POLITICS
U.S. Vice President Joe Biden began two days of talks with the Russian leadership on Wednesday with a focus on building stronger business ties amid a political thaw.
(Moscow Times, Rossiiskaya Gazeta)
Lawmakers in the southern Russian republic of Chechnya have handed strongman leader Ramzan Kadyrov a new five-year term, unanimously approving the Kremlin nominee in a vote whose outcome was never in doubt.
(Moscow Times)
Social networks were not the cause of the so-called Twitter and Facebook revolutions sweeping the Middle East, but a weapon used to spur them on.
(Kommersant)
ECONOMY & BUSINESS
Hermitage Capital, William Browder's $1.2 billion hedge fund, has filed a suit with the Russian Constitutional Court against the Interior Ministry over a criminal tax investigation opened against the company in 2007.
(Moscow Times)
Russia's second largest bank, VTB, may gain a controlling stake in the Bank of Moscow this week. VTB can buy the shares it needs from Credit Suisse and other minority shareholders, whose overall share amounts to 4.37% of stock.
(Kommersant)
SOCIETY
A frustrated mother has complained that the proceeds from a charity concert in St. Petersburg featuring a solo singing act by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin never reached the child cancer patients they were intended for.
(Moscow Times, Kommersant)
President Dmitry Medvedev signed a law banning minimal prison sentences for 68 criminal offenses.
(Moscow Times, Vedomosti, Rossiiskaya Gazeta)
Yevgeny Chichvarkin, one of London's big-name Russian exiles, sees no prospect for a return to his homeland, despite the Investigative Committee's closure of its case against him in January and the annulment of the warrant for his extradition.
(Moscow Times)
ENVIRONMENT
A new conflict could flare up around a planned Moscow-St. Petersburg toll road as another section of it is scheduled to pass through a national park where construction work is prohibited.
(Kommersant)
ENERGY
The Russian government's plan to curb energy price growth worried foreign investors. They blame officials for "breaking the rules of play."
(Vedomosti)
For more details on all the news in Russia today, visit our website at http://en.rian.ru.
