Titleholder England landed in a tough group with France, Sweden and Ireland in the qualifying draw for the 2025 Women's European Championship on Tuesday.

England went from winning Euro 2022 as the host country to reaching the World Cup final last year where Sweden was a semifinalist and France reached the quarterfinals.

Spain's Catalonia region rolled out a pioneering women's health initiative this week that offers millions of women and girls reusable menstruation products for free.

About 2.5 million women and girls in northeast Spain can receive one menstrual cup, one pair of underwear for periods and two packages of cloth pads at local pharmacies free of charge.

Women who run farms and rural households in poor countries suffer more from climate change and are discriminated against as they try to adapt to other sources of income in times of crises, the United Nations warned Tuesday.

A new report by the Food and Agriculture Organization, "The Unjust Climate," found that female-headed rural households lose on average 8% more of their income during heat waves and 3% more during floods, compared to male-headed households.

Taylor Swift stole the show at an Asian summit Tuesday when Singapore's leader defended his tiny country's lucrative concert deal that could cause bad blood with neighboring nations.

Singapore is a key member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, a 10-nation bloc known as ASEAN. Its three-day summit was expected to focus on member Myanmar's humanitarian crisis and conflicts in the South China Sea.

Top European Union officials on Tuesday outlined ambitious plans to boost its defense industry at an unprecedented pace as the bloc seeks to respond to the threat posed by Russia's war on Ukraine and a trans-Atlantic partner that could be wavering on its commitments to Europe.

For decades, EU nations have slumbered under the protective nuclear cover of the United States through the NATO alliance while their defense spending and crisis preparedness withered.

North Korea called the ongoing South Korean-U.S. military drills a plot to invade the country, as it threatened Tuesday to take unspecified "responsible" military steps in response.

The North's warning came a day after the South Korean and U.S. forces kicked off their annual computer-simulated command post training and a variety of field exercises for an 11-day run. This year's drills were to involve 48 field exercises, twice the number conducted last year.

China aims to achieve 5% economic growth this year, Premier Li Qiang said Tuesday, acknowledging that it will be a challenging goal in difficult times.

In his address to the annual session of the National People's Congress, Li outlined plans to boost spending on developing advanced technology, fortifying China's military and supporting the economy, among many other longstanding goals. But there was no big package of stimulus to help boost markets and reassure worried investors.

On the day that Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was laid to rest in Moscow, Russian state media leaked an audio recording of German military officers discussing the hypothetical use of Taurus long-range missiles in Ukraine.

The conversation on a sensitive subject was never meant to be public, and the leak embarrassed Germany and raised concerns about the security of its communications.

An Israeli airstrike killed at least 17 people in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis on Tuesday, Palestinian officials said, adding that a total of 97 people had died in the last 24 hours.

First responders with the Civil Defense circulated footage of rescuers pulling dead and wounded people from the rubble of a house, including a child with blood on his face who was not moving. The nearby European Hospital said Tuesday that it had received 17 bodies overnight.

Turkish police on Tuesday detained seven more people suspected of selling information to the Israeli spy agency Mossad, authorities said, the latest in a wave of such arrests in Turkey.

The suspects were taken into custody during simultaneous raids in Istanbul, Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya said on the social media platform X, formerly Twitter. The raids were a joint operation with Turkey's National Intelligence Organization.