WORLD

Saudi authorities were investigating Thursday after an assailant and a security guard were killed in an exchange of gunfire outside the US consulate in Jeddah, the gateway city for the massive hajj pilgrimage taking place in Mecca.

Since 2015, the UAE says it has spent at least $50 million on infrastructure projects throughout the Pacific islands, typically focused on renewable energy. Emirati petrodollars have funded a wind farm in Samoa, water storage facilities in the Marshall Islands, and solar power projects in Kiribati, Tuvalu and Solomon Islands. One of the most conspicuous examples sits smack in the middle of Vanuatu's leafy capital Port Vila, where a UAE-funded solar farm keeps the lights on inside the country's parliament.

President Joe Biden vowed Wednesday to restore the American dream in a speech promoting his "Bidenomics" policy that he said will deliver a clean break with decades of Republican economic thinking benefiting the rich.

Hundreds gathered in the Sudanese capital Khartoum Wednesday to pray for peace on the first day of the Eid al-Adha Muslim holiday, but gunfire shattered the brief respite, residents said.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Wednesday that no new nuclear agreement was on the table with Iran, after quiet new diplomacy between the adversaries. President Joe Biden took office with hopes of returning to a 2015 nuclear accord with Iran scrapped by his predecessor Donald Trump. But EU-mediated talks collapsed and mass protests in Iran made Washington increasingly hesitant to strike a deal with the clerical state.

US President Joe Biden said Wednesday that "pariah" Vladimir Putin is "losing" the war in Ukraine, but it is too early to tell whether the Russian president has been weakened by the mercenary Wagner group's aborted rebellion.

Four Israelis suspected of committing violence against Palestinians last week in the occupied West Bank have been detained under a controversial security measure, a senior security official said Wednesday.

Geoffrey Hinton, one of the so-called godfathers of artificial intelligence, urged governments on Wednesday to step in and make sure that machines do not take control of society.

Experts have recovered presumed human remains from what is left of the Titan sub that imploded during a dive to the Titanic wreck, with the death of five people, the US Coast Guard said Wednesday.

Virgin Galactic is set Thursday to finally begin commercial spaceflights, a major milestone for the company founded in 2004 by British billionaire Richard Branson.

The death toll from a Russian missile strike on a restaurant in eastern Ukraine rose to 11 on Wednesday, including children, as the Kremlin insisted Russian forces only hit military-linked targets.

Most markets rose in Asia on Thursday, building on the previous day's advances, even after central bank chiefs warned that interest rates would rise further to counter persistent inflation.

Norway's government gave the green light Wednesday to 19 oil and gas projects worth more than 200 billion kroner ($18.6 billion), a decision that outraged climate activists.

Soldiers in eastern Ukraine swiftly unpacked a large grey drone and launched it to check the cloud level and survey the area, just kilometres from Russian positions.

Four Armenian separatist fighters were killed Wednesday in the breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh region by Azerbaijani fire, rebels said, as Baku and Yerevan held peace talks mediated by the United States.

"I would say that the difference that we see in our engagement with leadership from the beginning of the year to now is night and day. We've put in a lot of hard work as a presidency to get everybody on track to saying where we're going forward and what we're going to do to respond to the global stocktake," Director general of Cop28, Majid Al Suwaidi said.

Fighting raged in the Sudanese capital on Tuesday, the eve of the Eid al-Adha Muslim holiday, after paramilitaries seized Khartoum's main police base.

At least four people were killed and more than 40 wounded in a Russian missile strike that hit a restaurant in Kramatorsk, eastern Ukraine, authorities said Tuesday.

The EU struck a deal on Tuesday to implement internationally-agreed banking reforms intended to avert a repeat of the 2008 financial crisis.

Swiss banking group UBS plans to cut 35,000 jobs at Credit Suisse -- more than half its workforce -- as part of the emergency rescue takeover of its rival in March, according to a report by Bloomberg News on Tuesday.

In 2013, Ukraine's Sergiy Stakhovsky pulled off one of the greatest Wimbledon shocks when he demolished Roger Federer on Centre Court.

Teenager Amanullah Khan teeters on his tiptoes, daubing towering camels with festive henna patterns to entice Eid al-Adha customers at a market near the Pakistan capital.

Massive crowds of robed Muslims gathered for the "stoning of the devil" ritual in Saudi Arabia on Wednesday as the biggest hajj pilgrimage since the pandemic draws to a close. rom dawn, hundreds of thousands of worshippers began pelting pebbles at three concrete monoliths representing Satan, the last major ritual of an event held in severe summer heat. The pilgrims flocked to Mina, near Mecca, a day after enduring temperatures of 48 degrees Celsius (118 degrees Fahrenheit) as they prayed for hours on Mount Arafat.

A controversial exiled Iranian opposition group is coming under increased pressure in Europe as it nervously eyes the intensification of European talks with Tehran in search of reviving a deal on the Islamic republic's nuclear drive.

Pakistan's national assembly has passed legislation limiting how long lawmakers can be disqualified from office, a state spokesman said Tuesday, paving the way for exiled former prime minister Nawaz Sharif's return to politics.

John Goodenough, who shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing the lithium-ion battery that revolutionized modern life, has died at the age of 100, the University of Texas announced.

Russia prepared Tuesday to take possession of heavy military hardware held by Wagner as Moscow moved to bring the mercenary group under its control after its aborted mutiny.

The hajj, a major earner for the largely oil-reliant Saudi economy, follows the lunar calendar, meaning it does not always take place during the summer. This year's gathering could be the biggest on record, according to officials, after Covid-era caps on numbers were removed. A maximum age limit has also been scrapped, opening the door to large numbers of elderly people who may be more vulnerable to the heat.

Common standards unveiled Monday for companies to report their greenhouse gas emissions could curb misleading climate claims in the corporate world, the chair of the body that wrote the norms told AFP.