AP News in Brief at 6:04 a.m. EDT

Jordan intercepts Iranian missiles as US and Saudi Arabia launch strikes against militias in Iraq

CAIRO (AP) — Jordan’s air defenses intercepted five missiles launched from Iran early Wednesday, the country’s military said, hours after the U.S. military said it had knocked down an Iranian missile barrage launched against American forces in the Middle East, shattering a brief pause in fighting.

The Jordanian military said the missiles had been “intercepted and destroyed.” Iran’s state-run IRNA news agency carried a statement from the paramilitary Revolutionary Guard saying the Guard’s Aerospace Force fired ballistic missiles at the Muwaffaq Salti Air Base and the headquarters of the U.S. military’s Central Command in Jordan.

The renewed hostilities sent oil prices spiking. Brent crude, the international standard, jumped 3.1% to $84.58 a barrel.

Hours earlier, the U.S. Central Command said its forces “remain vigilant and at a high state of readiness,” and that they had also worked with Saudi Arabia’s forces to strike sites in Iraq that Tehran-backed militias have used to launch attacks in recent days.

In announcing the strikes in Iraq, the U.S. warned that further attacks on American troops or Saudi Arabia ’s energy infrastructure risked additional action.

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Death toll rises to 18 as rescuers comb through quake rubble in southwestern Japan

KUMAMOTO, Japan (AP) — 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.

The sweltering weather heightened worries about the survivors as rescuers braved the heat. It remained unclear how many people might still be missing.

Some of the most serious damage was at the Aeon Mall shopping center in Kashima city, which was bustling with thousands of people when the quake happened. The company said some 3,000 customers were evacuated to a parking lot before a gas explosion happened in another part of the mall, where some people were still working.

The mall’s second floor collapsed, trapping people. Witnesses said the explosion shook the area as much as did the quake.

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Wildfires are more extreme in Europe and North America, but global burning is oddly decreasing

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.

“It does seem like a paradox because we’re talking increases in fires, yet the global numbers have been going down and down. But they’re both true,” said fire scientist Mike Flannigan of Thompson Rivers University in Canada.

Spain’s wildfire is that country’s largest on record at more than 193 square miles (500 square kilometers) while wildfires in Europe have burned just a bit under 2025’s all-time high. In Canada and the United States this summer, land burned by wildfires is at least 25% higher than the 10-year average and more than double what it was decades ago, according to national wildfire centers. Entire chunks of the continent were choked by smoke, causing unhealthy air quality.

Fires are worsening in terms of size, intensity, speed and frequency, especially in the U.S., Canada and Europe, said University of Colorado fire scientist Jennifer Balch.

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Anthony Fauci again faces questions from Senate Republicans about pandemic origins

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the U.S. scientist who helped lead the nation’s COVID-19 pandemic response, is set to face off — again — with a Republican senator probing the origins of the coronavirus.

Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky subpoenaed Fauci to appear before a Senate committee Wednesday. It’s part of Paul’s yearslong accusations that the now-retired infectious disease expert had lied about the pandemic, something Fauci has called “preposterous.”

Leading up to the hearing, Paul released more than a thousand pages of Fauci’s personal diary covering the pandemic years. Pointing to some notes about early efforts at understanding how the virus emerged, Paul wrote on the social media platform X that what Fauci “wrote privately and what he told the country are two different stories.”

Some of the diary entries — including his uncertainty in the pandemic’s earliest days as scientists around the world raced to understand the new virus and how best to curb it before vaccines could be created — already were reflected in Fauci’s 2024 memoir and in interviews at the time.

But they’re likely to further inflame a partisan divide that, years after the pandemic, still makes Fauci a target of vitriol from people who blame him for mask mandates and other policies they believe infringed on their rights as hundreds of thousands of people were dying.

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A 2:47 a.m. alert, a rabbit and 220,000 evacuees as France’s wildfire rages on

BORDEAUX, France (AP) — The mobile phone alert message marked “URGENT” came with a beeeeeeep in the dead of night.

“Evacuate now,” it said.

Suddenly awake, Morgane Bonichot scrambled. She grabbed her 9-year-old daughter, their rabbit and their dog but didn’t think to pack underwear.

The 40-year-old childcare worker found herself swept up in one of the biggest evacuations Europe has seen since World War II, forced with more than 220,000 other people to flee a monster wildfire in southwest France that has consumed an area four times the size of Paris and is defying a massive effort, involving a dozen countries, to bring it under control.

In hindsight, Bonichot thinks maybe she should have seen it coming.

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This Lebanese couple is among those returning to shattered homes under US-brokered deal with Israel

ZAWTAR AL-GHARBIEH, Lebanon (AP) — 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 the Iran-backed Hezbollah militant group.

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.

“Zawtar is our small homeland, and we are very happy,” Faqih, 58, said. “We will sleep here to tell the Israelis that we will stay in our land and will not leave it, no matter what happens.”

A week after the Lebanese army took control, only about 15 families have returned, according to Mayor Abed Ezzeldine, who says nearly half the village’s 500 homes have been destroyed and many others damaged.

Hezbollah is strongly opposed to the initial deal reached between Israel and Lebanon — which remain technically in a state of war since Israel’s establishment in 1948 — and to the direct talks between the nations, ongoing for nearly three months.

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Russia charges Telegram founder Pavel Durov with aiding terrorism and puts him on wanted list

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.

The Federal Security Service, also known as the FSB, accused Telegram’s administration in a statement of failing to remove “numerous channels, chats and bots” that are “actively used by Ukrainian intelligence agencies, terrorist, and extremist organizations to prepare and coordinate acts of sabotage and terrorism, mass murder, and cyberfraud” in Russia, which resulted in “numerous human casualties.”

The agency accused Ukrainian security services of using a popular dating chatbot on Telegram to lure and recruit Russians for “sabotage and terrorist activities,” and said 46 users of the chatbot, from 12 to 22 years old, have been detained across Russia since July 2025 for assaulting law enforcement officers, arson and other acts.

Durov earlier this year announced that the Russian authorities opened a criminal investigation against him and accused them of fabricating pretexts to restrict access to Telegram as part of an attempt to “suppress the right to privacy and free speech.”

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Fringe Israeli settler group is sneaking into Syria to try to claim land for a Jewish outpost

NAHARIYA, Israel (AP) — 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.

The episode, first reported last week by Israel’s public broadcaster and confirmed to The Associated Press by the Israeli military, has helped raise the profile of a fringe group of Israeli settlers that has staged numerous incursions into Syria, where they hope to establish Jewish settlements.

Israel’s military has occupied the area in southern Syria for more than a year, but the forays by civilian settler groups into the region only became a regular occurrence recently.

The groups, with members numbering in the dozens, have attempted to cross from Israel to Syria every few days in recent weeks. The military is tasked with reining them in and, while most Israelis regard them as fringe, the wider settlement movement in Israel has strong backers in the country’s far-right government.

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Lindsay Clancy’s ex-husband set to resume testifying about the day she killed their 3 children

PLYMOUTH, Mass. (AP) — The former husband of a Massachusetts woman on trial for killing their three young children is expected to return to the stand Wednesday, continuing his testimony about a day that began with art projects and playtime in the snow and ended with him coming home to find the bodies.

Prosecutors say Lindsay Clancy strangled her children — Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months — on Jan. 24, 2023, after sending her then-husband, Patrick, out for some errands. She then used multiple methods to try to end her own life and was paralyzed from the waist down after jumping from the home’s second-story window.

Whether Clancy killed the children is not in dispute. But her attorney argues that she was driven by postpartum psychosis, a rare mental illness linked to the stress, sleep deprivation and hormonal changes that follow childbirth. Prosecutors contend that she acted intentionally and bears full responsibility for the deaths.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: This story includes discussion of suicide. If you or someone you know needs help, the national suicide and crisis lifeline in the U.S. is available by calling or texting 988.

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A new media ecosystem is taking root on the left, reshaping Democratic politics

NEW YORK (AP) — Farah Berent, a teacher in Michigan, used to learn about politics from channels like ABC, CBS and CNN. But that changed as she decided that coverage of the war in Gaza was irreparably biased.

“I couldn’t stand all the lies on the stations,″ she said, arguing that there wasn’t enough attention being paid to Palestinian suffering. “I started going to Instagram to get my news.”

Berent is among many progressive-minded Americans who have sworn off legacy media institutions. They’re turning to a widening mix of independent podcasts, social media accounts and digital news sites, part of an increasingly influential ecosystem that has boosted this year’s wave of anti-establishment, left-leaning candidates who may not have gotten as much attention otherwise.

Liberals remain more likely than conservatives to trust mainstream outlets, but the splintering echoes how conservatives skeptical of their party created a collection of insurgent news sites years ago. The shift has elevated individual commentators with opinions on the news, some of whom have proven influential in driving people’s votes.

Ryan Grim, a co-founder of Drop Site News and a veteran of online political debates, said progressive politicians have sought out his platform to reach voters. In a change from previous election cycles, “they have ways to get covered even if the mainstream just basically ignores them,” he said.