Desperate Russian mother demands exorcism for Mayor

A single mother of three young boys has appealed to Pope Benedict XVI to send exorcists to her Volgograd region town after the mayor failed to provide suitable housing for her family. The letter by Svetlana Shults, a Russian Orthodox believer living in Kamyshin, a town of 117,300 residents located about 200 kilometers north of Volgograd, was published in Novaya Gazeta on Monday. Shults said she decided to appeal to Benedict after Kamyshin Mayor Alexander Chunakov told her that he would not help her find a new home even if she wrote to the Pope.

Shults said her dilapidated apartment building on Molodyozhnaya Ulitsa has been scheduled for demolition since 1990, but local authorities have refused to relocate her under a federal program. Pictures of her building published in Novaya Gazeta showed decaying walls and crumbling concrete. Shults said Chunakov, who announced completing the town's relocation program on national television in March, has refused to help her even though he once admitted that her complaints had bothered him in his dreams.



She also accused the mayor of threatening her three sons, aged 6 to 9, by asking her, “All right, so you're bananas, but aren't you afraid for your children?” "My only hope is you. There is no one else I can write to," Shults wrote in her appeal to Benedict. She also threatened to burn herself alive in public if the situation does not change, despite the fact that suicide is a cardinal sin for Orthodox believers.

A Vatican spokeswoman in Russia said that the Pope had not received the letter by mail yet but church officials had read it in Novaya Gazeta. The pontiff's intervention may not be necessary. Kamyshin's administration promised on Monday that Shults would soon get new housing. A statement signed by First Deputy Mayor Stanislav Zinchenko says "the district administration has found means to relocate residents to safe housing" by “approximately” Oct. 1.

Gold-wrapped Audi R8 supercar spotted in Moscow

Embellishing your vehicle with gold, diamonds and precious stones is a great way to exhibit your excess wealth on the roads. We have already introduced you to some of the most incredible gold-plated cars and the latest one is an Audi R8 that has been wrapped in gold. It came as no surprise last time when a golden Audi R8 supercar was seen in the oil rich capital of Dubai. The pictured above was spotted in Moscow and the rendition really makes the matte-black R8 with its stealth-like finish look a bit boring. For now, there isn’t any information about the money spent on the gilded makeover or the owner of this gilded beauty.

High tech Russian subs could stop oil leak, skipper says

Yevgenii Chernyaev helms the Mir-2, one of four manned vessels in the world capable of operating at the depths of BP's leaking oil well, and he's confident that his vessel, along with its sister-ship Mir-1, would be able to get the job done. The holdup? No one's asked.

"Our subs are unique," Chernyaev said. "There are two of them and they can submerge and work simultaneously. Also, they are powerful enough to work with any other additional equipment."

The additional equipment is key. Specially fabricated tools to cap the leak, as well as a "team of international specialists" would be needed for the job, which the Mir-2 captain warns all takes time. That means, this late in the game, it'd be another late gamble to kill the flow of the damaged well, which has been spewing into the Gulf for months.

"And we would not refuse to help, even though for us it would be very complicated, especially right now," Chernyaev said. Both he and the Russian government are surprised that no one came to them when it all started, and still haven't.

"There are only four vessels in the world that can go down to 6,000m — the Mirs, French Nautile and Japanese Shinkai. The Mirs are known to be the best, and we have a very experienced team of specialists."

A fleet of deep-sea robots, specialized ships, several wacky plans and even the aid of Kevin Costner have not been able to stop the leak. The last resort is still using freshly-drilled relief wells to stem the flow, though those probably won't be ready until sometime in August.

Love till death and even after was theme for Russian couple’s third wedding

We have the Gothic individuals who savor the dark and gloomy motif and adorn themselves in Black and now we’ve got the listless dead bunch that… well like dressing up as, you guessed it, Zombies. A young couple, Vitalich and Jirka, decided on a theme wedding and they picked one that I’m sure no one else would have. The whole ‘death do us part’ bit took on a new turn with this crowd.



The couple has been married three times. The first was normal, white gown, layered wedding cake, corny cover band the works. But they thought it wasn’t enough so they wanted to do it all over again in a new way so they got divorced got married again with a Goth theme, divorced after and their third time around was with a Zombie motif with clothes and make up done well enough to give Hollywood a run for it’s money. Ridiculous!

Russian’s develop $30,000 cryo-freeze technology for waking up in the future

Those who don’t want to live forever raise your hands. Like I’ve always said, it seems like Hollywood seems to have a firm grasp over the control of how people wish the future to be. The glimpse of the future is cryonics. You know, where you freeze yourself or your brain and wake up a few decades in the future.



A lab in Russia has developed a way to freeze your brain or body for the future for a paltry sum of $10,000 or $30,000 respectively. The body is drained of all fluids and filled up with cryo-protectants. Of course there’s no telling when the technology will be developed to unfreeze you successfully or have brain transplants as a mundane operation. Either ways it seems like a cheap way to be immortal if you don’t mind the cold.

Alleged Russian Spy Ring Mixes Old Tricks With New Tech

The exposure and detainment of an alleged Russian spy ring in New York state this past week has provoked a steady stream of disconcerting references, like "Cold War-era," "old-fashioned cold war thriller," "007-worthy" and "right out of a Cold War spy novel." Salivating scribes eagerly detail, and sometimes ridicule, the purported gang's dated and cliched tactics, particularly the brisk public handoffs, the hidden messages scrawled in invisible ink and the Morse Code radio blasts. The agents apparently relied on more than just established espionage stereotypes, though, including private Wi-Fi networks, encryption programs and password-protected disks.

The art of concealing messages, known as steganography, dates back thousands of years, but these new-millenium spies shrouded their correspondences under a particularly modern cloak. Various researchers, including a 2008 team from the Warsaw University of Technology, have discovered steganographic methods of exchanging messages through Internet communications and networking technologies. But, according to the Justice Department, back in 2005, these alleged spies received instructions via "wholly unremarkable photos" that actually contained secret, "readable text files" -- on public websites.

As the investigation progresses, the dialogue between U.S. and Russian officials grows increasingly acrimonious, particularly from Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, a former KGB agent. Putin, who also directed the FSB Russian spy agency, labeled the actions of U.S. law enforcement as "out of control." Given the terse and heated statements (possibly giving the 'Red Dawn' re-make producers cause to wish they'd stuck with the film's original antagonists), it's certainly calming and reassuring to know that the DARPA spy hunters are hard at work, hopefully on a wolverine-bot.