Shares fell Thursday in most world markets ahead of a key U.S. inflation report due Friday that might point the way ahead for interest rates.
Hong Kong led the decline, falling more than 2%. U.S. futures also fell, while oil prices rebounded.

The Israeli military says a soldier was killed and 16 others were wounded during a military operation in the West Bank overnight. It said Thursday that an explosive device detonated in the area of the northern city of Jenin, which has seen frequent raids and gunbattles with militants in recent years.
There were no immediate reports of Palestinian casualties. Israel says it has arrested over 4,000 Palestinians in the West Bank since Hamas' Oct. 7 attack ignited the war in Gaza, including around 1,750 suspected of being Hamas members.

China's space officials said Thursday they welcomed scientists from around the world to apply to study the lunar rock samples that the Chang'e 6 probe brought back to Earth in a historic mission, but noted there were limits to that cooperation, specifically with the United States.
Officials said at a televised news conference in Beijing meant to introduce the mission's achievements that any cooperation with the U.S. would be hinged on removing an American law that bans direct bilateral cooperation with NASA.

President Joe Biden and his Republican rival, Donald Trump, will meet for a debate on Thursday that offers an unparalleled opportunity for both candidates to try to reshape the political narrative.
Biden, the Democratic incumbent, gets the chance to reassure voters that, at 81, he's capable of guiding the U.S. through a range of challenges. The 78-year-old Trump, meanwhile, could use the moment to try to move past his felony conviction in New York and convince an audience of tens of millions that he's temperamentally suited to return to the Oval Office.

Children in sandals trudge through water contaminated with sewage and scale growing mounds of garbage in Gaza's crowded tent camps for displaced families. People relieve themselves in burlap-covered pits, with nowhere nearby to wash their hands.
In the stifling summer heat, Palestinians say the odor and filth surrounding them is just another inescapable reality of war — like pangs of hunger or sounds of bombing.

A ship traveling through the Red Sea on Thursday reported being hit in an attack likely carried out by Yemen's Houthi rebels, authorities said, the latest in the campaign targeting shipping over the Israel-Hamas war.
The ship issued a radio call off the coast of the rebel-held port city of Hodeida saying it had been struck, the private security firm Ambrey first reported. A warship in the area was responding to the attack, Ambrey said.

International experts portrayed a grim picture for war-torn Sudan, warning in a report Thursday that 755,000 are facing famine in the coming months, amid relentless clashes between rival generals.
The latest findings come from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, or IPC, an initiative first set up in 2004 during the famine in Somalia that now includes more than a dozen U.N. agencies, aid groups, governments and other bodies.

Clean-up crews and business owners were inspecting the damage Wednesday after sudden storms lashed southwestern Switzerland the previous night, sending torrents of water through roads and temporarily halting air traffic at Geneva's airport.
In the lakeside town of Morges, a creek overflowed, inundating downtown streets with tan-colored floodwater.

Catastrophic Canadian warming-fueled wildfires last year pumped more heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the air than India did by burning fossil fuels, setting ablaze an area of forest larger than West Virginia, new research found.
Scientists at the World Resources Institute and the University of Maryland calculated how devastating the impacts of the months-long fires in Canada in 2023 that sullied the air around large parts of the globe. They figured it put 3.28 billion tons (2.98 billion metric tons) of heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the air, according to a study update published in Thursday's Global Change Biology. The update is not peer-reviewed, but the original study was.

Three bodies were found inside a crater at the summit of Mount Fuji, Japan's most famous mountain, with one of them already brought down from the slopes, police said Thursday.
The identities of the people, including gender or age, were not confirmed. An effort to bring back the two other bodies will continue Friday or later, depending on weather conditions, they said. A search was called off for Thursday because of forecasts for heavy rainfall.
