The prosecutor leading an investigation into a horrific knife attack in a French Alpine town says four children aged between 22 months and 3 years suffered life-threatening wounds and that two adults also were injured.

The prosecutor said the attacker's motives remain unknown but do not appear to be terrorism-related.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky arrived in the flood-hit region of Kherson on Thursday to evaluate response to damage caused by a dam breach.

The Ukrainian leader wrote on his Telegram account that he was helping assess efforts to evacuate civilians, provide them with drinking water and other support, and try to stanch vast environmental damage.

Intense Canadian wildfires are blanketing the northeastern U.S. in a dystopian haze, turning the air acrid, the sky yellowish gray and prompting warnings for vulnerable populations to stay inside.

Karim Benzema has become the latest soccer star to move to Saudi Arabia after signing with the national champion Al-Ittihad on Tuesday.

Benzema, who left Real Madrid after 14 years and 648 games, is set to play against his former Madrid teammate Cristiano Ronaldo, who joined Al-Nassr in January.

The Turkish lira tumbled to a fresh record low Wednesday, extending its slide against the U.S. dollar since President Recep Tayyip Erdogan started his third term.

The lira weakened by around 7% on Wednesday, hitting 23.16 against the dollar. The decline took the currency's loss since the appointment of Erdogan's new government to more than 8%. The currency has weakened by around 20% since the start of the year.

As shelling from Russia's war on Ukraine echoed overhead, dozens of evacuees on an island in the Dnieper River scurried onto the tops of military trucks or into rafts to flee rising floodwaters caused by a dam breach upstream.

The unnerving bark of dogs left behind further soured the mood of those ferried to safety. A woman in one raft clutched the head of her despondent daughter. A stalled military truck stuck in swelling waters raised the panic level as Red Cross teams tried to manage an orderly evacuation.

Israel's foreign minister chided U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris on Wednesday for speaking out against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's planned overhaul of the country's judiciary.

The exchange underscored tensions between the Biden administration and Netanyahu's new government — the most right-wing and religious in Israel's history — over the planned judicial overhaul.

Pope Francis went to the hospital Wednesday to undergo abdominal surgery to treat an intestinal blockage, two years after he had 33 centimeters (13 inches) of his colon removed because of a narrowing of the large intestine.

The Vatican said Francis, 86, would be put under general anesthesia for the procedure Wednesday afternoon and would be hospitalized at Rome's Gemelli hospital for several days.

Residents of southern Ukraine, some who spent the night on rooftops, braced for a second day of swelling floodwaters on Wednesday as authorities warned that a Dnieper River dam breach would continue to unleash pent-up waters from a giant reservoir.

Officials said waters were expected to rise further following Tuesday's dramatic rupture of the Kakhovka dam about 70 kilometers (44 miles) to the east of the city of Kherson, but were slowing.

A real estate deal in Jerusalem's Old City, at the epicenter of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, has sent the historic Armenian community there into a panic as residents search for answers about the feared loss of their homes to a mysterious investor.

The 99-year lease of some 25% of the Old City's Armenian Quarter has touched sensitive nerves in the Holy Land and sparked a controversy extending far beyond the Old City walls. The fallout has forced the highest authority of the Armenian Orthodox Church to cloister himself in a convent and prompted a disgraced priest who is allegedly behind the deal to flee to a Los Angeles suburb.