AFP news

French President Emmanuel Macron was expected Thursday to name a new prime minister a week after MPs toppled the government, with politicians across the spectrum holding their breath while he conducts a day visit to Poland.

The Swiss central bank announced an unexpectedly large interest-rate cut on Thursday, citing rising "uncertainty" about the economic outlook due to the potential impact of Donald Trump's policies and political turmoil in Europe.

Salome Zurabishvili was a French diplomat before entering the turbulent politics of her ancestral homeland, where she was elected Georgia's first woman leader in 2018 and became the beacon of Tbilisi's EU aspirations.

The United States was pushing Thursday for an "inclusive" transition in Syria from president Bashar al-Assad's brutal rule, after the country's new leaders pledged to protect minority rights.

Equities mostly rose in Asian trade Thursday following another record day on Wall Street fuelled by inflation data that reinforced expectations for a US interest rate cut next week, while traders also remained hopeful for more measures to stimulate China's economy.

Her husband orchestrating her sexual abuse by strangers could have broken her.

Mohammed Naeem knew the Kabul street where he and his brothers built matching apartment buildings was too narrow, but he was still in disbelief as their homes were reduced to rubble to widen the road.

The movers and shakers of the video game industry will gather Thursday in Los Angeles to celebrate the annual Game Awards, the sector's equivalent of the Oscars.

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.