AFP news

Advance ticket sales for the movie of Taylor Swift's "Eras" tour have topped $100 million worldwide, theater operator AMC said Thursday, making it the best-selling feature-length concert film in history.

US market regulators on Thursday asked a judge to order Elon Musk to comply with a subpoena to answer questions about his purchases of Twitter shares last year.

A group of high-profile activists including Hillary Clinton, Malala Yousafzai and Gloria Steinem have signed a call for the United Nations to criminalize gender apartheid, according to a letter sent to member states Thursday.

An attack Thursday on a Syrian military academy killed 112 people, a war monitor said, with state media blaming "terrorist organisations" for the drone strike in government-held Homs.

New Zealand handed defending champions England a nine-wicket thrashing at the Cricket World Cup on Thursday at the start of a marathon tournament likely to dictate the event's status in the future of the sport.

A Russian strike killed at least 51 people gathered for a wake in northeastern Ukraine Thursday, provoking outrage from Western leaders for what the UN warned could be a war crime.

The United States said Thursday it would resume limited food assistance in Ethiopia, delivering to some one million refugees, but will keep most operations suspended after concerns of systematic diversion of aid.

Global trade growth will be sharply lower than forecast this year as stubborn inflation, high interest rates and the war in Ukraine pressure economies around the globe, the World Trade Organization said Thursday.

US President Joe Biden on Thursday defended plans to extend the border wall with Mexico, saying he didn't think such barriers worked but that he was bound by laws introduced under Donald Trump.

Efforts to help millions of people in need in Sudan due to the civil war are being hampered by a lack of security and meagre international funding, the United Nations said Thursday.

Russian mercenary group Wagner in 2022 signed a contract with a Chinese firm to acquire two satellites and use their images, aiding its intelligence work as the organisation sought to push Russia's invasion of Ukraine, according to a document seen by AFP. The contract was signed in November 2022, over half a year into Moscow's invasion of Ukraine in which the Wagner group under its founder Yevgeny Prigozhin was playing a key role on the battlefield.

President Joe Biden admitted Wednesday he was worried that political turmoil in Washington could threaten US aid to Ukraine, urging Republicans to stop their infighting and back "critically important" assistance for Kyiv.

The World Bank and International Monetary Fund will tackle the thorny issue of institutional reform at their upcoming annual meetings in Morocco next week.

Elon Musk's social media platform X has stripped headlines from news articles shared by users, in a move likely to further worsen relations with media groups.

Taipei has said it will investigate if Taiwanese firms that helped Huawei build semiconductor factories violated US sanctions against the Chinese tech giant.

Indian rescue teams searched on Thursday for 102 people missing after a devastating flash flood triggered by a high-altitude glacial lake burst killed at least 14, officials said.

The Swedish Academy on Thursday awarded the Nobel literature prize to Norwegian playwright Jon Fosse, whose plays are among the most widely staged of any contemporary playwright in Europe.

Pope Francis warned Wednesday the world "is collapsing" due to global warming, urging participants of the upcoming COP28 climate talks to agree to binding policies on phasing out fossil fuels.

A trio of US-based researchers on Wednesday won the Nobel Chemistry Prize for developing tiny "quantum dots" used to illuminate TVs and lamps, hours after a prematurely sent statement revealed their names.

More than a thousand migrants rode atop a freight train to the edge of the US border on Tuesday after dodging authorities on a 10-day journey through Mexico.

Visiting Washington on Tuesday, President-elect Bernardo Arevalo of Guatemala said he is confronting a concerted effort to keep him from taking power after his upset election win.

Meta is proposing to offer European users a subscription-based version of Instagram and Facebook if they would rather not be tracked for ads, a source said on Tuesday.

Indian anti-terror police said Tuesday they had arrested two people linked to a news website and raided the homes of 44 others, in a case reportedly connected to alleged Chinese funding.

Republican Kevin McCarthy rode the tiger of far-right US politics led by Donald Trump to achieve his dream of becoming House speaker early this year.

Kevin McCarthy was axed Tuesday as speaker of the US House of Representatives in a brutal, historic rebellion by far-right Republicans accusing him of a string of broken promises and furious at his cooperation with Democrats.

Pope Francis opens a major congress on the future of the Catholic Church Wednesday marked by tensions with conservatives on issues such as the treatment of divorcees and LGBTQ believers.

Facing grueling conditions worthy of a Dantean hell, up against soaring walls of blistering flames, thousands of firefighters mobilized throughout the Canadian summer.

Wearing a heat-protective coat with hood and a visor, Sergiy peered down into a glowing orange stream of searing liquid metal at Ukraine's Zaporizhstal steel plant.

Thailand's prime minister on Wednesday vowed "preventive measures" after a shooting at a Bangkok shopping mall left two people dead and raised fresh questions about the kingdom's gun control.