Changing political status

Late but true

Dangerous art

Found treasure

Total Control
Famous Russian sports model
Trevelling for a job
A very historical date

Changing political status

A. On Monday Barack Obama will urge a bruised America to renew itself by re-winning its founding principle of opportunity equality, in the second presidential inauguration ceremony. Addressing a crowd expected to total half the 1.8 million who made a pilgrimage to Washington for his swearing-in four years ago, Mr Obama will try to set a purposeful tone for his final four years in power. “This country’s gone through some very tough times before,” he said in a video message released by the White House in advance of the ceremony. “But we always come out on the other side.” Amid terrible unemployment, he said there was “nothing that can stop America” when its people had a “fair goal” to “get a great education, get a good job, look after their kids and get some basic security”. Mr Obama will speak on Martin Luther King Day, 50 years after the civil rights leader’s rousing address at the end of his March on Washington.

B. Britain may face a flood of Romanian and Bulgarian economic migrants as in December, work permit restrictions for Romanian and Bulgarian economic migrants end, and the European Union labour market is thrown open to them. British ministers, conscious of how wrong the last government got it over Polish immigration in 2004, are refusing to reveal their projections of how many migrants may come to the UK, although one Conservative MP has estimated it to be as high as 425,000. Unexpected or not, there is a mixed opinion.

C. In the highly anticipated interview on the Oprah Winfrey Network, disgraced US cyclist Lance Armstrong admitted that he used performance-enhancing drugs to win all seven of his Tour de France titles. In the pre-recorded interview Oprah Winfrey asked the disgraced cyclist: “In your opinion was it humanly possible to win the Tour de France without doping, seven times in a row?” “Not in my opinion,” replied Armstrong. Wearing a blue blazer and open-neck shirt, Armstrong was direct and matter-of-fact. “I view this situation as one big lie that I repeated a lot of times,” said Armstrong. He escaped a few questions and refused to implicate anyone else. “I don’t want to necessarily talk about anybody else, I made my decisions, they are my mistake and I’m sitting here today to acknowledge that and to say I’m sorry for that,” he told Oprah. Either way, a story that seemed too good to be true – cancer survivor returns to win one of sport’s hardest events seven times in a row – was revealed to be just that.

D. The government of the Falklands has set a date for a referendum on the future sovereignty of the islands.On March 10, 2011 Islanders will go to vote on a simple yes or no question: “Do you wish the Falkland Islands to retain their current political status as an Overseas Territory of the United Kingdom?” The Government of the Falkland Islands has arranged for outside observers to monitor the referendum in order to prove it is free and fair. Argentina claims British forces stole the territory from them 180 years ago and have ruled it as a colony ever since. Islanders have predicted an overwhelming vote for “yes.” The authorities in the Falklands hope the vote to send a firm message to Argentina that islanders want to remain British.

E. Doctors were battling to save the eyesight of the director of Moscow’s world famous Bolshoi Theatre following a horrific acid attack in the street outside his home. Sergei Filin was returning home from a reception to mark the 150th birthday of famed director Konstantin Stanslavsky at about 11pm on Thursday night when the attack happened. Speaking from his hospital bed on Friday, Mr Filin said he was just getting out of his car near his home when he was approached by an unknown man who shouted at him and then threw acid in his face. “I got scared and I thought he was going to shoot me,” a bandaged Mr Filin said in an interview with Russia’s REN TV. “I turned to run, but he raced ahead of me.” The 42 year-old former ballet star said his attacker was wearing a mask and scarf to cover his face.

F. Chinese PR officers have been instructed to step-up their online activities and tap into the social-media revolution to spread “positive energy” across the Internet. Beijing’s propaganda chief gave the order at a meeting on Thursday, according to a report in the Beijing News. Beijing’s “2.06 million” propaganda workers “should make more efforts in opinion guiding on hot topics”. It is said in an apparent reference to 60,000 directly employed propaganda officials and 2 million informal collaborators, likely including students and Party members. By expanding its presence on social media sites, the Communist Party would be able to “handle hot topics effectively, strengthen the online mainstream public opinion and improve the ‘ecology’ of online public opinion.” Referring to Weibo, China’s answer to Twitter, propaganda officials should: ‘Browse on Weibo, set up Weibo accounts, send Weibo messages and study Weibo.’ Beijing appeared to tighten its control over the internet by announcing new regulations that, if necessary, would require users to register their real names before using the service.

G. An amateur prospector has discovered a massive gold nugget in Australia, worth an estimated AUS $300,000 (£200,000). The man, who wants to remain anonymous, located it with a metal detector in Ballarat, in the state of Victoria. It has not been revealed exactly where the nugget, which weighs 177 ounces, was found but Ron Wheaton at Ballarat Goldfields outdoor museum says it is likely there is more gold in the region. “If you research where the gold has been in the past, yes, there’s gold to be found in Ballarat,” said Mr Wheaton. Cordell Kent, owner of The Mining Exchange Gold Shop in Ballarat, who is selling the nugget on the finder’s behalf, says it was one of the most significant in his 20 years in the business.

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Peter the Great

Born in Moscow, Russia on June 9, 1672, Peter the Great was a Russian czar in the late 17th

Gerard Depardieu ‘building a wooden house so he can go fishing in Russia’

Gerard Depardieu, the French actor who took Russian citizenship after a tax dispute earlier this month, has already started building himself a home in his adopted country, a top Russian film official has said. Depardieu, who has been in the centre of the heated debate on tax exiles as France’s Socialist government looks to rise tax levels for the wealthy, was attracted to Russia not for its 13 percent flat tax rate, but for the fishing, according to the official.

“Depardieu said in his letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin that he would like to buy a little house near Moscow,” Nikolai Borodachev, director of the state film archive Gosfilmofond, said in one of his interviews on Friday. “When he saw our countryside, birch trees, ponds with wild ducks swimming on them, where you can go fishing, he decided to settle here.” The star of Cyranо de Bergerac was so taken with the Russian countryside that he bought a plot of land in Belye Stolby, a village outside Moscow, long before Vladimir Putin handed him a passport earlier this month, Borodachev said.

“Gerard chose the plot himself. And he asked me to start building a big beautiful house, which has to be made of wood,” he said. Work on the house apparently began in August. Borodachev, who claims Depardieu as a close friend, revealed that the Frenchman set his sights on Russian citizenship a full three years before the current scandal around taxes.

“Depardieu never ran from taxes, and has already paid the French treasury 145 million euros. He talked about his desire to take Russian citizenship three years ago, when there was no law on the new tax. Even then, he wanted to live in Russia,” Borodachev said.

“He likes that in Russia you can easily communicate, regardless of class or social status. He says that he has never seen such internal freedom as there is in Russia in any other country,” he added.

Belye Stolby is in some senses a natural choice for the actor. It also houses the national film archive that Boradachev presides over, and it is just 25 minutes from the city’s busiest airport – giving the former Oscar nominee plenty of opportunity to slip back into the celebrity life style he is accustomed to. But apparently the most important consideration for the actor is the fishing.

Depardieu has also been offered a house in Mordovia, a relatively poor region known mostly for its prison colonies that he visited during his inaugural trip as a Russia citizen earlier this month.

That gift from the regional government was not Depardieu's idea, and is still under discussion, according to Borodachev. But if he does take the offer, he will want to be near the water.

“If he wants to live there they will give him a little cottage outside Saransk next to a pond so he could sit with a fishing rod,” said Borodachev. “The countryside there is very beautiful.”

To cement his status as a committed citizen, Depardieu is said to be planning to release gift versions of Russian cartoons and present them to orphans and sick children. Boradachev said there is already a script for a historical drama about Catherine the Great in which Depardieu will play cossack rebel Yemelyan Pugachev.

A 7 Gerard Depardieu has already started to build a Russian house.