Telegraph – Heydar Aliyev, the son of Ilham Aliyev, the oil-rich country’s president, allegedly spent almost £30 million (US$44 million) on nine waterfront mansions in the southern Gulf emirate earlier this year, reports said. The boy, who was 11 at the time, made the purchase in the Palm Jumeirah development over two weeks, the Washington Post reported on Friday. Heydar’s name and his date of birth appeared on Dubai Land Department records, which were obtained by the paper. The details listed on the property records were the same as those of the son of the former Soviet Republic’s president, whose annual salary is about £150,000 ($228,000). Read article
Times Online – Russia is to buy four warships from France in the biggest defence deal with a Nato member since the end of the Cold War. In a move that has alarmed Georgia and the Baltic States, France and Russia said that they were in “exclusive talks” on the sale of Mistral-class amphibious assault ships. President Sarkozy said that he wanted to “turn the page on the Cold War” after meeting President Medvedev in Paris. Read article
BBC – US President Barack Obama is planning “dramatic reductions” in the country’s nuclear arsenal, a senior US administration official has said. This would come as part of a sweeping policy review designed to prevent the spread of atomic weapons, he said. He added that the new strategy will point to a greater role for conventional weapons. Read article
Ed – then why is he spending MORE to maintain the current stockpile?
Telegraph – Amid fears that Moscow remains intent on weakening a planned Security Council resolution punishing Tehran for its nuclear programme, western diplomats are seeking to convince Russia to support much more robust measures. They hope the West’s case for robust action will be strengthened on Monday when the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN’s nuclear watchdog, meets in Vienna to discuss a damning new report on Iran’s atomic intentions. Read article
BBC – The head of Russia’s federal drug control agency has accused Nato of not doing enough to curb the production of heroin in Afghanistan. Victor Ivanov said at least 30,000 people died in Russia every year from heroin, 90% of it from Afghanistan. Read article
Moscow Times – Thousands of snow-removal vehicles hit Moscow’s streets Tuesday after a record snowfall dumped 67 centimeters of snow on the city over the extended holiday weekend. The heavy snowfall convinced residents to stay at home for the four-day Defender of the Fatherland holiday, leaving many streets eerily empty and halving the usual number of traffic accidents. Three days of snow flurries had covered the city with 67 centimeters of snow by Tuesday morning, which dawned bright and clear, the Moscow weather bureau said, Interfax reported. Meteorologists have not counted such a large amount of snowfall since they started keeping records in the capital. Read Article
Al Jazeera – A Ukrainian court has stopped considering a legal challenge to the result of February 7 presidential election after the prime minister decided to abandon her complaint. Yulia Tymoshenko said on Saturday that she had decided to withdraw her attempt to overturn Victor Yanukovych’s victory after losing confidence in the supreme administrative court. Read article
Times Online – Iran’s Supreme Leader took to the deck of a naval guided missile destroyer yesterday in defiance of the international storm sparked by the United Nations’ warning that Tehran may be building a nuclear bomb. There were renewed calls for sanctions from the United States, Britain, France and Germany. But some of the strongest reaction came from Russia, the country traditionally most reluctant to impose them, raising hopes of a consensus at the UN Security Council. Read article
Times Online – Russia raised Western hopes that it will support tougher international sanctions against Iran’s nuclear programme by announcing a delay in delivery of S-300 advanced air defence missiles. The postponement for unspecified “technical problems” was made public a day after Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Prime Minister, urged Russia to support “crippling” sanctions against Tehran during a visit to Moscow. Read article
Al Jazeera – The breakaway Georgian region of Abkhazia has concluded a deal with Russia to build a military base on its soil for land troops. The move will strength Abkhazia’s dependence on Moscow and will provoke ire from Tbilisi. Read article
Jerusalem Post – Russia sees no reason to stall on the sale of its S-300 anti-missile systems to Iran, the Kremlin’s powerful Security Council said on Sunday, Reuters reported. The possible sale of Russian air defense hardware to the Islamic Republic is a major irritant for both Israel and the United States. Both have pressed Moscow not to go ahead with a deal that could protect Iran’s nuclear facilities from air strikes. Read article
Deutsche Welle – Lake Baikal is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, but also home to a paper mill which for decades discharged waste into the lake. Months after it was shut down on ecological grounds, the Russian PM says it may reopen. Read Article
ITAR-TASS — A comeback of Russian science to world leading positions is hindered by the problem of what he described as “the infrastructure of people’s minds,” rather than financial or material factors, President Medvedev declared at a meeting with students held at Tomsk Polytechnic University on Thursday. Read Article
Telegraph – Russia has signalled it is losing patience with Iran over its nuclear programme as America said it expected a sanctions resolution to be put before the United Nations “within weeks”. Tehran confirmed it had begun to refine its stocks of low-enriched uranium to a higher-grade at its nuclear plant in the city of Natanz. Read article
Reuters – Opposition leader Viktor Yanukovich claimed victory in Ukraine’s presidential elections on Sunday and told his bitter rival Yulia Tymoshenko to resign as prime minister, but she refused to concede and declared she was ahead. Read article
Reuters – President Dmitry Medvedev approved Friday a new military doctrine identifying NATO expansion as a national threat and reaffirming Russia’s right to use nuclear weapons if the country’s existence is threatened. Read article
“Consider what the world might have done with the $5.5 trillion expended by the government to create, store, and deploy nearly 65,000 nuclear weapons held by the USA and USSR during the 19080’s. Imagine the improvements in health, education, environmental protection, transit, technology, sustainable development and foreign aid that might have changed the course of civilisation if these resources had been redirected for the greater good.”
- Prof. John Wargo, Green Intelligence
BBC – The Russian military allegedly dumped nuclear waste into the Baltic Sea in the early 1990s, according to a report on Swedish television. Radioactive material from a military base in Latvia is thought to have been thrown into Swedish waters. For many the biggest shock is that the Swedish government may have known at the time and done nothing about it. The partly enclosed Baltic Sea is known as one of the most polluted seas in the world. Read Article
BBC – Romania has agreed to host missile interceptors as part of a new US defence shield, its president says. President Traian Basescu said the plan was approved by the defence council. It still needs parliamentary approval. The US scrapped a previous missile shield, based in Poland and the Czech Republic, which had infuriated Russia. Read article
BBC – Russia is to supply Libya with small-arms and other weapons to the value of $1.8bn (£1.1bn, 1.3bn euros), Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has announced. The contract is worth nearly a quarter of the Russian state arms exporter’s entire sales last year, which were put at $7.4bn. Read article
Daily Telegraph – Tony Blair is lobbying world leaders on the environment on behalf of an organisation funded by the Russian oligarch with close links to Lord Mandelson. The former Prime Minister has given speeches and presented reports on climate change, including at the Copenhagen summit, which focus on the need for governments to fund new technology while allowing industries to keep polluting. His initiative, called Breaking The Climate Deadlock, is partly paid for by Oleg Deripaska, the billionaire tycoon who entertained both Lord Mandelson, the Business Secretary, and George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, on his yacht. Read Article
Ed – Another example of the pyramid of control exercised by the global elite and how they are able to influence the agenda – usually not for enlightened reasons. For those not familiar with the UK political elite, Lord Mandelson is the UK’s answer to Henry Kissinger, and the real power behind the throne of Blair and more recently Brown. Osborne is the opposition finance spokesman and will probably will be Chancellor of The Exchequer (Finance Minister) after the election in May. The fact alone that he holiday’s with Mandelson should have raised far more concern in a supposedly healthy democracy than it has done.
Reuters – Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said Sunday that a deal with the United States on a landmark nuclear arms reduction treaty was “95 percent” agreed, news agencies reported Sunday. Read article
Washington Times – President Obama sent two of his top national security officials to Moscow on Wednesday to clear the last hurdles to a new nuclear pact, but a revelation that U.S. missiles will soon be deployed near Russian territory could complicate the talks. Read article
Reuters – Russia will start up the reactor at Iran’s Bushehr nuclear power plant this year, the chief of Russia’s state nuclear corporation told reporters on Thursday. “2010 is the year of Bushehr,” Rosatom chief Sergei Kiriyenko told reporters after a cabinet meeting in Moscow. Read article
BBC – Ukraine’s presidential election is set for a second round run-off after partial results showed no candidate would win more than 50% of the vote. With almost one quarter of votes counted, former Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych led current PM Yulia Tymoshenko by 38% to 24%. The two were on opposing sides of the Orange Revolution in 2004-5, but both now favour closer ties with Russia. Read article
