Another mutated version of the coronavirus has popped up in New York City, and experts reacted to the the news with a mixture of caution and concern.

The new variant first appeared in the New York area in late November, and has since cropped up in neighboring states, according to researchers at the California Institute of Technology, one of two teams to share their work this week.

Violet light bathed the club stage as 300 people, masked and socially distanced, erupted in gentle applause. For the first time since the pandemic began, Israeli musician Aviv Geffen stepped to his electric piano and began to play for an audience seated right in front of him.

"A miracle is happening here tonight," Geffen told the crowd.

South Korea administered its first available shots of coronavirus vaccines to people at long-term care facilities Friday, launching a mass immunization campaign that health authorities hope will restore some level of normalcy by the end of the year.

The rollout of vaccines come at a critical time for the country, which has seen its hard-won gains against the virus get wiped out by a winter surge and is struggling to mitigate the pandemic's economic shock that decimated service sector jobs.

Albania's interior minister on Thursday said he was in Lebanon looking to repatriate more Albanians related to other nationals who had joined Islamic extremist groups in Syria and Iraq.

Bledi Cuci, in Beirut in the last two days, said he met with Maj. Gen. Abbas Ibrahim, the head of Lebanon's General Security Directorate whom Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama had described as "instrumental" in a previous successful attempt.

After weathering a year of the coronavirus pandemic, the fishermen of an Arab village in central Israel have been dealt another blow by a mysterious oil spill in the Mediterranean.

Grappling with its worst ecological disaster in years, the Israeli government this week ordered a precautionary ban on selling seafood.

Bahrain's crown prince spoke with the Israeli prime minister on Thursday about the return to nuclear talks with Iran, Bahrain's state-run news agency reported, as the U.S. administration tries to revive the tattered 2015 nuclear accord.

Bahraini Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa, also the country's prime minister, stressed to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu "the importance of the participation of regional countries in any negotiations on the Iranian nuclear file" to support "security and stability in the region," according to the official Bahrain News Agency.

Israel's defense minister on Thursday called for an immediate halt in plans to ship surplus coronavirus vaccines to a group of allied nations, accusing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of acting without oversight or transparency.

Syria's health minister on Thursday said his government procured coronavirus vaccines from a friendly country which he declined to name, adding that frontline health workers would be the first to be inoculated starting next week.

It was not clear why Hassan Ghabbash declined to name the country that provided the vaccines. He spoke at a press conference where only reporters from local media outlets were invited.

A secretive Israeli nuclear facility at the center of the nation's undeclared atomic weapons program is undergoing what appears to be its biggest construction project in decades, satellite photos analyzed by The Associated Press show.

A dig about the size of a soccer field and likely several stories deep now sits just meters (yards) from the aging reactor at the Shimon Peres Negev Nuclear Research Center near the city of Dimona. The facility is already home to decades-old underground laboratories that reprocess the reactor's spent rods to obtain weapons-grade plutonium for Israel's nuclear bomb program.

A Rhode Island businessman who runs an auto sales company illegally exported 19 vehicles to Lebanon, federal prosecutors said Wednesday.

Carlo Fakhri, 50, who operates D'Agostino's Auto Sales and Salvage, Inc., in North Providence, is charged with violating a law that requires him to provide the correct name, address, identification number, and contact information for the purchaser and receiver of each vehicle to the U.S. Commerce Department, according to the U.S. attorney's office in Rhode Island.