Mikhail Khodorkovsky, left, and his co-defendant Platon Lebedev, right, talk behind a glass enclosure at a court room in Moscow, Russia, Thursday, Dec. 30, 2010. Khodorkovsky, 47, is in the final year of an eight-year sentence after being convicted of tax evasion, and the new conviction on charges of embezzlement and money laundering could keep him behind bars for several more years. A judge read the... 

Russian prime minister, Vladimir Putin, has issued a decree calling for Microsoft to be taken off all government computers and replaced by Linux. While weirdie beardie open saucers will be cheering, it is worthwhile to point out that Putin is jolly cross with Microsoft at the moment. For a while he had a cracking good method of dealing with people who didn’t like him much. Coppers would appear... 

India and Russia have decided to work together in the field of nuclear commerce. The two countries will help set up smaller nuclear power plants in South Asian countries such as Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, sources said. This, according to South Block sources, is a key outcome of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev’s visit to India. China is active in most South Asian countries, building infrastructure... 

Russia delivered at least 1,800 shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles to Venezuela in 2009, U.N. arms control data show, despite vigorous U.S. efforts to stop President Hugo Chavez’s stridently anti-American government from acquiring the weapons. The United States feared that the missiles could be funneled to Marxist guerrillas fighting Colombia’s pro-American government or Mexican drug... 

Egor Sviridov 28 years old Spartak Moscow fan Egor Sviridov has been killed on 6th of December in Moscow. He has been shot in a fight with 8 members of ethnic gang of Muslims from Caucasus (Dagestanis and Chechens). He and other 4 lads stood in Kronshtadsky parkway waiting for taxi. A group of Caucasian youth passed and started to insult Russians, as fight has begun they used firearms. Egor has been... 

Unless something is done to reverse the flight of ethnic Russians from the republics of the North Caucasus, a commentator in one Moscow newspaper says, that region will ultimately be lost to Russia because “a Caucasus without ethnic Russians can mean only one thing: a Russia without the Caucasus.” In Friday’s “Segodnya,” Aleksey Sidorenko argues that Russian outmigration from the region... 

Kushchevskaya Unidentified attackers armed with knives killed 12 people, including three children and a newborn, who had gathered Friday for a celebration at a home in a Russian village, authorities said. The attackers then tried to burn the bodies. The motive for the brazen killings in Kushchevskaya, a farming village of about 100 homes in the southern Krasnodar region, was unclear. Prosecutors from... 

At least 5,000 Russian nationalists rallied for curbs on immigration in Moscow on Thursday in one of the largest far-right demonstrations in years in the capital. Activists shouted “Russia for the Russians,” and carried banners calling for “White Power” and “Orthodox Faith or Death” in a march held with official permission in a suburb in the south of the capital... 

Russia will limit the powers of police to their own jurisdictions to stem abuses, the Kremlin said Saturday. Under current law, policemen can exercise their authority anywhere in the country, but President Dmitry Medvedev has submitted a law to the State Duma ending that policy, RIA Novosti reported. “This amendment will, on the one hand, reduce police abuse and, on the other hand, concentrate... 

Russia called on the US Thursday to carry out a detailed investigation into allegations contained in leaked Iraq war documents published by WikiLeaks. “The US authorities bear the responsibility to conduct a thorough, independent and transparent investigation of all the reports that have appeared in the media,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement. The statement pointed out that Washington... 

A car bomb and two police raids killed six people and wounded seven in Russia’s volatile North Caucasus region on Saturday, authorities said. In the republic of Dagestan, a suicide bomber in a car tried to attack a police dormitory in the town of Khasavyurt but an armored vehicle blocked his way, a police spokesman said. The explosion killed the suspected militant and a police officer, and wounded... 

Thirty five years ago yesterday, we could only imagine the view from the surface of another world. But Russia’s Venera 9 probe changed all that, beaming back the first ever photo of another planet—25 million miles away. By 1975, the moon was no longer a frontier. It had been landed on, hopped across, analyzed, filmed, photographed, and dug into. The next step wasn’t the tiny rock orbiting... 

Microsoft is vastly expanding its efforts to prevent governments from using software piracy inquiries as a pretext to suppress dissent. It plans to provide free software licenses to more than 500,000 advocacy groups, independent media outlets and other nonprofit organizations in 12 countries with tightly controlled governments, including Russia and China. With the new program in place, authorities... 

The Soviet lunar program was covered up, forgotten after failing to put a man on the moon. These rare photos from a lab inside the Moscow Aviation Institute show a junkyard of rarely-seen spacecraft, including a never-to-be-used Russian lunar lander. Soviet scientists were well ahead of their American counterparts in moon exploration before President John F. Kennedy pronounced the U.S. would put a... 

Russian company Orbital Technologies has announced it will have a space hotel in orbit possibly by the end of 2015. This will be the first hotel of its kind, revolutionising tourism and launching the massive commercialisation of space travel, another first for Russia’s eternally pioneering space program. Russia was the first nation to conquer space, was the first to orbit the Earth and the Moon,...