The capital's power engineers warned today: due to the sharply increased consumption of electricity, a planned blackout of some Moscow enterprises may follow. And although the Moscow Stock Exchange could not get into the “dark” list, its leaders decided on Tuesday to terminate trading early. All operations were suspended at 14:00 until the morning of January 18 - so that in case of failures the transactions would not have to be invalidated.

The State Duma approved the Law “On the Special Economic Zone in the Kaliningrad Region and on Amendments to Certain Legislative Acts of the Russian Federation” on December 23 last year, and now, signed by the President, it comes into force. According to the document, special customs and tax regimes and a special procedure for entry and registration in the region begin to operate in the region.

Today Sergei Ivanov commented on the situation with the attempts by the Ukrainian side to seize lighthouses belonging to the Russian Black Sea Fleet.

The Ukrainian authorities responded to ((http://www.newsru.com/russia/17jan2006/flot.html statement)) the Russian Minister of Defense that, while guarding Russian facilities, our military has the right to open fire to kill. First Deputy Head of the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry Vladimir Ogryzko promised to investigate the legality of the carrying of weapons by the Russian military on the territory of Ukraine.

If you want to kill a neighbor or shoot from a window at moving targets, then you FIRST get a rifle and only THEN kill - silently or with wild screams. But who does the OPPOSITE: screams “I’ll kill you, just let me arm myself”? An attempt to understand the mysterious soul of the Iranian president is not so much a political analysis as it is a desire to unravel a tantalizing logical puzzle.

The original idea was born last fall during the visit of the Swedish Minister of Defense to Moscow.

As it became known this morning, a foreign fishing vessel, carrying a crew of 12 Russian sailors, sank on Tuesday in the Strait of Tartary, separating the mainland from Sakhalin. Rescuers from the Ministry of Emergency Situations found the bodies of 7 dead. Due to a strong storm in the Strait of Tartary, ferry traffic between Sakhalin and the mainland was stopped. Search and rescue operations are continued by 4 sea vessels.

Materials sent to the court by mail did not reach the addressee. Therefore, today Khodorkovsky’s lawyer Yuri Schmidt again filed a complaint against the actions of the Federal Penitentiary Service, which sent his client to serve his sentence in the Chita region.