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

French Open semifinalist Nikolai Davydenko will be hoping for a home crowd boost at this week's St. Petersburg Open after a disappointing third-round finish at the Madrid Masters on Thursday.

Freed by warming, waters once locked beneath ice are gnawing at coastal settlements around the Arctic Circle.

A United Nations agency smacked Hollywood last week with a rolled-up parchment, adopting a ""cultural diversity"" convention that says countries may subsidize or shelter their local creative industries.

In the past two weeks, U.S. President George W. Bush's administration has launched a concerted attempt to translate its pro-democracy rhetoric into action in two little-known Eurasian countries whose importance is about to soar.

Alexander Yakovlev, the Politburo member in charge of ideology who has been called the architect of perestroika, died last week. One month earlier to the day, the former editor of the newspaper Moskovskiye Novosti, Yegor Yakovlev, passed away. Yegor Yakovlev was known as the foreman of perestroika. In the interim, Moskovskiye Novosti was sold for the third time in the past two years.

Last week the ultra-nationalist newspaper Zavtra ran an interview with Vladimir Kvachkov, who has been charged in the attempted murder of Unified Energy Systems CEO Anatoly Chubais. In the interview Kvachkov, a retired special forces colonel, basically made the case for the necessity of a military coup in Russia. While Kvachkov didn't come out and admit his guilt, he asserted that the attempt on Chubais' life was ""the first case of armed action in a war of national liberation"" which every officer and soldier was duty bound to fight.

After passing through Mexico and Cuba, where it caused heavy flooding, the storm makes landfall in the United States.