Belgian federal prosecutors said Thursday they have arrested several individuals as part of a corruption probe linked to the European Parliament amid reports in local media that Chinese company Huawei bribed EU lawmakers.

Some 100 federal police officers carried out 21 searches in Brussels as well as in Flanders, Wallonia and Portugal, the federal prosecutor's office said.

Senior European Union officials were in South Africa for a summit Thursday with President Cyril Ramaphosa that centers on bolstering trade and diplomatic ties as both feel the impact of the Trump administration's confrontational foreign policy.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President António Costa will meet with Ramaphosa at his Cape Town office in the first EU-South Africa summit since 2018.

Pope Francis marked the 12th anniversary of his papacy Thursday with increasingly positive medical updates four weeks into his hospitalization for double pneumonia.

The pope spent another tranquil night, the Vatican said in its brief morning statement.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio may be walking into unusually unfriendly territory this week when he meets his counterparts from the Group of 7 industrialized democracies — strong American allies stunned by President Donald Trump's actions against them.

Just hours after Trump's steel and aluminum tariffs kicked in — prompting responses from the European Union and Canada and threatening to ignite full-scale trade wars with close U.S. partners — Rubio arrived at the scenic Quebec town of La Malbaie on the St. Lawrence River for two days of talks starting Thursday with the top diplomats of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan. All of them have been angered by the new American president's policies.

Vaccines could be a key means of suppressing bird flu and avoiding the slaughter of millions of chickens, which is blamed for egg prices averaging nearly $6 a dozen. But the move has been delayed in part because of concerns it could jeopardize chicken exports worth billions of dollars a year.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has announced plans to spend $100 million to study bird flu vaccines to fight the disease in concert with meat chicken, egg and turkey groups. That's part of a larger $1 billion effort to invest in more protections to keep the virus off farms that President Donald Trump believes will help lower egg prices.

Israel says it has sent 10,000 packages of food aid to Syria’s Druze, as it seeks to forge ties with the minority to shape the country’s troubled transition from civil war.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry said Thursday that the operation was conducted in recent weeks in coordination with local Druze leaders, with most of the aid delivered to the overwhelmingly Druze southern region of Sweida.

An Emirati diplomat earlier identified by Tehran as carrying a letter from U.S. President Donald Trump seeking to jump-start talks over Iran's rapidly advancing nuclear program met Wednesday with Iran's foreign minister in the Iranian capital.

It is unclear how Iran will react to the letter, which Trump revealed during a television interview last week. Its intended recipient, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has said he's not interested in talks with a "bullying government."

A letter U.S. President Donald Trump wrote to Iran's supreme leader in an attempt to jump-start talks over Tehran's rapidly advancing nuclear program has arrived in the Iranian capital.

While the text of the letter hasn't been published, its arrival comes as Trump has levied new sanctions on Iran as part of his "maximum pressure" campaign targeting the country. He also suggested military action against Iran remained a possibility, while emphasizing he still believed a new deal could be reached.

A delegation of Syrian Druze clerics is planning to visit a pilgrimage site in Israel on Friday for the first time since Israel's creation in 1948, a source close to the group said.

"A delegation of dozens of Druze clerics will visit Israel on Friday," the source said, adding that it follows an invitation from the Druze community in Israel.

Israel's military carried out an airstrike Thursday on a residential building on the outskirts of the Syrian capital Damascus that it said was a command center of the militant group Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

The military alleged that the command center has been used to direct attacks against Israel and vowed to "respond forcefully" to the presence of Palestinian militant groups inside Syria.