Russia has clashed with the United States and other Western nations over the Kremlin’s call for a U.N. investigation of the sabotage of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines from Russia to Western Europe.

A climate change conference will underscore to policymakers in the Middle East and the east Mediterranean that the switch from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources is needed urgently because greenhouse gas emissions are helping to drive up regional temperatures faster than in many other inhabited parts of the world.

As the World Health Organization draws up plans for the next phase of its probe into how the coronavirus pandemic started, an increasing number of scientists say it isn’t up to the task and that the U.N. health agency shouldn’t even be the one to investigate.

STOCKHOLM (AP) – The coronavirus brought a year of fear and anxiety, loneliness and lockdown, and illness and death, but an annual report on happiness around the world released Friday suggests the pandemic has not crushed people’s spirits. The editors of the 2021 World Happiness Report found that while emotions changed as the pandemic set in, longer-term satisfaction with life was less affected. AdDue to the pandemic, the surveys were done in slightly fewer than 100 countries for this year’s World Happiness Report, the ninth one compiled since the project started. The top 10 countries are Finland, Denmark, Switzerland, Iceland, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Luxembourg, New Zealand and Austria. “We don’t really have to be more.”____Seth Borenstein in Washington D.C. contributed to this report.