The two spoke by phone last July for the first time since the start of the war. In that “frank and direct conversation,” Blinken said he “pressed the Kremlin to accept the substantial proposal that we put forth on the release of Paul Whelan and Brittney Griner.”
-
-
MI5, the United Kingdom’s domestic spy agency, missed an opportunity to prevent the Manchester Arena bombing, an inquiry into the terror attack has found according to a report in British news agency PA Media.
-
Demonstrators poured into the streets of Greece after a head-on collision between two trains killed dozens and left scores injured, amid anger over the country’s poor record on railway safety.
-
Macron’s proposed pension reforms come as workers in France, as elsewhere, are being squeezed by rising food and energy bills. Nurses and ambulance drivers in the United Kingdom are also striking on Thursday over pay and working conditions.
-
Paleontologists in India have made a rare discovery — a dinosaur hatchery with 92 nests and 256 eggs that belonged to colonies of giant plant-eating titanosaurs.
-
A helicopter carrying the leadership team of Ukraine’s interior ministry crashed near a kindergarten and residential block in the Kyiv region on Wednesday, killing at least 14 people, including all nine people on board, according to officials.
-
Thousands lined the streets Tuesday as a funeral procession took soccer great Pelé to his final resting place.
-
The strike took place just after midnight on Sunday, New Year’s Day, on a vocational school housing Russian conscripts in Makiivka, in the Donetsk region, according to both Ukrainian and pro-Russian accounts.
