News of the Day: 15 October 2021

The Moscow Times: Russia on Friday reported a record high number of both new coronavirus cases and deaths. Officials reported 32,196 new coronavirus cases and 999 fatalities from Covid-19 over the last 24 hours.

The Guardian: A group of masked men stormed the offices of a renowned human rights organisation in Moscow on Thursday evening to disrupt the screening of Mr Jones, a British co-produced film about the Holodomor, the Stalin-era famine that killed millions of peasants in Soviet Ukraine during the 1930s.

Amnesty International: In the evening of 14 October 2021, the office of the NGO International Memorial in Moscow was intruded by a violent mob and then, effectively raided by police who subjected those inside to unlawful detention and questioning lasting several hours.

RFE/RL: A group of attackers burst into the office of Russia’s Memorial human rights center in Moscow on October 14, interrupting the screening of a film about a Welsh journalist who reported the existence of the Stalin-era mass famine in Ukraine in the early 1930s.

Human Rights Watch: Yesterday, a court in the city of Kolomna, Russia sentenced Viacheslav Yegorov to 15 months in prison for repeatedly taking part in peaceful protests in 2018 against the “import” of trash from Moscow. It is ironic that this sentence came less than a week after the UN Human Rights Council recognized the right to a healthy environment as a universal human right.

The Guardian: The Moscow metro has rolled out what authorities have lauded as the world’s first mass-scale facial recognition payment system, amid privacy concerns over the new technology.

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