China is shipping one million surgical masks and gloves to France as it struggles to contain the coronavirus, with Europe becoming the new focal point of the global pandemic. French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian confirmed the shipments on Wednesday in an interview with France's BFM TV. The first of two planes has already arrived via Belgium and a second will arrive on Thursday, he said. [...]

Iran’s New Year celebration of Nowruz finds it weathering a perfect storm of US sanctions, low oil prices and Covid-19. The resulting humanitarian crisis may make it even more resilient, as Iranians rally around their government. Iran is facing an existential crisis, brought on by a combination of economic, political and social emergencies which, when combined, threaten to bring the nation to it [...]

The testing tools for coronavirus were delivered to 13 countries, including Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) member states Iran and North Korea, Russia’s public health watchdog Rospotrebnadzor said on Saturday. The equipment manufactured in Russia can conduct over 100,000 tests for Covid-19, and has already been used to track down the first cases of the disease in Armenia, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan [...]

The fact Wuhan has not recorded any new cases of COVID-19 for the first time since the outbreak began gives hope to the rest of the world, World Health Organisation (WHO) Chief Tedros Adhanom Gebreyesus said Friday. "Wuhan provides hope for the rest of the world, that even the most severe situation can be turned around", Tedros said at a virtual press conference. [...]

Created by the Moscow-based Military Industrial Company (Russian acronym VPK), the 4x4 protected utility vehicle, based on a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) chassis, was first unveiled at a defense exhibition last July. The VPK-Ural has already been purchased by a foreign customer, company general director Alexander Krasovitsky has said. “The vehicle is undergoing preliminary testing. Moreover, [...]

Large-scale NATO military exercises are among the few major events not to be canceled due to the global Pandemic of COVID-19. Critics say this is a waste of both money and resources. UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson is being called-upon to reallocate the kingdom's military budget towards health and welfare in light of the global coronavirus illness (COVID-19) pandemic, by the Peace Pledge Union (PP [...]

Russia signed $17 billion worth of arms contracts with foreign customers in 2019, expanding its portfolio with military deals with African countries totaling $1 billion, the Federal Service for Military-Technical Cooperation revealed on Monday. Turkey has been named one of the five biggest importers of Russian arms for 2019, according to Dmitry Shugaev, director of the Federal Service for Military [...]

While the world is combatting COVID-19, a real pandemic, it seems the European Union is worried about a fake virus – the omnipotent, omnipresent, all-encompassing “Russian disinformation.” News of a brand-new EU report, still-secret yet seamlessly leaked to the likes of Reuters and the Daily Mail, made over a hundred headlines throughout Europe in the last few days. The report is said to b [...]

China may have managed to contain the coronavirus at home, but it's not over the hump yet. There's danger of a return of the deadly disease as the number of infected travelers entering the country reaches record levels. The Chinese authorities have done huge work since the Covid-19 pandemic broke out in Wuhan in late December. The blow was hard as 3,248 have died and 80,967 were infected, but for [...]

One of the curious things about Western media coverage of Crimea since 2014 has been the consistent narrative that Russia's reabsorption of the peninsula was carried out against the will of locals. Look, you can make legitimate arguments about international law and the way the process was carried out. But attempts to give the impression Moscow somehow dragged residents kicking and screaming into t [...]

Russia’s research center of virology and biotechnology, known as the Vector Institute, is testing multiple different vaccine prototypes against Covid-19 in a race to find a cure for the virus behind a global pandemic. This week, it “began immunogenicity studies in sensitive laboratory animals... of all developed vaccine prototypes,” said consumer watchdog agency Rospotrebnadzor in a state [...]

A Chinese citizen and US permanent resident infected with COVID-19 who flew from Los Angeles to Beijing on March 12 is accused of concealing her coronavirus symptoms and could face prison time as a result. According to reports, the woman, who has only been identified by her surname Li, became sick with symptoms consistent with the novel coronavirus while living in Massachusetts. After being denied [...]

Scientists in countries around the world have rushed to learn everything they can about COVID-19 in recent months in a bid to create an effective vaccine. Russian scientists have sequenced the whole genome of the new coronavirus, the Ministry of Health has announced. In a statement on Thursday, the Ministry explained that the genome, sourced from a patient infected with the virus, will help in the [...]

Plummeting oil prices have sparked another round of predictions about the economic collapse of Russia – this time from US President Donald Trump, who sounded a lot like his predecessor Barack Obama on the subject. The price of crude oil has crashed to $20 this week, due to a one-two punch of Saudi Arabia flooding the market with record output and a sharp drop in global demand owing to the corona [...]

The incompetence and hypocrisy of the European Union in dealing with the Covid-19 outbreak seems to have sobered up Serbia, a country that has previously slavishly committed itself to following orders from Brussels. For the past 20 years, every flavor of politician that ruled Serbia has signed on to the dogma that “the EU has no alternative” and that membership in that trans-national bloc was [...]

A senior German disease control expert has warned that the coronavirus pandemic could continue for two years, depending on how long it takes for an effective vaccine to be developed and if people develop immunity after illness. Speaking on Tuesday, the Robert Kock Institut's (RKI) president, Prof. Lothar Wieler, said pandemics tend to run their course in waves, and factors influencing how it unfol [...]

China is pulling the press credentials of US journalists from outlets including the New York Times and the Washington Post whose passes expire in 2020, in the latest move of an ongoing tit-for-tat with America over media access. [...]

ATHENS - Ex-Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis has published recordings from 2015 closed-door talks with the Eurogroup on his country’s bailout program to expose the "awful" decision-making of the troika creditors. A trove of audio files recorded between February and July 2015 is available on the website of Varoufakis’ self-styled pan-European DiEM25 party. In a video message, he said he [...]

According to Sweden’s Data Protection Authority (the Datainspektionen), the fine is punishment for the search engine giant’s failure to remove search results ordered to be blocked three years ago. Sweden’s Datainspektionen has fined google 75 million Swedish kronor (equivalent to about €7 million or $7.74 million) for failure to comply with the data protection watchdog’s instructions, th [...]

The Chinese government has rolled out new technology to curb the COVID-19 outbreak and is lending a hand to other struggling countries, while the US continues to take an “America first,” “profit-only” approach, web developer and technologist Chris Garaffa and software engineer Patricia Gorky told Sputnik Monday. [...]

Caught off guard by the EU’s ban on medical exports, Serbia found help in China as it struggled to prepare for the Covid-19 outbreak, the Serbian president said, adding that it has become clear that European solidarity is a myth. Serbia is the latest country to impose severe restrictions on travel and public gatherings in response to the global epidemic. [...]

Despite its apparent limitations, the new radar system can potentially be used in conjunction with other radar systems to strip enemy stealth aircraft of the very capabilities that give the latter their edge. It appears that stealth aircraft, one of the most potent tools in the NATO countries’ arsenal, may become not-so-potent in the near future as a new radar system developed by Russia’s Alma [...]