Organizers of the Eurovision Song Contest, the feel-good pop music gala that draws more than 100 million viewers every year, are meeting Thursday to tackle a bitter and divisive issue: Whether Israel should be allowed to participate in the 2026 competition.

Russian President Vladimir Putin says some proposals in a U.S. plan to end the war in Ukraine are unacceptable to the Kremlin, indicating in comments published Thursday that any deal is still some ways off.

U.S. President Donald Trump has set in motion the most intense diplomatic push to stop the fighting since Russia launched the full-scale invasion of its neighbor nearly four years ago. But the effort has once again run into demands that are hard to reconcile, especially over whether Ukraine must give up land to Russia and how it can be kept safe from any future aggression by Moscow.

China and France pledged deeper cooperation on global issues like the war in Ukraine and trade, as France prepares to take on the presidency of the Group of Seven next year.

French President Emmanuel Macron met with China's Xi Jinping on Thursday morning as part of a three-day state visit focusing on trade and diplomacy.

Israel said it launched an airstrike on a Hamas militant in southern Gaza late Wednesday in retaliation for an attack earlier in the day that wounded five Israeli soldiers.

The strike was the latest test for a fragile ceasefire that has mostly held up since early October, despite claims of violations by both Israel and Hamas. Hamas put out a statement condemning the Israeli strike in Khan Younis.

Erling Haaland scored his 100th Premier League goal on Tuesday and Manchester City moved to within two points of the top of the standings after surviving a stunning fightback from Fulham.

Haaland became the fastest player to reach a century of goals in the league with his 17th-minute opener in City's 5-4 win at Craven Cottage. But a night of personal glory was nearly wrecked as Fulham came back from 5-1 down and came agonizingly close to an equalizer in added time when Josh King's effort was cleared off the line.

It's a life-size World Cup football trophy — made of 2,842 Lego bricks.

The Taliban government said Wednesday that the alleged shooting of two National Guard members, one fatally, by an Afghan man in Washington last month had nothing to do with Afghanistan.

"The person who committed this act was trained by the Americans themselves," foreign minister Amir Khan Muttaqi said in a video published by his office, the first official Taliban reaction to the shooting.

The European Union on Wednesday issued updated guidance for asylum applications by Syrian nationals that reflects new conditions in Syria a year after the fall of the Bashar Assad. The changes may influence the result of asylum requests of some 110,000 Syrians who were still awaiting an asylum decision at the end of September.

The European Union Agency for Asylum said opponents of Assad and military service evaders "are no longer at risk of persecution."

Iran's rial currency fell Wednesday to a new low of 1.2 million to the U.S. dollar as nuclear sanctions squeeze Tehran's ailing economy.

Traders offered the new exchange rate as attempts so far to restart negotiations between America and Iran over its nuclear program appear stalled.

Eman Hassan Lawwa was dressed in traditional Palestinian prints and Hikmat Lawwa wore a suit as they walked hand-in-hand past the crumbled buildings of southern Gaza in a line of other couples dressed in exactly the same way.

The 27-year-old Palestinians were among 54 couples to get married Tuesday in a mass wedding in war-ravaged Gaza that represented a rare moment of hope after two years of devastation, death and conflict.