“Russian singer Eduard Khil has died at the age of 77, following a stroke. Khil is apparently well known in Russia, though attained belated fame outside of Russia when a musical number he performed on Soviet television in the 1970s, in which he sung nonsense lyrics in a rich baritone over luxuriantly loungy background music, but above all with an infectious sense of good cheer, ended up on YouTube and became a meme”. ... (Listen to songs of Eduard Khil)

“Romain de Tirtoff (23 November 1892 – 21 April 1990) was a Russian-born French artist and designer known by the pseudonym Erté, the French pronunciation of his initials, R.T. He was a diversely talented 20th-century artist and designer who flourished in an array of fields, including fashion, jewellery, graphic arts, costume and set design for film, theatre, and opera, and interior decor”. – Wikipedia. Photo: Romain de Tirtoff (Erte) – “Symphony In Black” (please click to enlarge).

Ed Freeman was born and raised in Boston and majored in French and Russian at Oberlin College in Ohio. After college, he worked as a performing musician, arranger and record producer, creating dozens of pop and jazz vinyls, including Carly Simon’s debut album and Don McLean’s American Pie. Ed Freeman in 1990 and have watched him grow as an artist and a teacher. For the past eight years, Ed has been teaching a Photoshop class at Santa Monica City College and currently has large pieces of his work, Desert Realty, featured in a traveling museum.

For more than three years, Ukraine has been plagued by a conflict between the eastern secessionist territories and the Kiev government. Demonstrations by pro-Russian parties that oppose the current government first began in 2014 - and now, over 10,000 people have died, many of them civilians. These images portray a generation caught between war and peace. Many of them were born into the civil conflict dominating the country and are disorientated about their place in the world. Here: Youths during a party organised on a decommissioned bridge in Kiev. (Photo by Aude Osnowycz/The Guardian)

People mourn at a makeshift memorial in front of the Russian embassy in Yerevan on March 23, 2024, a day after a gun attack on the Crocus City Hall in Russia's Krasnogorsk. Camouflaged assailants opened fire at the packed Crocus City Hall in Moscow's northern suburb of Krasnogorsk on March 22, 2024, evening ahead of a concert by Soviet-era rock band Piknik in the deadliest attack in Russia for at least a decade. Russia on March 23, 2024, said it had arrested 11 people – including four gunmen – over the attack on a Moscow concert hall claimed by Islamic State, as the death toll rose to 133 people. (Photo by Karen Minasyan/AFP Photo)

“Lombard Street is an east-west street in San Francisco, California. Lombard Street is best known for the one-way section on Russian Hill between Hyde and Leavenworth Streets, in which the roadway has eight sharp turns (or switchbacks) that have earned the street the distinction of being the crookedest street in the world”. – Wikipedia

Photo: A single car drives down a typically crowded Lombard Street, San Francisco's crooked street, April 29, 2003 in San Francisco. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Taken by photographer, Denis Budkov, 33, the Plosky Tolbachik is one of a cluster of volcanoes located in the Kamchatka Peninsula in the far east of Russia. After taking a lucky group of tourists to the crater of the flat volcano, the Russian photographer managed to get less than 300 metres away from the spurting jets of lava. Photo: The underground entrance to the volcano resembles a scene from the latest Hobbit movie. (Photo by Denis Budkov/Caters News)