Europe

YEREVAN (Armenia), June 28 (NNN-AGENCIES) — Four Armenian separatist fighters were killed Wednesday in the breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh region by Azerbaijani fire, rebels said, as Baku and Yerevan held peace talks mediated by the United States.

Armenia and Azerbaijan have been locked in a decades-long conflict for control of the mountainous region in Azerbaijan, which is populated mainly by ethnic Armenians.

ROME, June 29 (Reuters) - The reluctance of Italy's right-wing coalition to ratify reform of a vital euro zone bailout fund is rooted in a deep distrust of the European Union, analysts and lawmakers said, leaving Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni no easy way out of a political mess.

Italy is the only euro zone country that has not yet given a green light to a treaty that revises the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) - a fund created in 2012 after the euro zone sovereign debt crisis to provide a financial firewall for members of the currency bloc.

NANTERRE, France, June 29 (Reuters) - President Emmanuel Macron fought to contain a mounting crisis on Thursday as unrest erupted for a third day over the deadly police shooting of a teenager of Algerian and Moroccan descent during a traffic stop in a Paris suburb.

Forty thousand police officers were to deploy across France -- nearly four times the numbers mobilised on Wednesday -- but there were few signs that government appeals to a de-escalation in the violence would quell the widespread anger.

June 29 (Reuters) - Satellite images of a military base southeast of the Belarus capital Minsk appear to show new facilities set up in recent days, suggesting the swift construction of a base for Wagner, the Russian mercenary company behind an abortive mutiny.

Russian media have reported that Wagner, whose leader Yevgeny Prigozhin arrived in Belarus on Tuesday, could set up a new base at a vacant military facility near the town of Asipovichi, about 90 km (50 miles) from Minsk.

MOSCOW, June 29 (Xinhua) -- Western sanctions and the departure of foreign companies have a positive effect on the Russian economy, as such moves have expanded business opportunities for Russian entrepreneurs, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Thursday.

"As I have already said ... the world hasn't collapsed as a result of the sanctions or the departure of Western companies," the Kremlin cited Putin as saying at the plenary session of the third economic forum "Strong Ideas for the New Times."

COPENHAGEN, June 29 (Xinhua) -- A new "Smart Store" was launched in Denmark on Thursday, showcasing technologies running entirely on sustainable energy sources.

The Smart Store is in Nordborg in the west of the country, and uses heat capture and reuse technology which allows for a reduction of up to 90 percent in heating costs.

STOCKHOLM, June 29 (Xinhua) -- Sweden's central bank on Thursday announced a 25 basis point hike of its benchmark interest rate to 3.75 percent -- a level not seen since 2008.

It is the seventh consecutive rate hike by the Riksbank since May last year. Before this round of interest rate hikes, the policy rate in Sweden had been at zero or sub-zero for more than seven years.

Another increase is also likely to come before the end of the year, the Riksbank said in a press release.

PARIS (AP) — UNESCO’s 193 members states are gathering Thursday for a two-day meeting in Paris aimed at voting on the United States’ plans to rejoin the U.N. cultural and scientific agency after a decade-long dispute sparked by the organization’s move to include Palestine as a member.

The U.S. announced earlier this month, that it wanted to return, five years after it withdrew from the agency during the presidency of Donald Trump.

PRISTINA, Kosovo (AP) — Kosovo’s prime minister offered Thursday to hold new mayoral elections in four Serb-majority municipalities and reduce police there in an effort to defuse tensions with neighboring Serbia that flared anew last month.

Ethnic Serbs in northern Kosovo boycotted mayoral elections in the four municipalities in April as part of a campaign for greater autonomy, and they now object to the ethnic Albanian mayors chosen in the polls. Neighboring Serbia has backed calls for the mayors to step down.

(AP) --- As life in Russia returned to normal after an armed rebellion by a mercenary group, tensions were rising in and around its neighbor Belarus, where the exiled leader of the force and some of its fighters were settling in.

Moving to Belarus was part of the deal the Kremlin struck with Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the Wagner private military company, to end last weekend’s rebellion that rattled Russia’s leadership.