Новости за 24.04.2018

MOSCOW (Sputnik) - Russia will hold a briefing at the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) on Thursday, at which people who witnessed the process of staging the recent chemical incident in the Syrian town of Douma will be present, a spokesperson of Russia's Permanent Representation to the OPCW told Sputnik on Tuesday.

Atlanta was extorted for $50,000 to be paid in bitcoin (roughly 5.4 bitcoin as of press time) after the city’s computer networks were infected with vicious malware in late March. The city might as well have paid the ransom, because it wound up spending $2.6 million on emergency contracts to recover systems made inoperable by the malware infection.

WASHINGTON (Sputnik) - Senate Republicans on Wednesday are planning a permanent rule change that would shorten the time allowed for Democrats to stall consideration of nominations submitted by President Donald Trump, Senator Roy Blunt told reporters on Monday.

WASHINGTON (Sputnik) - A new US Senate bill calls for investing $1.5 billion in efforts to counter China and enhance American influence in the Indo-Pacific region, a policy summary document posted by Senator Corey Gardner revealed on Monday.

MOSCOW (Sputnik) - Business dialogues with delegations from Europe, Vietnam, India and South Africa were included on the agenda of the upcoming Eastern Economic Forum (EEF) in Vladivostok, Russian Far East Development Deputy Minister Alexander Krutikov said Tuesday.

YEREVAN (Sputnik) - Talks between opposition leader Nikol Pashinyan and acting prime minister of Armenia Karen Karapetyan have been canceled, press secretary of the opposition Civil Contract party Tigran Avinyan told Sputnik on Tuesday.

HELSINKI (Sputnik) – The Finnish authorities decided not to prolong the social experiment with the universal basic income, in which people receive unconditional monthly payment from the government, the Social Insurance Institution of Finland (Kela) said on Tuesday.

US stock prices fell sharply on Tuesday as French President Emmanuel Macron visited United States President Donald Trump.

MOSCOW (Sputnik) - Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan paid tribute Tuesday to the Armenians who died in the Ottoman Empire during World War I on the occasion of the international Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day.

Russian military stated Tuesday that Russian air defenses at Hmeimim airbase in Syria have intercepted and destroyed several unidentified targets.

One swimmer is lucky the fish didn’t get any closer to his leg…

Taiwan’s yearly live-fire drills in June will focus on repelling a simulated invasion from the China, officials said Tuesday after China began its own live fire exercises off the mainland last week.

MOSCOW (Sputnik) - Cambridge University rejected research conducted by Alexander Kogan, the academic who was hired by consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica to collect information from tens of millions of Facebook profiles, in 2015 because of his controversial approach to privacy issues, local media reported Tuesday.

Chinese aerospace engineers are testing experimental technologies that can manipulate an aircraft’s radar signature, making non-stealthy aircraft disappear - or even making one plane look like it’s really three.

Militants from the groups Jaysh al-Islam and Forces of Martyr Ahmad al-Abdo handed over heavy weaponry to the Syrian army in Eastern Qalamoun in Syria's province of Damascus.

Speaking with reporters in the White House Oval Office on Tuesday, US President Donald Trump took a moment to brush off a speck lying on French President Emmanuel Macron's jacket, remarking that he needed to look "perfect."

We all know Uranus has long been the butt of many jokes, and it doesn’t seem like the planet is going to be getting any slack now: a team of British researchers has revealed that it reeks of fart fumes.

It seems that Emma Watson and some other celebrities were targeted by a sex cult recruiter to join the notorious NXIVM group.

If weird experiments by British scientists were not enough, the country’s bloggers sometimes also come up with weird and entertaining ideas. According to blogger Tom Scott, the idea came to him during a regular chat in the pub.

An Internet company has installed transmitters on the head of the statue, providing Internet to nearby villages.

As peace and disarmament summits with both South Korea and the US grow near, North Korea’s main nuclear test site remains “fully operational,” according to 38 North, a US watchdog website devoted to analyzing the isolated Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, north of the demilitarized zone on the northern 38th parallel.

A potential military intervention by Washington would destabilize the region and lead to new refugee inflows that would again affect European countries the most, German political analyst Josef Braml said in an interview with Sputnik.

The US Senate Foreign Relations Committee has approved the confirmation of Mike Pompeo to be the next secretary of state, although he is often criticized for his hawkish, anti-Muslim views. Sputnik discussed his nomination with Daniel Franklin, associate professor of political science at Georgia State University.

MOSCOW (Sputnik) - Belgium extradites Dutch national Guido Wolters to Russia, where he is accused of drug trafficking, the official spokesman for the Russian Prosecutor General's Office, Alexander Kurennoy, said Tuesday.

Beijing has kicked off a number of measures aimed at bolstering its economic growth, Chinese researcher Liu Dan told Sputnik. According to Liu, the country's internal difficulties have not been triggered by the US tariff war unleashed by the Trump administration on China.