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.

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.

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parties within the British government deepened Friday when police said they wanted parts of it to remain unpublished until they finish a criminal investigation.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."

When the coronavirus began spreading around the world, the remote Pacific archipelago of Kiribati closed its borders, ensuring the disease didn't reach its shores for nearly two full years.

Kiribati finally began reopening this month, allowing the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to charter a plane to bring home 54 of the island nation's citizens. Many of those aboard were missionaries who had left Kiribati before the border closure to spread the faith abroad for what is commonly known as the Mormon church.

The EU's drug watchdog approved Pfizer's coronavirus pill on Thursday, making it the first oral antiviral treatment for the disease to be authorized in Europe.

U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon Dorothy Shea, Dr. Fadi Sanan representing Health Minister Firass Abiad and Dr. Souha Kanj of the American University of Beirut who represented AUB President Fadlo Khuri on Thursday launched the Moderna Covid-19 vaccination campaign at Haykel Hospital in Tripoli.

The United States, through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), has recently donated over 600,000 vaccine doses to support the Lebanese government's National Vaccination Strategy against the Covid-19 pandemic.

Thousands of people braved a morning chill Wednesday on a ceremonial boulevard in India's capital to watch a display of the country's military power and cultural diversity, but the colorful annual Republic Day spectacle was curtailed amid COVID-19.

Nearly 500 schoolchildren, folk dancers, police and military battalions, floats and stunt performers on motorbikes paraded from the presidential palace down the refurbished tree-lined boulevard of Rajpath.

Pfizer has begun a study comparing its original COVID-19 vaccine with doses specially tweaked to match the hugely contagious omicron variant.

Pfizer and its partner BioNTech announced the study on Tuesday.

Thailand on Tuesday became the first country in Asia to approve the de facto decriminalization of marijuana, though authorities have left a grey area around its recreational use.

Health Minister Anutin Charnvirakul announced that the Narcotics Control Board had approved the dropping cannabis from the ministry's list of controlled drugs.

Japan's government plans to put the majority of the country under pre-emergency status and extend COVID-19 restrictions as omicron cases have surged and threatened to disrupt basic services like hospitals and schools.

Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said Monday that he will tighten anti-virus measures in 18 more prefectures, including Hokkaido in the north to Osaka and Kyoto in western Japan, until Feb. 20. This will be in addition to areas where similar restrictions are already in place or to be further extended — including Tokyo, Okinawa, Yamaguchi and Hiroshima.