MADRID (Reuters) – At least 300 people who were travelling on three migrant boats from Senegal to Spain’s Canary Islands have disappeared, migrant aid group Walking Borders said on Sunday.

Two boats, one carrying about 65 people and the other with between 50 and 60 on board, have been missing for 15 days since they left Senegal to try to reach Spain, Helena Maleno of Walking Borders told Reuters.

A third boat left Senegal on June 27 with about 200 people aboard.

The families of those on board have not heard from them since they left, Maleno said.

All three boats left Kafountine in the south of Senegal, which is about 1,700 kilometres (1,057 miles) from Tenerife, one of the Canary Islands.

“The families are very worried. There about 300 people from the same area of Senegal. They have left because of the instability in Senegal,” Maleno said.

The Canary Islands off the coast of West Africa have become the main destination for migrants trying to reach Spain, with a much smaller number also seeking to cross the Mediterranean Sea to the Spanish mainland. Summer is the busiest period for all attempted crossings.

The Atlantic migration route, one of the deadliest in the world, is typically used by migrants from sub-Saharan Africa. At least 559 people – including 22 children – died in 2022 in attempts to reach the Canary Islands, according to data from the U.N.’s International Organisation for Migration.

(Reporting by Graham Keeley; Editing by David Holmes)

By Philip Pullella

(Reuters) -Pope Francis on Sunday announced that he would elevate 21 churchmen to the high rank of cardinal, again putting his mark on the group that will one day choose his successor after his death or resignation.

The ceremony to install them, known as a consistory, will be held on Sept. 30, the 86-year-old Francis announced during his noon prayer to pilgrims and tourists in St. Peter’s Square.

It will be the ninth consistory called by the pope since his election 10 years ago as the first pontiff from Latin America.

The new cardinals come from countries including the United States, Italy, Argentina, Switzerland, South Africa, Spain, Colombia, South Sudan, Hong Kong, Poland, Malaysia, Tanzania, and Portugal.

Eighteen of the 21 are under 80 and will be able to enter an eventual secret conclave to choose the next pope. They are known as cardinal electors.

After the September consistory, there will be 137 cardinal electors, about 73 percent of them chosen by Francis. This increases the possibility that the next pope will share his vision of a more progressive, inclusive Church.

Francis has also increased the possibility that the next pope will come from Asia or Africa, having consistently named cardinal electors from those continents and giving less importance than his predecessor to countries in Europe.

Whether the pope will name even more cardinals depends on how long he lives.

Francis spent nine days in hospital after surgery for an abdominal hernia last month. His recovery is going well and he is due to visit Portugal from Aug. 2 to 4 and Mongolia from Aug. 31 to Sept. 4.

The other three new cardinals, who are 80 or over and too old to vote in a conclave, were named to thank them for their long service to the Church.

All cardinals, regardless of their age, are allowed to take part in pre-conclave meetings, known as General Congregations, giving them a say in the type of person they think the younger cardinals should choose.

Cardinals rank second only to the pope in the Church hierarchy and serve as his closest advisers. Due to their historical power and influence, they are still called the princes of the Church, although Francis has told them not to live like royalty and to be close to the poor.

Three of the new cardinals were recently named as heads of major Vatican departments, including Argentine Archbishop Victor Manuel Fernandez, head of the Vatican’s doctrinal department.

Another significant appointment was that of Bishop Stephen Chow Sau-Yan of Hong Kong. Chow is one of the major links to the Catholic Church in communist China, where the Vatican is trying to improve conditions for Catholics. The bishop visited Beijing in April.

Another is Archbishop Robert Francis Prevost, an American who was recently named head of the Vatican department that helps the pope choose new bishops, one of the most powerful posts in the Vatican.

(Reporting by Federico Maccioni and Philip Pullella; Editing by Alison Williams and Sharon Singleton)

By Steve Holland and Doina Chiacu

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Israel and Saudi Arabia are a long way from a normalization agreement that would involve a defense treaty and a civilian nuclear program from the United States, U.S. President Joe Biden said in a CNN interview broadcast on Sunday.

U.S. officials have been negotiating in a bid to reach an elusive normalization deal between the two countries.

“We’re a long way from there. We got a lot to talk about,” Biden said in an interview with “Fareed Zakaria’s GPS.”

Israel’s energy minister expressed opposition last month to the idea of Saudi Arabia developing a civilian nuclear program as part of any U.S.-mediated forging of relations between the countries.

Biden pointed to Saudi Arabia’s decision on the eve of his visit to the kingdom last summer to open its airspace to all air carriers, paving the way for more overflights to and from Israel.

The U.S. president also noted efforts toward a permanent ceasefire in Yemen, a conflict that has killed tens of thousands of people and has widely been seen as a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

“So, we’re making progress in the region. And it depends upon the conduct and what is asked of us for them to recognize Israel,” Biden said in the interview.

“Quite frankly, I don’t think they have much of a problem with Israel. And whether or not we would provide a means by which they could have civilian nuclear power and/or be a guarantor of their security, that’s – I think that’s a little way off.”

Israel has said it expected to be consulted by Washington on a U.S.-Saudi deal affecting its national security. Israel, which is outside the voluntary Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and has no nuclear energy, is widely believed to have atomic weaponry.

Pointing to precedents like Iraq and Libya, Israel has long worried that potentially hostile neighbors could use civilian nuclear energy and other projects developed under the 1970 NPT as cover for clandestine bombmaking.

Public fury grew in the Arab world last week after one of Israel’s biggest military operations in the occupied West Bank in years, a raid in a Jenin refugee camp, a Palestinian militant stronghold.

Saudia Arabia on Tuesday joined other Arab League nations in condemning the raid, which killed 12 Palestinians. Even before the latest violence, Riyadh said normalization is not possible until Palestinian statehood goals have been addressed.

Israel’s religious-nationalist government has acknowledged setbacks in the normalization efforts amid Saudi censure of its policies toward the Palestinians.

Israel Foreign Minister Eli Cohen sounded a hopeful note on Sunday about the rare participation of an Israeli delegation at a Riyadh-hosted soccer video-gaming tournament over the weekend.

“Ultimately we want to reach a state of full relations – meaning cooperation on economic matters, intelligence, tourism, flights, et cetera – and I reckon this will happen sooner or later,” he told Israel’s Army Radio.

The Israel Football Association, which is managing the delegation at the FIFAe World Cup Riyadh 2023, said its participation was enabled by Riyadh’s agreement to admit all comers – not any arrangement between the Saudi and Israeli governments.

(Reporting by Steve Holland and Doina Chiacu,;Additional reporting by Dan Williams; Editing by Andrea Ricci, William Maclean and Mark Porter)

KYIV (Reuters) – The Ukrainian and Polish presidents jointly marked the anniversary on Sunday of World War Two-era massacres of Poles by Ukrainian nationalists, killings that have caused tension for generations between countries that are now close allies.

Warsaw has positioned itself as one of Kyiv’s staunchest supporters since Russia invaded the country in 2022.

But the Volhynia massacres have continued to hang over ties between the two nations, particularly ahead of the July 11 anniversary of one of the bloodiest days of a series of killings that took place from 1943 to 1945.

Poland says around 100,000 Poles were killed in the massacres by Ukrainian nationalists. Thousands of Ukrainians also died in reprisal killings.

Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskiy and his Polish counterpart Andrzej Duda attended a church service together in the western Ukrainian city of Lutsk, in memory of the victims.

“Together we pay tribute to all the innocent victims of Volhynia! Memory unites us!,” Duda’s office and Zelenskiy both wrote on Twitter. “Together we are stronger.”

The service was attended by the heads of the largest Orthodox and Catholic churches in Ukraine and the head of the Polish Bishop’s Conference, Archbishop Stanislaw Gadecki.

The Ukrainian president’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, wrote on Telegram that Ukraine and Poland were “united against a common enemy who dreamed of dividing us”.

Duda called the service “a testimony of friendship in the face of a difficult history”.

In a post on Twitter, Zelenskiy said he had a “brief but very substantive” discussion at the event with Duda about the upcoming NATO summit in Vilnius, where Ukraine is hoping for decisions that will hasten its goal of membership in the alliance.

“We agreed to work together to get the best possible result for Ukraine,” Zelenskiy wrote.

The head of Duda’s office said the fact that the presidents were commemorating the victims together was “historic”, but that more work was needed.

“This is not the end of this difficult road, explaining to our Ukrainian friends about the historical truth, it will of course be continued,” Pawel Szrot told private broadcaster Polsat News.

The Polish parliament has said that the murders, carried out between 1943 and 1945 by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists under the leadership of Stepan Bandera, bore elements of genocide.

Ukraine has not accepted that assertion and often refers to the Volhynia events as part of a conflict between Poland and Ukraine which affected both nations.

Warsaw and Kyiv have also clashed over the issue of whether Polish specialists can search for and exhume the remains of Poles that died in Ukraine.

The massacre caused an unusually public row between Poland and Ukraine earlier this year, after a Polish foreign ministry spokesman said that Zelenskiy should apologise and ask for forgiveness for the events in Volhynia.

However, Ukraine’s parliament speaker Ruslan Stefanchuk moved to defuse tensions in May when he told the Polish parliament that Kyiv understood Poland’s pain.

(Reporting by Max Hunder in Kyiv and Alan Charlish in Warsaw; Editing by William Maclean, Sharon Singleton, Peter Graff)

By Andrea Shalal

BEIJING (Reuters) -U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said 10 hours of meetings with senior Chinese officials in recent days were “direct” and “productive”, helping stabilise the superpowers’ often rocky relationship as her four-day Beijing trip ended.

Before departing China on Sunday, Yellen said the United States and China remained at odds on a number of issues but expressed confidence that her visit had advanced efforts to put the relationship on “surer footing”.

“The U.S. and China have significant disagreements,” Yellen told a press conference at the U.S. embassy in Beijing, citing Washington’s concerns about what she called “unfair economic practices” and recent punitive actions against U.S. firms.

“But President (Joe) Biden and I do not see the relationship between the U.S. and China through the frame of great power conflict. We believe that the world is big enough for both of our countries to thrive.”

With U.S.-China relations at a low over national security issues, including Taiwan, U.S. export bans on advanced technologies and China’s state-led industrial policies, Washington has been trying to repair ties between the world’s two biggest economies.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Beijing last month, the first trip by the top U.S. diplomat in Biden’s presidency. Climate envoy John Kerry is expected to visit this month.

The U.S. diplomatic push comes ahead of a possible meeting between Biden and President Xi Jinping at September’s Group of 20 summit in New Delhi or a Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation gathering scheduled for November in San Francisco.

Yellen said her visit aimed to establish and deepen ties with China’s new economic team, reduce the risk of misunderstanding and pave the way for cooperation in areas such as climate change and debt distress.

“I do think we’ve made some progress and I think we can have a healthy economic relationship that benefits both of us and the world,” she said, adding that she expected increased and more regular communications at the staff level.

Briefing reporters after the visit, a senior Treasury official said the trip as expected did not result in specific policy breakthroughs, but was “very successful” in terms of “re-establishing contact” and building relationships.

She said Chinese officials raised concerns about an expected U.S. executive order restricting outbound investment, but she assured them any such measure would be narrow in scope and enacted in a transparent way, through a rule-making process that would allow public input.

Yellen said she told Chinese officials they could raise concerns about U.S. actions, so that Washington could explain, and “possibly in some situations, respond to unintended consequences of our actions if they’re not carefully targeted.”

DECOUPLING WOULD BE ‘DISASTROUS’

Yellen met with officials including Premier Li Qiang and People’s Bank of China Deputy Governor Pan Gongsheng, whom she referred to as the head of the central bank, appearing to confirm his expected promotion.

She also met U.S. companies doing business in China, climate finance experts and women economists.

In her meetings with officials, she urged more cooperation between the sides on economic and climate issues while criticising what she called “punitive actions” against U.S. companies in China.

She reiterated that Washington was not seeking to decouple from China’s economy, as doing so would be “disastrous for both countries and destabilising for the world.”

The U.S. has implemented export controls designed to restrict China’s ability to acquire high-tech microchips that Washington fears could have military applications, and is considering an executive order to curb U.S. investment in sensitive areas.

But some U.S. lawmakers want stronger action. A bipartisan group has proposed giving the government sweeping powers to block billions in U.S. investment into China.

Yellen said she had emphasised to her Chinese counterparts that any investment curbs would be “highly targeted, and clearly directed, narrowly, at a few sectors where we have specific national security concerns,” to avoid unnecessary repercussions”.

Yellen stressed that any executive order would not be for economic gain and talked through what such an order “might look like” with her Chinese counterparts, according to the senior treasury official.

Asked about plans by Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa to create a common trading currency for their BRICS group, Yellen said she expected the dollar to remain the dominant currency in international transactions.

On Russia’s war in Ukraine, she told her Chinese interlocutors it was “essential” that Chinese firms avoid providing Moscow with material support for the war or in evading sanctions.

(Reporting by Andrea Shalal; Writing by Andrea Shalal and John Geddie; Editing by William Mallard and Kim Coghill)