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A new law expanding Russia's definition of treason took effect Wednesday - and critics say it's so vague that the government can now brand anyone who dissents as a traitor....

China on Thursday called for a phased-in cease-fire and negotiations on a gradual political transition to end the ongoing bloodshed in Syria. A four-point proposal issued by the Foreign Ministry stopped short of calling for the ouster of President Bashar Assad and omitted mention of any measures to compel compliance. Alongside Russia, China has steadfastly blocked any outside intervention that could force Assad from power, much to the consternation of the U.S. and other countries seeking a swift end to the 19-month-old conflict, which has killed more than 35,000 people.

A Russian appeals court on Wednesday upheld the two-year jail sentences for two members of punk band Pussy Riot for a protest in a cathedral but freed a third member by suspending her sentence.

A teenage mammoth that once roamed the Siberian tundra in search of fodder and females might have been killed by an Ice Age man on a summer day tens of thousands of years ago, a Russian scientist said Friday....

Russia and North Korea have signed a deal to write off nearly all of the isolated Asian country's $11 billion Soviet-era debt.

Protesters chanting "Russia without Putin" began marching through Moscow on Saturday in a protest seen as a test of the opposition's ability to mount a sustained challenge to President Vladimir Putin.

Mitt Romney took up the cudgels again against Russia on Monday, telling a radio interviewer that “almost everything we try to do globally, they try and oppose.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill hushed up evidence the Soviet secret police had killed thousands of Polish men in the Katyn forest in 1940 for fear of alienating World War Two ally Josef Stalin, newly-declassified documents show.

The Obama administration is opposing a Jewish group's bid to have civil fines levied against Russia for failing to obey a court order to return its historic books and documents - a dispute which has halted the loan of Russian art works for exhibit in the United States....

A university instructor on Friday confessed to killing two women in an apartment where a message demanding freedom for jailed members of the Pussy Riot band was scrawled on the wall, news reports said. The killing in the city of Kazan of a 76-year-old woman and her 38-year-old daughter attracted nationwide attention because of the Pussy Riot connection. Three members of the feminist punk band were sentenced two weeks ago to two years in prison in a politically charged case.