Youth unemployment in China ticked up to 17.1% in July, official figures showed, the highest level this year as the world's second-largest economy faces mounting headwinds.

China is battling soaring joblessness among young people, a heavily indebted property sector and intensifying trade issues with the West.

Chinese Premier Li Qiang, who is responsible for economic policy, called Friday for struggling companies to be "heard" and "their difficulties truly addressed," according to the state news agency Xinhua.

The unemployment rate among 16- to 24-year-olds released Friday by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) was up markedly from June's 13.2%.

Artificial-intelligence company Anthropic asked a California federal court on Thursday to dismiss some copyright claims brought by a group of music publishers over the alleged misuse of song lyrics to train its AI-powered chatbot Claude.

Anthropic said that the court should reject the publishers' allegations that the company induced Claude users to infringe their copyrights or committed other copyright-related violations.

The company did not address the core claim from the publishers - Universal Music Group (UMG.AS), opens new tab, ABKCO and Concord Music Group - that the use of their lyrics to train AI violates their rights or the key defense that such training makes fair use of copyrighted work.

"Anthropic's latest motion is completely without merit and is yet another example of an AI company seeking to avoid taking responsibility for its massive infringement of copyrights," the publishers' attorney Matt Oppenheim of Oppenheim + Zebrak said in a statement on Friday.

South Korea will urge automakers operating in the country to identify batteries used in their electric vehicles, the government said on Tuesday, as authorities seek to calm public safety concerns after a series of fires involving EVs.

The government said it would advise car makers to voluntarily disclose the information to reduce fears after an EV fire ripped through an underground parking lot in the city of Incheon, west of the capital Seoul, on Aug. 1, and caused extensive damage.

"Such battery information has not been available to the public so far and the measure is to reduce EV owners' fire anxiety," the office of government policy coordination said in a statement.

Jubilant FoodWorks (JUBI.NS), opens new tab, Domino's Pizza's (DPZ.N), opens new tab Indian franchisee, reported a near two-fold increase in first-quarter profit on Friday, as value meals attracted budget-conscious customers.

Consolidated net profit rose to 558 million rupees ($6.65 million) for the quarter ended June 30, from 289.2 million rupees a year earlier, it said in an exchange filing.

Persistently high inflation has been prompting consumers to pare back spending on dining out or ordering in. India's retail inflation hovered around 5% throughout the quarter amid high food prices, increasing cost pressure on the quick-service restaurant sector.

To spur demand Jubilant offered free home delivery and value deals such as meals for 99 rupees ($1.18), in a quarter that coincided with the T20 Cricket World Cup and school summer vacations.

U.S. based short-seller Hindenburg Research alleged on Saturday that the head of India's market regulator, Madhabi Puri Buch, previously held investments in offshore funds also used by the Adani Group.

In a late night press statement, Buch said the report's allegations were baseless.

A personal statement from Buch on Sunday said that all disclosure requirements had been followed diligently and that investments in the fund referred to in the Hindenburg report were made in 2015 in a private capacity, two years before she joined the Securities and Exchange Board of India.

India's markets regulator also asked investors to remain calm and exercise due diligence before reacting to such reports.

The pace of Russia's economic growth slowed in the second quarter of 2024, official data showed Friday, amid concerns over stubborn inflation and warnings of "overheating."

Gross domestic product (GDP) dipped from 5.4% in the first quarter to 4% from April to June, the lowest quarterly result since the start of 2023 but still a sign the economy is expanding.

Inflation meanwhile showed no signs of easing, with consumer prices rising 9.13% year-on-year in July — up from 8.59% in June and the highest figure since February 2023, according to data from the Rosstat statistics agency.

A court in Thailand on Wednesday ordered the dissolution of the progressive Move Forward Party, which finished first in last year's general election, saying it violated the constitution by proposing an amendment of a law against defaming the country’s royal family.

The Constitutional Court said it voted unanimously to dissolve the party because its campaign proposal to amend the law amounted to an attempt to overthrow the nation's constitutional monarchy.

The Move Forward Party was unable to form a government after topping the polls because members of the Senate, at that time a conservative military-appointed body, refused to endorse its candidate for prime minister.

The Election Commission had filed a petition against the party after the Constitutional Court ruled in January that it must stop advocating changes to the law, known as Article 112, which protects the monarchy from criticism with penalties of up to 15 years in jail per offense. Move Forward has insisted that it wants to keep the monarchy above politics and not be exploited as a political tool.

No one will be allowed to fish out any of the nearly 100 bottles of 19th-century Champagne and mineral water nestled in a shipwreck off southern Sweden without proper authorization, officials said Wednesday.

Though the wreck's location has been known since 2016 and is registered in Sweden's National Antiquities Office's cultural environment, it was only on July 11 that Polish scuba divers found the precious cargo.

The wreck, which sits at about 190 feet deep off the coast of the southern Sweden county of Blekinge, was found by the divers while they were checking spots of interest about 20 nautical miles south of the Swedish Baltic Sea island of Oeland.

Greenland has melted before, and as the climate warms, it will melt again — this time leading to what scientists warn could be 20 to 25 feet of sea-level rise.

During one of the warm periods within the last 1.1 million years, the center, not just the edges, of Greenland's massive ice sheet melted away, new research has found, giving way to a dry and barren "tundra landscape" that was home to various insects and plant life. The findings were shared in a new paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

When the ice sheet initially melted, there were lower levels of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere than there are today. Now with more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, scientists say Greenland's ice sheet is more susceptible to melting than previously thought.

In 2010, as the country still reeled from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, tech companies, real estate developers and rural lobbyists went to the state Capitol in Olympia to press for a tax break for data centers.

Turning it down, supporters argued, would mean rejecting high-paying, long-term and environmentally friendly jobs in distressed parts of rural Washington. Owners of data centers — gargantuan facilities filled with computer servers that power the internet — were scouting Washington and other states for new homes.

“In the end,” then-state Sen. Rodney Tom, D-Medina, who advocated for the tax break, told his Senate colleagues, “we get the clean jobs that all the states are competing with, as far as the jobs it takes to run these things long term.”

State lawmakers nearly unanimously passed the special exemption and have kept the benefits flowing to the industry ever since. But the tax break has strayed from its original promises, and the state failed to fully scrutinize whether the sacrifices were worth it, a deep examination of legislative archives, public tax disclosures and utility data by The Seattle Times and ProPublica revealed.

The new Labour government has shelved £1.3bn of funding promised by the Conservatives for tech and Artificial Intelligence (AI) projects, the BBC has learned.

It includes £800m for the creation of an exascale supercomputer at Edinburgh University and a further £500m for AI Research Resource, which funds computing power for AI.

Both funds were unveiled less than 12 months ago. The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) said the money was promised by the previous administration but was never allocated in its budget.

Some in the industry have criticised the government's decision. Tech business founder Barney Hussey-Yeo posted on X that reducing investment risked "pushing more entrepreneurs to the US." Businessman Chris van der Kuyl described the move as "idiotic."