Real Madrid faces an immediate rematch with Benfica after the teams were drawn together in the Champions League playoffs on Friday.

Benfica beat Madrid 4-2 on Wednesday to deny the 15-time European champion direct qualification to the round of 16 and force it into the uncertainty of the playoffs.

The U.N. atomic watchdog's board held a special session Friday to discuss risks to nuclear safety in Ukraine as concerns mount that relentless Russian attacks on its energy infrastructure pose an increasing danger of a nuclear accident.

The urgent meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency's board of governors was held at the request of the Netherlands with support from 11 other countries, diplomats said — Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Portugal, Romania and the United Kingdom. Though it won't produce any binding outcome, the aim is to increase diplomatic pressure on Russia.

Florida won't be getting hit with massive blankets of snow and ice like the rest of the U.S., but even frosty windshields and a few flurries can feel like Antarctica to people with permanent sandal tans.

U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer arrived in the Chinese financial center of Shanghai on Friday in his bid to boost business opportunities for British firms in the world's second-largest economy, just hours after U.S. President Donald Trump signaled a possible opposition to any deal between Beijing and London.

Starmer, the center-left Labour leader, has brought more than 50 business leaders on his trip to China, the first by a U.K. prime minister in eight years.

The European economy recorded modest growth at the end of last year, pushing past turmoil over higher U.S. tariffs. But now the economy faces another hurdle: a stronger euro against the dollar that could weigh on exports.

Growth in the 21 countries that use the shared euro currency came in at 0.3% for the last three months of 2025, matching the figure from the third quarter, the EU statistics agency Eurostat reported Friday. Growth compared with the fourth quarter of 2024 was 1.3%.

South Africa declared Israel's deputy ambassador persona non grata on Friday and ordered him to leave the country within 72 hours.

The South African Foreign Ministry said that it was expelling Ariel Seidman, the charge d'affaires at the embassy, because of repeated official Israeli social media posts that insulted South African President Cyril Ramaphosa.

Melania Trump is capping her first year back as first lady with the global release of a documentary she produced about the 20 days leading up to husband Donald Trump's return to the White House.

A private person, Melania Trump remains a bit of a mystery to the public in her husband's second term. "Melania" premiered Thursday at the Kennedy Center before it is released on Friday in more than 1,500 theaters in the U.S. and around the world.

Venezuela's acting President Delcy Rodríguez has signed a law that opens the nation's oil sector to privatization, reversing a tenet of the self-proclaimed socialist movement that has ruled the country for more than two decades.

The reform will undoubtedly be her government's signature policy as it positions the oil sector – Venezuela's engine – to lure the foreign investment needed to revamp a long-crippled industry. Rodríguez enacted the measure less than a month after the brazen seizure of then-President Nicolás Maduro in a U.S. military attack in Venezuela's capital, Caracas.

President Donald Trump has signed an executive order that would impose a tariff on any goods from countries that sell or provide oil to Cuba, a move that could further cripple an island plagued by a deepening energy crisis.

A collision involving a minibus taxi and a truck killed at least 11 people in South Africa on Thursday, a local government official and emergency services said, just over a week after a similar road crash left 14 schoolchildren dead.

Thursday's crash happened near the city of Durban in the eastern KwaZulu-Natal province. Provincial transport department official Siboniso Duma said in a statement that 11 people, including a schoolchild, died at the scene, although that was according to preliminary information.