At least eight people were killed after Tropical Storm Grace wreaked havoc in eastern Mexico, bringing floods and power outages.

Gas supplies via the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline may total 5.6 billion cubic meters this year, Russia’s state-run energy giant Gazprom said in a statement on Thursday.

Two million residents of Sydney will be under nightly curfew from next week to slow the highly infectious Delta variant of coronavirus that is spreading across New South Wales state, authorities said on Friday as they extended lockdown orders.

Around 125 Afghans hired to guard the British Embassy in Kabul have been informed they will receive no protection from the UK government, the Guardian reported, noting they were rejected as they didn’t work “directly” for London.

Jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny on Thursday told Russians to take part in a tactical voting campaign at next month’s parliamentary elections to try to dent the ruling United Russia party’s political dominance.

Protests against the Taliban’s takeover in Afghanistan have spread to more cities, including the capital Kabul, while the militant group called on the country’s imams to urge unity at Friday prayers, the first since they seized control.

Several Indian states are building facilities with more paediatric beds, plus oxygen, due to concern that children returning to school without being vaccinated will be among the most vulnerable during a third wave of coronavirus infections.

Sydney’s Delta outbreak has not peaked and residents must brace for more deaths, authorities said on Wednesday, as Australia’s largest city continued to break records for new daily infections despite a nearly two-month lockdown.

At least three people were killed in anti-Taliban protests in the Afghan city of Jalalabad on Wednesday, witnesses said, as the militant group tried to set up a government and Western countries stepped up evacuations of diplomats and civilians.

The Taliban held their first official news conference in Kabul on Tuesday since the shock seizure of the city, declaring they wanted peaceful relations with other countries and would respect the rights of women within the framework of Islamic law.

The number of children hospitalized with COVID-19 in the United States hit a record high of just over 1,900 on Saturday, as hospitals across the South were stretched to capacity fighting outbreaks caused by the highly transmissible Delta variant.

Taliban insurgents entered Afghanistan›s capital Kabul on Sunday and an official said President Ashraf Ghani had left the city for Tajikistan, capping the militants› lightning push for power.

Officials have raised the death toll from a devastating earthquake in Haiti to 724, with thousands more injured. Reeling from the quake, the Caribbean country is now bracing itself for a tropical storm.

India expects to get about 266 million COVID-19 vaccine doses in August as a simpler licensing process has helped the government secure far more than earlier expected, the President of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party said on Friday.

Former South Korean K-pop star known as Seungri was sentenced to three years in prison and fined nearly $1 million on Thursday after a court convicted him of crimes including procuring prostitutes for potential investors, local media reported.

Newly released data from the US Census Bureau show the percentage of white Americans declining sooner than demographers expected, while Asian, Hispanic, and Other categories are on the rise. Most Covid-19 deaths weren’t counted.

Australia’s capital Canberra was ordered into a seven-day lockdown Thursday, after a single Covid-19 case was detected in the city that has largely avoided virus restrictions.

Taliban fighters captured the strategic Afghan city of Ghazni on Thursday, taking them to within 150 km (90 miles) of Kabul following days of fierce clashes as the Islamist group ruled out sharing power with the government based there.

Four more bodies were recovered from the site of a landslide in a mountainous region in northern India on Thursday, raising the death count to 14, officials said.

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani flew to the besieged northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif Wednesday to rally his beleaguered forces, with Taliban fighters having now taken more than a quarter of the country’s provincial capitals in less than a week.

Wildfires tearing through forested areas of northern Algeria have killed at least 65 people, state television reported on Wednesday, as some of the most destructive blazes in the country’s history continued to rage.

Virginia Giuffre, whose lawsuit against Ghislaine Maxwell revived the interest in Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking and ultimately brought him down, has sued Prince Andrew for the British royal’s participation in her abuse.

Taliban insurgents tightened their grip on captured Afghan territory on Tuesday as civilians hid in their homes, with an EU official saying the militants now controlled 65% of the country after a string of sudden gains as foreign forces pull out.

Thousands of people fled their homes on the outskirts of Athens on Friday as emergency crews struggled to stop wildfires from spreading to more towns while scorching winds fuelled blazes across Greece for the fourth day.

The Taliban captured an Afghan provincial capital and assassinated the government’s top media officer in Kabul on Friday, dealing twin high-profile blows to the Western-backed administration.

Japan reached the milestone of one million coronavirus cases on Friday, domestic media reported, as infections surged in Olympic host Tokyo to other urban areas and the country grapples with an unprecedented speed of spread of the Delta variant.

Ebrahim Raisi officially took office as Iran’s new president on Thursday, according to Iranian media, in a move that places all three branches of the government - the executive, legislative and judiciary - in the hands of conservative hardliners.

Two rockets launched from Lebanon on Wednesday struck Israel, which responded with artillery fire, amid heightened regional tensions over an alleged Iranian attack on an oil tanker in the Gulf last week.

A blast near the office of Afghanistan’s main security agency wounded three people on Wednesday hours after a bomb and gun attack on a minister’s compound brought surging Taliban violence to the capital.

Iran is dropping plans for prisoner swaps with the United States due to “breaches” by Washington in efforts to free the detainees, an unnamed Iranian official told the semi-official Nour News agency on Tuesday.