MOSCOW, February ·24. /TASS/. Moscow has not been negotiating a peace treaty with Japan on Tokyo’s terms, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Sunday in an interview to Vietnam’s national broadcaster Vietnam Television (VTV), China’s CCTV and Phoenix TV.

According to Russia’s top diplomat, solving such complicated tasks requires not only creating a proper atmosphere, but also filling economic, political and diplomatic relations with practical contents.

WASHINGTON, February 24. /TASS/. Venezuelan servicemen who refuse to allow a humanitarian convoy into the republic will face tougher US sanctions, US National Security Advisor John Bolton said in a Twitter post on Saturday.

"Venezuela’s military has a choice: Embrace democracy, protect civilians, and allow in humanitarian aid; or face even more sanctions and isolation," he said, attaching to his message a Reuters news report about US plans to toughen its sanctions on Venezuela.

MOSCOW, February 24. /TASS/. Moscow, Tehran and Ankara have no plans to carry out joint military operations in Syria, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an interview with Vietnam’s national broadcaster Vietnam Television (VTV), China’s CCTV and Phoenix TV.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Nearly two years after the Chinese government began to detain members of Muslim minority groups in western China, a growing number of family members abroad are refusing to remain silent.

On Sunday, about three dozen relatives of some of the 1 million Uighurs, Kazakhs and others being held without charge spoke out about the mass detentions at an event in Washington, D.C., hoping to raise awareness of what many are calling a human rights travesty but which Beijing defends as necessary to counter violent religious extremism.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Roughly half the nation’s business economists say they think the U.S. economy will slip into recession by the end of next year, and three-fourths envision such a downturn beginning by the end of 2021.

The finding comes from the latest survey by the National Association for Business Economics of its member economists. Just 10 percent of them say they foresee a recession beginning this year. At the other extreme, only 11 percent expect the economy to avoid a recession through 2021.

24 Feb 2019; DW: Asylum-seekers in eastern Germany are 10 times more likely to be hate crime victims as those who live in the west, a study published on Sunday found.

Researchers from the Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW) looked at 1,155 incidents that took place between 2013 and 2015.

MOSCOW, February 24. /TASS/. The Russian military police can be deployed in the buffer zone currently being created on the border between Syria and Turkey, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Sunday.

Lavrov said that in 1998, Turkey and Syria signed a document about setting up a buffer zone.

25 Feb 2019; DW: Senegal's prime minister has claimed that President Macky Sall was re-elected in a first round vote on Sunday, hours after the opposition suggested that no candidate had won an outright majority.

Prime Minister Mahammed Boun Abdallah Dionne, a Sall ally, claimed at midnight that the president had won 13 out of 14 regions with "at least 57 percent" of the vote.

"The results allow us to say that we should congratulate President Macky Sall on his re-election," he said.

25 Feb 2019; AFP: A Kim Jong Un impersonator was hauled from his hotel Monday ahead of his planned deportation from Vietnam before the real North Korean leader meets US President Donald Trump in Hanoi later this week.

Howard X arrived in town with Trump impersonator Russell White last week, staging a fake summit on the steps of Hanoi's Opera House amid a swarm of press and hired security guards.

TOKYO (AP) — The residents of Japan’s southwestern island region of Okinawa rejected a relocation plan for a U.S. military base ina referendum, increasing pressure on the national government to change its stance that the facility will be built no matter what.

The results of Sunday’s vote showed 72 percent opposed the plan for the Marines air base being built on a landfill in coastal Henoko. Support for the relocation plan totaled 19 percent.

The referendum is not legally binding but underlines Okinawans’ sentiment on the relocation plan.

WASHINGTON, February 25. /TASS/. US President Donald Trump said on Sunday that he had decided to postpone increasing customs tariffs on Chinese products due to productive American-Chinese negotiations to resolve bilateral trade disputes, he wrote on his Twitter page.

NEW DELHI, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- The death toll due to consumption of illicit liquor in India's northeastern state of Assam Sunday rose to 156, local government officials said.

Over 200 victims, mostly the tea garden workers, are undergoing treatment in different hospitals.

The hooch was consumed by people on Thursday evening at Halmira tea estate in Golaghat and adjacent Jorhat districts, east of Dispur, the capital city of Assam.

According to officials, so far 85 deaths have taken place in Golaghat, while as 71 have died in adjacent Jorhat district.