MOSCOW (Mineweb.com) — The two greatest boxing matches ever fought were the two that the slowing, but wily Muhammad Ali won as the 3-to-1 underdog. They were the Rumble in the Jungle (Kinshasa) against George Foreman, and the Thriller in Manila against Joe Frazier. One year separated the bouts, as Ali aged from 32 to […]

by John Helmer - Monday, January 30th, 2006
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The greatest dynastic struggle between two queens that is recorded in European history was the rivalry over the throne of the 16th century British empire between Elizabeth I of England and Mary, Queen of Scots, The contest was decided by bribery, knives, explosives, multiple murder, forgery, extortion, espionage, entrapment, torture, a rigged court, and finally […]

by John Helmer - Thursday, February 17th, 2005
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Among soldiers and other hired gunmen, it is said that the bullet always tell the truth. It’s the triggerman’s way of passing moral responsibility for his deed, and his good or ill fortune, from the trigger to the target. In interpreting a national shock like this month’s killings at Beslan, in the Northern Ossetian Republic, […]

by John Helmer - Monday, September 13th, 2004
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MOSCOW (Mineweb.com) – There is a popular, if bawdy Russian anecdote about an over-confident rabbit in a village, on a fine day…. One morning the little fellow wakes up, stretches, and as was his custom in good weather, he goes outside his front-door to scratch his private parts. When he reaches into his pants, however, […]

by John Helmer - Wednesday, March 24th, 2004
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JOHANNESBURG (Mineweb.com) — Russian steelmakers are super-sensitive about this year’s European Union (EU) quota on imports of Russian steel, and for two good reasons. One is that Russian government policy may be about to change, dramatically. The other is that more than four months of negotiations between trade officials on both sides have failed to […]

by John Helmer - Thursday, March 11th, 2004
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In “Les Liaisons Dangereuses”, the 18th century French expose of the way vicious people plot to undermine virtue, it is allowed to a manservant to point out to the villain, the Vicomte de Valmont, that “going to bed with a girl only means getting her to do something she wants to do; but from that […]

by John Helmer - Wednesday, February 25th, 2004
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To groznify – active verb. Maximum firepower concentrated on an elusive target, with severe collateral damage; derived from Grozny, capital of Chechnya until its destruction in 1996-99; colloquial use, as in “we had to destroy the village in order to save it” (Vietnam 1970). Following President Vlad-imir Putin’s domestic television speech on Monday, and his […]

by John Helmer - Friday, September 28th, 2001
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Sub-Prefect Vyacheslav Ninilin of the Khoroshevsky district is the only genuine revolutionary I have met in Russia since 1986; and I made his acquaintance just this week. In the history of Moscow’s growth as a city, what Ninilin is quietly achieving is as profound as what the architects and planners argued over, but fell short […]

by John Helmer - Friday, August 31st, 2001
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PRESIDENT Vladimir Putin rides into the Apec summit in Brunei this week on a wave of foreign-policy successes his predecessor Boris Yeltsin never enjoyed. But, if you listen to the Russian and Western press, you would never know it. “”What was the cause of the fire in the Moscow television tower?” is the question in […]

by John Helmer - Thursday, November 16th, 2000
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THERE is an old Russian saying that if you drink, you die. And if you don’t drink, you die. So it’s better to drink. If that was the choice facing Russian policy towards last week’s events in Belgrade, the Russian parliament was first to point out that President Vladimir Putin’s endorsement of Kostunica’s election was […]

by John Helmer - Wednesday, October 11th, 2000
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