Europe

LONDON (AP) — British police hunted across the country on Thursday and put ports and airports on alert for a former soldier who escaped from a London prison while awaiting trial on terrorism charges.

Opposition politicians demanded to know how Daniel Abed Khalife managed to slip out of medium-security Wandsworth Prison and why he was not being held at a maximum-security facility.

Khalife, 21, is accused of planting fake bombs at a military base and of violating Britain’s Official Secrets Act by gathering information “that could be useful to an enemy.”

LONDON (AP) — Britain is rejoining the European Union’s $100 billion science-sharing program Horizon Europe, the two sides announced Thursday, more than two years after the country’s membership became a casualty of Brexit.

British scientists expressed relief at the decision, the latest sign of thawing relations between the EU and its former member nation.

WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Film director Agnieszka Holland demanded an apology from Poland’s justice minister after he compared her latest film, which explores the migration crisis at the Poland-Belarus border, to Nazi propaganda.

Holland said Wednesday that she planned to bring defamation charges against Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro unless she receives an apology within seven days. She also demanded that he make a charitable donation of 50,000 Polish zlotys ($11,600) to an association that helps Holocaust survivors.

MOSCOW, September 6. /TASS/: Washington has ruled out the possibility of international control of US biolaboratories by blocking the work on a legally binding protocol to the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC), Lieutenant-General Igor Kirillov, the chief of Russia’s Radiation, Chemical and Biological Protection Troops, has said.

MOSCOW, September 6. /TASS/: The volume of funds in the Russian National Wealth Fund as of September 1 amounted to 13.7 trillion rubles ($139.98 bln), or 9.1% of the Russian GDP anticipated for 2023, according to the Finance Ministry.

"As of September 1, 2023, the volume of the National Wealth Fund amounted to 13,703,597.7 mln rubles, or 9.1% of GDP projected for 2023 <...>," the Ministry of Finance stated.

MOSCOW, September 7. /TASS/: The Interpol database has information about more than 130,000 terrorists and their accomplices, as well as fingerprint cards and DNA of 665,000 people, whose traces were retrieved from sites of terror attacks, Valery Kalachev, chief of the National Central Bureau of Interpol of the Russian Interior Ministry, said in an interview with TASS.

MOSCOW, September 7. /TASS/: A drone was shot down by the air defense system in the Moscow Region’s Ramensky district, Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin said on Thursday.

"This night, air defense forces thwarted a drone attack on Moscow. No damage or casualties were preliminarily reported from the site where the fragments hit the ground," he wrote on his official Telegram channel.

ATHENS, Sept 7 (NNN-AMNA) – Cooperation between Greece and China on shipping finance, is set to receive a boost, after a conference held at the major Greek port of Piraeus, yesterday.

The Export-Import Bank of China (EXIMBANK) and Greek shipowners, discussed the issue within the framework of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), for global infrastructure development at the conference, co-organised by the Association of Banking and Financial Executives of the Hellenic Shipping (ABFEHS) and the Chinese embassy in Greece.

VATICAN CITY, Sept 6 (Reuters) - Ukraine's Eastern Rite Catholic bishops bluntly told Pope Francis at a meeting on Wednesday that some of his comments about Russia had caused great pain and were being used by Moscow to justify a "a murderous ideology".

In a statement that was remarkable for its candour, they said their two-hour session with the pope at the Vatican was a "frank conversation".

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — A Russian missile tore through an outdoor market in eastern Ukraine on Wednesday, killing 17 people and wounding dozens, as U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken returned to the country with more than $1 billion in new American funding for Ukraine, including military and humanitarian aid.