Israel's war against Palestinian militants reached into the suburbs of the Lebanese capital Beirut on Tuesday, where an Israeli strike killed Hamas' deputy leader Saleh al-Arouri, the group and security officials in Lebanon said.

Lebanese state media said the assassination came in an Israeli drone strike that killed a total of six people.

Hollywood closed out an up and down 2023 with "Wonka" regaining No. 1 at the box office, strong sales for "The Color Purple" and an overall $9 billion in ticket sales that improved on 2022's grosses but fell about $2 billion shy of pre-pandemic norms.

The New Year's weekend box office this year lacked a true blockbuster. (This time last year, "Avatar: The Way of Water" was inundating theaters.) Instead, a wide array of films – among them "Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom," "The Boys in the Boat," "Migration," "Ferrari," "The Iron Claw" and "Anyone But You" – sought to break out over the year's most lucrative box-office corridor.

England great Wayne Rooney was fired as the manager of second-tier club Birmingham on Tuesday after 15 games.

Rooney earned only two wins since his controversial appointment in October. Birmingham was sixth in the Championship when he started, and has fallen to 20th.

Mohamed Salah headed off to the Africa Cup of Nations on the back of a starring role for Liverpool in its 4-2 win over Newcastle that opened up a three-point lead in the English Premier League on Monday.

An individual performance that started with his latest failure from the penalty spot ended with Salah scoring Liverpool's first and last goals and having a hand in the other two for his team in a chaotic game in wet and wild conditions at Anfield. All of the goals came in an end-to-end second half.

Rafael Nadal showed no signs of rust from his year off the tour, winning his return match over former No. 3-ranked Dominic Thiem 7-5, 6-1 at the Brisbane International on Tuesday.

The 22-time major winner hadn't played a singles match at the elite level since a second-round exit at the Australian Open last January.

A survey of factory managers in China shows manufacturing contracted in December in the latest sign the world's second-largest economy remains sluggish.

The official purchasing managers index, or PMI, fell to 49 last month in what officials said was evidence of weak demand, the National Bureau of Statistics reported on Sunday. It was the third straight month of contraction. The PMI is on a scale up to 100 where 50 marks the cutoff between expansion and contraction.

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva likes to boast he had a good first year after returning to the job. The economy is improving, Congress passed a long-overdue tax reform bill, rioters who wanted to oust him are now in jail, and his predecessor and foe Jair Bolsonaro is barred from running for office until 2030.

Still, the 78-year-old leader has struggled to boost his support among citizens and lawmakers. Some major setbacks, including a series of votes by Congress to override his vetoes, signaled that Lula's future could be less productive in a Brazil almost evenly split between his supporters and Bolsonaro's.

European benchmarks were higher Tuesday after Asian markets mostly fell on the first trading day of 2024.

Israel's Supreme Court struck down a key component of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's contentious judicial overhaul Monday, delivering a landmark decision that could reopen the fissures in Israeli society that preceded the country's ongoing war against Hamas.

The planned overhaul sparked months of mass protests, threatened to trigger a constitutional crisis between the judicial and legislative branches of government, and rattled the cohesion of Israel's powerful military.

South Korea's tough-speaking liberal opposition leader, Lee Jae-myung, was stabbed in the neck by an unidentified knife-wielding man during a visit Tuesday to the southeastern city of Busan, police said.

Lee, 59, the head of the main opposition Democratic Party, was airlifted to a Seoul hospital for surgery after receiving emergency treatment in Busan. Police and emergency officials earlier said he was conscious after the attack and wasn't in critical condition, but his exact status was unknown.