The United Nations overwhelmingly isolated Russia on Thursday, marking one year since Moscow invaded Ukraine by calling for a “comprehensive, just and lasting peace” and again demanding Moscow withdraw its troops and stop fighting.

Health authorities in China said the country’s COVID-19 epidemic has “basically” ended, but it is not completely over as it found seven imported cases of the highly-transmissible XBB.1.5 variant since Jan. 8.

Turkey has stepped up plans to house victims of the devastating earthquake which struck its border region with Syria, the interior minister said, as the combined death toll in the two countries crept towards 50,000.

Egianus Kogoya, the dreadlocked rebel behind the kidnapping of a New Zealand pilot this month in the highlands of Indonesia’s Papua region, is at the vanguard of an increasingly dangerous and media-savvy insurgency for independence.

The New Zealand government today said it would hold a ministerial inquiry into the use of land for forestry due to damage caused during extreme weather events like the cyclone that struck 10 days ago.

President Vladimir Putin said Russia will maintain increased attention on boosting its nuclear forces in an address to mark Thursday’s Defender of the Fatherland public holiday and a day before the first anniversary of his invasion of Ukraine.

An earthquake of about 7.2 magnitude occurred in Tajikistan at around 8:37 a.m. (0037 GMT), at a depth of 10 km (6 miles), Chinese state television CCTV reported on Thursday， citing the China Earthquake Networks Center.

A 16-year-old pupil stabbed a Spanish-language teacher to death at a Roman Catholic high school in the high-end beach resort town of Saint-Jean-de-Luz in southwestern France, government officials said.

South Korea’s fertility rate dropped last year to a record low, data showed, in yet another grim milestone for the country with the world’s lowest number of expected children for each woman.

A major winter storm battered the Northern Plains and Upper Midwest with high winds and heavy snow on Wednesday, forcing hundreds of schools to close, grounding air travel and making road travel difficult – if not impossible – in some U.S. areas.

The United States is concerned by greater alignment between China and Russia, the U.S. State Department said on Wednesday after Russian President Vladimir Putin hailed “new frontiers” in ties with Beijing and signalled China’s Xi Jinping would visit his country.

India does not want the G20 to discuss additional sanctions on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine during New Delhi’s one-year presidency of the bloc, six senior Indian officials said on Wednesday, amid debate over how even to describe the conflict.