Europe

TAIPEI/BERLIN, Aug 8 (Reuters) - Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC on Tuesday committed 3.5 billion euros ($3.8 billion) to a factory in Germany, its first in Europe, taking advantage of huge state support for the $11 billion plant as the continent seeks to bring supply chains closer to home.

The plant, which will be TSMC's (2330.TW) third outside of traditional manufacturing bases Taiwan and China, is central to Berlin's ambition to foster the domestic semiconductor industry its car industry will need to remain globally competitive.

LONDON, Aug 8 (Reuters) - "Hostile actors" targeted Britain's Electoral Commission in a complex cyber incident that involved hackers accessing internal emails and copies of voter data, the commission said on Tuesday.

The Electoral Commission, the independent body which oversees elections and regulates political finance, said the incident came to light last year.

LONDON, Aug 8 (Reuters) - Russia's lack of ships and Western grain traders' shrinking appetite for business with Moscow are adding to rising costs of moving Russian wheat, at a time when the war in Ukraine has spilled perilously close to vital Black Sea supply routes.

President Vladimir Putin promised to replace Ukrainian grain with Russian shipments to Africa after Moscow in July ended an arrangement that gave Ukraine's food cargo safe passage in the Black Sea, imposing a de-facto blockade on its neighbour and attacking storage facilities, in an escalation of the war.

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Ukrainian officials on Tuesday accused the Kremlin’s forces of targeting rescue workers as the death toll from two Russian missile strikes that slammed into residential buildings in the downtown area of a Ukrainian city climbed to seven.

The dead in the Monday evening strikes in the city of Pokrovsk were five civilians, one rescuer and one soldier, Donetsk Gov. Pavlo Kyrylenko said. Dozens more were wounded, most of them police officers, emergency workers and soldiers who had rushed to the scene to assist residents.

KYIV, Aug 7 (Reuters) - Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said on Monday he had held a phone call with his U.S. counterpart Antony Blinken during which he requested ATACMS long-range missiles.

"In our call, @SecBlinken and I discussed further steps to broaden global support for the Peace Formula and solutions to expand grain exports," Kuleba said on messaging platform X, formerly known as Twitter.

"I thanked the U.S. for all the assistance provided and stressed the need to enhance Ukraine's long-range capabilities by providing ATACMS."

Aug 7 (Reuters) - Russia will launch its first lunar landing spacecraft in 47 years on Friday in a race with India to the south pole of the moon, a potential source of water to support a future human presence there.

The launch from the Vostochny cosmodrome, 3,450 miles (5,550 km) east of Moscow, will take place four weeks after India sent up its Chandrayaan-3 lunar lander, due to touch down at the pole on Aug. 23.

KYIV, Aug 7 (Reuters) - A senior Ukrainian official said on Monday that the weekend's talks in Saudi Arabia about the war in Ukraine dealt a "huge blow" to Russia, and that the participants agreed to hold another meeting of political advisers within about six weeks.

More than 40 countries, including China, India, the United States, and European countries, but not Russia, took part in the talks that were seen as an attempt by Kyiv to build a broader coalition of powers to support its vision of peace.

ABOARD THE PAPAL PLANE, Aug 6 (Reuters) - Pope Francis said on Sunday that the Catholic Church is open to everyone, including the gay community, and that it has a duty to accompany them on a personal path of spirituality but within the framework of its rules.

Francis, speaking to reporters on the plane returning to Rome from Portugal, also said his health was good following surgery for an abdominal hernia in June. He said his stitches had been removed but had to wear an abdominal band for another two or three months until his muscles strengthened.

LONDON/WASHINGTON, Aug 7 (Reuters) - An elite group of North Korean hackers secretly breached computer networks at a major Russian missile developer for at least five months last year, according to technical evidence reviewed by Reuters and analysis by security researchers.

Reuters found cyber-espionage teams linked to the North Korean government, which security researchers call ScarCruft and Lazarus, secretly installed stealthy digital backdoors into systems at NPO Mashinostroyeniya, a rocket design bureau based in Reutov, a small town on the outskirts of Moscow.

BOR, Serbia, Aug. 6 (Xinhua) -- Serbia's national miners' day was marked on Sunday here and also in Majdanpek with ceremonies, concerts, exhibitions, sports, an outdoor bazaar, and fireworks.

The celebration in the two cities in east Serbia was attended by representatives of the Serbian government, Chinese mining company Zijin, and local communities which number thousands of miners and their families.