Russia's new anti-terror laws could cost Russian delivery companies 180 billion rubles ($2.8 billion),

    Under the new laws, which come into force from July 1 2018, postal service providers will be required to employ X-rays, metal and gas detectors, and other equipment to scan for the presence of weapons, explosive devices and other illegal items in letters and parcels. 

    The Russian State Postal Service, who currently hold 70 percent of the market share, have estimated that purchasing the required equipment for all of its 42,000 branches will cost at least 500 billion rubles ($7.8 billion) with an extra 100 billion rubles ($1.5 billion dollars) needed annually for maintenance, Vedomosti reported.

    The same regulations could double the cost of delivery for online stores, leading to an estimated 30 to 40 percent drop in online orders, said Alexander Ivanov, president of Russia’s Association of Long-Distance Traders.

A monument to Tsar Ivan The Terrible is to be built in the Russian city of Orel 350km south of Moscow, the TASS news agency reported Wednesday.

The monument will be unveiled on 3 August, two days before the 450th anniversary of the city’s founding, the Orel region’s governor Vadim Potomsky told journalists. 

 “He founded the city 450 years ago. A great city of great people” he said, adding that the statue will not be financed from the city or the regional budget, TASS reported.

Russian President Vladimir Putin visited the Valaam Monastery in Russia's northern republic of Karelia on Sunday and received communion there.

The week before his trip to the monastery, Russian media had reported that Putin cancelled all his scheduled engagements for a number of days. The reasons behind the cancellations are still unknown. 

    Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov denied that the engagements had been cancelled and told journalists that none of Putin’s scheduled trips had been “definitely confirmed.” 

    “It seems that Putin often behaves in this manner, if we analyze his political career. He neglects domestic policy and its subjects, so he can cancel meetings for his own reasons,” political analyst Stanislav Belkovsky told The Moscow Times.

The governing body for world athletics says U.S.-based Russian long jumper Daria Klishina can take part in international competition as a neutral athlete.

The announcement in Monaco by the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) on July 10 clears the way for Klishina to possibly compete at the Rio de Janeiro Olympics. The Olympic track and field competition starts on August 12. 

     However, the IAAF said Klishina's participation is still subject to acceptance by the International Olympic Committee (IOC).

     Russia's athletics federation and sports minister condemned the IAAF board's ruling immediately after it was announced on July 10. They said it was also a rejection of the claims by 67 other Russian athletes

The Federation Council planned to consider a whopping 160 new laws on June 29, setting the Russian upper house up for what one daily dubbed a possible "world record" as it scrambled to wrap things up before summer recess.

Federation Council speaker Valentina Matviyenko told local media on June 27 that the fierce rhythm of the upper chamber's last working day might elicit "ironic quips" from critics, but said it did not mean that discussion was not taking place. It's just that it was happening out of the public view. 

     "These 160 laws are not new to us," she said. "We know them." Matviyenko said senators are in a position to handle the deluge of documents because of what are known as "zero" readings, which take place before formal readings in the parliament. 

     Matviyenko said senators had either been party to discussion of the 160 bills in the State Duma before they reached a first reading or had considered with the "utmost attention" texts of the bills sent to the Federation Council.

Keeping the Russian public entertained and distracted is the government's challenge.

In the winter of 2007, I was transferred by my employer to Moscow for two years. I was single, adventurous and jumped at the opportunity. 

Over the next fourteen months, I made a lot of local friends, traveled by the Metro and the subways daily, and roamed the streets for whole nights in the summer. I even hitchhiked through rural Russia to the Hollow Hills festival in the summer of 2008, attracting amused glances from the country folk. I made a conscious effort to avoid ‘safe areas’ and ‘safe company’. 

    People tried to step on my toes, men shouted abuses at me in the Metro, someone even kicked at me and missed on the corner of Oktyabrskaya, over those fourteen months. But I also found immense love and interest in me, and my culture. I have had instant compassion and help from strangers on the Metro when I collapsed one day, with a stuck kidney stone incapacitating me. I formed friendships for life in Moscow. 

    It was easy for me to slot Russia as racist and unsafe, like some of my colleagues did. I never blamed Russia or its people for the attack. They were just a few bad apples, which exist everywhere. To our misfortune, we met a few that day. 

   Sometimes I used to take out my bruised-face-selfie of 2007 to re-live the moment. With or without the photo, my memory of the attack isn’t one of fear, vulnerability and hate, but a positive one of how, in spite of the attack, I came away loving Russia and Russians, accumulating an overwhelming wealth of positive experiences that put my few negative ones in perspective.

The Russian Ministry of Defence confirmed that the Mi-25 helicopter was brought down over Palmyra, Homs.

"The crew received a request from the Syrian command group to help defeat the advancing terrorists and fire for effect. The captain of the aircraft, Ryafagat Khabibulin, made the decision to attack. "Having spent their ammunition, while turning back to the base, the helicopter was shot down by terrorists from the ground and crashed in an area controlled by the Syrian government. The crew did not survive." 

    The Ministry said that both pilots will posthumously receive state awards for their actions Mail Online reports. A statement from IS (Daesh), translated by the ISIS-affiliated Amaaq news agency, confirmed the attack. It read: "By Allah's grace alone, the soldiers of the Khilafah launched an attack with heavy weapons on Nusayri regime locations east of the silos in Tadmur city.

Russia expels two US diplomats from Moscow, after the White House ordered two Russian embassy staff from Washington.

In response to seeing its two diplomats ordered to leave Washington, the Kremlin announced its move on Saturday. "After their unfriendly step two employees of the United States embassy had to leave Moscow," Mr Ryabkov said. "They were declared persona non grata for activities incompatible with their diplomatic status." 

No official response has been made by Russia to the allegations of harassment of US diplomats. A statement to the Washington Post said there had been US provocation against Russian diplomats. Share this story About sharing

The US has expelled two Russian diplomats in response to an attack on an American diplomat in Moscow, the state department announces.

Spokesman John Kirby said the two officials - who have not been named - were told to leave on 17 June. Mr Kirby said that earlier that month, a Russian policeman attacked the US diplomat near the US embassy in Moscow. "The action was unprovoked," he said. 

Russia said the diplomat worked for the CIA and had refused to show ID papers. Last month, US officials said harassment against US diplomats by Russian security and intelligence services was on the rise. Russia has denied the allegation.

Back in April, President Vladimir Putin was asked at a press conference why he planned to sell state companies just when the market was at bottom.

A deep recession and plunging oil prices meant tax revenues were dwindling. Putin was unwilling to borrow to finance a growing budget shortfall. So his ministers drew up plans to privatize assets worth 1 trillion rubles ($15 billion). 

    The largest privatization since the 1990s, it would be enough to cover around two-fifths of the planned budget deficit of 3 percent of GDP. Still, many had their doubts. Putin has never been keen to privatize. And he insisted that despite rock-bottom company valuations, there should be no sales at knockdown prices. 

    But on July 11, the first sale was completed. The government successfully sold a 10.9 percent stake in Alrosa, the world's largest diamond miner, for 52.2 billion rubles ($816 million). The price wasn't the best. The shares went for 65 rubles ($1.01) each — nearly 4 percent cheaper than their price on the market. 

    According to business newspaper Kommersant, the government had hoped for 71 rubles a share.

Some 73 percent of Russians feel they have no influence over what happens in their country, a survey by the independent Levada Center revealed Wednesday.

    The figure has risen from 59 percent in November last year, with the percentage of respondents who believed they could slightly influence the country falling from 30 percent to 17 percent over the same period. 

     Fifty-four percent of respondents also said they had no ability to influence what goes on in their city or their region, with only 30 percent believing that they had a slight ability to do so. Out of the 1600 respondents, sixty-four percent said that they felt absolutely no responsibility for what happens in the country, rising from 55 percent in November last year. 

     The Levada Center interviewed Russians aged 18 and older in 137 urban and rural communities across 48 Russian regions between June 23 and 27.

The first Russian flight carrying package tourists to Turkey since a diplomatic crisis erupted eight months ago landed on Saturday in the Turkish Mediterranean resort of Antalya. 

The head of Antalya's airport, Osman Serdar, acknowledged the tourist season had started in a "troubled way" and was happy to see the Russians arriving. "We are seeing the first group of Russian tourists arrive. This will continue to increase and we definitely don't want to have these kinds of troubles again," he told reporters in Antalya. 

     The Turkish tourism industry is expected to be dealt another blow by tourists staying away following the June 28 triple suicide attack blamed on jihadists at Ataturk International Airport in Istanbul that killed 47 people. Aside from the Russian crisis, the tourism industry had already been dealt repeated blows by a string of attacks in Turkey blamed on Islamic State jihadists and Kurdish militants.

While the world's biggest fast-food chain might no longer thrill the denizens of modern-day Moscow, McDonald's is still breaking new ground elsewhere in Russia.

The news media has struggled to explain Barnaul's apparently massive interest in McDonald's, which Russians in Moscow are accustomed to thinking of as “yesterday's news,” having had their first taste of the food chain back in 1990. 

    The news website the Village even interviewed social science researchers and psychologists, who reasoned that McDonald's today—with its appealing “Western vibe”—is trendy within the country's youth culture. 

    According to these experts, McDonald's in Russia's regions currently enjoys the “coolness” factor that chains like Starbucks have managed to harness in the gentrified areas of many European cities. (Starbucks, incidentally, has yet to arrive in Siberia.) 

    Young people in Barnaul have undoubtedly been conspicuous about their consumption of McDonald's food and brand, adding banal, life-affirming hashtags to their Instagram photos from the restaurant that are straight out of the company's own viral marketing, writing (in Russian) things like #summer, #city, #imlovinit, #lovelyday, #summermood, #happiness, #selfie, and #smile.

There have been arrests and releases, petty prosecutions and sensible legal revisions. The overall trend in Russia may be toward a tougher line on potential dissent, but the path is a faltering, unclear one.

There has been no new directive from the Kremlin. Instead, there are ambiguous signals of a concern about the risks of mass protest andelite disloyalty, to which individuals and agencies have scrambled to respond as they think — hope — President Vladimir Putin would want. 

     To an extent, this is an end in itself, the latest mise-en-scène in the Kremlin’s theater of terror, a drama intended to cow those Russians thinking of making trouble, without all the blood and hassle of actual terror. However,in the usual way, this has also encouraged a motley and often unpleasant array of individuals, institutions and factions to leap forward in a flurry of activity. 

     For some, it is an opportunity to put forward policies in the hope the Kremlin will adopt them. This is how much of Russian policy-making works these days: not produced by a secretive cabal so much as shopped around in a marketplace of ideas — in the media, in the Duma, in action — in the hope to find a buyer in the Kremlin. 

     For others, and sometimes at the same time, it is an opportunity for more direct advancement, institutional or purely personal.