…f the raid to free the hostages only once it had got underway. Further details of the rescue bid were emerging last night, but it remained unknown whether Christopher McManus and Franco Lamolinara – a 48-year-old father of two – died before or during the operation. There were reports the men may have been held in a house in Sokoto, a city in Nigeria’s north-west. One witness said: “The security ag…
…tant strategic partners” who spoke a “common language”. President Xi Jinping will also visit Tanzania, South Africa and the Republic of Congo on his tour, which continues until March 30. In South Africa, he will attend the fifth BRICS summit from 26-27 March. BRICS stands for Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – five key emerging economies. Xi Jinping’s wif…
…221;, an Italian news agency said, after accusations the UK did not inform Italy about the planned mission. Islamist militants took British Chris McManus, 28, of Oldham, and Italian Franco Lamolinara, 48, hostage in north-west Nigeria last May. The engineers died as Nigerian and UK forces tried to free them on Thursday. UK Foreign Secretary William Hague and Giulio Terzi are attending a meeting in…
43 people died in a Yakovlev Yak-42 plane crash near the city of Yaroslavl in Central Russia on Wednesday afternoon. The majority of victims were members of the local top ice hockey team Lokomotiv. Of the 45 people on board, only two survived, Russia Today reported at the scene of the tragedy. Lokomotiv Ice Hockey Team was killed in a plane crash in Yaroslavl The aircraft went down and caught fi…
At least four people are dead and about 50 are missing after a Russian oil drilling rig sank in freezing seas in the Sea of Okhotsk. The Kolskaya rig was being towed some 200km (125 miles) off Sakhalin island when it capsized in a fierce storm. 14 people have been rescued alive but it is feared the rig overturned before the rest of the 67 people on board could escape on to life rafts. Rescue effo…
…and who would greatly appreciate your co-operation in the future.” The letter is simply signed “Your friends”. The last major espionage case involving the two countries took place in 2010, when 10 people pleaded guilty to spying on the US for Russia. The alleged agents were deported from the US in exchange for four people the Russians claimed had been spying for the West, in the…
…on APEC summit in Vladivostok Although Russia is now a member of the World Trade Organisation, there is still a piece of legislation that prevents US companies trading normally with Russia – the 1974 Jackson-Vanik amendment which, although suspended, remains in place. In her speech to the APEC summit in the Russian port city, Hillary Clinton – who is standing in for President Barack Ob…
Exiled Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky has been found dead at his home outside London on March 23. Boris Berezovsky, who died at the age of 67, was a Russian dissident and a former Kremlin power broker whose fortunes went into dramatic decline as Vladimir Putin established himself as the country’s president. He played a role in Vladimir Putin’s rise in the late 1990s, but went into oppositi…
Mar 23 2013 | Posted in
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sia by President Barack Obama’s National Security adviser Tom Donilon, who is to hold high-level talks in Moscow on Monday. The posthumous trial of Sergei Magnitsky – who died in 2009 aged 37 in pre-trial detention after developing pancreatitis – opened in Moscow in March but was adjourned shortly afterwards. Legal experts say they are unaware of any precedents for the trial of a…
Emergency workers in Tyumen, central Russia, had to rescued a man from a rubbish chute after he jumped into it to hide from his girlfriend. The man plunged three floors from the eighth floor of an apartment building in Tyumen, Siberia, before getting stuck. Residents then heard the 31-year-old man’s cries for help. Rescue workers had to use tools to cut him free. He was not seriously hurt….
May 17 2012 | Posted in
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The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has announced it will close its offices in Russia following an order from the authorities there to cease operations. The Russian government gave the US until 1 October to close the mission. USAID has worked in Russia for two decades, spending nearly $3bn on democracy and other programmes. Correspondents say the government’s anti…
strangest thing I have ever experienced as a professional diver.” The soot also proved cause for concern for Peter Lindberg’s colleague on the Ocean X explorer team, Stefan Hogeborn. “During my 20-year diving career, including 6,000 dives, I have never seen anything like this. Normally stones don’t burn,” Stefan Hogeborn said in the release. “I can’t explain what we saw, and I went down the…
Rescue teams in China are struggling to reach survivors of a powerful 6.6-magnitude earthquake that killed 203 and injured some 11,500 in remote hill villages in Sichuan province. Emergency workers dressed in bright orange uniforms were making their way to remote areas on foot after roads were blocked by landslides. Soldiers worked all night to search villages and treat the injured, while local p…
…ns aimed at pressuring Syrian President Bashar Assad’s regime, which is fighting an increasingly vigorous armed opposition. Activists now put the death toll from the uprising that began in March 2011 at between 23,000 and 26,000. Russia has said its policy is not aimed at supporting Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin in the interview gave strong indication that Moscow may have written off th…
…ce, and fell out with his partner Nikolai Shamalov. “I hadn’t worked 15 hours a day for 10 years to build a palace,” he says. “That didn’t interest me.” In December 2010, Sergei Kolesnikov wrote an open letter to President Dmitry Medvedev detailing the involvement of himself and others in the project and outlining his allegations against Vladimir Putin, then pri…
Vladimir Putin is back to Kremlin where he is inaugurated as president of Russia in a ceremony in the capital, Moscow. Vladimir Putin is returning to the presidency after an absence of four years in which he served as prime minister. The outgoing President, Dmitry Medvedev, was widely seen as an ally of Vladimir Putin. He won a third term as president in controversial elections in March. On Sunda…
Russia has revealed that its preliminary budget for holding the 2018 World Cup is almost twice what it projected when it won the bid in 2010. Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko announced a budget of 600 billion roubles ($19 billion), nearly 40% of which will go into building or renovating stadiums. The rest of the money will be spent on transport and hotel infrastructure. Russia beat off rival bids fro…
Sep 30 2012 | Posted in
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…sia, when multiple deals with the US had been signed. One Iraqi MP suggested that counterterrorism operations – the stated aim of the purchase – required improved intelligence, and not the 30 Mi-28 attack helicopters that were reported to be part of the deal. The contracts were announced to some fanfare on 9 October after talks between the two countries’ prime ministers near Mosc…
son, Tamerlan Tsarnaev. In another, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva was recorded talking to someone in southern Russia who is under FBI investigation in an unrelated case, U.S. officials said. Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, 45, insists there is no mystery. She’s no terrorist, just someone who found a deeper spirituality. She insists her sons – Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was killed in a gunfight with police, and Dzhokh…
May 5 2013 | Posted in
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…ed to “pull him into extremism”. He is currently in jail on charges of resisting police in an unrelated matter. His lawyer expects he will remain there for at least two more months. Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, was killed during a violent standoff with police on April 19, days after he and his brother Dzhokhar, 19, allegedly planted homemade bombs at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. Dzhokhar Tsar…
May 11 2013 | Posted in
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…US adoptive parents have made headlines in Russia. Vladimir Putin said he still needed to read the Russian bill in detail, though he backed it in principle. The rate of adoption in Russia is low. Some 3,400 Russian children were adopted by foreign families in 2011, nearly a third of them by Americans. “The State Duma’s response may be emotional, but I consider it to be appropriate,R…
…First Lady Laura. In October 2010 the couple, married in 1983, tried to quell rumors they had divorced by posing for pictures as they jointly answered questions for the national census. Then, on March 4, Lyudmila Putina was spotted leaving a polling station after casting her vote. Little is also known about the couple’s two daughters. Photographs of Maria, 26, and Yekaterina, 25, have never…
…e work of the justice system”. Cyprus protesters for freeing Archimandrite Ephraim Speaking to Skai TV, Bishop Anthimos of Thessaloniki wondered why Ephraim was the only person among the 32 involved in the Vatopedi land swap to be remanded in custody. “People are wondering whether Ephraim is being made a scapegoat,” said the bishop, who insisted that the Church of Greece’s Ho…
…fled to Jordan and Lebanon, but not all have been registered yet, meaning the true total is likely to be far higher, according to the UNHCR. Meanwhile, Syria’s national production has dropped by 40% and the number of people living below the poverty line has risen from two million to five million in just two years, according to the man in charge of the UN’s plans for reconstructing Syri…
ot; during Friday's Euro 2012 game against the Czech Republic in Wroclaw Anti-racism campaigners claimed Czech defender Theodor Gebre Selassie was the victim of monkey chants during Russia’s 4-1 victory, while footage seemingly shows Russian supporters attacking stewards in a walkway of the stadium. The FARE (Football Against Racism in Europe) network confirmed one of their observers at…
