Europe

MINSK, October 28. /TASS/: Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has stated that Minsk and Moscow would take a far harder line in light of the military build-up along Belarus' western borders, the BelTA news agency reported.

MOSCOW, October 28. /TASS/: The question of Russia's recognition of the interim Taliban government in Afghanistan (the movement is outlawed in Russia) is premature at the moment, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told a news briefing on Thursday.

"At the moment raising the question of Russia's official recognition of the new Afghan authorities would be premature," she said.

MOSCOW, October 28. /TASS/: Russia can reach the carbon-neutral status by 2060 unless complicating factors like new ‘all-encompassing sanctions’ emerge, special envoy of the Russian President on environmental matters, ecology and transport Sergey Ivanov told TASS on Thursday.

MOSCOW, October 28. /TASS/: The conflict in southeastern Ukraine cannot be settled by military means and the attempts to solve this problem with the use of force will have most deplorable and incalculable consequences, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told a briefing on Thursday.

LONDON, Oct 28 (NNN-AGENCIES) — From Death Valley to the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent to sub-Saharan Africa, global warming has already made daily life unbearable for millions of people.

  And if nothing is done to slow climate change, the record temperatures and deadly heatwaves it brings will only get worse, experts warn.

  “Climate (change) is sort of steroids for the weather. It’s loading the dice to make these sort of extreme events be more common,” said Zeke Hausfather, a climate expert at the Breakthrough Institute in California.

THE HAGUE, Oct 28 (Reuters) - Lawyers who represent the families of 298 people who died when a Malaysia Airlines jet was shot down over Ukraine in 2014, are being intimidated and have been offered protective measures, Dutch broadcaster RTL reported on Thursday.

Several members of the team of lawyers, representing the families in the ongoing Flight MH17 Dutch murder trial of three Russians and a Ukrainian citizen, reported being followed home from the court building or seeing suspicious men checking out their home addresses, the RTL report said.

SARAJEVO, Oct 28 (Reuters) - The European Union's top military official voiced support for the unified Bosnian armed forces on Thursday, after Serb leader Milorad Dodik had threatened to pull the Serb component out of the forces and form an exclusively Serb army within Bosnia.

The formation of the country's joint armed forces (OSBiH), incorporating Serb, Croat and Bosniak components that fought each other in a 1990s war, has been praised as the greatest achievement since the conflict, in which about 100,000 died.

LE HAVRE, France, Oct 28 (Reuters) - Britain denounced France's seizure of a British boat in French waters and warned Paris against further retaliation on Thursday, in a rapidly deteriorating row over post-Brexit fishing rights.

French Seas Minister Annick Girardin said the Cornelis Gert Jan, a scallop dredger, was escorted to the northern port of Le Havre overnight after its crew failed to prove it was allowed to fish in French territorial waters. A second British vessel was given a verbal warning.

GENEVA, Oct 28 (Reuters) - The World Health Organization (WHO) and other aid groups on Thursday appealed to leaders of the world's 20 biggest economies to fund a $23.4 billion plan to bring COVID-19 vaccines, tests and drugs to poorer countries in the next 12 months.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the Group of 20, whose leaders are meeting in Rome at the weekend, had the political and financial power needed to end the pandemic by funding the plan, which he said could save five million lives.

ROME, Oct 28 (Reuters) - If high-stakes climate talks are to succeed next month in Glasgow, the initial signs of progress may emerge this weekend when leaders of the world's 20 biggest economies hold their first face-to-face meeting in two years.

Big obstacles lie in the way. The G20 is divided over questions such as phasing out coal and limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), giving diplomats little time to forge an accord before the Oct. 30-31 gathering.