The Moscow Arbitration Court ordered a linguistic examination of the claim of the Inteko company filed against the Russian edition of Forbes magazine, Kommersant writes. Three experts must decide within two months whether the December article about Elena Baturina contained information discrediting the business reputation of Inteko.

Director of the FSB of Russia Nikolai Patrushev said that it was possible to detain the persons who were preparing the assassination attempt on the Governor of St. Petersburg Valentina Matvienko thanks to the operational information received by the special services. The director of the Russian FSB confirmed that the detainees are religious extremists and “were seriously preparing for the crime - two grenades and half a kilogram of explosives were confiscated from them,” Izvestia writes.

US President George W. Bush, in an interview with Reuters, asked why Putin thinks Russia is moving towards democracy. "He thinks that Russia is moving towards democracy. Obviously there are big doubts about this, and I would like to ask him why he thinks that his country is on the way to democracy. Sometimes I think that this is not the case at all ...I want to tell Vladimir Putin that there is a better path to democracy and that his interests lie in the West," Bush said.