A brief look at the stories making headlines in the Russian-language press

This past spring, in the May/June issue of Foreign Affairs magazine, Richard Pipes of Harvard University drew on public opinion data to argue that Russians don't want democracy.

Not content with their frontal assault on the Yukos oil major and its majority owner, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, on various tax evasion and fraud charges, the authorities are apparently considering pressing home their flanking attack on the group by filing a claim for back taxes against its main production unit, Yuganskneftegaz.

Iraqi National Guardsmen surrounded the sacred Imam Ali shrine in the city of Najaf on Tuesday and were just meters away from the holy site, where militants fighting U.S. forces have been holed up for weeks, Iraqi Defense Minister Hazem Shaalan said.

British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw toured a sprawling refugee camp in the conflict-ravaged Darfur region Tuesday, and said the Sudanese government must vastly improve security in its effort to tackle what the United Nations describes as the world's worst humanitarian crisis.

U.S. President George W. Bush said for the first time Monday that a television advertisement attacking Senator John Kerry's war record should be stopped, along with all other political ads run by independent groups.