AFP news

Carlos Alcaraz raced into the Wimbledon third round on Wednesday as Japanese superstar Naomi Osaka was demolished on her return to Centre Court after a five-year absence.

France's prime minister on Wednesday urged voters to form a united front to block the far right in legislative elections, warning that the anti-immigration party of Marine Le Pen was within reach of winning an absolute majority.

Eurozone stock markets rallied Wednesday and the euro rose on hopes France could avoid a far-right majority in looming polls, while London also gained ground on the eve of its general election.

The US trade gap grew slightly less than expected in May, to the widest level since late 2022, government data showed on Wednesday, as exports and imports both slipped.

Far from her home in the tourist mecca of Tenerife, Cati Padilla is one of the growing number of travellers escaping heatwaves for cooler holidays in Nordic countries.

Iranians will vote on Friday in a presidential runoff pitting the reformist Masoud Pezeshkian against ultraconservative anti-Western former nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili.

Russia said Wednesday its forces had captured a district in the key hilltop town of Chasiv Yar near Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine, where Moscow has been pressing for months.

Microsoft is to invest 2.2 billion euros ($2.4 billion) in a huge data centre project in northeastern Spain, regional authorities said Wednesday as the area seeks to establish itself as a cloud storage hotspot.

The leaders of Russia and China were in Kazakhstan on Wednesday for a regional summit, seeking to harden anti-Western alliances and press their influence in the strategic Central Asian region.

Georgian student Elene Deisadze was browsing TikTok in 2022 when she stumbled across the profile of a girl, Anna Panchulidze, who looked exactly like her.

Between the orange trunks of the acacia trees in the Chad savannah, a herd of elephants move through Zah Soo National Park, under the watchful eye of one of the only humans allowed to witness the scene.

Survivors of India's deadliest stampede in over a decade on Wednesday recalled the horror of being crushed at a vastly overcrowded Hindu religious gathering that left 116 people dead.

South Korea has declared its super-low birthrate a "national emergency" and poured billions into encouraging citizens to marry and reproduce, but one YouTuber has found happiness and success promoting the opposite ideal.

Labour leader Keir Starmer is a former human rights lawyer turned-state prosecutor whose ruthless ambition and formidable work ethic look set to propel him to Britain's highest political office.

Britain looks likely to see a change of government this week, swinging leftwards back to the centre ground and the Labour party after 14 years of right-wing Conservative rule.

Crowds in Kenya's capital Nairobi lobbed rocks and looted businesses as police officers fired tear gas in scattered violence during fresh anti-government protests Tuesday following last month's deadly demonstrations.

A Cambodian court on Tuesday sentenced 10 environmentalists to between six and eight years in jail over their activism in a case condemned by rights campaigners as a "crushing blow" to the kingdom's civil society.

Marketa Vondrousova on Tuesday became the first defending women's Wimbledon champion to lose in the first round for 30 years as Andy Murray ran out of time in his fitness race.

Veteran actors Judi Dench and Sian Phillips have become the first woman members of London's esteemed Garrick Club after it voted in May to allow women to join, the Guardian reported Tuesday.

Google made major changes to its search algorithm and spam filters earlier this year to get rid of low-quality content -- but the effects have proved devastating to some smaller websites.

Eurozone inflation cooled in June, official data showed Tuesday but experts say it will not be enough to convince the European Central Bank to accelerate its rate-cutting cycle despite sluggish economic growth.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban urged Kyiv on Tuesday to work towards a "quick ceasefire" in Ukraine that could pave the way for negotiations with Russia to end more than two years of war.

Uber driver Hussein Khalil was battling traffic in Beirut when he found himself in the Gaza Strip -- according to his online map, anyway -- as location jamming blamed on Israel disrupts life in Lebanon.

Benin and Niger are locked in a growing diplomatic row that has damaged their economies and seen Niger's military rulers switch off a key oil pipeline.

Israeli forces carried out deadly strikes Tuesday on southern Gaza and battled militants after the army again ordered Palestinians to leave areas near the besieged territory's border with Israel and Egypt.

Every time Turkish farmer Fatih Sik drives his tractor across his cornfields he knows the earth could open up and swallow him at any moment.

When Myanmar's junta announced a conscription law to help crush a popular pro-democracy uprising, Khaing knew there was only one way to escape its clutches, and began planning her escape.

Raped by her husband on her wedding night aged 17, Divya described her repeated suffering -- an all-too-common account in India, permitted by a terrifying colonial-era legal loophole.

On a densely populated island off Pakistan's megacity of Karachi, a group of pregnant women wait in a punishing heatwave for the only midwife to arrive from the mainland.