The traditional elite have been cut down to size at the Women's World Cup.

That has been the standout theme as a tournament that has already set records for attendance and goals scored enters the quarterfinals stage, and it has made for high drama.

As a military junta in Niger marked two weeks in power Wednesday, its leaders are appointing a government and rejecting calls for negotiation in what analysts described as an attempt to entrench their power and show that they're serious about governing the West Africa country in the face of an escalating regional crisis.

The junta has named a new prime minister and made a slew of other new cabinet appointments. They also refused to admit mediation teams that planned to come Tuesday from the United Nations, the African Union, and West African regional bloc ECOWAS, citing "evident reasons of security in this atmosphere of menace," according to a letter seen by The Associated Press.

The Syrian government decided to increase prices of drugs by 50%, the head of the pharmacies syndicate in Damascus said Tuesday, as the Syrian pound hit new a low in recent days.

Hassan Derwan did not give a reason for the price hike in his interview with the pro-government daily Al-Watan. Earlier this year, prices were raised by between 50% and 80%.

For the first time in 14 years, presidents of the South American nations home to the Amazon rainforest are converging to chart a common course for protection of the bioregion and address organized crime. The summit Tuesday and Wednesday in the Brazilian city of Belem is a meeting of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization, a toothless, 45-year-old alliance that has met only three times before.

The Amazon stretches across an area twice the size of India, and two-thirds of it lies in Brazil. Seven other countries and one territory share the remaining third — Colombia, Peru, Venezuela, Bolivia, Guyana, Suriname, Ecuador and French Guiana. Presidents from all but Ecuador, Suriname and Venezuela are attending.

Argentines lined up on a bitterly cold winter morning in an annual pilgrimage to a Roman Catholic shrine for the patron saint of work, asking for jobs and prosperity as many struggle with one of the world's highest inflation rates.

Voters in the South American country are set to go to the polls Sunday in national primary elections that will determine party candidates for the October presidential race. But many of those in line at the shrine to St. Cayetano had little optimism things would change regardless of who comes out on top.

Italian bank stocks plunged Tuesday after the Cabinet approved a proposal to apply a 40% tax on some bank profits this year to help consumers and businesses cope with higher borrowing costs.

Transport Minister Matteo Salvini announced the tax at a Monday evening press conference, saying it was a measure of "social equity" to make up for a series of interest rate hikes from the European Central Bank.

China's exports plunged by 14.5% in July compared with a year earlier, adding to pressure on the ruling Communist Party to reverse an economic slump.

Imports tumbled 12.4%, customs data showed Tuesday, in a blow to global exporters that look to China as one of the biggest markets for industrial materials, food and consumer goods.

Now that July's sizzling numbers are all in, the European climate monitoring organization made it official: July 2023 was Earth's hottest month on record by a wide margin.

July's global average temperature of 16.95 degrees Celsius (62.51 degrees Fahrenheit) was a third of a degree Celsius (six tenths of a degree Fahrenheit) higher than the previous record set in 2019, Copernicus Climate Change Service, a division of the European Union's space program, announced Tuesday. Normally global temperature records are broken by hundredths or a tenth of a degree, so this margin is unusual.

A senior U.S. diplomat said coup leaders in Niger refused to allow her to meet Monday with the West African country's democratically elected president, whom she described as under "virtual house arrest."

Acting Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland also described the mutinous officers as unreceptive to U.S. pressure to return the country to civilian rule.

Even in Antarctica — one of the most remote and desolate places on Earth — scientists say they are finding shattered temperature records and an increase in the size and number of wacky weather events.

The southernmost continent is not isolated from the extreme weather associated with human-caused climate change, according to a new paper in Frontiers in Environmental Science that tries to make a coherent picture of a place that has been a climate change oddball. Its western end and especially its peninsula have seen dramatic ice sheet melt that threatens massive sea level rises over the next few centuries, while the eastern side has at times gained ice. One western glacier is melting so fast that scientists have nicknamed it the Doomsday Glacier and there's an international effort trying to figure out what's happening to it. And Antarctic sea ice veered from record high to shocking amounts far lower than ever seen.