Ambassador to Russia Lynne Tracy met with jailed Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich on Monday, a State Department spokesperson said, in her third such visit since his March detention on espionage charges he denies.
Russia has said Gershkovich was caught trying to obtain military secrets while on a trip to the Russian city of Yekaterinburg, but has provided no details supporting that assertion.
The State Department has designated Gershkovich and Whelan as wrongfully detained and described the charges against both men as baseless.
Whelan, a former U.S. Marine detained in Moscow in 2018, is serving a 16-year sentence in a Russian penal colony on espionage charges.
Russia has agreed in the past to high-profile prisoner exchanges with the United States, most recently last year when American basketball star Brittney Griner, sentenced in Russia on a drug charge, was exchanged for Viktor Bout, a Russian arms trafficker convicted in the United States.
U.S.-Russian relations are at their lowest point in more than six decades following Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
CATANIA, Sicily, Aug 14 (Reuters) - Flights serving the eastern Sicilian city of Catania were halted on Monday after an eruption from nearby Mount Etna, local authorities said, bringing fresh travel woe to the crisis-plagued Italian airport.
The lava flow subsided before dawn, but ash was still coming from one of the craters.
Flights to and from Catania, a popular tourist destination, will remain suspended until 6 a.m. (0400 GMT) on Tuesday morning, the airport operator said in a statement, dashing hopes they could resume on Monday night.
Passengers were advised to check with airlines before heading to the airport on Tuesday.
Catania Mayor Enrico Trantino banned the use of motorcycles and bicycles in the city for the next 48 hours, because many streets were covered in ash, and ordered cars to drive no faster than 30 kph (19 mph) due to the skiddy conditions.
The latest cancellations at Catania airport, which attracts more arrivals than the island’s capital, Palermo, came a month after a fire at a terminal building led to weeks of disruptions for passengers.
Aug 14 (Reuters) - Floods in Russia’s Far East had forced the evacuation of more than 2,500 people by Monday, the ministry of emergency situations said, after Russia joined the list of countries battered by rainstorms in the wake of Typhoon Khanun.
After lashing southern Japan last week, Khanun weakened into a tropical depression as it swept across the Korean peninsula to make landfall in northeast China on Friday night, causing mudslides in Liaoning province that killed at least 21 people.
In the Russian Far East, 28 settlements were cut off by Monday.
Large stretches of roads and 4,620 houses were flooded in 15 municipalities, the ministry said on the Telegram channel.
The Pacific coast port of Vladivostok is the administrative centre of Primorye region.
The ministry said floodwaters had begun to recede in most parts of Primorye, and the worst flooding was on the Malinovka river near the village of Rakitnoye.
Aug 14 (Reuters) - Russia is in the process of equipping its new nuclear submarines with hypersonic Zircon missiles, the head of Russia’s largest shipbuilder told the RIA state news agency in an interview published on Monday.
“Multi-purpose nuclear submarines of the Yasen-M project will … be equipped with the Zircon missile system on a regular basis,” , Alexei Rakhmanov, chief executive officer of the United Shipbuilding Corporation (USC), told RIA.
Yasen-class submarines, also known as Project 885M, are nuclear-powered cruise missile submarines, built to replace Soviet-era nuclear attack submarines as part of a programme to modernise the army and fleet.
The sea-based Zircon hypersonic missiles have a range of 900 km (560 miles), and can travel at several times the speed of sound, making it difficult to defend against them.
President Vladimir Putin said earlier this year that Russia would start mass supplies of Zircon missiles as part of the country’s efforts to boost its nuclear forces.
The Russian multi-purposes frigate Admiral Gorshkov, which has tested its strike capabilities in the western Atlantic Ocean earlier this year, has been already equipped with Zircon missiles.
Aug 14 (Reuters) - India and the United Arab Emirates have started settling bilateral trade in their local currencies with India’s top refiner making payment in rupees for purchase of a million barrels of oil from the Middle Eastern nation, the Indian government said on Monday.
Indian Oil Corp (IOC.NS) made payment to Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), according to a statement issued by Indian embassy in UAE.
The transaction comes after one involving the sale of 25 kg gold from a UAE gold exporter to a buyer in India at about 128.4 million rupees ($1.54 million).
India in July signed an agreement with the UAE allowing it to settle trade in rupees instead of dollars, boosting India’s efforts to cut transaction costs by eliminating dollar conversions.
During a visit by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to the UAE, the two countries also agreed to set up a real-time payment link to facilitate easier cross-border money transfers.
India is keen to push similar local currency arrangements with other countries, as it looks to boost exports amid slowing global trade.
🤖 I’m a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:
Click here to see the summary"The central bank has all the tools to normalise the situation in the near future and ensure that lending rates are reduced to sustainable levels. On Monday, the bank said it saw no financial stability risks from the rouble’s weakening and gave another hawkish signal that a rate hike is possible soon. The rouble has chartered a turbulent course since Russia invaded Ukraine, slumping to a record low of 120 against the dollar in March last year before recovering to a more than seven-year high a few months later, supported by capital controls and surging export revenues. “The weaker rouble is a damning indictment of Russia’s war on Ukraine,” Timothy Ash, a London-based senior sovereign strategist at BlueBay Asset Management, said in an email. Last week, Russia effectively abandoned its budget rule, with the central bank halting the finance ministry’s FX purchases to try and reduce volatility. “The central bank is not fully in control,” independent Moscow-based economist Ian Melkumov told Reuters, although it has aggressive tools that it is currently reluctant to use.
WARSAW, Aug 11 (Reuters) - Polish police arrested five people suspected of being responsible for running a web platform that has been used to launch cyberattacks around the world, European policing agency Europol said on Friday.
Europol said LolekHosted.net, a bulletproof hosting service - meaning an opaque infrastructure registration site that helps cyber criminals to anonymously conduct intrusions - had all of its servers seized and was no longer in operation.
The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was also involved in the case, Europol said.
A botnet is a group of compromised internet-connected devices that can be manipulated to cause digital havoc.
Hackers build, buy and rent out botnets in order to conduct cyber crimes ranging from advertising fraud to large cyberattacks.
In a separate statement the Polish Central Cybercrime Bureau said hundreds of servers had been seized, as well as numerous pieces of computer equipment mobile phones and cryptocurrencies.
JAKARTA, Aug 9 (Reuters) - Indonesia’s capital Jakarta topped the list as the world’s most polluted city on Wednesday, having consistently ranked among the 10 most polluted cities globally since May, according to data by Swiss air quality technology company IQAir.
Resident Rizky Putra lamented that the worsening air quality was putting his children’s health at risk.
Jakarta residents have long complained of toxic air from chronic traffic, industrial smoke and coal-fired power plants.
Some of them launched and won a civil lawsuit in 2021 demanding the government take action to control air pollution.
Still, Nathan Roestandy, co-founder of air quality app Nafas Indonesia, said the pollution level has continued to deteriorate.
Indonesia is set to name Nusantara as the new capital next year and at least 16,000 civil servants, military and police are due to move there.
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