Ruslan Pankratov, the Russian -speaking resident of Latvia, failed to defend the right to write his last name without the Latvian letter "C" in court. The Administrative District Court rejected his complaint on Thursday, and therefore Ruslans Pankratov, the plaintiff will be called further in official documents. “I expected that the court’s decision would be just like that.

In Stockholm on Thursday, the first court session was held in the case of the Russian biologist Andrei Zamyatnin, detained by the Swedish authorities on suspicion of espionage. According to ITAR-TASS, the lawyer of Ula Salomonson, Andrei brought Andrei to the hall of the Stockholm District Court in handcuffs. The court extended the detention of Andrei Zamyatnin until March 16.

The new sponsor of the Russian Bucher literary prize was the international oil and gas company British Petroleum . Earlier, the sponsor of the prestigious prize was the Interregional Public Organization "Open Russia". This was announced on Thursday at a press conference by the chairman of the board of the Russian Booker Foundation Igor Shaitanov. The chairman of the jury was Alexander Kabakov.

In Japan, there was a new leak of information about the armed forces of the country.

The Belarusian special services exposed the activities of the 72nd radical opposition organizations that operated on the territory of Belarus at once. With such a sensational statement, the country's President Alexander Lukashenko spoke on Thursday at the 3rd All-Belorussian People's Assembly. According to him, the KGB covered 72 organizations, seized mobile phones from them, prepared protocols of falsification of elections.

In Oklahom, steppe fires broke out with renewed vigor, which since December last year forced the authorities to periodically evacuate the townsfolk. According to CNN , large -scale fires arose in the south of the state, in the county of Stevens. About 500 inhabitants of local settlements were evacuated, two firefighters received burns during extinguishing, one of them is in the Hospital of Oklahoma City in critical condition.

American psychologists are ready to present the keys to happiness, but it seems that very few people want to be happy, they celebrate with regret. “It is necessary to make certain efforts so that life is happy, but many fail it,” says the author of another study on this subject, psychologist Gregg Istebruck.

In the reserve, 14 dead birds were found on the American Bahamas. This message caused a commotion, because there were fears that the cause of the death of birds was a deadly strain of "bird flu" H5N1. At the same time, the health authorities of the islands are in no hurry to sound the alarm - the tests necessary to finally confirm or refute the presence of the virus in the blood of dead birds are being carried out, reports Russian NY .

With the caution and exaggerated secrecy with which Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert pursues the external policy of Israel is connected by one of the less than the mentioned aspects of the current changes in the government, the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz writes on Thursday. On the eve of Olmert announced that the “ongoing consultations” on Israeli-Russian relations would be secret and are not subject to no publicity.

The snowfall, which began on Thursday in the morning , practically paralyzed the movement of vehicles in the center of Moscow and on the main highways of the city in the evening-peak. As ITAR-TASS reported in the metropolitan traffic control center, now, due to a huge accumulation of cars, there are practically "stand" Tverskaya street, a garden ring.

To the south of Baghdad, unknown people undermined a section of the oil pipeline. The explosive device worked on Wednesday evening on a branch connecting the processing plant in a suburb of the Ed-Dora capital with the El Musab thermal power station, police representatives said on Thursday. After the explosion, a fire arose on the highway. When fire brigades arrived at the scene, fire was opened from automatic weapons - two firefighters received injuries.

The famous French actor Alain Delon was awarded a large medal of the city of Paris. The reward of gilded silver legend of French cinema on Wednesday evening was presented by the mayor of the capital Bertran Delainoe. “The great actor Alain Delon does the honor of Paris,” the mayor said. “Today we are celebrating his huge talent.” The ceremony was attended by actresses Mirere Dark, Natalie Bay and Claudia Cardinal, who were shot with Alena Delon, as well as two of his young children.

Almost 10 times more salt was bought by residents of Moscow during the period of excitement in February. This was announced on Thursday at a press conference by the head of the Department of Food Resources of the capital Alexander Baburin, Interfax reports. "As a rule, Muscovites buy 50-70 tons of salt daily, and about 90 tons during the mass saline," Baburin said. At the same time, he said that during the period of exciting demand, residents of the capital bought 600-700 tons of salt per day.

A plot was selected in Sochi for the construction of a large Olympic village, RIA Novosti was informed on Thursday in the press service of the city of Sochi. “It is planned to build a large Olympic village in the Nizhneimeretinskaya Valley. A land plot of 35 hectares is allocated for these purposes - this should be enough to place 20 thousand people at the same time,” the agency’s interlocutor said.

The exchanges of Eastern Europe this week covered a fever: it seemed as if the stock courses were furious. After on Tuesday, in the afternoon, the scoreboard appeared on the scoreboard about the state of economic activity in the United States, through the Eastern European exchanges, demonstrating rapid growth, a wave of sales swept. In a couple of minutes, the courses of such favorites as the Hungarian bank OTR and the Russian oil concern Lukoil immediately fell by several percent.