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Secretary of State John Kerry says the transfer of advanced missile defense systems from Russia to Syria would be a "destabilizing" factor for Israel's security.

Russian agents placed the elder Boston bombing suspect under surveillance during a six-month visit to southern Russia last year, then scrambled to find him when he suddenly disappeared after police killed a Canadian jihadist, a security official told The Associated Press....

NASA is blaming Congress for the need to pay $424 million more to Russia to get U.S. astronauts into space.

Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, a member of the feminist punk band, Pussy Riot, gestures at a district court from behind bars in Zubova Polyana, 240 miles southeast of Moscow in Russia's province of Mordovia, Friday.

Thirty-eight people were feared dead after a fire raged through an isolated psychiatric hospital north of Moscow on Friday, killing some patients in their beds and others who were trapped by barred windows. Most of the patients died in their sleep inhaling the fumes as they were likely sedated by prescribed medicine, a police source told the RIA Novosti news agency.

In an anguished interview, the father of the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing described his fugitive son as a smart and accomplished "angel." Anzor Tsarnaev spoke with The Associated Press by telephone from the southern Russian republic of Dagestan after police said one of his sons, 26-year-old Tamerlan, had been killed in a shootout and the other, Dzhokhar, was being intensely pursued.

Militants from Chechnya and other restive regions in Russia's volatile North Caucasus have targeted Moscow and other areas with bombings and hostage-takings, but the allegations of involvement in the Boston Marathon explosions would mark the first time they had conducted a terror attack in the West....

The summer heat waves over the past decade that killed thousands of people in Europe, scorched the Russian wheat crop, and sent Greenland's glaciers galloping to the sea are without parallel since at least 1400, according to a new study. The findings are based on a statistical analysis of summer seasonal temperatures inferred from tree rings, ice cores, lake sediments, and instrumental records.

Russia urged Germany to punish a group of women who staged a bare-breasted protest against President Vladimir Putin on Monday during a visit to a trade fair in Hanover with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Three members of the women's rights group Femen, which has staged protests against Russia's detention of the feminist punk band Pussy Riot around Europe, disrupted a visit by Putin and Merkel...

An air of cautious optimism hung over Almaty, Kazakstan, on Friday as Western and Iranian negotiators began another round of nuclear talks. The six powers – the United States, Russia, China, France, Britain and Germany – met Iranian officials with the aim of settling a decade-long tussle over Tehran's nuclear program.