Ron Nixon

An executive with NBCUniversal said he had been denied entry into Russia and detained for several hours July 13, raising the prospect that a growing spy and diplomatic confrontation could now be tipping into the world of business. The executive, Jeff Shell, who oversees the motion picture unit, said he was traveling to Russia on business when he was detained briefly and ordered out of the country. Shell said NBCUniversal had a movie operation in the country. He is also the chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, the federal agency that oversees Voice of America, Radio Free Europe and other government broadcasters that are not well liked in the Kremlin.

Shell said he had arrived in Moscow around 11:30 pm and was making his way through immigration when he was pulled out of the line. “I was then taken to a small room and left alone for about a half-hour before someone came back with a document in Russian that they wanted me to sign,” he said. Shell said he refused, telling the Russian authorities that he would not sign something he did not understand. He said he was then given a translation of the document, which explained that he had been barred from the country. He said he was then escorted to another room at the airport and that he was locked inside for nearly three hours, until a flight to Amsterdam was arranged.

The State Department is financing a new 24-hour satellite television channel in the turbulent northern region of Nigeria that American officials say is crucial to countering the extremism of radical groups such as Boko Haram.

The move signals a ramping up of American counterinsurgency efforts to directly challenge the terrorist group, which abducted nearly 300 Nigerian schoolgirls in April. State Department officials acknowledged that setting up an American-supported channel could prove challenging in a region where massacres, bombings and shootings by Boko Haram are common, and where the American government and Western educational programs are far from popular.

The group has been known to attack media organizations in Nigeria. The new television channel, to be called Arewa24 -- arewa means north in the Hausa language -- is financed by the State Department’s Bureau of Counterterrorism, and it is expected to cost about $6 million. State Department officials would discuss the program only on the condition of anonymity, and offered sparse information about it. But details have emerged in publicly available contracting documents and in interviews with people familiar with the effort.