Just after Christmas, the container ship Altona, bound for China and carrying a load of 770,000 pounds of uranium concentrate (also known as yellowcake, the transportable form of uranium that will eventually be processed into nuclear fuel), ran into a storm in the South Pacific, between Hawaii and the Midway Islands. After three days of gales and heaving seas, the crew discovered that the containers in the hold had shifted and two drums of yellowcake had been smashed open. There was loose uranium in the hold.
From the mid-1980s, Hungarian-born investor and philanthropist George Soros pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into foundations in Eastern Europe dedicated to promoting the idea of the "open society" and challenging the region's Soviet-backed regimes. Since then his Open Society Institute has evolved into a network of foundations and offices working in over 60 countries. Here, writing exclusively for CNN.com, he describes how the work of his foundations ultimately contributed to the collapse of communism.
"Global declines in press freedom" persisted last year, with setbacks highlighted in Israel, Italy, Taiwan, Hong Kong and elsewhere across the world, an annual survey said Friday.
Georgia's president said Tuesday his nation would withdraw from the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), an alliance of former Soviet republics.
A Defense Department report warns of the possibility that exotic drugs or implants could create a fearsome new enemy
The Soviet Union may be in the dustbin of history, but there's one place the socialist utopia lives on: cyberspace.
The eight-game junior Super Series that began today in Ufa, Russia with Canada's 4-2 win marks the 35th anniversary of the seminal 1972 Canada-Soviet Union Summit Series. It's the brainchild of Vladislav Tretiak -- the legendary USSR goaltender who played in '72 --and a tremendous event between two proud hockey nations. Of course, this venture cannot come close to replicating the context of that original series, but the juniors who compete nation-versus-nation gives further evidence of what that original meeting spawned: an intense hockey rivalry between Canada and Russia.
I can tell you that some things in Russia may never change. No more than 10 minutes after we landed, my colleague walked through immigration only to have a male immigration officer query her single status and ask "Why no husband?"
We landed in Leningrad in early September. The sun was golden. When you're that far north it has a funny way of slanting and casting everything in a glow that is hard to capture in photos or paintings.
I never intended to study Russian. It was a total accident. Well sort of. I had taken four years of French in high school, and still, mysteriously, was unable to pass the French competency exam when I got to college.
The island is called Vozrozhdeniye. Lodged between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan in the Aral Sea, it is among the most godforsaken outposts of the Cold War. And for precisely that reason it became, ear...
Pearl Harbor, Roseanne, the Soviet Union: Bigger isn't always better. According to a recent report by Booz-Allen & Hamilton, megacorporations are no exception. The study found that only 55% of larg...
-- Henry Kissinger, 71, ex-Secretary of State, speaking to the Economic Club of New York, on political prospects in the former Soviet Union: "In 500 years, no Russian leader has ever left office vo...
IT TAKES A LOT of hard work in this age of slow growth and lowered expectations to capture a few yards of ground. But for the persistent -- among them, automakers, heavy-equipment manufacturers, an...
THE COMMONWEALTH of Independent States (CIS) is in even worse shape than you think. Sure, the former Soviet Union's economy is disintegrating, but that may not be its biggest problem. After 74 year...
& GEORGE MCGOVERN, 69, former U.S. Senator and 1972 Democratic presidential nominee, on all the government regulations that contributed to the bankruptcy of his Stratford (Connecticut) Inn: ''First...
THE OLD SOVIET UNION is still a potential superpower -- in oil. The independent republics, particularly Russia, may well have up to a quarter of the world's undiscovered oil, about equal to what's ...
Never give up a good grudge is the present combatant's guiding principle, instantly invoked upon reading the news from St. Petersburg a while back. The news was grim. It told of ominous leaks of ra...
LIKE Christopher Columbus, Mikhail Gorbachev set out for one place but reached another and never quite knew where he was when he got there. What he did do, however, was change the world. The goals ...
Once again, the Soviet Union is threatening Europe, not with arms this time but with the specter of a potentially devastating economic implosion. In the nightmare scenario, Europeans could spend hu...
CALL IT the new New Europe. In a breathtaking rendezvous on the eve of 1992, the drive for a unified market has converged with the fall of communism to make Europe a far bigger and more competitive...
KENNETH OLSEN, 65, president of Digital Equipment, translating the microscopic inscription that company engineers inscribed on chips in Digital computers used in the Soviet Union, where manufacture...
Hey, fellows, guess what. It is now acceptable to say the Soviet Union was ''evil.'' It became so on Sunday, August 25, or at least that is when we first noticed this latest wonderful wobble in the...
How itchy is your trigger finger? With events in the Soviet Union unfolding at CNN speed, have you been buzzing your broker every five minutes? Hold the phone. While momentous happenings have a ter...
SELLING/COVER STORY 46 HOW SAM WALTON DOES IT Having built a multibillion-dollar fortune, America's most successful merchant can now do what he likes. That's why he's out there every day barnstormi...
BORIS YELTSIN never actually said the words across the top of this page, at least not within earshot of this writer. But he might as well have. Everything the Russian President and his new partner,...
Business is always personal, but especially so in Eastern Europe, where daunting bureaucracy and changing ground rules can spook even veteran investors from abroad. In such a climate, knowing the r...
The only thing rising as fast as prices in the Soviet Union is the number of reported crimes. They rose 50% between 1985, the year Gorbachev took power, and the end of 1990, and are expected to con...
THE NEW ENTENTE between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. is probably in better shape than many people think. The trouble is that the Soviet economy is in even worse shape than they think. Mikhail Gorbache...
Xenophobia has made a comeback in Soviet political debate, even as the Kremlin pushes a plan to at least double the price of many consumer goods. Once loquacious foreigners have grown tight-lipped,...
Here are some of the places that foreign aggressors have annexed. -- Cambodia (pop. seven million): Vietnam invaded in 1979; still supports a puppet regime. -- East Timor (pop. 700,000): Indonesia ...
IT'S MORNING and a light snow is falling on Malaya Kalitnikovskaya Street in Moscow's working-class Taganskaya neighborhood. Outside the local shoe store, in an all too familiar ritual, a line of s...
IT WAS A TYPICALLY GRAY, overcast December day in Moscow. He had just come from addressing the 542-member Supreme Soviet. He had answered questions from the floor -- some barbed and critical, other...
THE SOVIET ECONOMY and chaos,'' growled an irate Muscovite as he slammed back a shot of black-market vodka, chasing it with a piece of bread his wife had spent 20 minutes in line that morning to bu...
Europeans are worried that they will soon face a new Soviet menace: a flood of refugees. This winter, living conditions in the U.S.S.R. are sure to deteriorate and food will be scarce -- the nation...
IT'S THRILLING to have a front-row seat on history-in-the-making -- even if just for an inning or two. For me, that opportunity came last month when I was invited by U.S. Secretary of Commerce Robe...
WHAT SORT OF U.S. investment do the Soviets want most? When Mikhail Gorbachev greeted 14 American CEOs led by Commerce Secretary Bob Mosbacher in a chandeliered Kremlin meeting room last month, he ...
A rare U.S. presidential trade mission to the Soviet Union hit Moscow in the midst of the most dramatic political and economic crisis since 1917. Commerce Secretary Robert Mosbacher and 15 top Amer...
MEET the Soviet Lee Iacocca. Fifteen months ago Artem Tarasov, a self- proclaimed ''ruble millionaire,'' seemed headed for bankruptcy -- or worse. The Ministry of Finance had confiscated the assets...
The Soviet Union's industrial backwardness has had a deadly effect on the country's battle against AIDS. Ogonyok, a popular weekly Soviet magazine, has begun a campaign to tell citizens of the dang...
COMMUNISM HAS IMPLODED. In country after country, it is proclaiming its own failure, desperately searching for ''reform'' and new beginnings. Yesterday's heresies are today's official promises; yes...
MANAGING/Cover Story 52 WHO NEEDS A BOSS? Not employees in self-managed teams. They arrange schedules, buy equipment, fuss over quality -- and dramatically boost the productivity of their companies...
The growing appetites for products will come from the Third World, and its ambitions and demands will mimic in most ways everything that has gone before in Western society. Once television is there...
Not many people realize that Japan and the Soviet Union are still technically at war. One of the most significant changes in international relations in the next decade will be the warming of the Ja...
-- The red star and the Cyrillic writing on the back pockets and an accessory in the form of a free screwdriver mark a hot new seller: cotton jeans ($60 and up) from the Soviet Union. The screwdriv...
The world is entering unknown territory. For two out of three living Americans -- and about as many Russians and Europeans -- the bipolar system forged by the cold war is all they have ever known. ...
''Bold and brilliant,'' trumpeted Chicago philosopher Allan Bloom when his former student Francis Fukuyama published ''The End of History?'' in the neoconservative journal The National Interest las...
Most Westerners don't know it. But beneath the shabby surface of the Eastern bloc's markets lies a technological gold mine. Says Gordon Feller, head of Integrated Strategies, a California consultin...
Are you up to the challenge? Beware. Leading the vanguard of global investors doesn't necessarily make for restful nights. When Swedish ball-bearing maker SKF plunged into Russia, its dream of prof...
CALL IT CRAZY. Call it courageous. An American entrepreneur arrived in Moscow not long ago hoping to sell popcorn for microwave ovens, a dicey undertaking in a nation where such devices are all but...
Because we do not have a monetary or banking system in the Soviet Union as you have, I came to the U.S. to study banking practices in the world's biggest market economy. Under the Soviet privatizat...
The Kirov Ballet's . . . program ((includes)) a new ballet that will tell you where the Kirov men are. This week, 32 of them will be running up an aisle of the Metropolitan Opera House and yelling ...
LIKE AMERICAN and Soviet satellites docking in space, a consortium of five giant U.S. companies has joined up with a unique organization drawn from a cross section of the Kremlin's economic bureauc...
CHART: NOT AVAILABLE CREDIT: FIGURES SUPPLIED BY DATA RESOURCES The U.S. still dwarfs Japan as the biggest economy in the world. The list excludes the Soviet Union and its allies because data are u...
DESPITE the bloodshed that has stained China in recent weeks -- and despite continuing political ferment in the Soviet Union -- U.S. chief executives view both nations as vast, potentially valuable...
Contact Dossier makes its debut in October. Despite the somewhat cloak-and- dagger choice of title, it will be a monthly business magazine on joint venture opportunities in the Soviet Union. The jo...
Visitors to the Soviet Union who change their money legally pay $8 for a five- ruble note like this. The black market offers it for $1.60, but that comes with the risk of jail. So what exchange val...
It may be a while before Michael Jackson pitches Pepsi in Russian. But two Madison Avenue ad agencies, Ogilvy & Mather and Young & Rubicam, are forming joint ventures with Soviet counterparts to ma...
TO MANY WESTERN businessmen, the dazzling changes Mikhail Gorbachev has wrought in the Soviet Union have meant just one thing -- a shot at the largest untapped consumer market after the People's Re...
By the time Johnson & Johnson Chairman Jim Burke learned about the earthquake in Armenia from television, the company was already moving to help the victims. Executives had called the U.S. Office o...
-- BORIS GOSTEV, 61, minister of finance for the Soviet Union, on why he may levy new taxes on companies that let pay rise faster than productivity: ''As Keynes said, there's no more destructive po...
Computer companies tired of battling for market share in the U.S. should consider brushing up their Russian. The Soviet Union at last is getting serious about joining the high-tech revolution and p...
Greed is on the march again. No -- strike that. Blathering about greed is on the march. The blather seemed for a while to be focused on insider trading, but the jurisdiction now seems to be expandi...
Nexis, as ever our guide to ideas in the wind, confirms that a large new question has been laid on the table. It concerns legitimacy. Here we allude not to the marital status of various folks' natu...
A PHYSICAL CHILL settled on the 14th century at its very start, initiating the miseries to come. The Baltic Sea froze over twice, in 1303 and 1306-7; years followed of unseasonable cold, storms, an...
The Moscow summit is getting heavy play as a diplomatic event, but it is largely about economics. Missile reductions would benefit both countries' economies, the hard-pressed Soviet Union's most. A...
The old, boxy apartment buildings lining Gorky Street in Moscow bear little resemblance to the elegant mansions on Fifth Avenue in New York. They might even seem shabby to a tourist passing by. But...
Ever the negotiator, Mikhail Gorbachev pitched his plans for joint ventures to about 70 top American executives in Washington during summit week. The deal: He will cut red tape, making it easier fo...
BARELY 100 years after Karl Marx's body was laid in a north London grave, his truth no longer marches on. In all the major developed democracies, and many smaller ones as well, voters in the 1980s ...
''It is 70 years since the unforgettable days of October 1917, those legendary days that started the count of the new epoch of social progress, of the real history of humankind.'' Thus, breathlessl...
THE OUTLINES are clear now. Mikhail Gorbachev is not just trying to perk up the Soviet Union's chronically ailing economic system by motivating managers and getting workers to cut down on vodka. So...
Has Mikhail Gorbachev gone Madison Avenue? Apparently so. The Soviet leader is using imperialist dog-and-pony shows to sell his country's products and politics to the West. In August the U.S.S.R. p...
Soviet expansionism has got certain Washington lawmakers seeing red, but the battlefield is not Afghanistan or Nicaragua. It's Western capital markets. Short of hard currency because of the drop in...
Lenin would be appalled. But PepsiCo announced in early November that it is on the verge of a deal to put Pizza Huts across the Soviet Union, and McDonald's looks close to planting golden arches th...
Q. Can a refugee from Soviet Communism adapt to capitalist America? A. You bet. JUST LOOK at the record of the Russian emigres who began landing on U.S. shores 14 years ago. Though the best-known s...
Do economic sanctions work? Not against South Africa, says President Reagan, so he will probably veto a bill Congress has sent him that would impose sanctions -- mainly bans on certain imports and ...
WHAT ACCOUNTS for the amazing surge in the U.S. standard of living since the end of World War II? Capital, abundant natural resources, and economies of scale in the world's largest developed market...
What should American policy toward the Soviet Union be? Nobody can answer that question without confronting another: What are Soviet intentions? I am not referring to short-term, tactical intention...
Trying to figure out what to do with that 1911 Black Sea/Kuban railway bond Grandpa left you? Tired of using Imperial Chinese government certificates for wallpaper? Take heart, but not much, from t...
The Federal Reserve lowered the discount rate half a point to 6.5%, the lowest in eight years. Cleveland Electric Illuminating Co. and Toledo Edison Corp. won approval for the largest utilities mer...
Four major U.S. banks and one Canadian bank announced they would extend the Soviet Union a $200-million credit facility, which may rise to $400 million, to buy U.S. and Canadian grain. It was the f...
To what extent the Reagan-Gorbachev summit will improve trade relations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union could take weeks, even months, to sort out. For U.S. machine tool makers, suffering ano...
IF ANYONE wonders why Mikhail Gorbachev is pressing so hard to rein in Ronald Reagan's Star Wars defense, he should consider the state of the Soviet economy. It's a mess, and spending to catch up w...
WESTERN correspondents in Moscow call them yukkies -- for young urban Komsomol types (Komsomol is the Young Communist League). They are managers and engineers born during or since World War II, and...
A SOVIET NIGHTMARE is coming true. Despite impressive success in closing its technology gap with the West since the atomic age began in 1945, the U.S.S.R. is in danger of falling further behind in ...
WITH SOME KICKING and screaming along the way, the business managers of the Western world have long since adapted to computers. No sizable capitalist enterprise could be competitive nowadays withou...
INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCES can produce more snores than fireworks, but a meeting in August of some 160 countries to regulate satellite orbit positions promises a kind of Star Wars on earth. The gath...
IN THE BLIZZARD of commentary about the recent elevation of Mikhail Gorbachev, now general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, the word ''reform'' keeps recurring. Many commentators are asking...
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