Crime among officers in Russia’s armed forces soared to a 10-year high in the first half of this year, the chief military prosecutor said on Thursday, threatening Kremlin attempts to galvanize the country’s defense capability.
Russia has begun a radical reform of its military in a bid to combat low morale and create a smaller but better equipped and better paid combat-ready force.
The Kremlin-backed changes aim to more than halve the bloated numbers of officers, now a third of all servicemen.
“The scale of crime among officers has risen beyond all reasonable limits,” chief military prosecutor Sergei Fridinsky told a televised meeting with military prosecutors, noting that both junior and senior ranks were involved in the corruption.
Problems include embezzlement of military property, theft of funds earmarked for procurement of weapons and fraud in the allocation of housing for officers.
“The theft of hundreds of millions of roubles of budget funds ... in the final account thwarts strengthening the state’s defence capability and combat-readiness of the armed forces,” Fridinsky said.
Army and navy officers have committed more than a quarter of all crimes registered in the armed forces this year, he said.
Crowds in Bangladesh are flocking to snap photographs with an unlikely social media star — an albino buffalo with flowing blond hair nicknamed “Donald Trump” that is due to be sacrificed within days. Owner Zia Uddin Mridha, 38, said his brother named the 700kg bull over its flowing helmet of hair resembling the signature look of the US president. “My younger brother picked this name because of the buffalo’s extraordinary hair,” he said at his farm in Narayanganj, just outside the capital, Dhaka. Mridha said that a constant stream of curious visitors — social media fans, onlookers and children — have come throughout
The Philippines said it has asked the country’s Supreme Court to allow it to arrest former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte’s chief drug war enforcer to stand trial in an international tribunal. The International Criminal Court (ICC) last week unsealed an arrest warrant against Philippine Senator Ronald dela Rosa, accusing him along with Duterte and other “coperpetrators” of the “crime against humanity of murder.” Dela Rosa briefly sought refuge in the Philippine Senate last week while asking the Philippine Supreme Court to stop an ongoing attempt by government agents to arrest him. “By his own conduct, he has placed himself outside the protection of
It began as a satirical online project. Now millions of young people in India are flocking to it as an outlet for their frustration. A parody political party called the Cockroach Janta Party, with the insect as its symbol, has exploded across India’s social media by turning absurdist humor into protest. Memes and short videos mocking corruption, joblessness and political dysfunction have flooded social media sites, where millions of users are embracing the cockroach — known for its ability to survive harsh conditions — as a tongue-in-cheek symbol of endurance. The online movement’s rise has been unusually rapid. The Cockroach Janta Party (CJP)
The researchers in Ireland looked at their computer screen, marveling at a medieval book tracked down in a Roman library. They flipped through its digitized pages and found their sought-after treasure: the oldest surviving English poem. “We were extremely surprised. We were speechless. We couldn’t believe our eyes when we first saw that,” said Elisabetta Magnanti, a visiting research fellow at Trinity College Dublin’s school of English. The poem was also within the main body of Latin text, she said, calling it “extraordinary.” Composed in Old English by a Northumbrian agricultural worker in the 7th century, Caedmon’s Hymn appears within some copies of
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