Argentina and Brazil will play a June 11 friendly in Australia and officials from both teams will be hoping there is a proper conclusion this time.
The last time the teams met — in a World Cup qualifying match last September in Sao Paulo — the game was halted after only a few minutes after Brazilian health authorities walked onto the field during play as part of an effort to deport four Argentine players accused of violating coronavirus quarantine regulations.

With its ground troops forced to pull back in Ukraine and regroup, and its Black Sea flagship sunk, Russia's military failings are mounting. No country is paying closer attention than China to how a smaller and outgunned force has badly bloodied what was thought to be one of the world's most powerful armies.
China, like Russia, has been ambitiously reforming its Soviet-style military and experts say leader Xi Jinping will be carefully parsing the weaknesses exposed by the invasion of Ukraine as they might apply to his own People's Liberation Army and his designs on the self-governed island of Taiwan.

Heavy winds have kicked up a towering wall of flames outside a northern Arizona tourist town, ripping through two-dozen structures and sending residents of more than 700 homes scrambling to flee.
Flames as high as 100 feet (30 meters) raced through an area of scattered homes, dry grass and Ponderosa pine trees on the outskirts of Flagstaff as wind gusts of up to 50 mph (80 kph) pushed the blaze over a major highway.

Devastating floods in South Africa this week, as well as other extreme weather events across the continent linked to human-caused climate change, are putting marine and terrestrial wildlife species at risk, according to biodiversity experts.
Africa has already faced several climate-related woes in the past year: the ongoing fatal floods follow unrelenting cyclones in the south, extreme temperatures in western and northern regions, and a debilitating drought which is currently afflicting eastern, central and the Horn of Africa.

Thousands of people across Sri Lanka took to the streets on Wednesday, a day after police opened fire at demonstrators, killing one person and injuring 13 others, reigniting widespread protests amid the country's worst economic crisis in decades.
Protesters used vehicles to block key roads in many parts of the country as they demonstrated against the shooting as well as rising fuel prices and the government's failure to resolve the deepening economic problems. The shooting was the first by Sri Lankan security forces during weeks of protests.

An unexpectedly sharp drop in subscribers has Netflix considering changes it has long resisted: Minimizing password sharing and creating a low-cost subscription supported by advertising.
Looming changes announced late Tuesday are designed to help Netflix regain momentum lost over the past year. Pandemic-driven lockdowns that drove binge-watching have lifted, while deep-pocketed rivals such as Apple and Walt Disney have begun to chip away at its vast audience with their own streaming services.

Shanghai allowed 4 million more people out of their homes Wednesday as anti-virus controls that shut down China's biggest city eased, while the International Monetary Fund cut its forecast of Chinese economic growth and warned the global flow of industrial goods might be disrupted.
A total of almost 12 million people in the city of 25 million are allowed to go outdoors following the first round of easing last week, health official Wu Ganyu said at a news conference. Wu said the virus was "under effective control" for the first time in some parts of the city.

A group of Israeli ultra-nationalists said it is determined to go ahead with a flag-waving march around predominantly Palestinian areas of Jerusalem's Old City later Wednesday, brushing aside a police ban of an event that served as one of the triggers of last year's Israel-Gaza war.
In a sign of the already heated atmosphere, a small group of Palestinian protesters threw rocks at police while hundreds of Jewish visitors entered the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, known to Jews as the Temple Mount.

Churches in Jerusalem are up in arms against Jewish "radicals" who are settling in the Christian Quarter and threatening a fragile religious balance in the ancient Holy City.
"We have a major problem here," said Greek Orthodox Patriarch Theophilus III in Jerusalem's Old City, which is split into historic Jewish, Muslim, Christian and Armenian quarters.

During a visit to Syria in 2017, Vladimir Putin lavished praise on a Syrian general whose division played an instrumental role in defeating insurgents in the country's long-running civil war. The Russian president told him his cooperation with Russian troops "will lead to great successes in the future."
Now members of Brig. Gen. Suheil al-Hassan's division are among hundreds of Russian-trained Syrian fighters who have reportedly signed up to fight alongside Russian troops in Ukraine, including Syrian soldiers, former rebels and experienced fighters who fought for years against the Islamic State group in Syria's desert.
