Russia has put aside its anger over what it sees as an unfair levy on major deposits held in Cypriot banks, and agreed to support Europe’s bailout of the island by refinancing a major loan to the country. The usually hawkish President Vladimir Putin had no sharp rhetoric for the EU or Cyprus today, but instead confirmed that Russia would backstop the EU bailout by restructuring a €2.5bn loan first extended two years ago.

As England's opening game of Euro 2012 got under way, the travelling army of Three Lions fans were in strong voice in and around the stadium.

Dear Leader's body will be embalmed and put on display in tradition of communist rulers

Pyongyang is ready to suspend its nuclear missile tests if international talks on its atomic programme resume, a spokesman for Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said after his rare meeting yesterday with North Korea's reclusive leader, Kim Jong il.

Vladimir Putin has launched a programme to lionise Pyotr Stolypin, a Tsarist-era Russian prime minister who was known for his ruthless methods. Monuments will be built to the statesman to celebrate the 150th anniversary of his birth and streets and even a university will be renamed after him.

Workers began pulling down the largest statue of Vladimir Lenin in ex-Soviet Central Asia yesterday, sparking outrage from die-hard Communists celebrating the Russian revolutionary's 141st birthday.

On 15 March 1917, the supreme ruler of Russia, the autocratic Tsar Nikolas II, was forced to abdicate in the face of revolution.

The wrecks of three British warships that were intended to forestall a Soviet and German takeover of the Baltic states after 1917's October revolution have been found off the coast of Estonia.

There is no place in literary fantasy as strange as the multiple layers and many cultures of a modern city, seen asquint. This is why, from Moorcock to Gaiman and Mieville, some of the best British fantasy has not dealt with the great Matter of Arthurian Britain, but the Matter of London. Such novels not concerned with heroic quests for the cure for the world's pain so much as the equally huge problem of making a place for human life amid blood, money and filth. China Miéville's first novel, and his first book for young adults, were both stabs at this subject - all his books are, if you see New Crobuzon in the three "Bas-Lag" novels, and the divided Beszel/Ul Qoma of The City and the City as versions of London, just as much as the Invisible Cities of Italo Calvino are all Venice.

In the Bolshevik cabaret

When, in 1990, Near to the Wild Heart was brought to us in a powerful English translation by Giovanni Pontiero, the novel was promoted as by an unknown who was also "one of the major Portuguese-language writers this century". Yet it was already 46 years since its appearance in Brazil, a near half-century in which Clarice Lispector had published five novels and five short-story collections, along with her "bread-and-butter": an impressive quantity of women's columns and literary cronicas, alternating popular and intellectual outlets.

Thirteen years after the collapse of Communism and the systematic toppling of its idols, the Russian city of Novorossiysk is to turn back the clock and erect a monument to the dour Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev.

IT IS universally agreed that finding information on the Web can be damn irritating. It's not impossible, of course. If it was, no one would use it (and we'd be out of jobs).

TONY BLAIR is running a "Leninist" government staffed by at least three ministers with Communist backgrounds, one of Labour's leading left- wingers has warned.