By John Helmer in Moscow The growing number of tape-recorded disclosures from a bed belonging to Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has attracted a rising vote of no-confidence in the prime minister from Italian voters, and unusual interest in what happened on the bed in much of western Europe. One Italian opinion poll published at [...]

by John Helmer - Monday, July 27th, 2009
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By John Helmer The newsletter from the US Embassy warned recently that middle-aged American males should be on the lookout for a dangerous thief in Moscow who puts them to sleep before he or she steals their wallets, and any other property that can be carried off. At the start of the last century in [...]

by John Helmer - Friday, March 29th, 2002
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By John Helmer The only foreign-language sentence that managed to lodge itself correctly in the brain of Ronald Reagan, before he developed Alzheimer’s Disease but after he became President of the United States, was “doveryai no proveryai”. As he never tired of explaining, that is Russian for “trust but verify.” Reagan and his successors always [...]

by John Helmer - Friday, March 15th, 2002
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By John Helmer In 1833, four years before his wife’s flirtation caused the death, in a duel, of Alexander Pushkin, Russia’s greatest poet, he wrote her a warning letter. “You like it when the dogs trail after you like a bitch in heat,” Pushkin said bluntly. “All you have to do is make sure everyone [...]

by John Helmer - Tuesday, August 10th, 1999
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