It is estimated that airline carriers globally scrapped at least 2,366 flights on Friday, which fell on Christmas Eve and is typically a heavy day for air travel. Nearly 9,000 more flights were delayed.

"That would increase the prospect of running," Biden told ABC News on Wednesday.

An antigen test that Harris received Wednesday morning as part of regular testing and a PCR test after being notified of the staffer's case both came back negative, the White House said, quoted by Reuters.

In a televised address, Biden formally announced a raft of new measures to combat the winter surge -- including shipping half a billion at home tests -- but denied his administration had failed to adequately prepare for the fresh wave of cases.

The announcement came as the United States is seeing another surge in coronavirus cases, with Omicron accounting for about two-thirds of new infections last week, according to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"The rapid spread of the Omicron variant reinforces that we must all continue to accelerate our efforts to end this pandemic and that none of us are safe until all of us are safe," Blinken said in a statement.

A PCR test Biden received on Monday after being notified of the case came back negative, as did an antigen test he received on Sunday as part of his regular testing, White House spokesperson Jen Psaki said in a statement.

The spike, which was tallied by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is based on data for the week ending on Saturday. During the prior week period, Omicron accounted for only 12.6 percent of US cases.

Boric, 35, garnered nearly 56 percent of the vote compared to 44 percent for ultra-conservative Jose Antonio Kast, who conceded even before the final result was known.

The former student activist only just met the required minimum age to run in the presidential race, seven years after being elected to his first political job as a member of Chile's Chamber of Deputies.

The US Senate unanimously voted to make the US the first country to ban virtually all imports from China's Xinjiang region over forced labor concerns.

One day after the blast in Haiti's second largest city of Cap-Haitien, 75 people were confirmed dead in the latest disaster to hit the poverty-wracked Caribbean nation, riven by gang violence and political paralysis.

Indonesia's top diplomat insists that members of the Group of Seven still need to tackle the root issues causing a widening COVID-19 vaccination gap.

A plan to upgrade Russian-Indonesian ties would put Moscow on par with the United States, which signed its own strategic partnership with Indonesia in 2015.

The figure is greater than the entire population of several states, including North Dakota and Alaska. 

Some of Indonesia's biggest expected gains from the United States remained elusive, as Jakarta sought assurances that the US would deliver on a regional comprehensive economic cooperation framework.

With the new pledges, Harris has secured private sector investments in the region worth over $1.2 billion, senior White House officials said. This follows a similar round worth $750 million announced by companies such as Microsoft and Mastercard in May.

United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in Jakarta on Monday to kick off his Southeast Asian charm offensive.

Biden's appearance on NBC's "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon" is the first by a sitting president since Barack Obama, and comes as the White House seeks to highlight the recently passed bill for upgrading the nation's tattered transport networks.

"It's a tragedy. And we still don't know how many lives are lost and the full extent of the damage," he said in televised comments, quoted by AFP.

"It's a tragedy," a shaken Biden said in televised comments. "And we still don't know how many lives are lost and the full extent of the damage."

President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo touted the recently concluded Bali Democracy Forum as evidence of Indonesia's commitment to promoting democracy “beyond borders”.

The former US Secretary of State and first lady read chunks of the speech as part of a MasterClass she is giving on the power of resilience, the streaming platform said in a press release on Thursday.

The appeals court agreed with a lower court ruling that President Joe Biden could waive executive privilege on the records, so that they could be handed over to a Congressional panel investigating the violence by Trump supporters.

China has increased military and political pressure on Taiwan to accept its sovereignty claims, drawing anger from the democratically ruled island, which has repeatedly said it would not be bullied and has the right to international participation.

Biden, who took office in January amid the biggest US political crisis in decades, said trends are "largely pointing in the wrong direction" and that "more than ever, democracy needs champions."

The event, held by video link because of the coronavirus pandemic, is billed by the White House as US leadership in an existential struggle between democracies and powerful autocracies or dictatorships.

Speaking to AFP, President Joe Biden's chief medical advisor broke down the knowns and unknowns about Omicron into three major areas: transmissibility, how well it evades immunity from prior infection and vaccines, and severity of illness.

This sum would be in addition to $293 million that Digital World Acquisition Corp raised in an initial public offering in September, the companies said in a statement.

California, Colorado and Minnesota have found cases of the coronavirus variant among patients who were fully vaccinated and developed mild symptoms, while Hawaii reported a case with an unvaccinated person, who had moderate symptoms.