| February 12, 2013 | - An Iridium communications satellite crashed into a non-operational Russian satellite in the first major collision between two man-made objects in space.
| Source:
Spaceflight Now
|
| August 12, 2009 | - The Obama Administration abandoned its quest for a public, government-run health-care option for the uninsured. Protesters waved signs that read “Death to Obama” and depicted the president with an Adolph Hitler mustache at “town hall” meetings hosted by senators; at one such event, a conservative University of Colorado student challenged President Obama to an “Oxford-style” debate. Obama declined the invitation but did grant an hour-long interview on bullying and school lunches to an 11-year-old named Damon Weaver, ultimately agreeing to be Weaver's homeboy. Senator Arlen Specter arrived at his town hall meeting with extra security to guard him from irate Pennsylvanians, one of whom compared complicated reform proposals to “a Russian novel”; others said that Specter was inviting God's wrath and that the health-care plan was a step toward socialism. Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill, faced with a jeering crowd, threatened to use her “mom voice” to settle them down. “Irony,” she said, “seems to be lost on people.”
| Source 1:
NYT
Source 2:
NYT
Source 3:
NYT
Source 4:
AP
Source 5:
NYT
Source 6:
Baltimore Sun/AP
Source 7:
BBC
Source 8:
MSNBC
Source 9:
USA Today
Source 10:
NYT
Source 11:
NYT
Source 12:
WashPost
|
| August 9, 2009 | - The film version of G.I. Joe topped weekend box office sales. “One of the best markets on the movie was Russia,” noted Paramount vice chairman Rob Moore. “How far G.I. Joe has come.”
| Source:
AP via Google
|
| August 4, 2009 | -
Russian
nuclear submarines were caught patrolling off the eastern coast of the United States,.
| Source:
NYT
|
| June 27, 2009 | -
Russia refused to cooperate in a lawsuit brought by Hasidic Jews claiming rights over sacred documents that were seized by the Nazis and are currently held in the Russian State Library.
| Source:
AP via Google
|
| May 29, 2009 | -
Russia agreed to export uranium to the United States, a Russian firm bought nearly 2 percent of Facebook, and a five-year-old Russian girl was discovered who speaks in barks and hisses because she was raised as a pet.
| Source 1:
CNN
Source 2:
The New York Times
Source 3:
Telegraph
|
| May 8, 2009 | - Moscow schoolgirl Katya Kazakova, struck by stage fright, was unable to sing a patriotic song, “The Dug Out,” for Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, until Putin joined in. “The fire is pulsing in a cramped stove,” they sang together, Putin's voice soft and melodious. “The resin on the firewood is like a tear.”
| Source:
Breitbart
|
| May 3, 2009 | - The price of oral sex from a prostitute in Russia had fallen to that of a sandwich and soda, and many Russian men were hiring hookers just for conversation.
| Source:
Washington Post
|
| April 2, 2009 | -
President Barack Obama traveled to Europe with his wife, Michelle, for the G-20 summit and the sixtieth anniversary of NATO, and met a number of foreign leaders for the first time, including Queen Elizabeth II (who, the press noted, actually touched the First Lady), Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, and Chinese President Hu Jintao. When Hu and French President Nicolas Sarkozy quarreled and refused to sign the summit's communique, Obama resolved their argument. “I'd suggest,” said one senior official, “we'd still be in there had he not done this.”
| Source 1:
Washington Post
Source 2:
EW
Source 3:
ABC
|
| February 23, 2009 | - Obama announced that 17,000 more troops would be sent to Afghanistan, an increase of 50 percent, partly to help secure the border with Pakistan. General David D. McKiernan said he would like yet another 10,000 troops, adding that it was “very unhealthy” to compare the current war to British and Russian debacles in Afghanistan. “You can't look like the likely loser of the war,” explained Stephen Biddle of the Council on Foreign Relations. “No warlord is going to change sides to join the loser.”
| Source 1:
LAT
Source 2:
The New York Times
Source 3:
The New York Times
Source 4:
The New York Times
Source 5:
AFP via Google
|
| January 31, 2009 | - In cities across Russia, anti-government protesters rallied, chanting such slogans as “The crisis is in the heads of the authorities, not in the economy.”
| Source:
BBC
|
| January 12, 2009 | -
Russia agreed to restore shipments of Russian gas to Europe through Ukrainian pipelines,
| Source:
New York Times
|
| December 6, 2008 | - Aleksy II, Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, died at 79.
| Source:
The New York Times
|
| November 21, 2008 | - The U.S. National Intelligence Council released a report to U.S. policymakers intended to prepare them for a future of waning U.S. influence as countries including China, India, and Russia grow in standing. The report suggests the dollar may be replaced as the world's major currency, and that demand for oil, food, and water “will outstrip easily available supplies” and lead to global conflicts. “Conditions will be ripe for disaffection, growing radicalism... youths into terrorist groups... all current technologies are inadequate. This,” it concluded, “is a story with no clear outcome.”
| Source 1:
BBC
Source 2:
CNN
|
| November 6, 2008 | -
Russian President Dmitri Medvedev warned Obama against continuing Bush's plans for missile-defense systems in Eastern Europe and threatened to move short-range missiles into the Baltic near Poland and “to neutralize, when necessary” American installations there, but Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi insisted, “I don't see problems for Medvedev to establish good relations with Obama who is also handsome, young, and suntanned.”
| Source 1:
Washington Post
Source 2:
Reuters
|
| October 17, 2008 | -
Putin's black labrador was given a satellite-monitoring collar. “She looks sad,” said Russian Deputy Minister Sergei Ivanov. “Her free life is over.” “She is wagging her tail,” said Putin. “That means she likes it.”
| Source:
Reuters
|
| October 15, 2008 | - Senior officials of Russian energy company Gazprom, including personal associates of Vladimir Putin, met in Anchorage with Alaska's Department of Natural Resources to discuss investing in energy projects in the state. Governor Sarah Palin said that she did not know about the meeting.
| Source 1:
IHT
Source 2:
CNN
Source 3:
NYT
|
| October 1, 2008 | -
Russian billionaire Alexander Lebedev and former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev teamed up to form a new political party that will promote democracy.
| Source:
Washington Post
|
| September 28, 2008 | -
Somali pirates lowered from $35 million to $20 million their ransom demands for a captured Ukrainian ship carrying 33 Russian tanks and various munitions.
| Source:
BBC
|
| September 22, 2008 | -
Russian officials sought to ban South Park, The Simpsons, and Family Guy from television, and sent a fleet of warships, including nuclear-powered guided-missile cruiser “Peter the Great,” to Venezuela to participate in military exercises.
| Source 1:
Daily Telegraph
Source 2:
BBC
|
| September 5, 2008 | - The United States promised $1 billion in aid to Georgia, and Vice President Dick Cheney visited Tbilisi to pledge continued support. “It's Cheney,” said Russian politician Konstantin Kosachyov, “who was behind all the recent events on the former Soviet turf.”
| Source:
Washington Post
|
| August 31, 2008 | -
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin saved a television crew from attack by shooting an escaped Siberian tiger with a tranquilizer gun.
| Source:
Yahoo
|
| August 25, 2008 | - The Russian army was looting Poti, Georgia.
| Source:
The Times Online
|
| August 17, 2008 | - After more than a week of fighting and one failed cease-fire, Russia and Georgia signed a revised cease-fire agreement, but Russian troops remained within 25 miles of the Georgian capital, Tbilisi. Russian President Dmitri Medvedev promised French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who negotiated the agreement, that Russian forces would soon withdraw from Georgia. He also insisted that troops would remain in the breakaway Georgian territory South Ossetia. “The superpower showed that she was able to defend her people,” said Marina Katayeva, a 30-year-old Russian doctor. “Now we will be more respected.” Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili said Russians were “twenty-first-century barbarians” who had essentially raped his country; “Can you say that, you know the victim of a rape is to be blamed for the rape because she wore a short skirt?”
| Source 1:
New York Times
Source 2:
BBC
|
| August 17, 2008 | - The United States and Poland finalized a deal that would allow the United States to build a missile-interceptor base on Polish territory, and Ukraine offered the U.S. use of its missile-warning system. Poland, said Russian general Anatoly Nogovitsyn, “is exposing itself to a strike--100 percent.”
| Source 1:
Breitbart
Source 2:
Telegraph
|
| August 15, 2008 | - Vesti FM, a Russian state-run radio station, reported that the South Ossetia conflict was part of a plot by Vice President Dick Cheney to prevent Barack Obama from being elected president of the United States,.
| Source:
The Times
|
| August 11, 2008 | - Claiming that South Ossetian separatists had attacked its villages, U.S. ally Georgia sent troops to capture the city of Tskhinvali. Russia retaliated by sending ground troops into Tskhinvali, then into Georgia proper; Georgia claimed that hundreds of troops had been killed on both sides along with “huge numbers” of civilians. Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili described Russia's troop actions as “the preplanned, cold-blooded, premeditated murder of a small country.”
| Source 1:
NYTimes.com
Source 2:
Itar-Tass
Source 3:
Bloomberg.com
|
| May 21, 2008 | - A press conference by Garry Kasparov was interrupted by a helicopter-dildo.
| Source:
ninemsn.com
|
| April 14, 2008 | -
Russia was considering sending monkeys to Mars.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| April 5, 2008 | -
Russian President Vladimir Putin crashed a gala on the last day of the NATO summit in Bucharest. “Let's be friends, guys,” he said.
| Source:
Washington Post
|
| March 19, 2008 | -
Mikhail Gorbachev admitted that he is a Christian,
| Source:
The Telegraph
|
| February 22, 2008 | -
Kosovo, in a move supported by the United States and strongly opposed by Russia, declared its independence from Serbia. NATO sealed Kosovo's northern border, and Serbians looted designer clothes, shoes, and chocolates, and set fire to the U.S. embassy in Belgrade.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| February 21, 2008 | - The United States claimed to have successfully shot down a disabled and toxic spy satellite; China and Russia said the action was actually an excuse to test anti-satellite missile systems.
| Source:
BBCnews.com
|
| January 31, 2008 | - Seventeen Russian tourists visiting a spa in the Caucasus were hospitalized after a nurse accidentally administered hydrogen-peroxide enemas.
| Source:
Unhealthy enemas put tourists in hospital
|
| December 12, 2007 | - President Vladimir Putin selected his protege Dmitry Medvedev to be the next president of the Russian Federation. “It's almost a monarchical succession,” said the director of the Moscow-based Center for the Study of Elites, adding that Putin has “nominated his adopted son.” Medvedev, a 42-year-old, 5'4" fan of the band Deep Purple, quickly said that he would make Putin his prime minister.
| Source 1:
Washington Post
Source 2:
New York Times
|
| November 25, 2007 | - Amateur investigators in Russia found the charred bones of two teenage children of Tsar Nicholas II murdered along with their father, mother, and three siblings by Bolshevik agents in 1918, dispelling the rumor that a Romanov prince or princess had escaped execution.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| October 18, 2007 | -
Vladimir Putin traveled to Iran and cautioned the United States against a military strike; President Bush responded by saying that democracy might not be in the “Russian DNA” and threatened World War III if Iran acquired nuclear weapons.
| Source 1:
The Guardian
Source 2:
Washington Post
|
| October 18, 2007 | -
Vladimir Putin traveled to Iran and cautioned the United States against a military strike; President Bush responded by saying that democracy might not be in the “Russian DNA” and threatened World War III if Iran acquired nuclear weapons.
| Source 1:
The Guardian
Source 2:
Washington Post
|
| September 17, 2007 | -
Russian president Vladimir Putin dissolved his government, appointing a little-known technocrat, Viktor Zubkov, as new Prime Minister.
| Source 1:
BBC
Source 2:
CS Monitor
Source 3:
Moscow Times
|
| September 12, 2007 | - The governor of Ulyanovsk, Russia, urged everyone to skip work and make love.
| Source:
Reuters via Yahoo
|
| September 6, 2007 | - The first Starbucks opened in Russia,.
| Source:
BBC
|
| August 12, 2007 | - The United States denied approving the Iraqi Interior Ministry's $39.7 million purchase of 105,000 Russian-made assault rifles from the Italian Mafia. A senior official of the Iraqi Interior Ministry, which has backed Shiite death squads in the Shiite-Sunni civil war, said “most” of the Russian guns were meant for its police in the Sunni-majority Anbar province; Iraqi officials also complained that U.S. gun deliveries are slow.
| Source:
Washington Post
|
| August 1, 2007 | -
Russia annexed the North Pole.
| Source:
|
| July 26, 2007 | -
Russian President Vladimir Putin accused Britain of “colonial thinking” for demanding the extradition of Andrei Lugovoi, who is suspected of murdering former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko.
| Source:
Telegraph
|
| July 8, 2007 | - President George W. Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin rode Segway scooters together.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| June 27, 2007 | - It was reported that orders given by Vice President Dick Cheney in 2001 to reverse the flow of waters in the Pacific Northwest, against rules set by the Endangered Species Act, left 77,000 salmon rotting on the shores of the Klamath River. The ensuing “commercial fishery failure” required $60 million in federal disaster aid to local fishermen. Russian President Vladimir Putin visited the Bush family compound in Kennebunkport, Maine, where President George W. Bush and his father took him fishing. “Fishing,” said former President George H. W. Bush, “is good for the soul.”
| Source 1:
New York Times
Source 2:
Washington Post
|
| June 4, 2007 | -
Russian President Vladimir Putin threatened to point his country's missiles at Washington and Europe.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| April 30, 2007 | -
Hunters in Russia killed a rare wild Amur leopard; six remain at large.
| Source:
Daily Times
|
| April 22, 2007 | -
Boris Yeltsin died.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| March 22, 2007 | -
Russian peasants were refusing to collect their pensions because the payment slip barcodes contained Satanic symbols.
| Source:
Reuters via Yahoo! News
|
| February 9, 2007 | - Organized dog fighting was increasingly popular throughout central Russia. Stanislav Mikhailov, president of the All-Russian Association of Russian
Volkodavs (“wolf-killers”) said, “Only people who have not seen it, and do not understand it, dislike this.”
| Source:
NY Times
|
| February 1, 2007 | - Hospital staff in Yekaterinburg, Russia, were gagging crying babies.
| Source:
BBC
|
| January 9, 2007 | -
Vladimir Putin threatened to cut Russia's
oil production.
| Source:
Business Week
|
| December 1, 2006 | - Poisons were felling Russians around the globe.
| Source:
This is London
|
| November 25, 2006 | - In London, Col. Alexander Litvinenko, an ex-KGB agent, died several weeks after being poisoned with polonium 210, a rare isotope that is used in nuclear bombs and moon buggies. Investigators fear that Litvinenko, who accused Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin of ordering his assassination, may have spread radiation to his wife and son as they hugged and kissed him on his deathbed.
| Source 1:
Sky News
Source 2:
Sun (U.K.)
Source 3:
Daily Mail
|
| October 25, 2006 | -
Russian president Vladimir Putin blamed a failure to adopt a “proper tone” in diplomatic negotiations with North Korea for the current weapons crisis.
| Source:
United Press International
|
| October 16, 2006 | - In New York City, CBGB closed, but the Russian Tea Room will reopen.
| Source 1:
AP via USA Today
Source 2:
New York Times
|
| October 7, 2006 | -
Journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who criticized Russia's Chechnya policy, was found shot to death in an elevator.
| Source:
InterFax
|
| September 29, 2006 | - A Russian tabloid praised President Vladimir Putin for sprucing up his wardrobe.
| Source:
Baltimore Sun via Seattle Times
|
| September 14, 2006 | -
Russia said that it could send Madonna into space as early as 2009.
| Source:
Russia-InfoCentre
|
| August 28, 2006 | - In Russia a participant in a sex-doll
river-rafting
race was disqualified for sexually abusing his rafting apparatus. “I think,” said the man's friend, “it was an expression of his great desire to win.”
| Source:
MOSNEWS.COM
|
| August 15, 2006 | -
Russia sent text messages to Chechen rebels telling them to stop fighting.
| Source:
St. Petersburg Times
|
| July 18, 2006 | - The United States and Russia agreed to set quotas for how many polar bears they would kill each year.
| Source:
Washington Post
|
| July 10, 2006 | -
Airliners crashed in Russia and Pakistan, killing hundreds.
| Source:
Associated Press
|
| July 6, 2006 | - President Vladimir Putin of Russia explained that he had recently kissed a young boy on the stomach because he “wanted to stroke him like a cat.”
| Source:
Agence France-Presse
|
| June 21, 2006 | - In Baghdad a car bomb detonated next to an ice cream shop, killing at least three people of indeterminate age, and insurgents beheaded two Russian diplomats and shot another.
| Source:
Houston Chronicle via Google News
|
| June 7, 2006 | - President Vladimir Putin of Russia had lunch with Henry Kissinger, who said afterward that he has confidence in “Russian evolution.” “What if my grandmother had certain sexual attributes?” Putin asked a reporter. “Then she would would be my grandfather.”
| Source:
New York Times
|
| June 6, 2006 | -
Donald Rumsfeld, the American secretary of defense, traveled to Vietnam, where he complained that Russia is a bully and China is secretive; he also observed that when Vietnam's first university was founded in 1070 American Indians were still living in mud huts. “That's impressive,” he said.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| May 28, 2006 | - A gay-rights rally in Moscow turned violent when activists were attacked and beaten by anti-gay protesters. "Moscow," shouted the protesters, "is not Sodom!"
| Source:
Fox News
|
| May 24, 2006 | - Four Russian soldiers were killed in Chechnya.
| Source:
MosNews.com
|
| May 3, 2006 | - A plane flying from Armenia to Russia crashed into the Black Sea, killing 113 people.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| April 18, 2006 | - Greenpeace estimated that over the last 20 years 93,000 people have died from the fallout from the Chernobyl
nuclear disaster.
| Source:
Democracy Now!
|
| March 3, 2006 | - An Italian commission found that the Soviet Union organized the shooting of Pope John Paul II in 1981.
| Source:
|
| February 24, 2006 | - In Moscow the roof of a market collapsed, killing at least 56 people.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| February 19, 2006 | - Riots over cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad continued around the world. In Nigeria 16 people were killed in rioting and 11 churches were burned; in Libya at least 10 people were killed; and in Pakistan at least 5 people were killed. In Volgograd, Russia, officials closed the city newspaper after it published a cartoon that showed Muhammad, Jesus, Moses, and Buddha watching TV together. Fifteen thousand people protested the cartoons in London. “We have to speak up,” said a Muslim demonstrator, “to prevent something like the Holocaust from happening.”
| Source 1:
CNN.com
Source 2:
The New York Times
|
| February 3, 2006 | -
Russia was facing a vodka shortage.
| Source:
CNN.com
|
| January 30, 2006 | -
Vladimir Putin said that Russia has missiles that zigzag.
| Source:
CNN.com
|
| January 23, 2006 | -
Russia accused the U.K. of spying in Moscow, and offered a data-transmitting fake spy rock as evidence.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| January 22, 2006 | - It was cold in Russia. People were smearing goose fat on their bodies to stop frostbite, and near Moscow zookeepers fed an Indian elephant a bucket of vodka to keep it warm; the elephant then went on a rampage, tore radiators from a wall, and calmed down only after it was given a hot shower.
| Source 1:
HindustanTimes.com
Source 2:
The Toronto Star
|
| January 11, 2006 | - A skinhead shouting “I will kill you” stabbed eight people at a Moscow
synagogue.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| January 3, 2006 | -
Russia shut down a natural-gas pipeline to Ukraine; as a result, natural-gas supplies were diminished in Hungary, France, Italy, Poland, and Germany.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| December 4, 2005 | -
Russia confirmed plans to sell $1 billion worth of surface-to-air missiles and other weapons hardware to Iran.
| Source:
The Sydney Morning Herald
|
| December 1, 2005 | - In Russia a pack of squirrels attacked and, according to an eyewitness, “literally gutted” a large dog that was barking at them. When humans approached the squirrels ran away, some carrying flesh.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| October 17, 2005 | - A Chechen warlord took credit for coordinating attacks on the Russian city of Nalchik, claiming that 41 militants and 140 Russian troops were killed in the attack. Russia said that 94 militants, 33 Russian troops, and 12 civilians were killed in the attack.
| Source:
ABC News
|
| September 9, 2005 | -
Russia announced that it will build a small floating nuclear power station in the White Sea.
| Source:
MOSNews.com
|
| August 7, 2005 | - And North Korea would not make changes to its nuclear program, despite the efforts of China, Japan, Russia, the United States, and South Korea.
| Source:
VOA.com
|
| July 27, 2005 | -
Russia offered to send a rich person to orbit the moon in exchange for $100 million.
| Source:
The Guardian
|
| May 30, 2005 | - Seven hundred thousand chickens expired during a power blackout in Moscow that cut off their ventilation; not long afterward the dead chickens started exploding.
| Source:
Pravda
|
| May 19, 2005 | - In Bolotnikovo, Russia, a lake disappeared.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| May 9, 2005 | -
President Bush attended a display of Soviet pageantry in Russia.
| Source:
New York Timesimes.com
|
| April 6, 2005 | - Tom DeLay was accused of paying his wife and daughter $500,000 from funds controlled by his political-action committee. He was also accused of taking lobbyist-funded trips to Russia, Saipan, and Scotland.
| Source 1:
ABC News
Source 2:
New York Times
|
| March 31, 2005 | - Olga, the first Siberian
tiger ever fitted with a radio collar, was killed by poachers.
| Source:
Eurekalert!
|
| March 28, 2005 | - A Russian court found a museum director and an artist guilty of creating blasphemous
art and fined them $3,600 each. The piece in question depicted Jesus on a Coca-Cola advertisement with the words “this is my blood.”
| Source:
The New York Times
|
| March 23, 2005 | -
Russian doctors grew a penis on a man's arm.
| Source:
Ananova.com
|
| March 23, 2005 | -
Venezuela ordered 100,000 assault rifles from Russia; Donald Rumsfeld said that was too many.
| Source:
Sign On San Diego
|
| March 9, 2005 | -
Russian forces assassinated Aslan Maskhadov, the elected, internationally recognized leader of the Chechen movement.
| Source:
Christian Science Monitor
|
| February 28, 2005 | -
Russia agreed to sell nuclear fuel to Iran.
| Source:
LA Times
|
| February 2, 2005 | - Investing in Russian oil companies was nota good move.
| Source:
The Financial Times
|
| January 26, 2005 | - A group of Russian legislators demanded that Jewish organizations be investigated, and possibly closed down, for carrying out ritual killings and hate crimes against themselves.
| Source:
The New York Times
|
| December 30, 2004 | - and awarded the Hero of Russia medal to Ramzan Kadyrov, a Chechen leader widely accused of kidnapping and torture.
| Source:
New York Ties
|
| December 29, 2004 | - The imprisoned founder of Russia's largest oil producer accused the government of stealing his empire.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| December 19, 2004 | -
Russia forced the Yukos oil conglomerate to auction off its largest subsidiary to a little-known company with suspected government ties in a sale that was widely interpreted as a way to punish Yukos's politically outspoken founder, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who is currently in jail.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| December 14, 2004 | -
Russian border guards discovered an underground "vodka pipeline" used to smuggle alcohol into Estonia,
| Source:
New York Times
|
| December 3, 2004 | - At a Moscow airport Vladimir Putin told Ukraine's outgoing president that new run-off elections were unnecessary.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| December 3, 2004 | -
Russia blocked all exports from a breakaway region of Georgia because it did not support the candidate whom the region elected.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| November 28, 2004 | -
Russia's Federation Council ratified the Kyoto Protocol.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| November 6, 2004 | - A Russian
nuclear power plant was shut down because of what was called a "minor mishap."
| Source:
New York Times
|
| October 1, 2004 | -
Russia's cabinet approved the Kyoto Protocol, and
| Source:
New York Times
|
| September 19, 2004 | - The United Nations Security Council passed another resolution asking the Sudanese government to prevent its proxies from slaughtering people in Darfur (China, Algeria, Pakistan, and Russia abstained). The resolution, which for the first time formally invokes the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, says that the council will "consider" sanctions if the genocide continues.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| September 19, 2004 | - President Vladimir Putin of Russia responded to the recent terror attacks there by announcing plans for a radical restructuring of the Russian political system that would end the popular election of regional governors and district representatives in parliament.
| Source:
Lexington Herald-Leader
|
| September 5, 2004 | -
Chechen militants took more than 1,000 children and adults hostage at a school in southern Russia, though the Russian government lied at first and claimed that there were only 354 hostages; at least 338 died, half of whom were children, when security forces stormed the school.
| Source:
Washington Post, Reuters
|
| August 31, 2004 | - A suicide bomber blew herself up in a Moscow subway station, killing at least 10 people.
| Source:
Associated Press
|
| August 30, 2004 | - People in Chechnya apparently elected Vladimir Putin's choice for president, though there was widespread evidence of fraud.
| Source:
Guardian
|
| August 28, 2004 | - Two Russian airliners were destroyed by suicide bombers.
| Source:
Guardian
|
| August 1, 2004 | -
Russian researchers from the Voronezh State Technological Academy said they had perfected a method for using cow blood as a high-protein dairy replacement in foods such as yogurt.
| Source:
Telegraph
|
| July 23, 2004 | -
Russian police broke up a summer camp for young thieves.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| July 7, 2004 | - Aslan Maskhadov, the Chechen rebel leader, claimed to be able to fight the Russians for another twenty years if necessary, and he threatened to kill the next president of Chechnya. "Whoever occupies this puppet's chair — his days are numbered."
| Source:
New York Times
|
| June 5, 2004 | - Nine people died when a bomb blew up in a market in southern Russia, near Kazakhstan.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| May 28, 2004 | -
Russia ordered its border guards to be nice.
| Source:
Ananova
|
| May 28, 2004 | - A Russian museum of erotica announced an exhibit featuring Grigory Rasputin's penis.
| Source:
Moscow News
|
| May 25, 2004 | - A Russian scientist died of Ebola fever.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| May 10, 2004 | -
Russian legislators hired a Siberian shaman to purge the parliament building of "negative energy."
| Source:
Ananova
|
| April 16, 2004 | -
Russia said that 605 people were kidnapped in Chechnya last year, and 253 were kidnapped in nearby regions.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| April 10, 2004 | - The head of Russia's Federal Security Service, formerly known as the KGB, was named head of the Russian Volleyball Association.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| April 8, 2004 | - A Russian scientist was sentenced to 15 years for selling unclassified material to a British company that Russian authorities claim was a CIA front.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| April 7, 2004 | - The president of Ingushetia, a Russian republic, survived an assassination attempt.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| April 3, 2004 | -
Russia's parliament agreed to amend a bill that would have banned almost all public demonstrations.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| April 3, 2004 | -
Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia joined NATO; Russia was unhappy about NATO forces creeping so close to its border.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| March 25, 2004 | -
Ukraine's minister of defense announced that quite a few missiles that were supposed to have been decommissioned after the fall of the Soviet Union were in fact lost. "Unfortunately strange things happen," he said. "We are currently looking for several hundred missiles."
| Source:
BBC
|
| March 2, 2004 | -
Russian religious leaders refused to permit Roman Catholics to attend a conference on religious tolerance.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| February 24, 2004 | -
Russian president Vladimir Putin fired his prime minister and most of his cabinet.
| Source:
CNN
|
| February 9, 2004 | - Ivan Rybkin, a Russian presidential candidate who recently took out a full-page newspaper ad accusing President Vladimir Putin of being "the biggest oligarch in Russia," disappeared; a murder investigation was announced, and then it was cancelled.
| Source:
CNN
|
| February 7, 2004 | - A bomb blew up on the Moscow subway.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| January 22, 2004 | -
Russian soldiers rescued 10 tons of beer kegs that became trapped under the ice of a frozen Siberian river; after divers from the Ministry of Emergency Situations failed to dislodge the kegs, a T-72 tank saved the day.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| December 10, 2003 | - U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz decreed that Canada, Germany, France, Russia, and other nations that opposed the conquest of Iraq will be ineligible for $18.6 billion in reconstruction contracts. The announcement was greeted with astonishment by the blacklisted countries; Russia said that it would now refuse to consider restructuring Iraq's $8 billion debt, and Canada said the decision would probably rule out further reconstruction aid.
| Source:
Boston Globe
|
| December 5, 2003 | - A Kremlin official announced that Russia will not ratify the Kyoto Protocol; the next day another official contradicted that pronouncement, which was followed on the third day by a negation of the denial that President Putin had in fact decided against the global-warming treaty.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| November 6, 2003 | -
Yukos Oil, the Russian company whose chairman, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, was arrested last month, was being investigated for allegedly mistreating pigs and permitting rabbit "couplings [to] take place unsystematically."
| Source:
Reuters
|
| November 1, 2003 | - Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, who is considered pro-business, said he was "deeply concerned" about the case, but experts agreed that most Russians hate the rich.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| October 28, 2003 | -
Russian financial markets dropped after police arrested the country's richest man, Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, the CEO of Yukos Oil, on charges of fraud and tax evasion.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| October 9, 2003 | - President Vladimir Putin rejected any comparisons between his regime and the Soviet Union: "To talk about a return to the Soviet times in connection with [Russian security officials] would be like talking about the times of McCarthy, referring to the ministry of homeland security in the United States."
| Source:
New York Times
|
| October 7, 2003 | -
Russia's man in Chechnya won an overwhelming victory in the presidential election.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| October 2, 2003 | - A Russian electricity company was threatening to kidnap people's pets as a way to force delinquent customers to pay their bills.
| Source:
BBC
|
| October 1, 2003 | - A new study estimated that 160,000 people die as a result of global warming every year; President Vladimir Putin suggested that global warming could be good for Russians because they "would spend less money on fur coats and other warm things."
| Source:
Reuters
|
| October 1, 2003 | - Laura Bush told the Russians that American children's books teach children to be good Americans and that her children used to enjoy acting out "Hop on Pop" by Dr. Seuss.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| September 29, 2003 | - Vladimir Putin visited President Bush at Camp David; "Pootie-Poot," as he is known by the president, refused to cancel Russia's $800 million contract to build a commercial nuclear reactor for Iran.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| August 31, 2003 | - A decommissioned Russian
nuclear submarine sank in the Barents Sea.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| August 25, 2003 | - Three people died and 17 were injured in a bus bomb in Krasnodar, Russia.
| Source:
BBC
|
| August 22, 2003 | - The Bush Administration was hoping that the bombing would persuade Europeans to send more troops to Iraq; the French were quite clear that this would require "sharing information and authority." Germany and Russia were also unwilling to allow their troops to serve under U.S. command.
| Source:
BBC
|
| August 2, 2003 | - A three-story hospital in southern Russia was destroyed by a truck bomb, allegedly the work of Chechen separatists; forty-one people were killed and scores wounded.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| August 1, 2003 | - A Russian man said he had Hitler's penis, and offered to sell it for $20,000.
| Source:
Ananova
|
| June 23, 2003 | -
Russia's Duma, the lower house of parliament, passed a bill that would allow the government to shut down news organizations that publish "biased" election campaign coverage.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| June 2, 2003 | -
Bush gave Vladimir Putin a big hug and invited him to a sleepover at Camp David; Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder received perfunctory handshakes.
| Source:
Daily Telegraph
|
| May 1, 2003 | - The United States, the
United Nations,
Russia, and the European Union, acting collectively as "the Quartet," presented Israel and Palestine with the famous "road map" to peace that President Bush promised to reveal once the Palestinians acquired a prime minister independent of Yasir Arafat.
| |
| April 22, 2003 | -
Russian train conductors were hospitalized following a contest that involved smashing their heads repeatedly against a train window to determine who had the strongest forehead.
| |
| April 8, 2003 | -
The Council of Europe, a human-rights watchdog group, called for an international war crimes tribunal for the war in Chechnya, where a remote-controlled mine blew up a bus and killed eight people heading home from work at a Russian military base.
| |
| April 1, 2003 | -
Workers at a Russian marriage agency said interest in finding American bridegrooms was declining because American men are “boring cold Martians with dead eyes.” Interpol issued an arrest warrant for Alberto Fujimori, the former president of Peru.
| |
| March 25, 2003 | -
“This military action cannot be justified in any way,” said President Vladimir Putin of Russia, and Gerhard Schroeder of Germany observed that the president's decision meant “certain death to thousands of innocent men, women, and children.” Pope John Paul II said that the invasion of Iraq “threatened the destiny of humanity.” The United States Congress quickly voted to endorse the president's declaration of war.
| |
| March 25, 2003 | -
A Russian court demanded proof that the Federal Security Service, which was caught planting explosives in an apartment building in 1999, shortly after a series of apartment bombings that were blamed on Chechen rebels, planted the bombs as a training exercise.
| |
| March 4, 2003 | -
Members of the Bush Administration hinted that Russia might have a hard time collecting its Iraqi debts if it fails to support the American war drive: “What we've said is that if you are legitimately concerned about recouping your $8 billion of debt, and if you are interested in economic opportunities in a liberated Iraq, then it would be helpful if you are part of the prevailing coalition.” American diplomats were telling Security Council countries that they risked “paying a heavy price” if they don't vote for war with Iraq, although Ari Fleischer, the White House press secretary, denied that the Administration was trying to bribe countries for war votes: “The president is not offering quid pro quos,” he said.
| |
| March 4, 2003 | -
France, Germany, and Russia responded by demanding four months of further inspections.
| |
| March 4, 2003 | -
An American diplomat in Athens, Greece, resigned in protest over the President's policy toward Iraq and said that “our fervent pursuit of war with Iraq is driving us to squander the international legitimacy that has been America's most potent weapon of both offense and defense since the days of Woodrow Wilson.” Russia's foreign minister threatened to veto the new American resolution on Iraq.
| |
| February 11, 2003 | -
French, Russian, and German diplomats said that Powell had made a good case for continuing the inspection process.
| |
| February 11, 2003 | -
Russia outlawed profanity.
| |
| February 4, 2003 | - There were rumors of a lawsuit against Warner Brothers because Dobby the house elf in the latest Harry Potter
movie so closely resembles President Vladimir Putin of Russia.
| |
| December 31, 2002 | -
Suicide bombers attacked the headquarters of Chechnya's pro-Russian government, killing more than 50 people.
| |
| December 31, 2002 | -
The American Peace Corps was told that it is no longer welcome in Russia.
| |
| December 24, 2002 | -
North Korea began removing United Nations monitoring devices from its Yongbyon nuclear reactor and from its stockpile of plutonium; experts said that North Korea could potentially build a small nuclear arsenal within a year. Russia's deputy foreign minister blamed George W. Bush for the crisis: “How should a small country feel when it is told that it is all but part of forces of evil of biblical proportions and should be fought against until total annihilation?”
| |
| December 17, 2002 | -
Russia's Interior Ministry announced new rules requiring police officers to go door-to-door as part of a “getting to know you” campaign; the officers will do so every three months, and they will collect “social, economic, and demographic” data on residents, whose participation will be voluntary.
| |
| December 10, 2002 | -
President Vladimir Putin of Russia asked Pakistan to please stop funding Islamic
terrorists.
| |
| December 10, 2002 | -
A Russian diplomat named Konstantin Pulikovsky published a memoir of his travels with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il and revealed that the Dear Leader is an accomplished gourmet.
| |
| November 26, 2002 | -
In response to a question about Iran-Contra star John Poindexter and
his Total Information Awareness project, Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld had the following to say: “And then there was the office
of strategic influence. You may recall that. And 'oh my goodness
gracious isn't that terrible, Henny Penny the sky is going to fall.' I
went down that next day and said fine, if you want to savage this
thing, fine I'll give you the corpse. There's the name. You can have
the name, but I'm gonna keep doing every single thing that needs to be
done and I have. What was intended to be done by that office is being
done by that office, NOT by that office in other ways.” Rumsfeld
also said that “the Soviet Union is continuing to make nuclear
weapons, I mean the Russians.”
| |
| November 26, 2002 | -
Prince Philip, Queen Elizabeth's husband, denied an accusation from Princess Diana's “energy healer” that he had sent letters to the late princess calling her a “harlot” and a “trollop.” Russia's Ministry of Education proposed a ban on Barbie dolls.
| |
| November 19, 2002 | -
Russian troops, apparently inspired by Israeli tactics, began demolishing the homes of Chechen civilians in Grozny in retaliation for guerrilla attacks.
| |
| November 19, 2002 | -
Russia's lower house of parliament voted down a proposal for an independent investigation of the hostage fiasco in Moscow last month.
| |
| November 12, 2002 | -
France and Russia, after weeks of dickering, voted in favor of a United Nations Security Council resolution on Iraq after the United States agreed to change the word “and” to “or” and the word “secure” to “restore.” “This would be the 17th time that we expect Saddam to disarm,” said President George W. Bush. “This time we mean it. This time it's for real.” American officials claimed that the resolution was a “mousetrap” that gives the U.S. the right to go to war unilaterally; Europeans pointed to assurances from American diplomats that the document contains “no hidden triggers.” President Bush settled on a war plan for Iraq that will include a short air campaign followed by rapid ground operations involving about 250,000 troops.
| |
| November 12, 2002 | -
Communists in Russia marched to protest the betrayal of the Great October Socialist Revolution.
| |
| November 5, 2002 | -
Russian president Vladimir Putin gave a speech about the Chechen hostage debacle and declared that Russia will attack terrorists wherever they may be (“I stress, wherever they may be located”), suggesting that the Bush Doctrine, which disregards traditional principles of national sovereignty, has become the new international norm.
| |
| November 5, 2002 | -
Billboards went up in Moscow quoting Putin's remark that “We could not save everyone. Forgive us.” Russian TV stations were playing war movies, flags were flying at half mast, and most people seemed to be supportive of the government's decision to use a deadly gas to save the hostages even though it killed 120 of them.
| |
| November 5, 2002 | -
Russia's press ministry was already applying the Bush Doctrine domestically in a new assault on the media (websites were shut down, newspapers were raided), and a bill passed the lower house of parliament giving the government even more authority to ban any reporting deemed a hindrance to the war on terrorism.
| |
| October 29, 2002 | -
The United States, Japan, and South Korea issued a statement warning North Korea that the country will be shunned if it refuses to dismantle its nuclear weapons program, and President Bush, frustrated that Russia and France still have not submitted to his demands in the Security Council, again threatened to invade Iraq no matter what.
| |
| October 29, 2002 | -
A satellite television station in Egypt was advertising a 41-part treatment of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the Russian anti-Semitic forgery; the series, called “Horse without a Horseman,” will be broadcast during Ramadan.
| |
| October 29, 2002 | -
Russian commandos stormed the Moscow theater occupied by Chechen rebels and rescued about 750 hostages; more than 100 soon died, however, all but one from the unidentified gas used to rescue them, and 145 were in intensive care.
| |
| October 29, 2002 | -
A Russian army commander admitted to beating his soldiers with a black latex dildo.
| |
| October 1, 2002 | -
Germany, Belgium, and Russia all said that the dossier failed to justify an attack on Iraq; Russian foreign minister Igor Ivanov dismissed Blair's presentation as a “propaganda furor” and called for a return of weapons inspectors.
| |
| October 1, 2002 | -
Astrobiologists in El Paso said that they had found evidence of life on Venus, and Russian
scientists suggested that the bacteria deinococcus radiodurans, which is known for its resistance to radiation, evolved on Mars.
| |
| September 24, 2002 | -
Russia reported that its population had dropped by 505,900 people so far this year.
| |
| September 17, 2002 | -
Another mass grave was found in Chechnya, and the mutilated bodies were quickly identified as Chechens who were arrested by Russian forces in May.
| |
| September 17, 2002 | -
President Vladimir Putin of Russia threatened to preemptively invade Georgia as part of the war on terrorism.
| |
| September 10, 2002 | -
The leaders of Russia, France, Germany, and China all refused to support President Bush's plan to attack Iraq.
| |
| September 10, 2002 | -
A four-legged duckling drowned in Russia on its first attempt to swim.
| |
| September 3, 2002 | -
Russia's defense ministry offered lollipops to officers who agreed to quit smoking.
| |
| September 3, 2002 | -
NASA decided to let pop singer Lance Bass train at the Johnson Space Center in preparation for his $20 million adventure with the Russian space program.
| |
| August 20, 2002 | -
Russia refused to issue an entry visa to the Dalai Lama, citing China's disapproval of his political activities, and suspended space-tourist training for Lance Bass of the band 'N Sync because he fell behind on his payments.
| |
| June 18, 2002 | -
Russia responded by withdrawing from the Start II treaty, which outlawed multiple-warhead missiles.
| |
| June 18, 2002 | -
A giant calf was born in Russia, as was a four-legged duck.
| |
| May 28, 2002 | -
The Tageszeitung, a leftist newspaper, ran a blank front page under the sarcastic headline “Bush's Historic Speech.” American and Russian officials were unable to agree on what to call their new arms-control treaty, signed this week by Presidents Putin and Bush: the Americans insist on calling it the “Treaty between the United States of America and the Russian Federation on Strategic Offensive Reductions,” whereas the Russians call it the “Agreement on the Reduction of Strategic Offensive Potentials.” Asked what he thought about Russia's brain drain, President Bush replied: “It's going to take a lotta brains in Russia to create a drain.” India and Pakistan moved closer to war: Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee told Indian soldiers in Kashmir to prepare for a “decisive battle.” “We're deeply concerned about the rhetoric,” said President Bush.
| |
| May 21, 2002 | -
President George W. Bush announced that the United States and Russia will sign a new arms-control treaty that will reduce both countries' nuclear arsenals by two thirds.
| |
| May 21, 2002 | -
After NATO agreed to give Russia a more active role in the alliance's decision making, particularly concerning terrorism and arms control, Secretary of State Colin Powell observed that “we don't yet quite have a cliché to capture this all.”
| |
| April 16, 2002 | -
Russia's agriculture minister was still refusing to lift a ban on American chickens.
| |
| April 9, 2002 | -
Russia's Mosenergo utility company was threatening to cut off power to a bioweapons laboratory complex near Moscow that houses a repository of anthrax, plague, and 3,000 other strains of bacteria.
| |
| March 12, 2002 | -
There was concern that the Bush Administration was trying to redefine nuclear weaponry as an instrument of war rather than a deterrent; one Russian lawmaker suggested that the President's men had “somewhat lost touch with reality.” An unnamed Bush Administration official acknowledged that the President was beginning to lose the political advantage that resulted from September 11; the “post-attack glow is fading,” he said.
| |
| February 5, 2002 | -
President Vladimir Putin of Russia called for the establishment of a national sports channel on television to promote healthy living.
| |
| January 29, 2002 | -
President Vladimir Putin approved an amnesty that will free all Russian mothers from prison.
| |
| December 25, 2001 | -
“And so we'll make the determination whether or not he stays within the military system or comes through the civil justice system, the same system in America.” Former president George Bush suggested “a unique penalty” for Walker: “Make him leave his hair the way it is and his face as dirty as it is and let him go wandering around this country and see what kind of sympathy he would get.” The Salvation Army said it would fight to stay in Moscow after a city court upheld a ruling that defined the charity as a “paramilitary organization” that was out to destroy the Russian state.
| |
| December 25, 2001 | -
A Russian man was eaten by a bear.
| |
| December 11, 2001 | -
Moscow
police
arrested seven men trying to sell more than two pounds of weapons-grade enriched uranium.
| |
| November 20, 2001 | - Presidents Bush and Putin had a fine time kidding around down on the ranch in Crawford, Texas, and they agreed to cut American and Russian nuclear arms by two thirds.
| |
| November 13, 2001 | -
Russians celebrated the eighty-fourth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution.
| |
| October 23, 2001 | -
Russia announced that it would close its electronic eavesdropping station in Cuba.
| |
| October 16, 2001 | -
Russian sailors raised the sunken submarine Kursk and were greeted by a pod of dolphins swimming in formation.
| |
| October 16, 2001 | - President Leonid Kuchma finally admitted that Ukraine accidentally shot down a commercial Russian airliner, but said that mistakes happen everywhere: “Look around the world, in Europe; we are not the first and not the last.”
| |
| October 9, 2001 | - A Russian airliner filled with Jews exploded over the Black Sea.
| |
| October 9, 2001 | -
Pentagon sources said the plane was hit by a Ukrainian surface-to-air missile, apparently by accident, during training exercises with Russia.
| |
| October 2, 2001 | - Thomas L. Friedman, the
New York Times columnist, suggested hiring the Russian Mafia to assassinate
Osama bin Laden.
| |
| September 25, 2001 | - Five workers in a Russian soap factory died after they fell into a giant cauldron of fat.
| |
| September 11, 2001 | -
Bush Administration officials contradicted previous statements that they would let China build up its nuclear arsenal if Beijing would simply drop its objections to the missile-defense boondoggle. Russia was beginning to approach the subject with a certain irony. “If they have the money to build the most excessive response to the least probable threat situation, that's okay,” said Vladimir Lukin, deputy speaker of parliament.
| |
| August 21, 2001 | -
Russian surgeons grew a replacement penis on the arm of a sixteen-year-old boy.
| |
| July 31, 2001 | -
President George W. Bush and Russian president Vladimir Putin agreed to work toward a disarmament framework that would reduce nuclear weapons while allowing the U.S. its missile-defense scheme; a few days before their discussion, Putin remarked that Bush was “a fairly good-hearted person, nice to talk to, I would even say . . . even a little bit sentimental.”
| |
| July 31, 2001 | - Kim Jong Il, North Korea's Dear Leader, while on a train to Moscow to meet with President Putin, promised that his country won't shoot missiles at the United States.
| |
| July 24, 2001 | -
Russian president Vladimir Putin declared that Lenin's body will remain on display in Moscow, despite calls for it to be buried.
“Once I see an overwhelming majority of people wanting to tackle the Lenin question, we will discuss it,” he said. “But today I don't see it and therefore we will not talk about it.”
| |
| July 17, 2001 | -
Chinese president Jiang Zemin went to Russia to sign a treaty of friendship and cooperation.
| |
| July 17, 2001 | -
Russian officials said that the reappearance of crop circles in a wheat field near Maikop, Krasnodar, was evidence of space aliens taking soil samples from the Earth.
| |
| July 17, 2001 | - There were reports that Russian troops terrorized two Chechen villages, torturing and beating the men and looting the homes, after four soldiers were killed by mines.
| |
| June 12, 2001 | -
Moscow was covered in pukh.
| |
| May 22, 2001 | -
Russia bombed ice flows on the Lena River in Siberia.
| |
| May 22, 2001 | - President Vladimir Putin of Russia and President George W. Bush made a date to meet for the first time.
| |
| May 22, 2001 | -
Russia's
parliament voted to give President Putin more power.
| |
| May 15, 2001 | -
Russia's Polar Institute of Fish and Oceanography warned that over 200,000 baby seals were in danger of starving this spring in the White Sea.
| |
| April 10, 2001 | - Human-rights groups said that 51 bodies had been exhumed from a mass grave in Chechnya; many had been tortured; 12 were Chechens last seen in Russian custody.
| |
| March 27, 2001 | -
Moscow warned the United States about its new Cold War rhetoric; the Russians were upset over remarks by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who said that “Russia is an active proliferator” of dangerous weapons
technology which “seems to be willing to sell anything to anyone for money.” The United States expelled 50 Russian diplomats, four of whom were thought to have been working with Robert Philip Hanssen, the FBI agent recently arrested for spying; Russia in turn said it would expel the 50 diplomats most precious to America.
| |
| March 27, 2001 | -
Russian president Vladimir Putin urged the use of force to prevent the conflict from spreading.
| |
| March 27, 2001 | -
Russia's space station Mir fell from the sky.
| |
| March 20, 2001 | -
Russia said it would again sell arms to Iran, causing some Russians to wonder whether the weapons would end up in the hands of Islamic
terrorists within their own borders.
| |
| March 20, 2001 | - Chechen terrorists hijacked a Russian plane and flew it to Saudi Arabia, landing in the holy city of Medina.
| |
| March 20, 2001 | - A Russian urologist successfully reconstituted a coffin maker's penis after it was cut into six pieces by a circular saw.
| |
| March 6, 2001 | -
South Korean president Kim Dae Jung pleased Russian president Vladimir Putin by declaring his opposition to the United States' plan to build a national missile defense system that would violate the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty.
| |
| February 27, 2001 | - The FBI arrested a Russian spy, one of its own senior counterintelligence agents.
| |
| February 27, 2001 | -
Russia's chief veterinarian was blaming the outbreak of mad cow disease on the Jews.
| |
| February 20, 2001 | -
Russia warned that the United States was reverting to Cold War rhetoric after Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld denounced Russia as an “active proliferator” of dangerous technology. “They are part of the problem,” he said, defending President George W. Bush's plans, over Russia's objections, to deploy an anti-missile system. “Why they would be actively proliferating and then complaining when the United States wants to defend itself against the fruit of those proliferation activities it seems to me is misplaced.”
| |
| February 20, 2001 | -
Russia's Federal Security Service, the heir to the KGB, said it would once again investigate anonymous accusations against Russian citizens, a practice banned by Mikhail Gorbachev in 1988.
| |
| February 13, 2001 | -
United States Secretary of State Colin Powell defended President George W. Bush's plans to deploy the national missile defense system despite its technical and political flaws: “I don't consider it as being an arrogant position,” he said. “Or one where we are trying to force anything on the rest of the world.” Russian
defense minister Igor Sergeyev warned that Russia still had “three mighty programs to asymmetrically counteract U.S. national missile defense forces,” which were developed to defeat President Ronald Reagan's pie-in-the-sky Star Wars program.
| |
| January 30, 2001 | - The new government symbolized by George W. Bush continued to insist that it would deploy a national missile defense system despite the fact that the program, developed with equal parts fraud and wishful thinking, would upset the balance of terror with Russia—not to mention the world-historical irony that it might easily drive China to sell missile technology to the very “rogue” nations the program seeks to neutralize.
| |
| January 16, 2001 | - A husband and wife who ran a travel agency in Bukhara, Uzbekistan, were arrested for killing their clients and selling their organs to the Russians; six bodies and 100 passports were found in their apartment.
| |
| January 9, 2001 | -
Russian president Vladimir Putin was in Germany to discuss debt repayment with Chancellor Gerhard Schröder; Putin was also seeking German support for a multinational missile defense system as an alternative to the American scheme, which would violate the Treaty on the Limitation of Antiballistic Missile Systems and destabilize the world strategic order.
| |
| January 9, 2001 | -
United States intelligence officials reported that Russia recently moved nuclear weapons into the Baltic town of Kaliningrad, formerly known as Konigsberg, the home of Immanuel Kant, the author of the Critique of Pure Reason and “Perpetual Peace.” President Vladimir Putin, asked about the reports, responded: “That's rubbish.”
| |
| January 2, 2001 | -
Russian women were not getting married and having children because too many Russian men were not earning enough money; the
New York Times considered this to be yet another example of “freedom's toll.” A woman succeeded in introducing DNA evidence of infidelity into a divorce proceeding, a first.
| |
| December 26, 2000 | -
Russia was planning to earn billions for becoming the world's largest nuclear waste dump; the atomic energy minister, Yevgeny Adamov, said the plan would allow Russia, which just announced it might default on its debt again, to avoid “going with a begging bowl to the IMF, which we have done up to now to our shame.” Adamov recently criticized the Ukraine for closing the Chernobyl power station, saying that it was perfectly safe.
| |
| December 19, 2000 | -
Russia and the United States agreed to try not to launch nuclear missiles accidently, updating a previous agreement, which resulted from a 1995 mix-up when Russia nearly launched a nuclear counterstrike in response to a Norwegian weather rocket.
| |
| December 12, 2000 | -
Russia asked Interpol to help catch the runaway Jewish oligarch Vladimir V. Gusinsky, who was charged with fraud after he displeased President Vladimir V. Putin.
| |
| December 12, 2000 | - Edmond Pope, an American businessman, was sentenced, after a Moscow show trial, to twenty years' hard labor for trying to buy nonclassified information about a torpedo; the judge in the case took just two hours to produce a twenty-page decision. President Putin said he would accept the recommendation of the pardon commission to release Pope; the commission's chairman noted that Russians “are a magnanimous people, although legends circulate in the world about our cruelty.”
| |
| December 5, 2000 | -
Russians were busy paying “Freedom's Toll,” wrote the New York Times, drinking hard and dying young.
| |
| December 5, 2000 | -
Russia's lower house of parliament voted to give former presidents immunity from prosecution for acts committed while in office.
| |
| December 5, 2000 | -
Russia's Orthodox Church named St. Matthew as the patron saint of tax
police.
| |
| November 21, 2000 | -
Russia decided to go ahead and crash the space station Mir into the Pacific ocean, disappointing Dennis Tito, an American businessman who had hoped to pay $20 million to visit the doomed station, and television executives, who were planning to film a “reality-based” television program there.
| |
| November 21, 2000 | -
Russian oligarch Vladimir Gusinsky gave up and let the Putin government take over his media company, which owns Russia's leading independent TV station, but the deal fell apart; esoteric explanations abounded.
| |
| November 21, 2000 | -
President Putin called for radically lower numbers of Russian and U.S. nuclear weapons, which was said to be motivated largely by the fact that Russia cannot afford to maintain weapons that are designed never to be used.
| |
| November 7, 2000 | -
Russian president Vladimir Putin agreed to open Soviet archives to researchers for data about the millions murdered by Joseph Stalin.
| |
| November 7, 2000 | - A report by the General Accounting Office found that massive aid by the West failed to prevent corrupt Russians from squandering their chance at normal capitalism.
| |
| November 7, 2000 | - Vladimir Gusinsky and Boris Berezovsky, two Russian oligarchs, were called to appear before the deputy prosecutor general of Russia for unrelated investigations into financial crimes.
| |
| November 7, 2000 | - Fifty thousand Chinese attended a performance of Verdi's Aida, which featured a cast of 2,200 and a trained elephant, Bactrian camels, lions, tigers, and Olga Roanko, a Russian soprano.
| |
| October 31, 2000 | -
Russian hackers penetrated Microsoft's computer network using a well-known Trojan attack and for six weeks had access to the company's internal computer records, including the source code of some programs; the security breach was discovered only when system administrators noticed passwords being emailed to an address in St.
| |
| October 24, 2000 | -
Russian
space experts said that it was time to bring down the Mir space station before it crashed into a populated area; a spokesman for MirCorp, an Amsterdam company that plans to send tourists and game-show contestants to the station, said that Mir was just fine.
| |
| October 10, 2000 | - DNA tests identified the Hungarian WWII prisoner of war who spent 53 years in a Russian mental hospital.
| |
| October 10, 2000 | - Former Russian president Boris Yeltsin published a memoir in which he admitted to drinking too much and to having planned in 1996 the abolition of Russian democracy.
| |
| October 10, 2000 | - Fungus was devouring Russia's Mir space station.
| |
| September 19, 2000 | -
Russian prosecutors failed to reopen a treason case against Aleksandr Nikitin, a former navy captain who exposed the Russian navy's practice of dumping nuclear waste at sea.
| |
| September 12, 2000 | - Officials said they had evidence of the involvement of a Russian engineer with previous experience building subs.
| |
| September 12, 2000 | -
Russian President Vladimir Putin proposed a system of cooperation among nations that use submarines so that endangered crews might be more easily rescued.
| |
| September 12, 2000 | -
Russia's
defense minister confirmed that President Putin plans to cut the Russian military by a third.
| |
| September 12, 2000 | - While in Japan, the Russian president was serenaded by a robot
dog that sang the Russian national anthem.
| |
| September 12, 2000 | -
Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky claimed that the Kremlin told him to sell his stake in a major television station or risk going to jail.
| |
| September 5, 2000 | -
Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree dismissing the director of the Bolshoi Theater.
| |
| September 5, 2000 | -
Europe's tallest structure, a 1,772-foot television tower in Moscow, burned, killing at least three and disrupting television for 20 million Russians.
| |
| August 22, 2000 | -
Russia's Orthodox Church rejected genetic engineering, homosexuality, euthanasia, and abortion while reaffirming private property and the church's close ties to the Russian military.
| |
| August 22, 2000 | - After it became clear that the 118 Russian sailors aboard the sunken Mursk submarine were probably dead, President Vladimir V. Putin ordered his generals to accept offers of help from other countries.
| |
| August 15, 2000 | - The contents of a top secret report on the likely consequences of the anti-missile program were leaked to the news media, confirming numerous public statements by Chinese and Russian government officials that they would deploy more missiles.
| |
| August 15, 2000 | - A standoff between workers and government agents continued at one of Russia's premier vodka factories; President Vladimir Putin reportedly has seen the wisdom of state control of the vodka industry.
| |
| August 15, 2000 | - Eight pedestrians were killed in Moscow when a bomb exploded in an underground walkway; Russian authorities were quick to blame Chechen terrorists, saying the bombing had a “Chechen trace.” Russian soldiers were killed in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan by Islamic rebels.
| |
| August 1, 2000 | - A Russian spacecraft docked with the International Space Station above Kazakhstan.
| |
| August 1, 2000 | - Roman and Inna Flikshtein, a Russian couple living in Brooklyn, said they would not give up Cookie, their pet diana monkey, an endangered species, which the New York state attorney general says should be in a zoo.
| |
| July 25, 2000 | -
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat failed to meet President Bill Clinton's deadline for making peace in the Middle East; Clinton declared the summit over and flew to Okinawa for a meeting of the G8, the world's seven richest industrialized countries plus Russia, where the leaders issued a strongly worded statement decrying the alarming lack of Internet access in sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere.
| |
| July 25, 2000 | -
Russia and China again warned that America's proposed national missile defense system would cause a new arms race.
| |
| July 25, 2000 | - The Russian Orthodox Church nominated Czar Nicholas II and his family for canonization.
| |
| July 25, 2000 | - The Russian
Parliament voted to give President Putin more power.
| |
