Europe

18 May 2021; MEMO: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told Pope Francis that the international community must sanction Israel for its brutal violence against Palestinians, stressing that Palestinians continue to be subjected to massacres as a result of global inaction, Turkish media reported yesterday.

Erdogan, according to TRT, urged the pontiff to keep speaking about the ongoing onslaught against Palestine.

(Reuters) --- Leaders of the world’s largest economies back “voluntary licensing” of COVID-19 vaccine patents, the draft conclusions of a summit show, watering down a U.S. push for waivers and earlier commitments to supply more funds to the World Health Organization.

The draft document, seen by Reuters, lists commitments of G20 nations and other countries and is to be adopted on Friday at a Global Health Summit in Rome, one of this year's major events to coordinate global actions against the pandemic.

(Reuters) --- Germany called for a ceasefire in fighting between Israel and Palestinian Islamist group Hamas and offered more aid to help Palestinians on Tuesday before emergency European Union talks that are expected to highlight divisions over the conflict.

The call for a truce follows U.S. President Joe Biden's support for a ceasefire during a call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday. 

LONDON, May 17 (Xinhua) -- A total of 2,323 cases of the coronavirus variant first detected in India have been recorded in Britain, British Health Secretary Matt Hancock said Monday.

Speaking at the House of Commons, the lower house of British Parliament, Hancock said the variant is now the dominant strain of the virus in Bolton and Blackburn with Darwen, both in northwest England, with 483 confirmed cases.

According to Hancock, in Bolton and Blackburn with Darwen, cases of the variant have doubled last week.

NAGURSKOYE, Russia (AP) — During the Cold War, Russia’s Nagurskoye airbase was little more than a runway, a weather station and a communications outpost in the Franz Josef Land archipelago.

It was a remote and desolate home mostly for polar bears, where temperatures plunge in winter to minus-42 Celsius (43 degrees below zero Fahrenheit) and the snow only disappears from August to mid-September.

LONDON (AP) — Gary Miller drove a London taxi. Rohit Patel worked behind the till in a supermarket. Barry Bwalya was in customer service.

When the coronavirus tore through their London neighborhoods in early 2020, they all got sick. More than a year later, they are still struggling.

17 May 2021; MEMO: As Chair of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign in Britain, I was proud to work with our partners to organise the estimated 150,000-strong march from London's Marble Arch to the Israeli Embassy in Kensington on Saturday. Our partners were the Palestinian Forum in Britain, Friends of Al-Aqsa, Stop the War Coalition, CND, and the Muslim Association of Britain.

(Reuters) --- Moscow's prosecutor on Monday submitted a huge amount of new material to a court hearing a request to outlaw jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny's political movement, Navalny's lawyers said.

The court is considering the prosecutor's request to declare Navalny's anti-corruption foundation and regional campaign groups as "extremist", a major escalation in a crackdown on supporters of President Vladimir Putin's staunchest critic.

BRUSSELS (AP) — The European Union and the United States have decided to temporarily suspend measures at the heart of a steel tariff dispute that is seen as one of the major trade issues dividing the two sides.

With the decision, “we are walking the talk in our efforts to reboot the transatlantic relationship,” said EU trade chief Valdis Dombrovskis.

COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) — U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was in Denmark on Monday for talks on climate change, Arctic policy and Russia as calls grew for the Biden administration to take a tougher, more active stance on spiraling Israeli-Palestinian violence.