Soviet Union

A Red Army officer who fought for the French Resistance before being sent to the Gulag by Soviet authorities has died aged 95, officials said on Dec. 8.

Nikolai Vasenin died a few months after learning that the French love he lost 70 years ago had also passed away.

Macedonia's cabinet has put forward a proposal for a new state emblem set to replace the one Skopje has had for the past twenty-two years.

The fierce-looking red lion against the background of a golden shield and a crown should "restore the country's historic symbols," MINA news agency reports.

Russia's position on Kosovo "firm and reliable"

BELGRADE -- Russian Ambassador Aleksandr Chepurin has said that his country's position not to recognize Kosovo as independent was "firm and reliable."

As expected, the Turkey-Russia High-Level Cooperation Council witnessed important developments particularly in the field of energy.

Gorbachev: West has accepted Crimea as part of Russia

MOSCOW -- Former leader of the USSR and Nobel Peace Prize winner Mikhail Gorbachev says he believes the West has accepted the decision of Crimeans to join Russia.

“I was there, watching the parade in the Red Square, and everything was the same as the year before,” said Ali Reza Bigdeli, the Iranian ambassador to Ankara, speaking about the Soviet Union’s traditional October Revolution celebrations in 1990. “Yes, there was some unrest around, but the parade was no different to the one in 1989, or in 1979.

Prime Minister Victor Ponta, the candidate of the electoral alliance of the Social Democratic Party (PSD), the National Union for Romania's Progress (UNPR) and the Conservative Party (PC) in the presidential election, on Monday said in a televised show that, unlike Traian Basescu, who only claimed he wanted to help the Romanians of the Republic of Moldova, who only made promises,

In China, the Communists had just massacred the students in Tienanmen Square and won themselves another quarter-century in power. On the other hand, the Poles voted overwhelmingly for Solidarity in June, and by September Hungary had opened its border with the West.  But it was the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November, 1989, that really opened the flood-gates.

Latvian Foreign Minister Edgars Rinkevics has become the first high-ranking politician in his country and the Baltic states to come out publicly as being gay, in a series of tweets.
      
"I proudly announce I am gay... Good luck all of you," he said late Thursday in a tweet that has since gone viral.
      

‘A Mosque in Munich: Nazis, the CIA, and the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood’ by Ian Johnson (Mariner Books, 336 pages, $16)