Europe

BUDAPEST, July 15 (Reuters) - The European Union has "shot itself in the lungs" with ill-considered economic sanctions on Russia, which, unless rolled back, risk destroying the European economy, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said on Friday.

Gas supplies to Europe have tightened and fuel costs have soared since Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February and subsequent sanctions, leaving countries scrambling to refill storage and diversify supply channels. Russia calls its actions in Ukraine a "special operation".

July 15 (Reuters) - A Briton who was detained by Russian-backed separatists in Ukraine and accused of being a mercenary has died, an official in the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) said on Friday.

The death of Paul Urey, 45, was confirmed by a British charity which described him as a humanitarian worker and denied he had any military background.

MOSCOW, July 15 (Reuters) - The head of the company now running the former McDonald's Corp chain of restaurants in Russia told RBC TV that producers of French fries are refusing to supply to the country and warned that attempts to increase domestic processing are fraught with difficulties.

McDonald's quit Russia after a Western backlash against Moscow's military campaign in Ukraine, which included a barrage of economic sanctions, and sold all the restaurants it owned to a local licensee in May.

ROME, July 14 (Xinhua) -- Italian President Sergio Mattarella rejected a resignation offer of Prime Minister Mario Draghi, after meeting him late on Thursday night.

Draghi decided to formally resign after the second largest force in his coalition -- the Five Star Movement (M5S) -- boycotted a confidence vote on the government's relief bill to combat soaring prices in the Senate earlier in the day.

In an official statement after their meeting at the Quirinale Palace, Mattarella's office said that "the president has not accepted the resignation."

SOFIA, Bulgaria (AP) — Bulgaria’s president launched talks on Friday with all political parties represented in parliament to see if there was still a chance to form a government and avoid another early election.

President Rumen Radev is trying to prevent Bulgaria from sliding into new political turmoil after the two main parties stumbled over mustering enough support to form a government coalition.

Radev said that the political crisis is intensifying and that a functioning parliament is needed to cope with it.

15 July 2022; MEMO: The trial of two middlemen at the centre of a historic bribery case involving the payment of millions of dollars by the UK to Saudi royals to secure lucrative arms deal has been halted by a UK judge. The jury at Southwark Crown Court were discharged yesterday by Judge Simon Bryan, who imposed reporting restrictions on the reasons for halting proceedings in anticipation that a retrial could take place at a later date.

VINNYTSIA, Ukraine (AP) — Rescue teams with sniffer dogs combed through debris in a central Ukrainian city on Friday looking for people still missing after a Russian missile strike a day earlier that killed at least 23 people.

Russian forces, meanwhile, pounded other sites in a painstaking push to wrest territory from Ukraine and try to soften unbending morale of its leaders, civilians and troops as the war nears the five-month mark.

BERLIN (AP) — “It’s absolutely crazy to stick yourself to the road with superglue,” admits Lina Schinkoethe.

And yet, the 19-year-old recently landed in jail for doing just that, in protest at what she believes is the German government’s failure to act against climate change.

Schinkoethe is part of a group called Uprising of the Last Generation that claims the world has only a few years left to turn the wheel around and avoid catastrophic levels of global warming.

MOSCOW, July 14. /TASS/: Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a law on provision of counter-terrorism and other operations of Russian Armed Forces, other forces, counter-terrorism and other operations units abroad. The document has been published on the official legal information website Thursday.

PARIS, July 14. /TASS/: France seeks to end the conflict in Ukraine and does not want it to spill over and turn into a new world war, French President Emmanuel Macron said in an interview with France 2 and TF1 TV channels on Thursday.

"We would like to stop the war without joining it. We do not want a global war and a geographical spillover of this conflict to other regions," he stressed. The head of state explained that France hopes to attain this by supporting Ukraine and introducing restrictions against Russia’s economy.