Elon Musk has strengthened the equity stake in his $44 billion offer to buy Twitter with commitments of more than $7 billion from a diverse group of investors including Silicon Valley heavy hitters like Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison.

A regulatory filing Thursday also said that Musk is in talks with others for additional funding, including former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, the social media platform's second-largest individual stakeholder after Musk.

A NASA climate research scientist who has spent much of her career explaining how global food production must adapt to a changing climate has been awarded the World Food Prize.

Cynthia Rosenzweig, an agronomist and climatologist, was awarded the $250,000 prize in recognition of her innovative modeling of the impact of climate change on food production. She is a senior research scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and serves as adjunct senior research scientist at the Columbia Climate School at Columbia University, both based in New York.

Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta signed a three-year contract extension Friday to stay with the Premier League club through the 2024-25 season.

The former Arsenal midfielder has his team on the verge of Champions League qualification for the first time in five years. With four games left, the north London club is in fourth place.

Gesticulating on the touchline in a black vest and a gray hooded sweatshirt, José Mourinho could have easily been mistaken for one of the 70,000 fans inside the Stadio Olimpico.

The outspoken Portuguese coach had told Roma supporters before the Europa Conference League semifinal that they shouldn't come to the stadium just "to watch" the game but rather "to play" it.

A day after rushing from his victory to watch Real Madrid play Manchester City in the Champions League semifinals, Rafael Nadal needed the same fighting spirit as his favorite team showed to avoid his own elimination at the Madrid Open.

The "Si se puede!" ("Yes we can!") chants that echoed at the Santiago Bernabéu Stadium on Wednesday were also present at the "Caja Mágica" on Thursday after Nadal saw himself against the ropes, like Madrid was the night before.

Shops, offices and schools closed and transport came to a near standstill in Sri Lanka on Friday amid nationwide demonstrations against the government over its alleged inability to resolve the worst economic crisis in decades.

Protesters also hung undergarments by a road leading to Parliament and chanted: "This is all we are left with!"

Long-divided left-wing parties in France will march into forthcoming legislative elections largely together, after the Socialist Party agreed late Thursday to join a new coalition of the left that hopes to limit re-elected centrist President Emmanuel Macron 's room for policy-making in his second term.

The Socialists join the Greens and the Communist Party in hooking their wagon to the France Unbowed party of hard-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon. He placed third in the presidential election in April, just short of the run-off won by Macron. But Mélenchon hopes his showing will be a springboard for the left to win big in the National Assembly elections in June.

In lush fields southwest of Paris, farmers are joining Europe's fight to free itself from Russian gas.

They'll soon turn on the tap of a new facility where crops and agricultural waste are mashed up and fermented to produce "biogas." It's among energy solutions being promoted on the continent that wants to choke off funding for Russia's war in Ukraine by no longer paying billions for Russian fossil fuels.

There are no walls any longer. The broad wooden roof beams lie splintered and scattered, and random pieces of clothing dangle from damaged water pipes. But among the rubble of what used to be her home, the house that her grandparents built, Anna Shevchenko sees a glimmer of hope.

There, among the twisted metal and broken bricks of her former life in Irpin, stood the slender stalk of one of her beloved lilies. A bit further, some roses had survived. A small bunch of daffodils and a tiny peony poked through the destruction, battered but not broken. And her tulips are starting to bloom.

In a bid to protect coastal communities from climate change and encourage investment, African nations are increasingly turning to mangrove restoration projects, with Mozambique becoming the latest addition to the growing list of countries with large scale mangrove initiatives.

Mozambique follows efforts across the continent — including in Kenya, Madagascar, Gambia and Senegal — and is touted as the world's largest coastal or marine ecosystem carbon storage project. Known as blue carbon, carbon captured by these ecosystems can sequester, or remove, carbon dioxide from the atmosphere at a faster rate than forests, despite being smaller in size.