Europe

MOSCOW, July 15. /TASS/: Russian President Vladimir Putin said during a phone talk with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa that obstacles still persisted for Russian exports under the gain deal, the Kremlin press office reported on Saturday.

The phone talk was held on July 15 at the initiative of the South African side, the Kremlin press office specified.

MOSCOW, July 15. /TASS/: Moscow’s Basmanny District Court has ruled to arrest seven members of nationalist organizations suspected of an assassination attempt on journalists Margarita Simonyan and Ksenia Sobchak, the court’s press service told TASS on Saturday.

"The court has granted a request and selected custody as a restriction measure for the suspects who were earlier detained for the assassination attempt on Sobchak and Simonyan," the court said.

GENEVA, July 15 (NNN-AGENCIES) — The UN Human Rights Council called for transparency on the risks of artificial intelligence and for the data harvested by AI to be used responsibly.

An explosion in generative AI content since ChatGPT launched late last year has left authorities scrambling to figure out how to regulate such chatbots and ensure the technology does not endanger humanity.

GENEVA, July  15 (NNN-AGENCIES) — Some 289 children are known to have died in the first half of 2023 while trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea to Europe, the United Nations said.

 The figure is double that recorded in the first six months of 2022, the UN children’s agency UNICEF said, as it called for expanded safe, legal and accessible pathways for children to seek protection in Europe.

LONDON, July 15 (Reuters) - British defence minister Ben Wallace will not stand as a member of parliament (MP) in the next UK national election, and will leave government when Prime Minister Rishi Sunak carries out his next cabinet reshuffle, he told The Sunday Times newspaper.

Wallace, a member of the ruling Conservative party, has been MP for Wyre and Preston North and its predecessor constituency in northwest England since 2005.

He has been defence secretary for four years, helping lead Britain's response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

July 15 (Reuters) - Russia on Saturday demanded the immediate release of a senior Orthodox cleric detained in Kyiv on suspicion of inflaming religious hatred and justifying Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

A Kyiv court ordered pre-trial detention on Friday for Metropolitan Pavlo, a senior figure in the Ukrainian Orthodox Church who had been under house arrest since April.

July 15 (Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin held a phone call with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in which they discussed the Black Sea grain deal, due to expire on Monday, and a summit in South Africa next month, the Kremlin said on Saturday.

Ramaphosa finds himself in an awkward position as host of the BRICS summit because of an arrest warrant issued against Putin in March by the International Criminal Court (ICC), which accused him of the war crime of deporting Ukrainian children to Russia.

July 15 (Reuters) - President Volodymyr Zelenskiy warned Ukrainians that Russia was throwing all its resources into a campaign to stop Kyiv's troops from pressing their counter offensive and a top general reported new progress on the southern front.

But Ukrainian military analysts suggested that things were not easy for Ukrainian forces in their bid to advance southward.

Ukraine has launched a counter offensive to take back swathes of land in eastern and southern Ukraine captured by Russian forces in their invasion launched in February 2022.

July 15 (Reuters) - Russia is investigating whether a North Korean intercontinental ballistic missile crashed in its waters during a test launch on Wednesday, state media quoted Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Rudenko as saying.

RIA and TASS news agencies quoted Rudenko as saying that Russia's defence ministry was investigating, but "so far we have no clear information that the missile fell in Russia's economic zone".

(AP) --- A large convoy carrying fighters from the Wagner private army was spotted entering Belarus from Russia early Saturday, a monitoring group reported after the country’s Defense Ministry said it planned for the mercenaries and Minsk’s own armed forces to conduct joint military drills.

The independent monitoring group Belaruski Hajun, which tracks the movements of armed forces in Belarus, said that at least 60 trucks, buses and other large vehicles crossed into the Eastern European country accompanied by Belarusian police.