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India has a voracious market for asbestos, which is used to make a cement composite used in low-cost building products. Canada sent 69,575 tonnes of asbestos to India in 2010, according to the United Nations Commodity Trade Statistics Database, with a value of $39.1 million (U.S.). The leading supplier to the country, by far, is […]

In a secluded area on the ground floor, six brave young men (three Russians, an Italian, a Frenchman, and a Chinese national) are simulating a mission to Mars. For 520 straight days—that’s more than 17 months—the volunteers will be sequestered in a tubular steel stand-in for a spacecraft whose 775-square-foot living area is so cramped […]

Shortwave radio aficionados developed various hypotheses about the role of the station in Russia’s sprawling, military-communications network. It was a forgotten node, one theory ran, set up to serve some function now lost deep in the bureaucracy. It was a top-secret signal, others believed, that transmitted messages to Russian spies in foreign countries. More ominously, […]

Interview with Mikhail Gorbachev, 80. “I supported Putin during his presidency, and I still support him in many ways today. What troubles me is what the United Russia party, which is led by Putin, and the government are doing. They want to preserve the status quo. There are no steps forward. On the contrary, they […]

For the Russian version of “The Apprentice,” Vladimir Potanin, a metals oligarch worth more than $10 billion, was recruited to be the boss choosing between the candidates competing for the dream job. Potanin goaded, teased and tortured the candidates as they went through increasingly difficult challenges. The show looked great, the stories and dramas all […]

The Federal Security Service (FSB) is in several ways more powerful and more of a threat to individual rights than the KGB was during the Soviet era. The KGB took its orders from the Communist Party, which always kept a close watch on its operations. In contrast, although both Putin and Medvedev have influence over […]

“Five years ago,” said Dmitry Bakhirev, a lawyer for one of the National Socialist Organization defendants, “you would hear about some skinheads beating a Tajik migrant on the metro. Then it became knives and aluminum bats. Then firearms. Soon you will be hearing about machine guns and grenade launchers.”

At first, Salazar’s scheme was bizarrely complex. Among other things, he arranged for the design of a sealed house near the Nike campus in which athletes would sleep in rooms with varied amounts of oxygen. He also used an obscure computer program from Russia that claimed to measure an athlete’s fatigue level using electrodes that […]

Why, years after the cold war, the Kremlin’s still obsessed with getting respect.