Page 642 - Icks News Today

Armenia says clashes along the border with Azerbaijan have left two of its troops dead as tensions continue to simmer between the two countries after last year's war over the breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh region.

Iranian state media says authorities will impose a six-day "general lockdown" in cities across the country beginning on August 16.

As the number of cases of the coronavirus in Central Asia rises again this summer, what have the countries learned in the months that have passed since the virus first appeared.

Weeks after the dramatically flawed docking of a new Russian module at the International Space Station, there are lurid new Russian allegations aimed at NASA about an unexplained hole -- or possibly eight holes -- discovered on the station in 2018.

Russia has reported a new daily high of 819 for COVID-19 deaths, a day after Moscow reported the highest number of monthly deaths in the city since the start of the pandemic.

Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi has chosen Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, a senior diplomat with good ties to the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), as his foreign minister. A former ambassador and foreign policy aide to the parliament speaker, he is likely to be confirmed by lawmakers.

As September elections approach, COVID-19 takes a mounting toll and wildfires burn across huge swaths of the country, devouring forests, blanketing cities in smoke, and diminishing public trust in the authorities. The Kremlin crackdown on dissenters, civil society, and independent media continues.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) says it's keeping "close watch" on the situation in Belarus amid calls for the global lender to deny Alyaksandr Lukashenka's government access to newly allocated funds intended to help countries navigate the coronavirus crisis.

Russian authorities have stifled people's right to peaceful protests to such an extent that is has become almost impossible for Russians to protest in any meaningful way, Amnesty International has said in a report.

In 2019, Anastasia Bryukhanova was disqualified from running for the Moscow City Duma because officials used dubious pretexts to invalidate many of the signatures she submitted. This time, she has taken extraordinary measures to get past this obstacle to run for the national legislature.