United Kingdom

LONDON, March 24 (Reuters) - Russia's defence minister was briefly shown by state media at a meetingof top officials on Thursday after dropping out of public view for days during Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Sergei Shoigu, a close ally of President Vladimir Putin, is overseeing what Russia calls its "special military operation", but had not been seen in public since March 11, fuelling speculation about his whereabouts.

23 March 2022; MEMO: Julian Assange married his fiancee, Stella Moris, in a London prison on Wednesday, Anadolu News Agency reports.

Assange, 50, remains in Belmarsh prison as he continues to fight extradition to the US.

He has two children with Moris, a 38-year-old lawyer.

Moris' wedding dress was designed by Vivienne Westwood and her veil was embroidered with messages such as "valiant, wild and relentless."

LONDON, March 23 (Xinhua) -- "The West, and especially America, is principally responsible" for the Ukraine crisis, John J. Mearsheimer, a U.S. political scientist, wrote in a recent opinion piece published in The Economist.

American and European policymakers provoked the Ukraine crisis by trying to integrate Ukraine into the West and asserting that Russian President Vladimir Putin bears full responsibility for the crisis, said Mearsheimer, a political science professor at the University of Chicago, "But that story is wrong."

LONDON (AP) — The Dubai government-owned ferry operator at the center of a bitter labor dispute in Britain says it didn’t break the law when it fired 786 crew members without advance notice because they all worked on ships registered outside the U.K.

P&O Ferries also acknowledged in a letter dated Wednesday that the way the dismissals were carried out caused distress for workers and said it had offered “generous compensation” to those involved.

LONDON, March 22 (Reuters) - Ukraine wants China to play a more "noticeable role" in halting the war being waged by Russia on its territory and also to become a future guarantor of its security, a senior aide to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Tuesday.

Andriy Yermak, who heads Zelenskiy's office, also said he expected a dialogue "very soon" between Ukraine's leader and Chinese President Xi Jinping, without elaborating.

LONDON, March 22 (Reuters) - A Russian newspaper has accused hackers of planting fake news on its website after a report briefly appeared there saying nearly 10,000 Russian soldiers had been killed in Ukraine.

The incident marked the second apparent breach within a week of the tightly controlled war narrative that the Kremlin promotes through loyal Russian media.

LONDON (AP) — Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe said Monday that memories of her daughter helped sustain her through almost six years of captivity in Iran as she appealed for the release of fellow hostage Morad Tahbaz, who was left out of the deal that brought her home.

Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who was released last week after the U.K. settled a decades-old debt to Iran, said she was grateful to be free but her journey wouldn’t be complete until Tahbaz and others are returned home, too.

LONDON (AP) — A man who stabbed a veteran British lawmaker to death last year while he was meeting with voters was a “committed Islamist terrorist” who had spent years researching and planning potential attacks on lawmakers, a prosecutor said Monday.

Ali Harbi Ali, 26, appeared in the dock Monday at London’s Central Criminal Court as a trial opened into the murder of Conservative lawmaker David Amess, who was attacked on Oct. 16 during a routine meeting with constituents in a church hall in the town of Leigh-on-Sea in eastern England.

20 March 2022; MEMO: Ghanaian player Thomas Partey, who plays for the Arsenal football club, announced that he has converted to Islam.

Sheikh Muhammad Al-Azhari, an imam, preacher and researcher in Sharia sciences in London, announced that the Ghanaian player took his Shahada at a mosque in London and declared his conversion to Islam.

Partey joined Arsenal about two years ago from Atletico Madrid for a sum of £45 million.

LONDON, March 19 (Reuters) - Prime Minister Boris Johnson said on Saturday that Brexit showed British people loved freedom in the same way as Ukrainians fighting Russia's invasion, comments that were branded tasteless by opposition lawmakers and commentators.

With Ukraine's ambassador to Britain present, Johnson told a Conservative Party conference it was the instinct of British people, like Ukrainians, to choose freedom every time.