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.

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.

Led by a top general vowing to "restore democracy," armored vehicles rammed the doors of Bolivia's government palace Wednesday in what the president called a coup attempt, then quickly retreated — the latest crisis in the South American country facing a political battle and an economic crisis.

Within hours, the nation of 12 million people saw a rapidly moving scenario in which the troops seemed to take control of the government of President Luis Arce. He vowed to stand firm and named a new army commander, who immediately ordered the troops to stand down.

A candidate in Iran's presidential election withdrew from the race late Wednesday, becoming the first to back out in order for hard-liners to coalesce around a unity candidate in the vote to replace the late President Ebrahim Raisi.

Amirhossein Ghazizadeh Hashemi, 53, dropped his candidacy and urged other candidates to do the same "so that the front of the revolution will be strengthened," the state-run IRNA news agency reported.

Over the course of more than a dozen years at the top of Dutch politics, Mark Rutte got to know a thing or two about finding consensus among fractious coalition partners. Now he will bring the experience of leading four Dutch multiparty governments to the international stage as NATO's new secretary general.

On Wednesday, NATO ambassadors appointed the outgoing Dutch prime minister as the alliance's next secretary general, its top civilian post. Rutte is scheduled to head the world's biggest military organization from October.

Six candidates have been approved by Iran's theocracy to run in Friday's presidential election to replace the late President Ebrahim Raisi, who died in a helicopter crash with several other officials in May.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange returned to his homeland Australia aboard a charter jet on Wednesday, hours after pleading guilty to obtaining and publishing U.S. military secrets in a deal with Justice Department prosecutors that concludes a drawn-out legal saga.

The criminal case of international intrigue, which had played out for years, came to a surprise end in a most unusual setting with Assange, 52, entering his plea in a U.S. district court in Saipan, the capital of the Northern Mariana Islands. The American commonwealth in the Pacific is relatively close to Assange's native Australia and accommodated his desire to avoid entering the continental United States.

Kenyans woke up to the acrid smell of tear gas still lingering in the capital on Wednesday, a day after protesters stormed parliament amid violent demonstrations over a controversial tax plan during which at least six people have been killed.

As the day began, there were no reports of violence. Police and soldiers patrolled the streets as city workers began cleaning up debris. Parliament, the city hall and the supreme court were cordoned off with tape reading "Crime Scene Do Not Enter."

Seemingly every afternoon in Iran's capital, police vans rush to major Tehran squares and intersections to search for women with loose headscarves and those who dare not to wear them at all.

The renewed crackdown comes not quite two years since mass protests over the death Mahsa Amini after she was detained for not wearing a scarf to the authorities' liking. A United Nations panel has found that the 22-year-old died as a result of "physical violence" wrought upon her by the state.

Ukraine is set to officially launch membership talks with the European Union on Tuesday in what President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has described as a dream come true for his country's citizens more than two years into a war with Russia.

Deputy prime minister for European and Euro-Atlantic integration Olga Stefanishyna will lead Ukraine's delegation at an intergovernmental conference in Luxembourg marking the official opening of talks to align the country's laws and standards with those of the 27-nation bloc.