Flying in the Bundesliga, Bayern Munich is stuttering in the Champions League.

The Bavarian powerhouse lost 3-0 at Feyenoord on Wednesday for its third defeat of the campaign, denting its hopes of reaching the round of 16 without having to contest a playoff.

Jobless claims applications ticked up modestly last week, but the total number of Americans collecting unemployment benefits rose to their highest level in more than three years.

Applications for jobless benefits rose by 6,000 to 223,000 for the week ending January 18, the Labor Department said Thursday. Analysts were expecting 219,000 new applications.

In the wake of devastating wildfires in Los Angeles that struck at the heart of the movie industry, the nominations to the 97th Academy Awards are being announced.

The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences began announcing the nominations Thursday at 8:30am Eastern via a wide array of platforms, including on Oscar.com, Oscars.org, the academy's social network sites, ABC's "Good Morning America," as well as on Disney+ and Hulu. Bowen Yang and Rachel Sennott are reading the nominees.

The trouble started every day at around 3 p.m., after Cathy Higgins had spent five or six hours staring at an array of computer screens at her desk. Her university job overseeing research projects involved peering closely at numbers and details on contracts, applications and budgets.

"My vision was so blurry, I couldn't even see what was on the screen, and I was squinting so much that I could not function," Higgins said.

Police in Hungary said Thursday they were investigating bomb threats that were sent to more than 240 schools across the country, resulting in classes being cancelled at some schools.

The threats, which came in the form of emails, were identical in their text and likely sent by a single sender, police said in a statement. Officers were being dispatched to all affected institutions. No explosives or explosive devices were found in the buildings inspected so far, police added.

Turkey's central bank lowered its key interest rate by 2.5 percentage points to 45% on Thursday, in its second rate cut in as many months as official figures showed inflation was easing.

The bank's Monetary Policy Committee said it was reducing its benchmark one-week repo rate to 45% from the current 47.5%. In its previous reduction in December, the bank also cut the rate by 2.5 percentage points.

Germany's opposition leader vowed Thursday to bar people from entering the country without proper papers and to step up deportations if he is elected chancellor next month, as a knife attack by a rejected asylum-seeker spilled over into an election campaign in which he is the front-runner.

Two people, including a 2-year-old boy, were killed and three injured Wednesday in the Bavarian city of Aschaffenburg. The suspect, arrested shortly afterward, is a 28-year-old Afghan with a history of psychiatric problems and violence who said over a month ago that he would leave Germany voluntarily.

Syria's new foreign minister said Wednesday at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos that his country hopes it can follow in the footsteps of economic powerhouses like Singapore and Saudi Arabia as it begins rebuilding after nearly 14 years of war.

“We need the help of the international community to help us in this new experiment,” Asaad al-Shibani said.

A record 47% of the European Union's electricity now comes from solar and other renewables, a report Thursday said, in yet another sign of the growing gap between the bloc's push for clean energy and the new U.S. administration's pursuit of more fossil fuels.

Nearly three-quarters of the EU's electricity doesn't emit planet-warming gases into the air — with 24% of electricity in the bloc coming from nuclear power which also doesn't release greenhouse gases, a report released by the climate energy think tank Ember found. This is far higher than in countries like the United States and China, where nearly two-thirds of their energy is still produced from carbon-polluting fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas.

Inside a lavish clubhouse on Doha's waterfront, tensions strained by months of fruitless back-and-forth weighed on negotiators as the hour neared 3 a.m.

On the first floor, a Hamas delegation whose leader had once evaded an Israeli airstrike that killed seven family members combed through the details of yet another proposal to halt the war in Gaza. On the second floor, advisers to Israel's intelligence chief, who had vowed to hunt down those responsible for the Oct. 7, 2023, attack that ignited the war, did the same.