Blogs
on August 13, 2025
UKRAINE/BELARUS BORDER, April 8 (Reuters) - More than 30 children were reunited with their families in Ukraine this weekend after a long operation to bring them back home from Russia or Russian-occupied Crimea, where they had been taken from areas occupied by Russian forces during the war.
Peter's Square and then delivering his twice-annual "Urbi et Orbi" (to the city and the world) blessing and message from the central external balcony of St. Peter's Basilica. (Reporting by Philip Pullella; Editing by Christina Fincher)
"Now the fifth rescue mission is nearing its completion. It was special regarding the number of children we managed to return and also because of its complexity," said Mykola Kuleba, the founder of the Save Ukraine humanitarian organisation that helped arrange the rescue mission.
"We may feel helpless and discouraged before the power of evil, the conflicts that tear relationships apart, the attitudes of calculation and indifference that seem to prevail in society, the cancer of corruption, the spread of injustice, the icy winds of war," he said.
The United States and European Union imposed sanctions on Malofeev in 2014 over accusations that he funded pro-Moscow separatists fighting in Ukraine, which he denies. Russia considers such Western sanctions illegal.
Ofcom said it noted new laws in Russia which "effectively criminalise any independent journalism that departs from the Russian state's own news narrative", particularly in relation to the invasion of Ukraine.
Reading his homily in a strong and confident voice, Francis said that even when people felt the wellspring of hope had dried up, it was important not to be frozen in a sense of defeat but to seek an "interior resurrection" with God's help.
Lvova-Belova said earlier this week that her commission acted on humanitarian grounds to protect the interests of children in an area where military action was taking place and had not moved anyone against their will or that of their parents or legal guardians, whose consent was always sought unless they were missing.
"Thank God Google exists in India, China, Brazil and other countries. We will collect the money there until the court decision is fully realised." ($1 = 95.2500 roubles) (Reporting by Reuters; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)
'He was supposed to sit in a chair six feet away but apparently he walked into the room before I got there and said, "No way, I'm not having that" and dragged a chair from across the room. It was amazing. I thought it was quite a comfortable, cosy setting.'
And it turns out her day of fun in the sun, which included swimming, strolling and a relaxing massage, was just a warm up for another night behind the turntables as the guest DJ at the trendy LIV nightclub.
"Currently, writs of execution have been issued, enforcement orders have been initiated and funds sufficient to fulfil the court acts have been seized from Google's accounts," Tsargrad said in a statement.
The three said they had been separated from their parents who were pressured by Russian authorities to send their children to Russian summer camps for what was billed as two weeks, from occupied parts of Kherson and Kharkiv regions.
"By ignoring RT's completely clean record of four consecutive years and stating purely political reasons tied directly to the situation in Ukraine and yet completely unassociated to RT's operations, structure, management or editorial output, Ofcom has falsely judged RT to not be ‘fit and proper' and in doing so robbed the UK public of access to information."
Moscow has not concealed a programme under which it has taken thousands of Ukrainian children from occupied areas, but presents this it as a humanitarian campaign to protect orphans and children abandoned in the conflict zone.
The International Criminal Court last month issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russia's children's rights commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova, accusing them of abducting children from Ukraine.
A statement released by the regulator on Friday said: "We consider the volume and potentially serious nature of the issues raised within such a short period to be of great concern - especially given RT's compliance history, which has seen the channel fined £200,000 for previous due impartiality breaches.
In a statement, she said: "Ofcom has shown the UK public, and the regulatory community internationally, that, despite a well-constructed facade of independence, it is nothing more than a tool of government, bending to its media-suppressing will.
Kateryna Rashevska, a lawyer from a Ukrainian NGO called Regional Centre for Human Rights, told the briefing they were collecting evidence to build a case that Russian officials deliberately prevented return of the Ukrainian children.
<img src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/8RsF8bWE9tw/hq720.jpg"; style="max-width:400px;float:left;padding:10px 10px 10px 0px;border:0px;" alt="Social and Emotional Learning Curriculum for Your 5th or 6th Grade Students!" />March 17 (Reuters) - The television channel of a sanctioned Russian businessman on Thursday said Alphabet Inc's Google had lost a court appeal against a 2021 ruling that the company pay a compounding fine for blocking access to the channel's YouTube account.