United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres was appointed for a second-five year-term on Friday by the 193-member U.N. General Assembly.

The number of people fleeing wars, persecution, violence and human rights violations in 2020 rose to a record high 82.4 million despite the impact of the pandemic, according to the UN's refugee agency (UNHCR).

Coronavirus-related deaths worldwide passed a grim milestone of 4 million on Thursday, according to a Reuters tally, as many countries struggle to procure enough vaccines to inoculate their populations.

The author of “Fire and Fury,” the million-seller from 2018 that helped launched the wave of inside accounts of the Trump White House, will have a last take coming out next month.

Moscow is facing a new coronavirus variant that is more aggressive and infectious, and the situation in the city is rapidly deteriorating, its mayor said on Thursday.

Britain reported its biggest daily rise in new cases of COVID-19 since Feb. 19 on Thursday, according to government figures which showed 11,007 new infections, up from 9,055 the day before.

More than 350 doctors and medical workers have caught Covid-19 in Indonesia despite being vaccinated with Sinovac and dozens have been hospitalised, officials said, as concerns grow about the efficacy of some vaccines against more infectious variants.

Websites of dozens of financial institutions and airlines in Australia and the United States were briefly hit by an internet outage yesterday, after a second major blackout in little more than a week.

The European Union and Britain yesterday said a police raid on Hong Kong’s pro-democracy tabloid Apple Daily showed that China was using a new national security law to crack down on dissent and silence the media rather than deal with public security.

Some camps dotted in the forest have a few dozen people, some more than a thousand. The displaced sleep packed together under plastic sheeting for protection from Myanmar’s monsoon rains.

The House of Representatives on Wednesday voted overwhelmingly to create a federal holiday commemorating Juneteenth, which until now has been the unofficial fete marking the end of slavery in the United States.

The US Supreme Court yesterday rejected a Republican bid that had been backed by former President Donald Trump’s administration to invalidate the Obamacare healthcare law, ruling that Texas and other challengers had no legal standing to file their lawsuit.

Botswanan diamond firm Debswana said Wednesday it had unearthed a 1,098-carat stone that it described as the third largest of its kind in the world.

US President Joe Biden delivered a stern warning to Russian leader Vladimir Putin over ransomware attacks emanating from Russia, saying he was prepared to retaliate against any more cyber assaults on American infrastructure.

Three Chinese astronauts on Thursday flew to an unfinished space station in China's first crewed mission since 2016, expanding the country's already growing near-Earth presence and challenging U.S. leadership in orbital space.

A senior Chinese epidemiologist said the United States should be the priority in the next phase of investigations into the origin of Covid-19 after a study showed the disease could have been circulating there as early as December 2019, state media said on Thursday.

Kim Jong Un has admitted that North Korea’s food situation is “tense”, state media reported yesterday, sounding the alarm in a country that suffered a devastating famine in the 1990s in which hundreds of thousands died.

British barrister Karim Khan, 51, took over as the International Criminal Court’s top prosecutor yesterday with a pledge to improve its track record by taking only its strongest cases to trial.

Maida Bilal endured being beaten and harassed when she spent more than 500 days guarding the site of a planned mini hydropower plant on Bosnia’s Kruscica River with a team of women from her village before the building permits were annulled.

US President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin yesterday agreed at their first summit to resume arms control talks and to return ambassadors to each other’s capitals after they were withdrawn earlier this year.