EXPERIMENTS SUCCESSFUL AND NOT SO SUCCESSFUL The first attempt was made a year ago by the Emergency Exit publishing house. In the Inner Voice series, four books of three thousand copies each were published; the publishing house boasted of sold-out editions, promised reprints, but then somehow went sour.

VBD – Troika Dialog Troika Dialog has downgraded its recommendation on Wimm-Bill-Dann (WBD) ADS from “buy” to “hold,” keeping the fair price at $45.04. The company’s shares have risen sharply in price after the publication of excellent results for the first quarter of 2006, analysts explain the downgrade. This week, WBD announced the appointment of two new heads of the beverage division. Silviu Popovici has been appointed head of the division, and Leonid Yushin – commercial director.

Two months ago it became known that MTS , VimpelCom and Megafon introduced a fee for connecting to each other's subscribers in the amount of 0.95 rubles per call. All other operators will have to pay the players of the "big three" 1.1 rubles for connecting to their numbers. Having learned about this, regional mobile operators complained to the FAS.

Mazeikiu nafta shares are being acquired for $1.4 billion by Poland's PKN Orlen, and the former Yukos Finance executives have verbally agreed with representatives of the Slovak Ministry of Economy to sell their stake in Transpetrol for more than $100 million. Yukos's bankruptcy trustee Eduard Rebgun tried to prevent GML from receiving the money and replaced Misamore and Godfrey with managers loyal to him.

Lieutenant General Dan Halutz made his investment decision two hours after the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers, which became the pretext for the start of the Lebanese campaign, the Maariv newspaper reported. According to the newspaper, he called his broker at Bank Leumi just as the political and military leadership of Israel, with the direct participation of the general, was deciding whether to start a war with Lebanon or not.

The opening of country restaurants with an average bill of 30-50 euros on the coast of the Gulf of Finland is considered a new trend in the Committee for Economic Development, Industrial Policy and Tourism that emerged last year. According to the district administration, two new restaurants opened in the Kurortny District this year (Russkaya Rybalka and Dacha415), and three last year (Zolotaya Orda, Atlantis and Makrel).

For some reason I was upset. And all because I recently happened to look through the modern photo products of one Russian news agency. In printed publications these pictures are diluted with advertising and are not very noticeable. And so they create a fairly indicative picture of the life of the country or, more precisely, how the life of the country appears in its official coverage. And what did you think? What if tomorrow we all die from a giant meteorite.

"The reception quality was not always good even in Moscow, where Megafon tried to launch this service. At the same time, mobile TV is quite expensive, since the subscriber must pay both for viewing and for GPRS traffic. SMARTS wants to maintain leadership in its regions, trying to be original, but the consumer is not yet ready to pay big money to watch TV programs on a mobile phone," Sayapina believes.

This year, TD Narodny will develop a project outside the Nizhny Novgorod Region for the first time. In the capital of Chuvashia, Cheboksary, the holding is starting construction of a 10,000 sq. m shopping center, the owner of the holding, Vasily Pushkin, told Vedomosti. The supermarket will occupy up to 1,500 sq. m, the remaining space will be occupied by stores selling related products. According to Pushkin, investments in the project will amount to about 200 million rubles of borrowed funds.

Rospotrebnadzor, the agency of Gennady Onishchenko, who has become a prominent figure in Russian foreign policy, recently found itself under surveillance. The Prosecutor General's Office said that during comprehensive inspections it had uncovered numerous violations committed by Rospotrebnadzor's territorial offices. The issue concerns counterfeit trade, which prosecutors believe the agency is not paying due attention to.

Novokuibyshevsk Novatek-Polymer published its financial statements for the second quarter of 2006, in which the company's loss amounted to 132 million rubles with revenue of 323.2 million rubles. The company explained such financial results by increased competition in the PVC market and a decrease in demand for Polilen brand insulation materials.

The world has become accustomed to terrorists. The latest opinion poll in Britain (commissioned by the Spectator) found that the population is ready for stronger anti-terrorism measures; 73% agreed that “the West is in a global war with Islamic terrorists who threaten our way of life”, and only 8% believed that the West was winning this war. 69% believed that the police should be given the power to detain suspects for up to 90 days without charge, rather than being bound by a 28-day limit.

The war in the Middle East has sharply worsened Israel's television image on Russian channels. Only a few reports can be considered positive towards Israel (this is two times less than towards Hezbollah). These are the conclusions contained in a report by Medialogiya, which, at the request of Vedomosti, examined the television broadcasts of six Russian channels, including Channel One, Russia Channel and NTV. The study was conducted in July – the first ten days of August.

Yesterday, at a government meeting, Gref reminded the oilmen of a story from a year ago. In September 2005, the heads of the largest oil companies – Lukoil, TNK-BP, Rosneft, Sibneft, Surgutneftegaz and Tatneft – after a meeting with the Minister of Energy and Industry Viktor Khristenko promised not to raise prices for oil products on the domestic market until the end of the year. And since January, prices have been creeping up again.

The Central Bank's gold and foreign exchange reserves have been growing since May 1999 and have increased more than 20-fold in seven years. The Central Bank managed to accumulate the most in 2004 – almost $48 billion, but this year the old record was broken back in April.