Europe

SOFIA, Nov. 21 (Xinhua) -- Bulgarians went to the polls on Sunday morning to vote in the second round of the presidential elections.

Nearly 6.7 million eligible voters would choose their president for the next five years between incumbent President Rumen Radev and Rector of Sofia University Anastas Gerdjikov.

Radev, who was backed by several political formations such as Continue the Change coalition, Bulgarian Socialist Party and There Is Such A People, won the first round of the election on Nov. 14 with 49.42 percent.

LONDON (AP) — The British government is investigating whether built-in racial bias in some medical devices led to Black and Asian people getting sick and dying disproportionately from COVID-19.

Health Secretary Sajid Javid said Sunday that the pandemic had highlighted health disparities along race and gender lines. He said that a third of intensive care admissions in Britain at the height of the pandemic were people from Black and ethnic minority backgrounds, more than double their share of the population.

PARIS (AP) — France’s minister of the sea vowed Sunday to “continue the fight” in the country’s dispute with Britain over fishing rights.

Minister Annick Girardin met with fishermen in northern France on Sunday.

“We fight every day for these ships, for these licenses, and we will not give up,” she told reporters, criticizing the British interpretation of post-Brexit rules over fishing rights as “inadmissible.”

21 Nov 2021; MEMO: Unidentified people attacked Iran's Consulate General in Hamburg, Germany, local police said on Saturday, Anadolu Agency reported.

Police in Hamburg said unidentified persons threw flammable materials at the iron gate of the consulate.

Smoke rose in the area where the consulate is located, while the fire was immediately extinguished, the statement said, noting that no one was injured in the incident.

Two people who fled the scene are being sought, it added.

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — Police arrested seven rioters in The Hague on Saturday night after youths set fires in the streets and threw fireworks at officers. The unrest came a day after police opened fire on protesters in Rotterdam amid what the port city’s mayor called “an orgy of violence” that broke out at a protest against coronavirus restrictions.

VIENNA (AP) — Tens of thousands of protesters, many from far-right groups, marched through Vienna on Saturday after the Austrian government announced a nationwide lockdown beginning Monday to contain skyrocketing coronavirus infections.

MOSCOW, November 20. /TASS/: A carrier rocket developed by the American company Astra with a test cargo of the US Space Force has successfully reached orbit, the company reported on its Twitter page.

The launch took place at 21:16 local time (09:16 Moscow time on Saturday) from the Pacific Spaceport Complex on Kodiak Island (Alaska).

Earlier, the company postponed the launch initially scheduled for Thursday.

The previous launch in late August ended in failure: a couple of minutes after the launch, the rocket's engines turned off and it lost stability.

MOSCOW, November 20. /TASS/: The initiatives of US congressmen to end recognition of Vladimir Putin as president of Russia if he is re-elected in 2024 indicate that Russian citizens made a correct choice in 2018 and it’s not up to the US Congress to decide who will become the country’s leader, State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin wrote on his Telegram channel on Saturday.

MOSCOW, November 20. /TASS/: Russia has registered 37,120 new confirmed COVID-19 infections over the past 24 hours with the total number of infections reaching 9,294,188 cases, the anti-coronavirus crisis center told reporters on Saturday. According to the crisis center, the relative increase of new infections is at the level of 0.4%.

ROME, Nov 20 (NNN-AGENCIES) — A boat carrying the bodies of 10 migrants found dead at sea arrived in Sicily on Friday, along with dozens of people it rescued this week as they tried to cross the Mediterranean.

The crew of the Geo Barents vessel, run by charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF), found the corpses on an overcrowded boat 30 nautical miles off the Libyan coast.

They are believed to have died from suffocation after spending 13 hours on the boat’s lower deck where there was an intense smell of fuel, MSF said in a statement.