TURIN, Italy (AP) — Juventus coach Luciano Spalletti has signed a new two-year contract with the Serie A club after a largely encouraging six months in charge.
Spalletti told his players first on Friday ahead of training, with Juventus publishing a video of the announcement on its social media channels.
“I considered it most important, first of all, to tell you this fact, that we decided to extend this contract for another two years,” Spalletti said. “I want you to know first before it gets out. I’m telling you today.
“Naturally, we have challenges ahead of us, but I’m convinced that together with you, they will become great challenges because I will face them with your attitude and your strength, as you have always done.”
Spalletti was hired back at the end of October to replace Igor Tudor, who was fired following three straight losses and an eight-match winless run.
Juventus announced at the time that it had signed Spalletti to an eight-month contract, which Italian media reported would be automatically renewed for two years if the club qualified for the Champions League.
Juventus is currently just outside the Champions League qualifying spots, a point behind fourth-placed Como, with seven matches remaining in the Serie A season.
“When I arrived seven months ago, they offered me this contract,” Spalletti said. “It was a bit like saying: let’s hang out a bit, let’s spend some time together, let’s get to know each other and then at the end of the season we’ll be free to decide what we want based on what we’ve done.”
When Spalletti took over, Juventus was seventh in Serie A and in the elimination places in the Champions League.
Under Spalletti, Juventus has won 17 of 31 matches, lost six and drawn eight. The Bianconeri managed to reach the playoff round of the Champions League, but lost to Galatasaray.
“Since Luciano joined our great Juventus family, he has had an immediate and very positive impact on our players, the whole club and the entire Bianconeri community,” Juventus chief executive Damien Comolli said in a statement. “It was immediately clear to everyone that Luciano was the right person to lead the team on a path of growth.
“His ambitious style of play reflects the expectations of our fans and the club, and his values embody our identity. We have therefore decided to continue working together beyond the previously agreed contract term because we believe that stability and continuity are two essential pillars for future success.”
Juventus hasn’t won Serie A since 2020 when it concluded a run of nine straight titles.
Spalletti is best known for leading Napoli to the Serie A title in 2023. Then he had an unsuccessful run with Italy and was fired last June when the Azzurri got off to a poor start in World Cup qualifying.
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Juventus' head coach Luciano Spalletti looks on during the Serie A soccer match between Juventus Fc and Genoa in Turin, Italy, Monday April 6, 2026. (Fabio Ferrari/LaPresse via AP)
BEIRUT (AP) — It was 2:14 in the afternoon when the first bomb fell, and the sudden sound of crashing metal was like a heavy truck had overturned outside our office. The Israeli strike had hit somewhere nearby.
Within seconds, plumes of smoke were rising across Beirut’s skyline, from the coastal corniche, down to the city’s busiest intersection, up from one of its wealthiest neighborhoods and one of its poorest. Boom. Boom. Boom. We stopped counting. One staffer ran into the office from downstairs, her face white and lips trembling.
During the 10 years that Beirut has been my home, the Lebanese capital has lived through rounds of Israeli bombing, Israel’s detonation of pagers belonging to Hezbollah members and a devastating port explosion in 2020. But Wednesday was the first time it felt like the city had been left breathless.
In a span of 10 minutes, Israel says it hit 100 targets in Lebanon. Most were in Beirut. Over 300 people were killed, including more than 100 women, children and elderly. Late night TV shows said it rivaled one of the worst days during Israel’s 1982 invasion of Beirut — in August of that year, when roughly 300 people were killed over some 10 hours of bombardment.
Before Wednesday's bombardment, many Lebanese had hoped that a ceasefire announced hours earlier in the Iran war would bring a pause in the more than a month of fighting between Israel and the Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah.
It is still not clear what the targets were. Israel said it hit Hezbollah command and control centers, but the only Hezbollah official it reported killing was an aide to the group’s secretary-general.
As bombs fell, panicked commuters got stuck in traffic while trying to rush home to move their families, unsure where Israel may hit next. Others made frantic calls on an overwhelmed communication network, looking for loved ones or yelling at relatives to pack up and leave. Confused drivers stared at the acrid black and white smoke billowing over the city, trying to determine which road to take.
In the stricken areas, the mayhem was on another level. People’s faces were covered in black soot. At one of Beirut’s busiest intersections, on Corniche al-Mazraa, an Associated Press photographer saw charred cars piled on top of each other. A body was crushed inside one.
In Mar Elias, one of Beirut’s main commercial streets, a blast raised dust and debris that hid the view of the entire block. Across the street, Sahar Charara was huddled in her apartment.
Ever since the 2020 port explosion, in which her two children suffered minor injuries, Charara has tried to protect herself from seeing the victims of violence — a sign of how years of accumulated heartbreaks have marked Lebanese. But when the dust cleared, she looked outside and saw the despair of an entire city on the face of an elderly woman frozen in place and screaming for minutes.
“There were so much horror and fear in her screaming,” said Charara.
When Charara left her apartment an hour later, she exchanged a few words with her neighbor whose shop was destroyed. The expression on her face was a “blank look of horror,” Charara said.
She learned later from her building’s doorman that another neighbor had fallen from the balcony and died from the impact.
A strike hit near the home of Nahida Khalil, close to the corniche. Then she saw smoke also coming from the direction of her brother’s building further up the street.
The next 15 minutes felt like an eternity as she tried to call her brother, with no answer. Finally, his wife responded, screaming that their building was hit. They had searched through the black smoke filling their apartment to find their three children. When they finally made it to the street, they saw half of their building had been leveled, and the other half was slowly tumbling down as rescuers searched for the missing.
“I lived through all the wars since 1975. I never felt this fear,” said Khalil, who has lived in the same building for decades. "These strikes are meant to terrorize ... and to spoil the ceasefire and cause division” between Lebanese.
A few hundred meters to the west of Charara’s building later in the day, motorists swerved and crossed paths, as they tried to evacuate Tallet al-Khayyat, one of the highest points in Beirut and home to some of the city’s classiest apartment buildings. One building crumbled to dust in seconds after being struck by an Israeli bomb; a resident described hearing the building’s stones grind before it collapsed.
By nightfall, people were still assessing the losses – and trying to figure out where was safe. Some families spent the night sleeping in different rooms, figuring if overnight strikes hit, some would survive.
Rescue efforts went on through the night.
At Khalil’s family building in the Ain Mreisseh neighborhood, rescue workers' hopes were boosted after finding a 92-year-old man alive. But by daylight Thursday, they were still searching for four or five more bodies, they told the AP. A man whose 23-year-old daughter was among the missing stood on a mound of rubble and helped search.
At hospitals, staff were still trying to identify dozens of bodies, with some burned or damaged. From death notices and its own reporting, the AP collected the names of 61 of the dead. They reflected the breadth of society, including the chef of a popular restaurant, a well-known poet, four soldiers from the Lebanese military, 11 members of two Syrian refugee families, a teacher and her two children, and a doctor along with his wife and three children.
The last strike came shortly after midnight, hitting the southern suburbs of Beirut, which have been regularly hit during the war. Mohammed Mehdi’s barbershop, in operation for 30 years, was destroyed.
During the current war, he and his family fled their home in the neighborhood, Chiyah, and now sleep in a dentist clinic, near Khalil’s family building. But he made it a point to keep his barber shop open, going to it every day to meet friends, have coffee and give the occasional haircut. He shut down Wednesday as bombs starting falling across the city.
“They carried out 100 strikes. Ours was the 101st,” he said Thursday. He is mourning Lebanon’s dead from the day. “I am still in shock, and I don’t know where things are going. I lost my job and this loss may last for a while.”
AP correspondent Kareem Chehayeb in Beirut contributed to this report.
People inspect debris and damaged vehicles at the site of an Israeli airstrike in Dahiyeh, Beirut's southern suburbs, Lebanon, Thursday, April 9, 2026. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar)
A Lebanese civil defense worker, right, stands with a resident at the site of a building destroyed in an Israeli airstrike a day earlier in central Beirut, Lebanon, Thursday, April 9, 2026. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar)
A woman and an injured man, center, are rescued by firefighters from a destroyed building that was hit in an Israeli airstrike in central Beirut, Lebanon, Wednesday, April 8, 2026. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)
A man gathers his belongings from his home, which has been destroyed in an Israeli airstrike a day earlier in Beirut, Lebanon, Thursday, April 9, 2026. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)
Residents gather at the site of an Israeli airstrike in Beirut, Lebanon, Wednesday, April 8, 2026. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)
Smoke rises following several Israeli airstrikes in Beirut, Lebanon, Wednesday, April 8, 2026. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar)
Smoke rises following several Israeli airstrikes in Beirut, Lebanon, Wednesday, April 8, 2026. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar)
A Lebanese civil defense worker, right, stands with a resident at the site of a building destroyed in an Israeli airstrike a day earlier in central Beirut, Lebanon, Thursday, April 9, 2026. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar)
