Pavel Durov was once hailed as Russia’s answer to Mark Zuckerberg. Now he faces a prison sentence in France. The billionaire co-founder of Telegram, an ultra-secure messaging app with more than 900 million users, is hailed by some as an anti-authoritarian hero and free speech champion who took on the power of Vladimir Putin. Others … Read more
Saif Alrubie is acquitted of sending an intimidating email to Marina Granovskaia – PA/Jordan Pettitt Southwark Crown Court, with its bare plaster walls, threadbare carpets and mice, is a world away from the private members’ clubs, exclusive restaurants and overseas hideaways where football’s biggest names are used to speaking. And yet it was in the … Read more
Esma Cakir, the president of the Foreign Press Association in Italy, peers out from a hidden entrance behind a bookcase in Palazzo Grazioli For the correspondent in Rome, tired of trying to understand the inner workings of Italian politics, relief is now at hand: the prospect of a nice warm bath in a sunken pool. … Read more
As head of two of Russia’s most important musical institutions, the Kirov (later Mariinsky) Opera and Ballet Theater (1976-88) and the Leningrad (later St. Petersburg) Philharmonic Orchestra, of which he was chief conductor for more than thirty years. 1988 Yuri Temirkanov, who has died at the age of 84, was at the foundation of music … Read more