A group of Chinese officials arrived in Taiwan on Saturday on the first visit in three years, since the COVID-19 pandemic began, to attend a cultural event at a time of soaring military tensions across the Taiwan Strait.

A gunman went on a rampage in a small Mississippi town on Friday, killing his ex-wife and five other people in three locations before sheriff’s deputies arrested him, the county sheriff and witnesses said.

New Zealand’s death toll from Cyclone Gabrielle rose to nine on Saturday as clean-up continued on the nation’s battered North Island and authorities worked to find missing people.

French duck farmer Herve Dupouy has culled his flock four times since 2015 to stop the spread of bird flu but as a wave of deadly outbreaks nears his farm once again, he says it’s time to accept a solution once considered taboo: vaccination.

Brazil’s new President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva will meet Chinese leader Xi Jinping on March 28 on Lula’s first trip of his current term to his country’s largest trading partner, official sources told Reuters.

The United States brought its most advanced fighter jet, the F-35, to India for the first time this week alongside F-16s, Super Hornets and B-1B bombers as Washington looks to woo New Delhi away from its traditional military supplier, Russia.

Islamists stormed a police station in the southern Pakistani city of Karachi on Friday, killing two people in a hail of gunfire and a series of loud explosions before they themselves were killed, officials said.

The United States said on Friday it had successfully concluded recovery efforts off South Carolina to collect sensors and other debris from a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon shot down by a U.S. fighter jet on Feb. 4, and investigators are now analyzing its “guts.”

The death toll from Cyclone Gabrielle rose to seven, and New Zealanders were told the number was likely to rise because emergency services have not yet made contact with hundreds of communities.

China’s top leaders declared a “decisive victory” over COVID-19, claiming the world’s lowest fatality rate, although experts have questioned Beijing’s data as the coronavirus tore across the country after largely being kept at bay for three years.

Colombia and Venezuela signed an agreement to revive trade between the two countries during a ceremony on a border bridge at which Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro and Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro both signed.

Jamaica’s anti-corruption agency said on Thursday that the prime minister will not face any charges after it investigated a possible conflict of interest around government contracts awarded to a construction company between 2006 and 2009.