Ukrainian forces hit two of Russia's biggest oil refineries overnight in its latest long-range strikes, officials said, as Kyiv deepened its economic, military and diplomatic pressure on Moscow.

Ukraine's almost daily long-range drone and missile strikes using domestically developed weapons have battered Russian oil facilities for months. The operation has brought a fuel crisis that is embarrassing the Kremlin more than four years after Russia's all-out invasion of its neighbor.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa, the Japanese director known as "the master of horror," was a bit nervous about how viewers might react to his first samurai film.

He needn't have worried.

Soldiers and emergency workers combed through a badly damaged shopping mall and collapsed houses looking for trapped survivors Wednesday after a powerful earthquake that killed at least 18 people in southwestern Japan.

The magnitude 7.1 earthquake that hit a day earlier in the Kumamoto area on the southern main island of Kyushu, also left at least 62 people injured, six of them seriously, the prefectural government said. The tally has been steadily growing, fanning fears it may continue to rise.

It seems as if the world is afire this summer. But even as wildfires in Europe and North America grow more extreme, key worldwide burning statistics are at a record low largely because Africa and Asia are controlling fire more.

Experts say these seemingly opposite trends are happening at the same time because of what humanity is doing to the planet.

Fire crews battled a mega-fire four times the size of Paris in southwest France while facing tinderbox temperatures forecast to climb above 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) on Wednesday.

The heat wave and forecast winds could hamper progress against the blaze that has forced 220,000 people from their homes, authorities for the Gironde region around Bordeaux said.

Russia's main domestic security agency said Wednesday that Pavel Durov, founder and owner of the messaging app Telegram, has been charged with aiding terrorism and put on an international wanted list.

The charges against Durov, who was born and began his career in Russia but later moved abroad, came as the Russian authorities restrict Telegram, one of the most popular messaging apps in the country. It is part of a long-term effort to bring the internet under the Kremlin's full control that has intensified since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Investigators have found what appears to be a claim of responsibility by the suspect in the fatal attack near Berlin's Pride festival, German authorities said Tuesday.

The 21-year-old suspect, Abdul Rahman Ballout, was killed in a confrontation with police on Sunday, the day after investigators say he drove a van into a crowd near the festival's closing party before apparently cutting others with a machete. A Polish woman was killed and 31 other people injured.

The man on trial in the stabbing of Salman Rushdie chose Tuesday not to testify or call any witnesses in the federal terrorism case, which is expected to head to the jury as soon as Wednesday.

Hadi Matar's lawyer told the court that the 28-year-old — who already has been convicted of state-level attempted murder charges — wouldn't take the stand at his trial on charges that include engaging in an act of transnational terrorism.

Mahasen Faqih and her husband returned this week to their village in southern Lebanon, digging through the debris of their home in search of their belongings, as part of the U.S.-brokered "pilot zones" agreement in which Israel agreed to withdraw in exchange for the disarmament of Hezbollah.

The couple fled north shortly after the start of the latest Israel-Hezbollah war, in early March. Now, their home in Zawtar al-Gharbieh — one of three zones where Israel agreed to turn over control to the Lebanese army — is among homes so damaged that they're unlivable. But Faqih said they've vowed to stay, settling inside the large grocery shop that they own in the village as they wait to have their home demolished and rebuilt.

The Israeli military was about to launch a nighttime strike on a group of men in southern Syria when the soldiers noticed the long curls dangling from the temples of their targets. The troops held their fire.

These were not Syrian militants attempting to breach Israel's border but religious Jews who had slipped into Syria and were on their way back.