WORLD

The United Nations Security Council on Monday approved a Kenyan-led mission aiming to bring stability to Haiti, a year after leaders in the violence-ravaged Caribbean nation first pleaded for help.

Congolese surgical gynaecologist Denis Mukwege, who won the Nobel prize for his work with rape victims, is renowned at home for his boundless energy and biting criticism of the central African country's government.

The European Union signalled its long-term support for Ukraine on Monday as its foreign ministers convened in the capital Kyiv for a historic first gathering outside the bloc's borders.

Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman won the Nobel Medicine Prize on Monday for work on messenger RNA (mRNA) technology that paved the way for groundbreaking Covid-19 vaccines.

Pro-China candidate Mohamed Muizzu won Saturday's presidential election in the Maldives, a result set to once again upend the archipelago's relationship with traditional benefactor India.

Turkish jets launched air strikes inside Iraqi Kurdistan late Sunday, after a blast earlier the same day injured two police officers near the parliament building in Ankara.

The future of US aid for Ukraine hangs in the balance after a last-gasp deal to avoid a government shutdown, despite President Joe Biden's attempts to reassure Kyiv it will get what it needs to fight Russia.

Meta's chief technology officer is quick to push back on assertions that the company has fallen behind rivals like ChatGPT in the explosive surge across the tech industry in generative AI. "The majority of the world's population will have their first experience of generative artificial intelligence with us," Andrew "Boz" Bosworth told AFP at the company's recent Connect conference for developers.

Billionaire Elon Musk on Saturday waded into German politics at a time of a heated debate on immigration across Europe, saying Berlin-funded migrant rescue operations in the Mediterranean could be seen as an "invasion" of Italy.

The wife of Gabon's ousted president Ali Bongo Ondimba has been charged with "money laundering" and other offences, the public prosecutor said Friday, a month after her husband was toppled in a coup.

A Rome-bound aircraft departed on Saturday from Libya's capital, restarting flights to Italy after a nearly decade-long suspension due to an EU ban, authorities in Tripoli said.

Nigerian President Bola Ahmed Tinubu's government on Sunday proposed a temporary wage hike for federal workers and more cheap gas-powered public transport among other measures to offset the impact of his economic reforms and convince labour unions to call off a planned national strike.

At least nine miners were killed after a shaft in a Zimbabwean gold mine collapsed, an engineer at the site and the miners federation said Saturday.

The Philippine Coast Guard vowed Friday to "do whatever it takes" to remove any more floating barriers installed by China at a disputed reef in the South China Sea.

The jailed leader of Tunisian opposition party Ennahdha, Rached Ghannouchi, 82, began a hunger strike on Friday to protest his detention and express support for other "political prisoners", his party said.

Europe must invest more quickly and massively in its energy transition if it wants to remain a global industrial power, top policymakers warned on Friday.

"The warning by the Fund and the elevated risks calls for decisive and intentional actions if we are to steer economies towards a prosperous, sustainable, and inclusive economy," Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana said.

Israel's top court debated appeals Thursday against a law restricting how a prime minister can be removed from office, as current premier Benjamin Netanyahu faces protests against the judicial overhaul.

The leaders of nine Mediterranean and southern European countries, including France's Emmanuel Macron and Italy's Giorgia Meloni, meet Friday in Malta for talks set to focus on migration.

With a clean energy transition hungry for more minerals, representatives from dozens of countries and industry met in Paris on Thursday looking to shore up deliveries against supply chain snarls and geopolitical tensions.

A gunman dressed in combat gear and wearing a bulletproof vest went on a shooting rampage at a house and a hospital in Rotterdam Thursday, killing a 14-year-old girl, her mother, and a teacher.

Russia said Thursday that it plans to raise defence spending by almost 70 percent next year, funnelling massive resources into its Ukraine offensive to fight what it calls a "hybrid war" unleashed by the West.

Nagorno-Karabakh's long and bloody dream of independence ended on Thursday with a decree declaring that the ethnic Armenian statelet in Azerbaijan "ceases to exist" at the end of the year.

Gang-plagued Haiti is sinking further into bloodshed and lawlessness, the United Nations chief warned in a report Wednesday, urging the international community to provide security and financial aid to the troubled Caribbean nation.

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) on Wednesday began hearing a case brought by six Portuguese youths against 32 nations for not doing enough to stop global warming, the latest bid to secure climate justice through the courts.

Next week's Nobel Prize announcements will celebrate a string of groundbreaking achievements, but with conflicts raging around the globe, experts solicited about possible Peace Prize winners are scratching their heads.

European maritime companies are ditching their old ships for scrap on Bangladeshi beaches in dangerous and polluting conditions that have killed workers pulling them apart, Human Rights Watch said Thursday.

North Korea has enshrined its status as a nuclear power in its constitution, with leader Kim Jong Un calling for more modern atomic weapons to counter the threat from the United States, state media reported Thursday.

Burkina Faso's military government said Wednesday it had foiled a coup attempt the previous day, almost a year after the country's leader came to power in a coup himself.