Word: mikhail
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...morning. TIME religion writer Richard N. Ostling, who's sneaked an advance peak, says U.S. distributor Alfred A. Knopf's million-copy advance printing may be an American record. The $20 hardcover is being put on sale in 35 countries in 21 languages, a commercial feat rivaled only by Mikhail Gorbachev's "Perestroika" and Madonna's teaser "Sex." Ostling, who says many expected repackaged boilerplate from the Holy See, says the Pope's book actually breaks new ground by providing his personal (if unsurprising) views on abortion, Marxism, competing religions and bad things happening to good people. "What he does...
Such a peek was given last week by Mikhail Piotrovsky, since 1992 director of Russia's greatest art institution, the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. While on a trip to the U.S., planning to set up an international funding body for his beleaguered museum, Piotrovsky disclosed that some 700 paintings and 2,000 archaeological objects looted from Germany, many from private collections, have been kept in storage in the Hermitage basements since 1945. Their existence was a state secret, and Piotrovsky himself did not see any of them until 1992. Piotrovsky plans to put 70 of the paintings...
...most accounts, former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev had a miserable job during the last two years of his tenure. But apparently retirement, at least financially, was even worse. His pension: $1.65 a week. That pittance has been boosted to the comparative bonanza of $409. The source of the generosity was Gorby's old rival, Russian President Boris Yeltsin. A rumored explanation: Russians believe Yeltsin is looking ahead to his own days on the dole...
...membership had its privileges. For as little as $55 a year, consumers could twinkle in fellowship with such glitterati as Mikhail Baryshnikov, Ella Fitzgerald and Meryl Streep. All one had to do was wave one's little piece of green, gold or platinum plastic, and waiters and clerks would fawn prettily. Such potent snob appeal once seemed irresistible -- until American Express "cardmembers" began weighing the costs of privilege against the benefits of more plebeian credit cards. While the AmEx elite shelled out annual fees, Discover clients were issued free cards. Amex users had to pay their bills in full each...
With big money presumably to be made in the plutonium trade, some thefts will be inside jobs. Deputy Interior Minister Mikhail Yegorov told Western officials at a conference in Germany that he believed the 6 grams of plutonium found in that country in May had been stolen by officials of the Russian Atomic Energy Ministry. In other cases, Russian gangsters will step in and bribe or coerce those with access to fissionable materials to steal them...