WORLD

San Francisco, United States | AFP | Twitter on Tuesday confirmed that a year after doubling the character limit for tweets, the average length of messages fired off in English actually got a smidge shorter. The news promised to allay concerns that raising the character limit from 140 to 280 …

Seoul, South Korea | AFP | Samsung Electronics on Wednesday posted record quarterly operating and net profits for the July-September period as solid demand for its memory chips cushioned the fallout from slowing smartphone sales — but warned of tougher times ahead. The South Korean tech giant — the world’s …

San Francisco, United States | AFP | Facebook announced plans Tuesday to adapt to users sharing more privately as the leading social network pours money into an ongoing battle with “bad actors” out to misuse its service. Silicon Valley-based Facebook reported that its quarterly profit climbed in the recently ended …

Washington, United States | AFP | President Donald Trump plans to abolish the right to citizenship for anyone born in the United States — guaranteed by the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution — with an executive order, he said in an interview excerpt released Tuesday. While Trump asserts that …

Oldenburg, Germany | AFP | Former nurse Niels Hoegel, admitted Tuesday to killing 100 patients in his care, on the first day of his trial in the biggest serial killing case in Germany’s post-war history. Hoegel, 41, has already spent nearly a decade in prison on a life term for …

Berlin, Germany | AFP | Angela Merkel on Monday announced she will quit as German chancellor when her mandate ends in 2021, as she sought to curtail a series of political crises that have rocked her fragile coalition. Often described as the world’s most powerful woman and Europe’s de facto …

Byneset, Norway | AFP | Russia plans to test missiles off Norway this week in an area where NATO is carrying out its biggest military exercises since the end of the Cold War, NATO’s chief said Tuesday, downplaying the situation. “We were notified last week about the planned Russian missile …

Washington, United States | AFP | Some 75,000 youths under the age of 18 were sent to US emergency rooms due to gun violence from 2006 to 2014, at a cost of some $2.5 billion, researchers said Monday. That’s the equivalent of around 8,300 cases per year, according to the …

Tampa, United States | AFP | NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, which launched earlier this year, has set a new record for becoming the closest human-made object to the Sun, the US space agency announced Monday. “The spacecraft passed the current record of 26.55 million miles (42.73 million kilometers) from the …

Paris, France | AFP | The global population of fish, birds, amphibians, reptiles and mammals has declined 60 percent since 1970, according to the WWF’s “Living Planet” report released Tuesday. WWF director general Marco Lambertini tells AFP what went wrong and what’s at stake. – How bad is it? – …