UEFA's Executive Committee on Wednesday approved an unprecedented qualifying system for the 2028 European Championship, with hosts England, Wales, Ireland and Scotland participating in the preliminaries.
The four teams will be drawn separately into the 12 qualifying groups, with the winners and the eight best runners-up advancing directly to the final tournament that will be held across nine venues in the United Kingdom and Ireland.

The financial consequences of Manchester United losing in the Europa League final should be painful and affect the club for years.
It was a zero-sum game Tottenham won 1-0 on Wednesday: Winner goes into the Champions League — plus the UEFA Super Cup game in August — and loser is out of Europe next season and gets nothing.

Striker Son Heung-min was among the Tottenham players left without winner's medals during the awards ceremony for the Europa League final on Wednesday.
UEFA President Aleksander Čeferin appeared to be caught by surprise when the medals ran out before all Tottenham players had received them following the team's 1-0 win over Manchester United.

Landslides struck a rural area in China's southwestern Guizhou province Thursday morning, leaving 21 people trapped, officials said.
Rescuers were dispatched to Qingyang village, where eight households and 19 people were trapped in a landslide, while another landslide struck nearby Changshi township.

Greece is deploying a record number of firefighters and nearly doubling its drone fleet this summer to address growing wildfire risks driven by climate change, officials said Thursday.
Civil Protection Minister Ioannis Kefalogiannis said 18,000 permanent and seasonal personnel, supported by thousands of volunteers, would be mobilized as wildfire damage has increased steadily over the past two decades.

To survive warming oceans, clownfish cope by shrinking in size.
Scientists observed that some of the orange-striped fish shrank their bodies during a heat wave off the coast of Papa New Guinea. Fish that slimmed were more likely to survive.

The latest selfie by NASA's Perseverance rover at Mars has captured an unexpected guest: a Martian dust devil.
Resembling a small pale puff, the twirling dust devil popped up 3 miles (5 kilometers) behind the rover during this month's photo shoot. Released Wednesday, the selfie is a composite of 59 images taken by the camera on the end of the rover's robotic arm, according to NASA.

The White House violated a court order on deportations to third countries with a flight linked to the chaotic African nation of South Sudan, a federal judge said Wednesday, hours after the Trump administration said it had expelled eight immigrants convicted of violent crimes but refused to reveal where they would end up. The judge's statement was a notably strong rebuke to the government's deportation efforts.
In an emergency hearing he called to address reports that immigrants had been sent to South Sudan, Judge Brian E. Murphy in Boston said the eight migrants aboard the plane were not given a meaningful opportunity to object that the deportation could put them in danger. Minutes before the hearing, administration officials accused "activist judges" of advocating the release of dangerous criminals.

There are hardly any tourists in the scenic Himalayan region of Kashmir. Most of the hotels and ornate pinewood houseboats are empty. Resorts in the snowclad mountains have fallen silent. Hundreds of cabs are parked and idle.
It's the fallout of last month's gun massacre that left 26 people, mostly Hindu tourists, dead in Indian-controlled Kashmir followed by tit-for-tat military strikes by India and Pakistan, bringing the nuclear-armed rivals to the brink of their third war over the region.

Global shares fell Thursday as investors reacted to growing worries over surging U.S. debt.
France's CAC 40 slipped 0.8% to 7,849.87, while Germany's DAX declined 0.7% to 23,962.00. Britain's FTSE 100 fell 0.7% to 8,728.84.
