AFP news

South Korea has declared its super-low birthrate a "national emergency" and poured billions into encouraging citizens to marry and reproduce, but one YouTuber has found happiness and success promoting the opposite ideal.

Nearly a quarter of a million people were evacuated in eastern China as rainstorms lashed swathes of the country and caused the Yangtze and other rivers to swell, state media reported Wednesday.

The AI revolution is upon us with companies around the world looking to jump headfirst into the technology made famous by ChatGPT. To satisfy their generative AI urge, firms need to secure state-of-the-art software and ramp up computing power, which quickly brings them knocking on the doors of the globe's cloud computing giants, of which Amazon's AWS is the biggest.

In the battle against drug use at the Paris Olympics, the International Testing Agency (ITA) plans to deploy a more streamlined, high-tech approach to identify and target potential cheats.

US President Joe Biden on Tuesday congratulated South Africa's President Cyril Ramaphosa on winning a new term, devoting time to a key if complicated relationship despite a political storm in Washington.

A second contingent of the Kenya-led multinational policing mission in Haiti will arrive "in the coming weeks," Prime Minister Garry Conille told AFP on Tuesday.

A judge postponed Tuesday Donald Trump's sentencing for covering up hush money payments until September 18, the first fallout of a Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity, pushing it to after the Republican convention.

US President Joe Biden on Tuesday called on pharmaceutical giants Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly to lower prices for diabetes and weight loss drugs such as Ozempic, saying firms must stop "ripping off the American people."

The Philippines and China agreed on Tuesday to "de-escalate tensions" over the South China Sea, Manila said, following a violent clash in the disputed waters last month.

Democrats shocked by Joe Biden's dismal debate performance urged the US president Tuesday to be transparent about his mental fitness as he faced the first call from his own side to drop out of the election.

The UN humanitarian coordinator for Gaza said Tuesday that 1.9 million people -- 80 percent of the territory's population -- were now displaced, adding she was "deeply concerned" by reports of new evacuation orders for Khan Yunis.

Andy Murray lost his race to be fit for the Wimbledon singles on Tuesday as Novak Djokovic prepared to launch his bid for a record-equalling eighth Wimbledon men's crown.

Dutch King Willem-Alexander swore in former spy chief Dick Schoof as new prime minister Tuesday, at the head of a right-wing coalition cabinet with a mission to implement the country's "strictest-ever" immigration policy.

Veteran actors Judi Dench and Sian Phillips have become the first woman members of London's esteemed Garrick Club after it voted in May to allow women to join, the Guardian reported Tuesday.

Eurozone inflation cooled in June, official data showed Tuesday but experts say it will not be enough to convince the European Central Bank to accelerate its rate-cutting cycle despite sluggish economic growth.

Uber driver Hussein Khalil was battling traffic in Beirut when he found himself in the Gaza Strip -- according to his online map, anyway -- as location jamming blamed on Israel disrupts life in Lebanon.

Israeli forces carried out deadly strikes Tuesday on southern Gaza and battled militants after the army again ordered Palestinians to leave areas near the besieged territory's border with Israel and Egypt.

Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban arrived in Ukraine on Tuesday for a surprise visit to the war-torn country by the EU and NATO's most vocal critic of Western support for Kyiv.

Raped by her husband on her wedding night aged 17, Divya described her repeated suffering -- an all-too-common account in India, permitted by a terrifying colonial-era legal loophole.

Google made major changes to its search algorithm and spam filters earlier this year to get rid of low-quality content -- but the effects have proved devastating to some smaller websites.

The United States crashed out of the Copa America on Monday after a 1-0 defeat to Uruguay, as Panama sealed their place in the quarter-finals with a 3-1 win over Bolivia.

The dollar rose Tuesday and Asia equities were mixed as investors weighed the possibility of another Donald Trump presidency after last week's poor debate performance by incumbent Joe Biden.

US President Joe Biden's son Hunter is suing right-wing Fox News for airing nude images of him in a miniseries that he claims amount to "revenge porn," court documents showed Monday.

Bot-like social media accounts have spread "disinformation and hate" in tens of thousands of posts viewed an estimated 150 million times during the UK general election campaign, a watchdog investigation revealed Tuesday.

Jose Raul Mulino was sworn in Monday as Panama's new president, with the right-leaning leader pledging to make his Central American country no longer a "transit" point for US-bound undocumented migrants.

The Brazilian Amazon recorded 13,489 wildfires in the first half of the year, the worst figure in 20 years, satellite data revealed Monday.

Taliban authorities were told women must be included in public life, UN Under-Secretary-General Rosemary DiCarlo said on Monday as she defended a decision to sideline civil society groups at official talks in Doha.

Hurricane Beryl was Tuesday hurtling towards Jamaica as it strengthened into a record top-level Category 5 storm after sweeping across several islands in the southeastern Caribbean.

The US Supreme Court on Monday sidestepped a ruling on the constitutional validity of a pair of Republican-backed laws that imposed restrictions on social media content moderation, sending legal challenges backed by tech platforms to lower courts for review.