Europe

MOSCOW, June 3 (Reuters) - Russian mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin said on Saturday that Kremlin factions were destroying the state by trying to sow discord between him and Chechen fighters.

That row had now been settled but infighting in the Kremlin had opened a Pandora's Box of rifts, he said.

Prigozhin, a 62-year-old former restauranteur who founded the Wagner mercenary group and is a member of President Vladimir Putin's wider circle, has gained widespread notoriety during the 15-month war in Ukraine.

PARIS, June 3 (Xinhua) -- The French National Assembly and the French Senate have adopted a bill to regulate influencer marketing on social media, local media reported Friday.

The bill prohibits the influencers from promoting adulterated products, conducting scams or fraud on social media.

The influencers are also obliged to label content paid by brands when creating content to encourage their audience to purchase the products or services.

VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Francis warned the Vatican’s missionary fundraisers on Saturday not to allow financial corruption to creep into their work, insisting that spirituality and spreading the Gospel must drive their operations, not mere entrepreneurship.

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Concerns around civilian safety spiked in Ukraine on Saturday, as officials announced that an inspection had found nearly a quarter of the country’s air-raid shelters locked or unusable, just days after a woman in Kyiv allegedly died waiting outside a shuttered shelter during a Russian missile barrage.

The Ukrainian interior ministry said through its press service Saturday that of the “over 4,800” shelters it had inspected, 252 were locked and a further 893 “unfit for use.”

BERLIN (AP) — A senior United Arab Emirates official says the Gulf nation wants the U.N. climate summit it’s hosting later this year to deliver “game-changing results” for international efforts to curb global warming, but doing so will require having the fossil fuel industry at the table.

BUDAPEST, June 2. /TASS/: Hungary's policy will be determined on the basis of its geographical position within the triangle of three countries - Russia, Germany and Turkey, Prime Minister Viktor Orban said on the radio station Kossuth.

He believes that the attention of Budapest, as the capital of a European country, should be focused on the three centers of political and economic power - Moscow, Berlin and Ankara.

"Russia, Germany, Turkey - our life is within this triangle - and it is in this triangle that the lives of Hungarians must be governed well," Orban said.

BELGRADE, June 2. /TASS/: The West made a mistake by recognizing the independence of self-declared Kosovo and providing unilateral support to the Pristina authorities, Petr Bystron, a Bundestag member for the Alternative for Germany party said.

BERLIN, June 2. /TASS/: The German Cabinet is aware of the reports about a possible Ukrainian suspect in the blowups of Nord Stream gas pipelines but will not comment on them until the end of the investigation, Cabinet spokesperson Christiane Hoffman told reporters on Friday.

"We certainly have taken note of this publication. I request patience until the actual completion of the investigation," Hoffman said. "We have no position [on this matter] at the moment," she noted.

WARSAW, June 2 (Reuters) - Poland's President Andrzej Duda said on Friday he would propose amendments to a law on undue Russian influence he signed this week, reacting to criticism that it could result in banning opposition politicians from public office.

Duda on Monday signed into law the bill proposed by the ruling party to let a panel investigate whether opposition parties allowed Poland to be unduly influenced by Russia. He said he would send it to the Constitutional Tribunal for review only after it comes into force.

MOSCOW, June 2 (Reuters) - The Kremlin said on Friday that if Ukraine joined NATO then it would cause problems for many years to come, an issue he said many European Union countries understood though the United States ultimately called the tunes at the military alliance.

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy pressed his case on Thursday for Ukraine to be part of the NATO military alliance and urged the alliance to provide security guarantees if membership were not possible for now.