AFP news

Angry protests broke out Wednesday in the heartland of deposed Syrian ruler Bashar al-Assad's Alawite minority, a war monitor and witnesses said, after a video circulated showing an attack on a shrine.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Wednesday denounced an "inhumane" attack from Russia, which launched over 170 missiles and drones on his war-torn country's power grid on Christmas Day, killing an energy worker.

Christmas revellers around the world donned red and white Santa hats, offered meals to the homeless and lit candles on Wednesday, as Pope Francis launched observation of the global holiday with a sombre mass in the Vatican.

From riding pillion on zooming motorbikes to round-the-clock airport stakeouts, India's celebrity-hunting paparazzi photographers have gone from "outcasts" to becoming a key part of Bollywood's vast film industry machine.

AFP photographer Sameer al-Doumy never dreamed he would be able to return to the hometown in Syria that he escaped through a tunnel seven years ago after it was besieged by Bashar al-Assad's forces.

Hundreds of people gathered at the Church of the Nativity in the holy city of Bethlehem on Tuesday to mark another solemn Christmas overshadowed by the war in Gaza.

President-elect Donald Trump's repeated support for TikTok has sparked speculation about potential solutions to prevent the app's impending ban in the United States, though the path forward remains unclear.

A massacre of more than 200 people in Haiti this month followed a gang-ordered manhunt that saw victims, many of them elderly, pulled from their homes and shot or killed with machetes, the UN said Monday.

South Korea's opposition said Tuesday it would hold back a decision to impeach acting president Han Duck-soo until later in the week.

A powerful blast ripped through an explosives plant in northwestern Turkey on Tuesday killing 12 people and injuring five others, officials said.

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.