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

Everyone's heart should go out this weekend to the millions of people whose lives have been thrown into turmoil as the second devastating hurricane of the year hits the U.S. Gulf Coast.

Since the Orange Revolution, Ukraine seems in many respects to have left its giant neighbor to the east behind. But there is at least one thing that the new Ukrainian government can learn from Russia.

As Iraq moves toward a referendum on its new constitution just three weeks from now, many of its senior politicians readily concede that the charter is seriously flawed, and that its approval may worsen rather than alleviate the relentless violence.

One day, Vladimir Vladimirovich™ Putin was sitting in his Kremlin office thinking up questions for his annual conversation with the people of Russia.

Urals Energy Posts H1 Loss Urals Energy Public, a British oil company with assets in Russia, reported a net loss of $1.145 million for the first half of the year, when cold weather halted tanker shipments of crude oil from its Sakhalin unit. Ural Energy, which sold shares for $131 million in an initial public offering in August, did not give results for a year earlier. The company's was 2 cents per share, Urals Energy said Friday in a statement. First-half revenue was $28 million. Of that, 59 percent came from crude oil exports and 26 percent from domestic product sales. (Bloomberg) Severstal in Erdemir Bid ISTANBUL -- Steelmaker Severstal has joined with Turkish partners including the Nurol group to bid for a 49 percent stake in Erdemir, Turkey's state-run steelmaker, the Ankara-based Privatization Administration said.

Brewery Baltika, controlled by Scottish & Newcastle and Carlsberg, may have intensified minority shareholders' anger with a statement this month that was aimed at soothing concerns.