Lee Sun-kyun, a popular South Korean actor best known for his role in the Oscar-winning movie "Parasite," was found dead in a car in Seoul on Wednesday, authorities said, after weeks of an intense police investigation into his alleged drug use.

Police and emergency officers initially found Lee in what they believed was an unconscious state in the car parked on a street in northern Seoul. Emergency officers later confirmed he was dead, according to Seoul's Seongbuk police station.

Sweden edged closer toward joining NATO on Tuesday after the Turkish parliament's foreign affairs committee greenlighted a protocol for the Nordic country's membership in the military alliance.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan dropped his objection to Sweden's membership during a NATO summit in July, but it took him several months to send the bill to parliament for ratification and weeks for the parliamentary committee to give its consent.

Turkey has hit more than 70 sites allegedly linked to Kurdish groups in Syria and northern Iraq during airstrikes launched this week in retaliation for the deaths of 12 Turkish soldiers in Iraq, the defense minister said Wednesday.

At least 59 Kurdish militants were killed in the strikes as well as in land clashes, Yasar Guler said in a video message to top military officials which was posted on X, formerly Twitter.

Israel launched heavy strikes across central and southern Gaza overnight and into Wednesday after broadening its offensive against Hamas to more areas where the military had told Palestinians to seek shelter earlier in the war.

Residents reported heavy bombing in the built-up Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza, in the southern city of Khan Younis and in the southern town of Rafah, areas where tens of thousands have sought refuge as much of northern Gaza was pounded to rubble.

Pope Francis has blasted the weapons industry and its "instruments of death" that fuel wars as he made a Christmas Day appeal for peace in the world and in particular between Israel and the Palestinians.

Speaking from the loggia of St. Peter's Basilica to the throngs of people below, Francis said he grieved the "abominable attack" of Hamas against southern Israel on Oct. 7 and called for the release of hostages. And he begged for an end to Israel's military campaign in Gaza and the "appalling harvest of innocent civilians" as he called for humanitarian aid to reach those in need.

Wall Street inched modestly higher in holiday-thinned trading Tuesday, while Asian markets mostly advanced and European markets remained closed.

Futures for the S&P 500 rose 0.1% before the bell and futures for the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose less than 0.1% to kick off what's expected to be a quiet, holiday-shortened week of trading.

She's an important figure behind today's artificial intelligence boom, but not all computer scientists thought Fei-Fei Li was on the right track when she came up with the idea for a giant visual database called ImageNet that took years to build.

We lost Twitter and got X. We tried out Bluesky and Mastodon (well, some of us did). We fretted about AI bots and teen mental health. We cocooned in private chats and scrolled endlessly as we did in years past. For social media users, 2023 was a year of beginnings and endings, with some soul-searching in between.

Here's a look back some of the biggest stories in social media in 2023 — and what to watch for next year:

Firefighters and volunteers worked to reinforce dikes against rising floodwaters in northern and eastern Germany as heavy rains falling on already soaked ground pushed rivers and streams over their banks and forced several towns to evacuate residents.

The city of Braunschweig in Lower Saxony deployed an artificial dike — a long tube filled with water from the rising river — to protect its downtown area, while several hundred residents of Windehausen in the Thuringia region were told to leave their homes as the town lost power, the dpa news agency reported.

British billionaire Jim Ratcliffe has finally got his hands on Manchester United after securing a stake of up to 25% in the Premier League club.

Ratcliffe's interest in sports — and football in particular — is long-standing. The 71-year-old owner of petrochemicals giant has been a United fan since childhood, and supporters will like his stated ambitions.