Europe

WHALEY BRIDGE, United Kingdom, Aug 5 (NNN-BSS) – Another 55 homes have been evacuated from an English town threatened by a collapsing dam, emergency services said Sunday as they raced to reduce the water levels ahead of fresh storms.

Around 1,500 people had already been moved out of Whaley Bridge in Derbyshire after part of the dam wall holding back the Toddbrook Reservoir above the town fell away on Thursday following heavy rain.

5 Aug 2019; MEMO: London Borough of Tower Hamlets refused to host the closing rally of the annual bike ride raising money for Palestinian children in the besieged Gaza over claims it would breach the IHRA’s anti-Semitism criteria, the Guardian reported on Saturday.

MOSCOW, Aug. 4 (Xinhua) -- The aviation force of the Russian Defense Ministry has managed to extinguish forest fires on an area of 753,000 hectares in the Krasnoyark and Irkutsk regions in Russia's Siberia in the last four days, the ministry said Sunday.

The aviation group of the Russian Defense Ministry has dumped about 6,000 tons of water onto the forested areas covered by fire since the beginning of the operation, and wildfires on about 303,000 hectares of forests were extinguished on Sunday alone, a ministry statement said.

LONDON, August 3. /TASS/: The UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office welcomes Washington’s second round of sanctions imposed on Russia over the Skripal case, new UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab wrote on Twitter on Saturday.

"We welcome unwavering US support today, with the introduction of Chemical & Biological Weapons Sanctions in response to Russia’s use of a deadly nerve agent in Salisbury. Continued global response shows we will not stand & watch these horrific weapons be used without consequences," Raab wrote.

MOSCOW, August 4. /TASS/: A criminal case has been opened against a detained participant of Saturday’s unauthorized rally in Moscow, who has been charged with using violence against a riot police officer, a source in the law enforcement agencies told TASS.

"An investigator of the Investigative Committee has opened a case against citizen Ustinov under Part 1 of Article 318 of the Russian Criminal Code," the source said.

MOSCOW, August 4. /TASS/: Organizers of unauthorized rallies in the Russian capital sought to involve their participants in riots, Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said in his interview with TVC, shown by Rossiya-1 TV channel on Sunday.

"Obviously, not all who attended the rally had expected this scenario. But the organizers, apparently, sought to drag them into riots," Sobyanin said. According to the mayor, many of those who participated in the rally had no relation to the upcoming elections to the Moscow City Duma (parliament).

KIEV, August 3. /TASS/: The Servant of the People political party has won a sweeping victory in the snap election to the Verkhovna Rada (parliament) taking 43.16% of the votes, Ukraine’s Central Election Commission head Tatiana Slipachuk said on Saturday announcing the official results of the July 21 parliament election.

04 August 2019; AFP: With its main rival hobbled by the worldwide grounding of a top-selling jet, Europe's Airbus could seem poised to emerge as the undisputed global aerospace leader.

Airbus has overtaken the American giant Boeing in some key benchmarks in 2019. And the company is now better positioned to move quickly on a new jet product.

Meanwhile, the American company is mired in efforts to get its crisis-stricken 737 MAX planes back in the sky after two deadly crashes.

04 August 2019; AFP: A French daredevil who spent years developing a jet-powered hoverboard zoomed across the English Channel on Sunday, fulfilling his quest after pulling off a tricky refuelling manoeuvre that cut short his first attempt 10 days ago.

Franky Zapata blasted off on his "Flyboard" from Sangatte on the northern coast of France at 8:17 am (0617 GMT) for the 35-kilometre (22-mile) trip to St. Margaret's Bay in Dover.

04 August 2019; DW: Germany's federal police force has said 71 of its officers were injured last year while carrying out deportations, according to a media report. The injuries, for the most part, were not severe.

Germany's federal police have said "of the 284 officers attacked during repatriations, 71 were injured" in 2018, according to a report Sunday in the Welt am Sonntag newspaper.