couple days, a heat wave prompting record temperatures has swept across much of the country since the beginning of the week.

After pageantry and politics in Paris, Britain's King Charles III heads south Friday to Bordeaux to focus on a more personal passion: the environment.

Charles will meet emergency workers and communities affected by wildfires in the Bordeaux region last year, and visit an experimental forest designed to monitor the impact of climate on urban woodlands.

A day-long communication outage in a flood-stricken city in eastern Libya further complicated the work of teams searching for bodies under the rubble and at sea Wednesday.

The country's chief prosecutor, meanwhile, vowed to take "serious measures" to deliver justice for the victims of the floods, which killed thousands of people and devastated the coastal city of Derna more than a week ago.

The Asian Games are an attention grabber. For starters, they involve more participants than the Summer Olympics. Organizers say more than 12,000 will be entered when the opening ceremony takes place Saturday in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou. This is more than the 10,500 expected for next year's Paris Olympics.

The giant numbers are partly due to the staggering array of events with many regional specialties, sports, and games you won't find in the Olympics. And there's also cricket, which appears headed to the Olympics as soon as 2028 in Los Angeles, and certainly for 2032 in Brisbane, Australia.

Chinese President Xi Jinping announced a "strategic partnership" with Syria on Friday during talks with President Bashar al-Assad, who is seeking financial support to help rebuild his devastated country.

The leaders met on the eve of the Asian Games opening ceremony, which Assad will attend as part of his first visit to China since 2004.

Lebanese security agencies are investigating a late-night shooting outside the heavily fortified U.S. Embassy just north of Beirut. No one was hurt in the small-arms fire.

The shots erupted near the entrance to the embassy compound in Beirut's northeastern suburb of Awkar on Wednesday night. No one claimed responsibility for the shooting and the motives behind it were not known.

The Israeli military said tanks struck two structures inside a demilitarized zone in Syria, claiming the buildings violated a half-century-old cease-fire agreement between the two countries.

The structures, it said, were being used by the Syrian military, amounting to what the army called a "clear violation" of the 1974 cease-fire. The Israeli army did not provide any information on what the structures were used for or when they were built.

Anti-government demonstrators took to the streets of Yerevan on Friday for a third day to protest the government's handling of the crisis in Nagorno-Karabakh.

On Wednesday, Armenian separatists in Nagorno-Karabakh agreed to lay down their arms and dismantle their military, following a lightning offensive by Baku.

Israeli authorities are trying to figure out how a heavily armored, but unarmed, tank was stolen from a military training zone after finding it discarded in a junkyard.

The Israeli Merkava 2 tank disappeared from a training zone in northern Israel near the coastal city of Haifa, the Israeli army said Wednesday. The training zone is closed to the public when in use, but is otherwise accessible to passersby.