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NEW YORK, Jan 17 (APP): Within hours of being sworn in on Wednesday as the US President, Joe Biden plans to sign a number of executive orders, including rejoining the 2016 Paris climate accord and ending the travel ban on predominantly Muslim countries, designed to signal an immediate break from President Donald Trump.

“President-elect Biden will take action — not just to reverse the gravest damages of the Trump administration — but also to start moving our country forward,” incoming White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain wrote in a memo released Saturday.

NEW YORK, January 17. /TASS/: NASA specialists carried out test firing of the Space Launch System (SLS) carrier missile engines Saturday. The event was livestreamed on the NASA website.

Four engines, installed on a special stand inside the NASA testing facility, worked simultaneously for about one minute. The firing was expected to last about eight minutes.

16 Jan 2021; MEMO: The United Nations Security Council approved on Friday the appointment of veteran diplomat Jan Kubis as the UN Libya envoy, diplomats said, nearly a year after the last mediator stepped down.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) has called on the administration of President-elect Joe Biden on Wednesday to stop selling weapons to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), in order to have a positive impact on the situation in Yemen.

The organisation stated in a report published on its website: "The parties to the armed conflict in Yemen have continued to violate the laws of war over the past year, including committing what appear to be new war crimes."

UNITED NATIONS, Jan. 15 (Xinhua) -- United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Friday called for "far greater solidarity" in his video message on the 2 millionth death from the COVID-19 pandemic.

"In the memory of those two million souls, the world must act with far greater solidarity. Now is the time," the UN chief said, highlighting the fact that "our world has reached a heart-wrenching milestone: the COVID-19 pandemic has now claimed two million lives."

NEW YORK (AP) — New York prosecutors conducted an hourslong interview Thursday of Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s former personal attorney, asking a range of questions about Trump’s business dealings, according to three people familiar with the meeting.

The interview focused in part on Trump’s relationship with Deutsche Bank, his biggest and longest standing creditor, according to the three people, who weren’t authorized to discuss the investigation and spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity.

NEW YORK (AP) — Justice Department lawyers asked a federal appeals court Friday to replace President Donald Trump with the United States as the defendant in a defamation lawsuit brought by a woman who says he raped her in the 1990s.

The lawyers filed papers in an appeal of a lower-court Manhattan judge’s ruling denying the substitution in a lawsuit brought by E. Jean Carroll, a columnist who in a June 2019 book described her encounter with Trump at an upscale Manhattan department store.

UNITED NATIONS, Jan 15 (APP): Senior UN officials have called on the US to reverse a decision to designate Yemen’s Houthis as a terrorist organization, saying the move will cause a large-scale famine in the Arab country already suffering the worst humanitarian crisis in the world.

The call from UN’s Humanitarian chief Mark Lowcock, head of the World Food Programme (WFP) David Beasley and UN’s Special Envoy for Yemen Martin Griffiths were made Thursday at the virtual U.N. Security Council meeting on Yemen.

NEW YORK, Jan 15 (APP): As Israel presses ahead with its coronavirus vaccination programme, a number of human rights groups and United Nations rights experts have called on the Jewish state to also provide doses to Palestinians in the occupied territories of West Bank and Gaza.

Amnesty International said denying Covid-19 vaccines to Palestinians exposed Israel’s “institutionalised discrimination”.

United Nations, Jan 15 (AP-PTI) The UN chief and top officials urged the United States on Thursday to reverse its decision to declare Yemen's Iran-backed rebels a terrorist group to prevent massive famine and death in the conflict-torn Arab nation but the Trump administration in its final days stood by its action.

The US deputy ambassador, Richard Mills, told the Security Council the U.S. has listened to warnings of the terrorist designation's humanitarian impact and will take measures to reduce the impact on aid deliveries and commercial imports.