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WASHINGTON (AP) — Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Friday the buildup of Russian forces along Ukraine's border has reached the point where President Vladimir Putin now has a complete range of military options, including actions short of a full-scale invasion.
WARSAW, Poland (AP) — High-stakes diplomacy continued on Friday in a bid to avert a war in Eastern Europe. The urgent efforts come as 100,000 Russian troops are massed near Ukraine's border and the Biden administration worries that Russian President Vladimir Putin will mount some sort of invasion within weeks.
WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — When the coronavirus began spreading around the world, the remote Pacific archipelago of Kiribati closed its borders, ensuring the disease didn't reach its shores for nearly two full years.
MIAMI (AP) — It was a classic Russian power play with echoes of Cold War gamesmanship.
Shortly after entering into service in 2019, Russia's most advanced warship made a goodwill tour of the Caribbean, armed with cruise missiles, air defense systems and other weapons.
IRBIL, Iraq (AP) — In a classroom in northern Iraq, Zhiwei Hu presides over his students as a conductor would an orchestra. He cues with a question, and the response from his students resounds in perfect, fluent Chinese.
LIMA, Peru (AP) — A Peruvian judge on Friday banned Repsol's Peru director and three other executives from leaving the country for 18 months while the government investigates an oil spill at a refinery run by the Spain-based company.
ZOLOTE, Ukraine (AP) — In the Ukrainian village of Zolote, Olga Berezhna cradles one of the rabbits she raises, feeds her chickens and gets an eager greeting from her shaggy dog when she walks into the yard of her house.
MIAMI (AP) — Negotiators from the U.S., China and 13 other governments failed to take action to protect threatened squid stocks on the high seas off South America amid a recent surge in activity by China's distant water fishing fleet.
OTTAWA, Ontario (AP) — Police in Canada’s capital have called in reinforcements as a planned anti-vaccine mandate protest began to swell in numbers.
Several thousand people are expected in Ottawa as part of group demanding an end to vaccine mandates and COVID-19 restrictions.
MEXICO CITY (AP) — The U.S. government is warning Americans to avoid a hospital at a Mexican beach destination, following years of complaints that the facility preyed on Americans by overcharging, bullying them and refusing to release medical records.
TIJUANA, Mexico (AP) — Mexican journalist Lourdes Maldonado dedicated her last program to a fellow journalist one day after he was gunned down outside his home, and then she described her own vulnerability covering the violent, border city of Tijuana.
ROME (AP) — Insistence by Italy's center-right bloc that one of their candidates is vaulted to the country's presidency backfired on Friday, as tensions and frustration mounted among the rival parties forming Premier Mario Draghi's pandemic unity government and a fifth day of voting yielded no winner.
LONDON (AP) — Doubt about the content and release of a key report into lockdown-breaching parties within the British government deepened Friday, when police said they wanted parts of it to remain unpublished until they finish a criminal investigation.
TOKYO (AP) — Japan's government said Friday it will watch the World Health Organization's investigation into staff complaints over racism and abuse by a top Japanese official at the agency but denied it inappropriately received sensitive vaccine information from him.
BEIRUT (AP) — U.S.-backed Kurdish-led fighters searched Friday near a Syrian prison for Islamic State group militants and gave an ultimatum to dozens of armed extremists holed up in a small part of the jail to surrender or face an all-out attack, a Kurdish official said.
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP) — Argentina has reached an agreement with the International Monetary Fund to refinance more than $40 billion in debt, President Alberto Fernández said Friday.
“We had an unpayable debt that left us without a present or a future, and now we have a reasonable agreement that will allow us to grow and comply,” Fernández said on national television.
TOKYO (AP) — Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said Friday that Japan will recommend a former gold mine on Sado Island for a UNESCO World Heritage list, despite protests from South Korea that the site is inappropriate because of its wartime abuse of Korean laborers — a sensitive issue that still strains ties between the neighbors.
RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — When the pandemic hit Rio de Janeiro, Sabrina Crespo da Silva and her girlfriends were forced to live — for the first time — without the beach. But they couldn’t bear losing their tans, so they started lying out on her rooftop.
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — More than a third of the people in Ethiopia’s embattled Tigray region “are suffering an extreme lack of food,” the United Nations World Food Program said in a new assessment of a region under a months-long government blockade.
BANGKOK (AP) — An oil slick off the coast of Thailand continued to expand Friday and was approaching beaches on the east coast, home to fragile coral and seagrass, officials said.
LISBON, Portugal (AP) — Filipe Orfao, a 37-year-old emergency room nurse in Lisbon, voices grievances that have long been heard in Portugal.
The familiar gripes include a tradition of low pay, a public service career structure that thwarts ambitions to get ahead in life, the nagging enticement of going to work abroad instead of staying at home, and politicians’ broken promises of improvement, especially for health workers like Orfao who have weathered the coronavirus pandemic.
CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — The Australian government on Friday pledged to spend another 1 billion Australian dollars ($704 million) over nine years on improving the health of the Great Barrier Reef after stalling a UNESCO decision on downgrading the natural wonder’s World Heritage status.
TOKYO (AP) — Toyota is working with Japan's space agency on a vehicle to explore the lunar surface, with ambitions to help people live on the moon by 2040 and then go live on Mars, company officials said Friday.
HONG KONG (AP) — Hong Kong is cutting the length of mandatory quarantine for people arriving from overseas from 21 to 14 days, even as the southern Chinese city battles a new surge in COVID-19 cases.
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — North Korea said Friday its two latest rounds of weapons tests this week were successful while vowing to bolster its nuclear “war deterrent” and speed up the development of more powerful warheads.
PARIS (AP) — The name Kim Jones dominated Paris fashion for a second week running as the indefatigable Briton who designs for Dior Men’s returned to the runway for his latest couture collection for Fendi.
MOSCOW (AP) — The White House says President Joe Biden warned Ukraine's president Thursday that there is a “distinct possibility” Russia could take military action against Ukraine in February. The Kremlin likewise sounded a grim note, saying it saw “little ground for optimism” in resolving the crisis after the U.S.
WARSAW, Poland (AP) — The United States and NATO have made no concessions to the main Russian demands to resolve the crisis over Ukraine, including giving Moscow a guarantee that its western neighbor can never join the alliance.
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — After spending two years in a strict lockdown because of the COVID-19 pandemic, North Korea may finally be opening up — slowly. The reason could reflect a growing sense of recognition by the leadership that the nation badly needs to win outside economic relief.
TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras (AP) — Hondurans saw Xiomara Castro sworn in as their country’s first female president Thursday amid a sea of waving flags in the national stadium.
Castro blasted the outgoing administration for leaving her a heavily indebted country where poverty and a lack of opportunity have driven hundreds of thousands of Hondurans to migrate in recent years.
OUAGADOUGOU, Burkina Faso (AP) — Burkina Faso’s new military leader said he was going to bring security and order back to the conflict-ridden nation and unite the country, but warned that betrayal wouldn’t be tolerated by the new regime.
Current and former staffers have accused the top director of the World Health Organization in the Western Pacific of racist, unethical and abusive behavior that has undermined the U.N. health agency’s efforts to curb the coronavirus pandemic.
COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) — Denmark will pull its small military force out of northern Mali after the West African country's transitional government said no permission had been given for them to deploy there, the Danish foreign minister said Thursday.
WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Survivors recalled their agony to a world they fear is forgetting, Israel's parliamentary speaker wept in the German parliament and politicians warned of a resurgence of antisemitism on Thursday's International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — Nearly 1,500 people died of malnutrition in just part of Ethiopia’s blockaded Tigray region over a four-month period last year, including more than 350 young children, a new report by the region’s health bureau says.
BRUSSELS (AP) — The European Union and China on Thursday stepped up their diplomatic dispute as the EU took a spat over exports problems for member state Lithuania to world trade's governing body, and accused Beijing of seeking to undermine the 27-nation bloc's single market.
RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — There has been a renewed surge of COVID-19 in Brazil with the spread of the omicron variant and, as elsewhere in the world, it is largely a pandemic of the unvaccinated.
Brazil confirmed an average 162,000 cases in the week through Jan.
BEIRUT (AP) — Dozens of armed Islamic State militants remained holed up in the last occupied section of a Syrian prison, U.S.-backed Kurdish-led forces said Thursday. The two sides clashed a day after the Syrian Democratic Forces announced they had regained full control of the facility.