MOSCOW (Dispatches) -The Kremlin says it regrets a decision by European Union (EU) leaders to reject a German-French proposal to hold a summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin. “President Putin was and remains interested in establishing working relations between Moscow and Brussels,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Friday. EU leaders said on Friday that they had rejected a push by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron to invite Putin to a summit. The proposal came after US President Joe Biden met the Russian president last week.

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PRAGUE (Reuters) - A rare tornado and strong storms struck along the Czech Republic’s southern border on Thursday to destroy parts of some towns, killing at least three people and injuring dozens more, emergency services and media said. The tornado, reported in towns around Hodonin, along the Slovak and Austrian borders and 270 km southeast of Prague, the capital, may have reached windspeeds above 332 kph, a Czech Television meteorologist said. That would make it the strongest in the modern history of the central European nation and its first tornado since 2018.

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NEW YORK (Dispatches) - The Appellate Division of the Supreme Court of New York has ruled that they are temporarily suspending former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani from the practice of law based on a finding that he gave false statements to courts and others while representing former President Donald Trump. The disciplinary proceedings were the result of multiple complaints filed against Giuliani, and are based on allegations of false statements made in court, in the media, and elsewhere about the 2020 election, Fox News reported.

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PARIS (Dispatches) - According to a statement on Thursday by the Algerian Presidency, Abdelmadjid Tebboune accepted the resignation of the government led by Abdelaziz Djerad and appointed him as caretaker premier until a new cabinet is formed. Djerad’s resignation follows a parliamentary election on June 12 that was marked by a low turnout and no majority winner after two years of mass protests and political turmoil, Al-Jazeera reported. The vote was boycotted by the long-running Hirak protest movement, and at just 23 percent, the turnout was the lowest ever recorded in an Algerian election.

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BEIJING (Al-Jazeera) - China plans to send its first crewed mission to Mars in 2033, with regular follow-up flights, under a long-term plan to build a permanently inhabited base on the Red Planet and extract its resources. The ambitious plan, which will intensify a race with the United States to put humans on Mars, was disclosed in detail for the first time after China landed a robotic rover on Mars in mid-May in its inaugural mission to the planet. Crewed launches to Mars are planned for 2033, 2035, 2037, 2041 and beyond, the head of China’s main rocket maker, Wang Xiaojun, told a space exploration conference in Russia recently by video link.

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PARIS (France 24 ) - Fifteen UN peacekeepers, including several from Germany, were wounded in a car bomb attack targeting a temporary base in northern Mali, according to UN and German military officials. The car bomb attack Friday morning on a temporary forward operating base of the UN mission in Mali, known by the acronym MINUSMA, occurred near the village of Ichagara, in the northern Gao region. “The MINUSMA peacekeeping forces were escorting a new battalion of the Malian army in order to redeploy in this region. They most probably had bad intelligence about the situation on the ground because it’s an area where al Qaeda is very, very active,” said FRANCE 24’s terrorism expert, Wassim Nasr.