AFP news

Manchester City's crisis continued with a 2-0 defeat away to Juventus in the Champions League on Wednesday, while Pep Guardiola's old club Barcelona beat Borussia Dortmund to clinch a spot in the knockout stage of Europe's elite club competition.

Russia on Wednesday vowed retribution against Ukraine, accusing Kyiv of firing Western-supplied missiles on a military airfield in its southern Rostov region.

US auto giant General Motors announced Tuesday it will abandon its robotaxi development efforts after a highly publicized incident last year stymied its progress in the autonomous vehicle field.

Nippon Steel on Wednesday slammed the "inappropriate" influence of politics on its planned takeover of US Steel after a media report said President Joe Biden would block it.

Taiwan said Wednesday it had detected 53 Chinese military aircraft and 19 ships near the island in the past 24 hours, as Beijing holds its biggest maritime mobilisation in years.

Stock markets struggled for direction Wednesday as traders awaited key US inflation data with the Federal Reserve expected to cut interest rates next week.

Rescuers were working Wednesday to find people under the rubble of a building destroyed in a Russian attack the day before that killed eight people, Ukrainian officials said.

French President Emmanuel Macron raced Wednesday to meet a self-imposed 48-hour deadline to name a new prime minister after he hosted party bosses in a bid to hammer out a consensus and avoid a protracted political crisis.

FIFA is set to confirm on Wednesday that Saudi Arabia will host the 2034 World Cup while a joint bid by Morocco, Spain and Portugal which also features matches in South America will be awarded the 2030 tournament.

Syria's new prime minister said the Islamist-led alliance that ousted president Bashar al-Assad will "guarantee" the rights of all religious groups and called on the millions who fled the war to return home.

Two suspects daubed anti-Israel graffiti and torched a car in a Sydney suburb on Wednesday, police said, sparking "outrage" from Australia's government days after a Melbourne synagogue was set ablaze.

South Korean police said Wednesday that security guards were blocking a raid on President Yoon Suk Yeol's offices to investigate his brief imposition of martial law, with the opposition party accusing the presidential staff of illegally protecting an insurrectionist.

China has expanded military drills around Taiwan aimed at drawing "a red line" for the next US president, Taipei authorities said on Wednesday, branding Beijing a "troublemaker".

For three years, Kala and her family were stranded on a remote British-US military base in the middle of the Indian Ocean, trapped in horrific conditions after fleeing persecution at home.

Meeting Indonesia's pledge to phase out coal power in just 15 years and reach net-zero emissions by mid-century is a "daunting task" that will require immediate and ambitious action, experts warn.

For more than a decade, the United States has sought to keep out of Syria's political debacle, seeing no viable partner.

Pro-Europe protests showed no sign of abating Tuesday, with thousands taking to the streets as the European Union warned it could punish Tbilisi for its crackdown on demonstrators.

Israel's bombing of Syrian military assets and its entry into the UN-patrolled buffer zone on the Golan Heights show it fears the worst from the end of the Assad clan's rule, analysts told AFP. "The Israeli government... is operating on a worst-case scenario with little to no nuance," said Yossi Mekelberg, a Middle East specialist at Chatham House in London.

Syrians lived in terror for decades of what went on behind the concrete walls of Damascus's security compound.

Japan's atomic bomb survivors' group Nihon Hidankyo accepted its Nobel Peace Prize on Tuesday, urging countries to abolish the weapons resurging as a threat 80 years after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.

Lighting his pipe, the commander barely reacted to explosions in the distance as he explained how his men were dying, overwhelmed by Russian soldiers storming eastern Ukraine despite heavy losses.

Carmen Schuster was a young woman when she left the Transylvanian village of Cincsor in Romania for West Germany in search of a better life 40 years ago.

Taiwan accused China on Tuesday of holding its biggest maritime mobilisation around the island in years, though Beijing has stayed tight-lipped over its latest show of force.

Car giant Stellantis and Chinese manufacturer CATL said Tuesday they would build a $4.3-billion factory to make electric vehicle batteries in Spain, the latest bid to boost Europe's troubled EV drive.

China's "coercive behaviour" threatens regional stability, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Tuesday, after Taiwan said Beijing was carrying out its biggest maritime mobilisation around the self-ruled island in years.

Air passenger numbers are forecast to top five billion for the first time next year and the sector's revenues will break the trillion-dollar barrier, the global aviation body IATA said on Tuesday.

South Korean authorities banned more top officials from leaving the country Tuesday, in the wake of President Yoon Suk Yeol's bungled attempt to impose martial law.

A war monitor said on Tuesday that Israel had conducted 300 strikes on Syria since the fall of president Bashar al-Assad, adding that the raids had "destroyed the most important military sites" in the country.

China is deploying dozens of ships in its biggest maritime mobilisation around Taiwan in years, Taipei said Tuesday, after Beijing voiced fury at President Lai Ching-te's recent visit to the United States.