By John Helmer, Moscow  If you were the only person in the world who thought yourself a genius, it would be an embarrassment to be named Barry Parsnip. Robert Zimmerman solved the nomenclature problem. He became Bob Dylan – and Hey Presto! He won the Nobel Prize for Literature for 2016. Barry Parsnip (aka Boris […]

by Editor - Sunday, November 6th, 2016
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By John Helmer, Moscow In hot pursuit of the $3 billion fortune embezzled from Trust Bank of Moscow, English lawyers, Russian bankers, Swiss policemen, and Cypriot accountants need rest and recreation. Where better to study the evidence than in the south of France, where Benedict Worsley, son of a famous Old Bailey criminal lawyer, has […]

by Editor - Wednesday, November 2nd, 2016
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By John Helmer, Moscow Henry Kissinger has been elected a foreign member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, according to an announcement last Friday. He is the first American member of the Academy’s Department of Global Problems and International Relations. He is also the first Russian academician to have been charged with war crimes and […]

by Editor - Wednesday, November 2nd, 2016
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By John Helmer, Moscow Investigators searching for $3 billion in funds missing from Trust Bank of Moscow, the biggest Russian bank fraud in history, have found Benedict Worsley, the Cyprus-based manager of the bank’s offshore operations, at a heavily fortified house in the south of France, where he is guarded by British gunmen formerly employed […]

by Editor - Sunday, October 30th, 2016
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By John Helmer, Moscow  It’s the job of the Dorchester doorman to know his hotel guests’ sins; cater to them discreetly; but  keep them under his top-hat, forever secret. During more than a decade of Sergei Frank’s trips to London to direct High Court litigations against the men he succeeded at Sovcomflot, the Russian state […]

by Editor - Thursday, October 27th, 2016
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By John Helmer, Moscow In the first tale of the thieves’ picnic, published by Leslie Charteris in 1937,a gang of robbers, kidnappers, and smugglers starts to fall apart over a $2 million lottery ticket one of the thieves stole from the gang’s pot. The detective who recovers the ticket, and rescues a diamond-cutter who’d been […]

by Editor - Wednesday, October 26th, 2016
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By John Helmer, Moscow In the war against Russia, the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Bob Dylan is a sideshow, although the Swedish Academy is doing what it can to elevate his monosyllabic rhyming to a moral high ground whose only precedent is the Norwegian award of the Nobel Prize for Peace […]

by Editor - Thursday, October 20th, 2016
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By John Helmer, Moscow Canadian governments are often portrayed as Dudley Do-Right, a caricature member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in the 1960s television cartoon series, who was always trying to do good; never caught the villain, never got satisfaction from the girl. That was because Dudley had less brains than his horse, who […]

by Editor - Monday, October 17th, 2016
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By John Helmer, Moscow The Kremlin has dropped a fish and meat bomb on New Zealand. The casualties are reported to be women, children and the elderly forced to eat food formerly sold to Russia; together with fishermen and farmers whose annual income of US$100 million from exports to Russia has been lost since the […]

by Editor - Thursday, October 13th, 2016
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By John Helmer, Moscow In war it’s a commonplace to say it’s the winner who tells the story. It’s less well understood that the story doesn’t win the war. In other words, war is won on the field by force. Info-war decides what people, who don’t fight, don’t vote, and don’t count, think afterwards. Afterwards […]

by Editor - Tuesday, October 11th, 2016
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