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.

President Joe Biden said on Thursday he expects to speak with China’s president, Xi Jinping, about what the United States says was a Chinese spy balloon that a U.S. fighter jet shot down early this month after it transited the United States.

Democratic U.S. Senator John Fetterman, who flipped a Republican-held seat in last November’s elections just six months after suffering a near-fatal stroke, checked into a Washington-area hospital on Wednesday for treatment for clinical depression, his office said in a statement.

Doctors declared U.S. President Joe Biden, 80, healthy and “fit for duty” on Thursday after a physical examination that included removing a lesion from his chest and declaring him free of symptoms of long-COVID after testing positive last year for the coronavirus.

Some witnesses may have lied under oath during a grand jury probe of former President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election defeat in Georgia, according to excerpts from the panel’s findings released on Thursday.

Russia rained missiles across Ukraine on Thursday and struck its largest oil refinery, Kyiv said, while the head of the Wagner mercenary group predicted the long-besieged city of Bakhmut would fall within a couple of months.

Hundreds of irate residents of the Ohio town where a train derailed and spilled toxic chemicals packed into a high school gym on Wednesday, seeking answers to what health dangers they face.

U.S. officials believe a Chinese balloon that was shot down after crossing the continental United States originally had a trajectory that would have taken it over Guam and Hawaii but was blown off course by prevailing winds, a U.S. official speaking on condition of anonymity, said on Wednesday.

Vladimir Putin casts the war in Ukraine as a watershed when Russia finally stood up to the West – but some within the elite fear he has committed his country to a long and fruitless drain on lives and resources.