AFP news

NASA's pioneering Parker Solar Probe is poised to make its closest-ever approach of the Sun on Christmas Eve, a record-setting 3.8 million miles (6.2 million kilometers) from the surface.

A US government panel failed to reach a consensus on whether US Steel's acquisition by Nippon Steel threatens Washington's national security, shifting the decision to the White House, the Japanese company said late Monday.

Global stocks were mostly higher on Tuesday boosted by a tech rally on Wall Street, but gains remained modest in thin Christmas Eve trade.

The status of the Panama Canal is non-negotiable, President Jose Raul Mulino said in a statement Monday signed alongside former leaders of the country, after Donald Trump's recent threats to reclaim the man-made waterway.

Far-right leader Marine Le Pen said Tuesday that the days of France's new government are already numbered, predicting an early presidential election in a few months.

Finland is consistently ranked as Europe's most media literate country and the skills needed to spot online hoaxes are on the school curriculum, amidst a boom of mis- and disinformation campaigns.

A factory turned into a battlefield, riot police armed with tasers and an activist who spent 100 days atop a chimney -- the unrest that inspired Netflix's most successful show ever has all the hallmarks of a TV drama.

The world's deadliest tsunami hit nations around the Indian Ocean two decades ago before social media platforms flourished, but they have since transformed how we understand and respond to disasters -- from finding the missing to swift crowdfunding.

French President Emmanuel Macron named a new government Monday evening, putting together a team under Francois Bayrou, his fourth prime minister of the year, to drag the second-largest EU economy out of political crisis.

Two Syrian doctors and a nurse told AFP in a series of interviews over the weekend that Bashar al-Assad's government coerced them into providing false testimony to international investigators after a deadly 2018 chlorine attack.

Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told lawmakers on Monday that "some progress" had been made in negotiations to secure the release of hostages held in Gaza, more than 14 months into the war.

Three days after Germany's deadly Christmas market attack in which a Saudi man was arrested, both the far-right AfD and counter-protesters were due to hit the streets Monday in the bereaved city of Magdeburg.

Despite a barrage of Western sanctions and swathes of brands quitting Russia after the Kremlin launched its Ukraine offensive, Moscow's most well-off shoppers are still spoilt for choice when it comes to luxury Western goods.

Exhausted by more than 14 months of war, the wives and mothers of Israeli soldiers are uniting in protest against exemptions from conscription for ultra-Orthodox men.

Two weeks after seizing power in a sweeping offensive, Syria's new leader Ahmed al-Sharaa on Sunday said weapons in the country, including those held by Kurdish-led forces, would come under state control.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz's government on Sunday pledged to investigate whether security services could have prevented the Christmas market car-ramming attack that killed five people and injured over 200.

Gaza's civil defence agency said Israeli strikes overnight and early Sunday killed at least 28 Palestinians, including at one family's home and at a school building the military said was used by Hamas.

A missile fired from Yemen by Iran-backed Huthi rebels struck Israel's commercial hub Tel Aviv before dawn on Saturday, wounding 16 people in the second such attack in days.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and other politicians will Saturday visit the scene of a bloody car-ramming that targeted visitors to a Christmas fair in an old market city.

In the mid-19th century, Dutch colonial officials climbing an Indonesian volcano spotted an ancient statue meant to serve as protection against misfortune, looted it, and took it to the Netherlands.

German police arrested a Saudi Arabian man after a deadly car-ramming attack on a Christmas market Friday in which an SUV barrelled through a crowd of revellers at high speed, leaving a trail of bloody carnage.

Syrian media outlets which trumpeted the glories of Bashar al-Assad's oppressive rule quickly adopted revolutionary fervour after his ouster, but uncertainty shadows the sector.

US diplomats met with Syria's new ruler on Friday, an official told AFP, as outside powers seek assurances the country's Islamist-led authorities will be moderate and inclusive.

El Salvador will privatize or close the cryptocurrency wallet "Chivo" created by President Nayib Bukele when he made bitcoin legal tender in 2021, an official said Thursday.

Russian missiles targeted Kyiv at sunrise on Friday, killing at least one person and damaging six diplomatic missions and a university in the centre of the Ukrainian capital.

Switzerland's financial regulator was ineffective in tackling the scandals at Credit Suisse, where executive mismanagement scuppered the bank and nearly triggered a global financial crisis, a Swiss inquiry concluded Friday.

Bursting with customers one afternoon the week before Christmas, a second-hand charity shop in London's Marylebone High Street looked even busier than the upscale retailers surrounding it.

A French court on Friday was expected to deliver a verdict against eight people charged in connection with the jihadist beheading of schoolteacher Samuel Paty in 2020, a murder that horrified France.

Australian Olympic breakdancer Rachael "Raygun" Gunn says her legal dispute with the makers of a parody musical about her has been resolved, with a new version planned.