Europe

LONDON, Sept. 15 (Xinhua) -- British Prime Minister Boris Johnson likened himself to the Incredible Hulk in an interview on Saturday ahead of talks with European leaders.

"The madder Hulk gets, the stronger Hulk gets," Johnson told the Mail on Sunday newspaper. "Hulk always escaped, no matter how tightly bound in he seemed to be and that is the case for this country."

Johnson made the remarks ahead of talks with European Commission President Jean-Claude Junker and European Union (EU)'s chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier in Luxembourg on Monday.

BERLIN (AP) — Berlin was the last place Helga Melmed had expected to see again.

She was 14 when the Nazis forced her and her family onto a train from their home in the German capital to the Jewish ghetto in Lodz, Poland, in 1941.

That started a gruesome odyssey that later saw her imprisoned at Auschwitz and Neuengamme outside Hamburg before she was finally freed by British soldiers in 1945 from Bergen-Belsen in northern Germany, a 46-pound walking skeleton.

LONDON (AP) — To some, he’s a strategic genius. Others call him a mayhem-loving anarchist.

Everyone seems to have an opinion about Dominic Cummings. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s most powerful aide — dubbed “Boris’ brain” by some — is an enigmatic backstage operator who shuns media attention, yet has been played onscreen by “Sherlock” star Benedict Cumberbatch.

LONDON (AP) — The British prime minister who called the 2016 Brexit referendum and then saw the public vote to leave the European Union, creating the nation’s prolonged political crisis, says he is sorry for the divisions it has caused.

David Cameron said in an interview published Saturday that he thinks about the consequences of the Brexit referendum “every single day” and worries “desperately” about what will happen next.

“I deeply regret the outcome and accept that my approach failed,” he said. “The decisions I took contributed to that failure. I failed.”

BERLIN (AP) — Germany faces a decisive week in its efforts to combat climate change, with Chancellor Angela Merkel pledging Saturday that Europe’s biggest economy will find good solutions but her governing coalition still haggling over a long-promised policy package.

MOSCOW, September 14. /TASS/: Russian Defense Minister Army Gen. Sergei Shoigu awarded victory in the "Courage and Honor" nomination of the Russian Army-2019 festival to a serviceman who saved a senior officer in Syria and a pilot who landed a burning jet.

"We are now choosing the best in 54 military jobs. Many of those people have had a serious combat experience before climbing to this stage," the minister said during the award ceremony.

MOSCOW, September 14. /TASS/: The Interstate Aviation Committee, an air crash investigation authority for Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States, has prepared an interim report about its investigation into last month’s belly-landing of an Airbus A-321 plane on a corn field near Moscow.

An IAC source told TASS that preliminary investigation confirmed the initial version of engine failure as a result of multiple bird strikes.

MOSCOW, September 14. /TASS/: During exercises in the Pacific Ocean, Russia’s Varyag missile cruiser used a Vulkan anti-ship cruise missile to strike a target at a distance of some 500 km, Pacific Fleet spokesman Nikolai Voskresensky told reporters on Saturday.

"The Pacific fleet flagship, the Order of Nakhimov Guards missile cruiser Varyag launched a cruise missile of the Vulkan system at a target ship at a distance of about 500 kilometers," he said. "According to live recording equipment data, the missile hit the target at the designated time."

MOSCOW, September 14. /TASS/: The world’s first-ever floating nuclear power plant "Akademik Lomonosov," which arrived to Russia’s northeasternmost region of Chukotka earlier this week, started mooring at its operating site in the city of Pevek, a regional government spokesperson told TASS on Saturday.

"According to latest reports, the station began the mooring procedure. It will be completed within two hours," the source said.

MOSCOW, September 14. /TASS/: Moscow regularly holds consultations with Washington on normalizing the work of Russia's overseas agencies in the United States, a source in the Russian Foreign Ministry told TASS on Saturday.

"Such expert consultations with the Americans are held regularly," the source said.

"Our dialogue regarding, among other things, normalization of conditions for functioning of Russian overseas agencies in the United States is practically constant," the source stressed.