U.S. President Joe Biden said on Saturday that Russia's leader Vladimir Putin "cannot remain in power" in a fiery speech pushing the world's democracies to unite to support Ukraine, though the White House later said Biden was not calling for regime change in Moscow.

US President Joe Biden met top Ukrainian ministers in an emphatic show of support yesterday, as Russia signalled it may scale down its war aims after failing to break Kyiv’s resistance in a month of fighting and deadly attacks on civilians.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was expected to fly in in Israel as the Ukraine war rages, aiming to rally regional support for Kyiv and quell the Jewish state’s worries about a looming nuclear deal with Iran.

The Russian army on Friday updated its losses in Ukraine to 1,351 soldiers, while saying that it had evacuated more than 400,000 civilians and condemning Western supplies of weapons to Kyiv.

The European Union’s coordinator for talks to restore the Iran nuclear deal, Enrique Mora, said he was hoping to close gaps in the negotiations ahead of his expected arrival in Tehran.

The war in Ukraine has killed 136 children in the 31 days since the start of the Russian invasion, Ukraine’s office of the prosecutor general said on Saturday in a message on the Telegram app.

Coronavirus levels reached all-time highs in Scotland and Wales and are nearing record levels in England, with around 4.2 million people infected across the UK last week, official figures showed Friday.

A top UN rights expert slammed the international community Friday for allowing Israel’s decades-long occupation of Palestinian territories to evolve into a system of “apartheid”.

The United States cancelled planned talks in Doha with the Taliban after the hardline Islamist rulers of Afghanistan shut girls’ secondary schools as about two dozen girls and women protested in the Afghan capital yesterday against the move.

Two rocket strikes hit Ukraine's western city of Lviv on Saturday, wounding five people, regional Governor Maksym Kozytskyy said, after local authorities told residents to seek shelter in the wake of powerful blasts on the city's outskirts.

Russian forces have taken control of a town where workers at the defunct Chernobyl nuclear plant live, the governor of Kyiv region said on Saturday, and fighting was reported in the streets of the besieged southern port of Mariupol.

US President Joe Biden spoke with top Ukrainian government officials in Warsaw on Saturday during his visit to Poland to show support for the NATO alliance's eastern flank in the face of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy called on energy producing countries on Saturday to increase output so that Russia cannot use its oil and gas wealth to "blackmail" other nations.

A search and rescue ship saved 128 migrants trying to reach Europe on an overcrowded dinghy Friday but found two on board had died, the NGO operating it said.

The war in Ukraine has killed 136 children in the 31 days since the start of the Russian invasion, Ukraine's office of the prosecutor general said on Saturday in a message on the Telegram app.

US President Joe Biden will argue in a speech in Poland on Saturday that the "free world" opposes Russia's invasion of Ukraine and that there is unity among major economies on the need to stop Vladimir Putin, the White House said.

Yemen's Houthis said they launched attacks on Saudi energy facilities on Friday and the Saudi-led coalition said oil giant Aramco's petroleum products distribution station in Jeddah was hit, causing a fire in two storage tanks but no casualties.

Former US president Donald Trump filed a lawsuit on Thursday against Hillary Clinton, Democratic Party leaders and others alleging they falsely accused him of colluding with Russia ahead of the 2016 election.

The United States will work to supply 15 billion cubic metres of liquefied natural gas (LNG) to the European Union this year to help it wean off Russian energy supplies, the transatlantic partners said yesterday.

Australia’s spectacular Great Barrier Reef is suffering “mass bleaching” as corals lose their colour under the stress of warmer seas, authorities said yesterday, in a blow widely blamed on climate change.