GENEVA — The global coronavirus death toll rose past a million on Tuesday, according to a Reuters tally, a grim statistic in a pandemic that has devastated the global economy, overloaded health systems and changed the way people live.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Federal Aviation Administration Chief Steve Dickson is set to conduct an evaluation flight at the controls of a Boeing 737 MAX next week, a key milestone as the U.S. planemaker works to win approval to resume flights, the agency told lawmakers.
NEW YORK — President Donald Trump told the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday that China must be held accountable for having “unleashed” COVID-19 on the world, prompting Beijing to accuse him of “lies” and abusing the U.N. platform to provoke confrontation.
LONDON — British Prime Minister Boris Johnson told people on Tuesday to work from home where possible and ordered bars and restaurants to close early to tackle a fast-spreading second wave of COVID-19 with restrictions lasting probably six months.
ARCTIC OCEAN — Warming in the Arctic shrank the ice covering the polar ocean this year to its second-lowest extent in four decades, scientists announced this week, yet another sign of how climate change is rapidly transforming the region.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Trump administration will ban WeChat and video-sharing app TikTok from U.S. app stores starting Sunday night, a move that will block Americans from downloading the Chinese-owned platforms over concerns they pose a national security threat.
WASHINGTON, D.C. —The United Arab Emirates and Bahrain on Tuesday will become the latest Arab states to break a longstanding taboo when they sign agreements toward normalizing relations with Israel in a strategic realignment of Middle Eastern countries against Iran.
BEIJING — U.S. Ambassador to China Terry Branstad announced Monday that he will retire from his position and return to the United States by early October, a departure that comes amid extreme political and diplomatic tension between the U.S. and China.
LESBOS, Greece — For asylum-seekers trapped in the overcrowded facility on Greece's island of Lesbos, Moria was hell most days. But a coronavirus quarantine was the final straw.
LONDON — British actress Diana Rigg, who came to fame in the cult 1960s TV show "The Avengers" and recently appeared in "Game of Thrones," died on Thursday aged 82.
LA BOQUILLA DAM, Mexico — Two people died in a gunfight with Mexico's military police near a protest at a dam that diverts water to the United States, the National Guard said on Wednesday, as tensions rose between protesters and officials in the drought-hit region.
BEIRUT — Lebanon’s Amal movement, a Shi’ite Muslim group allied to Hezbollah, said on Wednesday it would not be swayed by U.S. sanctions imposed on one of its members, saying Washington’s move was like targeting the whole nation.
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — A Saudi Arabian court on Monday jailed eight people for between seven and 20 years for the 2018 murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, state media reported, four months after his family forgave his killers and enabled death sentences to be set aside.
TOKYO — Japan’s Shinzo Abe on Friday said he was resigning because of poor health, ending a tenure as the country’s longest-serving prime minister in which he sought to revive an economy stricken by deflation and push for a stronger military.
AMSTERDAM — Two European patients are confirmed to have been re-infected with the coronavirus, raising concerns about people’s immunity to the virus as the world struggles to tame the pandemic.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Top U.S. and Chinese trade officials reaffirmed their commitment to a Phase 1 trade deal and discussed how to increase lagging Chinese purchases of American goods, lending support to financial markets on Tuesday.
MOSCOW — Mass testing of Russia’s first potential COVID-19 vaccine to get domestic regulatory approval will involve more than 40,000 people and will be overseen by a foreign research body when it starts next week, backers of the project said on Thursday.
The following is a roundup of some of the latest scientific studies on the novel coronavirus and efforts to find treatments and vaccines for COVID-19, the illness caused by the virus.
WELLINGTON — New Zealand officials are investigating the possibility that its first COVID-19 cases in more than three months were imported by freight, as the country plunged back into lockdown on Wednesday.
BAGHDAD — At least two explosions have hit convoys supplying U.S.-led coalition forces in Iraq in the last 24 hours, security sources said, the first on Monday evening near the southern border with Kuwait and the second on Tuesday north of Baghdad.
MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin said on Tuesday that Russia had become the first country to grant regulatory approval to a COVID-19 vaccine after less than two months of human testing, a move Moscow likened to its success in the Cold War-era space race.
WELLINGTON, New Zealand — New Zealand's largest city was placed in lockdown Tuesday after the country's coronavirus-free status ended after more than 100 days with the detection of four cases of COVID-19.
BEIRUT — Lebanon’s beleaguered prime minister and the rest of his Cabinet resigned Monday, six days after a catastrophic explosion in Beirut’s port leveled large areas of the capital.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The United States on Friday imposed sanctions on Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam, the territory’s current and former police chiefs and eight other top officials for what Washington says is their role in curtailing political freedoms in the territory.
GENEVA — The deadly warehouse blast in Beirut this week devastated Lebanon’s already faltering healthcare system and U.N. agencies are scrambling to support hundreds of thousands of people, officials said on Friday.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Donald Trump signed a pair of executive orders prohibiting U.S. residents from doing any business with TikTok, WeChat or the apps’ Chinese owners beginning 45 days from now, citing the national security risk of leaving American’s personal data exposed.
TOKYO — Bells tolled in Hiroshima on Thursday for the 75th anniversary of the world’s first atomic bombing, with ceremonies downsized due to the coronavirus and the city’s mayor urging nations to reject selfish nationalism and unite to fight all threats.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — A bipartisan group of state attorneys general on Tuesday urged the federal government to allow other companies to make Gilead Sciences' COVID-19 treatment, remdesivir, to increase its availability and lower the price of the antiviral drug.
BEIRUT — A huge explosion near the center of Beirut killed at least 60 people, injured hundreds and sent shockwaves across the Lebanese capital, shattering windows and causing apartment balconies to collapse, witnesses and security sources said.
BEIJING — Fears are rising on both sides of the Pacific that the U.S. and China could be headed for a total breakdown of relations and even outright conflict within the next few months.
SAN DIEGO — U.S. law enforcement's killing of a man at the San Diego-Tijuana border a decade ago will go on trial before an international tribunal, after the organization decided this week that it has authority to hear the case.
MEXICO CITY — Mexico is poised to overtake Britain as the country with the third-highest coronavirus death toll as the pandemic reaches new milestones in Latin America and threatens to disrupt efforts to reopen the economy.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Thursday the “tide is turning” in U.S. dealings with China, saying there is international support for American policies even as he said he was dismayed at the number of countries supporting Beijing’s new security law for Hong Kong.
China ordered the U.S. to close its consulate in the southwestern city of Chengdu, after the American government forced China to leave its mission in Houston earlier this week.
BRUSSELS — European Union leaders clinched an historic deal on a massive stimulus plan for their coronavirus-throttled economies in the early hours of Tuesday, after a fractious summit lasting almost five days.
LONDON — An experimental vaccine being developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University against the new coronavirus produced an immune response in early-stage clinical trials, data showed on Monday, preserving hopes it could be in use by the end of the year.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — A Russian cyber espionage group, code-named Cozy Bear, has been targeting organizations involved in the development of a vaccine for COVID-19 in the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States, the top cybersecurity agencies of all three countries said in a joint notifica…
WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Donald Trump announced Tuesday he had signed legislation that establishes a regime for gradually sanctioning foreign banks if they continue to indirectly support Chinese officials’ crackdown on Hong Kong.
For more than 25 years, the North American Free Trade Agreement, commonly known as NAFTA, had its share of critics on both the left and the right — sometimes for different and, at other times, for overlapping reasons.
ISTANBUL — President Tayyip Erdogan declared Istanbul's Hagia Sophia a mosque on Friday with the first Muslim prayers to begin in two weeks, after a top court ruled the ancient building's conversion to a museum by modern Turkey's founding statesman was illegal.
PARIS — Turkey's top administrative court announced on Friday it annulled a 1934 government decree turning Istanbul's Hagia Sophia into a museum, ruling it was unlawful, paving the way for the building's conversion back into mosque despite international warnings against such a move.
GENEVA — An advance team from the World Health Organization (WHO) has left for China to organize an investigation into the origins of the novel coronavirus which sparked the global pandemic, a spokeswoman said on Friday.
MOSCOW — Russian firefighters have been seeding clouds to bring down rain over wildfires raging in Siberia, the authorities said on Friday.
ROZNO, Slovenia — A wooden sculpture of U.S. first lady Melania Trump was torched near her hometown of Sevnica, Slovenia, on the night of July Fourth, as Americans celebrated U.S. Independence Day, said the artist who commissioned the sculpture.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Trump administration sent a letter giving the United Nations a one-year notice for the U.S. to quit the World Health Organization, formalizing President Donald Trump’s decision to leave the agency even as the coronavirus rages out of control in the U.S. and in many oth…
(Adds comment from China's United States embassy)
NEW YORK — The United States will leave the World Health Organization (WHO) on July 6, 2021, the United Nations said on Tuesday, after receiving notification of the decision by President Donald Trump, who has accused the agency of becoming a puppet for China during the coronavirus pandemic.
MEXICO CITY — Investigators have found a bone fragment belonging to one of the 43 student teachers who disappeared in Mexico in 2014, the Attorney General’s office said on Tuesday, only the second set of remains to be definitively identified in a case that has roiled the country.
NAIROBI, Kenya — Kenyan police on Tuesday fired teargas and arrested activists gathering for a march against perceived government injustice that has been given extra impetus this year by allegations by rights groups of police brutality during the COVID-19 lockdown.
MOSCOW — Russian security forces on Tuesday detained a former journalist who works as an aide to the head of Russia’s space agency and accused him of treason, saying he had passed military secrets to the Czech Republic.
