The UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres delivered an unexpected moment of levity at the COP27 climate conference on Wednesday, reading the beginning of the wrong speech before realising, chuckling and starting again with a different opening line.
Speaking in the main plenary hall of the Sharm el-Sheikh conference on Wednesday, Guterres was due to give the opening address at a session with former US Vice President Al Gore on tracking carbon emissions.
"The world is losing the race against the climate crisis, but I am hopeful because of you. You have been relentless in holding decision makers to account," Guterres began before pausing in confusion and shuffling through his written speech.
Laughing to himself, he said: "I think that I was given the wrong speech."
The delegates assembled in the hall then applauded as the correct document was brought to him.
Guterres explained that he was due to speak to a group of young people after his address, and had begun reading the speech aimed at them instead.
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.