Scott Neuman

A man escaped North Korea last week by swimming several kilometers before coming ashore in the South, where he managed to evade border guards for more than six hours, according to a report released on Tuesday.

Malaysia has returned nearly 1,200 migrants from Myanmar in defiance of a court order and appeals from human rights groups to halt the process.

The Myanmar nationals were bused in from around the country and loaded onto three navy ships sent to retrieve them by Myanmar's ruling junta, which seized power in a coup earlier this month.

The action followed a stay issued by the Kuala Lumpur High Court putting the deportation stay of the 1,086 refugees on hold pending a Wednesday hearing.

Malaysia maintains that the deportees were detained for immigration offenses.

After traveling nearly 300 million miles and surviving a heart-stopping 7-minute descent to the surface of Mars, NASA's Perseverance rover is preparing to get down to the real science – looking for signs of ancient life on the red planet.

On Thursday, Perseverance shed its "cruise stage" and began a blistering 12,000 mph drop to the Martian surface.

Chicago police showed "confusion and lack of coordination" in their response to last summer's protests sparked by the death of George Floyd, according to a new watchdog report, which said officers frequently did not understand who was in charge or how to handle sometimes violent demonstrators.

Nearly a half-million Texans are without electricity for a third-straight day as the effects from historic winter storms that have blasted the state and many other parts of the country this week are still being felt.

And more severe weather is ahead for many of the same areas already hit hardest, with 100 million people in the path of the latest storm forecast to bring freezing rain and snow from the Plains to the East Coast on Thursday.

It's been a long journey for Perseverance, NASA's latest Mars rover, and it's about to get very real very quickly.

Perseverance, a six-wheeled, SUV-sized vehicle with the most sophisticated robotic astrobiology lab ever launched and an experimental aerial drone aboard, is at the heart of the Mars 2020 mission. It blasted off in July on a 293-million-mile journey.

Ousted Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who has been detained since the Feb. 1 coup that toppled her government, is facing new charges that might see her held indefinitely without trial.

Suu Kyi was initially accused of importing unregistered walkie-talkies, a charge widely viewed as a pretext for her arrest as the country's military junta consolidated power.

Updated 8:05 p.m. ET

Heavy snowfall and frigid temperatures across the U.S. have kept winter storm warnings in effect from Washington state to the Great Lakes into northern New England and a large section of the South that includes Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Arkansas.

It's also left more than four million customers without power across the United States, including three million in Texas alone.

Russia said Friday that it is prepared to cut ties with the European Union if the bloc slaps economic sanctions on the Kremlin in retaliation for the detention of opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was asked in an interview on the Russian YouTube channel Solovyov Live whether Moscow is moving toward severing ties with the EU.

Updated at 12:05 p.m. ET

Amid "growing reports and photographic evidence" that live ammunition is being used against anti-junta protesters in Myanmar, a United Nations human rights investigator is calling on the Security Council to consider sanctions against the country's coup leaders.

Thomas Andrews' remarks at a special session of the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva come a day after the U.S. imposed its own sanctions on the generals who overthrew the government of Aung San Suu Kyi on Feb. 1.

Updated at 2:51 p.m. ET

The Biden administration has imposed sanctions on 10 current and retired top-ranking leaders in Myanmar's military following a coup earlier this month that toppled the democratically elected government led by Aung San Suu Kyi.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel defended her government's decision to extend a COVID-19 lockdown into March, as she issued a stark warning that new strains of the coronavirus "may destroy any success" already achieved in keeping the pandemic in check.

The president of the European Commission admitted to mistakes Wednesday in the bloc's approach to inoculating its 447 million people against COVID-19, acknowledging that it was late to approve a vaccine and that officials held unrealistic expectations about how quickly one could be deployed.

As a result, "We are still not where we want to be," Ursula von der Leyen told European Parliament lawmakers in Brussels.

China's space agency, fresh off a successful sample-return mission to the moon, announced Wednesday that an ambitious rover mission it launched in July had reached orbit around Mars.

"China's Tianwen 1 robotic probe entered Martian orbit on Wednesday night after a lengthy interplanetary voyage, becoming the first Chinese spacecraft to reach the red planet," the state-run China Daily reported, citing the China National Space Administration.

A faulty engine throttle may have contributed to the crash of an Indonesian jetliner last month that killed all 62 people aboard, the country's air accident investigative agency said Wednesday.

Pilots aboard the Sriwijaya Air Boeing 737-500 struggled to keep the plane airborne just after takeoff from Jakarta on Jan. 9. Within minutes, they lost control, and the airliner nosed into the Java Sea.