Europe

LONDON (Reuters) - U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden warned the United Kingdom that it must honour the Northern Irish peace deal as it extracts itself from the European Union or there would be no U.S. trade deal.

“We can’t allow the Good Friday Agreement that brought peace to Northern Ireland to become a casualty of Brexit,” Biden said in a tweet.

“Any trade deal between the U.S. and U.K. must be contingent upon respect for the Agreement and preventing the return of a hard border. Period.”

MOSCOW (Reuters) - The nerve agent used to poison Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was detected on an empty water bottle from his hotel room in the Siberian city of Tomsk, suggesting he was poisoned there and not at the airport as first thought, his team said on Thursday.

PARIS (Reuters) - French financial firms need to finalise preparations for the end of Britain’s Brexit transition arrangements and in particular find solutions for securities clearing, France’s financial stability council said on Thursday.

Britain left the European Union in January and transition arrangements that still allow it unfettered access to the bloc end on Dec. 31.

BRUSSELS, Sept. 16 (Xinhua) -- In the first seven months of 2020, China became the top trading partner of the European Union (EU), a position previously held by the United States, said Eurostat on Wednesday.

EU's imports from China increased by 4.9 percent in the January-July period, compared to the same period last year, whereas its imports from the U.S. dropped by 11.7 percent.

The bloc's exports to China recorded a slight drop of 1.8 percent, while those to the U.S. fell by 9.9 percent, according to the EU's statistical office.

LONDON, Sept. 16 (Xinhua) -- British Prime Minister Boris Johnson told a parliamentary committee Wednesday he did not believe the European Union (EU) was negotiating a Brexit deal with Britain in good faith.

Johnson spent more than an hour being grilled by the House of Commons Liaison Committee, made up of the chairs of the major parliamentary select committees.

GENEVA, Sep 16 (APP): The Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) has urged the UN Human Rights Council to effectively address the “systematic” human rights violations of the people suffering from long-running disputes in Palestine, Jammu and Kashmir, Myanmar and Nagorno-Karabakh, saying its global rights agenda would remain elusive without dealing with those issues.

MINSK, September 16. /TASS/: Russia’s decision to allocate a $1.5-billion loan to Belarus won’t save the country’s economy, member of the presidium of the Belarusian Coordination Council Pavel Latushko said.

ROSTON-ON-DON, September 16. /TASS/: Crews of S-400 missile air defense systems, deployed at the Russian military base in Abkhazia, conducted practice shooting at the Kapustin Yar proving ground in Russia’s Astrakhan Region, successfully hitting mock enemy targets, the Southern Military District's press service told journalists Wednesday.

MOSCOW, September 16. /TASS/: The visual aesthetics of Russian-made weapons and military equipment could be the reason why it was used in an ad, made by the Trump Make America Great Again Committee, Russia’s state corporation Rostec told TASS on Tuesday.

"Clearly, it was a blunder caused by the visual beauty of Russian weapons. Apparently, the designer was so impressed that he forget to check the manufacturing country. Nevertheless, he definitely has good taste and we hope that the punishment won’t be severe," Rostec said.

KIEV, Septeber 16. /TASS/: Former Belarusian presidential candidate Svetlana Tikhanovskaya has said that the Belarusian opposition is ready to provide "security guarantees" to incumbent head of state Alexander Lukashenko, if he steps down "peacefully".