Andy Potts

German police have dropped charges against Dmitry Kovtun, one of the suspects in the death of former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko.

Kovtun was suspected of leaving a trace of the radioactive substance polonium-210 - used to poison Litvinenko - in a Hamburg apartment, but local prosecutors said that while the chemical was found there, nothing clearly linked Kovtun to the toxin, the BBC reported.

The news also puts more pressure on Britain, which has named Andrei Lugovoi, a State Duma deputy for the ultranationalist Liberal Democratsic Party, as the prime suspect in Litvinenko's murder in London in 2006. British prosecutors want to extradite Lugovoi to stand trial there, but the Russian constitution protects its citizens against extradition.

Lugovoi told RIA Novosti: "The new circumstances undermine the whole British investigation. Now we demand that the UK objectively investigates the case. Clearly the act of provocation has failed and it is time for London to move from politics to constructive actions."

Girls thrown from window

Two eight-year-old girls are in critical condition after being thrown from an eighth-floor window by a drunken military officer, RIA Novosti reported.

The unnamed 30-year-old man sent a text message to his common-law wife: "Say goodbye to Dasha and Katya," before the attack.

The two girls are in a Moscow hospital recovering from serious internal injuries. Dasha was reported to be on a life support machine, while Katya was in a stable condition with fewer injuries after a tree broke her fall.

Poetic justice?

The editors of two newspapers in the Krasnodar region face up to five years in jail over the 2007 publication of a poem entitled "Be Russian", which is claimed to have incited racial tension and insulted Jews and gypsies.

Boris Solomakha, editor of the regional Vesti Slavyan Yuga Rossii, and Vladimir Karatayev, of Zakubanye, another Krasnodar region paper, could face five years in jail if he is convicted of extremism, RIA Novosti said.

The same poem was written by Siberian author Yevgeny Skvoreshnev.

But the Movement Against Illegal Immigration, a neo-fascist group, claims the court case "grossly violates the rights of citizens", arguing the courts want to muzzle free speech.

You are what you eat

The meat served up in Russia's Shaurma kiosks has long been the subject of cynical jokes about its provenance - but snackers in the Ural city of Perm could be forgiven for losing their appetite for the gag.

Police have charged three homeless men with murdering a 25-year-old and selling some of the remains to stallholders in the city.

The victim was attacked with a knife and a hammer, and part of the corpse was eaten by the trio before the rest was sold, RIA Novosti said.

Also last week, a court in Samara handed a reduced jail term to a man who killed his mother and ate part of her body after he told the judge he was hungry and needed food.

The killer, Sergey Gavrilov, also complained that the meat was "too fatty", but said he had to tuck in after running out of money in a vodka and gambling binge.

Whale penis gets the chop

A Russian company's plans to kit out its luxury SUV with whale penis leather drew such an outcry that the scheme has been shelved. Leonard Yankelovich, of Dartz, told The Moscow News how he wanted his $1.5 million supercar to be fitted out with the most expensive materials known to man. However, when the likes of Greenpeace, WWF and even Pamela Anderson - herself no stranger to expensive add-ons - wrote to protest, the firm backed down.

So the oligarch-mobiles will now use top-notch artificial fabrics, and whalesong tapes won't get alarmingly squeaky. In a statement, Yankelovich was keen to make his peace with the endangered marine mammals. "Our sea brothers!" he wrote. "We will keep you alive!"

Dartz has inherited the mantle of the legendary RussoBaltique marque, which constructed armoured vehicles for the Imperial Russian army and Tsar Nikolai II before it was nationalised by the Soviets and renamed Prombron.

Good week for...

Monumental politicians

A sculpture of Chechnya's first president, Akhmad Kadyrov, could find a new home in Moscow if artist Zurab Tsereteli gets his way. The statue had stood in Grozny for four years, but was dismantled on September 10. Now the sculptor - notorious for his bombastic Peter the Great gigantic structure - wants to install his work on Ulitsa Kadyrov in the remote modern suburb of Yuzhnoye Butovo, he told Gazeta.ru.

Longer lie-ins

Anyone fed up with early starts to do business with Russia's Far East will welcome President Dmitry Medvedev's proposal to reduce the nation's 11 sprawling time zones. Alarmed by the lack of shared business hours between the capital and the Pacific Coast, Medvedev used his annual state of the nation address to propose cutting the time difference from Moscow and Kamchatka from its current nine hours.

Premier's pencils

Oleg Deripaska was famously ordered to give Vladimir Putin his pen back, but a pencil used by the premier at a news conference is making a break for the free market, Newsru.com reports. An enterprising seller on online auction site e-Bay claimed to have picked it up after Putin gave a press conference in Tula, and bids topped $1,000 before site managers removed the advert.

Bad week for ...

Lazing by the pool

Siberia isn't renowned for its mild winters, but residents of the remote Kolyma River region were still shocked when the mercury plummeted to a chilly minus 46 degrees Celsius last week, Itar-Tass reported. It was a record regional low, which left communities like Seymchan colder than the renowned "poles of cold" at Verkhoyansk and Oimyakon.

Playing hangman

The moratorium on Russia's death penalty is likely to be extended - though the final fate of the ultimate punishment is likely to be left hanging until a public consensus has been reached, State Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov said. RIA Novosti reported that the Constitutional Court was considering the future of the moratorium following Chechnya's adoption of trial by jury this year. Every Russian region now uses jury trials, paving the way for the death penalty to return.