SpaceX's new rocket, the biggest and most powerful ever built, blasted off Thursday on its first test flight, thundering into the South Texas sky in an attempt to orbit the world.

Elon Musk's company launched the nearly 400-foot (120-meter) Starship rocket from the southern tip of Texas, near the Mexican border. The plan called for the booster to peel away and plummet into the Gulf of Mexico shortly after liftoff, with the spacecraft hurtling ever higher toward the east in a bid to circle the world, before crashing into the Pacific near Hawaii.

A Dutch salvage company has reached agreement with the United Nations to pump oil from a rusting tanker off the coast of war-ravaged Yemen in a move hailed as a "critical milestone" in moves to avert a possible environmental disaster, its parent company announced Thursday.

Boskalis said that its Smit Salvage subsidiary has reached agreement with the U.N. Development Program to transfer more than one million barrels of oil from the decaying tanker FSO Safer. A specialist support ship, the Ndeavor, is setting sail Friday to the east African nation of Djibouti to prepare for the mission, the company said.

The number of Americans applying for unemployment benefits rose last week but remains low by historic standards.

U.S. jobless claims rose by 5,000 to 245,000, the Labor Department reported Thursday.

A German labor union is calling for railway workers to stage an eight-hour strike on Friday to back calls for an inflation-busting pay raise. Walkouts are also scheduled at three airports this week in a parallel pay dispute.

The EVG rail workers union called for members to walk off the job from 3 a.m. to 11 a.m. on Friday. It said Wednesday that it had "to increase pressure on employers, who think that they can ignore the demands of their workforce and conduct wage negotiations in a patronizing way."

Wall Street is following global markets lower early Wednesday ahead of another trove of corporate earnings reports and potentially new maneuvers by central banks.

U.S. lawmakers have accused embattled Swiss bank Credit Suisse of limiting the scope of an internal investigation into Nazi clients and Nazi-linked accounts, including some that were open until just a few years ago.

The Senate Budget Committee says an independent ombudsman initially brought in by the bank to oversee the probe was "inexplicably terminated" as he carried out his work, and it faulted "incomplete" reports that were hindered by restrictions.

Bulgaria on Wednesday became the latest European country to temporarily ban the import of Ukrainian grain and other agricultural produce following protests from local farmers, excluding goods in transit destined for export.

The measure will be in place until the end of June. Officials said it will protect Bulgarian farmers' competitiveness amid a market glut of Ukrainian grain that has lowered prices, and help them sell their own grain that has piled up, unsold, in warehouses.

Tesla dropped the starting prices for its two top-selling models overnight, the company's fourth price cut in the U.S. this year.

The company lopped $3,000, or about 6%, off the starting prices for all three versions of the Model Y small SUV, Tesla's top-seller. It also cut $2,000, or about 5%, from the starting price of a version of the Model 3 small sedan.

China's economic growth accelerated in the latest quarter as consumer flocked back to shops and restaurants following the abrupt end of anti-virus controls.

The 4.5% growth in gross domestic product from January to March compared to the same period in 2022 was the fastest in the past year, and outpaced the 2.9% growth in the previous quarter, according to government data released Tuesday.

Volkswagen unveiled an electric luxury sedan that promises a 700-kilometer (435-mile) battery range as global and Chinese automakers displayed their latest SUVs, sedans and muscle cars Tuesday at the world's biggest auto show.

Auto Shanghai 2023 reflects the intense competition in China's fast-growing electric vehicle market after the ruling Communist Party poured billions of dollars into promoting the technology. China accounted for two-thirds of global electrics sales last year.