President Joe Biden leaves Saturday to meet with other G7 leaders in southern Germany before heading to Madrid for a summit where NATO is expected to announce plans to expand its forces in eastern Europe and Washington will lay out steps to strength European security.

President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo has "chosen not to stay silent" in the face of continued conflict, Foreign Minister Retno LP Marsudi has said, as he plans to push for peace between Ukraine and Russia.

Speaking on France 2 television, he said there was no doubt there was once again an upsurge of the pandemic in the country, adding he was personally in favour of reinstating mandatory face mask wearing on public transport.

Retno confirmed during a news conference the intention of Jokowi to visit Kyiv in addition to Moscow, which had been reported in Indonesian and Russian state media.

The bloc's executive arm last week proposed taking the symbolic first step to put Ukraine on the years-long path towards EU membership in a strong sign of support as Kyiv battles Russia's military onslaught. 

Macron was due to host far-right leader Marine Le Pen and other political party chiefs for rare talks at the Elysee as he seeks solutions to an unprecedented situation that risks plunging his second term into crisis two months after it began.

This year's meetings of the Group of 20 major economies have been overshadowed by the war in Ukraine, with Indonesia struggling to keep the group united as some Western countries threaten to boycott the summit and push for Russia's exclusion.

Picket lines appeared at dawn and will be lined by some of the more than 40,000 rail workers who are due to strike on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, bringing the network to a standstill. The London Underground was also shut due to the strike.

The war in Ukraine has overshadowed G20 meetings this year, with current chair Indonesia struggling to keep the group united and resisting pressure from Western members to exclude Russia.

While Macron's "Ensemble" grouping secured the largest number of lawmakers in the 577-seat National Assembly, it fell short of an absolute majority in a vote on Sunday that saw a leftwing alliance and the far-right perform strongly.

Britain last week approved the Australian's extradition to the United States, where he could face life in prison over publishing secret military files.

Making a rare trip outside Kyiv, where he is based for security reasons, Zelensky travelled to the hold-out Black Sea city of Mykolaiv and visited troops nearby and in the neighbouring Odessa region for the first time since the Russian invasion.

The weekend's soaring temperatures were the peak of a June heatwave in line with scientists' predictions that such phenomena will now strike earlier in the year thanks to global warming.

Trumping lobbies from pharmaceutical companies, the trade forum passed the deal on a partial IP waiver to allow developing countries to produce and export COVID-19 vaccines, an issue that had the WTO nations divided for nearly two years.  

"GRTgaz remains vigilant for the coming winter and calls on shippers to continue to fill their national storage facilities as much as possible," the grid operator, a unit of France's main gas supplier Engie, said in a statement.

Maxar's images showed two Russian-flagged bulk carrier ships docked in the Russian-controlled Crimean port of Sevastopol in May and being loaded with grain, the company said.

French President Emmanuel Macron, Germany's Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Italian premier Mario Draghi arrived in Ukraine by train and headed to the Kyiv suburb of Irpin, scene of fierce battles early in the brutal war.

The UN health body already announced on Tuesday that it would hold an emergency meeting next week to determine whether to classify the outbreak as a public health emergency of international concern.

"The Ukrainian President and his officials will have to negotiate with Russia," said Macron, while on a visit to Romania and Moldova.

The combined impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, Russia-Ukraine war and cost-of-living crisis have led to declining interest in the news, a survey by the British research group found. 

Foreign Secretary Liz Truss insisted the first flight to Kigali would take off no matter how many people were on board, after 23 of the 31 migrants had their tickets cancelled.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine and Western support for Kyiv has heightened tensions among the world's nine nuclear-armed states, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) think-tank said in a new set of research.

The conflict in Ukraine has fuelled a global food crisis, with surging prices for grains, cooking oils, fuel and fertilizer. Russia and Ukraine account for nearly a third of global wheat supplies, while Russia is also a key fertilizer exporter and Ukraine a major supplier of corn and sunflower oil.

Russia has seized large parts of Ukraine's coast, blocking farm exports and driving up the cost of grain.

Ukraine's fierce resistance of Russia's all-out invasion of its neighbour led to a stalemate in parts of the country, with Moscow subsequently re-focussing its forces in the east.

In her first major interview since stepping down six months ago, Merkel insisted she had not been naive in her dealings with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Johnson, who scored a sweeping election victory in 2019, has been under increasing pressure after he and staff held alcohol-fuelled parties in his Downing Street office and residence when Britain was under lockdowns to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Ukrainian president will not attend in person if the war is ongoing and hopes the summit will not include ‘occupiers’.

A local SAR operation resumed on Friday morning after Ridwan Kamil's son Eril was swept away by a strong current in Bern's Aare River yesterday afternoon.

More than a dozen countries where monkeypox is unusual, mostly in Europe, have reported at least one confirmed case, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) said in an epidemiological note released Wednesday night.