Russia plans to increase gold holdings and diversify the structure of its reserves, seeking alternatives to a weakening dollar.

A Perm court on Sunday night also sanctioned the arrest of four people on charges of causing multiple deaths by negligence and breaking fire safety rules in Friday night’s blaze at the Khromaya Loshad (Lame Horse) nightclub in central Perm.

Russia and India, partners in the so-called BRIC nations, which also include China and Brazil, are looking to boost trade to $10 billion by 2010 and to restore a relationship that has cooled since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Whitney Houston’s concerts in Moscow and St. Petersburg will serve as a rehearsal for the pop diva’s World Tour, which starts in Japan in February 2010.

Governors earn up to 352,000 rubles ($11,900) per month, a figure that surpasses the salaries of President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and is more than double the salary of other ministers.

The most difficult stage of customs union negotiations concerned automotive tariffs, with Belarus agreeing to increase tariffs for dealers to match Russian levels — meaning a large hike in the price of foreign-made cars for Belarussians.

A virus coming from a server based in South Korea “erased” the contents of the Moskovsky Komsomolets web site in 10 minutes, MK web editor Albert Shchegrov, said by telephone Friday.

The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or START, expired Saturday without an agreement on a replacement, despite past promises by President Dmitry Medvedev and his U.S. counterpart Barack Obama that the deadline would be met.

No amount of image building will ever hide the fact that Russia has not yet mastered the art of designing a decent internal-combustion engine, a 19th-century technology.

The ruling, made late last week by the Derbent City Court, also sends a strong message to the Kremlin, which must soon decide whether to reappoint Mukhu Aliyev as the president of the volatile North Caucasus republic.