Bad weather forced scores of divers to temporarily suspend their hunt for a crashed Indonesian jet’s cockpit voice recorder yesterday, as investigators worked to read critical details on a flight data device that had already been salvaged.

More than 43 million hectares of forest -- an area bigger than Germany -- have been lost in a little over a decade in just a handful of deforestation hotspots, conservation organisation WWF said yesterday.

South African police have arrested more than 7,000 people caught without face masks in public since the end of December, the government said yesterday.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has called upon the youth of the country to contribute selflessly and constructively in politics.

Outgoing US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo alleged Tuesday that arch-enemy Iran has become a new “home base” for al-Qaeda, surpassing Afghanistan or Pakistan, an assertion mocked by Tehran and questioned by experts.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un pledged to strengthen his country’s nuclear arsenal as he delivered his closing address to a top ruling party meeting, state television showed yesterday, days before Joe Biden takes office as US president.

The United States has endured its worst day of the pandemic, with three Americans dying every minute, as China took decisive steps yesterday to stamp out a tiny coronavirus outbreak.

A coronavirus vaccine developed by China’s Sinovac Biotech was just 50.4% effective at preventing symptomatic infections in a Brazilian trial, researchers said on Tuesday, barely enough for regulatory approval and well below the rate announced last week.

Security forces in Central African Republic repelled an attack today by armed groups seeking to seize the capital Bangui, athorities said, in a marked escalation of fighting with rebels opposed to the president.

The US government executed convicted murderer Lisa Montgomery, the only woman on federal death row, early on Wednesday, after the Supreme Court cleared the last hurdle for her execution by overturning a stay.

Indonesian President Joko Widodo on Wednesday received the first shot of a Chinese-made COVID-19 vaccine after Indonesia approved it for emergency use and began efforts to vaccine millions of people in the world’s fourth most populated country.

A Bangladeshi man with asthma was not deported from France after his lawyer argued that he risked a severe deterioration in his condition, and possibly premature death, due to the dangerous levels of pollution in his homeland, according to The Guardian.

The director of intelligence for the US Capitol Police warned Congress in July that rebellion against COVID-19 precautions had accelerated violence by right-wing “revolutionary extremists,” according to congressional testimony.

Public settings, such as schools, childcare centres, nursing homes, hospitals and correctional facilities can play a key role in ensuring people are provided with healthy food and helping prevent the 8 million annual deaths currently caused by unhealthy diets, said the World Health Organization (WHO) on Tuesday.

Within a span of about 24 hours, three House Democrats have announced they tested positive for COVID-19, prompting concern that last week’s insurrection at the Capitol has also turned into a super-spreader event threatening the health of lawmakers and their staffs.

President Donald Trump’s outgoing administration on Monday returned Cuba to the US blacklist of state sponsors of terrorism, the latest in a slew of last-minute actions to hinder President-elect Joe Biden’s diplomacy.

A UN-backed summit of political leaders and CEOs pledging to reverse the accelerating destruction of the natural world was long on promises and short on cash.

Yemen’s Huthis were defiant Monday after Washington said it will designate the Iran-backed rebels as terrorists, a last-ditch move under President Donald Trump that the UN and US lawmakers warned would worsen the humanitarian crisis.

The US State Department’s website prematurely announced that President Donald Trump had left office Monday, sending social media into a tailspin on what happened.

China will give Myanmar a batch of coronavirus vaccines for free, the Chinese foreign ministry announced yesterday, as the government’s top diplomat wrapped up a two-day visit to Myanmar.