How do you smooth over trade tensions with the all-powerful leader of economic powerhouse China? Charm him with a bottle of Cognac, or two.

That seemed to be French President Emmanuel Macron's strategy with his carefully selected gift list for visiting Chinese President Xi Jinping on Monday.

An extra day and the lure of an appearance by the Rolling Stones pushed attendance at the 2024 New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival to a half a million people, organizers said Monday.

That was the second highest attendance in the festival's history — just behind the 600,000 attendees in 2001. In 2023, more than 460,000 people passed through the festival's gates.

No doubt Kylian Mbappé will be greeted with loud cheers and applause when he takes to the Parc des Princes pitch on Tuesday night.

It will be his final Champions League match in the French capital in a Paris Saint-Germain shirt.

Thousands of Israelis rallied around the country Monday night calling for an immediate deal to release the hostages still held in the Gaza Strip.

The protests came as Israel’s War Cabinet voted to begin an operation on the city of Rafah, saying that a cease-fire proposal Hamas accepted earlier in the night was not in line with Israeli demands.

Hamas has published a copy of the cease-fire and hostage release proposal that the militant group said it had agreed to on Monday.

The framework brought forward by Qatar and Egypt aims to bring a halt to seven months of war in Gaza. However, it's unclear if Israel will agree to the terms. The proposal outlines a phased release of Israeli hostages held in Gaza alongside the gradual withdrawal of Israeli troops from the entire enclave and ending with a “sustainable calm” or “permanent cessation of military and hostile operations.”

France's president is hosting China's leader at a remote mountain pass in the Pyrenees on Tuesday for private meetings after a high-stakes state visit in Paris dominated by trade disputes and Russia's war in Ukraine.

French President Emmanuel Macron made a point of inviting Chinese President Xi Jinping to the Tourmalet Pass near the Spanish border, where Macron spent time as a child visiting his grandmother. It is meant to be a reciprocal gesture after Xi took Macron last year to the residence of the governor of Guangdong province, where the Chinese president's father once lived.

The Olympic torch will finally enter France when it reaches the southern seaport of Marseille on Wednesday. And it's already been quite a journey.

After being lit by the sun's rays on April 16 in Ancient Olympia, the torch was carried around Greece before leaving Athens aboard a three-mast ship named Belem, headed for Marseille.

Vladimir Putin begins his fifth term as Russian president in an opulent Kremlin inauguration Tuesday, after destroying his political opponents, launching a devastating war in Ukraine and consolidating all power in his hands.

Already in office for nearly a quarter-century and the longest-serving Kremlin leader since Josef Stalin, Putin's new term doesn't expire until 2030, when he is constitutionally eligible to run for another six years.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping's visit to European ally Serbia on Tuesday falls on a symbolic date: the 25th anniversary of the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade during NATO's air war over Kosovo.

U.S. jets dropped five bombs on the Chinese Embassy compound in the Serbian capital on May 7, 1999, setting it ablaze and killing three Chinese nationals. Twenty other people were injured in the incident, which has burdened relations between the two powers ever since.

Millions of Indian voters across 93 constituencies were casting ballots on Tuesday as Prime Minister Narendra Modi has mounted an increasingly shrill election campaign, ramping up polarizing rhetoric in incendiary speeches that have targeted the Muslim minority.

In recent campaign rallies, Modi has called Muslims "infiltrators" and said they "have too many children," referring to a Hindu nationalist trope that Muslims produce more children with the aim of outnumbering Hindus in India. He has also accused the rival Indian National Congress party of scheming to "loot" wealth from the country's Hindus and redistribute it among Muslims, who comprise 14% of India's more than 1.4 billion people.