By John Helmer in Moscow If life were a circus, then the only reason a contemplative man would walk behind an elephant in a ring, wielding bucket and shovel, would be for the money, not for the laughs. John Lloyd, a onetime Moscow correspondent of the Financial Times, has made many of his colleagues and […]

by John Helmer - Monday, April 23rd, 2007
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MOSCOW – The Moscow Times published an editorial Friday, which could only have been written by Judas Iscariot. The editorial is a wholesale denunciation of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, demonizing the man as he faces a likely prison sentence if the charges brought against him by Russian prosecutors are proven to be true. Talk about hitting a […]

by John Helmer - Friday, April 2nd, 2004
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By John Helmer Wars usually start with one large lie. Throwing more troops into the breach requires a great many little lies. Wars usually end when the lying can’t staunch the bleeding, and the stench. According to the wife of David Kelly, the Defence Ministry expert on Iraqi weapons, who committed suicide last Friday by […]

by John Helmer - Sunday, July 20th, 2003
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By John Helmer in Moscow When Russians gather to drink, they often offer each other a traditional rhyming toast that can be roughly translated as: “May we have more pies and doughnuts, fewer black eyes and bruises!” It’s a formula which Russia’s most powerful businessmen have been quietly offering the advertising-starved managements of some of […]

by John Helmer - Thursday, July 3rd, 2003
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A great writer who was dying of cancer once told a television interviewer, days before his death, that he had decided to call his cancer Rupert. The reason, he said, was that the media proprietor Rupert Murdoch represented a cancer that was destroying the media world. The remark had both a particular and a general […]

by John Helmer - Monday, February 19th, 2001
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