Europe

LONDON (AP) — The chief executive of NatWest, one of Britain’s biggest banks, left her job on Wednesday after discussing personal details of a client — the populist politician Nigel Farage — with a journalist amid a furor over financial institutions’ power to refuse customers for their political views.

The bank said Alison Rose was leaving “by mutual consent.” The surprise early-morning statement came just hours after NatWest had expressed full confidence in the CEO, who was the first woman to head one of Britain’s four big banks.

PARIS (AP) — The president of the International Olympic Committee on Wednesday formally invited the world’s nations but not Russia or its military ally Belarus to gather in one year in Paris for the Olympics — launching the final countdown to the 2024 Games against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine.

IOC president Thomas Bach accompanied his invite with a plea for togetherness and invoked the memory of John Lennon as he argued that “our fragile world, with conflict, division and war,” needs the Olympics’ “unifying power more than ever.”

DNIPRO, Ukraine (AP) — The horrors of war arrive through the night at a hospital in eastern Ukraine, a procession of stretchers bearing limp bodies whisked from the front line.

The soldiers come with bandaged limbs soaked in blood, faces blackened with shrapnel fragments and stunned eyes fixed on the ceiling, frozen in shock. Lately, they’ve been coming with ever-greater frequency.

“Pain!” shrieks a serviceman with a gaping thigh wound as medical workers move him to a surgical gurney.

25 July 2023; MEMO: A judge in the UK has ruled that the home secretary acted unlawfully in not providing basic support to asylum seekers including young children and pregnant women.

Mr Justice Swift found that Suella Braverman broke the law by withholding £3 ($3.8) a week for healthy food for children up to three years old and pregnant women after lawyers representing five asylum seekers challenged the home secretary in the high court.

25 July 2023; MEMO: The UK government has underwritten financing for an $872 million new high-speed electric railway in Turkiye, local Turkish media reports.

According to the report, HS2 plans are scaled back, and the Northern Powerhouse Rail project gets ditched, Westminster appears to have turned its attention to infrastructure projects in far-flung countries rather than investing in crucial connectivity in the north.

26 July 2023; MEMO: The Palestine Action protest outside the Elbit-owned UAV Tactical Systems factory in Leicestershire's Meridian Business Park has now entered its 87th day. A small but determined group of protesters is on site 24 hours a day to ensure that the local council doesn't remove the flags and banners from the protest camp across the road from the factory entrance.

26 July 2023; MEMO: Swedish Foreign Minister Tobias Billstrom has expressed his country's deep regret and categorical rejection of the repeated incidents when copies of the Holy Quran were burned by protesters, describing them as "despicable". According to the foreign ministry in Algiers, he made his comments during a phone call with his Algerian counterpart, Ahmed Ataf, after the Swedish charge d'affaires in the North African country was summoned to hear Algeria's protest about the incidents in Stockholm.

MOSCOW, July 25. /TASS/: Russian Federation Council Speaker Valentina Matviyenko has called the Ukrainian shelling of Russian reporters a despicable murder and atrocity.

MOSCOW, July 25. /TASS/: The Russian State Duma passed a bill increasing the maximum conscription age to 30 years, while keeping the minimum age at 18.

The bill was introduced by a group of lawmakers, led by Chairman of the Duma Committee on Defense Andrey Kartapolov, in March. The bill stipulates that the minimum conscription age remains at 18 years, while the maximum age is being increased from 27 to 30 starting on January 1, 2024. There will be no gradual increase of the maximum conscription age.

MOSCOW, July 25. /TASS/: Coming back to the grain deal is now impossible, since its conditions regarding Russia have not been met, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Tuesday.