Power was cut off in large swaths of southern and central Iraq for much of Saturday during scorching summer heat and observances of the Shiite holy day of Ashoura after a fire broke out at a power station in the southern city of Basra.

Hezbollah chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah has stepped up his attacks against the LGBTQ communities in Lebanon and the region.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has courted leaders from Africa at a summit, hailing the continent's growing role in global affairs and offering to expand political and business ties.

Addressing the Russia-Africa summit for a second day, Putin said Moscow would closely analyze a peace proposal for Ukraine that African leaders have sought to pursue.

Russian forces have struck the central Ukrainian city of Dnipro and pounded a key village in the southeast that Ukraine claimed to have recaptured in its grinding counteroffensive, while Moscow accused Kyiv of firing two missiles at southern Russia and wounding 20 people.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, meanwhile, marked Ukraine's Statehood Day by reaffirming the country's sovereignty — a rebuke to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who used his claim that Ukraine didn't exist as a nation to justify his invasion.

Kurdish-led armed groups in Iraq and Syria alleged that Turkish airstrikes killed a total of eight of their fighters Friday.

The counterterrorism service of the regional government in the semi-autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq said in a statement that four members of the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, were killed and another wounded in a Turkish drone strike in Sharbazher district in Sulaymaniyah in the Kurdish region of Iraq.

UEFA confirmed Barcelona's place in the next Champions League on Thursday though said an investigation into more than $7 million paid to a refereeing official could be reopened if more evidence emerges.

Barcelona's place in the Champions League group stage worth tens of millions of euros (dollars) – earned by winning the Spanish league last season – could have been at risk from the so-called "Caso Negreira" case.

Wall Street is back to climbing following more encouraging profit reports and the latest signal that inflation is loosening its chokehold on the economy. The S&P 500 was 0.7% higher in early trading Friday. The Dow was up 207, or 0.6%, after breaking a 13-day winning streak a day before. The Nasdaq composite was up 1.1%. Stocks have been rallying recently on hopes high inflation is cooling enough to get the Federal Reserve to stop hiking interest rates. A report on Friday said the inflation measure the Fed prefers to use slowed by a touch more than expected last month.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. AP's earlier story follows below.

Poland's lawmakers voted Friday to approve an amended but divisive law on Russian influences believed to be targeting the opposition and criticized by the U.S. and the European Union.

The law was proposed in May by Poland's ruling right-wing Law and Justice party and critics see it as primarily targeting opposition leader and former Prime Minister Donald Tusk, before a parliamentary election scheduled for this fall. Following criticism, President Andrzej Duda proposed urgent amendments to tone it down.

The Japanese government stepped up its alarm over Chinese assertiveness, warning in a report issued Friday that the country faces its worst security threats since World War II as it plans to implement a new strategy that calls for a major military buildup.

The 2023 defense white paper, approved by Prime Minister Fumio Kishida's Cabinet, is the first since the government adopted a controversial new National Security Strategy in December, seen as a break from Japan's postwar policy limiting the use of force to self-defense.

The lower house of Jordan's parliament has passed legislation to punish online speech deemed harmful to national unity, drawing accusations from human rights groups of a new crackdown on free expression in a country where censorship and repression are increasingly common.