Some people couldn't wait to leave town. Others just wanted to get outside and feel free again. All of them wore face masks against the virus that had forced them to stay in their homes for more than two months. Chinese authorities ended the lockdown of Wuhan on Wednesday, allowing people to move about and leave the city for the first time in 76 days. Thousands boarded trains, planes and long-distance buses, finally able to return to their homes and jobs. Many had come to visit relatives during the Lunar New Year holiday in late January and were trapped when the coronavirus lockdown was announced with no advance warning. The outbreak started in Wuhan, an industrial city of 11 million people on the Yangtze River. Authorities cut off and shut down the city in a desperate bid to stop the disease from spreading. It still killed more than 2,500 people in Wuhan, by far the highest death toll in China, and grew into a pandemic. Once the lockdown was lifted, drivers took to the roads...

A truck driver accused in the deaths of 39 Vietnamese migrants whose bodies were found inside a refrigerated container in England has pleaded guilty to manslaughter

Supermoons occur several times a year when the moon becomes closest to Earth in orbit.

Israeli Jews have been forced to scale back or cancel beloved traditions and rituals marking the start of Passover, the holiday celebrating the Israelites’ freedom from Egyptian bondage

The global chemical weapons watchdog has issued a report blaming the Syrian air force for a series of chemical attacks in late March 2017 on the central town of Latamneh

More than 200 European intellectuals, artists and politicians have signed an open letter to European Union leaders urging them to take swift action to ease the economic pain of the pandemic crisis

Health authorities in Thailand say more than half the people returning from a trip to a mass religious meeting in Indonesia were found to be infected with the COVID-19 virus

A huge bridge section has collapsed in Tuscany, the latest case of Italy’s infrastructure crumbling after years of neglect

A truck driver has pleaded guilty to manslaughter in the deaths of 39 Vietnamese found inside a container in England

France’s defense ministry says the aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle is heading back to port amid a possible on-board outbreak of the new coronavirus

Global chemical weapons watchdog: Reasonable grounds to believe Syrian air force responsible for attacks in March 2017

The Saudi king has ordered the suspension of rulings and judicial orders regarding visitation rights of children of separated parents

The Vatican says Pope Francis has created a new commission of experts to examine whether women can be deacons, an ordained role in the Catholic Church currently reserved for men

Europe's top court has ordered Poland's government to immediately suspend a new body set up to discipline judges, saying that the chamber did not guarantee impartiality

French counter-terrorism prosecutors have opened a judicial investigation after a knife attack south of Lyon left two people dead on Saturday

Boris Johnson's spokesman says the British prime minister is “responding to treatment” but remains in intensive care with the new coronavirus

The streets of Wuhan are clogged with traffic and long lines formed for mass transit as people left the central Chinese city for homes and jobs elsewhere

European governments are struggling to agree on how to help the region's hardest-hit countries weather the coronavirus recession

The Philippines has expressed solidarity with Vietnam after Hanoi protested what it says was the ramming and sinking of a Vietnamese fishing boat by a Chinese coast guard ship in the disputed South China Sea

The largest supermoon of the year lit up the famed Paris landmark, as the city is deserted amid the coronavirus outbreak.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has declared a monthlong state of emergency in Tokyo and six other hard-hit prefectures to step up the fight against the coronavirus outbreak

Germany’s Cabinet has approved legislation that will make it easier for authorities to prevent foreign takeovers of strategically important companies

One person was injured after a fire broke outat a replica of a Prussian palace being rebuilt on the city’s historic Unter den Linden boulevard, which was brought quickly under control

An Afghan official says a Taliban attack in northern Balkh province the previous day killed seven civilians

Officials say an improvised explosive device went off on a road in southeast Turkey, killing five forestry workers traveling to work

The leader of the remote Solomon Islands says 27 people are dead after being washed overboard from a packed ferry last week and the government is conducting a criminal investigation

The coronavirus outbreak poses a dilemma for tens of thousands of Palestinian laborers working inside Israel who can no longer travel back and forth from their homes in the occupied West Bank

A prominent Communist party member who criticized Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak is being investigated on suspicion of a “severe violation of discipline and law.”

The last restrictions on movement have been lifted in the central Chinese city where the coronavirus pandemic began

Boris Johnson is in stable condition at a London hospital’s ICU unit due to coronavirus infection.

Wuhan was released from coronavirus lockdown on Wednesday, and it’s as if the Chinese city where the pandemic started late last year has awakened from a long slumber. For more than two months, the once-bustling city of 11 million people was all but silent. Its borders were sealed, businesses closed and communities kept behind barriers. During the 76-day lockdown, Wuhan’s residents seemed to live in a crepuscular world of neither night nor day, with time passing slowly, each day blurring into the next. Now, residents of central China’s largest city are eager to reawaken and for life to flow back to its streets and factories. It’s a cycle many places will experience as the coronavirus sweeps through.

The Ocean Park in Hong Kong had been closed since January due to the coronavirus outbreak.

While tributes to courageous medical personnel putting themselves in the virus' path circle the globe, Mexico and some other places have seen disturbing aggression born of fear

Cardinal George Pell has welcomed Australia’s highest court clearing him of child sex crimes and says his trial had not been a referendum on the Catholic Church’s handling of the clergy abuse crisis

The devastation wrought by COVID-19 across the developed world in cutting into the financial lifelines for people in Latin America, Africa and Asia

The supermoon, the largest yet this year, rose over Durham, England, on Tuesday.

With coronavirus prevention measures shuttering houses of worship, pastors across the country are using that ultimate tool of social distancing — cars — to safely bring their communities closer together

Health authorities in Libya's U.N.-backed government say rockets have rained down on the capital of Tripoli in the second day of heavy bombardment by eastern-based forces that struck one of the city’s largest hospitals

Nearly 60 percent of 217 people _ many from Australia, Europe and the United States _ on board a cruise ship off the coast of Uruguay have tested positive for the new coronavirus

An Ecuadorian court has found former President Rafael Correa guilty of corruption and sentenced him to eight years in prison

The Pakistani military says dozens of doctors who were briefly jailed for protesting a lack of protective equipment to treat the growing number of coronavirus cases will get the equipment they need

A government ministry says Germany plans to take in up to 50 unaccompanied children from overcrowded migrant camps in Greece

People across Rwanda are marking the anniversary of the 1994 genocide at home

As British Prime Minister Boris Johnson fights the coronavirus in the intensive care unit of a London hospital, the people of his country are wishing him well and also wondering who’s in charge

Pakistan's military says its troops have killed seven militants in separate raids on militant hideouts in the country's northwest bordering Afghanistan

Sixty-six people at a single hospital in South Africa have tested positive for the coronavirus in the past few days

A look at the top photos from around the globe.

The workers held up signs reading “covered mouths have a voice.”

An endangered eastern black rhino calf copied his mother by rolling around in the mud.

German airline group Lufthansa is slashing capacity on a permanent basis, saying that air travel will take years to come back to where it was before the virus outbreak