Europe

19 Sep 2020; AA: French President Emmanuel Macron on Saturday called on Turkey to reopen a "responsible dialogue" on the Eastern Mediterranean.

"In Ajaccio, we sent a clear message to Turkey: let's reopen a responsible dialogue, in good faith, without naivety. This call is now also that of the European Parliament. It seems to have been heard. Let's move on," Macron said in a tweet in Turkish.

LONDON (Reuters) - Britain is likely to need to reintroduce some national coronavirus lockdown measures sooner rather than later, a leading epidemiologist and former senior government health advisor said on Saturday.

Neil Ferguson, a professor of epidemiology at London’s Imperial College, told the BBC the country was facing a “perfect storm” of rising infections as people return to work and school.

BUDAPEST (Reuters) - Hungary will extend a moratorium on loan repayments for some households and companies until the middle of 2021, as its finance minister warned the economy could struggle to grow next year unless a coronavirus vaccine is found.

Prime Minister Viktor Orban introduced the moratorium for all companies and private borrowers in March as one of his government’s key measures to help reduce the economic fallout from the pandemic. It was due to expire at the end of the year.

BERLIN (Reuters) - Germany would relax insolvency rules under proposals set out on Saturday to help avert a wave of bankruptcies in Europe’s biggest economy, provided companies hit by the coronavirus crisis have a robust business model.

Keen to avoid bankruptcies and mass layoffs, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government has launched a range of stimulus and relief measures as Germany braces for its biggest slump since World War Two, having shrunk by an unprecedented 9.7% in the second quarter.

19 Sep 2020; MEMO: Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov announced today that his country is willing to mediate in the crisis between Qatar and the Gulf countries led by Saudi Arabia, if a request is made for him to do so, Anadolu has reported.

19 Sep 2020; MEMO: France’s foreign ministry on Friday said there was no evidence to suggest the armed wing of Lebanon’s Hezbollah was storing chemicals to make explosives in France after a senior US official said the group had set up caches in Europe since 2012.

MOSCOW, September 18. /TASS/: The European Parliament’s statements indicate that foreign intelligence agencies are behind the Alexey Navalny incident, Russian State Duma (parliament's lower house) speaker Vyacheslav Volodin said Friday.

MOSCOW, September 18. /TASS/: The attempts by Western countries to use sanctions against Russia will only increase while Moscow won’t leave them without response, Spokeswoman for Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs Maria Zakharova stated on the Solovyev Live YouTube channel, quoting the soon to be published interview with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

"He used a wonderful metaphor there: "What we are observing now is a sanction itch and it is only increasing," she said.

MINSK, September 18. /TASS/: Belarusian human rights activists say they have collected more than 500 testimonies by detained protest demonstrators who complained of torture.

"At the moment the human rights center Vyasna has collected more than 500 testimonies by victims of torture. Human rights activists are in the process of classifying them and writing a report," the human rights center said on its website.

The center says the Investigative Committee has received about 1,200 grievances from people who complained about "moral and psychological pressure."

MOSCOW, September 18. /TASS/: Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that there are too many absurd inconsistencies in the alleged poisoning of Russian blogger Alexey Navalny to take anyone's word for it.

"There is too much absurdity about this whole situation to take anyone’s word on trust, so we are not going to take anyone’s word," Peskov told journalists Friday.