Saudi Defense Minister Khalid bin Salman has met with U.S. President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance, according to two people familiar with the matter who were not authorized to comment publicly about the private meeting.

The defense minister conveyed Wednesday the view of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom's de facto leader, that Iran has lost leverage in Syria and Lebanon but is still managing to provide support to the Houthis in Yemen and militias in Iraq, according to one of the people familiar with Prince Khalid's talks with Trump and Vance.

The stop-start fighting between the United States and Iran appears to have entered a new phase as Saudi Arabia has publicly joined military escalations against Tehran-backed proxies. At the same time, an already untenable diplomatic effort to end the war has faltered once again as mistrust deepens between the longtime adversaries.

Despite several days of relative calm, both sides carried out military strikes in the last 24 hours that once again risk a return to all-out war — and further expansion in the region — while little is clear about what strategy, if any, American or Iranian officials have for a path forward.

Jordan's air defenses shot down five missiles launched from Iran Thursday morning, the country's state-run Petra news agency said, hours after the U.S. military announced it had completed "a heavy wave of strikes against Iran" in response to an earlier Iranian missile attack on a U.S. base in Jordan.

No casualties were reported from Jordan's interception of the missiles, the news agency quoted the spokesman for the country's armed forces as saying.

President Donald Trump on Wednesday said the U.S. military will be hitting Iran "hard" after a missile attack against U.S. bases in Jordan, Fox News reported.

"We'll be hitting them hard. They're going to get a beating," Fox's correspondent quoted Trump as saying, adding that the U.S. president used swear words to emphasize his point: "We are going to beat the 'effing s' out of them."

Ukrainian forces hit two of Russia's biggest oil refineries overnight in its latest long-range strikes, officials said, as Kyiv deepened its economic, military and diplomatic pressure on Moscow.

Ukraine's almost daily long-range drone and missile strikes using domestically developed weapons have battered Russian oil facilities for months. The operation has brought a fuel crisis that is embarrassing the Kremlin more than four years after Russia's all-out invasion of its neighbor.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa, the Japanese director known as "the master of horror," was a bit nervous about how viewers might react to his first samurai film.

He needn't have worried.

Soldiers and emergency workers combed through a badly damaged shopping mall and collapsed houses looking for trapped survivors Wednesday after a powerful earthquake that killed at least 18 people in southwestern Japan.

The magnitude 7.1 earthquake that hit a day earlier in the Kumamoto area on the southern main island of Kyushu, also left at least 62 people injured, six of them seriously, the prefectural government said. The tally has been steadily growing, fanning fears it may continue to rise.

It seems as if the world is afire this summer. But even as wildfires in Europe and North America grow more extreme, key worldwide burning statistics are at a record low largely because Africa and Asia are controlling fire more.

Experts say these seemingly opposite trends are happening at the same time because of what humanity is doing to the planet.

Fire crews battled a mega-fire four times the size of Paris in southwest France while facing tinderbox temperatures forecast to climb above 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) on Wednesday.

The heat wave and forecast winds could hamper progress against the blaze that has forced 220,000 people from their homes, authorities for the Gironde region around Bordeaux said.

Russia's main domestic security agency said Wednesday that Pavel Durov, founder and owner of the messaging app Telegram, has been charged with aiding terrorism and put on an international wanted list.

The charges against Durov, who was born and began his career in Russia but later moved abroad, came as the Russian authorities restrict Telegram, one of the most popular messaging apps in the country. It is part of a long-term effort to bring the internet under the Kremlin's full control that has intensified since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.