AFP news

Borussia Dortmund face the acid test after a fairytale run to Saturday's Champions League final as a star-studded Real Madrid roll into Wembley expecting to be crowned European champions for a 15th time.

Donald Trump once boasted "When you're a star, they let you do it. Despite the sounds and the fury of four years of tweeting, he got some things done -- Republicans boast that the economy was better back then, and he at least started the border wall he had pledged to build.

Donald Trump became the first former US president ever convicted of a crime after a New York jury found him guilty on all charges in his hush money case, months before an election that could see him yet return to the White House.

Spain's parliament gave the final green light to a controversial amnesty bill for Catalan separatists Thursday, paving the way for the return of their figurehead Carles Puigdemont after years of self-imposed exile.

Like millions of Ukrainian children, Kyiv teenager Sofia Klochko is finishing up a third school year marked by war and the constant stress of air raid sirens and strikes.

NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg pushed at the start of a meeting of the alliance's foreign ministers on Thursday to let Ukraine use Western weapons to strike inside Russia, a move sought by Kyiv but opposed for now by its chief backer Washington.

The British parliament dissolved on Thursday ahead of a July 4 general election, which looks set to bring Labour to power after 14 years of Conservative rule.

The Australian government was on Thursday investigating claims by a hacking group to have stolen the details of 560 million customers from global events giant Ticketmaster, with the FBI offering its assistance.

Google will invest $2 billion in Malaysia to house the firm's first data centre in the country, the government said Thursday, making it the latest tech titan to pump cash into the region in search of growth opportunities.

Jurors return Thursday to a second day of deliberations in Donald Trump's criminal trial, leaving the Republican presidential candidate and the country waiting for a decision that could upend November's election.

The LGBTQ community faces "relentless opposition" across the globe despite some progress, said a report published on Thursday by an international advocacy group, with one-third of the world still criminalising same-sex acts.

Authorities arrested four people and took down or disrupted more than 100 servers in the "largest ever" operation against botnets that deploy ransomware, Europol said Thursday.

A second French actor has filed a legal complaint against arthouse film director Benoit Jacquot accusing him of rape, including when she was a minor, she and her lawyer said.

Extreme temperatures across India are having their worst impact in the country's teeming megacities, experts said Thursday, warning that the heat is fast becoming a public health crisis.

Africa's economy has shown resilience overall despite global conditions but growth needs to be in double digits to truly tackle poverty on the continent, the African Development Bank (AfDB) said on Thursday.

On the face of it, the villain from "Shrek", British singer turned TV presenter Cilla Black, and national service have nothing in common.

Chinese President Xi Jinping called on Thursday for a peace conference to end the war between Israel and Hamas, as he addressed Arab leaders at a forum aimed at bolstering ties with the region.

Hong Kong activist Chan Po-ying became one of the city's only pro-democracy voices after her prominent husband's arrest in 2021, refusing to give up the struggle they had waged together for decades.

Boeing is expected to deliver on Thursday a "comprehensive action plan" required by US air safety regulators after a near-catastrophic incident in January.

Mexico's campaign season came to a bloody end as a gunman shot dead an aspiring mayor at a rally on Wednesday, days before the country is expected to elect its first woman president.

On the edge of the Afghan border with Uzbekistan, where the railway abruptly stops, throngs of young men transfer sacks of wheat or flour from freight trains to trucks.

Rafah residents reported intense artillery shelling and gunfire Thursday in Gaza's far-southern city after Israel said it had seized a strategic corridor on the Palestinian territory's border with Egypt.

Ballot counting was under way on Thursday after South Africans queued long into the night to vote in a watershed election, with partial results suggesting the ANC could lose its 30-year-old unchallenged majority.

A Hong Kong court found 14 people guilty of subversion on Thursday in the biggest case against pro-democracy campaigners since China imposed a national security law to crush dissent.

At a Tehran cafe, Hamid waves his mobile around hoping to latch onto a faint signal and thus bypass Iran's stringent ban on the latest models of iPhone.

Almost every Indian meal requires an onion -- one of the cooking essentials along with sugar and lentils that sweet-talking politicians use to curry favour with their voters by lowering costs.

The EU faces a delicate balancing act as it prepares to rev up taxes on Chinese electric cars to protect European industry, while steering clear of a US-style showdown with Beijing that could spark a trade war.

North Korea fired a salvo of short-range ballistic missiles early Thursday, Seoul's military said, hours after Pyongyang sent hundreds of trash-filled balloons across the border to punish South Korea.

Since the early days of Paris's bid for the 2024 Olympics, the city has been receiving advice from a prestigious counsel: Nobel peace prize winner and social business guru Mohammed Yunus.