A South Korean court on Tuesday approved an arrest warrant for President Yoon Suk Yeol, who was stripped of his presidential powers just weeks ago over his short-lived martial law decree that threw the country into political chaos.

This is the first time a sitting South Korean president has faced an arrest warrant granted by a court.

South Korea’s parliament voted to impeach Yoon on December 14 in an extraordinary rebuke that came about after his own ruling party turned on him following his refusal to resign.

South Korea’s anti-corruption agency said the Seoul Western District Court granted the warrant for Yoon, who is facing a probe on charges of abuse of authority and orchestrating a rebellion after he announced martial law on December 3.

The arrest warrant was issued after Yoon, a former prosecutor, had refused to answer three summonses by investigators in recent weeks asking for his cooperation, according to the Corruption Investigation Office (CIO).

The CIO said an arrest warrant must usually be executed within seven days but can be extended.

This is a developing story.

The Taliban say they will close all national and foreign nongovernmental groups in Afghanistan employing women, the latest crackdown on women’s rights since they took power in August 2021.

The announcement comes two years after they told NGOs to suspend the employment of Afghan women, allegedly because they didn’t wear the Islamic headscarf correctly.

In a letter published on X Sunday night, the Economy Ministry warned that failure to comply with the latest order would lead to NGOs losing their license to operate in Afghanistan.

The United Nations said the space for women in Afghanistan has shrunk dramatically in the last two years and reiterated its call for the Taliban to reverse the restrictions.

“This really impacts how we can provide life saving humanitarian assistance to all the people in Afghanistan,” UN associate spokesperson Florencia Soto Nino-Martinez said. “And obviously we are very concerned by the fact that we are talking about a country where half the population’s rights are being denied and are living in poverty, and many of them, not just women, are facing a humanitarian crisis.”

The Economy Ministry said it was responsible for the registration, coordination, leadership and supervision of all activities carried out by national and foreign organizations.

The government was once again ordering the stoppage of all female work in institutions not controlled by the Taliban, according to the letter.

“In case of lack of cooperation, all activities of that institution will be canceled and the activity license of that institution, granted by the ministry, will also be canceled.”

It’s the Taliban’s latest attempt to control or intervene in NGO activity.

Earlier this month, the UN Security Council heard that an increasing proportion of female Afghan humanitarian workers were prevented from doing their work even though relief work remains essential.

According to Tom Fletcher, a senior UN official, the proportion of humanitarian organizations reporting that their female or male staff were stopped by the Taliban’s morality police has also increased.

The Taliban deny they are stopping aid agencies from carrying out their work or interfering with their activities.

They have already barred women from many jobs and most public spaces, and also excluded them from education beyond sixth grade.

In another development, the Taliban leader Hibatullah Akhundzada has ordered that buildings should not have windows looking into places where a woman might sit or stand.

According to a four-clause decree posted on X late Saturday, the order applies to new buildings as well as existing ones.

The United Nations also called for a reversal of this restriction, Soto Nino-Martinez said.

The decree said windows should not overlook or look into areas like yards or kitchens. Where a window looks into such a space then the person responsible for that property must find a way to obscure this view to “remove harm,” by installing a wall, fence or screen.

Municipalities and other authorities must supervise the construction of new buildings to avoid installing windows that look into or over residential properties, the decree added.

A spokesman for the Ministry of Urban Development and Housing was not immediately available for comment on Akhundzada’s instructions.

The World Health Organization has urged China to share data to help understand the origins of Covid-19, five years on from the start of the pandemic in the Chinese city of Wuhan.

On December 31, 2019, the WHO’s China office noted a cluster of “pneumonia” cases in a statement from health authorities in Wuhan. More than three weeks later, Chinese authorities locked down the city of 11 million.

Fears of a rapidly spreading virus gripped the nation, but – as authorities would later learn – the coronavirus had already spread far beyond China.

While much of the world has moved on from the pandemic lockdowns and restrictions, many questions remain about the source of a virus that killed at least seven million people, crippled health care systems and upended the global economy. And many experts say China’s opacity has made finding answers to the pandemic’s origins harder.

“We continue to call on China to share data and access so we can understand the origins of COVID-19. This is a moral and scientific imperative,” the WHO said in a statement on Monday.

“Without transparency, sharing, and cooperation among countries, the world cannot adequately prevent and prepare for future epidemics and pandemics.”

How the pandemic started has been a subject of intense scientific scrutiny as well as heated political debates, with opinions divided primarily over whether it originated from a natural animal spillover or a lab leak.

Many scientists believe the virus originated in the wild, before it jumped from infected animals to humans and spread through a wet market in Wuhan, though they haven’t been able to identify the intermediate host.

Suspicions that the coronavirus was leaked from a laboratory near the market, which was first dismissed as a conspiracy theory, have persisted and been endorsed by some researchers.

The search for the origins of the virus has been hugely controversial from the onset and a key source of political tension. The United States and other Western countries have repeatedly accused China of withholding access to original and complete data – which Beijing has vehemently denied.

WHO officials have also criticized China’s tight control of data access, with one official calling its lack of data disclosure “simply inexcusable” in 2023.

Chinese disease control officials responded at the time, saying China had provided the WHO’s expert group with all information it had on the origins of the virus “without withholding any cases, samples, or their testing and analysis results.”

For years, the global health agency has sought access to test results from workers at the market, as well as other raw data that China collected early on in the pandemic.

It was only in 2023, three years after the start of the pandemic, that WHO got access to certain data that Chinese scientists had gathered in early 2020 at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan. The raw genetic sequences from the samples had been uploaded to the data-sharing site GISAID. They were soon removed, but quick-thinking researchers had already noticed them and downloaded them for further study.

An analysis of that material, published in the peer-reviewed journal Cell in September, showed that coronavirus-susceptible animals and the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 were present at a specific section of the market, although the study did not confirm whether the animals themselves were infected with the virus.

In its statement on Monday, the WHO recounted how on December 31, 2019, its country office in China picked up a statement from the Wuhan municipal health commission’s website on cases of “viral pneumonia” in the city.

“In the weeks, months and years that unfolded after that, COVID-19 came to shape our lives and our world,” it said.

“As we mark this milestone, let’s take a moment to honour the lives changed and lost, recognize those who are suffering from COVID-19 and long COVID, express gratitude to the health workers who sacrificed so much to care for us, and commit to learning from COVID-19 to build a healthier tomorrow.”

When the ball drops in New York City’s Times Square to herald the start of 2025, it’ll actually be late to the party as dozens of countries around the world will already have welcomed the new year.

Kiribati is an island country in the central Pacific Ocean, and its largest island, Kiritimati, will be the first place to kick off 2025 when it is just 5 a.m. on December 31 on the East Coast of the United States and 11 a.m. UTC (Coordinated Universal Time, the global standard).

The Pacific Island nation will be followed by Chatham Islands in New Zealand at 5:15 a.m. ET and then most of New Zealand at 6 a.m., along with Tokelau, Samoa, Tonga, Kiribati’s Phoenix Islands and some regions of Antarctica.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the international date line, Hawaii, American Samoa, and many of the US outlying islands will be among the last places to pop Champagne corks. They’ll have to wait until Wednesday morning (Eastern Time) to toast 2025.

In all, there are 39 different local time zones in use across the globe – some differing by 15 or 30 minutes compared to nearby zones – including two which are more than 12 hours ahead of UTC, which means it takes 26 hours for the entire world to welcome the New Year.

So, if you really, really, really love to hum “Auld Lang Syne,” the list below will get you in the spirit over and over and over again as the day rolls around.

Here’s when places around the world will be ringing in the New Year, relative to East Coast time.

Tuesday, December 31, 2024

5 a.m. ET Kiritimati, which is also known as Christmas Island and forms part of the Micronesian island nation of Kiribati

5:15 a.m. ET Chatham Islands, off the eastern coast of New Zealand

6 a.m. ET Most of New Zealand (with a few exceptions) and Tokelau, Samoa, Tonga, Kiribati’s Phoenix Islands and some regions of Antarctica

7 a.m. ET Fiji, a small part of eastern Russia, and several more Pacific islands, including the Marshall Islands and Tuvalu

8 a.m. ET Much of Australia including Melbourne and Sydney and seven more locations, including Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands, Bougainville in Papua New Guinea, and New Caledonia

8:30 a.m. ET A small region of Australia including Adelaide

9 a.m. ET Australia’s state of Queensland and six more locations, including parts of Micronesia, the Northern Mariana Islands, a small part of Antarctica, and Guam

9:30 a.m. ET Australia’s Northern Territory

10 a.m. ET Japan, South Korea, a small part of Russia, North Korea, a small part of Indonesia, Timor-Leste, and Palau

10:15 a.m. ET Western Australia

11 a.m. ET China, Philippines, Malaysia, parts of Indonesia, most of Mongolia, Taiwan, Brunei, Russia’s Irkutsk region, some parts of Antarctica, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Macao

Noon ET Much of Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, some parts of Russia, some parts of Mongolia, a small region of Antarctica, and Australia’s Christmas Island

12:30 p.m. ET Myanmar and the Cocos Islands, an Australian territory

1 p.m. ET Bangladesh, parts of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Bhutan, the British Indian Ocean Territory, the city of Omsk in Russia, and a small part of Antarctica

1:15 p.m. ET Nepal

1:30 p.m. ET India and Sri Lanka

2 p.m. ET Pakistan, some parts of Russia, much of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, the Maldives, Tajikistan, French Southern territories, France’s Kerguelen islands, and a small region of Antarctica

2:30 p.m. ET Afghanistan

3 p.m. ET Azerbaijan, the United Arab Emirates, Armenia, a small region of Russia, Oman, much of Georgia, Frances’ Réunion Island, Mauritius, and the Seychelles

3:30 p.m. ET Iran

4 p.m. ET Moscow in Russia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Kenya, in addition to 17 other locations

5 p.m. ET Greece, Egypt, Lebanon, Rwanda, Romania, and 26 other locations

6 p.m. ET Germany, Nigeria, Algeria, Italy, Belgium, Morocco, Albania, France and 38 other locations

7 p.m. ET United Kingdom, Portugal, Iceland, Burkina Faso, Senegal, Ghana, Sierra Leone, and 18 other locations

8 p.m. ET Cabo Verde, the Azores – which are made up of nine enchanting islands in the Atlantic but are part of Portugal – and a small region of Greenland

9 p.m. ET Most of Greenland, the Brazilian state of Pernambuco, and South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands

10 p.m. ET Most of Brazil, Argentina, Chile with exceptions, Uruguay, parts of Antarctica, Paraguay, French Guiana, Suriname, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, and the Falkland Islands

10:30 p.m. ET Canada’s Newfoundland and Labrador province

11 p.m. ET Some regions of Canada, Venezuela, Bolivia, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Aruba, Guyana, and 23 other locations

Wednesday, January 1, 2025

Midnight The East Coast of the USA (including New York City, Washington, D.C., and Detroit), parts of Canada, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Cuba, Acre in Brazil, Panama, a small part of Mexico, Haiti, Bahamas, Turks and Caicos Islands, Jamaica, a small region of Chile, and the Cayman Islands

1 a.m. ET Central USA (including Chicago), much of Mexico (including Mexico City), parts of Canada, Honduras, Belize, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, and a small part of Ecuador

2 a.m. ET US (Mountain time zone, including Denver and Phoenix), parts of Canada (including Edmonton and Calgary), and parts of Mexico

3 a.m. ET US (Pacific time zone, including Los Angeles and San Francisco), British Columbia in Canada, Baja California in Mexico, Pitcairn Islands, and Clipperton Island

4 a.m. ET Alaska in the US and regions of French Polynesia

4:30 a.m. ET Marquesas Islands in French Polynesia

5 a.m. ET Hawaii in the US, Tahiti in French Polynesia, and the Cook Islands

6 a.m. ET American Samoa, parts of the US minor outlying islands (including the Midway Atoll), and Niue, an island nation in the South Pacific Ocean

7 a.m. ET Much of US minor outlying islands (unincorporated US territories in the Pacific), including Baker Island and Howland Island