Europe

LONDON (AP) — Northern Ireland’s biggest political parties appear set to agree on a new government Thursday after ending a standoff that threatened to scuttle the Protestant-Catholic power-sharing administration.

The pro-British Democratic Unionist Party has picked Northern Ireland Assembly member Paul Givan as its choice of first minister. But the Irish nationalist party Sinn Fein had threatened not to fill the post of deputy because of a feud about protections for the Irish language.

ATHENS, Greece (AP) — The European Union’s top executive on Thursday announced the bloc’s endorsement of Greece’s national spending plan for its share of the EU’s massive pandemic recovery fund.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced the approval of Greece’s “recovery and resilience” plan during a visit to Athens. The EU has earmarked 30.5 billion euros ($36.4 billion) of the recovery fund for Greece - 12.7 billion euros in loans and 17.8 billion euros in grants from 2021 to 2026.

GENEVA (AP) — U.S. President Joe Biden and Russia’s Vladimir Putin exchanged cordial words and plotted modest steps on arms control and diplomacy but emerged from their much-anticipated Swiss summit Wednesday largely where they started -- with deep differences on human rights, cyberattacks, election interference and more.

MOSCOW, June 16. /TASS/: The authors of the European Union’s strategy on Russia, drawn up for the bloc’s summit due on June 24-25, have problems with the knowledge of history and perceiving the reality, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova wrote on her Telegram channel on Wednesday.

The European Union’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, earlier announced that the strategy would be based on three principles — pushing back, constraining, and engaging with Moscow at the same time.

KRASNODAR, June 16. /TASS/: International military drills make it possible to practice troop interoperability, and deployments to large distances, Deputy Commander of the Belarusian Special Operations Forces Colonel Vladimir Beliy said at the opening of the Slavic Brotherhood-2021 maneuvers of Russia, Belarus, and Serbia on Wednesday.

The active phase of the Slavic Brotherhood-2021 international drills involving almost 1,000 troops from Russia, Belarus, and Serbia kicked off at the Rayevsky practice range near Novorossiysk in Russia’s south on June 16.

MOSCOW, June 16. /TASS/: Russia confirmed 13,397 daily COVID-19 cases, bringing the total case tally to 5,249,990, the anti-coronavirus crisis center told reporters on Wednesday.

In relative terms, the coronavirus cases grew by 0.26%. 

The lowest growth rates were recorded over the past day in the Chukotka Autonomous Region (0%), the Karachay-Cherkess Republic, the Republic of Adygea, and North Ossetia (0.05%), the Tuva Republic, and Kabardino-Balkarian Republic (0.06%).

ROME, June 16. / TASS /: Italy has launched the production of the first test batch of the Russian Sputnik V vaccine, the Swiss-Italian company Adienne Pharma & Biotech’s press service told TASS on Wednesday.

16 June 2021; MEMO: British barrister Karim Khan took over as the International Criminal Court's top prosecutor today with a pledge to improve its track record by taking only its strongest cases to trial, Reuters reports.

Khan, who is only the third person to hold the role, faces many challenges at a time of fierce political pressure on the world's permanent war crimes tribunal.

16 June 2021; MEMO: Reviving the 2015 Iran nuclear accord will have to await the formation of a new Iranian government, the head of the UN nuclear watchdog said in remarks published today and reported by Reuters, adding a deal needed political will from all parties.

BERLIN, June 16 (NNN-AGENCIES) — The pandemic has worsened corruption across the European Union, Transparency International said, with citizens at times needing personal connections to get medical care and some governments using the crisis for their own gain.

The anti-graft watchdog surveyed more than 40,000 people in the EU’s 27 member states between October and December 2020.

On average, it found that 29 percent had relied on favours or well-connected friends and family to access public sector health services last year.