Page 150 - Current Time News Today

share Print The United States plans to close its last two consulates in Russia, leaving only an embassy in Moscow as relations between the two countries continue to deteriorate. The State Department confirmed on December 19 that the United States will shutter its consulate in Vladivostok in the Far East and suspend operations at the consulate in Yekaterinburg, Russias fourth-largest city. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, in consultation with Ambassador John Sullivan, decided to close the two con...

Journalists in Trouble Newsletter Share INCIDENTS AND THREATS Russian President Vladimir Putin responded to extensive investigations by Bellingcat and various Western media into the poisoning of opposition leader Aleksei Navalny. During his annual news conference on December 17, Putin made the claim, without any evidence, that the media outlets were merely "laundering" U.S. intelligence materials. He also said that if Russian security services had wanted to poison Navalny, "they would have fini...

The regime stood out again. Now, in the mornings, employees of housing and communal services pick out and hollow out white-red-white flags from under the ice on rivers and reservoirs. This is the know-how of the Belarusian protesters. With the onset of winter and frost, they came up with the idea of literally letting go of the white-red-white flags for free swimming. They freeze into the water overnight, and you have to sweat a lot to get them. Now, instead of sprinkling the paths with sand in ...

Radio Free Europe fires a prominent Russian journalist — and the Kremlin smirks Paul Farhi © Georgiy Alexandrov Timur Olevskiy in Moscow in 2019. To his Russian admirers, Timur Olevskiy is a kind of latter-day Walter Cronkite or Mike Wallace, a trusted journalist and fearless muckraker. In a country where the press is suppressed and many prying reporters have been killed, Olevskiy has been a rare independent voice, operating outside state controls as a star host for Radio...

Human error According to Tass, a Russian news agency, around 660,073 cases of the coronavirus have officially been detected in Moscow. However, the files show only a subset of these numbers. Eduard Lysenko, the head of Moscow Department of Information Technologies, said that during the checks, they have established that there has been no violation of the information system of the Moscow city government. Lysenko added that the leak happened due to human error as members of staff who were process...