Europe

OEIRAS, Portugal (AP) — As Portugal closes in on its goal of fully vaccinating 85% of the population against COVID-19 in nine months, other countries in Europe and beyond want to know how it was accomplished.

A lot of the credit is going to Rear Adm. Henrique Gouveia e Melo. With his team from the three branches of the armed forces, the naval officer took charge of the vaccine rollout in February — perhaps the moment of greatest tension in Portugal over the pandemic.

GENEVA, Sep 22 (APP): Pakistan told the UN Human Rights Council Wednesday that India continues to trample upon Kashmiri people’s fundamental rights, and urged the 47-member body to act and halt those abuses.

Speaking in a general debate, Khalil Hashmi, Pakistan’s ambassador to the UN offices in Geneva, also called on the Council to demand that India upholds and respects fundamental rights of Kashmiri people, especially their inalienable right to self-determination.

MOSCOW, September 22. /TASS/: Afghanistan’s Shiite minority, the Hazara community, will resume armed confrontation with the Taliban (outlawed in Russia) if the radicals renege on their promises and do not refrain from tyranny, former Vice President Karim Khalili, who leads the Hazaras, one of the country’s main ethnic groups, said on Wednesday.

MOSCOW, September 22. /TASS/: Russia's federal security service FSB has said a group of Central Asia-born terrorist recruiters has been detained in Yekaterinburg. The detainees had contacts with terrorists in the Middle East and were persuading labor migrants to join terrorist activities, the FSB said in a news release received by TASS.

MOSCOW, September 22. /TASS/: Washington’s refusal to issue a visa to Leonid Slutsky, Chairman of the State Duma Committee on International Affairs, is a gross violation of international law and will be responded to in kind, the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Wednesday.

The Russian Foreign Ministry pointed out that "the US authorities, which pursue a now longstanding and quite deliberate line, continue to obstruct the issuance of visas for Russian representatives traveling to events at the UN Headquarters in New York."

MOSCOW, September 22. /TASS/: Russia is not going to use the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline for geopolitical purposes, Deputy Foreign Minister Andrey Rudenko said in an interview with TASS, adding that the project would remain solely an economic one for Moscow.

"For us, Nord Stream 2 remains solely an economic project. We are not going to use it, as the Ukrainians say, in any geopolitical calculations. We do not need that," the high-ranked diplomat noted.

VIENNA (Austria), Sept 22 (NNN-KBC) — Russia and Zimbabwe signed a Memorandum of Understanding on cooperation in the field of peaceful uses of atomic energy on the sidelines of the 65th IAEA General Conference in Vienna.

From the Russian side, the document was signed by Russian State Atomic Energy Corporation (ROSATOM) Director General Alexey Likhachev, while Minister of Energy and Power Development Soda Zhemu signed the document on behalf of Zimbabwe.

MOSCOW, Sept 22 (NNN-AGENCIES) — A Russian An-26 military transport aircraft with six people on board disappeared Wednesday near the Far Eastern city of Khabarovsk, the emergencies ministry said. 

   The ministry said that at 6:45 pm local time (0845 GMT) it learned that “an An-26 aircraft had disappeared from radar 38 kilometres (23 miles) from Khabarovsk airport”. 

“According to preliminary data, there are six people on board,” the ministry added on its Telegram channel. 

   The ministry said that a helicopter had been dispatched to search for the aircraft. 

LONDON, Sept 22 (Reuters) - Britain wants to make incremental steps on trade with the United States and still believes a bigger free trade deal can be done, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said on Wednesday, despite little public encouragement from U.S. President Joe Biden.

Johnson's government once touted a trade deal with the United States as one of the big prizes of Brexit, but those hopes have dramatically faded after Biden replaced Donald Trump and pushed all trade negotiations down his list of priorities.

LA PALMA, Spain, Sept 22 (Reuters) - Lava flowed from an erupting volcano on the Spanish island of La Palma for a fourth day on Wednesday, forcing more people to evacuate their homes and blanketing towns in ash, while residents struggled to come to terms with the destruction.

"All we can do is cry. We are a small business, we live off all these people who have lost everything," said Lorena, 30, who works in a jewellers in the small town of Los Llanos de Aridane.