Iran yesterday said it had stepped up its uranium enrichment, amid heightened tensions with arch-foe the United States and after Iran seized a South Korean tanker in strategic Gulf waters.

More than half the world’s nations failed to submit upgraded commitments by year’s end to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, straggling behind the schedule of accelerated climate ambitions set out in the Paris Agreement.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson yesterday postponed a post-Brexit trip planned this month to India after the Covid crisis worsened in Britain, Downing Street said.

Tens of thousands of poultry will be slaughtered in India after an outbreak of deadly avian influenza was found to have killed scores of birds across the country, officials said yesterday.

Gulf leaders signed a “solidarity and stability” deal yesterday after the leaders of Saudi Arabia and Qatar publicly embraced, bringing Doha back into the regional fold after a three-year rift.

Trinamool Congress MLA and sports minister Laxmi Ratan Shukla has resigned from his post in the government and the party to pursue a career in cricket, a decision that comes just months ahead of the assembly election in West Bengal and weeks after a senior minister, Suvendu Adhikari, quit the party and joined the BJP along with a dozen other MLAs.

Julian Assange is “free to return home” to Australia once legal challenges against him are dealt with, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said yesterday, after a UK court denied a request to extradite the Wikileaks founder to the United States.

Iran has started the process to enrich uranium to 20 percent purity at its underground Fordow facility, state media reported yesterday, going well beyond the threshold set by the 2015 nuclear deal.

The US government is considering giving some people half the dose of Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine in order to speed vaccinations, a federal official said on Sunday.

All 10 living former US defense secretaries, including two Donald Trump appointees, warned Sunday against involving the military in the US presidential transition.

South Korea’s population fell for the first time in 2020, with more people dying than were born, the government said yesterday, warning that towns in poor regions faced a “crisis of extinction”.

Nancy Pelosi, the only woman to serve as US Speaker of the House, was narrowly re-elected to the position Sunday in a deeply divided new Congress that convened in the final weeks of Donald Trump’s presidency.

Gunmen killed at least 15 people in Syria, mostly government soldiers travelling on a bus in the second such road ambush in recent days, a war monitor said yesterday.

The number of wildfires in Brazil increased 12.7 percent last year to a decade-high, according to official figures likely to add to pressure on President Jair Bolsonaro’s government over the destruction of the Amazon rainforest.

A British judge yesterday ruled that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange should not be extradited to the United States to face espionage charges for publishing secret documents online, finding he was at risk of suicide.

Donald Trump and Joe Biden headed to Georgia yesterday to rally their party faithful ahead of twin runoffs that will decide who controls the US Senate, one day after the release of a bombshell recording of the outgoing president that rocked Washington.

Gunmen in southwestern Pakistan have killed at least 11 workers at a remote coal mine, officials saidyesterday. The victims of the attack in Baluchistan province were from the minority Shia Hazara community.

An Israeli official yesterday dismissed as “nonsense” an allegation by the Iranian foreign minister that Israel was trying to trick the United States into waging war on Iran.

At least 70 civilians were killed in simultaneous attacks on two villages by suspected Islamist militants in Niger, near the border zone with Mali, security sources said on Saturday.

A group of Republican senators led by veteran lawmaker Ted Cruz said Saturday they will challenge Joe Biden’s election win -- the latest last-ditch move to support Donald Trump’s efforts to undermine the vote.