Cities around the world are readying to ring in the New Year with celebrations highlighting local cultures and traditions, after a year roiled by ongoing conflict and political instability.

Countries in the South Pacific Ocean will be the first to welcome 2025, with midnight in New Zealand striking 18 hours before the ball drop in Times Square in New York.

Russia and Ukraine have exchanged prisoners of war in the latest such swap that saw the release of hundreds of captives and was brokered with the help of the United Arab Emirates, officials said Monday.

Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said 189 Ukrainian prisoners, including military personnel, border guards and national guards — along with two civilians — were freed. He thanked the UAE for helping negotiate the exchange.

The United States announced a $2.5 billion security assistance package for Ukraine on Monday as Washington races to provide aid to Kyiv before President-elect Donald Trump takes office.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping on Monday told U.S. President Joe Biden the relationship between their two countries was "one of the most important" in the world, state media reported.

"China is willing to work with the United States... (to) promote the development of healthy, stable China-US relations, moving sustainably forward down the right track", state broadcaster CCTV reported Xi as saying in a condolence letter, following the death of former U.S. president Jimmy Carter.

Former President Jimmy Carter has died at the age of 100. The 39th president of the United States was a Georgia peanut farmer who sought to restore trust in government when he assumed the presidency in 1977 and then built a reputation for tireless work as a humanitarian. He earned a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.

Carter died Sunday, coming up on two years after entering hospice care, at his home in Plains, Georgia.

Jimmy Carter, the peanut farmer who won the presidency in the wake of the Watergate scandal and Vietnam War, endured humbling defeat after one tumultuous term and then redefined life after the White House as a global humanitarian, has died. He was 100 years old.

The longest-lived American president died on Sunday, roughly 22 months after entering hospice care, at his home in the small town of Plains, Georgia, where he and his wife, Rosalynn, who died at 96 in November 2023, spent most of their lives, The Carter Center said.

A passenger plane burst into flames Sunday after it skidded off a runway at a South Korean airport and slammed into a concrete fence when its front landing gear apparently failed to deploy, killing most of the 181 people on board, in one of the country's worst aviation disasters.

The head of Russia's civil aviation agency said Friday that Ukrainian drones were attacking the city of Grozny as an Azerbaijani Airlines plane was trying to land there, before it later crashed in Kazakhstan.

Dmitry Yadrov also said on Telegram that there was heavy fog over Grozny when the incident occurred Wednesday and "conditions that day and in those hours around the airport were very complicated".

North Korean troops are suffering heavy losses in the fighting in Russia's Kursk region and facing logistical difficulties as a result of Ukrainian attacks, Ukraine's military intelligence said Thursday.

The intelligence agency, known under its acronym GUR, said Ukrainian strikes near Novoivanovka inflicted heavy casualties on North Korean units. It said North Korean troops also faced supply issues and even shortages of drinking water.

German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier dissolved parliament on Friday and confirmed the expected date for the early general election prompted by the collapse of Olaf Scholz's government last month.

"I have decided to dissolve the 20th German Bundestag to fix the date for an early election for February 23rd," Steinmeier said in a speech, adding that "political stability in Germany is a precious asset".