The Russia House film Wikipedia

Table Of Content

• Florida's "Little Moscow" may be all the rage, but it isn't the only city that Russian buyers call home.
• U.S. announces new Patriot missiles for Ukraine as part of $6-billion aid package
• Biden signs $95-billion military aid measure that includes path to ban TikTok
• Film and audio adaptations
• More From the Los Angeles Times
• Opinion: The Supreme Court just showed us that Trump is not incompetent. He’s a master of corruption
• Ukraine, Israel aid advances in rare House vote as Democrats help Republicans push it forward

“Legislators who are genuinely concerned about social media platforms’ practices have better options at their disposal, and we continue to urge lawmakers to lean in to those rather than undermining the First Amendment rights of millions of Americans,” Johnson said. “Policymakers have legitimate concerns about Chinese-made apps and reciprocal access to China’s digital market, but they should address those issues through policies that are specific, scalable, and sound,” Castro said in an email to The Post. “I’m glad to see the House help push this important bill forward to force Beijing-based ByteDance to divest its ownership of TikTok,” Warner said in a statement to The Post.

Florida's "Little Moscow" may be all the rage, but it isn't the only city that Russian buyers call home.

The House vote “will make the United States of America richer, further ruin Ukraine and result in the deaths of even more Ukrainians, the fault of the Kyiv regime,” Peskov said, according to official Russian media. Russia, predictably, hammered on what has become a key talking point — that U.S. assistance would do little more than prolong a bloody confrontation. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov also suggested that the main idea behind the package was to funnel money to U.S. weapons manufacturers. Speaking on CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday, Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.), head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said he was confident the U.S. would be able to resume shipments of equipment by the end of the week.

U.S. announces new Patriot missiles for Ukraine as part of $6-billion aid package

Principal photography included scenes in and around Moscow and Leningrad (now St Petersburg). In 1987, Bartholomew "Barley" Scott Blair, a British publisher, is at a book fair in Moscow. With business friends he goes on a drunken retreat to a secluded dacha in the forest near Peredelkino. When their talk turns to politics, Barley finds himself talking boldly of patriotism and courage, of a new world order, and an end to Cold War tensions.

Biden signs $95-billion military aid measure that includes path to ban TikTok

You see, the Russian notion of “suburbia” is slightly different to that of the West. As a country that was transformed into an urban society in a matter of decades, the Soviet Union housed its upwardly mobile peasants as cheaply as possible in communal apartments. As a result, the only fenced-off, gardened house the average Russian city-dweller stays in is the family dacha (unless he/she is a multi-millionaire with a suburban mansion). For most, a three-room apartment in a block of flats is deemed a perfectly acceptable place to settle down and raise a family. We can see how practicing espionage has coalesced his disparate temperaments. Barley seemed miscast as a book publisher--he’s too out-sized and physical and unruminative.

Film Details

In the two years since Russia's invasion, opposition to aiding Ukraine has grown from a fringe position to a majority view among House GOP lawmakers. Many argue the money should be spent domestically or that policy changes at the US-Mexico border should take precedence. The House of Representatives on Saturday passed a more than $60 billion bill to provide military and economic aid to Ukraine.

Film and audio adaptations

The top-level spies in this film are apparently hooked into some kind of high-tech electronics network that allows them to know at all times what their people in the field are doing. But the people are often not doing very much, and so my mind wandered, speculating what it would be like to sit for hours in cynical world-weariness, drinking coffee or sherry in book-lined rooms, waiting for something to happen so you can make a suitably jaundiced comment about it. It takes a lot of patience to watch "The Russia House," but it takes even more patience to be a character in the movie.

More From the Los Angeles Times

All of these questions are debated at length before and after Barley's trip, during which he actually meets the mystery woman who passed the manuscript to the West. Now that the US House of Representatives, acting in an unusually bipartisan way, has finally passed a $61 billion aid package for Ukraine, the big question is what the Ukrainians should spend it on. House lawmakers escalated efforts to restrict video-sharing platform TikTok, renewing pressure on the Senate by advancing a bill Saturday that would force the company to be sold or face a national ban as part of a broader package sending aid to Israel and Ukraine. A few, including Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, could not suppress a slightly sardonic tone even in expressing relief.

Since lawmakers introduced their latest proposal targeting the app last month, the company has launched a major counteroffensive against the effort, enlisting scores of users through pop-up notifications to bombard lawmakers with calls voicing opposition to the legislation. TikTok has blasted lawmakers’ efforts to potentially ban the app as an affront on free speech and disputes lawmakers’ suggestions that it is beholden to China or any government. TikTok is “a spy balloon in Americans’ phones” used to “surveil and exploit America’s personal information,” Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Tex.), chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, said Saturday as he introduced the measure for debate.

"The fact that Russian foreign buyers are purchasing properties at the high end of the market or in more expensive locations indicates that Russian foreign buyers tend to be wealthier than other foreign buyers, so they have the capacity to make all-cash purchases," Cororaton said. "This indicates that Russian foreign buyers tend to purchase more expensive properties — not necessarily high-end, but because they are purchasing in areas where properties are more expensive, like New York," Cororaton said. Sprinkled throughout the US, Russians account for 0.8% of all foreign buyers who purchased US residential property from April 2015 through March 2021, the National Association of Realtors said. Although small in number, they spend more on their home purchases than any other foreign demographic, and most already hold US visas. There’s an almost total absence in “The Russia House” of gunplay and chase scenes and torrid sex and all the other accouterments of the thriller. (The R rating is for occasional violence and strong language.) It’s not that Schepisi can’t do this stuff; he’s just interested in a different set of machinations.

The philosophical Barley reasons that governments are not the only ones who can manipulate and betray, and some things are more important than the games that spies play with others' lives. So all is in place for an effective movie, except for a screenplay in which anything happens. The director, Fred Schepisi, has obtained the playwright Tom Stoppard to make le Carre's novel into a film, but what it has been made into is sort of a filmed dramatic reading, with endless variations of shots in which middle-aged men stand around saying le Carre's dialogue. Michelle Pfeiffer makes a splendid Katya, with her hair pulled back to accentuate her vaguely Slavic cheekbones. Klaus Maria Brandauer of course gets all substantial male Russian and Eastern European roles these days, with his sleek and slightly sinister intelligence. And James Fox, as Ned, the Brit master spy, provides that precise note of cold British analytical reserve that is required.

US warned allies about Russian space, nuclear capabilities, source says - Reuters

US warned allies about Russian space, nuclear capabilities, source says.

Posted: Thu, 15 Feb 2024 08:00:00 GMT [source]

NATO allies that feel more directly threatened by Russia, including the Baltic states and Poland, have long viewed the conflict with a sense of crisis and urgency, and were at times incredulous as U.S. support appeared to flag. Even so, the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank, noted that “Ukrainian forces may suffer additional setbacks in the coming weeks” while waiting for the arrival of weaponry that will allow them to stabilize the front lines. Just as important in that initial reaction was what Zelensky did not say. House of Representatives approved a long-sought $61 billion in aid, breaking a legislative logjam that had deepened hardships on the war’s front lines, and made it difficult for Ukrainian forces to fend off Russian attacks on civilian neighborhoods and critical infrastructure. After months of delay at the hands of a bloc of ultraconservative Republicans, the package drew overwhelming bipartisan support, reflecting broad consensus.

The Senate is expected to pass the legislation as early as Tuesday and send it to President Biden’s desk, capping its tortured journey through Congress. Most Russian buyers in the US purchased their properties for use as a primary residence, while 36% purchased properties to use for vacation or to rent, NAR said. In comparison, 40% of all US foreign buyers purchased their properties as vacation homes.

The film was re-released on Blu-Ray by Sandpiper Pictures on June 14, 2022.[19] Their release included the trailer. It was also a single-layer Blu-Ray, where the previous release had contained a larger file size, on a dual-layer Blu-Ray. The sequence at the safe house was shot on Bowen Island, near Vancouver, British Columbia. Impressed by the additional volume, Russell's boss Brady and U.S. military officer Quinn interrogate Barley to be certain of his loyalties.

State television showed Putin directing the exercise via video call with top military officials. "I buzz for the wrong apartment very often," she tells us, "and I end up looking for the right one for hours on end." You better know the apartment number and not just the host's name, says Lucia Bellinello from Italy. “The average Russian apartment building would dominate the skyline of an English or Irish city, but here they’re just a drop in the ocean of thousands of lookalikes,” says Jack Dean, an Irish teacher.

Ironically, you usually need a car to access the recycling services currently available in Russia. In Russia, heating is centralized via a few immense power plants – this means that an administrator will set the temperature in your flat. They usually put it at a sweltering temperature too, creating a discrepancy between indoors and out that takes quite some getting used to. It also means there are a couple of periods during the year (usually mid-October and early May) when it’s either chilly out, and the radiators aren’t on yet, or it’s balmy outdoors and the heating is still on.

We’ve become so jangled by the punch-and-grab of conventional thrillers that I fear “The Russia House,” with its kicky combination of slow, tricky plotting and fervent emotionalism, may be left in the lurch this season. Watching this film about conspirators requires an almost conspiratorial participation on the part of its audience; we’re made to understand that our patience and our attentions will pay off. A middle-aged, boozy publisher is enlisted as a spy by British Intelligence after he receives a manuscript, authored by a leading Russian physicist, purporting to lay out the true details about Soviet nuclear capabilities. It appears to be a highly technical work calling into question the quality of the Soviet Union's defense weaponry.