AFP news

Taiwan's president-elect Lai Ching-te, a staunch defender of the island's democracy, will be sworn into office Monday as Beijing ratchets up military and diplomatic pressure on Taipei.

The incoming Taiwanese president's best strategy to stop China from seizing the self-ruled island will likely be to bolster an agile defensive "porcupine" approach by spending more on missiles and drones.

Born at the bottom of the Hindu faith's rigid caste system, voters like Anil Sonkar will determine whether Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi returns to power next month.

Languishing behind bars since 2016, Selahattin Demirtas has waged a relentless battle against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan while profoundly expanding the national appeal of his leftist pro-Kurdish party.

Another masterpiece emerging from chaos, or just a chaotic mess?

German industrial giant Siemens said Thursday it will sell its electrical motors business Innomotics to private US equity firm KPS Capital Partners for 3.5 billion euros ($3.8 billion).

US troops early Thursday anchored a long-awaited temporary pier, meant to boost aid deliveries into war-ravaged Gaza, to a beach in the besieged Palestinian territory, the US military said.

Far-right leader Geert Wilders told AFP Thursday it could take "years" for the Netherlands' new government to fulfil its pledge to opt-out of the EU asylum system, but vowed the nation would enforce its strictest asylum policy ever.

Ukraine warned on Thursday it faced a "very difficult" military situation in its northeast Kharkiv region, where Moscow has made its largest territorial gains in 18 months since launching a surprise offensive last week.

Israel said Thursday that five of its troops were killed by friendly fire in a Gaza battle, as a rift emerged inside the war cabinet on how the Palestinian territory should be ruled in future.

US President Joe Biden unveiled steep tariff hikes on Chinese green tech this week, hitting imports like electric vehicles, chips and solar cells -- and adding stress to US-China ties.

It's crunch time for Donald Trump's defense team as they take another stab Thursday at Michael Cohen, the key witness in the criminal trial in which the former president is accused of fraudulently covering up his affair with a porn star to influence his first presidential bid.

Like hundreds of other pro-Turkish fighters, Omar left northern Syria for mineral-rich Niger last year, joining Syrian mercenaries sent to the West African nation by a private Turkish military company.

A motorway attack that claimed the lives of two prison officers in France this week marks a new level of violence by the latest generation of drug traffickers, police officers and experts told AFP. On Tuesday, gunmen attacked a prison van at a motorway toll in northern France, killing two prison officers and freeing a convict linked to gangland drug killings.

Russian President Vladimir Putin arrived in China on Thursday to meet with counterpart Xi Jinping as he seeks greater support from Beijing for his war effort in Ukraine and his isolated economy.

Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico fought for his life on an operating table Wednesday after being shot multiple times in what the government called a "political assault".

Some 30,000 Georgians took to the streets Wednesday in the latest round of a weeks-long mass protest against a "foreign influence" law whose adoption by parliament has prompted a blizzard of international condemnation.

French police were on Wednesday hunting for a group of gunmen who killed two prison officers in an attack at a motorway toll that freed a convict linked to gangland drug killings.

Last year's northern hemisphere summer was the hottest in 2,000 years, according to a new study published on Tuesday.

Alice Munro, the Nobel Prize-winning author known for her mastery of the short story, has died at 92, her editor said Tuesday.

The US Justice Department on Tuesday said Boeing can be prosecuted for two subsequent 737 Max crashes that killed 346 people approximately five years ago.

OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever announced his departure Tuesday from the startup that ignited an artificial intelligence tech race with its release of ChatGPT. Sutskever said on X, formerly Twitter, that he was leaving after almost a decade at OpenAI, whose "trajectory has been nothing short of miraculous."

Asian markets wobbled Wednesday ahead of key US inflation data later in the day, with traders struggling to pick up the baton after a record performance on Wall Street.

Ukraine has pulled back troops near several villages in the northeastern Kharkiv region, where Russian forces have been advancing and pounding settlements in a new offensive along the border, Kyiv said.

Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell said Tuesday that hot US inflation data has lowered his level of confidence that price rises will slow back down towards the bank's long-term target.

As Israel keeps up its campaign against Hamas, Arab leaders are mapping out ways to support post-war Gaza, placing one major condition on their involvement: a pathway to Palestinian statehood.

Walking between the corrugated iron shacks of the informal settlement west of Johannesburg she calls home, Lutho Makheyi points out trenches filled by dirty rainwater holing the unpaved streets.

Tens of thousands of civilians fled the southern Gaza city of Rafah ahead of a threatened Israeli ground offensive, as Palestinians on Wednesday mark the anniversary of their "Nakba" or "catastrophe" of 1948.

Baia Pataraia, the head of a leading women's rights group in Georgia, woke up last weekend to find her apartment building in the capital Tbilisi plastered with posters of her face and the words "foreign agent".