Tighter COVID-19 restrictions, including a ban on dining in restaurants after 6 p.m., mean many Hong Kong families are eating their reunion dinner on Lunar New Year's eve at home this year.

The traditional dish known as "poon choi," or "basin food," is a large dish filled with lotus root, radish, taro and more expensive delicacies such as prawns, abalones and meat layered on top. Each food is symbolic and enjoying the dish with family is a way of sharing hope for a good year.

Lebanon’s crisis is increasingly forcing young people to drop out of learning and engage in ill-paid, irregular and informal work "just to survive and help feed their families," UNICEF said in a report released Friday.

The report – Searching for Hope – says that more than 4 in 10 youth in Lebanon reduced spending on education to buy basic food, medicine and other essential items, and 3 in 10 stopped their education altogether.

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.

In a classroom in northern Iraq, Zhiwei Hu presides over his students as a conductor would an orchestra. He cues with a question, and the response from his students resounds in perfect, fluent Chinese.

The 52-year-old has been teaching the cohort of 14 Iraqi Kurdish students at the behest of the Chinese consulate in the northern city of Irbil.

Australians celebrated and protested the anniversary of British colonization of their country Wednesday on a day that is officially known as Australia Day but is considered by Indigenous activists Invasion Day.

Argument rages over how history should remember a fleet of 11 British ships carrying a human cargo of convicts arriving at Port Jackson in present-day Sydney on Jan. 26, 1788.

France has a new law that bans so-called conversion therapies and authorizes jail time and fines for practitioners who use the scientifically discredited practice to attempt to change the sexual orientation or gender identity of LGBTQ people.

The National Assembly approved the new law unanimously, voting 142-0 on Tuesday evening.

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.

Lia Thomas has made a splash in U.S. collegiate women's swimming with her dominant performances for the University of Pennsylvania. But just a few years ago, she competed on the men's team.

War kept him away from his beloved homeland for decades. Now, virtuoso oud player Naseer Shamma hopes to help rebuild conflict-scarred Iraq through a series of concerts and other projects to support culture and education.

The audience at the Iraqi National Theater were on their feet, overcome with emotion as Shamma played a night of classics from the Iraqi songbook and modern compositions.