Chechen trail
A knife attacker who killed a 29-year-old man in central Paris on Saturday night was a French citizen born in Russia's Chechnya region in 1997, sources said on Sunday.
A judicial source named the attacker — who killed one passerby and wounded four others before being shot dead by police — as Khamzat A, without giving his full name. BFM TV and other French media gave the alleged attacker’s name as Khamzat Azimov.
Costly prank
A 27-year-old Muscovite who was filmed picking up and carrying a Russian National Guard officer at a Moscow metro station has been charged with “using violence against a representative of the authority.”
Islyam Melekov may face up to 10 years behind bars after he was filmed carrying the unnamed officer, Russia’s Investigative Committee said.
Telegram protests
Around 20 activists were arrested at a sanctioned rally in support of the banned Telegram instant messaging service in central Moscow.
All but one of the detainees have since been released with citations for violating public assembly rules, the OVD-Info police monitoring website reported.
Inconvenient sleuth
Russia has refused World Cup accreditation to Hajo Seppelt, a journalist specializing in investigations into illegal doping, whom the German ARD television had asked to include in its team covering the upcoming football tournament.
The refusal of accreditation to report on a major sports event was "unique in the history of ARD's sports journalism," the broadcaster said, describing the refusal as an "unheard-of violation of press freedom."
Bad marriage
Zenit St. Petersburg FC terminated manager Roberto Mancini's contract by mutual consent on Sunday after an Italian football official said the 53-year-old was willing to become the country's next national coach.
"I want to emphasize that the move to leave Zenit was exclusively my own," Mancini, one of the highest-profile foreign coaches to join the Russian Premier League in recent years, told the club's website.
Cordial interception
A Russian long-range bomber was intercepted by U.S. fighter jets off the western coast of Alaska in what the Russian authorities described as a "respectful" encounter.
Two Alaskan-based F-22s maintained a "respectful distance of approximately 100 meters" from the two Tu-95 "Bear" bombers for 48 minutes, one of the pilots told the Russian military Red Star publication Red Star.
Reuters contributed reporting to this article.
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