Greek authorities further reinforced firefighting forces in the country's northeast Thursday, where a massive blaze in its thirteenth day has flared up once more, triggering authorities to issue alerts to residents in the area to be on standby for possible evacuation.

More than 100 extra firefighters were deployed, bringing the total to 582, backed by a fleet of 10 planes and seven helicopters from nine European countries, the fire department said. The fire that started Aug. 19 has decimated homes and vast tracts of forest in the Alexandroupolis and Evros region, near Greece's border with Turkey. It has been blamed for 20 of last week's 21 wildfire-related deaths in Greece.

Japan's Prime Minister Fumio Kishida sampled seafood and talked to workers at Tokyo's Toyosu fish market Thursday to assess the impact of China's ban on Japanese seafood in reaction to the release of treated radioactive wastewater from the wrecked Fukushima Daiichi plant to the sea.

The release of the treated wastewater began last week and is expected to continue for decades. Japanese fishing groups and neighboring countries opposed it, and China immediately banned all imports of Japanese seafood in response.

A nighttime fire ripped through a rundown five-story building in Johannesburg that was occupied by homeless people and squatters, killing at least 73 people early Thursday, emergency services in South Africa's biggest city said.

Some of the people living in a maze of shacks and other makeshift structures inside the building threw themselves out of windows to escape the fire and might have died then, a local government official said. Seven of the victims were children, the youngest a 1-year-old, according to an emergency services spokesperson.

An airstrike early Thursday hit an alleged drug factory in southern Syria near the Jordanian border, causing damage but there was not word on casualties, Syrian opposition activists said. They said the attack was believed to have been carried out by Jordan's air force.

Jordan's state media reported over the past weeks that several drones carrying drugs were shot down after crossing from Syria.

With the walls stripped bare and furniture dismantled, the east Jerusalem apartment is a far cry from the vividly-hued haven it was in early February, when members of the Zalabani family played cards on the cobalt couch and feasted on stewed chicken with richly spiced rice.

That February dinner — a day before 13-year-old Mohammed Zalabani boarded a bus at an Israeli army checkpoint in the Shuafat refugee camp and lunged at an Israeli police officer with a kitchen knife — was the last time the Palestinian family gathered in their home that will soon be blown up. Last week, Israel's Supreme Court dismissed the family's appeal and decided to destroy the new, third-floor apartment where they've lived for almost three years.

Gabonese awoke Thursday to a new military leader after mutinous soldiers ousted a president whose family had ruled the oil-rich Central African nation for more than five decades.

The new leader is Gen. Brice Clotaire Oligui Nguema, head of the elite republican guard unit, who soldiers announced on state TV Wednesday, hours after President Ali Bongo Ondimba was declared winner of last week's presidential election, which Gabonese and observers say was marred with irregularities and a lack of transparency.

Iran's foreign minister has condemned an Israeli airstrike on the international airport of the Syrian city of Aleppo, saying such attacks would eventually face retaliation.

Hossein Amirabdollahian made his comments during a news conference in the Syrian capital, Damascus, where he was beginning a two-day visit.

Israeli police has shot and killed a 14-year-old Palestinian boy who stabbed a man in a Jerusalem light-rail station, officials said, while Palestinian militants detonated a bomb near a convoy of Israeli troops escorting Jewish worshippers to a holy site in the occupied West Bank, wounding four Israeli troops.

The attacks came hours after fighting erupted in a Palestinian refugee camp between local residents and their own security forces, leaving a 25-year-old Palestinian man dead.

Chinese state media report at least 121 passenger trains are suspending service in anticipation of the arrival of Typhoon Saola, while people in coastal areas of southern China were being warned to stay away from the coastline.

The suspensions on key lines running from north to south as well as on regional networks will begin Thursday and continue through Sept. 6, state broadcaster CCTV reported.

A Palestinian driver slammed his truck into soldiers at a busy checkpoint in the occupied West Bank on Thursday, killing one Israeli before being shot dead, Israeli authorities said, in the latest bloodshed in a relentless cycle of violence to roil the region.

The violence came a day after Israeli police shot and killed a 14-year-old Palestinian boy who stabbed a man in a Jerusalem light-rail station and after Palestinian militants detonated a bomb near a convoy of Israeli troops escorting Jewish worshippers to a holy site in the West Bank, wounding four Israeli troops.