World

Beijing accused Washington on Wednesday of harming its own credibility after a top US intelligence official said his agency believed the pandemic "most likely" caused by a laboratory incident in Wuhan, China.

FBI Director Christopher Wray told Fox News on Tuesday that the Bureau has now assessed the source of Covid-19 was "most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan."

A 99-year-old who was being investigated on suspicion of complicity in murder as a former Nazi camp guard has died, ending the case against him, German prosecutors said Tuesday.

The man had allegedly worked at the Ravensbrueck concentration camp between 1943 and 1945 and was suspected of being an accessory to murder, the prosecutors in the town of Coburg said.

After 145 years chronicling the life and times of Liechtenstein, the tiny principality's oldest daily newspaper announced Tuesday that it would close down next month.

The Liechtensteiner Volksblatt, founded in 1878, is to call time in March because of a drop in subscriptions and advertising revenue in the Alpine microstate of 39,000 inhabitants, between Switzerland and Austria.

He's over 80, but the Austrian climber Peter Habeler -- one half of the duo that was first to scale Everest without supplemental oxygen -- is still fantastically fit and scaling mountain peaks, which he calls his "fountain of youth".

Many thought it impossible when he and Reinhold Messner of Italy -- both Tyroleans -- set out to conquer the world's highest peak in 1978 without additional oxygen.

A French farmer steps away from his barn and fills up a tractor with fuel made from the manure of his cows, an attempt to put their climate-damaging methane to good use.

Anchored by a stone farmhouse, much has changed on the Guerin family farm in the southern Dordogne region since its founding in 1926.

Swedish director Ruben Östlund, a two-time winner of the Palme d'Or, will be jury president at this year's Cannes Film Festival in May, organisers announced Tuesday.

Östlund, 48, won the festival's top prize last year for "Triangle of Sadness", which left audiences squirming over its biting exploration of class divisions on a cruise ship, and extended display of extreme sea sickness.

Japan's space agency JAXA named its first new astronaut candidates in over 13 years on Tuesday, with a surgeon and a climate scientist chosen from more than 4,000 applicants.

Ayu Yoneda, a 28-year-old surgeon for Tokyo's Japanese Red Cross Medical Center, will become just the third woman ever to join the space training programme. Japan's six current astronauts are all men.

Donald Trump released a video statement on Twitter Monday vowing that he'll "tax China to build up America" if he becomes president — but he would have no power to do so.

It's a twist on his often repeated lie as president that the Chinese treasury was paying his imposed duties on imported Chinese goods directly to the U.S. government. He again claimed in his video that China paid "hundreds of billions of dollars" to the U.S. because of his tariffs.

An Israeli who was killed in violence in the West Bank city of Jericho on Monday was also a U.S. citizen, State Department spokesman Ned Price said.

"We condemn the horrific killing of two Israeli brothers near Nablus and the killing today of an Israeli near Jericho, who we understand was also an American citizen," Price told reporters.