Europe

ROSTOV-ON-DON, November 17. /TASS/: Russia began moving Ukrainian Navy warships, which were seized in the Kerch Strait on November 25, 2018, a source in the Southern Federal District’s emergency services told TASS.

"The operation on moving [the vessels] has started," the source said.

17 November 2019; AFP: A US businesswoman at the centre of controversy over whether Boris Johnson showed her inappropriate favouritism amid an alleged affair said Sunday she had been left "heartbroken" and "humiliated" by the British prime minister.

Jennifer Arcuri, who is accused of getting privileged access to foreign trade jaunts and grants when Johnson was previously London mayor, told Britain's ITV he was treating her like "some fleeting one-night stand".

PARIS (Reuters) - French Interior Minister Christophe Castaner blamed “thugs” and “bullies” on Sunday for the violence that hit demonstrations the previous day marking marked the first anniversary of the anti-government “yellow vest” protests.

“Yesterday, what we saw were few (legitimate) demonstrators but thugs, bullies and morons,” Castaner told Europe 1 radio when asked about the violence in Paris on Saturday.

MINSK (Reuters) - Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko on Sunday threatened to pull out of signing an integration deal with Russia next month if Moscow failed to resolve their dispute over energy subsidies.

Russia has propped up its traditional ally with loans and subsidies to keep Belarus in its political orbit but now plans to phase these out to lessen the burden on its economy.

That has strained ties at the same time as Lukashenko has sought to improve relations with the West.

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Pope Francis takes his mission to ban nuclear weapons this week to the only places where they were used in war, visiting the World War Two ground zeros of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as part of a tour of Japan and Thailand.

The seven-day trip, one of his longest and most distant, gives Francis an opportunity to support and encourage the tiny but well respected Catholic communities, which make up less than 1% of the population in each country.

LONDON (AP) — A senior Labour party official says leaks from a report on Russian interference in British politics raises serious questions about the security of next month’s election.

The Sunday Times says the report from Parliament’s intelligence committee concludes that Russian interference may have affected Britain’s 2016 Brexit referendum, though the impact was “unquantifiable.” The Times says the report discusses the impact of articles posted by Russian new sites that were widely disseminated on social media.

MOSCOW, November 16. /TASS/: The number of terrorist crimes has risen in the first nine months of 2019 by 3% in comparison with last year’s figures in the same period, while extremist crimes fell by 61%, the Russian Exterior Ministry statistics shows.

"In January-September 2019, 1,382 terrorist crimes were registered [which is 3.1% more than in the same period last year] and 454 extremist crimes [61% fewer]," the statistics says.

MOSCOW, November 16. /TASS/: The death toll in the blast that rocked Baghdad on Friday has climbed to six people, Xinhua news agency reported citing a source in the Iraqi Interior Ministry.

Thirty people were also injured in the blast. Earlier reports said that four people died and 20 were injured.

A car bomb exploded near Tahrir Square in downtown Baghdad where many protesters gathered.

MOSCOW, November 15. /TASS/: The Russian military police conducted a number of patrol missions in Syria’s Aleppo and al-Hasakah governorates, and the air taskforce conducted an aerial patrol mission in northern Syria, Major General Yury Borenkov, chief of the Russian Center for reconciliation of the conflicting sides in Syria, told reporters on Friday.

STOCKHOLM/BEIJING (Reuters) - Beijing has doubled down in its criticism of Stockholm’s support for Gui Minhai, a book publisher detained in China, after Sweden’s minister for culture attended a literary award ceremony in his honor.

The Chinese ambassador to Sweden had threatened Minister of Culture Amanda Lind with a ban on entering China if she attended the prize-giving on Friday.

After the ceremony where Lind defended freedom of speech, China’s embassy in Stockholm said in a statement on Saturday that Lind’s attendance was a “serious mistake”.