From Russia, with love :-)

While the jury is still out on the PAC report and the attendant "sanitize-myself-ahead-of-2007" battles for guys in and outside government, something will have to give in the way of openness in the area of capitalization and privatization of some public corporations / parastatals.

You know the Russian orligachs that hoovered around Boris Yeltsin and, in part, continue to hound Vladimir Putin (no hard feelings towards Chelsea fans :-)?

Most of these guys made their kill at the height of the results of the petroiska and other fruits of the glasnost when most souls had their eyes on what they thought was the bigger prize (changes at the Kremlin).

Thus a good number of Russians remain in abject poverty, battling against their biggest silent killer apart from substance abuse - HIV / Aids (much because of the weak moral fabric spawned by an atheistic 70 years-plus past as well as the continent's never-ending "sexual revolution") - and other issues that are spiralling into off-shots of heightened Anti-Semitism (there always has to be someone to blame for some of these things; global and European Jewry in particular has had its unfair share of this down the ages).

Not very different from most post-independent African stories in several respects.

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