Europe

GENEVA, July 30 (Reuters) - More than 100,000 children in Ethiopia's northern region of Tigray could suffer from life-threatening malnutrition in the next 12 months, a 10-fold jump over average annual levels, the U.N. Children's Fund (UNICEF) said on Friday.

UNICEF spokeswoman Marixie Mercado, speaking after returning from Tigray, said that one in two pregnant and breastfeeding women screened in the region were acutely malnourished, leaving them and their babies prone to sickness.

BRUSSELS, July 30 (Xinhua) -- China opposes any attempts to manipulate the COVID-19 origins study in the name of open and transparent scientific study, the spokesperson of the Chinese Mission to the European Union (EU) has said.

ATHENS, Greece (AP) — A search and rescue operation is underway Friday near Greece’s island of Lesbos along the maritime border with Turkey, after an inflatable dinghy carrying migrants apparently sank, authorities said.

Ten people had been rescued and another three were believed to be missing, Greece’s coast guard said.

MOSCOW, July 29. /TASS/: Russia is interested in deepening cooperation with the Islamic world, Federation Council (the upper house of parliament) Chairperson Valentina Matviyenko said in a video address to the participants in the 12th International Economic Summit dubbed "Russia-Islamic World: KazanSummit 2021."

YEREVAN, July 29. /TASS/: Acting Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan on Thursday suggested setting up Russian border patrol posts along the entire Armenian-Azerbaijani border.

"Given the current situation, it would be advisable to consider the issue of deploying Russian border guard posts along the entire Armenian-Azerbaijani border. This would provide the opportunity to carry out works on the delimitation and demarcation [of the border] without running the risk of military clashes," Pashinyan told a government meeting.

MOSCOW, July 29. /TASS/: The Magistrates' Court in Moscow has fined Google 3 mln rubles ($40,975) for refusing to localize its users’ data in Russia, a representative of the court’s press service told TASS.

ROME, July 29. /TASS/: The Culture Ministers Meeting of the Group of Twenty (G20) put the culture to the forefront for recovery after the pandemic, Culture Minister of Italy Dario Franceschini told TASS in an interview. 

KOROLYOV /Moscow Region/, July 29. /TASS/: Russia’s Nauka (Science) multi-purpose laboratory module docked to the nadir port of the Zvezda service module of the International Space Station (ISS), a TASS correspondent reports from Mission Control near Moscow where the docking is being broadcast live.

The latest Russian research module docked in the automatic mode. The docking process was controlled by Mission Control specialists and Russian cosmonauts aboard the space station.

ROME, July 29 (Reuters) - Mario Draghi is struggling to hold together his coalition government due to divisions over a proposed justice reform which is contested by the 5-Star Movement, the largest ruling party, and by many Italian prosecutors.

Italy has long been dogged by a dysfunctional, painfully slow judicial system, but repeated attempts to overhaul it have failed to significantly reduce backlogs in many courts.

MOSCOW, July 29 (Reuters) - Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan proposed on Thursday that Russian border outposts be stationed along the length of Armenia's border with Azerbaijan after a rise in tensions between Yerevan and Baku.

Armenia and Azerbaijan accused each other earlier on Thursday of flouting a Russian-backed ceasefire that both sides had accepted the previous day to halt deadly clashes over their joint border, which Yerevan wants demarcated.