World Briefs

CHINA-RUSSIA Russia’s constitutional changes that prompted the prime minister’s departure won’t affect increasingly close ties between Beijing and Moscow, China said yesterday. Under Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, the China-Russian “strategic cooperative partnership has entered a new era, becoming increasingly mature, stable and resilient,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said at a daily briefing.

CHINA German researchers said yesterday they have developed the first diagnostic test for a new virus that has emerged in central China. The virus was first detected in the Chinese city of Wuhan last year and cases have since been reported in Thailand and Japan.

AUSTRALIA Specialist firefighters have saved the world’s last remaining wild stand of a prehistoric tree from wildfires that razed forests west of Sydney, officials said yesterday. Firefighters winched from helicopters to reach the cluster of fewer than 200 Wollemi Pines in a remote gorge in the Blue Mountains a week before a massive wildlife bore down.

IRAN-UKRAINE The governments of countries that lost citizens when Iran shot down a Ukrainian airliner demanded yesterday that Tehran accept “full responsibility” and pay compensation to the victims’ families. The foreign ministers of Canada, the U.K., Afghanistan, Sweden and Ukraine issued the statement after a meeting at the Canadian High Commission on Trafalgar Square.

UKRAINE Police said yesterday they have opened an investigation into the possibility that the U.S. ambassador came under illegal surveillance by an unknown party before she was recalled from her post in May. The announcement came two days after Democratic lawmakers in the United States released a trove of documents that showed Lev Parnas, an associate of President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, communicating about the removal of Marie Yovanovitch [pictured] as the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine.

RUSSIA Mikhail Mishustin never had any political ambitions as a career bureaucrat and his name didn’t come up as a top candidate to become Russia’s next prime minister. But the 53-year-old Mishustin, the longtime chief of Russia’s tax service, was tapped for the post by President Vladimir Putin. The lower house of Russia’s parliament, the Duma, quickly appointed Mishustin as prime minister yesterday.

FRANCE Opponents of President Emmanuel Macron’s proposed overhaul of France’s pension system marched in Paris and other French cities yesterday, the latest round of street protests against the government plan that also has brought 43 straight days of railway strikes.

USA The Senate opens its historic proceedings against President Donald Trump yesterday with a formal reading of the articles of impeachment by House prosecutors, followed by the arrival at the Capitol of Chief Justice John Roberts, who will swear in all 100 senators as jurors for only the third impeachment trial in U.S. history.