Russia, US nuclear talks
MOSCOW — Moscow has postponed a round of nuclear arms control talks with the United States set for this week because of stark differences in approach and tensions over Ukraine, a senior Russian diplomat said Tuesday.
Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said the decision to put off the talks that were scheduled to start Tuesday in Cairo was made at the political level. The postponement marked another low point in badly strained US-Russian relations and raised concerns about the future of the last remaining nuclear arms control pact between the two powers.
“We faced a situation when our US colleagues not just demonstrated their reluctance to listen to our signals and reckon with our priorities, but also acted in the opposite way,” Mr Ryabkov told reporters in Moscow.
Mr Ryabkov claimed the US wanted to focus solely on resuming inspections under the New START treaty and stonewalled Moscow’s request to also discuss specifics related to the weapons count under the strategic arms reduction pact.
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BEIJING - Chinese authorities have begun inquiries into some of the people who gathered at weekend protests against COVID-19 curbs, people who were at the Beijing demonstrations told Reuters, as police remained out in numbers on the city’s streets.
Two protesters told Reuters that callers identifying themselves as Beijing police officers asked them to report to a police station on Tuesday with written accounts of their activities on Sunday night. A student also said they were asked by their college if they had been in an area where a protest happened and to provide a written account.
“We are all desperately deleting our chat history,” said another person who witnessed the Beijing protest and declined to be identified. The person said police asked how they heard about the protest and what was their motive for going.
It was not clear how authorities identified the people they wanted to question about their participation in the protests, and it was also not clear how many such people the authorities aimed to question.
Beijing’s Public Security Bureau did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for China’s foreign ministry said rights and freedoms must be exercised within the framework of the law.
Simmering discontent with stringent COVID prevention policies three years into the pandemic ignited into protests in cities thousands of miles apart over the weekend.
Mainland China’s biggest wave of civil disobedience since President Xi Jinping took power a decade ago comes as the number of COVID cases hit record daily highs and large parts of several cities face new lockdowns.
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