Europe

VIENNA, Jan 27 (NNN-XINHUA) – Austrian President, Alexander Van der Bellen, was sworn in yesterday, inaugurating his second six-year term.

Van der Bellen won the presidential election in Oct last year, with 56.7 percent of the vote. He has served as Austrian president since 2017.

“I will fulfill my duty to the best of my knowledge and belief,” the 79-year-old said, in his inaugural address, at the Austrian parliament in Vienna, yesterday.

BERLIN, Jan 27 (Reuters) - Russia has twisted comments by Germany's foreign minister about the war in Ukraine for propaganda purposes, a German foreign ministry spokesperson said on Friday, stressing Berlin's position that NATO must not become party to the conflict.

German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock riled Moscow with comments at an event in Strasbourg on Tuesday, when, speaking in English, she said that "we are fighting a war against Russia, and not against each other".

WARSAW, Jan 27 (Reuters) - Poland will send an additional 60 tanks to Ukraine on top of the 14 German-made Leopard 2 tanks it has already pledged, the Polish prime minister said in an interview with Canadian television on Thursday.

Warsaw, which has positioned itself as one of Kyiv's staunchest allies, had pressed hard for Germany to send Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine and to allow other countries to do so as well, a demand which Berlin agreed to on Wednesday.

BUDAPEST, Jan 27 (Reuters) - Hungary will veto any European Union sanctions against Russia affecting nuclear energy, Prime Minister Viktor Orban told state radio on Friday.

Ukraine has called on the 27-nation EU to include Russian state nuclear energy company Rosatom in sanctions but Hungary, which has a Russian-built nuclear plant it plans to expand with Rosatom, has blocked that. 

Orban reiterated in an interview that sanctions on nuclear energy "must obviously be vetoed".

OSLO, Jan 27 (Reuters) - A Norwegian study has found a "substantial" amount of metals and minerals ranging from copper to rare earth metals on the seabed of its extended continental shelf, authorities said on Friday in their first official estimates.

The Nordic country, a major oil and gas exporter, is considering whether to open its offshore areas to deep-sea mining, a process that requires parliament's approval and has sparked environmental concerns.

KYIV, Jan 27 (Reuters) - Ukraine on Friday battled Russian troops trying to pierce its lines in the east and northeast before Kyiv takes delivery of tanks from its Western allies, saying the fighting showed it needed more weapons to repel the invaders.

Kyiv said fierce battles were under way, a day after at least 11 people were killed in missile and drone strikes which were widely seen in Ukraine as a response to the promises by important allies to send it tanks.

STOCKHOLM, Jan. 26 (Xinhua) -- "The migratory situation in the European Union (EU) is strained," the member states' justice and home affairs ministers agreed at their Council meeting here on Thursday.

"There is an urgent need to strengthen the external borders, increase returns, and prevent irregular migration," they said, according to a statement issued by the Swedish Presidency of the Council of the EU.

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russian shelling killed at least 10 Ukrainian civilians and wounded 20 others in a day, the office of Ukraine’s president reported Friday as the country worked to recover from an earlier wave of Russian missile strikes and drone attacks.

MOSCOW (AP) — A former Russian Orthodox monk, who denied that the coronavirus existed and defied the Kremlin, was handed a seven-year prison sentence Friday.

Nikolai Romanov, 67, who was known as Father Sergiy until his excommunication by the Russian Orthodox Church, urged his followers to disobey the Russian government’s lockdown measures and spread conspiracy theories about a global plot to control the masses.

A court in Moscow convicted him of inciting hatred. His lawyer immediately announced plans to appeal.

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — The global chemical weapons watchdog said Friday that its investigators found “reasonable grounds to believe” Syria’s air force dropped two cylinders containing chlorine gas on the city of Douma in April 2018, killing 43 people.

A report by a team from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons offered the latest confirmation that the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad used chemical weapons during his country’s grinding civil war.