A top World Health Organization official says low hospitalization and death rates in South Africa due to the omicron variant cannot be considered a template for how the variant will fare as it surges in other countries.

Dr. Abdi Mahamud, COVID-19 incident manager at the U.N. health agency, notes a “decoupling” between case counts and deaths in the country, which first announced the emergence of the fast-spreading new variant.

Hizbullah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah has verbally attacked the king of Saudi Arabia, saying Riyadh helped spread extremist Islamic ideology worldwide and is taking the thousands of Lebanese who work in the Gulf region "hostage."

Nasrallah's statements during a televised speech came in response to comments by King Salman, who called on the Lebanese in a speech last week "to end the terrorist Hizbullah's control" of Lebanon.

A court in Canada has ruled that Iran should pay about $84 million in punitive damages to families of six people with Canadian citizenship or residency who were killed in the Iranian military's downing of a Ukrainian passenger plane in 2020.

The military's shootdown of Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752 with two surface-to-air missiles killed all 176 people on board. Over 100 of the Iranian victims had Canadian citizenship or residency, prompting some families of the victims to sue Iran in Canadian civil court.

Two Israeli pilots were killed when a navy helicopter crashed off Israel's Mediterranean coast late Monday near the northern city of Haifa, the Israeli military announced.

The helicopter was conducting a training flight when it crashed. A third crew member, an aerial observer, was moderately injured and evacuated to a hospital, the military said early Tuesday. "After extensive resuscitation efforts, the two pilots were declared dead."

Yemen's Houthi rebels seized a ship in the Red Sea, armed drones targeted Baghdad's international airport, and hackers hit a major Israeli newspaper Monday - a string of assaults that showed the reach of Iran-allied militias on the second anniversary of America's killing of a top Iranian general.

All three coincided with a massive memorial in Tehran for Qassem Soleimani, the general killed by a U.S. drone strike in 2020 in Iraq. Iran's hard-line President Ebrahim Raisi demanded former U.S. President Donald Trump be "prosecuted and killed."

Hollywood closed out 2021 with more fireworks at the box office for "Spider-Man: No Way Home," which topped all films for the third straight week and already charts among the highest grossing films ever. But even with all the champagne popping for "No Way Home," the film industry heads into 2022 with plenty of reason for both optimism and concern after a year that saw overall ticket revenue double that of 2020, but still well off the pre-pandemic pace.

Movie theaters began the year mostly shuttered but ended it with a monster smash. Sony Pictures' Marvel sequel "No Way Home" grossed an estimated $52.7 million over the weekend to bring its three-week total to $609.9 million. That ranks 10th all-time in North America. Worldwide, it's made $1.37 billion, a total that puts it above "Black Panther" and makes it the 12th highest grossing film globally.

Rembrandt van Rijn's iconic and huge painting "The Night Watch" is now also a supersized museum photo delivered right to your laptop in unsurpassed detail.

The Amsterdam Rijksmuseum on Monday put on its digital portal what it called "the most detailed photograph of any artwork" ready for assessment by scientists and art lovers alike. It is expected to draw widespread interest especially since the museum is closed because of coronavirus measures.

Draft European Union plans that would allow nuclear and gas energy to remain part of the bloc's path to a climate-friendly future came under immediate criticism over the weekend from both environmentalists and some governing political parties in EU member nations.

In draft conclusions seen by The Associated Press, the EU's executive commission proposes a classification system for defining what counts as an investment in sustainable energy. Under certain conditions, it would allow gas and nuclear energy to be part of the mix.

The winter grassland fire that blew up along Colorado's Front Range was rare, experts say, but similar events will be more common in the coming years as climate change warms the planet — sucking the moisture out of plants — suburbs grow in fire-prone areas and people continue to spark destructive blazes.

"These fires are different from most of the fires we've been seeing across the West, in the sense that they're grass fires and they're occurring in the winter," said Jonathan Overpeck, a professor in the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan. "Ultimately, things are going to continue to get worse unless we stop climate change."

While the "will he or won't he?" question remains for No. 1 Novak Djokovic and his participation in the Australian Open, the rest of the tennis world returns to work this week to prepare for the season's first major beginning Jan. 17 at Melbourne Park.

The men's ATP Cup team event has been on since the weekend in Sydney, and there are three tune-up events being played this week in Melbourne as part of Tennis Australia's "Summer Set" of tournaments — two WTA tournaments and one ATP.