Reuters World News Summary

Following is a summary of current world news briefs. Italy revokes lease for site of Bannon's right-wing academy

Italy's culture ministry has said it will revoke the lease on a state-owned monastery where a right-wing Roman Catholic institute close to former Trump White House adviser Steve Bannon had planned to train political activists. In a statement on Friday, the ministry said it would revoke the concession on the mountaintop property outside Rome granted to the Dignitatis Humanae Institute, citing violations of various contractual obligations including a failure to pay concession fees and do maintenance work. Court orders Danube cruise captain held as flood halts search near wreck

A Hungarian court on Saturday ordered the captain of a cruise liner that crashed into a pleasure boat on the Danube to be held pending a criminal investigation into a disaster believed to have killed 28 people, nearly all of them South Korean tourists. The Viking Sigyn cruise liner struck a smaller boat, the Mermaid, in heavy rain on Wednesday. The smaller vessel, which was carrying a group of South Koreans on a pleasure cruise, capsized and sank in the worst accident on the Danube in more than half a century. Rockets fired from Syria at Israeli-occupied Golan Heights: military

Two rockets were fired on Saturday from Syria toward the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights causing no casualties, the Israeli military said. A military spokeswoman said that the details were still being looked into and that it remained unclear who had fired the rockets and where they had landed. Germany's Greens shoot into first place in poll, overtaking Merkel's conservatives

The Greens have overtaken Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives to become the most popular party in Germany, an opinion poll released on Saturday showed, while her Socialist SPD coalition partners fell to an all-time low. The poll, asking voters which party they would back in a national election, showed the Greens at 27% support, one point ahead of Merkel's conservative CDU/CSU bloc. Eleven wounded in Sudan by gunfire near sit-in -opposition committee

At least 11 people were wounded by gunfire near a protest sit-in in the Sudanese capital Khartoum on Saturday, an opposition doctors’ committee said. Sudan's main protest group blamed the violence on the Transitional Military Council (TMC), saying that it is part of a plan to violently clear the protests. Trump tells UK to 'walk away' if EU does not give what it wants in Brexit: Sunday Times

U.S. President Donald Trump said Britain should refuse to pay its 39 billion pound EU divorce bill and “walk away” from Brexit talks if Brussels does not give the UK what it wants. In an interview with the Sunday Times newspaper ahead of his state visit to Britain starting Monday, Trump said the next British leader should send arch-Brexiteer Nigel Farage to conduct talks with the EU. Pope urges ethnic Hungarians, Romanians to put troubles behind them

Pope Francis urged ethnic Hungarians and Romanians to put their troubled past behind them on Saturday as bad weather disrupted his visit to Transylvania, forcing him to be driven for hours on winding mountain roads. More than 80,000 people gathered on muddy slopes around one of Romania's most popular Catholic shrines to see the pope on the second day of his trip to the country. U.S. won't 'tiptoe' around China with Asia stability at threat: defense chief

The United States will no longer "tiptoe" around Chinese behavior in Asia, with stability in the region threatened on issues ranging from the South China Sea to Taiwan, acting U.S. Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan said on Saturday. Shanahan did not directly name China when making accusations of "actors" destabilizing the region, but went on to say the United States would not ignore Chinese behavior, the latest in the exchange of acerbic remarks between the world's two biggest economies. He added, however, he was keen to foster a military relationship with Beijing. Scores injured in blasts at Russian military plant

Seventy-nine people were injured when several blasts at the explosives plant Kristall shook the central Russian town of Dzerzhinsk on Saturday, the Russian health ministry said. The blasts, around midday (0900 GMT) were heard all over the town of more than 230,000 residents and shock waves smashed or damaged windows in around 180 buildings, city authorities told TASS news agency. Iranian president says talks possible only if Washington shows "respect"

President Hassan Rouhani on Saturday suggested Iran may be willing to hold talks if the United States showed it respect, but said Tehran would not be pressured into negotiations, the semi-official Fars news agency reported. Iran and the United States have been drawn into starker confrontation in the past month, a year after Washington pulled out of a deal between Iran and global powers to curb Tehran's nuclear program in return for lifting international sanctions.