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 [...]

The scrapping by the Philippines of a military partnership with the US occurs with rather embarrassing timing for Washington, as it seeks to rally its allies to adopt America’s hostile line towards China. Evidently, the Southeast Asian nation has decided it doesn’t need Washington’s presumed military ‘protection’ and is confident it can conduct normal relations with China and neighboring [...]

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 [...]

As the coronavirus epidemic monopolizes the attention of the American people, government is taking the opportunity to sneak through all manner of restrictive legislation, including a law that could end the internet as we know it. Killing the internet… to save the children? The ominously-named EARN IT Act (short for “Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies Act”) [...]

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 [...]

Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard has dropped out of the 2020 presidential race to endorse her ideological opposite, establishment darling Joe Biden. It's political suicide – for her, and for the idea of a progressive Democrat. Gabbard's decision to bow out on Thursday may have made sense from an electoral perspective – with just two delegates from her native American Samoa, she wasn't exactl [...]

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 [...]

US Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin has promised immediate financial relief “within the next two weeks” to Americans hit hard by the coronavirus recession - plus a massive financial aid package for the airline industry. The Trump administration will be sending a check to Americans within the next two weeks for an undetermined amount, Mnuchin announced at a press conference on Tuesday. [...]

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. [...]

The president is pushing to get a Covid-19 vaccine before the election. It doesn’t work like that. It’s understandable that during a White House meeting on Monday with pharmaceutical executives and public health officials, President Donald Trump pressed them to develop and deploy a vaccine to Covid-19 (the disease caused by the novel coronavirus) as quickly as possible. Beyond the obvious publ [...]

The coronavirus containment measures the US has (belatedly, reluctantly) taken are revealing enormous fissures in its first-world facade, from legions of hungry schoolchildren to their broke parents left to fend for themselves. The US puts a lot of effort into maintaining its image as the world’s richest country, but while it may have the world’s highest GDP, near-record levels of income inequ [...]