By ELENA BECATOROS, Associated Press

ATHENS, Greece (AP) — The Olympic flame for the Milan Cortina Winter Games was formally handed to Italian organizers on Thursday in the all-marble stadium in central Athens where the first modern Olympics were held nearly 130 years ago.

From Athens the flame will travel to Italy, where it will begin a 63-day, 12,000-kilometer relay through all 110 Italian provinces before reaching Milan’s San Siro Stadium for the opening ceremony on Feb. 6.

Italy will host the flame for the first time in 20 years and 10,000 torchbearers have been organized.

“To stand here in this historic stadium provides an inspiring reminder of the honor we have been granted and the precious treasure we will carry home with us,” Milan Cortina organizing committee president Giovanni Malago said before receiving the flame.

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A forecast of severe rainstorms in Athens kept large crowds away and led organizers to announce the ceremony would be shortened. But the rain held off until the very end, a weak sun filtering through the heavy black clouds, and the few hardy spectators who turned up were able to enjoy a performance featuring Greek and Italian singers and a children’s choir in the stadium which staged the first modern Games in 1896.

After spending the night burning in a cauldron outside the 5th century B.C. Parthenon temple atop the Acropolis, Greece’s most famous landmark, the flame was carried into the Panathenaic stadium by Greek water polo player Elena Xenaki, who lit another cauldron in the stadium along with Greece’s women’s national water polo team.

The flame was lit on Nov. 26 in Ancient Olympia, the site of the ancient games which inspired the modern Olympic movement, using a concave mirror to focus the sun’s rays on a torch in a highly ceremonial performance. The idea of the Olympic flame and torch relay was the result of Greek-German cooperation and began ahead of the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany. The tradition has been followed ever since.

On Thursday, Greece’s Olympic Committee president Isidoros Kouvelos handed the flame to Malago.

“We cannot change the whole world in 16 days of competition,” Kouvelos said, “but we can show for 16 days what the world could look like when respect comes first.”

These are the third Winter Games hosted by Italy but preparations have been plagued by cost overruns and construction setbacks.

The Games feature 116 medal events, the debut of ski mountaineering, the return of NHL players to Olympic ice hockey and higher female participation.

A separate flame for the March 6–15 Winter Paralympics will be lit on Feb. 24 at Stoke Mandeville Hospital in England, the birthplace of the Paralympic movement.

By DASHA LITVINOVA, Associated Press

Russian President Vladimir Putin says that some proposals in a U.S. plan to end the war in Ukraine are unacceptable to the Kremlin, indicating that any deal is still some way off despite intense shuttle diplomacy by American envoys.

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U.S. President Donald Trump has set in motion the most intense diplomatic push to stop the fighting since Russia launched a full-scale invasion of its neighbor nearly four years ago. But the peace efforts have once again run into demands that are hard to reconcile, especially over whether Ukraine must give up land to Russia and how it can be kept safe from any future Russian aggression.

Putin said in comments published Thursday that his five-hour talks with U.S. envoys this week were “necessary” and “useful,” but also “difficult work.” Some of the proposals were unacceptable to the Kremlin, he said.

Meanwhile, Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, and son-in-law Jared Kushner, are set to meet with Ukraine’s lead negotiator, Rustem Umerov, on Thursday in Miami for further talks, according to a senior Trump administration official who wasn’t authorized to comment publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Putin spoke to the India Today TV channel before his visit to New Delhi on Thursday. Before the full interview was broadcast, Russian state news agencies Tass and RIA Novosti quoted some of Putin’s remarks in it.

Tass quoted Putin as saying in the interview that at the talks in the Kremlin on Tuesday, the sides “had to go through each point” of the U.S. peace proposal, “which is why it took so long.”

“This was a necessary conversation, a very concrete one,” the Russian president said.

There were provisions that Moscow said it was ready to discuss, while others “we can’t agree to,” Putin said, adding “it’s difficult work.”

Trump said Wednesday that Witkoff and Kushner came away from their marathon session confident that he wants to find an end to the war.

“Their impression was very strongly that he’d like to make a deal,” Trump said.

Putin refused to go into details as to what Russia could agree to and what it finds unacceptable. None of the officials involved in the negotiations has offered details of the talks.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, third right, Russian Presidential foreign policy adviser Yuri Ushakov, fourth right, and Russian Direct Investment Fund CEO Special Presidential Representative for Investment and Economic Cooperation with Foreign Countries Kirill Dmitriev, right, attend talks with U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff, second left, and Jared Kushner, U.S. President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, third, at the Senate Palace of the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, Tuesday, Dec. 2, 2025. (Alexander Kazakov, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

“I think it is premature. Because it could simply disrupt the working regime” of the peace effort, Tass quoted Putin as saying.

European leaders, left on the sidelines by Washington as U.S. officials engage directly with Moscow and Kyiv, have accused Putin of feigning interest in Trump’s peace drive.

Russian barrages of civilian areas of Ukraine continued overnight into Thursday. A ballistic missile struck Kryvyi Rih on Wednesday night, wounding six people, including a 3-year-old girl, according to city administration head Oleksandr Vilkul.

He said that the strike damaged more than 40 residential buildings, a school and domestic gas pipes in the city, which is Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s hometown.

A 6-year-old girl died in Kherson, a southern port city, after Russian artillery shelling wounded her the previous day.

“Doctors fought until the very end to save her life, but her injuries were too severe,” regional military administration chief Oleksandr Prokudin wrote on Telegram.

Russia also struck Odesa with drones, wounding six people, while civilian and energy infrastructure was damaged, said Oleh Kiper, the head of the regional military administration.

Overall, Russia fired two ballistic missiles and 138 drones of various types at Ukraine overnight, officials said.

Meanwhile, in the Russia-occupied part of Ukraine’s Kherson region, two men were killed by a Ukrainian drone strike on their vehicle Thursday, Moscow-installed regional leader Vladimir Saldo said.

A 68-year-old woman was also wounded in the attack, he said.

Aamer Madhani contributed to this report from Washington.

Today is Thursday, Dec. 4, the 338th day of 2025. There are 27 days left in the year.

Today in history:

On Dec. 4, 2016, a North Carolina man fired several shots from an assault rifle inside Comet Ping Pong, a Washington, D.C., pizzeria, as he attempted to investigate an online conspiracy theory that prominent Democrats were harboring child sex slaves at the restaurant; no one was hurt, and the man surrendered. (Edgar Maddison Welch was later sentenced to four years in prison; in 2025, police shot and killed him during a traffic stop in which officials said he pulled out a handgun and pointed it at one of the officers.)

Also on this date:

In 1783, Gen. George Washington bade farewell to his Continental Army officers at Fraunces Tavern in New York.

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In 1956, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins, dubbed the “Million Dollar Quartet,” gathered for the first and only time for a jam session at Sun Records in Memphis.

In 1964, police arrested some 800 students at the University of California, Berkeley, one day after the students stormed the administration building and staged a massive sit-in to protest university restrictions on political activity on campus.

In 1965, the United States launched Gemini 7 with Air Force Lt. Col. Frank Borman and Navy Cmdr. James A. Lovell aboard on a two-week mission. (While Gemini 7 was in orbit, its sister ship, Gemini 6A, was launched on Dec. 15 on a one-day mission; the two spacecraft were able to rendezvous within a foot of each other.)

In 1969, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark of the Black Panther Party were shot and killed during a raid by Chicago police.

In 1991, after being abducted and held hostage for nearly seven years by Hezbollah militants in Lebanon, Associated Press correspondent Terry Anderson was freed from captivity.

In 2018, long lines of people wound through the Capitol Rotunda to view the casket of former President George H.W. Bush.

In 2024, United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson was fatally shot on a midtown Manhattan sidewalk. (The accused shooter, Luigi Mangione, has pleaded not guilty to state and federal charges.)

In 2024, France’s far-right and left-wing lawmakers joined together in a no-confidence vote prompted by budget disputes, forcing Prime Minister Michel Barnier to resign, a first since 1962. President Emmanuel Macron insisted he would serve the rest of his term until 2027.

Today’s Birthdays:

Actor-producer Max Baer Jr. is 88.
Actor Gemma Jones is 83.
Actor Jeff Bridges is 76.
Actor Patricia Wettig is 74.
Jazz singer Cassandra Wilson is 70.
Basketball Hall of Famer Bernard King is 69.
Baseball Hall of Famer Lee Smith is 68.
Olympic pole vault gold medalist Sergey Bubka is 62.
Actor Marisa Tomei is 61.
Actor-comedian Fred Armisen is 59.
Rapper Jay-Z is 56.
Actor Kevin Sussman is 55.
Actor-model Tyra Banks is 52.
Football Hall of Famer Joe Thomas is 41.
Musician Jelly Roll is 41.
Singer-songwriter Jin (BTS) is 33.

Gophers men’s basketball coach Niko Medved wanted to see the character of his shorthanded team in the Big Ten opener against No. 22 Indiana on Wednesday.

Already amid a three-game nonconference losing streak, what were the U players made of after swallowing the tough news that starting point guard Chansey Willis Jr. is out for the season with a broken foot?

Turns out, a heck of a lot as the Gophers upset the Hoosiers 73-64 at Williams Arena.

Minnesota (5-4, 1-0 Big Ten) was eight-point underdogs against the previously undefeated Hoosiers (7-1, 0-1). Indiana was 19th in the country, according to the KenPom analytics site, while Minnesota’s swoon had them way down the list to 116.

The stunning win came in Medved’s first conference game at his alma mater.

“I try not to get emotional,” Medved said postgame. “I’m just so proud. It’s why you coach. You do what you do to try to help young people respond and to see the way that, they did is awesome. From a personal level, it just feels unbelievable to have the crowd into it and the students. That is what I grew up with here, that way. This is a day that I’ll remember. … We got to enjoy this. You don’t get to do this every day.”

The Gophers took a 65-55 lead with Bobby Dunkin’s 3-pointer with four minutes left, but the Hoosiers went on a 7-0 run to put pressure on Minnesota.

Minnesota had only eight scholarship players; they were also missing starting center Robert Vaihola (knee), BJ Omot (leg) and Chance Stephens (illness).

Then three Minnesota big men — Jaylen Crocker-Johnson, Grayson Grove and Nehemiah Turner — battled serious foul trouble in the second half.

Four players had to log nearly every minute: Cade Tyson played all 40, Isaac Asuma 39, Langston Reynolds 38 and Bobby Durkin nearly 37.

Minnesota had five players in double figures, and only one point from its thin bench.

The Gophers defense made it challenging for the Hoosiers two best shooters — Tucker DeVries and Lamar Wilkerson. Each were making more than 40% from three-point range, but were held to 31% Wednesday.

Indiana’s leading scorer, Tucker DeVries, was held to nearly half his scoring average. He shot 3 for 13 from the field and finished with nine points

“It was everybody because we got into switches, but I just thought Langston Reynold’s mentality defensively was phenomenal,” Medved said. “I thought we did a great job of paying attention to detail, we closed out hard to them. We didn’t give them any clean looks.”

The Gophers held Indiana without a field goal for the final four minutes of the first half, taking a 27-19 deficit to a 33-33 tie at the break.

That surge had the biggest crowd at The Barn so far this season on its feet as the Gophers went into he locker room.

Grayson Grove made impressive hustle plays in the middle of the first half. After a bad pass from Langston Reynolds looked it it would be an easy dunk for Tucker DeVries, Grove blocked it at the rim. Then Grove ran the floor, was fed the ball in the paint and drew a foul.

DeVries was listed to six points in the first half on 2-of-8 shooting. Reynolds and Asuma contributed to him missing his first three treys.

In the first half, Reynolds and Cade Tyson each had nine points for Minnesota.

The Hoosiers made their opening five shots, but Minnesota got more disruptive and forced them to miss four of their next five as the U started to work its way back into the game.

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