Europe

LONDON, March 12 (Xinhua) -- Had COVID-19 vaccines been shared equitably with the world, at least 1.3 million lives could have been saved in the first year of the rollout, or one preventable death every 24 seconds, an open letter said on Saturday.

ROME (AP) — Intelligence reports indicate nearly 700,000 migrants are in Libya awaiting an opportunity to set out by sea toward Italy, a lawmaker from Premier Giorgia Meloni’s far-right party said Sunday.

Tommaso Foti, the lower parliamentary house whip for the Brothers of Italy Party, told television channel Tgcom24 the Italian secret services estimate there are 685,000 migrants, many of them in Libyan detention camps, who are eager to sail across the central Mediterranean Sea in smugglers’ boats.

Some 105,000 migrants reached Italy by sea in 2022.

ATHENS, Greece (AP) — Thousands of people protested on Sunday against safety deficiencies in Greece’s railway network nearly two weeks after dozens were killed in the country’s deadliest train crash.

The demonstrators also demanded punishment for those responsible for the head-on collision between a passenger train and a freight train that killed 57 people Feb. 28. Police said that more than 8,000 people in Athens gathered outside Parliament to protest on Sunday.

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russia’s advance seems to have stalled in Moscow’s campaign to capture the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, a leading think tank said in an assessment of the longest ground battle of the war.

The Washington-based Institute for the Study of War said there were no confirmed advances by Russian forces in Bakhmut. Russian forces and units from the Kremlin-controlled paramilitary Wagner Group continued to launch ground attacks in the city, but there was no evidence that they were able to make any progress, ISW said late Saturday.

11 Mar 2023; MEMO: During a conference held in Rome on Wednesday and Thursday, the Vatican reiterated the importance of free access and worship in all holy places in Jerusalem.

The conference was held by the Joint Working Group for Dialogue, the Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue and the Palestinian Commission for Interreligious Dialogue.

Sheikh Mahmoud Al-Habbash, religious affairs advisor to Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas, headed the PA delegation.

BERLIN, March 11 (Reuters) - Germany's Verdi trade union has called for strikes on March 13 at the country's northern airports, including Berlin, which it said would likely cause longer queues for passengers and flight cancellations.

The strikes will affect Berlin's international airport, as well as the smaller airports of Hamburg, Hanover and Bremen, the relevant regional branches of the services sector trade union said on Saturday in separate statements.

ROME, March 11 (Reuters) - More than 1,300 migrants have been rescued in three separate operations off the southern tip of Italy, the coastguard said on Saturday, two weeks after at least 74 people died when their boat hit rocks near the coast.

Growing numbers of migrant arrivals have piled pressure on Italy's conservative government, which took office last October promising to reduce the flow only to see a sharp increase in such landings this year from both North Africa and Turkey.

KYIV, March 11 (Reuters) - Three civilians were killed in Russian shelling of Kherson in southern Ukraine on Saturday, and one more died in the eastern Donetsk region, regional officials said.

Regional governor Oleksandr Prokudin said three people, including an elderly woman, were also wounded during the artillery shelling of the city.

"Today the Russian occupiers have hit Kherson again. On a Mykolayivsky road near a shop debris from a shell killed three people...," Prokudin told Ukrainian TV, adding that a car, several buses and a commercial property were damaged.

PARIS, March 11 (Reuters) - France faced a seventh day of demonstrations on Saturday against President Emmanuel Macron's unpopular pension reform plans amid ongoing rolling strikes which have affected refineries, public transport and garbage collections.

A coalition of French unions, maintaining a rare show of unity since the protest movement was launched at the end of January, hopes to keep up to pressure on the government to withdraw the reform, whose key measure is a two-year extension of the retirement age to 64.

LONDON, March 11 (Reuters) - Britain's BBC was forced to axe much of its sports coverage on Saturday after presenters refused to work in a show of solidarity with Gary Lineker, as a row over freedom of speech threatens to turn into a crisis for the national broadcaster.

Former England soccer captain Lineker, the BBC's highest paid presenter and the anchor of the football highlights programme "Match of the Day", was taken off air by the broadcaster on Friday after he criticised Britain's migration policy earlier in the week.