Tesla's global sales fell for the second straight quarter despite price cuts and low-interest financing offers, another sign of weakening demand for the company's products and electric vehicles overall.

The Austin, Texas, company said Tuesday that it sold 443,956 vehicles from April through June, down 4.8% from 466,140 sold the same period a year ago. But the sales were better than the 436,000 that analysts had expected.

Egypt's new Cabinet was sworn in Wednesday as the country faces an ailing economy and raging conflicts in neighboring nations.

The new Cabinet, chaired by Prime Minister Mustafa Madbouly, who has been in office since 2018, included major changes, particularly in the defense and economy-related portfolios. Some ministers, including those in charge of police and tourism, remain in place.

Japan issued its first new banknotes in two decades Wednesday, yen packed with 3-D hologram technology to fight counterfeiting.

Prime Minister Fumio Kishida praised as "historic" the state-of-the-art anti-counterfeit traits of the new 10,000 yen, 5,000 yen and 1,000 yen bills.

Global shares were mostly higher on Wednesday after comments by Federal Reserve chief Jerome Powell raised hopes for interest rate cuts.

Speaking at a conference of central bankers in Portugal a day earlier, Powell gave a nod to improvements in inflation data after some disappointingly high readings early in the year. Investors hope inflation will slow enough to convince the Fed to lower its main interest rate, which has been sitting at its highest level in more than two decades and pressing the brakes on the economy.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping will be meeting for the second time in as many months as they visit Kazakhstan for a session of an international group founded to counter Western alliances.

Putin and Xi last got together in May when the Kremlin leader visited Beijing to underscore their close partnership that opposes the U.S.-led democratic order and seeks to promote a more "multipolar" world.

Rishi Sunak has covered thousands of miles in the past few weeks, but he hasn't outrun the expectation that his time as Britain's prime minister is in its final hours.

United Kingdom voters will cast ballots in a national election Thursday, passing judgment on Sunak's 20 months in office, and on the four Conservative prime ministers before him. They are widely expected to do something they have not done since 2005: Elect a Labour Party government.

Investigators in Germany and Sweden on Wednesday arrested eight suspects over alleged participation in crimes against humanity in Syria, prosecutors said.

Three people suspected of committing crimes against humanity in Syria in 2012 have been arrested in Sweden, in an investigation carried out in cooperation with Germany.

The Hamdan family — around a dozen people from three generations — fled their home in the middle of the night after the Israeli military ordered an evacuation from the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis.

They found refuge with extended relatives in a building further north, inside an Israeli-declared safe zone. But hours after they arrived, an Israeli airstrike on Tuesday afternoon hit their building in the town of Deir al-Balah, killing nine members of the family and three others.

The man charged with stabbing author Salman Rushdie has rejected a plea deal that would have shortened his state prison term but exposed him to a federal terrorism-related charge, the suspect's lawyer said.

Hadi Matar, 26, has been held without bail since the 2022 attack, in which he is accused of stabbing Rushdie more than a dozen times and blinding him in one eye as the acclaimed writer was onstage, about to give a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York.

The deputy leader of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah has said the only sure path to a cease-fire on the Lebanon-Israel border is a full cease-fire in Gaza.

"If there is a cease-fire in Gaza, we will stop without any discussion," Hezbollah's deputy leader, Sheikh Naim Qassem, said Tuesday in an interview with The Associated Press at the group's political office in Beirut's southern suburbs.