By John Helmer in Moscow One of the lucrative carry trades is about to be chopped. A new report by the UK market regulator, the Financial Services Authority (FSA), has warned that it intends to crack down on links between companies preparing share market sales and financial media reporters and columnists, the effect of which, […]

by John Helmer - Monday, September 27th, 2010
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The Harmonics Vuvuzela for the season’s purest noise goes to Maxim Fedotov, who led the Moscow City Symphony Orchestra on June 16 in performances that included Ravel’s Bolero. Fedotov placed a snare drum at the front of the stage, and assigned the drummer the virtuoso noise-making part, obliging the rest of the sound-makers gathered behind […]

by John Helmer - Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010
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On December 14, 2008, as then President George Bush was speaking at a press conference in Baghdad, Mountazer al-Zaidi rose abruptly from about twelve feet away, lifted his right arm, and tossed a shoe at the president’s head while shouting in Arabic: “This is a gift from the Iraqis; this is the farewell kiss, you […]

by John Helmer - Monday, September 14th, 2009
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By John Helmer in Moscow Depending on how fanciful you wish to be, the Flying Dutchman is either a reference to the nautical refraction phenomenon that makes phantom ships appear at sea, like mirages, in conditions of temperature inversion; or else it’s a tale of a half-mad Dutch sea captain, whose 17th century navigational ineptitude […]

by John Helmer - Thursday, September 3rd, 2009
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By John Helmer in Moscow On February 24, at the headquarters of Russia’s state media, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin visited the offices of Russia Today, an English-language cable and satellite broadcaster. He was escorted by Svetlana Mironyuk, the head of the Russian News and Information Agency (RIA-Novosti), an administrative holding for state media; in the […]

by John Helmer - Tuesday, March 10th, 2009
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By John Helmer in Moscow If life were a circus, then the only reason a contemplative man would walk behind an elephant in a ring, wielding bucket and shovel, would be for the money, not for the laughs. John Lloyd, a onetime Moscow correspondent of the Financial Times, has made many of his colleagues and […]

by John Helmer - Monday, April 23rd, 2007
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MOSCOW – The Moscow Times published an editorial Friday, which could only have been written by Judas Iscariot. The editorial is a wholesale denunciation of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, demonizing the man as he faces a likely prison sentence if the charges brought against him by Russian prosecutors are proven to be true. Talk about hitting a […]

by John Helmer - Friday, April 2nd, 2004
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By John Helmer Wars usually start with one large lie. Throwing more troops into the breach requires a great many little lies. Wars usually end when the lying can’t staunch the bleeding, and the stench. According to the wife of David Kelly, the Defence Ministry expert on Iraqi weapons, who committed suicide last Friday by […]

by John Helmer - Sunday, July 20th, 2003
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By John Helmer in Moscow When Russians gather to drink, they often offer each other a traditional rhyming toast that can be roughly translated as: “May we have more pies and doughnuts, fewer black eyes and bruises!” It’s a formula which Russia’s most powerful businessmen have been quietly offering the advertising-starved managements of some of […]

by John Helmer - Thursday, July 3rd, 2003
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A great writer who was dying of cancer once told a television interviewer, days before his death, that he had decided to call his cancer Rupert. The reason, he said, was that the media proprietor Rupert Murdoch represented a cancer that was destroying the media world. The remark had both a particular and a general […]

by John Helmer - Monday, February 19th, 2001
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