Israel’s far-right national security minister said Wednesday that Jews are allowed to pray at Jerusalem’s most sensitive holy site, threatening to stoke tensions that are already soaring over the war in Gaza.

Itamar Ben-Gvir has said before it's his policy that Jews should be able to pray at the hilltop compound known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary. But his statement on Wednesday comes at a politically sensitive time, hours before Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to a joint session of Congress in Washington.

Ukraine's Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba has said he is seeking "common ground" in talks this week with his Chinese counterpart on ending his country's war with Russia.

Kuleba met Wednesday with Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Guangzhou, a major commercial and manufacturing center in southern China. It is the first visit to the country by a Ukrainian foreign minister since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which has strained Ukraine's relations with China.

Chinese officials warned a delegation of top U.S. executives visiting Beijing this week that higher tariffs on imports from China will harm their businesses inside the country.

The delegation of influential business people belonging to the U.S. China Business Council, including the CEOs of FedEx and Micron, followed a top-level meeting last week where ruling Communist Party leaders endorsed a blueprint for policies that included numerous pledges to improve the business environment for foreign investors. But they also vowed greater vigilance in protecting state secrets, a potential minefield for foreign businesses that face intense scrutiny of their China operations by authorities.

In the crush of anti-government protests paralyzing downtown Buenos Aires in the last months, some Argentines saw a traffic-induced headache. Others saw a reaction to President Javier Milei's brutal austerity measures.

Alejandra, a street vendor, saw people with nowhere to urinate.

When Benson Wanjala started farming in his western Kenya village two and a half decades ago, his 10-acre farm could produce a bountiful harvest of 200 bags of maize. That has dwindled to 30. He says his once fertile soil has become a nearly lifeless field that no longer earns him a living.

Like many other farmers, he blames acidifying fertilizers pushed in Kenya and other African countries in recent years. He said he started using the fertilizers to boost his yield and it worked — until it didn't. Kenya's government first introduced a fertilizer subsidy in 2008, making chemical fertilizers more accessible for smaller-scale farmers.

A plane crashed Wednesday just after taking off from Nepal's capital, killing 18 people and injuring a pilot who was the lone survivor.

Police official Basanta Rajauri said authorities have pulled out all 18 bodies. The pilot has injuries to his eyes but his life is not in any danger, said a doctor at Kathmandu Medical College Hospital, where the pilot is being treated. The doctor spoke on condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to speak to media.

Voters in Indiana haven't backed a Democratic presidential candidate in nearly 16 years. But when Vice President Kamala Harris heads to the solidly Republican state on Wednesday, she'll speak to a constituency she hopes will turn out for her in massive numbers in November: women of color.

Just three days after launching her bid for the White House following President Joe Biden's departure from the race, Harris will address the biennial gathering of the historically Black sorority Zeta Phi Beta in Indianapolis.

Sudan's paramilitary leader has announced plans to attend cease-fire talks in Switzerland next month arranged by the United States and Saudi Arabia.

Gen. Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, head of the Rapid Support Forces fighting Sudan's army, expressed hope on social media late Tuesday that the talks would become "a major step" toward peace and stability in Sudan and create a new state based on "justice, equality and federal rule."

Golden fields of wheat no longer produce the bounty they once did in Morocco. A six-year drought has imperiled the country's entire agriculture sector, including farmers who grow cereals and grains used to feed humans and livestock.

The North African nation projects this year's harvest will be smaller than last year in both volume and acreage, putting farmers out of work and requiring more imports and government subsidies to prevent the price of staples like flour from rising for everyday consumers.

On Sunday, the Earth sizzled to the hottest day ever measured by humans, yet another heat record shattered in the past couple of years, according to the European climate service Copernicus.

Copernicus' preliminary data shows that the global average temperature Sunday was 17.09 degrees Celsius (62.76 degrees Fahrenheit), beating the record set just last year on July 6, 2023 by .01 degrees Celsius (.02 degrees Fahrenheit). Both Sunday's mark and last year's record obliterate the previous record of 16.8 degrees Celsius (62.24 degrees Fahrenheit), which itself was only a few years old, set in 2016.