Russia declared a regional state of emergency in Crimea, which it seized from Ukraine in 2014, as workers cleared tons of contaminated sand and earth on either side of the Kerch Strait following an oil spill in the Black Sea last month.

The pro-Russian breakaway Moldovan region of Transdniestria, left without Russian gas supplies no longer transiting through neighbouring Ukraine, faced longer periods of rolling power cuts, local authorities said.

Talks between Austria’s two main centrist parties on forming a coalition government without the far-right Freedom Party (FPO) collapsed, prompting conservative Chancellor Karl Nehammer to announce he would step down.

Attacks on both sides of the Ukraine-Russia border killed three people, local officials said.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken will travel to South Korea, Japan and France from Jan. 4-9, the State Department said, amid a political crisis in Seoul.

U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson was reelected to the chamber’s top job by a razor-thin margin that highlighted potential fissures among President-elect Donald Trump’s Republicans on Capitol Hill.

Australia’s southeast sweltered in a heat wave that raised the risk of bushfires and led authorities to issue fire bans for large parts of Victoria state.

A judge has ordered that Donald Trump will be sentenced on 10 January in his hush-money case in New York – less than two weeks before he is set to be sworn in as president.

Hundreds of Montenegrins protested in the capital Podgorica against what they see as a lack of action by authorities to prevent a mass shooting in which a gunman killed 12 people and seriously wounded four.

Law enforcement officials said a U.S. Army soldier from Colorado was likely the person inside a Tesla TSLA.O Cybertruck that exploded outside the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas, leaving the driver dead and seven people with minor injuries.

Bosnia’s international peace envoy sought to keep the country’s European Union integration on track by rejecting the Serb Republic parliament’s orders last week that would have blocked progress.

Over 300,000 migrants crossed the Darien Gap into Panama in 2024, 42% fewer than the record number who made the perilous jungle crossing from South America a year earlier, Panama’s migration authorities told Reuters.