Rooting for Donald Trump to fail has rarely been this profitable.

Just ask a hardy band of mostly amateur Wall Street investors who have collectively made tens of millions of dollars over the past month by betting that the stock price of his social media business — Truth Social — will keep dropping despite massive buying by Trump loyalists and wild swings that often mirror the candidate's latest polls, court trials and outbursts on Trump Social itself.

China's vision of the future of the automobile — electrified and digitally connected — is on display at the ongoing Beijing auto show.

Organizers say that 117 new models are making their debut at Auto China 2024, which runs through May 4. They range from eye-poppingly cutting edge to more subtle novelties.

Online fast-fashion retailer Shein must face the European Union's strictest level of digital regulations, the bloc said on Friday as it added the company to its list of big platforms that need extra scrutiny.

The EU's Executive Commission said it formally classed Shein as a "very large online platform" under the 27-nation bloc's Digital Services Act, an expansive rulebook designed to clean up online platforms and keep internet users safe.

FIFA deepened its ties to Saudi Arabia by confirming a sponsorship on Thursday with the kingdom's state oil firm Aramco which made a profit of $121 billion last year.

The deal was expected and became inevitable once Saudi Arabia was all but sealed last October as the 2034 host of the men's World Cup.

Chinese President Xi Jinping on Friday told top U.S. diplomat Antony Blinken that the world's two biggest economies should be "partners, not rivals", adding that there were a "number of issues" to be resolved in their relations.

"The two countries should be partners, not rivals," Xi said, according to state broadcaster CCTV, adding: "There are still a number of issues that need to be resolved, and there is still room for further efforts."

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Air passengers traveling to and from Paris experienced significant disruptions Thursday, despite a decision by air traffic controllers to cancel a strike after last-minute negotiations. Flight operations were substantially reduced because of adjustments made to schedules ahead of the proposed industrial action.

French civil aviation authorities had preemptively requested airlines to cut their flights significantly — by 75% at Paris-Orly, 55% at Charles-de-Gaulle, and 65% at Marseille-Provence, with varying reductions across other French airports. As a result, operations were severely limited, also affecting international flights that cross French airspace.

French President Emmanuel Macron is expected to outline his vision for Europe to become a more assertive global power against a backdrop of war in Ukraine and other security and economic challenges, in a speech on Thursday ahead of pivotal European Parliament elections in June.

The French president plans to focus on strategic and geopolitical issues in Europe, including defense, the economy, protecting the environment and safeguarding democracy, his advisers said. Russia's war in Ukraine, now in its third year, is expected to be the main theme of the speech Macron will deliver at Paris' Sorbonne University on Thursday.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken raised what the U.S. describes as unfair Chinese trade practices during his first full day of meetings in China on Thursday with local government officials in the financial hub of Shanghai.

Blinken met with the city's top official, Communist Party Secretary Chen Jining, and "raised concerns about (Chinese) trade policies and non-market economic practices," the State Department said in a statement.

Coming off a robust end to 2023, the U.S. economy is thought to have extended its surprisingly healthy streak at the start of this year, with consumers still spending freely despite the pressure of high interest rates.

The Commerce Department is expected to report Thursday that the gross domestic product — the economy's total output of goods and services — grew at a slow but still-decent 2.2% annual pace from January through March, according to a survey of forecasters by the data firm FactSet.