Europe

LONDON, July 19 (Xinhua) -- "Choosing Huawei is choosing opportunities and growth, and rejecting Huawei is rejecting opportunities and growth," a senior Chinese diplomat has said here, referring to the British government's stance shift on the Chinese technology company.

The statement came as Liu Xiaoming, Chinese ambassador to Britain, was giving a recent online interview to The Times newspaper.

BRUSSELS (AP) — Weary and bleary European Union leaders temporarily broke up their summit at dawn on the fourth day of acrimonious haggling over an unprecedented 1.85 trillion-euro ($2.1 trillion) EU budget and coronavirus recovery fund to tackle the crisis. They committed to pick up the fight again later Monday.

MOSCOW, July 19. /TASS/: The Russian government presented a bill providing for tax support of books and periodicals publishers to the State Duma, the lower house of the Russian diet. The text of the document is posted in the database of the lawmaking support system.

The current version of the Russian Internal Revenue Code categorizes losses in the form of the cost of reject and unsold books and mass media products as sundry expenses and reduces the tax base of the income tax.

MOSCOW, July 19. /TASS/: Vaccination against the novel coronavirus will not prevent other inoculations, including seasonal ones, Director of the National Research Center of Epidemiology and Microbiology Alexander Gintsburg told TASS.

LONDON, July 19. /TASS/: Russia will find the way to punish those who impose personal sanctions against Russian citizens as part of the Magnitsky case, Russia’s Ambassador to the United Kingdom Andrei Kelin said in an interview with the BBC on Sunday.

"Believe me as for Magnitsky we will find the way to punish those who are making this type of sanctions. Because sanctions are illegal. There is only one body who can impose sanctions and this is the United Nations," Kelin told the Andrew Marr Show, recalling that the UK is a permanent member of the UN Security Council.

LONDON (Reuters) - British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said on Sunday it was clear the Uighur minority in China had suffered abuses of their human rights.

“It is clear that there are gross, egregious human rights abuses going on, which is why in Geneva at the UN we raised this with 27 partners ... to call out the government of China for its human rights abuses of the Uighurs, also of Hong Kong,” Raab told the BBC’s The Andrew Marr Show.

LONDON (Reuters) - China will respond resolutely to any attempt by Britain to sanction Chinese officials following the imposition of a security law in Hong Kong, its ambassador in London said on Sunday.

Earlier this month Britain introduced a new sanctions regime to target individuals it says are involved in human rights abuses or organised crime.

Some lawmakers in Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party have said the sanctions should be used to target Chinese officials.

19 July 2020; MEMO: French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian announced on Friday that his country will provide aid and medical supplies to the Kurdistan Region of Iraq to combat the coronavirus pandemic.

BRUSSELS (AP) — Marathon European Union talks to agree an unprecedented 1.85 trillion-euro ($2.1 trillion) EU budget and coronavirus recovery fund entered a third day Sunday with German Chancellor Angela Merkel warning that the summit of 27 leaders could still end without a deal.

The bitter negotiations, which are taking place amid the unprecedented crisis of the coronavirus pandemic, have underscored the deep fissures within the 27-nation bloc with the traditional Franco-German alliance struggling to get its way.

LONDON (AP) — Russia’s ambassador to Britain has rejected allegations that his country’s intelligence services sought to steal information about a coronavirus vaccine.

Andrei Kelin said in a BBC interview broadcast Sunday that there was “no sense” in the allegations made last week by the United States, Britain and Canada.