Europe

MINSK, August 21. /TASS/: Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has a shared understanding of the situation in the country with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, as Lukashenko himself said during a visit to the Dzerzhinsky agricultural facility outside the country’s capital of Minsk on Friday.

"I have warned the Russian president of the situation in Belarus. We enjoy mutual understanding, we have a relevant agreement within the SCTO [the Collective Security Treaty Organization] and the Union State," Lukashenko said, as cited by the BelTA news agency.

BERLIN, Aug 21 (NNN-AGENCIES) — Germany will need to take on yet more debt in 2021 to mitigate the impact of the coronavirus on the economy, Finance Minister Olaf Scholz said.

“Next year we will continue to be forced to suspend the debt rule and spend considerable funds to protect the health of citizens and stabilise the economy,” Scholz said in an interview with the Funke media group, referring to Germany’s cherished policy of keeping a balanced budget.

BRUSSELS/LONDON (Reuters) - Britain and the European Union made scant progress towards a deal on future ties in talks this week, and their chief negotiators blamed each other for the stalemate as time ticks down to an end-of-year deadline.

“Those who were hoping for negotiations to move swiftly forward this week will have been disappointed,” the EU’s chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, told a news conference after two full days of talks in Brussels.

MINSK (Reuters) - Two leading members of a newly formed opposition council in Belarus were questioned on Friday in a criminal case that accuses the body of trying to seize power from President Alexander Lukashenko after a disputed election.

Dozens of supporters accompanied Maksim Znak and Sarhey Dyleuski as they arrived for questioning at the headquarters of the Investigative Committee.

Znak, a lawyer, said on entering that he feared he might be arrested. But when he emerged later, he said he had “productive discussions”.

DUBLIN (Reuters) - Ireland’s agriculture minister resigned on Friday after he said he had damaged the national effort in fighting COVID-19 by attending a social event that could have breached health regulations.

Dara Calleary was among more than 80 guests at a hotel dinner hosted by the Irish parliament’s golf society, the night after he and his cabinet colleagues significantly tightened nationwide restrictions to try to rein in a rise in infections.

LONDON (Reuters) - Britain’s economic recovery from the shock of the COVID-19 pandemic has gathered pace, data showed on Friday, but government borrowing rose past the 2 trillion pound ($2.6 trillion) mark and fears of future job losses are mounting.

Retail sales rose above pre-pandemic levels in July, the first full month for many shops reopening after lockdown, and August’s Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) data showed the fastest growth in almost seven years.

VIENNA, Aug. 20 (Xinhua) -- A train loaded with fibers and pulp used for textiles pulled out of the Vienna South Terminal heading for China on Thursday, marking the first time a train with goods exclusively "Made in Austria" going from the Alpine country to China.

"For the first time in the history of Austria, a local company is sending goods that are 100 percent produced in Austria directly to China by train," the Lenzing Group said in a press statement.

MOSCOW (AP) — Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, one of Vladimir Putin’s fiercest critics, lay in a coma Friday at a Siberian hospital, the victim of what his allies said appeared to be a poisoning engineered by the Kremlin.

Navalny’s organization was scrambling to make arrangements to transfer him to Germany for treatment; a German group said it was ready to send a plane for him and that a noted hospital in Berlin was ready to treat him.

MINSK, August 20. /TASS/: Belarus is now undergoing processes similar to the August 1991 coup d'etat attempt, the republic’s Security Council State Secretary Andrei Ravkov wrote on his Facebook page on Thursday.

"29 years ago an attempt was carried out to stage a coup d’etat, which entered history as the August coup attempt, and the anti-constitutional steps of the self-proclaimed State Committee on the State of Emergency deepened chaos in the society, bringing the former great power closer to collapse," Ravkov noted. "Such processes are happening in Belarus today."

MOSCOW, August 20 /TASS/: Rosneft Deutschland GmbH, a Rosneft subsidiary, has started into-plane fuel supplies in Germany’s Stuttgart Airport, the Russian oil producer said on Thursday.

The company plans further increase in production and jet fuel sales in Germany and on the European market as a whole. Rosneft Deutschland clinched several deals for jet fuel sales since the beginning of its marketing operations in Germany in 2019, the company says, including the contract with Aeroflot for fuel supplies in Schonefeld Airport.