Americans are deeply frustrated with President Donald Trump's handling of the economy and rising prices, with most panning his performance and blaming his policies as higher costs threaten his party's chances in November.

A new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds that only 17% of U.S. adults approve of the Republican president's handling of the cost of living. Just 26% approve of his handling of the economy overall, marking a new low.

France's public debt has climbed to a record during the two terms of President Emmanuel Macron, unsettling investors and emerging as a defining issue ahead of next year's presidential election.

With France already gripped by deep social tensions, the candidates vying to succeed Macron are under pressure to explain how they would bring the debt under control. It now stands at 119% of gross domestic product, leaving the country's strained public finances likely to dominate the campaign.

President Donald Trump said South Korea plans to invest about $54 billion in a natural gas project in Alaska, an announcement he made in the Oval Office on Wednesday flanked by a Republican senator who has found himself in a tough reelection race in the state.

But while Trump and Alaska Sen. Dan Sullivan — a two-term senator and long-time advocate for the pipeline project — described it as a fait accompli, South Korean officials were more cautious, saying they needed to assess the project's commercial viability before committing to the investment.

Five African heads of state led a ground breaking ceremony Wednesday on a $16-billion oil refinery project in East Africa, following calls for the continent to boost its self-sufficiency in processing raw materials into finished products.

Kenya's President William Ruto hosted his counterparts from Uganda, Ethiopia, Togo, Benin as well as Nigeria's former President Olusegun Obasanjo, shoveling soil at the site to symbolically show construction of the refinery has started.

Medication prices are soaring in Iran and some treatments have become hard to find, leaving patients and their families scrambling as a U.S. blockade and stepped-up sanctions squeeze the country's pharmaceuticals industry.

Some medicines have more than tripled in price, further squeezing Iranians' finances seven months into the country's war with the United States and Israel. Prices for food and other goods have skyrocketed even as unemployment has risen and the currency, which hit a record low this week, has lost half its value.

China on Tuesday rolled out new measures to help boost its economy and sluggish property sector as pressures ramp up ahead of a year-end target for hitting the government's economic growth goal.

The measures, some of the bigger moves made this year by Chinese officials, include encouraging targeted bank lending and new subsidies for homebuyers' mortgage interest payments.

European Union nations have spent over an extra 100 billion euros ($113.5 billion) on energy imports since the outbreak of the Iran war, pushing politicians to seek alternatives to fossil fuels as prices skyrocket.

Consumers in some European countries pay nearly 50% more at the pump, equivalent to more than $11 a gallon, following the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the crucial waterway through which a fifth of the world's traded oil passed in peacetime.

Iran's currency fell to a new record low on Tuesday, with traders in Tehran exchanging more than 2.5 million rials to the U.S. dollar in a stark reflection of how the war in the Middle East has steadily eroded the Iranian economy.

The latest decline came just 27 days after the rial hit its previous record low of 2.2 million to the dollar on Sept. 2. The currency has repeatedly reached new lows since the war began in February.

U.S.-Canada relations, already tense, are likely to deteriorate further after the United States went ahead early Tuesday with a decision to ban nearly $1 billion worth of Canadian imports, including alcoholic beverages, dairy products and motorcycles.

The ban amounts to barely a ripple in $880 billion worth of a two-way annual trade between the two northern neighbors. But it marks another ratcheting up of President Donald Trump's second-term trade war with America's longtime ally and trading partner.

The Trump administration released new fuel economy standards Monday that relax regulatory requirements for automakers to control pollution from gasoline-powered cars and light trucks.

Fuel economy requirements set out how far new vehicles need to travel on a gallon of gasoline. The change furthers President Donald Trump's promise to revoke policies that encouraged or created incentives for the production of electric vehicles.