Free Republic

Russian officials voiced fear Wednesday that the rise of the Republican party could threaten President Barack Obama’s “reset” of relations with Russia. “We all understand the reason for this [defeat]: disappointment that Obama isn’t a magician,” said Sergei Markov, a senior legislator from the ruling United Russia party. “ Unlike voters in the U.S., we in Russia already knew he wasn’t a magician.” He and other Russian officials voiced fear that the rise of the republican party could threaten Mr. Obama’s “reset” of relations with Russia. On Wednesday, the chairman of a key committee in the Russian parliament said it...

It seems to be a math problem to figure out map coordinates where Eigen is a vector of some sort. User name Cauchy3 on Stratics.com is making what he calls poems, it seems to be map coordinates and targets of some sort: Here is his latest ‘poem’: Cauchy3-chain-Eigen values… Markov chains consider two cases. Go to lands with purely honors take the zeroes. Heck to jacks are ones. Know it all but take the good. How Markov chain become multiplications identities. Causes the cases are ones or zeroes. Jacks in boxes are all with zeroes. Both when times up take...

On October 15 in Moscow, officials from the presidential administration and other Kremlin-connected figures hosted a "Forum on Democracy and Multiculturalism in the Euro-East." The participants included representatives of Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Transnistria, and Karabakh, activists of pro-Russia parties and associations from several post-Soviet countries, and Moscow figures who -- according to Kremlin consultant Gleb Pavlovsky, speaking at the Forum -- "play a major if often shadowy role in developing Russia's real policy" (Regnum, October 15). Outlining geopolitical challenges and opportunities to Russia, Pavlovsky noted that the United States is focusing its hostile attention on Belarus, "our basic military-political ally."...

London umbrella assassin is named Jack Hamilton, Sofia and Tom Walker THE IDENTITY of the secret agent who assassinated Georgi Markov, the Bulgarian dissident, with a poison pellet umbrella on Waterloo Bridge in London has finally been revealed. Leaked intelligence documents have named Francesco Giullino, a Dane of Italian origin who worked for the Bulgarian secret service, as the hitman who carried out the murder 26 years ago. The new evidence is likely to prompt fresh inquiries from Scotland Yard, which has kept an open file on the notorious cold war killing. Giullino, now 59, is named in Bulgarian secret...

Fears grow that extremists are ready to cross another threshold of terror Evidence gathered in Iraq and Afghanistan lends credence to claims that radical Islamic groups are dabbling in lethal toxins BEIRUT: A few days ago, Japanese prosecutors demanded the death sentence for the guru of the Aum Shinrikyo (Supreme Truth) doomsday cult, Shoko Asahara, for masterminding the sarin gas attack on Tokyo’s subway system on March 20, 1995. Twelve people were killed and 2,500 sickened. A year earlier, sect activists had released sarin in a residential neighborhood in the Nagano Mountains, killing seven people. Those atrocities crossed a moral...