If you want to achieve the miracles required for sainthood, one of the great advantages of the Russian Orthodox Church is that it allows you to perform them after you are dead. This not only relieves qualifiers for canonization of a lot of pressure while they are alive. It also gives them the benefit of […]

by John Helmer - Friday, December 21st, 2001
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When President Vladimir Putin this week handed a visibly nervous Vyacheslav Shtirov a bouquet of flowers in a red wrapper, a revolution in Russian diamond policy began. The flowers were a farewell from the Kremlin for the man who has headed Almazy Rossii-Sakha (Alrosa), Russia’s dominant diamond miner and the principal source of wealth for […]

by John Helmer - Friday, December 14th, 2001
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Remember the taste test? That was a marketing ploy by Pepsi, when the soft-drinks maker claimed that consumers who sampled their drink preferred it for taste to Coca-Cola – so long as they couldn’t see the label on the bottle. In reaction, Coca-Cola blind-tested consumers, and discovered that if their old sugar formula was changed […]

by John Helmer - Saturday, December 1st, 2001
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