Iran is accelerating online activity that appears intended to influence the U.S. election, in one case targeting a presidential campaign with an email phishing attack, Microsoft said Friday.

Iranian actors also have spent recent months creating fake news sites and impersonating activists, laying the groundwork to stoke division and potentially sway American voters this fall, especially in swing states, the technology giant found.

Caretaker Foreign Minister Abdallah Bou Habib said Friday, after he met with caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati, that the Lebanese government supports a joint statement by the United States, Egypt and Qatar, calling on Israel and Hamas to return to the negotiating table.

The foreign powers involved in brokering a possible cease-fire aimed at halting the fighting in Gaza and releasing Israeli hostages have jointly appealed to Israel and Hamas to return to the negotiating table next week.

Three suspected attacks by Yemen's Houthi rebels targeted a ship in the strategic Bab el-Mandeb Strait linking the Gulf of Aden to the Red Sea, including one that saw private security guards shoot and destroy a bomb-loaded drone boat, authorities said Friday.

The Houthis did not immediately claim the assaults, though they follow a monthslong campaign by the rebels targeting shipping through the Red Sea corridor over Israel's war on Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

Four Syrian army soldiers were injured in an Israeli airstrike Thursday, Syrian state media reported.

Syrian state news agency SANA, citing an unnamed military source, said strikes targeted “a number of military points in the central region.”

Leaders of the United States, Egypt and Qatar jointly demanded Israel and Hamas return to stalled talks on the war in Gaza next week, saying Thursday that "only the details" of carrying out a cease-fire and hostage release remain to be negotiated. "There is no further time to waste, nor excuses from any party for further delay," they said in a joint statement.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office said Thursday, "Pursuant to the proposal by the U.S. and the mediators, Israel will — on 15 August — send the negotiations team to a place to be determined in order to finalize the details of the implementation of the framework agreement."

Earth's string of 13 straight months with a new average heat record came to an end this past July as the natural El Nino climate pattern ebbed, the European climate agency Copernicus announced Wednesday.

But July 2024 's average heat just missed surpassing the July of a year ago, and scientists said the end of the record-breaking streak changes nothing about the threat posed by climate change.

Women's boxing at the Paris Olympics has highlighted the complexity of drafting and enforcing sex eligibility rules for women's sports and how athletes like Imane Khelif of Algeria and Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan are left vulnerable in the fallout.

When eligibility for women's events has come into question, it often has been a legally difficult process for sports bodies that has risked exposing athletes to humiliation and abuse. In the 1960s, the Olympics used degrading visual tests intended to verify the sex of athletes.

A Yemeni official said Wednesday that 30 people have been killed and hundreds displaced in flooding in the southern city of Hodeidah following several days of heavy rains.

Hodeidah Gov. Mugammad Qahim told Houthi rebel-controlled Masirah TV that the floods displaced people from 500 homes. Five people were missing, he said.

The Israeli Supreme Court considered a petition Wednesday to shutter a desert military prison where soldiers have been accused of abusing Palestinians, as a new video emerged purporting to show the sexual assault of a Palestinian detainee.

Rights groups have been engaged in a legal battle since June to shut down the detention facility, known as Sde Teiman, where Israel has held many Palestinians detained in Gaza during the 10-month war with Hamas. The groups claim that conditions at the facility are grave and that abuse by Israeli soldiers is common, basing their claims on testimony from released detainees and Israeli whistleblowers.

Israel's Western allies have condemned remarks by its far-right finance minister, who suggested that causing the starvation of Gaza's population of more than 2 million Palestinians "might be just and moral" until hostages captured in Hamas' Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel are returned home.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said in a speech Monday that Israel had no choice but to send humanitarian aid into Gaza.