As New Zealand began easing month-long lockdown restrictions, burger and coffee takeaway joints in the country witnessed a massive rush.
Long queues of cars were seen outside McDonald's outlets in Auckland and Wellington from the early hours of Tuesday, with many spotted heading to the beaches.
Around 400,000 people returned to work after Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced the easing of lockdown restrictions from "Level 4" to "Level 3".
She said the shutdown had effectively eliminated the coronavirus in the country, but stressed it would be weeks before all movement restrictions were lifted.
"It's an ongoing battle," Ardern said at a televised news conference. "There is no one point in time that this mission ends. We are in the next phase of the battle and we are not done."
"No one wants a second wave in New Zealand and we must guard against that," she added.
So far, the country has recorded 1,472 cases and 19 deaths.
GlaxoSmithKline sued Pfizer and BioNTech in Delaware federal court on Thursday, accusing them of infringing GSK patents related to messenger RNA (mRNA) technology in the companies' blockbuster COVID-19 vaccines.
Israel's military is poised to evacuate Palestinian civilians from Rafah and assault Hamas hold-outs in the southern Gaza Strip city, a senior Israeli defence official said, despite international warnings of a humanitarian catastrophe.
Relentless rains, hail and winds of near hurricane intensity battered southern China, forcing the evacuation of an entire town of more than 1,700 people in the province of Guangdong, media said on Thursday.
Marine wildlife experts were frantically trying to rescue some 140 pilot whales stranded on Thursday in the shallow waters of an estuary in the southwest of the state of Western Australia.
A grand jury has charged 18 people with allegedly participating in an Arizona fake elector scheme to re-elect then-US President Donald Trump in 2020, the state's attorney general said on Wednesday.