Europe

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russian strikes hit Ukraine’s southern Odesa region and the city of Dnipro for the first time in weeks on Thursday morning, and air raid sirens sounded all across the country amid fears that Moscow unleashed another large-scale missile attack.

An infrastructure target was hit on the Odesa region, Gov. Maksym Marchenko said on Telegram, warning about the threat of a “massive missile barrage on the entire territory of Ukraine.”

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russian airstrikes inflicted more damage on Ukraine on Thursday, with the latest barrage smashing into energy infrastructure, apartment buildings and an industrial site.

At least four people were killed and more than a dozen others wounded in drone and missile strikes around the country, authorities said.

Separately, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres announced an extension of a four-month-old deal to ensure the safe delivery of export of grain, foodstuffs and fertilizers from Ukraine through the Black Sea just days before it was set to expire.

16 Nov 2022; MEMO: The University of Edinburgh has excluded Palestinian staff and scholars of Palestine from a task group set up to discuss the "vicious repercussions" of the highly controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism. Details of the marginalisation of Palestinian voices at the Scottish university was reported by senior lecturer in international relations Nicola Perugini.

WARSAW, November 16. /TASS/: Poland found no evidence of the need to invoke Article 4 of the NATO treaty on urgent consultations in crisis situations, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said on Wednesday.

"Most of the evidence that we have collected so far shows that there will probably be no need to invoke Article 4 this time," he pointed out. "We are assessing the prerequisites for its use," the prime minister added.

MOSCOW, November 16. /TASS/: Russia and China launched traffic on the first-ever railway bridge across the Amur River at the interborder section Nizhneleninskoye-Tongjiang, the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) said in a press release on Wednesday.

"The launch of traffic on the bridge opens a new transport corridor between Russia and China, which removes a number of existing infrastructure restrictions. The distance for transporting goods to the northern provinces of China will be reduced by more than 700 km compared to existing routes," RDIF noted.

MOSCOW, November 16. /TASS/: The fragments of the missile that fell in Poland on Tuesday do not give any reason for an escalation. Warsaw could immediately say that those were fragments of an S-300 missile having nothing to do with Russia, Russian Presidential Spokesman Dmitry Peskov told the media on Wednesday.

"No, I don’t know anything about this," he said in response to a question whether the Russian authorities had contacted the United States and NATO in order to prevent an escalation.

LONDON, Nov 16 (Reuters) - Iran's intelligence services have made at least 10 attempts to kidnap or even kill British nationals or individuals based in the United Kingdom regarded by Tehran as a threat, the head of Britain's domestic spy agency said on Wednesday.

Ken McCallum, Director General of the Security Service known as MI5, said while Tehran was using violence to silence critics at home, its "aggressive intelligence services" were also projecting a threat to Britain directly.

ROME, Nov 16 (Reuters) - Italy believes it does not make much difference if the missile that caused a deadly explosion in Poland was not Russian, because Moscow is still to blame for attacking infrastructure in Ukraine, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said on Wednesday.

Talking to reporters at the G20 summit in Bali, Meloni said she spoke to Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki.

"The possibility that the missile falling on Poland was not a Russian missile but a Ukrainian one changes very little," she said.

Nov 16 (Reuters) - The world's largest satellite ground station, on the Svalbard archipelago off Norway, is used by Western space agencies to gather vital signals from polar-orbiting satellites. This January, one of two fibre-optic cables on the Arctic seabed connecting Svalbard to the mainland was severed. Norway was forced to rely on a back-up link.

In April 2021, another cable – one used by a Norwegian research laboratory to monitor activity on the Arctic seafloor – was ripped away.

BERLIN, Nov 16 (Reuters) - U.S. President Joe Biden told G7 and NATO partners that a missile blast in eastern Poland was caused by a Ukrainian air defence missile, a NATO source told Reuters on Wednesday.

The blast, which killed two people, raised global alarm that the Ukraine conflict could spill into neighbouring countries.

Ukraine blamed Russia. Russia denied its missiles struck Poland.

Biden told reporters in Indonesia on Wednesday that the missile was unlikely to have been fired from Russia.