US President-elect Joe Biden on Tuesday vowed a relentless effort to fight Covid-19 the moment he takes office, as he warned that Donald Trump's vaccination drive was falling dangerously short.

Jonathan Pollard, an American jailed in the US in 1985 for spying for Israel, landed in the Jewish state on Wednesday, where he was received by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

In the days before he detonated a bomb in downtown Nashville on Christmas, Anthony Quinn Warner changed his life in ways that suggest he never intended to survive the blast that killed him and wounded three other people.

Warner, 63, gave away his car, telling the recipient that he had cancer. A month before the bombing, he signed a document that transferred his longtime home in a Nashville suburb to a California woman for nothing in return. The computer consultant told an employer that he was retiring.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Tuesday that Moscow and Ankara's military cooperation would not be deterred by US sanctions on Turkey for acquiring a Russian missile defence system.

Turkey's Constitutional Court on Tuesday rejected leading rights defender Osman Kavala's appeal for an immediate release, ruling that his detention for over three years without a conviction was lawful.

Search efforts for survivors stretched into the night Tuesday after a powerful earthquake killed at least six people in central Croatia, tearing down rooftops and piling rubble in the streets.

Russia said Tuesday it had dismantled an international drug smuggling network as part of a collaborative operation with the United States, in a rare show of cooperation between Washington and Moscow.

The Federal Security Service (FSB) said it had carried out a multi-stage mission with the US Department of Justice that ended with the seizure of 330 kilograms of cocaine with an estimated street value of $1 billion.

President-elect Joe Biden said Monday that Donald Trump's appointees at the Pentagon were stalling on the transition and warned that the United States faces security risks as a result.

Fifty journalists and media workers were killed in connection with their work in 2020, the majority in countries that are not at war, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said Tuesday.

Despite London and Brussels reaching a trade deal to limit the fallout of Brexit the flow of people and goods across the Channel will change significantly on January 1, when Britain's departure from the EU becomes complete.