Month: August 2007

August 15, 2007

Wolf: Fear Makes a Welcome Return

Writing in the FT today, Martin Wolf puts forward the argument that the heightened caution on the markets caused by the sub-prime mortgage fiasco may not necessarily be at terrible thing. As any regular reader of this blog knows, the voracious app...
August 15, 2007

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August 14, 2007

Russian Blogger Faces Jail – Kommersant Translation

[Note – yesterday we did a blog post about the case of a Russian blogger who is being criminally charged for something he wrote on LiveJournal – now we are pleased to bring you an exclusive (for now) translation of the original Kommers...
August 14, 2007

Corporate Foreign Policy and the Fate of UK Energy Security

[Over the next number of weeks, I am going to be taking a closer look a phenomenon my colleagues and I are calling “Corporate Foreign Policy” – the comparative strategies of engagement with governments carried out private corporations. Not only wi...
August 14, 2007

World Leaders on Summer Vacation

Apart from the train attack, it is one slow news day out of Russia. It seems that everyone is on vacation: Anne Applebaum writes about the summer destinations of our world leaders, the New York Times notes that Cécilia Sarkozy may have faked a sor...
August 14, 2007

The Chaos Myth

Leon Aron has an interesting article out this month making a compelling argument about the perception of “chaos” in Russia’s restructuring of the economy. A second article is promised for later this summer. Below is a short excer...
August 14, 2007

Video: Bomb Attack on Russian Train

Last night the Neva Express train was derailed by what is believed to have been a homemade bomb while traveling between Moscow and St. Petersburg. More than 60 people were injured, but no deaths were reported. Within hours authorities announced th...
August 13, 2007

Russian Blogger Faces Jail Time

The news that LiveJournal blogger Savva Terentyev, a young man resident in Syktyvkar, is being charged for allegedly “inciting hate” against police officers on his blog, is a serious and frightening development in Russia’s crackd...
August 13, 2007

No Honor Among Thieves

When you make the decision to steal a company, don’t you also thereby steal any of that group’s outstanding debts? Apparently not in Russia, where whatever inconvenient legal decision that is not approved by Rosneft gets overturned by ...
August 13, 2007

PepsiCo Makes a Big Purchase in Russia

Today’s news of PepsiCo’s significant planned purchase of a majority stake in the Russian juice company Lebedyansky is another indication of the buoyant enthusiasm of Western firms to compete with their rivals for Russia’s boomin...