Europe

OSLO, Oct. 10 (Xinhua) -- About 50,000 troops from 31 countries will participate in NATO's Trident Juncture 2018 exercise in Norway from Oct. 25 to Nov. 7, the Norwegian Armed Forces said on Wednesday.

All 29 NATO member nations and its partners Sweden and Finland, with around 150 aircraft, 65 vessels and up to 10,000 vehicles, will take part in the exercise, which would be the alliance's biggest maneuvers since the Cold War.

MILAN, October 9. /TASS/. Russia will remain the global oil industry leader over the long term, Energy Minister Alexander Novak told reporters on Tuesday.

"Russia is currently the leader of the global oil industry and will remain as such on a long-term horizon. Our strategy provides for maintaining oil production at the current level, even with a small increase," the minister said.

Nevertheless, Russia needs to undertake incentivizing measures currently discussed by the government to maintain oil production, Novak added.

MOSCOW, October 8. /TASS/. Japan’s ELSA-d satellite intended to demonstrate the project of capturing and removing space junk from orbit is expected to be launched aboard a Russian Soyuz-2 rocket from the Baikonur spaceport in early 2020, the Glavkosmos Launch Services operator said on Monday.

"The Tokyo-based company Astroscale Japan has concluded a contract with Glavkosmos Launch Services to launch its ELSA-d satellite aboard a Soyuz-2 carrier rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. Currently, the takeoff has been scheduled for early 2020," the Russian operator said.

MOSCOW, October 8. /TASS/. Russia has donated to Syria three battalion sets of S-300PM missile systems of eight launchers each, a military diplomatic source told TASS on Monday.

"On October 1, three battalion sets of S-300PM systems of eight launchers each were delivered to Syria," the source said.

MOSCOW, October 8. /TASS/. Russia has sent a note to the Dutch Ambassador to Russia Renee Jones-Bos, in which it stated that the expulsion of Russian citizens from the Netherlands in April is a provocation related to Moscow’s position in the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), the Russian Foreign Ministry informed on Monday.

MOSCOW, October 9. /TASS/. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) forecasts global growth at 3.7% both for this year and next year, 0.2 percentage points below the last assessments, according to the World Economic Outlook report released on Tuesday.

MOSCOW, October 9. /TASS/. Russia will fight against attempts of other countries to inhibit its activity on the international arena, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev wrote in the article for the Voprosi Ekonomiki (Economic Questions) magazine published on Tuesday.

"Every time when our country becomes active on the international arena, it always faces hard attempts to hinder us. We cannot ignore these tendencies, and we will actively fight for a good place in world economy and world politics," Medvedev said.

ROME (AP) — Italian authorities say they have placed a 25-year-old Italian under investigation for allegedly hacking eight NASA web domains in 2013.

Italy’s postal police, who handle hacking and other cybercrime investigations, said the suspect was allegedly a member of a group called “Master Italian Hackers Team” and boasted of the hack on social media.

In addition to NASA sites, police said the unnamed suspect also hacked some 60 Italian institutional sites, including those of state-run broadcaster RAI, the penitentiary police and some provincial sites in Tuscany.

MOSCOW, October 7. /TASS/. The idea of weaning the Russian economy off the dollar does not envisage any restrictions on using the greenback by Russians and the government has never had any plans to convert dollar deposits into rubles, Finance Minister and First Deputy Prime Minister Anton Siluanov said in an interview with the program "Moscow. Kremlin. Putin" of the Rossiya-1 TV channel on Sunday.

MOSCOW, October 7. /TASS/. De-dollarization does not imply refusal of the dollar, CEO of Russia’s VTB bank Anderi Kostin said on Sunday.

"Several words have been said about the refusal of the dollar. I would like to say that, first, no one is speaking about the refusal of the dollar. Moreover, the so-called de-dollarization program does not envisage any restrictive, the more so, prohibitive measures in respect of the dollar neither for people nor for corporations," he told the Tolstoy. Sunday program on the Rossiye-1 television channel.