Mikhail Kopeikin, the Cabinet’s deputy chief of staff, sat red-faced in the corner as Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin scolded him for suggesting that the two-year-old stabilization fund be invested in riskier, high-yield assets.

A female suicide bomber blew herself up near a busy downtown market in North Ossetia’s capital, Vladikavkaz, on Thursday, killing at least 10 people and wounding 40 others, authorities said.

Agreements on cooperation to revive Italy's nuclear sector and give LUKoil a foothold in the European refining sector topped a slew of deals signed Thursday, overseen by President Dmitry Medvedev and visiting Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

The Audit Chamber said Thursday that it had found 73.4 billion rubles ($2.7 billion) in violations, including 1.9 billion rubles in federal budget money, at government-funded institutions through September this year.

Investment bank Otkritie said Thursday that it had agreed to buy 100 percent of Russky Bank Razvitia and that it would take on all of the lender's obligations.

Nearly half of Russians are worried that they will lose their jobs in the next three months because of the global financial crisis, a survey showed.

The incidence of corruption cases in the military and security services has sharply grown this year, the chief military prosecutor said Thursday. Others in the services countered that the higher number of registered crimes was not a sign of increased corruption, but rather an indication that monitoring of the problem had intensified amid President Dmitry Medvedev's anti-corruption drive.

Garry Kasparov and Boris Nemtsov are teaming up to create a new democratic movement called Solidarity that will try to prevent the Kremlin from extending the presidential term to six years.

Police have detained a suspect in the killings of two Jesuit priests in their Moscow apartment in late October, the Investigative Committee said Thursday.

A Stavropol resident has been arrested on murder charges after using a cell phone cord to strangle his wife who was dying of liver cancer, a senior investigator said Thursday.

Basic Element, billionaire Oleg Deripaska's holding company, has won a tender to build a 34.5 billion ruble ($1.28 billion) railroad in the far eastern republic of Sakha, the company said Thursday.

The Federal Tariffs Service has cleared an almost 20 percent rise in domestic gas prices next year in another step to bring the currently state-capped prices up to market levels in a few years, the agency said Thursday.

The MICEX Index fell for the first time in seven days as investors seeking to raise cash sold shares after the recent rally and oil prices tumbled on concern that the economic slowdown will curb demand.

The fall in the value of Russia's gold and forex reserves, down by $62 billion from Oct. 3 to Oct. 31, slowed in the last week of October after the Central Bank moved to change its calculation technique.

TMK Sees Profits Drop 45%; Enel Renews RZD Contract; Sechin Backs RusAl Bid; MMK Suspends Investments; Sakhalin Energy's Pipeline; Rostelecom Income Growth; North-West Gets Loan and For the Record.

A senior lawmaker has criticized the U.S. presidential election as unfair and accused European election observers of failing to take Washington to task for “quite a lot of violations.”

Yukos lawyer Svetlana Bakhmina, who is eight months pregnant, has withdrawn her petition for a presidential pardon for unclear reasons, her lawyer said Thursday.

Almost every country greeted the news of President-elect Barack Obama's victory with joy, hoping that the United States would carry out a new, more balanced foreign policy relying primarily on diplomacy and multilateralism and rejecting the previous administration's heavy dependence on military power and unilateralism.

It was not only President-elect Barack Obama’s charismatic personality and well-orchestrated election campaign that won him the election. It was also the fact that American voters were tired of the Republican administration.

A few years ago, the only vaguely derogatory slang words I could find for Americans were америкашки and америкосы, the first rather affectionate (though condescending), the second more contemptuous (but still rather friendly). Ah, what a difference a few years make. Today, my fellow Americans, we are пиндосы.