South Korea will remove concrete embankments near airport runways in response to a recent air disaster, media reports said Thursday. The embankments contain antennas called localizers designed to guide aircraft during landings and have been blamed for making last month’s crash of a Jeju Air plane worse. The Boeing 737-800 skidded off a runway in the South Korean city of Muan on Dec. 29 after its landing gear failed to deploy, slamming into the concrete structure and bursting into flames, killing all but two of the 181 people on board.
The Philippines will soon decide on an international platform to sue China for alleged damage to the marine environment, its justice minister said, as it pursues a second high-profile legal challenge against Beijing over the South China Sea. The Philippines won a landmark case at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in 2016 that found China's sweeping claim of sovereignty in the South China Sea had no basis under international law.
Air pollution forced nearly 200 schools in Bangkok to close on Thursday, local authorities said, as officials urged people to work from home and restricted heavy vehicles in the city."There really needs to be a wake-up call on the need to invest in the education system and protect children," she told AFP. Earlier this week, authorities encouraged people to work from home, but the scheme is voluntary and has just 100,000 registered participants in a city of some 10 million.
Sweden and Finland, Europe's most forested countries, are not doing enough to protect their primary and old-growth forests, falling short of EU commitments, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) said in a report Thursday."The current government has shown a low ambition to strictly protect primary and old-growth forests on private lands," the WWF said.
Donald Trump is coming to Davos. The freshly reinaugurated U.S. president is to speak Thursday to an international audience for the first time after returning to the White House three days earlier, with a speech and question-and-answer session at the World Economic Forum's annual event. The fourth day of the annual gathering also features Javier Milei, the brash and cost-cutting president of Argentina, and Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate who became interim leader of Bangladesh after the longtime president was driven from power during a public uprising.
Fueled by powerful winds and dry conditions, a series of ferocious wildfires erupted last week and roared across the Los Angeles area.
NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte warned on Thursday that a Russian victory over Ukraine would undermine the dissuasive force of the world’s biggest military alliance and that its credibility could cost trillions to restore. NATO has been ramping up its forces along its eastern flank with Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, deploying thousands of troops and equipment to deter Moscow from expanding its war into the territory of any of the organization’s 32 member countries. “If Ukraine loses then to restore the deterrence of the rest of NATO again, it will be a much, much higher price than what we are contemplating at this moment in terms of ramping up our spending and ramping up our industrial production,” Rutte said.
Asian equities mostly rose Thursday, cheered by another tech-fuelled run-up on Wall Street after Donald Trump's huge AI investment announcement, as traders assessed the outlook for the next four years under the new president.Tech titans including Nvidia, Microsoft and Arm helped lead a surge in New York, pushing the S&P 500 to within a whisker of a record, after Trump announced a new $500-billion venture to build infrastructure for artificial intelligence in the United States.
Donald Trump on Thursday will star in an eagerly-anticipated online appearance at the World Economic Forum in Davos, addressing global elites whose annual gabfest has been consumed by the US president's days-old second term.One of the Republican president's biggest cheerleaders on the world stage, Argentina's libertarian President Javier Milei, will make a speech to the WEF on Thursday, hours before Trump.
Evacuation orders and warnings were issued to more than 31,000 people in the vicinity of two new wildfires north of Los Angeles on Wednesday.
The Philippines has signalled a softened stance towards an International Criminal Court (ICC) investigation into thousands of killings in a "war on drugs", a probe activists hope will see popular ex-president Rodrigo Duterte face charges of crimes against humanity. The "war on drugs" was the signature campaign policy that swept Duterte to power in 2016 as a maverick, crime-busting mayor, who delivered on promises he made during vitriolic speeches to kill thousands of narcotics dealers. The firebrand Duterte unilaterally withdrew the Philippines from the ICC's founding treaty in 2019 when it started looking into allegations of systematic extrajudicial killings, and the Philippines has until recently refused to cooperate with the ICC investigation, which it announced in 2023.
Hundreds of same-sex couples are tying the knot across Thailand on Thursday as the country becomes the first in Southeast Asia to recognize marriage equality.
Donald Trump pledged to end the conflict in Ukraine, but the war has proved harder to solve than he once thought. Now, he says he'll sanction Russia.
Having attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is associated with a shorter life expectancy and a greater risk of mental health issues, a new study has found.
Donald Trump is back in the White House, promising to use the United States's vast economic weight to hit back at China for its alleged unfair trade practices and role in the deadly American fentanyl crisis.Both sides have also launched investigations into the others' alleged unfair trade practices with probes into dumping and state subsidies.
The sandwich cookie brand just launched Limited Edition Post Malone Oreo Cookies, which contain a combination of salted caramel- and shortbread-flavored creme.
The United States' new top diplomat Marco Rubio reaffirmed the country's "unwavering support" for Israel, days into a fragile ceasefire in the Gaza Strip and a large-scale raid in the occupied West Bank.Rubio spoke to Netanyahu from Washington on Wednesday night to "underscore that maintaining the United States' steadfast support for Israel is a top priority for President Trump," State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce said.
The fire threat remains critical in Southern California, where thousands of residents were under evacuation orders Wednesday as fire crews battled the out-of-control Hughes Fire near Castaic, a suburb in the foothills and mountains of northern Los Angeles County.
In the moment when her world shattered three years ago, Stephanie Mistre found her 15-year-old daughter, Marie, lifeless in the bedroom where she died by suicide. “I went from light to darkness in a fraction of a second,” Mistre said, describing the day in September 2021 that marked the start of her fight against TikTok, the Chinese-owned video app she blames for pushing her daughter toward despair. Delving into her daughter’s phone after her death, Mistre discovered videos promoting suicide methods, tutorials and comments encouraging users to go beyond “mere suicide attempts.”
Israeli forces have killed two Palestinian militants who carried out a deadly attack on a bus in the West Bank earlier this month. The Israeli military said Thursday that the two men barricaded themselves in a structure in the West Bank village of Burqin and exchanged fire with Israeli troops before they were killed overnight. The military said Mohammed Nazzal and Katiba al-Shalabi were operatives with the Islamic Jihad militant group.
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