Endangered seed bank

One of the world's foremost seed banks is in deep trouble after a Russian court ruled yesterday that the Russian Housing Development Foundation can take the land the seed bank is on and sell it to private home developers.

Currently, Pavlovsk Experimental Station is home to 5,500 varieties of edible plants, mostly fruit. The collections survived World War II and many of the varieties can be found nowhere else on Earth. Losing a seed bank would represent more than just a loss of biodiversity for biodiversity's sake. Collections like this can be used as breeding stock, imparting useful traits like drought tolerance or weed resistance to more commonly grown varieties. As the effects of global climate change increase, such breeding could become crucial.

The only chance left to stop the razing of Pavlovsk is a direct appeal to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

That's where you come in. The Global Crop Diversity Trust is collecting signatures on a petition that will be presented to Medvedev and Putin. The hope is that the show of global support for the Pavlovsk station might incline the men to step in and save it.

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.

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!

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.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev meets Apple CEO Steve Jobs

This happened today. How'd I learn about it? Why, from the Kremlin's new official Twitter account. Medvedev also visited Twitter, Cisco, and other Silicon Valley companies. Medvedev works on a MacBook, and recently began using an iPad.

Russian art group Voina "dicks" a St. Petersburg Bridge

Animal New York reports on the latest project by Russian art renegades Voina (War): dicking a bridge.
Over the years, Voina staged many actions: police station take-overs, anti-homophobic faux-lynchings in malls, stray cat throwing into swanky restaurants, anti-Medvedev public orgies and all kinds of ruckus. Their most recent target: the headquarters of FSB, the offices of Russia’s KGB incarnate Federal Security Service. Our source: Voina themselves.
In the early morn of Che Guevara’s birthday, the group psyched out bascule bridge guards and made their way to the center of Liteiny Bridge. In 23 seconds flat, Voina painted a 213-feet-tall, 89-feet-wide phallus dubbed “Giant Galactic Space Dick.”

Russia: Stalin-era mass grave discovered

In Russia today, approximately 500 skeletons—nearly all of which show head gunshot wounds—have been discovered in a mass grave believed to date back to Stalin-era purges in the 1930s.

"Practically all of the skulls have bullet wounds," said Yaroslav Livanksy, the head of a group of volunteers who helped to excavate the site. He said money and clothes from the 1930s had been found at the site. A crushed child's skull was discovered close to a bead bracelet and a small slipper.
Irina Fliege, a senior researcher with Russian human rights group Memorial, which collects information about Stalin-era killings, said she had no doubt that the victims were shot by Stalinist forces. She said far more bodies were likely to be found as adjacent sites are studied.

"This happens all over the country, it's impossible to say how often," Felige said. "All we can to is put up monuments to remember the dead."

Russian man becomes father at the age of 89

Dribbling, burping and nodding off in the middle of the day - and that's just the father. Aramais Nazarov, a decorated Second World War veteran, has become a dad for the fourth time aged 89.

He took his newborn son Artem - weighing in at 8lb 2oz - home from hospital yesterday. The former soldier, who served in Stalin's Red Army, brought a bouquet of pink roses to congratulate his wife Yevgeniya, who is 54 years his junior.



Mr Nazarov, whose eldest child is a 61-year-old pensioner, said: "What is the secret of my strength? When you've got a wife that much younger you just have to meet her demands - and so I do. All things being well, we will have a daughter to make the family complete."

His wife, 35, said: "I don't feel the age gap. We live like a normal man and wife. He is very strong." Her mother Lidia Alexeevna, who is herself two decades younger than her son-in-law, admitted that she tried to persuade her daughter against the match. "Of course I tried to talk her out of it," she said. "But she insisted. He's a faithful and loving husband to her."

Russian man kills himself with home-made guillotine

A Russian engineer killed himself using a guillotine he built in his bedroom.
47-year-old Albert Repin's mother said he had shut himself in his bedroom for days, saying he wanted to build a cupboard, according to a report in newspaper Tvoi Den, which also published photographs and sketches of the contraption.



His body was found jammed in the "strange construction" which used a metal plate - attached to a plank and weighted with large water bottles - as a blade.
The man, a divorcee from Moscow, lay on the floor beneath and triggered the guillotine himself. He had reportedly suffered psychiatric problems in recent years.

Russian lady destroys booze aisle in San Francisco supermarket

US woman develops Russian accent after falling down stairs

Some people fall on their heads and wake up with their memories wiped out. A few revive with their personalities totally changed. Others die. Robin Jenks Vanderlip fell down a stairwell, smacked her head and woke up speaking with a Russian accent.

Vanderlip has never been to Russia. She doesn't remember ever hearing a Russian accent. She lives in Fairfax County, was born in Pennsylvania and went to college on the Eastern Shore. Yet since that fall in May 2007, the first question she gets from strangers is: "Where are you from?" "They say your life can change in an instant," she said in what sounds like a thick Russian accent. "Mine did."

For 42 years, Vanderlip, whose case is being studied at the National Institutes of Health and the University of Maryland, spoke with what NIH neurologist Allen Braun called a typical mid-Atlantic American accent. But since the fall, her clipped way with consonants - dropping the final "s" from some plural words, saying "dis" and "dat" for "this" and "that" or "wiz" instead of "with" - and her formation of vowels - "home" sounds more like "herm," "well" sounds like "wuhl" - identify her more like a transplant from Moscow. The more fatigued she becomes, the thicker her accent grows.

What she has, Braun and other doctors say, is Foreign Accent Syndrome - a legitimate though rare and little understood medical condition that can follow a serious brain injury. "It does sound strange," Braun said. "It certainly does sound like someone has a foreign accent." The syndrome was first described by a neurologist in the closing days of World War II, when a Norwegian woman injured by a shrapnel hit to the head fell into a coma and woke up speaking - most unfortunately for her - with a German accent. (Fellow Norwegians ostracized her as a result, according to the medical literature.) Since then, fewer than 60 cases have been reported worldwide.
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Russian democracy caught in action

A new video has revealed that most Russian MPs cannot even be bothered to go through the motions of democracy but prefer to bunk off and let the few MPs who do turn up vote in their stead. The footage, shot last week in Russia's Duma, the 450-member lower house of parliament, showed three MPs frantically running from empty seat to seat in order to vote for fellow deputies who were playing truant after lunch.

The vote, which made it illegal for motorists to have any alcohol in their blood, was passed by a crushing 449 votes even though there were only 88 MPs, or just over one fifth of the chamber, present. Western critics say the parliament is little more than a puppet chamber that does the Kremlin's bidding. But Kremlin-backed politicians insist it is a serious institution and on Wednesday rushed to condemn the incident as "shameful" while conceding, rather oddly, that such practices were a regular occurrence.



You cannot call a situation where MPs run all round the chamber pushing buttons for absent colleagues anything other than a disgrace," said Sergei Mironov, leader of the Kremlin-friendly Just Russia party.

"Usually, voting in parliament takes place at the end of a session when the cameras have left and the journalists are not in the chamber." This time was different though and a cameraman from Russian TV channel Ren TV caught the farce on camera in a video. One unidentified MP was caught voting nine times. Critics said the abysmal turnout technically made the vote illegal since the rules of parliament itself stipulated that a majority of MPs needed to be present for its activities to be legitimate.

School leavers in Moscow

25 of May is the last day for school leavers. They celebrate it, bathing in Moscow fountains and drinking sham everywhere.




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A large photo gallery of a zombie walk in Moscow.

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Dostoevsky images on Moscow metro ‘could cause suicides’

The author of Crime and Punishment never had a reputation for lightness in his soul. Now the Moscow authorities have postponed the opening of a metro station named after Fyodor Dostoevsky over fears that illustrations from his works that decorate it could turn the station into a "mecca for suicides".



The new station was decorated with black and white marble mosaics of scenes from Dostoevsky's most famous novels, including Crime and Punishment, Demons, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov. But unsurprisingly for a writer famously preoccupied with death, the scenes include images of suicide and murder.

The opening of the station, which was meant to be today, has been put back indefinitely. The metro has refused to comment but the daily Izvestia claims that it was the transport system's chief who raised the question of changing the decorations when he visited the site last week. Sources at the metro told The Independent that the controversy was convenient cover for the fact that the stations are not ready.
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