French unions are staging new nationwide protests Thursday, on the eve of an expected ruling by a top constitutional body that they hope will derail President Emmanuel Macron's unpopular pension reform plan.

If the Constitutional Council greenlights the reform, the bill raising the retirement age from 62 to 64 can enter into force. Yet the body has the power to reject the text, fully or partially. Here's a look at what's at stake ahead of Friday's decision.

Al Mawarid Bank chairman and ex-Lebanese minister Marwan Kheireddine has been charged in France and slapped with a travel ban without being detained.

Billionaire Elon Musk has told the BBC that running Twitter has been "quite painful" but that the social media company is now roughly breaking even after he acquired it late last year.

In an interview also streamed live late Tuesday on Twitter Spaces, Musk discussed his ownership of the online platform, including layoffs, misinformation and his work style.

In Egypt, state-owned companies bottle water, make dry pasta and cement, and run gas stations and fish farms.

Two of the most powerful economic players in the North African country have long been the government and military. For years, they have faced criticism from economists and international lenders that this approach is stifling economic growth.

A European judicial delegation will return to Lebanon in late April, specifically after April 22, to continue its investigations in the embezzlement and money laundering case against Central Bank Governor Riad Salameh, an NGO said.

Wall Street was somewhat subdued Tuesday ahead of several reports this week that could help the Federal Reserve determine whether its interest rate increases have further tempered four-decade high inflation.

Futures for the S&P 500 Dow Jones Industrial Average were each up less than 0.1% before the bell Tuesday.

Switzerland's parliament is opening a special session Tuesday to scrutinize the state-imposed takeover of Swiss bank Credit Suisse by rival UBS — and possibly considering strengthening the legal arsenal to better gird against financial blowups.

The debate could run up to three days, with expectations that lawmakers will voice — and need to iron out — disagreements over the 3 billion Swiss franc ($3.25 billion) fusion of the country's top two banks, a thunderclap for a country that prides itself on finesse and acumen in finance.

The UBS chairman voiced confidence Wednesday that the Swiss bank will succeed in a government-engineered takeover of hobbled rival Credit Suisse, pledging the deal will reduce costs, benefit shareholders and buttress Swiss finance despite "huge" risks in knitting the global lenders together.

Speaking to UBS shareholders, Colm Kelleher gave an overview of the 3 billion Swiss franc ($3.25 billion) takeover that he said would close in the next few months, alluding to the complexity of the first-ever merger of two "global systemically important banks."

The chairman of Credit Suisse apologized Tuesday to shareholders for failures of the once-venerable bank and acknowledged the shock and anger felt as the troubled Swiss lender is set to be swallowed up by rival UBS in a government-arranged takeover.

Axel Lehmann, who took the top board job only last year after joining Credit Suisse from UBS in 2021, decried "massive outflows" of customer funds in October and a "downward spiral" that culminated last month as a U.S. banking crisis unleashed global turmoil.

A Geneva appeals court on Tuesday upheld the conviction of Israeli diamond magnate Beny Steinmetz for corrupting foreign officials, in connection with lucrative mining rights in the West African country of Guinea.

The court, issuing its ruling after a trial last summer, upheld the convictions of Steinmetz and two other defendants for bribing foreign public officials over promises made to then-President Lansana Conte through payments to his wife, Mamadie Toure, that came to be worth about $8.5 million. The court also upheld a $50 million fine against the Israeli tycoon, but it threw out a conviction for forgery and reduced his sentence from five years to three, half of it suspended.