Spotlight
Numerous governments across Central and Eastern Europe are taking steps to conserve electricity and avert an energy crisis as record low water levels on the Danube River have forced power plants to the brink of shutting down.
Persistent drought and successive extreme heat waves have deprived one of Europe's largest rivers of water, pushing the Danube's levels in Hungary's capital Budapest to around 10 centimeters (4 inches) on Monday, well below the previous all-time low of 33 centimeters (13 inches) set in 2018.
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European football body UEFA has threatened FIFA with legal action over Gianni Infantino's failed plan to sell a stake in future World Cup profits to private investors, and said any potential evidence should not be destroyed.
Infantino's secretive proposal to raise $4.2 billion from investors including the New York investment firm of Joshua Kushner was dropped early Saturday, days after the revelation in media reports provoked a global furor.
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Russian planes dropped eight powerful glide bombs in a span of 90 minutes on residential districts of the southern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia, killing one person and wounding dozens of others, regional chief Ivan Fedorov said Monday.
Russia has used glide bombs to smash Ukrainian towns and cities since it invaded its neighbor more than four years ago. The weapons are Soviet-era bombs retrofitted with guidance systems and can carry up to 3,000 kilograms (6,600 pounds) of explosives, leaving huge craters. Ukraine has no effective countermeasures against them.
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The U.S. dollar weakened sharply Monday against the Japanese yen after U.S. President Donald Trump and Japan's finance minister confirmed both sides had intervened in markets.
Before late last week, the dollar was trading above 163 yen, touching 40-year highs. After regulators were suspected of stepping in, it fell below 160 yen.
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U.S. President Donald Trump said Sunday he decided to hold off on ordering American forces to carry out new strikes against Iran at the urging of Gulf allies Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
Trump added that a plan was in place for U.S. forces to carry out "the biggest attack since World War II" on Sunday. But he decided to scrap the plan and give diplomacy more time to play out after hearing from key Gulf leaders — including Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman — as well as at the request of unnamed Iranian officials.
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President Donald Trump has played this hand before during the 5-month-old Iran war.
It starts with a grim warning to Tehran that he's on the cusp of ordering U.S. forces to "obliterate" its power plants or seize key parts of its oil industry if its leaders don't quickly agree to U.S. terms to end the war. It ends with him edging away with a last-minute declaration, sometimes at the behest of Gulf allies, that he's going to give diplomacy more time.
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Israel has shared "serious security concerns" with the White House regarding the proposed disarmament deal with Hamas, an Israeli official said as Israeli strikes overnight and into Sunday evening killed at least 17 people, including children, in Gaza.
The remarks by Doron Spielman, spokesperson for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office, were some of the first public comments since U.S. President Donald Trump announced the agreement.
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Hamas said Frsay that it reached an agreement to disarm, a significant move that could help end the war in Gaza — but one that will face many hurdles and could take a long time to achieve, if at all.
The group agreed to a road map as long as Israel also makes concessions, including ending hostilities and withdrawing its troops from the Palestinian territory, a Hamas official and a regional official told The Associated Press. Senior Hamas official Bassem Naim confirmed in a post on X that the group agreed to the deal.
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It took a World Cup to transform a remote cluster of islands that's home to more sheep than people into a cultural juggernaut.
A decision by Argentina's players to unfurl a banner about the disputed Falkland Islands after defeating England in the World Cup semifinals carried a historical cause onto the T-shirts, bedroom walls and Instagram feeds of a new generation. In the weeks since, the image that has endured from the tournament in soccer-crazed Argentina hasn't been of Lionel Messi. It's been the crudely painted sign reading: "The Malvinas are Argentine."
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Climate change's fingerprints are all over the extreme fire weather that sparked this week's devastating wildfires in Spain and France and has spiked Southern Europe's burning the past eight years, two new studies conclude.
Human-caused climate change made the hot and dry conditions responsible for Spain's record-sized inferno 20 times more likely to happen, and it doubled the chances of extreme fire conditions for the flames in France, scientists at World Weather Attribution calculated in a rapid analysis Thursday, conducted while fires were still burning. Warming in the past 26 years has tripled the odds of the severe fire risk conditions in Spain and increased the chances in France 40%, the same report found.
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