Europe

ATHENS, Feb. 27 (Xinhua) -- Greece proceeds to the upgrade of controls at its borders on land and at sea as part of measures to address both the migrant flows and the novel coronavirus outbreak, Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said on Thursday, according to Greek national news agency AMNA.

With three confirmed COVID-19 cases reported in Greece within 24 hours -- a woman and her child in Thessaloniki city in the north and another woman in Athens, Greek authorities are implementing measures to avert the spread of the virus.

MOSCOW, February 27. /TASS/: Rosatom considers possible to conclude the contract with Uzbekistan for construction of the nuclear power plant (NPP) in June 2020 and associate signing with the visit of the President of Uzbekistan to Russia, chief executive officer of the Russian nuclear corporation Alexei Likhachev told reporters on Thursday.

MOSCOW, February 27. /TASS/: Artillery units of the Central Military District’s 41st all-arms army eliminated a notional enemy’s mechanized column with the support of reconnaissance squads during battalion-level tactical drills at the Yurginsky training range in the Kemerovo Region, the District’s press office reported on Thursday.

MOSCOW, February 27. /TASS/: Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov has denied reports that Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan will meet in Istanbul on March 5.

"President Putin has no plans for such a meeting on March 5 so far," he told reporters on Thursday.

Peskov added that there was no trip to Istanbul in the president’s schedule for March 5. "No, President Putin has other work plans for March 5," he said.

MOSCOW, February 27. /TASS/: Russian President Vladimir Putin has confessed that the idea of having a body double was floated for the sake of ensuring the safety of the head of state in the early 2000s, but he rejected it.

"I discarded the idea of any doubles," Putin told TASS in an interview for the project entitled "20 Questions with Vladimir Putin." "This was during the toughest time of our war against terrorism."

MOSCOW, February 27. /TASS/: Russia test-launched its Tsirkon hypersonic missile from a ship for the first time when the Project 22350 frigate Admiral Gorshkov fired the weapon from the Barents Sea against a ground target in January, two sources in defense circles of Russia’s North-Western Federal District told TASS on Thursday.

27 February 2020; AFP: Ukrainian authorities began the task of destroying 37,000 bottles of illicit adulterated vodka on Wednesday, a national "record" in a country where consumption of illegal alcohol regularly poisons and even kills.

Minister of Justice Denys Malyuska launched the operation in the city of Vynnyky in the central Lviv region where the bottles, holding 14 tonnes of alcohol, have been stored since their seizure in 2014.

LONDON (Reuters) - Oil prices fell nearly 3% on Thursday, plunging for a fifth day to their lowest since January 2019 as a rise in new coronavirus cases outside China fuelled fears of a pandemic that could slow the global economy and dent demand for crude.

Brent crude LCOc1 was down $1.55, or 2.9%, at $51.88 a barrel at 1315 GMT. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) futures CLc1 fell by $1.41 cents, or 2.9%, to $47.32 a barrel.

OSLO (Reuters) - Norway’s $1.1 trillion wealth fund, the world’s biggest fund and a long-time advocate of companies being more transparent about their impact on the climate, on Thursday welcomed a shift among European oil and gas firms towards greener policies.

Top energy firms including BP, Repsol, Royal Dutch Shell and Total - as well as Norway’s Equinor - have in recent months pledged to cut carbon dioxide emissions and provide more information about their role in global warming.

MOSCOW (Reuters) - The United States embassy in Moscow urged Russia on Thursday to find the people who organized the murder of opposition politician Boris Nemtsov who was gunned down near the Kremlin five years ago.

Nemtsov, one of President Vladimir Putin’s most vocal critics, was killed in 2015 as he walked home across a bridge near the Kremlin’s walls. He had been working on a report examining Russia’s role in the conflict in Ukraine.