News Highlights

Four policemen were killed in Russia’s violence-plagued Dagestan region on Sunday when unidentified gunmen opened fire on their car, local investigators said.

President Vladimir Putin ordered the surprise drill on July 12 to check the alert status of all forces in Russia’s Eastern Military District. The exercise is thought to be the largest of its kind in the post-Soviet period.

Strauss-Kahn left the IMF in 2011 after facing allegations of the attempted rape of a hotel maid in New York. He denied the charges, which were later dropped, and he settled the maid’s lawsuit last year.

A Russian Orthodox youth group unveiled a video game on Thursday that gives players a chance to “kill” members of the punk band Pussy Riot, whose profanity-laden protest in a Moscow cathedral last year angered the church and offended some believers.

The government has refused a request for a public inquiry into the death of the Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko, in what the dead man’s widow called a “political” decision that showed more concern for British-Russian relations than getting to the truth.

Travel site Skift reports that the new law, signed into law by Russian President Vladimir Putin on June 30, contains a provision that allows the government to arrest and detain gay (or “pro-gay”) foreigners for up to 14 days before they would then be expelled from Russia.

In the wake of recent NSA spy scandals, Russia’s Federal Guard Service has decided to revert to using more typewriters and paper documents,Izvestia reports.

Edward Snowden, the self-professed leaker of classified National Security Agency documents that revealed secret U.S. government phone and Internet surveillance programs, has asked for a meeting with lawyers and human rights activists, Russia’s Interfax news agency reported Friday.

A Moscow court convicted late investment fund lawyer Sergei Magnitsky on Thursday of tax evasion after Russia’s first posthumous trial, a ruling that will further undermine President Vladimir Putin’s reputation in the West.

An armada of Chinese and Russian warships sailed in ceremonial formation in the Sea of Japan, off the port of Vladivostok, on Wednesday in what was the high point of joint naval exercises intended to show the growing unity between two countries with a historically uneasy relationship.