Europe

BRUSSELS, June 15 (Xinhua) -- The European Union (EU) has administered more than 300 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced Tuesday on Twitter.

"We have passed 300 million vaccinations in the EU. Every day, we get closer to our goal: to have enough doses delivered to vaccinate 70 percent of adults in the EU next month," she tweeted.

As of Monday, 53.3 percent of the EU adults had received at least one dose, and 353 million doses had been delivered to the 27-state bloc.

BRUSSELS, June 15 (Xinhua) -- The Chinese Mission to the European Union (EU) on Monday rejected NATO's claim of presenting "systemic challenges," saying it is a slander on China's peaceful development and represents "a continuation of the Cold War mentality and bloc politics."

In a statement, a spokesperson for the Chinese mission said China is committed to a defense policy "that is defensive in nature," and its pursuit of defense and military modernization is "justified, reasonable, open and transparent."

BERLIN (AP) — Authorities in Germany said Tuesday that the number of far-right extremists in the country increased last year as neo-Nazis sought to join protests against pandemic-related restrictions.

German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer said authorities counted 33,300 far-right extremists in 2020, an increase of almost 4% from the previous year.

“Far-right extremists were repeatedly able to protest side-by-side” with non-extremist opponents of the pandemic restrictions, Seehofer said.

London, Jun 15 (PTI) The Delta variant of coronavirus, first identified in India, doubles the risk of hospitalisation compared with the Alpha variant first found in the UK, but Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines provide good protection against the strain, says a study published in The Lancet journal.

Researchers at Public Health Scotland and the University of Edinburgh, UK, found that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine offered better protection against the Delta variant compared to the Oxford-AstraZeneca preventive, known as Covishield in India.

BERLIN (AP) — Scientists say damaging frost that caused significant economic loss to France’s central winegrowing region this year was made more likely by climate change.

A report released Tuesday by researchers who study the link between global warming and weather events suggests that the intense April 6-8 frost in France was particularly damaging due to a preceding warm period in March.

WARSAW, Poland (AP) — The Polish prime minister has called for a closed-door parliamentary session to discuss a number of cyberattacks on Polish government officials, including one against his own chief of staff, a government spokesman said Tuesday.

The spokesman, Piotr Mueller, told the Polsat News channel that the sitting was necessary for the government to present a report on recent cyberattacks in Poland. He added he hoped the secret session could take place this week.

(AP) --- President Joe Biden will seek to stave off another surge of civilian suffering in the devastating war in Syria when he meets President Vladimir Putin this week, appealing to Putin to drop a threat to close the last aid crossing into that country.

BRUSSELS (AP) — President Joe Biden is seeking to tamp down trade tensions with European allies as he spends one last day consulting with western democracies ahead of his highly anticipated meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

After a pair of summits with Group of Seven world leaders in the U.K. and then NATO allies in Brussels, Biden meets Tuesday with European Council President Charles Michel and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.

BRUSSELS, June 14. /TASS/: The summit of heads of NATO states on Monday in Brussels with the participation of US President Joe Biden, is set to "fix up" the alliance after the previous administration of Donald Trump, a diplomatic source in Brussels told TASS on Monday.

MOSCOW, June 14. /TASS/: Monitoring of strains of coronavirus, created in Russia, revealed that the country has its own strains of coronavirus circulating on its territory, Alexander Gintsburg, the Director of the Gamaleya National Research Center of Epidemiology and Microbiology, which developed the vaccine, told TASS.