Europe

PARIS (AP) — France is holding the second round of municipal elections in 5,000 towns and cities Sunday that got postponed due to the country’s coronavirus outbreak.

The voting to fill local offices in Paris and thousands of other places was suspended after the first round of the nationwide municipal elections on March 15, which produced decisive outcomes in some 30,000 other mostly small communes.

LONDON (AP) — Centrist politician Micheál Martin became Ireland’s new prime minister Saturday, fusing two longtime rival parties into a coalition four months after an election that upended the status quo.

The deal will see Martin’s Fianna Fail govern with Fine Gael — the party of outgoing leader Leo Varadkar —and with the smaller Green Party. Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, bitter opponents whose roots lie in opposing sides of the civil war that followed Ireland’s independence from the United Kingdom, have never before formed a government together.

LONDON Jun 27 (APP): Speakers including President Azad Jammu and Kashmir Sardar Masood Khan, Pakistan High Commissioner to the United Kingdom Mohammad Nafees Zakaria and British Parliamentarians in a webinar/video conference on Kashmir called upon the international community and the United Nations to take serious notice of human rights and sexual abuses, tortures, rapes and killings of innocent and oppressed people of Indian occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IOJK).

MOSCOW, June 26. /TASS/: Anna Kikina, Russia’s only woman cosmonaut, may make her spaceflight in a span of two years, Oleg Kononenko, chief of Russia’s cosmonaut corps, said on Friday.

"If nothing changes, if everything goes smoothly, because we have many if’s, Anna will probably fly in the autumn of 2022, along with me," he said in an interview with Vecherny Urgant program on TV Channel One.

LONDON, June 27. /TASS/: Berlin needs to continue constructive dialogue with Moscow, including for reasons of Russia’s strategic influence in Syria and Libya, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said in an interview to several European newspaper, including The Guardian.

"There are good reasons to keep engaging in constructive dialogue with Russia. In countries like Syria and Libya, countries in Europe’s immediate neighbourhood, Russia’s strategic influence is great," she said. "I will therefore continue to strive for cooperation."

MOSCOW, June 27. /TASS/: The supervisory board of Hungary’s pipeline operator FGSZ approved on Friday a plan of investment into the construction of a gas pipeline to Serbia with an annual capacity of 6 billion cubic meters, the company said in a statement.

According to the document, the designated capacity at the pipeline’s southern tip - that is, on the border with Serbia - must be achieved by October 2021.

MOSCOW, June 26. /TASS/: No violations were reported on the second day of voting on amendments to the Russian constitution in Moscow, a deputy chairman of the Moscow City Election Commission, Dmitry Reut, has told TASS.

"There were no incidents that deserve attention. The voting in Moscow is taking place in normal regime, in a calm atmosphere," he said.

VIENNA, June 26. /TASS/: Moscow is aware of NATO countries’ attempts at attaining military supremacy, which is seen in the fact that the alliance’s overall military spending is 20 times greater than Russia’s defense budget, the acting chief Russian delegate at the Vienna negotiations on military security and arms control, Andrei Vorobyov, told the OSCE Annual Security Review Conference. TASS obtained a transcript of his statement from Russia’s mission at the OSCE.

MOSCOW, June 26. /TASS/: Moscow’s Meshchansky Court has handed down a three-year suspended sentence to director Kirill Serebrennikov regarding his 129-million-ruble ($1.8 mln) embezzlement case, where he stood accused of misappropriating state funds for the Platforma theater project.

"[The court] hereby imposes a penalty on Serebrennikov in the form of a three-year-suspended prison sentence along with a fine of 800,000 rubles [about $11,480] and probation for three years," judge Olesya Mendeleyeva ruled.

BRUSSELS/CHICAGO (Reuters) - European Union countries failed to settle on Friday on a final “safe list” of countries whose residents could travel to the bloc from July, with the United States, Brazil and Russia set to be excluded.

Ambassadors from the 27 EU members convened from Friday afternoon to establish criteria for granting quarantine-free access from next Wednesday.