While Xi Jinping is primed to receive a third term as head of China's ruling Communist Party on Sunday, it is unknown who will join him for the next five years on the party's leading bodies, the Central Committee and the Politburo.

Analysts will scrutinize who joins, and who leaves, for any clues about the future direction of policy as well as just how much power the 69-year-old Xi has been able to amass as one of China's most influential figures in the country's modern political history.

French cement company Lafarge has pleaded guilty to paying millions of dollars to the Islamic State group to keep a plant operational in Syria — at a time when the militant group was engaged in torturing kidnapped Westerners — and agreed to pay roughly $778 million in penalties.

The Justice Department accused the company of turning a blind eye to the conduct of the Islamic State, negotiating a revenue-sharing agreement with the militant group as it was acquiring new territory and as Syria was mired in a brutal civil war. The company's actions, already investigated by French law enforcement authorities, occurred before it merged with Swiss company Holcim to form the world's largest cement maker.

An emaciated little girl lies motionless on a hospital bed and struggles to breathe. Her body is covered with sores. She can barely open her eyes.

Hafsa Ahmed is about 2. About a dozen other children in the red-brick hospital in this southern Yemeni city are also dying of starvation.

Russian President Vladimir Putin declared martial law Wednesday in the four regions of Ukraine that Moscow annexed and gave additional emergency powers to the heads of all regions of Russia.

Putin didn't immediately spell out the steps that would be taken under martial law, but said his order was effective starting Thursday. His decree gives law enforcement agencies three days to submit specific proposals and orders the creation of territorial defense forces in the four annexed regions.

British Prime Minister Liz Truss described herself as "a fighter and not a quitter" Wednesday as she faced down a hostile opposition and fury from her own Conservative Party over her botched economic plan.

Yet the grim faces of Conservative lawmakers behind her in the House of Commons suggested that Truss faces an uphill struggle to save her job.

A Hamas delegation arrived in Damascus Wednesday for talks with President Bashar Al-Assad in the first  such visit since the Palestinian Islamist group severed ties with Syria a decade ago.

Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, was one of Assad's closest allies but left Syria in 2012 after condemning his government's brutal suppression of peaceful protests in March 2011, which triggered the country's descent into civil war.

An American citizen has been arrested in Saudi Arabia, tortured and sentenced to 16 years in prison over tweets he sent while in the United States, his son said Tuesday.

Saad Ibrahim Almadi, a 72-year-old retired project manager living in Florida, was arrested last November while visiting family in the kingdom and was sentenced earlier this month, his son Ibrahim told The Associated Press, confirming details that were first reported by the Washington Post. Almadi is a citizen of both Saudi Arabia and the U.S.

Iranian competitive climber Elnaz Rekabi received a hero's welcome on her return to Tehran early Wednesday, after competing in South Korea without wearing a mandatory headscarf required of female athletes from the Islamic Republic.

Rekabi's decision not to wear the hijab while competing Sunday came as protests sparked by the Sept. 16 death in custody of a 22-year-old woman have entered a fifth week. Mahsa Amini was detained by the country's morality police over her clothing — and her death has seen women removing their mandatory hijabs in public.

North Korea fired about 100 more artillery shells toward the sea Wednesday in response to South Korean live-firing drills at border areas as the rivals accuse each other of dialing up tensions on the Korean Peninsula with weapons tests.

The drills conducted by both sides come amid heightened animosities over recent North Korean missile tests that it calls simulated nuclear attacks on South Korean and U.S. targets.

The Iranian-made drones that Russia sent slamming into central Kyiv this week have complicated Israel's balancing act between Russia and the West.

Israel has stayed largely on the sidelines since Russia's invasion of Ukraine last February so as not to damage its strategic relationship with the Kremlin. Although Israel has sent humanitarian aid to Ukraine, it has refused Kyiv's frequent requests to send air defense systems and other military equipment and refrained from enforcing strict economic sanctions on Russia and the many Russian-Jewish oligarchs who have second homes in Israel.