KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — A Russian drone blasted a hole in an apartment building in northeastern Ukraine during a nighttime attack, killing at least six people and wounding nine others, officials said Thursday.

RAMAT GAN, Israel (AP) — For more than 470 days, Eitan Gonen publicly pleaded with his daughter to stay alive while in Hamas captivity. He didn't know if she would hear him, but he ended every interview he gave with the same hopeful message: Romi is coming home alive.

JERUSALEM (AP) — The terrorist group Hamas will release three Israelis, including two women and an 80-year-old man, as well as five Thai nationals during the next hostage release set for Thursday, Israel and Hamas said Wednesday as their tenuous ceasefire moves ahead.

DAMASCUS, Syria (AP) — The Syrian factions that toppled President Bashar Assad last month named an Islamist former rebel leader as the country‘s interim president on Wednesday in a push to project a united front as they face the monumental task of rebuilding Syria after nearly 14 years of civil war.

MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — Australian police believe explosives found on Sydney’s outskirts were evidence of a deadly escalation in a campaign of antisemitic arson and graffiti crimes that has been waged in major cities for months, officials said on Wednesday.

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — A passenger plane caught fire before takeoff at an airport in South Korea late Tuesday, but all 176 people on board were safely evacuated, authorities said.

PRAYAGRAJ, India (AP) — Several people were feared dead and many more injured in a stampede early Wednesday as tens of thousands of Hindus rushed to take a holy bath in the river at the massive Maha Kumbh festival in Prayagraj in northern India, local media reported.

GOMA, Congo (AP) — Congolese security forces on Tuesday tried to slow the advance of Rwanda-backed M23 rebels who say they have captured Goma after entering eastern Congo's largest city, as U.N. officials reported an unspecified number of bodies on the streets.

BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) — Visa appointments at the U.S. Embassy in Colombia were canceled Monday following a dispute over deportation flights from the U.S. that nearly turned into a costly trade war between the two countries.

LONDON (AP) — Manfred Goldberg was just 13 years old when — stripped to his skin and shuffling toward an SS guard at a Nazi labor camp in Latvia — a man leaned over his shoulder and whispered the secret that saved the young Jew’s life. “If he happens to ask you your age, say you are 17,’’ the man told him.

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) — Tens of thousands of Palestinians streamed into the most heavily destroyed part of the Gaza Strip on Monday as Israel lifted its closure of the north for the first time since the early weeks of the 15-month war with Hamas in accordance with a fragile ceasefire.

OSWIECIM, Poland (AP) — The 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet troops is being marked on Monday at the site of the former death camp, a ceremony that is widely being treated as the last major observance that any notable number of survivors will be able to attend.

DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — Qatar announced early Monday that an agreement had been reached to release an Israeli civilian hostage and allow Palestinians to return to northern Gaza, easing the first major crisis of the fragile ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.

GOMA, Congo (AP) — Rwanda-backed rebels claimed they captured eastern Congo’s largest city, Goma, early Monday, as the United Nations described a “mass panic” among its 2 million people and Congo’s government said the rebel advance was a “declaration of war.”

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russia on Sunday claimed its troops had captured a strategically important town in eastern Ukraine as part of a grinding campaign to weaken Kyiv’s grip on the country’s industrial heartland, while uncertainty over the continued flow of U.S. funding has reportedly halted the work of some Ukrainian NGOs, including those helping war veterans.

HAIFA, Israel (AP) — Naftali Fürst will never forget his first view of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, on Nov. 3, 1944. He was 12 years old.

LONDON (AP) — A London judge on Friday rejected a U.S. mother's challenge to her extradition to face murder charges in Colorado in the deaths of two of her young children.

TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — Hamas announced Friday that it would release four female soldiers held hostage for 15 months in Gaza, as part of an exchange for dozens of Palestinian prisoners laid out in its ceasefire agreement with Israel. An advocacy group representing the families of hostages confirmed the identities of the captive Israelis to be released on Saturday.

TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — Relatives of hostages still being held by militants in Gaza called on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Friday to ensure all remaining captives are freed, while also appealing to U.S. President Donald Trump to continue pressing for their release.

The last time Belarus staged a presidential election in 2020, authoritarian leader Alexander Lukashenko was declared the winner with 80% of the vote. That triggered cries of fraud, months of protests and a harsh crackdown with thousands of arrests.

LONDON (AP) — A teenager who stabbed three young girls to death at a dance class in England was sentenced Thursday to more than 50 years in prison for what a judge called “the most extreme, shocking and exceptionally serious crime.”

Israeli forces have killed two Palestinian terrorists who carried out a deadly attack on a bus in the West Bank earlier this month.

NAWA, Syria (AP) — As insurgents raced across Syria in a surprise offensive launched in the country's northwest late last year, officials from several countries backing either the rebels or Syria’s government met in Qatar on what to do.

JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) — Indonesian rescuers retrieved two more bodies after they resumed their search Wednesday for people missing after floods and landslides on Indonesia’s main island of Java, bringing the death toll to 19.

ANKARA, Turkey (AP) — A fire at a 12-story hotel at a popular ski resort in northwestern Turkey on Tuesday killed at least 66 people, Turkey's Interior Minister said.