Cyprus hosted a meeting Thursday aimed at sending "as many boats as possible" carrying aid to the war-battered Gaza Strip along a maritime corridor, Foreign Minister Constantinos Kombos said.

Representatives of 36 countries, United Nations agencies and humanitarian groups participated in the meeting in the Cypriot port of Larnaca, where a first aid vessel embarked earlier this month and a second ship was waiting to depart.

As Venezuela's government would have it, President Nicolás Maduro and members of his inner circle have been the target of several conspiracies since last year that could have left them injured or worse.

Few details have been released about the alleged plots. But the government has cited them in the arrests of more than 30 people since January including a prominent human rights attorney and staffers of the leading opposition presidential candidate.

A suicide bomber carried out an attack Thursday at a private bank in Kandahar city in southern Afghanistan, killing at least three people and injuring 12 others, officials said.

All of the victims were people who had gathered at the branch of New Kabul Bank to collect their monthly salaries, said Inamullah Samangani, head of the government's Kandahar Information and Culture Department.

AI fakery is quickly becoming one of the biggest problems confronting us online. Deceptive pictures, videos and audio are proliferating as a result of the rise and misuse of generative artificial intelligence tools.

With AI deepfakes cropping up almost every day, depicting everyone from Taylor Swift to Donald Trump, it's getting harder to tell what's real from what's not. Video and image generators like DALL-E, Midjourney and OpenAI's Sora make it easy for people without any technical skills to create deepfakes — just type a request and the system spits it out.

Former Spanish soccer boss Luis Rubiales says he will return to Spain to face a judicial probe into the business deal to hold the Spanish Super Cup in Saudi Arabia, court officials said on Thursday.

Rubiales was in the Dominican Republic when police raided a property belonging to him in Granada and the offices of the Spanish Football Federation in Madrid on Wednesday in a corruption and money laundering investigation. Officers made seven arrests. Rubiales was identified as one of five additional individuals put under investigation.

Turkey's central bank raised its key interest rate by 5 percentage points on Thursday, resuming a policy of rate hikes aimed at combating soaring inflation that is causing households severe economic pain.

In a surprise decision, the central bank said it was raising the benchmark one-week repo rate to 50%. The bank had been widely expected to keep the benchmark rate steady for a second month, ahead of mayoral elections on March 31.

European Union leaders gathered Thursday to consider new ways to help boost arms and ammunition production for Ukraine and to discuss the war in Gaza amid deep concern about Israeli plans to launch a ground offensive in the city of Rafah.

Ukraine's munition stocks are desperately low, and Russia has more and better-armed troops. There is also a growing awareness that the EU must provide for its own security, with election campaigning in the U.S. raising questions about Washington's commitment to its allies.

A 12-year-old boy in east Jerusalem lights the fuse of a long firework and hoists it in the air. Then, just before it explodes and illuminates the night sky with a burst of red, he is shot in the chest by Israeli police and falls to the ground.

A clip of Rami Halhouli's final moments last week has been circulating on social media for days. Human rights activists say it shines a light on the surge of Palestinians — including dozens of children — who have been killed without justification by Israeli forces since Oct. 7.

Israel is determined to launch a ground offensive against Hamas in Rafah, Gaza's southernmost city, a plan that has raised global alarm because of the potential for harm to the hundreds of thousands of civilians sheltering there.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says Israel can't achieve its goal of "total victory" against Hamas without going into Rafah.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken will travel to Israel this week as part of his sixth urgent mission to the Middle East since the Israelis' war with Hamas began in October, as relations between the two countries have soured dramatically in recent weeks.

The visit comes amid a flurry of calls, planned trips by U.S. and Israeli officials and public airings of severe disagreements over the state of the conflict — notably Israeli plans to mount a major military operation in the southern Gaza city of Rafah and what will happen to Gaza after the war ends.