Europe

LONDON, Oct. 14 (Xinhua) -- Jeremy Hunt, former foreign secretary of the United Kingdom (UK), has been appointed as chancellor of the exchequer, Downing Street said in a statement on Friday.

Hunt, 55, replaces Kwasi Kwarteng, who resigned earlier in the day after his mini-budget was blamed for causing economic turmoil.

"You have asked me to stand aside as your Chancellor. I have accepted," Kwarteng said in his resignation to Prime Minister Liz Truss posted on Twitter.

VALLETTA, Malta (AP) — A judge in Malta has sentenced two brothers to 40 years in prison each after they pleaded guilty to the car-bomb murder of an anti-corruption journalist.

Hours earlier at the start of the trial in a Valletta courthouse Friday, George Degiorgio, 59, and Alfred Degiorgio, 57, had entered not-guilty pleas.

They were charged with having set the bomb that blew up Daphne Caruana Galizia’s car as she drove near her home on Oct. 16, 2017.

STOCKHOLM (AP) — Three Swedish center-right parties on Friday agreed to form a coalition government with the support of the Sweden Democrats, a once radical far-right group that has moved toward the mainstream but retains a hard line on immigration.

The agreement comes after a month of talks following Sept. 11 elections that gave the Sweden Democrats an unprecedented position of influence in Swedish politics with over 20% of the vote.

KYIV, UKRAINE (AP) — Russian President Vladimir Putin said Friday he expects a mobilization of army reservists he ordered to bolster his country’s troops in Ukraine to be completed in two weeks, a milestone that would allow him to end the unpopular call-up as the Kremlin tries to counter Ukrainian gains on the battlefield.

LONDON (AP) — Embattled British Prime Minister Liz Truss sacked her Treasury chief and reversed course on a major part of her tax-cutting economic plan Friday as she struggled to hang on to her job after weeks of turmoil on financial markets. But the market response was muted and the political reaction to what many saw as panicked moves left Truss’ credibility in tatters after only six weeks in office.

14 October 2022; MEMO: Finland has violated the rights of its child nationals stranded in detention camps in north-eastern Syria, according to United Nations child rights experts.

In a statement by the UN Child Rights Committee, which consists of 18 independent experts tasked with monitoring the implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, it stressed that "Finland has the responsibility and power to protect the Finnish children in the Syrian camps against an imminent risk to their lives by taking action to repatriate them".

MOSCOW, October 13. /TASS/: Russia’s Foreign Ministry recently summoned the German, Danish and Swedish ambassadors to Moscow over those countries’ probe into the Nord Stream attacks where Russia was not invited to participate.

BRUSSELS, October 13. /TASS/: The West will give a powerful response to Russia’s allegedly possible use of nuclear weapons against Ukraine, but that response won’t be nuclear, High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrell said on Thursday.

"It has to be clear that any nuclear attack against Ukraine will create an answer. Not a nuclear answer, but such a powerful answer from the military side that the Russian army would be annihilated," he said in a speech at the European Diplomatic Academy in Bruges.

MOSCOW, October 13. /TASS/: The United States is benefiting handsomely from the anti-Russian sanctions in several spheres simultaneously, Deputy Secretary of Russia’s Security Council Alexander Venediktov told TASS on Thursday.

"Let’s take a look at the agricultural sector. Six or seven years ago the Americans resorted to provoking a global food crisis, achieving considerable growth in the export of its agricultural products, and used the situation in Ukraine for a redivision of the markets, which includes the goal of promoting genetically modified products," he maintained.

MOSCOW, October 13. /TASS/: Moscow will not be chasing the West in pursuit of contacts on Ukraine. There have been no serious proposals for an appropriate dialogue so far,

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in a comment to Izvestiya posted on the daily’s Telegram channel on Thursday.

"No one [in the West] has approached us with serious proposals. We are not going to run after them," Lavrov said.