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Offering Ukraine NATO membership while allowing Russia to keep captured territories could end the "hot stage" of the war, Volodymyr Zelensky told Sky News. Photo: LUDOVIC MARIN / AFP By John Irish and Tom Balmforth, Reuters Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha has urged his NATO counterparts to issue an invitation to Kyiv at a meeting in Brussels next week to join the Western military alliance, according to the text of a letter seen by Reuters on Friday. The letter reflects Ukraine's renewed push to secure an invitation to join NATO, which is part of a "victory plan" outlined last month by President Volodymyr Zelensky to end the war triggered by Russia's 2022 invasion. Zelensky told UK-based Sky News that offering Ukraine NATO membership while allowing Russia to keep for the moment ...

Dozens of Palestinians returned to areas where the army had retreated to check on damage to their homes. Photo: AFP / EYAD BABA By Nidal al-Mughrabi, Reuters Israeli military strikes killed at least 40 Palestinians overnight and on Friday in the Gaza Strip, medics said, as efforts to revive Gaza ceasefire talks received a boost with officials from the Palestinian group Hamas headed to Cairo for a new round of talks. Medics said they had recovered 19 bodies of Palestinians killed in northern areas of Nuseirat, one of the enclave's eight long-standing refugee camps. Later on Friday, an Israeli air strike killed at least 10 Palestinians in a house in Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza, medics said. Others were killed in the northern and southern areas of the Gaza Strip, medics added. There was n...

The baptistery of Notre-Dame de Paris cathedral, designed by French artist and designer Guillaume Bardet, in Paris on November 29, 2024. Photo: AFP French President Emmanuel Macron praised on Friday (local time) the more than 1000 craftspeople who helped rebuild Paris' Notre-Dame Cathedral in what he called "the project of the century", five-and-a-half-years after fire gutted the Gothic masterpiece. The 12th-century cathedral, one of the French capital's most beloved and visited monuments, will reopen its doors next week to tourists and to the Catholic faithful. Notre Dame is one of Paris' most beloved monuments. Photo: CHRISTOPHE PETIT TESSON / AFP "Never before have we seen such a construction site. You all had your share in the project of the century," Macron told a gathering t...

World wine output is on course to hit another 60-year low in 2024. Photo: World wine output is on course to hit another 60-year low in 2024 as vineyards in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres endured adverse weather as they did last year, the International Organisation of Vine and Wine (OIV) said on Friday. In its first global projections for 2024, the OIV pegged world wine output, excluding juices and musts, at between 227 million and 235 million hectolitres (mhl), with a mid-range estimate of 231 mhl. The mid-range figure was 2 percent lower than last year's output and the smallest since 1961, the OIV said. A hectolitre is the equivalent of 133 standard wine bottles. "Globally, 2024 appears to be a re-run of 2023," the OIV said in a note. "As with 2023, extreme or atypical met...

By Rob Picheta for CNN Debate over the issue sharply divided lawmakers, many of whom have laboured to choose a side during an unusually strained week in Westminster. Photo: Unsplash/ Marcin Nowak British members of parliament have voted to legalise assisted dying, approving a contentious proposal that would make the United Kingdom one of a small handful of nations to allow terminally ill people to end their lives. Lawmakers in the House of Commons voted by 330 to 275 to support the bill, after an hours-long debate in the chamber and a years-long campaign by high-profile figures that drew on emotional first-hand testimony. Britain is now set to join a small club of nations to have legalised the process, and one of the largest by population to allow it. The bill must still clear the Ho...

A man rides his motorbike through a flooded street after a heavy downpour in Kota Bharu, in Malaysia's Kelantan state, on November 29, 2024. Photo: AFP / Mohd Rasfan Three people have died and more than 80,000 have been evacuated from floods across several Malaysian states, the government said on Friday as officials warned the monsoon season could bring the country's worst flooding in a decade. Floods are common on the east coast of peninsular Malaysia during the monsoon period between October and March, but this week's torrential rain has led to the mass evacuations, mostly in the northeastern state of Kelantan that borders Thailand. The National Disaster Command Centre's website said as of Friday morning three people had died and 80,589 people had been evacuated to 467 temporary shelt...