Britney Spears and Sam Asghari are officially divorced and single

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Britney Spears and Sam Asghari are officially divorced and single.

The dissolution of the couple’s marriage was finalized Friday by a Los Angeles County judge, nearly two years after the two were married.

The judgment comes hours after the 42-year-old pop superstar and the 30-year-old model and actor informed the court that they had reached a divorce settlement, and a week after Spears reached a court settlement with her father over lingering issues in her conservatorship.

The couple filed court papers Thursday and Friday saying they had reached an agreement on dividing their assets. Few details were made public, but neither Spears nor Asghari will get future spousal support. Asghari had said in his initial petition that he would seek financial support. Any future disputes would need to be settled in private arbitration.

Spears and Asghari separated in July, and he filed for divorce in August. They had been dating for about seven years.

The two had no children together, so no custody agreement was necessary. Spears wrote in her memoir published last year that she and Asghari had a miscarriage early in a pregnancy about a month before they married.

Emails seeking details or comment from lawyers for both Spears and Asghari were not immediately returned.

Their marriage at her home in June 2022 in front of guests including Selena Gomez, Drew Barrymore, Paris Hilton and Madonna was seen as a triumphant milestone in her newly reclaimed life after she was freed a few months earlier from the court conservatorship that controlled her life and money for more than 13 years.

But they would split just over a year later.

Last Friday, Spears and her father, Jamie Spears, reached a settlement on the lingering issues from that legal arrangement, avoiding what could have been a long, ugly and revealing trial that was scheduled to start later this month.

Spears has said little publicly of the split.

In an Instagram post soon after the divorce filing, she said, “I’m not here to explain why because its honestly nobody’s business !!! But, I couldn’t take the pain anymore honestly !!!”

In her memoir, “ The Woman in Me,” released two months after Asghari filed for divorce, Spears speaks only briefly and positively of Asghari. She describes him holding her hand while she addressed a judge remotely during a key hearing that helped end her conservatorship.

Like the vast majority of those who file for divorce in California, Asghari cited irreconcilable differences as the reason for the split.

It was the third marriage for Spears. She has two teenage sons with previous husband Kevin Federline, to whom she was married from 2004 to 2007, a time when intense media scrutiny led to emotional difficulty for her.

Spears was married for less than three days in 2004 to childhood friend Jason Alexander, who attempted to crash her wedding to Asghari and was later convicted of misdemeanor trespassing and battery.

Spears met and began dating Asghari, a model and actor, when he appeared in her video for the song “Slumber Party” in 2016.

She cited her desire to marry him as among the reasons she wanted an end to the constraining conservatorship, which she said was preventing it. The two announced their engagement in September of 2021.

Since the conservatorship ended, Spears has put out music, including a collaboration with Elton John in 2022. But she has not performed live in years, and she said she has no intention of performing or making a new album.

Jamie Spears, father of singer Britney Spears, leaves the Stanley Mosk Courthouse in Los Angeles on Oct. 24, 2012, left, and Britney Spears arrives at the Billboard Music Awards in Las Vegas on May 17, 2015. (AP Photo)

FILE - Britney Spears and Sam Asghari appear at the Los Angeles premiere of "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" on July 22, 2019. Spears has reached a divorce settlement with her soon-to-be-ex-husband Asghari. (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP, File)

ROUEN, France (AP) — French police shot and killed a man armed with a knife and a metal bar who is suspected of having set fire to a synagogue in the Normandy city of Rouen early on Friday, the latest apparent act in a storm of antisemitism roiling France amid the Israel-Hamas war.

Officers were alerted early Friday morning that smoke was rising from the synagogue and came face to face with the man when they got there, the national police information service said. It said the man surged toward officers with a knife and a metal bar. An officer opened fire and fatally wounded the man, police said. Police said they had not yet identified the man.

Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin posted on the social media site X that the armed individual was “clearly wanting to set fire to the city’s synagogue.”

He congratulated officers for “their reactivity and their courage.”

Tensions and anger have grown in France over the Israel-Hamas war. Antisemitic acts have surged in the country, which has the largest Jewish and Muslim populations in western Europe.

Rouen Mayor Nicolas Mayer-Rossignol said the man is thought to have climbed onto a trash container and thrown “a sort of Molotov cocktail” inside the synagogue, starting a fire and causing “significant damage.”

“When the Jewish community is attacked, it's an attack on the national community, an attack on France, an attack on all French citizens," he said.

“It’s a fright for the whole nation,” he added.

Frédéric Desguerre, a regional police union official, told broadcaster BFM-TV that the man hurled the metal bar he was carrying at the officers and pulled out a long kitchen knife from one of his sleeves.

“He moved toward them with a determined air, quite violent,” he said.

Desguerre, of the Unité police union, said the officer fired five shots after warning the man to stop moving.

French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal said this month that the sharp spike in antisemitic acts in France that followed the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas on Israel has continued into this year.

Authorities registered 366 antisemitic acts in the first three months of 2024, a 300% increase over the same period last year, Attal said. More than 1,200 antisemitic acts were reported in the last three months of 2023 — which was three times more than in the whole of 2022, he said.

“We are witnessing an explosion of hatred,” he said.

Leicester reported from Paris.

French policemen stand the synagogue in Rouen, France, Friday, May 17, 2024. French police have shot and killed a man armed with a knife and a metal bar who is suspected of having set fire to a synagogue in the Normandy city of Rouen. (AP Photo/Oleg Cetinic)

A police car is parked in front of the synagogue in Rouen, France, Friday, May 17, 2024. French police have shot and killed a man armed with a knife and a metal bar who is suspected of having set fire to a synagogue in the Normandy city of Rouen. (AP Photo/Oleg Cetinic)