World

Taylor Swift's worldwide Eras Tour will boost the UK economy by almost £1 billion ($1.3 billion) as fans splash the cash to see the US music star, Barclays bank estimated Wednesday.

A study entitled "Swiftonomics" said almost 1.2 million fans would each shell out about £848 on tickets, travel, accommodation and merchandise to see the singer and songwriter perform in the UK over 15 summer dates.

Britain's Queen Camilla has promised not to buy any more fur for her wardrobe, according to a letter from Buckingham Palace that animal rights group PETA released Wednesday.

Camilla -- a keen fox hunter before it was made illegal in the UK -- follows in the footsteps of late Queen Elizabeth II, who announced she would stop buying fur in 2019.

A blood-splattered "Mad Max" heroine, a Meryl Streep masterclass, a #MeToo figurehead -- the Cannes Film Festival showed the progress women have made in cinema on its first full day on Wednesday.

The festival was bracing for the world premiere of "Furiosa", the latest instalment of the post-apocalyptic "Mad Max" franchise, with Anya Taylor-Joy in the no-holds-barred title role playing alongside "Thor" star Chris Hemsworth.

Thousands of residents of Fort McMurray, a city in Canada's major oil-producing region, fled as an out-of-control wildfire drew near and thick smoke filled the skies.

Shifting winds gusting to 40 kilometers per hour (25 miles per hour) fanned the flames, scorching 9,600 hectares of surrounding forests as it advanced to within 13 kilometers of the city in the western province of Alberta that had been gutted by wildfires in 2016 -- one of the biggest disasters in the nation's history.

Taiwanese drag queen Nymphia Wind and winner of hit TV series "RuPaul's Drag Race" performed a rousing medley of songs for outgoing President Tsai Ing-wen, thanking her for being the island's "mother".

During Tsai's two terms in power, her Democratic Progressive Party had been a strong proponent of social issues particularly on LGBTQ rights, making the island the first place in Asia to legalise gay marriage in 2019.

Indonesian rescuers raced Wednesday to find dozens of people still unaccounted for after heavy rains caused flash floods and washed volcanic debris into residential areas over the weekend, sweeping away houses and leaving 67 people dead.

Hours of torrential rain on Saturday caused mud and rocks to flow into districts near one of Indonesia's most active volcanos, destroying dozens of houses and damaging roads and mosques.

The European Union's top diplomat has said that the United States is showing "fatigue" in its Middle East diplomacy and called for greater EU efforts toward a Palestinian state.

On a visit to California, the bloc's foreign policy chief Josep Borrell again strongly criticized Israel's war campaign, saying Gazans were "dying and starving and suffering in unimaginable proportions" and that it was a "man-made disaster."

Alice Munro, the Nobel Prize-winning author known as "Canada's Chekhov" for her mastery of the short story, has died at 92, Canadian media reported Tuesday.

Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013 and the International Booker Prize for her body of work in 2009, Munro had suffered from dementia in recent years. According to the Globe and Mail, she died late Monday at her care home in Ontario.

A deadly attack on a convoy of World Central Kitchen aid workers which killed 7 people last month was not a one-off occurrence, Human Rights Watch said Tuesday, but rather representative of a documented pattern in which Israel military forces have targeted relief personnel and infrastructure despite being informed of the exact locations of those operations.

"Even though aid groups had provided their coordinates to the Israeli authorities to ensure their protection," an analysis by HRW found that eight such attacks on such operations, including the April 1 bombing of the WCK in Deir al-Balah, have been carried out by Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) over the last seven months.

Gunmen on Tuesday attacked a prison van at a motorway toll in northern France, killing at least two prison officers and freeing a convict who had been jailed last week.

President Emmanuel Macron vowed that everything would be done to find those behind the attack as hundreds of members of the security forces were deployed for a manhunt to find the attackers and the inmate who were all still at large.

A French court on Tuesday acquitted French-Polish filmmaker Roman Polanski of defaming British actor Charlotte Lewis after she accused him of raping her when she was a teenager.

Polanski, 90, was not in court for the verdict at the Paris criminal court.