Europe

6 July 2019; DW: Malta and Italy reportedly reached a deal on Friday to begin to tackle the standoff between charity rescue ships in the Mediterranean Sea and Italy's far-right Interior Minister Matteo Salvini.

The two countries are said to have agreed to each take refugees from a sailboat belonging to Italian NGO Mediterranea that rescued 54 people at sea.

WARSAW, July 5. /TASS/: A court in Poland has approved the extradition of Vyacheslav Vishnevsky, a former owner of the Zimnyaya Vishnya shopping mall in Russia’s Siberian city of Kemerovo, where 60 people died in fire in 2018.

"Concerning the case of Vyacheslav V. [in line with the Polish law, the suspect’s second name must not be disclosed], we inform that the District Court of Warsaw has issued a ruling on legal permissibility of the wanted person’s extradition to the Russian Federation," the Warsaw District Court’s press service said on Friday.

MOSCOW, July 6. /TASS/: The chief of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Mark Green, has presented a strategy on ‘countering malign Kremlin influence,’ the organization said on its website on Friday.

The document features measures to counter Russia’s influence in Europe, in particular in Moldova and Ukraine.

The concept "responds to the challenge of the Kremlin’s malign influence by building the economic and democratic resilience of targeted countries."

MOSCOW, July 6. /TASS/: Later this month, a group of Russian scientists will embark upon an expedition to study Baikal seals, or nerpas - a species of freshwater earless seal endemic to Siberia’s Lake Baikal, the press service of the Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution said.

KRASNODAR, July 6. /TASS/: The pleasure boat that capsized in the Black Sea near the coastal town of Dzhubga late on Friday killing two people had 55 people on board, head of the Tuapse district Anatoly Rusin told TASS on Saturday.

Earlier reports said that it had 43 people on board. According to head of the company that manufactured the vessel, it was built in 2008. The warranty period was six years, and it was to be scrapped after that. The boat was designed to carry 12 people, including the crew, meaning it was overloaded almost five-fold.

TULUN /Irkutsk Region/, July 6. /TASS/: More than 400 people have been taken to hospitals following heavy floods in East Siberia’s Irkutsk Region, Russia’s Deputy Minister for Civil Defense, Emergency Situations and Disaster Relief Pavel Baryshev said at a meeting of the commission on the issue of floods in the Irkutsk Region.

As of the middle of Friday, 22 people were reported dead, 15 people missing and over 330 hospitalized as a result of floods in the Irkutsk Region.

MOSCOW (AP) — One evening last summer, Mikhail Khachaturyan decided that his living room wasn’t tidy enough, so he summoned his three teenage daughters one by one and doused each with pepper spray.

5 July 2019; MEMO: French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said on Thursday he hoped a special trade channel set up with Iran would complete a first, limited transaction in the coming days, Reuters reports.

Set up by France, Britain and Germany, Instex is a barter trade mechanism that aims to avoid direct financial transfers by offsetting balances between importers and exporters on the European side.

5 July 2019; DW: A supertanker suspected of transporting oil to Syria in violation of EU sanctions was detained by British marines on Thursday off the coast of the British territory of Gibraltar.

The Grace 1 tanker was detained for trying to take oil to Syria in violation of European Union sanctions, a spokesman for the British territory said on Friday.

5 July 2019; DW: Chinese army medics and German Bundeswehr soldiers began a practice UN mission this week in southern Germany. The aim is to prepare the teams so they can respond to large-scale outbreaks of epidemics.

Called "Combined Aid 2019," the joint operation will see groups tackle a staged cholera outbreak in multiple refugee camps. The drill includes 92 Chinese medics, 129 German soldiers and 120 support officers. It began on Wednesday and continues until July 17.