The head of Russia's state-owned gas company Gazprom says it has a deal to build a pipeline to China, but there are many unanswered questions about the details of the agreement.

South Korea's president said Thursday that Korean companies will likely hesitate to make further investments in the United States unless Washington improves its visa system for their employees, as U.S. authorities released hundreds of workers who were detained from a Georgia factory site last week.

In a news conference marking 100 days in office, Lee Jae Myung called for improvements in the U.S. visa system as he spoke about the Sept. 4 immigration raid that resulted in the arrest of more than 300 South Korean workers at a battery factory under construction at Hyundai's sprawling auto plant west of Savannah.

France's finances and politics are in turmoil. President Emmanuel Macron has just appointed a new prime minister — the fourth person to hold the job in the past 12 months. The deficit is out of control. Borrowing costs are rising. And parliament can't muster a majority to tackle spending.

It's a serious comedown for a major industrial power that has the second-largest economy in Europe.

NATO allies swiftly held talks Wednesday on the incursion by multiple Russian drones into Polish — and alliance — airspace and the shooting down of some of the weapons by Polish and Dutch fighter jets.

The consultations at NATO headquarters were part of a regular meeting of ambassadors from the alliance's 32 member states known as the North Atlantic Council, but Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk told Parliament that they came under Article 4 of the treaty that founded NATO in 1949 in the aftermath of World War II.

Americans are marking 24 years since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks with solemn ceremonies, volunteer work and other tributes honoring the victims.

Charlie Kirk, a conservative activist and close ally of President Donald Trump who played an influential role in rallying young Republican voters, was shot and killed at a Utah college event in what the governor called a political assassination.

Authorities say Kirk was killed with a single shot from a rooftop on Wednesday. Whoever fired the gun then slipped away amid the chaos of screams and students fleeing the Utah Valley University campus. Federal, state and local authorities were still searching for an unidentified shooter early Thursday and working what they called "multiple active crime scenes."

Poland said early Wednesday that multiple Russian drones entered and were shot down over its territory with help from NATO allies, describing the incident as an "act of aggression" carried out during a wave of Russian strikes on Ukraine.

Several European leaders said they believed Russia was intentionally escalating the war, and NATO was discussing the incident in a meeting. It came three days after Russia's largest aerial attack on Ukraine since the war began, an attack that for the first time hit a key government building in Kyiv.

French President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday appointed Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu as new prime minister and tasked him with immediately trying to get the country's fractious political parties to agree on a budget for one of the world's biggest economies.

Lecornu, 39, was the youngest defense minister in French history and architect of a major military buildup through 2030, spurred by Russia's war in Ukraine. A longtime Macron loyalist, Lecornu is now France's fourth prime minister in barely a year.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen delivers a major state of the union speech on Wednesday addressing the challenges facing the world's biggest trading bloc and laying out her vision for tackling them.

The commission has enthusiastically billed her speech — modeled on the annual State of the Union addresses to Congress by U.S. presidents — as "a milestone event for European democracy."

The tiny, gas-rich Gulf Arab state of Qatar hosts the biggest U.S. military base in the Middle East. It has evacuated tens of thousands of American citizens from Afghanistan. It has been designated a U.S. "major non-NATO ally." It has even lavished a $400 million jumbo jet on President Donald Trump for use as Air Force One.

None of that protected this quiet peninsula in the Persian Gulf from coming under an Israeli aerial attack on Tuesday as it mediated U.S.-backed negotiations to end the Israel-Hamas war.