World

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is waiting for the phone to ring. But President Joe Biden is taking his time.

Biden is making clear he is in no rush to court the Israeli leader, a marked shift from his predecessor Donald Trump that some observers see as an early signal that the United States will no longer give carte blanche to its ally.

After more than 17,000 years of silence and decades forgotten in a French museum, a shell fashioned into a horn by our prehistoric ancestors has been played again as a result of new research published Wednesday.

Scientists believe the ancient conch, from a species of large sea snail still present in the Atlantic and North Sea, is the oldest wind instrument of its type yet found.

A 7.7-magnitude earthquake struck in the South Pacific on Thursday, the US Geological Survey said, sparking a tsunami warning for New Zealand, New Caledonia, Vanuatu and other nations in the region.

The quake struck at just after midnight on Thursday local time (1320 GMT Wednesday) about 415 kilometres (258 miles) east of Vao in New Caledonia at a depth of 10 kilometres, according to the USGS.

The World Health Organization expert mission to China ended this week without finding the source of the coronavirus that has killed over 2.3 million worldwide.

But the team of foreign experts did agree the novel coronavirus likely jumped from bats to an unknown animal species, before being transmitted to humans.

Four people were arrested in Jerusalem after clashes between Israeli security forces and ultra-orthodox Jews opposed to coronavirus restrictions, the police said Wednesday.

Such protests have taken place repeatedly in recent weeks, sometimes leading to violence.

Pet dogs are far more likely to play with one another when their owner is present and being attentive, according to a new study, raising the intriguing possibility that they are putting on a show for our benefit.

That our canine companions are keenly attuned to the level of interest humans are showing them is well established, Lindsay Mehrkam, an animal behaviorist and lead author of the paper that appeared in Animal Cognition, told AFP Tuesday.

A WHO expert sent to China to probe the coronavirus hit out at US intelligence on Covid-19 as his team headed home with few answers about the origin of a pandemic that was forcing more clampdowns in some of the hardest-hit parts of the world.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel was set to seek an extension of strict virus curbs, as the European Commission chief prepared to defend the stumbling vaccination rollout in the continent -- which accounts for a third of the 2.3 million Covid-19 deaths worldwide.

New Zealand's parliament backed down Wednesday after ejecting a Maori lawmaker because he refused to wear a tie, allowing him to speak without an accessory he labelled a "colonial noose".

The issue flared on Tuesday when Maori Party co-leader Rawiri Waititi was ejected from the parliamentary debating chamber for not wearing the required attire during question time.

The Russian translator who was the only American to hear several secret conversations between President Donald Trump and President Vladimir Putin would of course never expose what the two world leaders said in private, but she did reveal one disturbing fact about their relationship.

Putin attacked America in the years leading up to the 2016 presidential election, helped Trump win the White House, and has benefitted from his mysterious relationship with the billionaire real-estate mogul turned disgraced and twice-impeached president. Russia has since attacked the U.S., including with its cash-for killing U.S. soldiers bounty program, and its continued attacks on American elections.

he United States on Tuesday denounced the use of force against anti-coup protesters in Myanmar, renewing a call for their freedom of expression.

"We strongly condemn violence against demonstrators," State Department spokesman Ned Price told reporters.

Britain's Prince Andrew became a grandfather on Tuesday after his youngest daughter Princess Eugenie gave birth to a baby boy, the ninth great-grandchild of Queen Elizabeth II, Buckingham Palace said.

Eugenie, 30, gave birth to her first child just before 0900 GMT, with husband Jack Brooksbank in attendance at the private Portland Hospital in central London, the palace added in a statement.

A spacecraft from the United Arab Emirates swung into orbit around Marson Tuesday in a triumph for the Arab world's first interplanetary mission.

Mission controllers at the UAE's space center in Dubai announced that the unmanned craft, called Amal, Arabic for Hope, reached the end of its nearly seven-month, 300-million-mile journey and began circling the red planet, where it will gather detailed data on Mars' atmosphere.