The chairman of Swiss banking giant UBS said in an interview published Sunday that he does not consider the soaring cryptocurrency bitcoin as money and called for regulators to intervene. Bitcoin prices have surged this year from less than $1,000 in January to $17,000 last week, after trading in the digital currency began on the Chicago Board Options Exchange — the first time it has appeared on ...

At least two people have been killed following a strong 6.5-magnitude earthquake on Indonesia's main island of Java, an official said Saturday. The quake struck at a depth of 91 kilometres (56 miles) just outside the coastal town of Cipatujah on Java island late Friday, the US Geological Survey said. The tremor was felt across the island including in the capital Jakarta, some 300 kilometres (19...

North Korea must "earn its way back" to the negotiating table, US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said Friday, backing away from an earlier offer of unconditional talks to end the stand-off with Pyongyang. Tillerson told the UN Security Council that a "sustained cessation of North Korea's threatening behavior must occur before talks can begin," apparently after coming under pressure from Presid...

International judges on Friday awarded $10 million in damages to child soldiers recruited into the ranks of a brutal Congolese militia by former warlord Thomas Lubanga. The judges at the International Criminal Court set "the sum of reparations for which Mr Lubanga is liable as the total sum of $10 million," presiding judge Marc Perrin de Brichambaut said. While the court formally acknowledged 42...

Walt Disney Co. said Thursday it had reached a deal to buy 21st Century Fox for $52.4 billion (44.3 billion euros) in stock, solidifying its position as a producer of entertainment content as it faces new rivals from Silicon Valley. The deal will see Disney acquire film and television studios, cable entertainment networks and international TV businesses, bringing popular entertainment properties...

A North Korean defector interrupted a United Nations human rights press conference in Seoul on Thursday to plead tearfully to be allowed to go back to her relatives in Pyongyang. More than 30,000 North Koreans have fled poverty and repression in their isolated homeland to move to the South. But they often struggle to make a living in the capitalist South and sometimes fail to adjust to their ne...

NEW YORK (AFP) - Facebook, in a bow to transparency, has announced it plans to declare certain ad revenues in the country where they are made and not in Ireland, where it has a greater tax advantage. The social networking giant said the move was in response to pressure from governments and policy makers for greater visibility into sales made in their countries. “In simple terms, this means th...

Former basketball star Dennis Rodman is perhaps the only person in the world to call both US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un "friend". The ex-Chicago Bulls power forward -- who has swigged vodka with Kim and been fired by Trump on "Celebrity Apprentice" -- believes the two unpredictable leaders "are pretty much the same people". "They love control," Rodman told AFP Tu...

The US military is reportedly in talks with South Korea on the timing of large-scale annual military exercises that always infuriate nuclear-armed Pyongyang and could coincide with next year's Winter Olympics. The Foal Eagle and Key Resolve drills usually start in late February or early March and involve tens of thousands of troops from the two allies, which say they are purely defensive. The N...

A new high-quality counterfeit $100 bill has been found in South Korea, bank officials said Tuesday, prompting suggestions the sanctions-hit North might have resumed forging "supernotes". A team of forgery specialists at KEB Hana Bank have confirmed that a $100 note found at a Seoul branch in November was a fake which was almost impossible to distinguish from real banknotes, they said. "It was ...

Pregnant women struggling to bag a seat on the famously packed Tokyo subway could find their salvation in a new app connecting them with nearby passengers willing to give up their coveted perch. The digital match-making app being trialled this week on the metro aims to overcome two problems especially prevalent in Japan: passengers generally have their nose buried in their phones and talking is ...

Charles Jenkins, a US Army deserter who spent four decades in communist North Korea and married a Japanese woman abducted by Pyongyang, has died at the age of 77, officials said on Tuesday. According to the Asahi Shimbun daily, his daughter found him collapsed outside their house on Monday and called the emergency services. He later died of heart problems at a hospital in the northern city of S...

NEW DELHI (AFP) -- India's opposition Congress party named Rahul Gandhi as its new leader on Monday after years of speculation, calling it a "historic occasion". Senior Congress leader Mullappally Ramachandran said the 47-year-old had stood unopposed for election as the president of the party his family had led for generations. "I hereby declare Shri Rahul Gandhi elected as the President of the...

Demoralized and divided, France’s traditional center-right party is expected to move closer to the far-right on Sunday when it picks a new leader to take on centrist President Emmanuel Macron. The Republicans party, which represents the dominant conservative force in post-war French politics, will almost certainly turn to 42-year-old Laurent Wauquiez as it looks to recover from a disastrous 2017...

Setsuko Thurlow, 85, was 13 years old when she was rescued from the ruins of the world’s first atomic bombing in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. On Sunday she receives the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, along with its head Beatrice Fihn. Here is how Thurlow recalled the horrors of that day 72 years ago, in her speech during the ceremony in Osl...