Andy Potts
Ballots, bards and kitschy ballads
Parliamentary walk-out
Russia's three opposition parties - the Communists, the ultranationalist Liberal Democrats and the Just Russia party - staged a short-lived walk-out of the State Duma last week in protest over last Sunday's local elections.
But RIA Novosti reported Prime Minister Vladimir Putin insisted that the issue should be settled in the courts, adding: "Those who lose are always unsatisfied." Putin's United Russia won the local poll by a landslide.
Among the problems with the polls Russian media reported disturbances in Derbent, Dagestan, where 14 polling stations reportedly failed to open as planned. OMON officers were said to have tear-gassed residents and attacked journalists, according to Moskovsky Komsomolets.
The Lib Dems and Just Russia returned to parliamentary sessions on Friday, appeased by a promised meeting with President Dmitry Medvedev.
However Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov kept his delegates away and pledged to continue his fight against election day "barbarity".
Gay writes
Visiting Moscow last week, Hillary Clinton told students how she was influenced by Dostoevsky's classic "The Karamazov Brothers" before facing flak from gay rights activists and enduring accusations of "going soft" on the Kremlin from back home.
While the US Secretary of State's efforts at literary criticism went down a storm with youngsters at Moscow State University - who she also urged to strive for political diversity as a path to prosperity - her appearance at the unveiling of a statue of American poet Walt Whitman brought her into the firing line of Moscow's gays.
Whitman's use of homosexual imagery in the early 20th century makes him an important figure for the gay rights movement, and Clinton joining Mayor Yury Luzhkov at the ceremony outraged activist Nikolai Alexeyev, The Associated Press reported.
He complained that Clinton had not raised gay rights issues with Luzhkov, at a time when Alexeyev's protest group has taken its case to the European Court of Human Rights after three marches were banned.
Meanwhile, after Kommersant quoted Clinton's adviser on Russia, Michael McFaul, saying that Washington was ready to back off on complaints about human rights abuses, ultra-conservative US website Fox Nation howled: "Hillary caves to Russia on rights, but gets no Iran sanctions?"
Putin on song
The high camp of the Eurovision song contest clearly made an impression on Vladimir Putin when it came to Russia earlier this year - he wants to expand the franchise out of Europe.
The premier is reportedly keen to set up a Central Asian contest, which could involve China and various former Soviet republics - and the official eurovision website gave the idea a coveted 12 points.
"We would be happy to sell the format to Prime Minister Putin," said Bjørn Erichsen, Television Director at the EBU, which runs the show.
Slavs unite
Russia and Serbia could unite as one, if the founder of the former Yugoslav republic's "My Russia" party has his way.
Ivan Isakovic, from the town of Sabac, believes he will easily find the 10,000 backers needed to register his political party, which calls for a "fight to join our Orthodox mother and cradle, Russia", Balkan Insight reported.
He wants his party to merge Russian and Serbian values in a bid to persuade Moscow that Serbia should unite with it, in a manner similar to the Union State agreement with Belarus.
Good week for ...
Getting spaced out
Russia is ready to invest 400 billion roubles ($13.5 billion) on a new space centre in the Amur Region, RIA Novosti reports. The Vostochny centre will end Russia's dependence on Kazakhstan's Baikonur complex once the first manned missions blast off in 2018. Building work on the site is due to start in 2011, with the first unmanned launches due in 2015. The space complex will employ 20,000 to 25,000 people.
Bottling it
A tramp in Kemerovo, Siberia, proved that where there's muck, there's brass - or did he? According to trashy tabloid Tvoi Den, Leonid Konovalov - who earlier made headlines with a self-penned movie about life on the streets featuring "erotic scenes" - claimed to have raised 50,000 euros to invest on the stock exchange simply by collecting empty bottles. He argued that this year, thanks to the crisis, Russians were drinking more and he was coining it as a result. However, with a return of 2 roubles per bottle, he would need to have collected more than 2,500 bottles a day to earn his alleged investment stake.
Bad week for ...
Dodgy degrees
That treasured Harvard diploma may not be all it seems, as Russian police have uncovered a criminal gang hawking Ivy League knock-offs - for a cool $40,000. While it might seem easy enough to round up the perekhod peddlers of dubious degrees, investigator Alexander Khazin told RIA Novosti that large groups of fraudsters ran these scams and it took time to discover them. His colleague Alexei Shyshko urged employers to be more vigilant in checking qualifications.
Grandpa Joe
It's OK to say that Josef Stalin signed death warrants during his reign as Soviet leader, a court ruled in a libel case brought by the dictator's grandson Yevgeny Dzhugashvili. Dzhugashvili claimed he had been defamed by an article in liberal newspaper Novaya Gazeta, which said Stalin had ordered executions to be carried out by the secret police. But a Moscow court accepted the paper's argument that its story was based on recently published NKVD documents. The verdict was greeted by cries of "disgrace" in the courtroom, while others cheered the decision.
