AP National News

Associated Press Tarmo Peltokoski has been hired to succeed Jaap van Zweden as music director of the Hong Kong Philharmonic. The philharmonic says the 24-year-old will start a four-year term in the 2026-27 season after serving as music director designate in 2025-26. Peltokoski grew up in Finland and studied at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki

Associated Press BEIRUT (AP) — The Lebanese Hezbollah group says it’s launched over 200 rockets at several military bases in Israel in retaliation for a strike that killed one of its senior commanders. The attack by the Iran-backed militant group on Thursday was one of the largest in the monthslong conflict along the Lebanon-Israel border,

AP Sports Writer LONDON (AP) — Some of Britain’s top tennis players are avoiding election talk like double-faults at Wimbledon. Polls opened Thursday morning in the U.K.’s first national election in almost five years but Britain’s rising stars are sticking to the tennis at the All England Club. Jack Draper says he has no interest

Associated Press COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) — An Iranian-born Norwegian man has been found guilty of terrorism in a 2022 attack on an LGBTQ+ festival in Oslo and sentenced to 30 years in prison. Two people were killed and nine were seriously wounded in the shooting at three locations, chiefly outside the London Pub, a popular

Associated Press MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — Pro-Palestinian protesters have breached security at Australia’s Parliament House to unfurl banners from the roof as a senator quit the government over its direction on the Gaza war. Tensions over Israel’s war against Hamas dominated Parliament’s final sitting day on Thursday before a five-week break. The four protesters were

Associated Press PESHAWAR, Pakistan (AP) — A Japanese climber has died while descending one of the highest mountains in northern Pakistan, the third death of a Japanese on the mountain in less than a month. Officials said Thursday that rescuers have located the body of Hiroshi Onishi, who fell into a crevasse earlier this week

AP Business Writer BANGKOK (AP) — Japan’s benchmark Nikkei 225 surged Thursday to a record close of 40,913.65, while most other major world markets also advanced. Investors worldwide are keen to see the Federal Reserve cut rates that it has been keeping at two-decade highs to slow growth and tame inflation, and hopes have been

TOKYO (AP) — Japan’s Nikkei 225 stock index has closed at a fresh record high of 40,913.65, pushing past its most recent record close set in March on heavy buying of automaker and technology shares. The index gained 0.8%. The gains followed an overnight rally on Wall Street, where the S&P 500 and tech-heavy Nasdaq

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping are attending the summit of a security grouping created by Moscow and Beijing to counter Western alliances. Putin and Xi joined the leaders of other countries that are members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization at its annual meeting in Kazakhstan’s capital of Astana on Thursday. The

Associated Press KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — On his way to the Kyiv train station to greet his wife and daughter returning from Poland to Ukraine, Oleksander Tryfonov made a stop. He bought two red roses from one of a half-dozen flower shops lining a dimly lit underpass — something beautiful for the two most precious

Associated Press CHEBAA, Lebanon (AP) — With cease-fire talks faltering in Gaza and no clear offramp for the conflict on the Lebanon-Israel border, the daily exchanges of strikes between Hezbollah and Israeli forces have sparked fires that are tearing through forests and farmland on both sides of the frontline. The blazes — exacerbated by supply

Associated Press PARIS (AP) — Cybersecurity experts and French officials say Russian disinformation campaigns against France are zeroing in on legislative elections and the Olympic Games which open in Paris at the end of the month. More than a dozen reports issued in the past year point to an intensifying effort from Russia to undermine

Associated Press CAPE TOWN, South Africa (AP) — Scientists in South Africa have been stunned to discover that termite mounds that are still inhabited in an arid region of the country are more than 30,000 years old, meaning they are the oldest known active termite hills. Some of the mounds near the Buffels River in

Associated Press BENGALURU, India (AP) — Months of scorching temperatures sometimes over 50 degrees Celsius (122 Fahrenheit) in parts of India this year — its worst heat wave in over a decade — left hundreds dead or ill. But the official number of deaths listed in government reports barely scratches the surface of the true

Associated Press DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — After the 2022 death of Mahsa Amini, Iranian lawmaker Masoud Pezeshkian wrote that it was “unacceptable in the Islamic Republic to arrest a girl for her hijab and then hand over her dead body to her family.” Days later as nationwide protests and a bloody crackdown on

Associated Press DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — As Iran’s runoff presidential election nears, comments by an official in the campaign of reformist Masoud Pezeshkian raised the possibility of his government increasing government-set gasoline prices — a move that has sparked nationwide protests in the past. While still tentative, economists long have warned Iran needs

Associated Press TULUM, Mexico (AP) — After leaving a trail of destruction across the eastern Caribbean and at least nine people dead, Hurricane Beryl strengthened back into a Category 3 storm late Thursday as it chugged over open water toward Mexico’s resort-studded Yucatan Peninsula. The U.S. National Hurricane Center said Beryl, which was the earliest

MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — Police on Thursday found the remains of a 12-year-old girl, two days after she was snatched by a crocodile while swimming in a creek in remote northern Australia. The remains were found in the river system near where the girl vanished at the Indigenous community of Palumpa, southwest of the Northern