After weeks of defying international pleas to free eight European officials they had captured in May, pro-Russian rebels in east Ukraine released them unexpectedly in June following a public appeal by the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill.
 

Russia has pulled out of a longstanding American high-school exchange program after a teenage Russian boy who befriended a gay couple sought asylum in the United States on the grounds that he faced persecution at home as a homosexual.

Amid political tensions with the West, Russia is pulling out of a popular high school exchange program funded by the U.S. government, according to the U.S. embassy in Moscow.

No wonder NASA is looking up. It just awarded contracts, worth up to $6.8 billion, to Boeing and SpaceX to carry astronauts back and forth to the International Space Station, ending our reliance on the Russians for travel services in space. The deal sets the scene for a new and exciting chapter in American space travel at a time when Americans need a "boost. 

U.S. Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Richard Stengel says that in the face of strong foreign propaganda machines such as Russia and the Islamic State, the U.S. needs to harden its "soft power" with its own participation in the global conversation.

The fundamentalist militant group ISIS has capitalized on the power of social media to spread its message and recruit new followers, but social networks and governments are fighting back. On Thursday, VKontakte, the Russian equivalent of Facebook, announced it will ban accounts affiliated with the ISIS terrorist group.

Health care diplomacy trumps political tension between the United States and Russia for a delegation of doctors and nurses visiting La Crosse to glean ideas to improve care back home. The two doctors and three nurses are rubbing elbows with their counterparts and others at Gundersen Health System this week as part of World Services of La Crosse’s Bridging Cancer Care project.