Europe

LONDON, Aug 13 (Reuters) - Britain on Sunday warned citizens going to Sweden of possible terrorist attacks following Koran burnings by anti-Islam activists that have outraged Muslims.

In updated travel advice, Britain's foreign ministry said Swedish authorities had successfully disrupted some planned attacks and made arrests.

"You should be vigilant at this time," it said, adding that "terrorists are very likely to try and carry out attacks in Sweden" with places visited by foreigners potential targets.

Aug 13 (Reuters) - Britain's defence ministry said on Sunday there was a realistic possibility that Russia no longer funds the activities of the mercenary Wagner Group.

The defence ministry said in a daily bulletin the Russian state has acted against some other business interests of Wagner owner Yevgeny Prigozhin after he led a failed mutiny against the Russian army's top brass in June.

"If the Russian state no longer pays Wagner, the second most plausible paymasters are the Belarusian authorities," it said, adding that this would be a drain on Belarus' resources.

MOSCOW, Aug 13 (Reuters) - A Russian warship on Sunday fired warning shots at a cargo ship in the southwestern Black Sea as it made its way northwards, the first time Russia has fired on merchant shipping beyond Ukraine since exiting a landmark UN-brokered grain deal last month.

Russia in July halted participation in the Black Sea grain deal that allowed Ukraine to export agricultural produce via the Black Sea and Moscow cautioned that it deemed all ships heading to Ukrainian waters to be potentially carrying weapons.

BERLIN (AP) — A record-setting Norwegian mountaineer pushed back Sunday against claims that she could have done more to save the life of a Pakistani porter who slipped off a narrow trail near the peak of the world’s most treacherous mountain and died there after several hours.

The circumstances of Mohammad Hassan’s July 27 death on K2, the world’s second-highest peak, sparked ongoing controversy, with two climbers arguing that he could have been saved if all those on the mountain that day had aborted their climb and focused on getting him down safely.

WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Poland’s ruling party wants to ask voters in a referendum whether they support accepting “thousands of illegal immigrants from the Middle East and Africa” as part of a European Union relocation plan, the prime minister said Sunday, as his conservative party seeks to hold onto power in an October parliamentary election.

Mateusz Morawiecki announced the referendum question in a new video published on social media. It indicated that his party, Law and Justice, is seeking to use migration in its election campaign, a tactic that helped it take power in 2015.

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Seven people – including a 23-day-old baby girl – were killed in Russian shelling in Ukraine’s southern Kherson region on Sunday, the country’s Internal Affairs Ministry said.

Artillery shelling in the village of Shiroka Balka, on the banks of the Dnieper River killed a family — a husband, wife, 12-year-old boy and 23-day-old girl — and another resident.

Two men were killed in the neighboring village of Stanislav, where a woman was also wounded.

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russia thwarted an attack by 20 Ukrainian drones targeting Moscow-annexed Crimea overnight, the Russian Defense Ministry said Saturday.

Fourteen drones were shot down by Russian air defenses and a further six were jammed electronically, the ministry said in a Telegram post. No casualties or damage were reported. Kyiv officials neither confirmed nor denied Ukraine’s involvement in the attacks.

11 August 2023; MEMO: Britain has removed migrants from a residential barge less than a week after they moved in, after Legionella bacteria was found in the water supply, the government said on Friday, Reuters reports.

Britain had begun moving some migrants on to the large "Bibby Stockholm" barge on its southern coast at the beginning of the week as part of its high-profile strategy to deter asylum seekers from arriving in the country.

MOSCOW, August 11. /TASS/: Commodity prices, including oil prices, will fall as a result of deglobalization, but Russia's GDP will not fall below 2020 levels even under a risky scenario, the Bank of Russia reported on Friday.

By 2026, the Bank of Russia intends to achieve 1.5-2.5% GDP growth and bring the key rate to a long-term neutral range of 5.5-6.5%.

MOSCOW, August 11. /TASS/: Russia is taking all necessary measures to guarantee national security but is firmly committed to the principle of the inadmissibility of a nuclear war, the Russian foreign ministry said on Friday, commenting on the decisions made by Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States to not target strategic nuclear missiles.