BUSINESS

Crime has taken a sadistic turn in Ecuador, where kidnappers now regularly amputate the fingers of their victims and send images to pressure relatives to pay higher ransoms.

The Basel contemporary art fair this week defied forecasts of a market slowdown, with wealthy collectors buying works with seven or eight-figure price tags.

Italian haute couture house Valentino opened men's fashion week in Milan on Friday, abandoning its coed format of the past three years for men front and centre on the runway.

When an Algerian woman with mental health problems killed a 12-year-old child in Paris last year, far-right idealogue Eric Zemmour wasted no time in labelling the crime a "francocide".

Any flight scheduled to last over 16 hours is defined as "ultra long."

World stock markets rose Friday and currencies gyrated as investors digested diverging interest-rate decisions by central banks on three continents this week.

Sheikh Jassim remains in competition with Sir Jim Ratcliffe over Manchester United ownership.

After years of demonising billionaire investor George Soros as a sinister liberal bogeyman, the Hungarian government and its allied media are taking aim at a fresh target -- his son Alexander.

A flurry of Russian missiles greeted a delegation of African leaders arriving in Kyiv Friday as part of a mission aiming to broker peace between Kyiv and Moscow.

Many workers believe AT&T's return-to-office mandate would result in a lot of them leaving the company, sparing the U.S. telecom giant from layoff criticism.

US chip giant Intel said Friday it will invest up to $4.6 billion to build a new site in Poland, creating around 2,000 jobs in the process.

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba claims its founder Jack Ma is still alive and now teaching at a university in Japan, following years of his public absence.

US chipmaker Micron said Friday it would invest more than $600 million in a packing and testing factory in northern China, less than a month after Beijing banned its chips from critical infrastructure projects.

"The Shares have been designed to remove the obstacles represented by the complexities and operational burdens involved in a direct investment in Bitcoin," the Blackrock's application read.

Japan's age of consent was raised from 13, among the world's lowest, to 16 years old on Friday as lawmakers passed key reforms to sex crime legislation.

Billionaire Elon Musk is set to meet French President Emmanuel Macron in Paris on Friday for the second time in just over a month, as France aims to curry favour and attract investment from the Tesla boss.

On the shores of a reservoir that feeds one of Vietnam's biggest hydropower plants, Dang Thi Phuong points at the cracked ground where the fish that help her earn a living normally swim.

Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Bill Gates will meet President Xi Jinping on Friday, after his foundation pledged $50 million to help Chinese efforts to battle disease.

Hopes China will unveil fresh measures to kickstart its ailing economy lifted most markets Friday, while the dollar struggled to bounce from losses fuelled by bets the Federal Reserve is near the end of its tightening cycle.

Nissan top executive Ashwani Gupta is leaving the company, the Japanese automaker said Friday, in a surprise departure that will revive concerns about the stability of the firm's leadership.

In Washington they paused; in Frankfurt they hiked; and in Beijing, they cut.

The Teamsters union, which represents hundreds of thousands of UPS employees, is set to reveal Friday whether it has authorized a strike against the delivery service -- a work stoppage seen as unlikely, but one that would certainly rattle the US economy.

The sausages are being recalled following a customer complaint of finding "small, black, flexible thread-like material."

Jack Teixeira, the US airman accused of leaking top-secret Pentagon documents in an online chat forum, was slapped with additional federal charges on Thursday.

Overfishing is driving coral reef sharks towards extinction, according to a global study out Thursday that signals far greater peril to the marine predators than previously thought.

British actress Glenda Jackson, the two-time Oscar-winning actress who went on to become an MP, died on Thursday at the age of 87, her agent said.

The surprise data indicates that consumer spending has remained resilient despite an elevated inflation rate and the headwinds in the economy.

Retail sales in the United States grew at a slower pace in May but still came in stronger than expected, according to government data released Thursday, on the back of falling gas station sales.

Nigeria's central bank has abolished the country's multiple exchange rate system and effectively floated the naira currency, the bank said, as new President Bola Ahmed Tinubu revamps the country's monetary policies.