AFP news

The central bank hiked borrowing costs aggressively from mid-2022 to tame runaway energy and food costs, but is now bringing them back down as price rises slow and the eurozone economy looks weak.

The European Union is under pressure to help a sector that employs 13 million people and accounts for about seven percent of the bloc's GDP, as it seeks to revamp the continent's lagging competitiveness.

A Stockholm court was due to rule on Thursday whether Salwan Momika, a Christian Iraqi who burned Korans at a slew of protests, was guilty of inciting ethnic hatred.

Factories producing mainly foreign-owned brands, including from Japanese giant Nissan and Indian-owned Jaguar Land Rover, turned out a total 905,233 vehicles, down 11.8 percent on 2023, said the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders.

Oil prices came under pressure from weakness in the Chinese economy while the cost of gas has fallen heavily since soaring after the invasion of Ukraine by energy producer Russia.

The agency, UNRWA, will be banned from operating on Israeli soil, and contact between it and Israeli officials will also be forbidden.

The Kumbh Mela attracts tens of millions of Hindu faithful from around India every 12 years to the northern city of Prayagraj, but has a woeful record of deadly crowd incidents.

The hole suddenly opened up in Yashio during the morning rush hour on Tuesday, swallowing the lorry.

Signaling a shift in the US position on the agency by the administration of President Donald Trump, a US envoy voiced support for the decision and called for a probe into Israeli claims UNRWA sites were used by Palestinian militant group Hamas.

Big money government contracts are often tech firm targets, and OpenAI already boasts some 90,000 users of ChatGPT across federal, state and local governments in the United States.

The Ukrainian leader responded by saying that Putin was "afraid" of negotiations and was using "cynical tricks" to prolong the nearly three-year conflict.

The chain, which has hit a rough patch of sagging sales, installed Brian Niccol as CEO last year, recruiting him from Chipotle after the short-lived tenure of Laxman Narasimhan.

Deadly crowd incidents are a frequent occurrence at Indian religious festivals, including the Kumbh Mela, which attracts tens of millions of devotees every 12 years to the northern city of Prayagraj.

While Musk hasn't publicly expressed interest in acquiring TikTok, his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter (now X) in 2022 demonstrates his appetite for social media investments.

Kim recently visited a nuclear-material production facility, Pyongyang's official Korean Central News Agency said, where Kim warned of an "inevitable" confrontation with hostile nations and said 2025 would be a "crucial year" for bolstering North Korea's nuclear forces.

The M23 armed group and Rwandan troops have seized the airport and most of the center and neighborhoods since marching into the eastern provincial capital on Sunday after a lightning offensive.

The mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have invited US President Donald Trump to visit this year for the 80th anniversary of the World War II atomic bombings, officials said Wednesday.

The struggling English giants are laboring in the bottom half of the Premier League table but do sit in the top eight of the Europa League.

Despite opposition from environmentalists and some Labour MPs, Prime Minister Keir Starmer is determined to deliver major infrastructure projects to grow a UK economy which has struggled to take off since the party came to power in July.

Totoki, 60, joined in 1987 and is currently Sony's chief operating officer, finance chief and president. From April 1, he will succeed Kenichiro Yoshida, who will remain chairman, Sony said in a statement.

Markets were closely scrutinising ASML's annual results after a rollercoaster few days for the tech sector sparked by the emergence of Chinese AI start-up DeepSeek.

The self-ruled island is a global power in the manufacturing of chips, which are used in products from Apple's iPhones to Nvidia's artificial intelligence hardware and are a key driver of its economy.

Taking place in London, scene of all Bridget's greatest catastrophes, the red carpet showing is also due to be attended by rising star Leo Woodall, 28, who plays her latest and much younger love interest.

Spain has been consistently outstripping a mostly sluggish eurozone and the data published by the National Statistics Institute confirmed its standout performance with 0.8 percent growth in the final three months of 2024.

Analysts expect the Fed to do nothing this week as it waits to see which policies the new Trump administration approves and how they might affect the US economy.

If confirmed, the 71-year-old Kennedy family scion and former environmental lawyer would take the helm of a department overseeing more than 80,000 employees and a $1.7 trillion budget at a time when scientists are sounding the alarm over the potential for bird flu to trigger a human pandemic.

While the company's profits were pressured by vehicle price cuts introduced amid intensifying electric vehicle (EV) competition, Musk's monumental bet on Trump's candidacy proved successful.

Journeying across India for the pinnacle celebration of the Hindu calendar, Laxmi and her family were sleeping by the roadside Wednesday as they waited to cleanse themselves in the sacred Ganges river.

The success will come with heightened scrutiny, both from Western governments with long-held suspicions about Chinese technology but also from Beijing, whose stern regulatory crackdown on the sector, though eased in 2022, still has a chilling effect.