Europe

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Drone advances in Ukraine have accelerated a long-anticipated technology trend that could soon bring the world’s first fully autonomous fighting robots to the battlefield, inaugurating a new age of warfare.

The longer the war lasts, the more likely it becomes that drones will be used to identify, select and attack targets without help from humans, according to military analysts, combatants and artificial intelligence researchers.

02 Jan 2023; MEMO: The appointment of the far-right French lawmaker, José Gonzalez, as vice-president of the Algeria-France Parliamentary Friendship Group has caused widespread alarm because of his glorification of colonialism and denial of French colonial crimes in Algeria.

MOSCOW, January 2. /TASS/: A Ukrainian drone attacked a power installation in the Klimovsky District, Governor of the Bryansk Region Alexander Bogomaz wrote in his Telegram account.

"A Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicle attacked the Klimovsky District this morning," the Governor wrote. "Nobody was injured. <...> A power installation was damaged as a result of the delivered strike; there is no electricity in a settlement," the official said.

Rescue services are working at the incident scene.

MOSCOW, January 2. /TASS/: Russia recorded 3,884 coronavirus cases in the past 24 hours, the anti-coronavirus crisis center said on Monday.

The number of new daily cases was the lowest since July 12. Total cases have reached 21,807,431.

As many as 379 people were hospitalized with COVID-19 in the past 24 hours, down from 470 the day before. Hospitalizations declined in 41 regions of the country and rose in 17 regions.

Moscow’s COVID-19 cases surged by 751 to 3,302,315 in the past day and St. Petersburg’s cases increased by 615 to 1,828,928.

MOSCOW, January 2. /TASS/: Russia’s Gazprom gas giant exceeded its obligations in terms of annual gas supplies to China in 2022, the company’s CEO Alexey Miller said.

MOSCOW, January 2. /TASS/: A Ukrainian rocket strike from the HIMARS multiple rocket launcher left 63 Russian servicemen killed in Makeyevka in the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), Russia’s Defense Ministry told reporters on Monday.

"The Kiev regime delivered a strike firing six projectiles from the US-made HIMARS multiple rocket launcher on a Russian unit near Makeyevka in the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR). The attack <…> left 63 Russian service members killed," the top brass said in a report.

GENEVA, Jan 2 (NNN-XINHUA) — Alain Berset from the Social Democrat party of Switzerland on Sunday took office as President of the Swiss Confederation for the second time.

Berset is also head of the Swiss Federal Department of Home Affairs. Born in Fribourg on April 9, 1972, he previously held the presidential post in 2018.

MOSCOW, Jan 2 (Reuters) - Russia's buffetted IT sector risks losing more workers in the new year because of planned legislation on remote working, as authorities try to lure back some of the tens of thousands who have gone abroad without prompting them to cut ties completely.

Having relatively portable jobs, IT workers featured prominently among the many Russians who fled after Moscow sent its army into Ukraine on Feb. 24 and the hundreds of thousands who followed when a military call-up began in September.

KYIV, Ukraine, Jan 2 (Reuters) - Russia acknowledged on Monday that scores of its troops were killed in one of the Ukraine war's deadliest strikes, drawing demands from nationalist bloggers for commanders to be punished for housing soldiers alongside an ammunition dump.

Russia's defence ministry said 63 soldiers had died in the fiery blast which destroyed a temporary barracks in a former vocational college in Makiivka, twin city of the Russian-occupied regional capital of Donetsk.

LONDON, Jan. 2 (Xinhua) -- Scientists have dismissed British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's decision to impose COVID-19 tests on travelers from China, calling it "a purely political manoeuvre," British newspaper The Guardian has reported.

Scientists said testing travelers from China will "make no difference to the rise or fall" of the number of COVID-19 cases in the United Kingdom (UK), according to the report published on Saturday.