TOKYO (AP) — The postponed Tokyo Olympics are due to open in just six months. Local organizers and the International Olympic Committee say they will go ahead on July 23. But it’s still unclear how this will happen with virus cases surging in Tokyo and elsewhere around the globe.
WUHAN, China (AP) — China is rolling out a state-backed film praising Wuhan ahead of the anniversary of the 76-day lockdown in the central city where the coronavirus was first detected.
TOKYO (AP) — IOC President Thomas Bach and local organizers are pushing back against reports that the postponed Tokyo Olympics will be canceled.
WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — Google on Friday threatened to make its search engine unavailable in Australia if the government went ahead with plans to make tech giants pay for news content.
BEIJING — Shanghai has imposed lockdowns on two of China’s best-known hospitals after they were linked to new coronavirus cases.
PUNE, India (AP) — At least five people were killed in a fire that broke out Thursday at a building under construction at Serum Institute of India, the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer, officials said. The company said the blaze would not affect production of the COVID-19 vaccine.
GENEVA (AP) — The United States will resume funding for the World Health Organization and join its consortium aimed at sharing coronavirus vaccines fairly around the globe, President Joe Biden’s top adviser on the pandemic said Thursday, renewing support for an agency that the Trump administ…
BERLIN (AP) — World leaders breathed an audible sigh of relief that the United States under President Joe Biden is rejoining the global effort to curb climate change, a cause that his predecessor had shunned over the past four years.
BRUSSELS (AP) — European Union leaders agreed that borders should remain open and assessed more measures to counter the spread of coronavirus variants during a video summit Thursday as the bloc's top disease control official said urgent action was needed to stave off a new wave of hospitaliz…
TIRANA, Albania (AP) — Albania on Thursday expelled a Russian diplomat for allegedly not respecting the country’s virus lockdown rules.
BAGHDAD (AP) — Twin suicide bombings ripped through a busy market in the Iraqi capital on Thursday, killing at least 32 people and wounding dozens, officials said in what was the first massive bombing in years, harkening back to darker days of rampant militant attacks.
MOSCOW (AP) — Police on Thursday took into custody two top associates of jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny ahead of planned protests against his detention.
U.S. climate envoy John Kerry on Thursday lamented “wasted years” under the Trump administration to slow climate change and urged faster work to curb fossil fuel emissions.
ROME (AP) — The Vatican’s criminal tribunal on Thursday convicted the former head of the Vatican bank and his lawyer of embezzling millions of euros in proceeds from the sales of Holy See-owned real estate, and sentenced them to nearly nine years in prison each.
THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — A majority of Dutch lawmakers backed the government’s planned curfew Thursday, despite fierce criticism from some opposition legislators.
PARIS (AP) — “I was 9. ... It was my father. He raped me until I was 17.”
TBILISI, Georgia (AP) — Europe's top human rights court on Thursday found Russia responsible for a swath of violations in Georgia's breakaway regions after the 2008 Russia-Georgia war.
LONDON (AP) — Britain has sparked a post-Brexit spat with the European Union by declining to grant the bloc’s first-ever ambassador to the country full diplomatic status.
MOSCOW (AP) — A fire at a private nursing home in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv killed 15 people and injured five others Thursday, officials said.
NICOSIA, Cyprus (AP) — An earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 5 shook Cyprus on Thursday, frightening some people who fled from their homes. No injuries or damage was reported.
BRUSSELS (AP) — NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg called Thursday on the United States and Russia to extend a major nuclear arms agreement before it expires in less than two weeks, and to later broaden the pact to include more weapons and China.
LISBON, Portugal (AP) — Portugal’s government on Thursday ordered the closure of schools for two weeks amid a surge in COVID-19 infections that the prime minister blamed on the rise of a more contagious variant.
ROME (AP) — The French doctor who discovered the genetic basis of Down syndrome but spent his career advocating against abortion as a result of prenatal diagnosis has taken his first major step to possible sainthood.
BEIJING (AP) — It will take at least 15 more days to get through a massive amount of debris and reach miners already trapped for 11 days since an explosion in a gold mine in eastern China, authorities said Thursday.
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (AP) — Sri Lanka reopened to foreign tourists on Thursday after a nearly 10-month pandemic closure that cut deeply into the Indian Ocean island nation's lucrative travel industry.
LONDON (AP) — Britain’s Glastonbury music festival has fallen victim to the coronavirus pandemic for the second year in a row.
BRUSSELS (AP) — Turkey on Thursday launched a new effort to get its strained relations with the European Union back on track, as the country’s foreign minister visited Brussels looking to talk about migration and plan a series of high-level talks with the 27-nation bloc.
GENEVA (AP) — The Biden administration has taken quick steps to keep the United States in the World Health Organization and reinforce financial and staffing support for it — part of his ambition to launch a full-throttle effort to fight the COVID-19 pandemic in partnership with the world.
SALISBURY, England (AP) — David Halls isn’t a doctor, nurse or ambulance driver, but he wanted to contribute in the fight against COVID-19. So he did what he does best: He sat down on the bench beside at Salisbury Cathedral’s historic organ and began to play.
MEXICO CITY (AP) — World leaders welcomed into their ranks the new U.S. President Joe Biden, noting their most pressing problems, including the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change, require multilateral cooperation, an approach his predecessor Donald Trump ridiculed.
NUCSOARA, Romania (AP) — A gentle hero to many in Romania, Valeriu Nicolae says that, at heart, he is more like former NBA star Michael Jordan — highly competitive and eager to improve in what he does best. In Nicolae’s case that is helping others.
DOHUK, Iraq (AP) — Piles of plush carpets line the floors of a northern Iraq shopping center hosting traders from neighboring Iran who hope the spangle of their ornate handicrafts might offer a lifeline out of poverty.
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — Sri Lanka is welcoming tourists again after keeping the doors closed to visitors for nearly 10 months due to the coronavirus pandemic.
THULASENDRAPURAM, India (AP) — With chants of “Long live Kamala Harris,” fireworks and prayers, residents of a tiny Indian village celebrated her inauguration as U.S. vice president.
Rare for an inaugural address, President Joe Biden issued a strong repudiation of white supremacy and domestic terrorism seen on the rise under Donald Trump.
MEXICO CITY (AP) — New testimony by a cooperating witness directly implicates Mexico's army in the disappearance of 43 college students in a 2014 incident that continues to haunt the country, according to a newspaper report Wednesday.
TIRANA, Albania (AP) — Albania’s Defense Ministry on Wednesday reported the death of a soldier in Afghanistan, the second from the tiny Western Balkan country to die during the international peacekeeping mission.
BRUSSELS (AP) — Frustration is mounting from Europe to North America over reduced shipments of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine while the U.S. pharmaceutical company increases production capacity at its Belgian plant. Governments say it is costing critical time during the early stages of the rollou…
MADRID (AP) — A powerful gas explosion tore through a residential building in central Madrid on Wednesday, killing four people and ripping the facade off the structure.
LISBON, Portugal (AP) — Portugal’s new daily COVID-19 cases jumped to more than 14,600 to set a new national record Wednesday, as the country weathers one of the worst pandemic surges in the world.
LONDON (AP) — A lawyer for the publisher of the Daily Mail newspaper said Wednesday that the Duchess of Sussex had no reasonable expectation of privacy for a letter she sent to her estranged father after her marriage to Prince Harry.
CAIRO (AP) — A boat carrying migrants bound for Europe capsized in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Libya, drowning at least 43 people, the U.N. migration agency said Wednesday.
HARARE, Zimbabwe (AP) — Zimbabwe’s Foreign Minister Sibusiso Moyo, who gained prominence in 2017 as the military general who announced the coup against then-president Robert Mugabe on television, has died from COVID-19, the government announced Wednesday. He was 61.
THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — The Dutch government wants to impose a curfew as part of beefed-up restrictions to rein in the spread of a new more contagious virus variant that already accounts for at least one in 10 Dutch infections.
ROME (AP) — Italian police have recovered a 500-year-old copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s 16th century “Salvator Mundi” painting of Jesus Christ that was stolen from a Naples church during the pandemic without the priests even realizing it was gone.
BRUSSELS (AP) — The European Union’s top officials breathed a sigh of relief on Wednesday that Joe Biden will be taking over as president of the United States, but they warned that the world has changed after four years of Donald Trump and that trans-Atlantic ties will be different in the future.
Representatives of the religious faiths recognized in Belgium have joined forces to urge federal authorities to increase the number of people admitted inside places of worship during the coronavirus pandemic.
BERLIN (AP) — The German government plans to ban the practice of killing male chicks after they hatch, which results in the death of around 45 million birds per year in the country.
BEIJING (AP) — China’s capital, Beijing, recorded seven more coronavirus cases on Wednesday amid a lingering outbreak in the country’s north.
LONDON (AP) — British Prime Minister Boris Johnson welcomed the start of a new U.K.-U.S. chapter on Wednesday under incoming U.S. President Joe Biden, even as his predecessor Theresa May accused Johnson of “abandoning” the U.K.’s moral leadership in the world during the tumultuous Trump era.
