Europe

MINSK, July 15. /TASS/: The nationwide campaign race leading up to the August 9 presidential election in Belarus kicked off on Wednesday.

On Tuesday, the country’s Central Election Commission (CEC) registered five candidates. They are to submit their campaign platforms to the media selected by CEC until July 19.

TOMSK, July 15. /TASS/: A resident of Seversk, a closed town in Siberia’s Tomsk Region, has been detained on suspicion of setting up a cell of Jehovah's Witnesses religious group (recognized as extremist in Russia).

According to investigators, the man and a group of other individuals organized meetings in 2017-2020, disseminated extremist literature and recruited new members, the Russian Investigative Committee’s press service said.

LONDON (Reuters) - Levels of childhood immunisations against dangerous diseases such as measles, tetanus and diphtheria have dropped alarmingly during the COVID-19 pandemic, putting millions of children at risk, United Nations agencies said on Wednesday.

“The avoidable suffering and death caused by children missing out on routine immunisations could be far greater than COVID-19 itself,” World Health Organization (WHO) director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a joint report with UNICEF.

LONDON/BEIJING (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump said he was responsible for Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s decision to ban Huawei from Britain’s 5G network, a remark that London brushed off and Beijing said said proved the British move was political.

Johnson on Tuesday ordered Huawei equipment to be purged completely from Britain’s 5G network by the end of 2027, risking the ire of China by signalling that the world’s biggest telecoms equipment maker was not welcome in the West.

LONDON (Reuters) - British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said there would be an inquiry into the country’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic in the future but now was not the time as the battle to combat it was ongoing.

“We will seek to learn the lessons of this pandemic in the future and certainly we will have an independent inquiry into what happened,” he said on Wednesday.

LUXEMBOURG/DUBLIN (Reuters) - Apple scored a major win on Wednesday as Europe’s second-highest court rejected an EU order for the iPhone maker to pay 13 billion euros ($15 billion) in Irish back taxes, dealing a blow to the bloc’s attempts to crack down on sweetheart tax deals.

In its order four years ago, the European Commission said Apple benefited from illegal state aid via two Irish tax rulings that artificially reduced its tax burden for over two decades - to as low as 0.005% in 2014.

BERLIN, July 14 (Xinhua) -- German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Tuesday that Germany is willing to compromise on the European recovery fund at the upcoming summit of the European Union (EU) leaders.

"We will of course go to Brussels and the German side has a certain stock of willingness to compromise," Merkel said during a press conference ahead of a preparatory meeting with visiting Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez.

KIEV, July 14 (Xinhua) -- Ukraine does not agree with Iran's claim that the downing of the Ukraine International Airlines passenger plane was due to human error, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said Tuesday.

LONDON (AP) — Politicians and public health leaders have publicly committed to equitably sharing any coronavirus vaccine that works, but the top global initiative to make that happen may allow rich countries to reinforce their own stockpiles while making fewer doses available for poor ones.

MOSCOW, July 14. /TASS/: Five establishments in Moscow, including the Helmholtz Research Institute of Eye Diseases, have received bomb threats, an emergency source told TASS on Tuesday.

"Anonymous bomb threats have been reported in five buildings, including the children’s department of the Helmholtz Research Institute of Eye Diseases," he said, adding that probes were underway but none of the buildings had been evacuated.