Senegal and Morocco played a chaotic Africa Cup of Nations final in January and they contested the title again Thursday — this time at the Court of Arbitration for Sport which expects a verdict within days.

A turbulent match, provoking violent clashes between Senegal fans and Moroccan police, and a hugely controversial fallout is being re-litigated at sport's highest court in Switzerland nearly nine months after the referee's final whistle blew in Rabat.

European Union foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said Thursday that the bloc is preparing a "support mission" to train and advise Lebanon’s army and security forces, though that won't replace U.N. peacekeepers in southern Lebanon whose mandate expires at the end of the year.

Kallas said during a visit to Beirut that Lebanese authorities formally asked the EU for this. She added that she expects the mission to be set up by EU foreign ministers on Monday.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s former military secretary has accused the Israeli leader of altering official transcripts of phone calls from the morning of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attacks.

The accusations by Maj. Gen. Avi Gil came in a wide-ranging interview with the right-wing Israel Hayom newspaper.

Canadian poet and essayist Anne Carson won the Nobel Prize in literature Thursday "for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature."

Ingrid Carlberg, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, said the author was in Iceland "listening to the wind" when the academy reached her to notify her of the win.

Russia's public health watchdog on Thursday denied that a lab worker who died in Siberia had spread infection to another person, as global concerns swirled about suspected pneumonic plague.

Rospotrebnadzor has said that the lab worker at a plague research institute in Irkutsk in southeastern Siberia died of pneumonia of unknown origin. In tersely worded statements, it said that "extensive" testing found no evidence her illness was caused by any of the pathogens she worked with, and it informed the World Health Organization that no case of plague has been registered in the Irkutsk region.

The wife of former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was set to be back in court Thursday, where her lawyers will urge a judge to free her from jail and put her under house arrest because she has heart problems.

Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores have been behind bars in New York since early January when forces seized them from their Caracas home in a middle-of-the-night raid.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is in Portugal on the last leg of a three-nation tour of NATO allies.

Rubio arrived in Lisbon on Thursday for a brief stop on his return to Washington, a day after delivering a speech in the Greek capital of Athens urging European countries to save Western civilization by upholding the values and traditions of ancient Greece.

High school students across France launched a fresh day of protests on Thursday, despite government attempts to ease the crisis.

Amid a growing outcry, Interior Minister Laurent Nunez announced Wednesday that the model of stun grenade suspected of mutilating a teenager in Lens will no longer be used against high schoolers, in light, he said, of a "strong possibility" that such a weapon was involved in ripping off the pupil's hand.

Thirty people were killed and at least 18 were injured by Russian strikes in eastern Ukraine that included an attack on a public bus, authorities said Thursday, as an intensive pre-winter wave of attacks continued and power outages worsened in the capital Kyiv.

Vadym Filashkin, head of the regional military administration, said public transport in Kramatorsk and the neighboring city of Sloviansk, in Ukraine's Donetsk region, was halted because of the sharp deterioration in security.

Several explosions were heard in Saudi Arabia's capital of Riyadh on Thursday, including a large blast at the city's international airport, a witness told The Associated Press, a day after the kingdom said an attack there killed one person and wounded others.

The cause of the blasts was not immediately known. There was no immediate claim of responsibility. Iran-backed Houthi rebels in neighboring Yemen have repeatedly claimed attacks against airports, military and oil facilities in Saudi Arabia in recent days.