The presidents of Nauru, the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), Kiribati, Marshall Islands and Palau said an informal agreement to elect a new chief diplomat from their Micronesia sub-region was not honoured.

Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger had faced calls to open a probe after Trump was recorded in a Jan. 2 phone call pressuring Raffensperger to overturn the state's election results based on unfounded voter fraud claims.

The programme in the sprawling South Korean capital comes weeks after the country reported its first case of Covid-19 infection in an animal, involving a kitten.

Joseph Flavill, 19, suffered a traumatic brain injury when he was hit by the car in the central English town of Burton-on-Trent on March 1 last year, about three weeks before a first national lockdown was imposed to curb the spread of the virus.

Japan and China dispute ownership of the uninhabited islets in the East China Sea that Tokyo calls the Senkakus and Beijing the Diaoyu.

Three bodies have been found and a desperate operation has been launched to rescue about 20 people trapped in a tunnel, the Uttarakhand state police chief said.

Britain was also bracing for heavy snow from what Dutch meteorologists have called Storm Darcy, which is packing winds of up to 90 kilometres (55 miles) an hour.

The total number of COVID-19 cases rose slightly to 14 on Feb. 7 from 12 a day earlier, the National Health Commission said in a statement, but all were imported infections from overseas. Seven of the cases were in Shanghai, the rest in the southeastern Guangdong province.

Africa's hardest-hit nation was due to start its campaign in the coming days with a million doses of the vaccine developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford.

"As prime minister of Israel, I can assure you this: we will fight this perversion of justice with all our might," Netanyahu said in a statement.

The vaccine has already been rolled out to key groups at higher risk of exposure to coronavirus but Saturday's approval allows for its use on the general public.

Two Chinese coast guard ships intruded into Japanese waters near the uninhabited islands around 4:45 a.m. and stayed there until around 1:15 p.m., according to the Japan Coast Guard.

Blinken told Yang that the United States "will continue to stand up for human rights and democratic values, including in Xinjiang, Tibet and Hong Kong," a State Department statement said of the call, which took place on Friday Washington time.

About a third of the nearly 25 million people who downloaded the COCOA app have been unable to receive alerts that they have been in proximity to someone who has tested positive for the novel coronavirus.

Speaking to the Atlantic Council think-tank, Macron conceded that China's early "diplomatic successes" in distributing vaccines to other countries could be seen as "a little bit humiliating for us as (Western) leaders".

The comedian, Munawar Faruqui, 30, was arrested early last month following a complaint by the son of a politician from Prime Minister Narendra Modi's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) alleging that he had made objectionable remarks about Hindu deities and the interior minister, Amit Shah, during a show at a cafe in the city of Indore.

"The fields in which China and the United States must cooperate are expanding rather than narrowing" in the face of "global challenges such as the novel coronavirus pandemic and climate change," Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin told reporters.

Conservative first-term congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, facing bipartisan opprobrium for a series of disturbing comments and support of social media posts advocating the assassination of Democratic lawmakers, was stripped of her two assignments on the House education and budget committees.

This week, new daily infections were the lowest in eight months, while deaths fell below 100 -- the smallest single-day total since May.

Gao Liu posted candid pictures of her post-surgery face on China's Twitter-like Weibo platform, which showed a part of her nose blackened with dead flesh.

Chief medical officer Paul Kelly said there is still not enough evidence about vaccines' ability to limit transmission to allow the dismantling of border controls that have virtually closed the country off from the world for almost a year.

While a presidential memorandum is largely symbolic, Biden campaigned on a pledge to pass LGBTQ rights legislation known as the Equality Act in the first 100 days of his administration and to make LGBTQ rights a top priority.

Palau said its departure was prompted by the failure of its preferred candidate to win election as the grouping's secretary-general, with four other Micronesian nations also threatening to withdraw over the issue.

Trump's lawyers ridiculed the request in a letter by lead House prosecutor Jamie Raskin to answer questions over the January 6 attack on the US Capitol as a "public relations stunt." 

In his first major speech on foreign affairs as president, Biden also froze former president Donald Trump's plans to redeploy troops from Germany and vowed a tough approach against what he described as a rising authoritarian threat from China and Russia.

The National Health Commission said in a statement that a total of 20 new mainland COVID-19 cases were reported on Feb. 4, down from 30 cases a day earlier and marking the fewest cases since 19 patients were reported on Dec. 31.

The former president of the European Central Bank (ECB) was slated to meet party leaders in Rome to sound them out about their willingness to support a national unity administration.

The second and third deliveries of the vaccine were due to be sent to Tehran on February 18 and 28, IRNA quoted Kazem Jalali, Iran's ambassador to Moscow, as saying.

The talks covered famous claims widely reported in global media, Peter Ben Embarek said in an interview a day after he and his WHO team visited the lab.

With 12,028 deaths registered since the start of the pandemic, Sweden's death rate per capita is many times higher than its Nordic neighbours, but lower than several European countries that opted for lockdowns.