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MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — Two-time defending champion Novak Djokovic advanced to his third consecutive Australian Open final with a 6-2, 6-2, 6-1 win over No. 4-seeded David Ferrer on Thursday night.

The top-ranked Djokovic was in dominating form, hitting 30 crisp winners in the 1-hour, 29-minute match. He is aiming to be the first man in the Open era to win three consecutive Australian titles.

On Sunday, he'll meet the winner of Friday's semifinal between No. 2-ranked Roger Federer, a four-time Australian champion, and U.S. Open winner Andy Murray, who is ranked No. 3.

Djokovic, who is now unbeaten in five Grand Slam head-to-heads with Ferrer, allowed his opponent only four points in the first four games of the last set to strangle any chance of a comeback.

The announcement, to be made on Thursday morning at the Palais Garnier by the general director of the Paris Opera, Nicolas Joel, will end months of intense speculation surrounding the successor to Brigitte Lefèvre, the director of dance at the Paris Opera since 1995 who plans to retire at the end of the 2013-14 season.

Mr. Millepied's appointment comes as a surprise as it was generally expected that a current or former company member would be chosen to lead one of the world's grandest and most traditional ensembles. The shortlist was considered to come from a small group of Paris Opera Ballet insiders, including the star dancers, or étoiles, Nicolas Le Riche, due to retire in 2014, and Laurent Hilaire, a ballet master with the company and Ms. Lefèvre's right-hand man.

Although Mr. Millepied, 35, was born in Bordeaux and trained at the Lyon Conservatory, he joined the School of American Ballet as a teenager. His subsequent professional career as a dancer was spent with City Ballet, where he rose quickly through the ranks to become a principal dancer in 2002. He retired in 2011 to focus on choreography, and moved to Los Angeles, where he founded the L.A. Dance Project last year.

In an interview on Wednesday at his hotel here, Mr. Millepied said he was approached relatively recently, in mid-November, by Stéphane Lissner, artistic director of La Scala, who is to succeed Mr. Joel as general director in 2015. In the Paris Opera hierarchy, the director of dance's artistic policy is subject to the approval of the general director, but in past decades there has been little interference or involvement.

"I certainly knew about the position, but I also knew that there were candidates from within the company," Mr. Millepied said. "I was surprised, but I felt very quickly that the artistic dialogue between us was an exciting one. After a while I did feel there was a really good chance I might get the position. Which made my head spin."

Well it might.

Mr. Millepied will inherit one of the world's greatest classical troupes. It has 150 dancers, a complex hierarchy of ranking and promotions and the sizable weight of history: the company is effectively an outgrowth of the very beginnings of ballet at the court of Louis XIV. Its dancers almost all come from the Paris Opera Ballet school, and they rarely leave to dance elsewhere once they have achieved a coveted position in the company.

They are also civil servants, with long-term contracts that run until their mandatory retirement, with pension, at 42. And with the notable exception of Ms. Lefèvre, directors tend to drop like flies at the Paris Opera. Even Rudolf Nureyev lasted only six stormy, if productive, years in the 1980s, while directors like John Taras and Violette Verdy managed just a few seasons.

The byzantine politics, scale and bureaucracy of the Paris Opera is worlds away from Mr. Millepied's professional experience. He has long put together touring groups, and even at the peak of his dancing career was an indefatigable organizer of small choreographic projects and festivals with musicians and artists. He is a prolific choreographer who has created works for major companies (including American Ballet Theater, City Ballet and the Paris Opera Ballet), and his public profile is high, thanks partly to his work on the Darren Aronofsky film "Black Swan" and his subsequent marriage to its star, Natalie Portman.

But his new company, the L.A. Dance Project, which made its debut in September in Los Angeles, is small and experimental in orientation. (Mr. Millepied said he planned to continue running the L.A. Dance Project until he began his new job, when he would move to Paris with Ms. Portman and their son. He said he hoped the company, which has a budget guaranteed for the next three years, would continue.)

Spain's unemployment rate rose to 26 percent in the fourth quarter of 2012, or 5.97 million people, the National Statistics Institute said on Thursday, up from 25 percent in the previous quarter and more than double the European Union average.

"We haven't seen the bottom yet and employment will continue falling in the first quarter," said Citigroup strategist Jose Luis Martinez.

Spain sank into its second recession since 2009 at the end of 2011 after a burst housing bubble left millions of low-skilled laborers out of work and sliding private and business sentiment gutted consumer spending and imports.

Efforts by Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy's government to control one of the euro zone's largest deficits through billions of euros of spending cuts and tax hikes have fueled general malaise, further hampering demand.

When Rajoy took office in late 2011 there were 5.27 million jobless in Spain.

The economic downturn put an average of 1,900 out of work every day through 2012 and with the recession expected to last at least until the end of 2013, net job creation is unlikely this year.

Joblessness has been particularly acute for Spain's youth, with 60 percent of people under the age of 25 unemployed in the fourth quarter.

In the fourth quarter, the economy shrank at its fastest pace since the recession began, the Bank of Spain said on Wednesday, dragged down by a steep drop in private consumption due in part to a September VAT hike and public wage cuts.

(Additional reporting by Manuel Maria Ruiz; Writing by Paul Day; Editing by Fiona Ortiz)

In a statement issued through its state-run media, the National Defense Commission, the North's highest governing agency, headed by its young leader Kim Jong-un, said that "a variety of satellites and long-range rockets which will be launched by the D.P.R.K. one after another and a nuclear test of higher level which will be carried out by it in the upcoming all-out action" will be aimed at deterring the hostile policy of "the U.S., the sworn enemy of the Korean people."

The statement, which used the acronym for the North's official name, Democratic People's Republic of Korea, did not clarify when it would conduct such a test, which would be the first since Mr. Kim came to power in December 2011. But citing preparations at the Punggye test site in northeastern North Korea, South Korean officials and news media said that Pyongyang can conduct a new underground nuclear test there on short notice.

North Korea had previously hinted at the possibility of conducting a nuclear test, as its Foreign Ministry did on Wednesday when it issued a scathing statement rejecting a unanimous resolution that the Security Council adopted on Tuesday. The resolution tightened sanctions and condemned North Korea's Dec. 12 rocket launching as a violation of earlier resolutions banning the country from conducting any tests involving ballistic missile technology.

The North's statement on Thursday indicated that Mr. Kim, despite recent hints of economic reform and openness in North Korea, was likely to follow the pattern his father, Kim Jong il had established when he ran the country: a cycle of a rocket launching, U.N. condemnation and nuclear test.

Mr. Kim's posture threw a direct challenge to President Obama as he starts his second term, and to Park Geun-hye, who will be sworn in as president of South Korea next month.

After years of tensions with North Korea, both Mr. Obama and Ms. Park recently said they were keeping the door open for dialogue with North Korea on the premise that such engagement would lead to the eventual dismantling of its nuclear weapons program.

On Thursday, the North's National Defense Commission said the Security Council's move convinced it to "launch an all-out action" to foil Washington's hostile policy and "safeguard the sovereignty of the country and the nation." It said that North Korea's drive to rebuild its moribund economy and its rocket program, until now billed as a peaceful space project, will now "all orientate toward the purpose of winning in the all-out action for foiling the U.S."

"Settling accounts with the U.S. needs to be done with force, not with words as it regards jungle law as the rule of its survival," it said.

The North's comments came as Washington reaffirmed its policy of punishing North Korea for moving toward the development of long-range missiles tipped with a nuclear warhead, spearheading international backing for the Security Council resolution.

North Korea's Foreign Ministry said Wednesday that it would take "physical counteraction" to bolster its "nuclear deterrence both qualitatively and quantitatively."

In recent months, international experts have detected what appear to be new tunneling activities and efforts to fix flood damage in the Punggye-ri nuclear test site in northeastern North Korea. The North conducted an underground nuclear test in Punggye-ri in 2006 and in 2009.

North Korea said its Unha-3 rocket December put a scientific satellite into orbit. But Washington said the launching was a cover for testing technology for intercontinental ballistic missiles. After analyzing the debris of the rocket North Korea fired in December to put a satellite into orbit, South Korean officials said North Korea indigenously built crucial components of a missile that can fly more than 6,200 miles.

A new nuclear test by the North could help bolster its efforts to build a nuclear device small enough to mount on long-range missiles.

In recent years, North Korea has made it increasingly clear that it is determined to keep its nuclear weapons at whatever costs, undermining a once-popular belief that the Pyongyang government's brinkmanship was a mere bargaining ploy designed to get as many concessions as possible in exchange for nuclear weapons.

Choi Jin-wook, an analyst at the Korea Institute for National Unification in Seoul, said, "This is a strong message from North Korea, basically saying that no matter how much economic aid it receives, no matter how flexible other countries become, it will be negotiating only on the premise that it will be accepted and treated as a nuclear power."

He continued, "The North is sending a wake-up alarm to Washington and Seoul."