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By John Helmer, Moscow The Ukrainian civil war, and its aftermath, economic warfare between the US, the European Union, and Russia, are transforming the global flows of the minerals from which steel is made. Starting with iron-ore, the future for steelmaking will start at the minehead, not in Australia, nor Brazil, but in West Africa. […]

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By John Helmer, Moscow If one man aims to prove, all by himself, that Russia is a country ruled by a handful of cronies of the President, that man is Arkady Rostenberg.

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By John Helmer, Moscow A decade of lawsuits promoted in the UK courts by Sovcomflot’s chief executive, Sergei Frank (right), has ended disastrously with a judgement issued against him and his company in the High Court today.

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  On August 24, 1991, Marshal Sergei Fyodorovich Akhromeyev committed suicide. He had returned from his holiday at Sochi responding to the attempted removal of Mikhail Gorbachev from power. According to the reports of the time, he hanged himself in his Kremlin office, leaving behind a note. One version of what it said was: “I […]

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The Nile crocodile and some species of hedgehog and tortoise take a break and sleep through the peak of the summer season. It’s usually called aestivation, and this bear is taking a leaf out of the other animals’ book.

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By John Helmer, Moscow Backstage at the Theatre du Chatelet on May 9, 1909, the curtain had come down on Vatslav Nijinsky’s performance of the Polovtsian Dances, an adaptation to Alexander Borodin’s music of the Tatar warrior dance. The Tatars flaunt their prowess, and their alluring slave girls, before their captive, the defeated Prince Igor. […]

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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 […]

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By John Helmer, Moscow Having destroyed Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria, the next big event for the regime-changers of the western media will be the Downhill at Sochi. If our brave reporters can’t find sexual disorientation and repression, they will provoke it during the Pair Skating. The Canadians will discover the Federal Security Service rigged […]