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By John Helmer, Moscow The South African Government has pulled back from the agreement it reached last November with Rosatom, the state nuclear industry corporation, to build nuclear reactors to supply South Africa’s future power needs. Officials at the South African Department of Energy refuse to say to what the Minister of Energy, Ben Martins, […]

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By John Helmer, Moscow When the last war with Germany was ending, the British intelligence services rounded up as many of their German counterparts as they could find, and interrogated them. They were taken by surprise, as a series of reports by Hugh Trevor-Roper, then a signals intelligence analyst, uncovered as early as 1944.* For […]

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By John Helmer, Moscow Oleg Deripaska has never agreed to settle before judgement in international litigations against him, or against his management of United Company Rusal, unless Deripaska was certain his opponents held a winning hand. When Rusal announced last week that it has settled a London arbitration with Rusal shareholders, Victor Vekselberg and Len […]

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By John Helmer, Moscow Theologians may wrestle to Kingdom Come before they will agree that a gusher of faith can be drilled out of a bedrock of reason. In the case of junior Russian oil companies taking money from investors on the London Stock Exchange (LSE), the gushers are proving to be short-lived. The loss […]

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By John Helmer, Moscow The Kremlin has yet to agree to a Ukrainian application for the resumption of duty-free quotas for steel pipe imports to Russia. In December, Ukrainian Industry Minister Mykhaylo Korolenko told Bloomberg that there had been an agreement with the Kremlin to reinstate the quotas which were cancelled on July 1 and […]

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By John Helmer, Moscow The dickhead question is not which direction the dick is pointing in, but whether it’s connected to the brain. The heart being an automatic organ, it’s the brain which must obey the rules of informed consent and their corollary, the age of consent. Among the ancient Greeks, who celebrated homosexuality more […]

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By John Helmer, Moscow Interpipe, the heavily indebted Ukrainian pipemaker owned by Victor Pinchuk (left foreground), has defaulted on its pledge to list its Eurobonds on the Luxembourg Stock Exchange by December 27, a notice from Deutsche Bank, the bond trustee, has revealed. This is Pinchuk’s second default in two months. On November 1, Interpipe […]

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By John Helmer, Moscow It’s possible to imagine that when Kornei Chukovsky wrote about crocodiles telephoning Moscow for take-out galoshes to eat (1926), or about the bear who beat up a crocodile and saved the sun from his jaws (1916), he was doing something secret and political for adults, instead of making children laugh and […]

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By John Helmer, Moscow Once upon a time, not so long ago, the United States and Russia appeared to agree that the President of Tajikistan, Emomali Rahmon, was a crook. It now appears that whatever government officials say in private, in public it is now US policy, along with that of the multilateral banks which […]

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By John Helmer, Moscow This year the Moscow School of Management at Skolkovo is planning to publish what it calls a market atlas of the jobs and professions which will be newly needed by the year 2020, and those needed no longer. One of the new ones is what the Skolkovo atlas calls a cyber-cleaner […]