In an east Ukrainian village under Russian control, farm manager Viktor Molotok is surrounded by several tonnes of grain, piled up around him in mounds. . He manages a 5,500-hectare farm in the village of Kalmykivka, in eastern Ukraine's Lugansk region that Moscow claimed full control of in early July.
President Joe Biden's symptoms "have improved" and his key vital signs including blood pressure remain normal, his White House physician said Friday a day after the 79-year-old US leader tested positive for Covid.. "His symptoms have improved," doctor Kevin O'Connor wrote in a memorandum to the White House press secretary.
At least 13 people have been killed in fighting that flared overnight between armed groups in Tripoli, emergency services said Friday, the latest violence to hit the Libyan capital in months of rising political tensions.. The fighting "killed 13 people, among them three civilians including a child aged 11, and wounded 30," the ambulance service told news channel Libya al-Ahrar.
The United States on Friday slapped a travel ban on Paraguay's former president Horacio Cartes, accusing the businessman turned politician of corruption and links to "terrorist" groups.. He did not specify further but Paraguay's Vice President Hugo Velazquez has accused the former leader of ties with the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, which has allegedly profited on the smuggling of counterfeit cigarettes through Paraguay and its porous three-way frontier with Argentina and Brazil.
Iran and Saudi Arabia are ready to move reconciliation talks to a higher level, more than a year after they began and six years after the two rivals severed relations, Iran's foreign minister says.. He added that last week Iran had received a message from Iraqi Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein who said "the Saudi side is ready to move the talks to the political and public level."
Russian investigators on Friday opened a criminal probe against a pregnant city councillor in Siberia who is one of the last allies of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny still in the country. . Nearly all key opposition figures are now either in exile or in jail, and virtually any criticism of Moscow's offensive in Ukraine has been outlawed.
At least nine people were killed overnight Thursday-Friday in heavy clashes between militias in the Libyan capital Tripoli, emergency services said.. Updating an earlier toll, emergency services told Al-Ahrar television a child was among the nine dead and that 25 other people -- including civilians -- were wounded, several of them seriously.
After artillery bombardment killed nine people in Iraq's autonomous Kurdistan region, Baghdad called for a withdrawal of Turkish forces and said Ankara should handle its "domestic problems" with PKK rebels far from Iraq's borders.. - Baghdad wants Turkish forces out of its territory, but for this to happen, Fazil said Ankara "might require the Iraqi government to expel the PKK".
Dublin's Special Criminal Court on Friday sentenced former soldier Lisa Smith to 15 months in jail for joining the so-called Islamic State (IS) group in Syria.. Judge Hunt rejected her lawyer's plea to impose a suspended sentence but heeded his call for a jail term at the lower end of the scale.
When fighting erupted between Taliban forces and a breakaway group led by one of their former commanders in northern Afghanistan last month, Zahra and her family fled to the mountains. . In Balkhab, Mujahid and his followers have fled into the mountains, according to defense ministry spokesman Enayatullah Khwarizmi, and fighting has stopped.
