Europe

ATHENS (Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo urged Armenia and Azerbaijan on Tuesday to cease hostilities as clashes continued over the breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh region.

Nagorno-Karabakh is inside Azerbaijan but is run by ethnic Armenians and is supported by Armenia. It broke away from Azerbaijan in a war in the 1990s, but is not recognised by any country as an independent republic.

Pompeo said during a visit to Crete that he had discussed the clashes in talks earlier with Greek Foreign Minister Nikos Dendias.

(Reuters) - Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya met French President Emmanuel Macron during his visit to Lithuania on Tuesday, Tsikhanouskaya’s official channel in the Telegram messaging app reported.

Tsikhanouskaya planned to discuss international mediation in the political standoff prompted by the August presidential election in Belarus, her channel said.

BUDAPEST (Reuters) - Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has called for the resignation of European Commission Vice President Vera Jourova over what he described as her “derogatory public statements” about democracy in Hungary.

Orban, 57, has repeatedly clashed with European Union leaders over his moves to increase state control of the judiciary, media and academia under his vision to transform Hungary into an “illiberal democracy.”

LONDON (Reuters) - Britain’s economy is underproductive and its weaknesses have been exposed by the COVID crisis, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said on Tuesday as he announced new measures to try to improve skill levels in the workforce.

“Our economy has been shaken by COVID, and in the hand-to-mouth scrabblings of the pandemic, the shortcomings of our labour market and our education system have been painfully apparent,” Johnson said in a speech.

LONDON (Reuters) - British authorities hit Airbnb UK with an extra tax bill of 1.8 million pounds ($2.3 million) last year, the home rental startup’s accounts showed on Tuesday, following an investigation into the firm.

The UK arm of the San Francisco company, which also paid annual corporation tax of over 1 million pounds, said it had paid the extra obligations after a request from British tax authorities Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC).

BRUSSELS, Sept. 28 (Xinhua) -- The United Kingdom's position on the withdrawal from the European Union (EU) is far apart from what the EU can accept and the bloc "will not be shy" from taking legal action for violations of the withdrawal agreement, European Commission Vice President Maros Sefcovic said on Monday.

Addressing the media after a third round of talks of the EU-UK Joint Committee, which oversees the implementation of the Brexit agreement, Sefcovic said time was pressing and a lot of work remained to be done with just less than 100 remaining days.

VILNIUS, Sept. 28 (Xinhua) -- Lithuania has made huge progress in the two decades since the last official visit by Jacques Chirac in 2001, visiting President Emmanuel Macron said here on Monday, referring to one of his predecessors.

"Thank you for the warm welcome during this difficult time. We try to live with COVID-19, we try to find solutions and move forward," Macron said at a joint press conference with Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda after their tete-a-tete meeting.

BRUSSELS, Sept. 28 (Xinhua) -- The European Union (EU) launched on Monday a new Customs Union Action Plan, which aims at modernizing and simplifying customs procedures at the EU borders while tackling fraud linked to customs and VAT.

Presenting the plan at a press conference in Brussels, European Commissioner for Economy Paolo Gentiloni said it would lead to less expenditure as well as more revenues for the EU.

MOSCOW, September 28. /TASS/: Armenia is ready to request additional military assistance from Russia but sees no reason to do it at the moment, Armenian Ambassador to Moscow Vardan Toganyan told the Govorit Moskva radio station on Monday.

According to him, Yerevan and Moscow continue to boost defense cooperation. "We believe that should the need arise, we will request Russia [for additional military assistance]," the envoy pointed out. "As of today, we don’t think that we need additional troops or other forces," he added.

SOCHI, September 28./TASS/: Russia never meddles in internal affairs of the neighboring countries and it always supports their authorities in efforts to stabilize the situation, Russian President Vladimir Putin said as he met with President of Kyrgyzstan Sooronbay Jeenbekov on Monday.