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By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with Somerset Maugham, the leading story-teller in the Anglo-American market a century ago, said there are three rules for writing a best-seller, but he added: “no one knows what they are.” As unlikely as it is for the profitability of a major line of business to be as unpredictable and irrational […]

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By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with The semi-annual sale of Russian paintings this week by London’s leading auction houses fell short of proving that demand has overcome five years of wartime pressure and is recovering with the price of crude oil.  The Russian art market remains  unsettled, however, by the disappearance of big Russian bidders who […]

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By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with The Malaysian Prime Minister, Mahathir Mohamad, has announced in a new documentary film on the shooting-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 that the claim the Russians were responsible was invented from the start. He emphasized that Malaysian officials have been stopped from reviewing the evidence. Forty-three Malaysian nationals were among […]

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By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with Just three and a half years ago, on January 20, 2016, the Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan had good reason to congratulate himself. He had successfully arranged a scheme of payoffs for two men who were intimate advisors to the presidents of the United States and Russia — at the […]