Europe

MATERA, Italy, June 29 (Xinhua) -- Ministers of foreign affairs and development from the world's 20 biggest economies on Tuesday called on the entire international community to build inclusive and resilient food chains, to ensure adequate nutrition for all, in line with the goal of "Zero Hunger" set for 2030.

In their first face-to-face meetings in nearly two years, the Group of 20 (G20) ministers gathered in the southern Italian city of Matera for the one-day talks.

MOSCOW (AP) — Russian President Vladimir Putin said Wednesday that a U.S. reconnaissance aircraft was operating in sync with a British destroyer last week when the ship sailed through the Black Sea in what he described as a “provocation” to test Moscow’s response.

Moscow said one of its warships fired warning shots and a warplane dropped bombs in the path of Britain’s Defender on June 23 to force it from an area near Crimea that Moscow claims as its territorial waters. Britain insisted its ship wasn’t fired upon and said it was sailing in Ukrainian waters.

30 June 2021; MEMO: One of Britain's leading trade unions, ASLEF, has published an article in its monthly journal highlighting Israeli apartheid. This is another sign of the growing awareness of systemic racism that Palestinians suffer under Israel's brutal military occupation.

LONDON (AP) — Marlies Haselton has called Britain home for more than 30 years. The Dutch national married a Briton, had her children there, and considers herself “part and parcel” of the U.K. Until Britain’s divorce from the European Union, she had never given a thought to her immigration status in the U.K.

MOSCOW, June 29. /TASS/: The integrated control system guarantees that people cannot contract the coronavirus through inactivated vaccines, a senior staffer of the Chumakov Center Georgy Ignatyev told a press conference.

The Russian Health Ministry registered the CoviVac inactivated whole-virion COVID-19 vaccine developed by the Chumakov Center. Whole-virion vaccines use either artificially weakened viruses that cannot cause diseases or dead viruses (inactivated).

MOSCOW, June 29. /TASS/: The effectiveness of the Sputnik V vaccine against the Indian strain of the novel coronavirus is 2.6 times lower than against other varieties, the deputy director of the Gamaleya Center, Denis Logunov, said on Tuesday, adding that the decline was not very significant.

"We see that the activity of serums is slightly down in relation to the strain Delta. Sputnik V's effectiveness is lower by a factor of 2.6," Logunov told a news conference.

He pointed out that foreign vaccines' effectiveness was lower by a factor of 3-5 times.

MINSK, June 29. /TASS/: The ultimate goal of external forces is regime change in Belarus, Secretary of Russia’s Security Council Nikolai Patrushev said after a meeting with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko in Minsk on Tuesday.

"Their [the external forces’] ultimate goal is to change the structure and power in Belarus. We have been witnessing this lately," the Belarusian state-run news agency BelTA quoted Patrushev as saying.

MOSCOW, June 29. /TASS/: Russia has documented 20,616 COVID-19 cases in the past 24 hours, bringing the total case count to 5,493,557, the federal anti-coronavirus crisis center informed reporters on Tuesday.

The relative daily increase rate has reached 0.38%.

In the past 24 hours, 2,453 cases have been documented in the Moscow Region (compared to 2,722 the day before, the highest daily figure in the region since the start of the pandemic), 1,374 in St. Petersburg, 336 in the Nizhny Novgorod Region, 318 in the Bryansk Region, 315 in Buryatia.

MOSCOW, June 29. /TASS/: Russia and member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) need to coordinate efforts to ensure extensive coronavirus vaccination, ex-Russian Prime Minister, Chairman of the ruling United Russia Party and Deputy Chairman of Russia’s Security Council Dmitry Medvedev said at a roundtable discussion with parties of ASEAN countries on Tuesday.

ROME, June 29 (Reuters) - The United States hopes for more stable and predictable relations with Russia but if the latter continues to "be aggressive", then Washington will respond, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a newspaper interview published on Tuesday.

"But if Russia is going to continue to take reckless or aggressive actions, we'll respond — not for purposes of conflict, not to escalate, but because we will defend our interests and values," he told Italian daily La Repubblica.