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.

A rocket attack in Damascus on Sunday that Syria blamed on Israel hit an installation where Iranian officials were meeting to advance programmes to develop drone or missile capabilities of Tehran’s allies in Syria, sources told Reuters.

South Korea will not require travellers from China to test for COVID-19 after arrival starting next month, although they will still need to take pre-departure tests.

The Seoul High Court ruled on Tuesday that the state’s health insurer should provide spousal coverage to a same-sex couple, in a decision that lawyers and advocates said marked the first legal recognition of same-sex union in South Korea.

Six people were killed in the latest earthquake to strike the border region of Turkey and Syria, authorities said on Tuesday, two weeks after a massive quake killed more than 47,000 people and damaged or destroyed hundreds of thousands of homes.

U.S. President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin have been sparring verbally, presenting starkly different views of the world and the Ukraine war, Biden promising to defend democracies and Putin asserting the West was a threat to Russia.