Europe

GENEVA, Aug 26 (NNN-AGENCIES) — The World Health Organization announced that a million people had died from COVID-19 in 2022, calling it a “tragic milestone” when all the tools existed to prevent deaths.

Nearly 6.45 million deaths have been reported to the WHO since the virus was first detected in China in late 2019.

But WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus questioned whether the world was really on top of the pandemic, this far in.

“This week, we crossed the tragic milestone of one million reported deaths so far this year,” he told a press conference.

KYIV, Aug 26 (Reuters) - Ukraine plans to expand the number of districts on the war's front lines where civilian evacuations will be mandatory, as those areas could be occupied and face central heating problems this winter, a deputy prime minister said on Friday.

The Ukrainian government launched a campaign of mandatory evacuations in July for people in the eastern Donetsk region that it began implementing this month.

Ukrainian-controlled districts and towns in the industrial east are under constant shelling from Russia and its proxies.

SARAJEVO, Aug 26 (Reuters) - Government digital infrastructure in Montenegro has been hit by an "unprecedented" cyber attack and timely measures have been taken to mitigate its impact, authorities said on Friday.

"Certain services were switched off temporarily for security reasons but the security of accounts belonging to citizens and companies and their data have not been jeopardised," Public Administration Minister Maras Dukaj said on Twitter.

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — The Dutch leader said he is ashamed that hundreds of asylum-seekers have been forced to sleep in the sweltering heat outside an overcrowded migrant reception center, as his government announced measures Friday to ease the situation by providing more accommodations and temporarily restricting migration.

“It is terrible what is happening in Ter Apel,” Prime Minister Mark Rutte said, referring to the center in the northeastern village of Ter Apel.

But, he added: “I think together we have found a way out of this problem.”

BERLIN (AP) — Authorities in western Germany said Friday that two boys who drowned in a lake near the border with Belgium were British tourists.

The brothers, aged 7 and 9, were reported missing by their parents at a designated swimming area on the Eiserbach lake south of Aachen.

Rescuers were able to retrieve the children from the water and they were taken to hospitals in Aachen and Cologne, but later died.

Aachen prosecutors said they were investigating whether the deaths were the result of negligence.

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Authorities began distributing iodine tablets to residents near Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant Friday in case of a radiation leak, amid mounting fears that the fighting around the complex could trigger a catastrophe.

The move came a day after the plant was temporarily knocked offline because of what officials said was fire damage to a transmission line. The incident heightened dread of a nuclear disaster in a country still haunted by the 1986 explosion at Chernobyl.

LONDON (AP) — Jennifer Jones keeps feeding money into her energy meter, but it never seems to be enough. And when she can’t pay, she feels the impact immediately.

The power in her London home has gone off suddenly three times recently, once when her partner was cooking an egg.

KYIV, Aug 25 (Reuters) - The International Atomic Energy Agency could travel to Ukraine's Russian-held Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant for a mission in southern Ukraine in the coming days, Ukrainian Energy Minister German Galushchenko said on Thursday.

"A visit is planned. We are talking about the coming days - definitely no later than the beginning of September," Galushchenko told Reuters in an interview in Kyiv.

KYIV, Aug 25 (Reuters) - Ukraine's capital renamed 95 streets on Thursday as part of a drive to purge Russian and Soviet place names, Kyiv's mayor announced a day after Ukraine marked 31 years of independence.

Since Russia invaded in February, Ukraine has accelerated what it calls "derussification", a campaign to shed the legacy of hundreds of years of rule by Moscow.

Aug 25 (Reuters) - The world narrowly avoided a radiation accident at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear station in Ukraine on Thursday after power was cut to the two remaining working reactors, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said.

Ukraine's state nuclear company Energoatom said fires in the ash pits of a coal power station near the complex had disconnected the reactors from the power grid. The company blamed Russian "invaders" for the disconnection.