A super-sized World Cup has paved the way for tiny Curaçao and Cape Verde to book their places at sport's biggest global event next year.

Just as FIFA president Gianni Infantino predicted.

Three months in and it has already been a season of extreme highs and lows for Liverpool.

A run of five straight wins to start the Premier League title defense. Then a streak of four consecutive losses.

Italy will first host Northern Ireland in a World Cup qualifying playoff in March but then would go on the road to reach its first tournament after back-to-back failures at this stage.

FIFA made the playoffs draw on Thursday that will send the winner between four-time champion Italy and the Northern Irish on March 26 to travel to face Wales or Bosnia-Herzegovina five days later. At stake was a place at the first 48-team finals tournament in north America.

As Brazil seeks to boost its environmental credentials by hosting the United Nations' climate summit, a proposal to build a railway through the Amazon has threatened to tarnish that image amid protests by Indigenous groups and environmentalists.

The Ferrograo railway project would transport commodities including corn and soybeans nearly 1,000 kilometers (621 miles) from a city on the southern edge of the rainforest to a port along a major tributary of the Amazon River. From there, commodities would be ferried to a larger port near Belem, the host city of the COP30 conference, for export to China and other trading partners.

India is unlikely to submit its climate pledge before the end of the annual United Nations climate summit, raising questions about how the world's most populous nation can influence others on confronting climate change.

Experts say the delay may be a sign of India's displeasure with a lack of progress toward funding global climate priorities. However, this can also hurt its ability to lead at the climate talks in Brazil.

If heat-trapping pollution from burning coal, oil and gas continues unchecked, thousands of hazardous sites across the United States risk being flooded from sea level rise by the turn of the century, posing serious health risks to nearby communities, according to a new study.

Researchers identified 5,500 sites that store, emit or handle sewage, trash, oil, gas and other hazards that could face coastal flooding by 2100, with much of the risk already locked in due to past emissions. But more than half the sites are projected to face flood risk much sooner — as soon as 2050. Low-income, communities of color and other marginalized groups are the most at risk.

The rapid rise of ChatGPT and other generative AI systems has disrupted education, transforming how students learn and study.

Students everywhere have turned to chatbots to help with their homework, but artificial intelligence's capabilities have blurred the lines about what it should — and shouldn't — be used for.

They're cute, even cuddly, and promise learning and companionship — but artificial intelligence toys are not safe for kids, according to children's and consumer advocacy groups urging parents not to buy them during the holiday season.

These toys, marketed to kids as young as 2 years old, are generally powered by AI models that have already been shown to harm children and teenagers, such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, according to an advisory published Thursday by the children's advocacy group Fairplay and signed by more than 150 organizations and individual experts such as child psychiatrists and educators.

The U.S. jobless rate crept up in September even as hiring exceeded analyst expectations, according to a delayed employment report published Thursday after a record-long government shutdown.

The world's biggest economy added 119,000 jobs in the month -- up from August -- but the unemployment rate edged up from 4.3 percent to 4.4 percent, said the Labor Department.

Israel may have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity when it forcibly expelled 32,000 Palestinians from three West Bank refugee camps earlier this year during a military operation in the area, a human rights group said Thursday.

Human Rights Watch said in a report that top Israeli officials including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Defense Minister Israel Katz should be investigated for war crimes and prosecuted if found responsible.