Chinese are traveling to their hometowns for the Lunar New Year, the country's biggest family holiday, despite a government plea to stay where they are as Beijing tries to contain coronavirus outbreaks.

The holiday, which starts Wednesday, usually is the biggest annual movement of humanity as hundreds of millions of people who migrated for work visit their parents and sometimes spouses and children they left behind or travel abroad.

Japanese 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.

Kishida's decision to recommend the 400-year-old site in northern Japan this year apparently reverses his earlier, more cautious stance after a strong push by powerful ultra-rightwing revisionists in his governing party.

Human rights activists issued a call to action against the Beijing Olympics on Friday, imploring athletes and sponsors to speak out against what they call the "genocide games."

Speaking at an online press conference organized by the rights group Human Rights Watch, activists representing Chinese dissidents and the minority Uyghur and Tibetan populations urged international attendants to voice their opposition to China's hosting of the Games, which begin next week.

President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden have finally added the long-promised cat to their pet family.

Her name is Willow, and she's a 2-year-old, green-eyed, gray and white farm cat from Pennsylvania.

Russia's top diplomat said Friday that Moscow will not start a war but warned that it wouldn't allow the West to trample on its security interests amid fears it is planning to invade Ukraine.

U.S. President Joe Biden warned Ukraine's leader a day earlier that there is a "distinct possibility" that Russia could take military action against its neighbor in February.

The attack by Islamic State militants on a Syrian prison holding around 3,000 of its fighters and about 700 children is a predictable tragedy spotlighting the need for urgent international action to deal with those allegedly linked to the extremist group in prisons and camps in the country's northeast, the U.N. counter-terrorism chief said.

Undersecretary-General Vladimir Voronkov told the U.N. Security Council that the Islamic State group "has been highlighting and calling for jail breaks," and "there have been previous instances in Syria and elsewhere in the world."

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.

WHO staffers have alleged that Dr. Takeshi Kasai, the U.N. health agency's top director in the Western Pacific, engaged in unethical, racist and abusive behavior, undermining their efforts to curb the coronavirus pandemic, according to an internal complaint filed last October.

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.

Critics argue the investment is a bid to improve the ruling conservative coalition's green credentials ahead of looming elections while doing nothing to change the greatest threat to the coral: rising ocean temperatures.

Major global stock markets fell Friday ahead of data on U.S. employment costs that might influence Federal Reserve decisions on interest rate hikes to cool inflation.

London and Frankfurt opened lower. Tokyo and Seoul advanced while Shanghai and Hong Kong declined.

Doubt about the timing 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.

The Metropolitan Police force said it had asked for civil servant Sue Gray's report to make only "minimal reference" to the events being investigated by detectives, "to avoid any prejudice to our investigation."