Russia

MOSCOW, May 18. /TASS/: Aeroflot, Russia’s flagship air carrier, has refuted reports that the crew of Sukhoi Superjet 100 plane that crashed at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport in early May violated instructions while landing.

YEKATERINBURG, May 17. /TASS/: Yekaterinburg’s Verkh-Isetsky District Court has arrested another participant in the May 15 authorized protest that took place in the city center, where St. Catherine’s Cathedral is planned to be rebuilt, the court’s spokesperson told TASS on Friday.

"The court’s magistrate ruled to arrest another one of those detained on May 15 for five days under Article 20.21 of the Russian Administrative Violations Code (public drunkenness)," the spokesperson said.

GROZNY, May 16. /TASS/: US sanctions against Chechnya's Terek Special Rapid Response Team mean that the United States is afraid of Chechnya, Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov said on Thursday.

The US Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) earlier added Chechnya's Terek Special Rapid Response Team and five Russian nationals, including Terek's commander Abuzayed Vismuradov, to the Magnitsky Act.

MOSCOW, May 17. /TASS/: The first anti-doping case based on analytical data retrieved from the Moscow Laboratory is likely to be opened in the next few weeks, Inside the Games portal reported on Thursday citing director of intelligence and investigations at the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) Gunter Younger.

MOSCOW, May 17. /TASS/: Small anti-submarine ships have located and attacked an 'enemy' submarine at the military drills in the Sea of Okhotsk, spokesman for the Russian Pacific Fleet Nikolay Voskresensky said on Friday.

"Small anti-submarine ships MPR-107 and MPK-82, with the support of two Il-38 anti-submarine aircraft, have located an 'enemy' submarine in the assigned area. A Russian Pacific Fleet's nuclear-powered submarine was designated as an 'enemy' submarine during the drills," Voskresensky said.

MOSCOW, May 16. /TASS/: Russian scientists have proposed that Russia should start building astrophysical observatories on the Moon in the late 2020s and the early 2030s, Scientific Head of the Space Research Institute within Russia’s Academy of Sciences Lev Zelyony told TASS on Thursday.

MOSCOW, May 16. /TASS/: Most Russians are not afraid of losing jobs to artificial intelligence (AI), while one in two feels robots’ assistance in performing duties at work, as follows from a survey by the analytical center Bitrix24, the IT company 1S Bitrix told TASS.

The survey is based on an opinion poll of 1,300 Russian companies held on April 16-18. Taking part in the survey were companies in the IT segment, sales, marketing and PR, education, finance, e-commerce, logistics and others - most of them small and medium businesses.

MOSCOW, May 16. /TASS/: Russia’s two-time Olympic gymnastics Champion Maria Filatova has been inducted into the International Gymnastics Hall of Fame (IGHOF), the press service of the US-based IGHOF announced in a statement on Thursday.

"Five gymnastics legends will be honored at the 23rd annual International Gymnastics Hall of Fame (IGHOF) ceremony on Saturday, May 18, 2019, at the Petroleum Club in Oklahoma City," the statement reads.

MOSCOW, May 16. /TASS/: Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov and French Special Envoy for Libya Frederic Desagneaux have discussed the situation in Libya during a meeting on Thursday, the Russian Foreign Ministry informed.

"During a detailed discussion, [the diplomats] have touched upon the current situation in Libya with special attention paid to the importance of putting an end to armed confrontation and establishing a stable inter-Libyan national dialogue in the interest of ending the prolonged crisis in the country," the ministry noted.

YEKATERINBURG, May 16. /TASS/: As many as 96 people have been detained since the beginning of authorized protests in downtown Yekaterinburg, where St. Catherine’s Cathedral is planned to be rebuilt, the regional branch of the Russian Interior Ministry said on Thursday. A source in the city’s Verkh-Isetsky District Court told TASS that 21 of them had been arrested.