The big media outlets slowly woke up to the accreditation news this week. There was this story in USA Today and another in the Chicago Tribune, and even a brief notice in the Moscow Times. The New York Times didn't weigh in, but it did have a nice piece on a summer hosting program that I missed when I did my recent round-up.

In business news, Russia's big energy company Gazprom, which has been nudging foreign partners out of exploration deals, signed a deal to bring a new foreign partner in. Gazprom picked Total SA of France to work in the Shtokman gas field in the Russian Arctic. According to a report in Bloomberg, the offshore field may hold enough gas to supply Europe for more than three years. This year, Gazprom has taken over Royal Dutch Shell's Sakhalin-2 project and BP's stake in a Siberian gas field.

Alrosa, the Russian diamond miner that is one of the world's two biggest diamond companies, signed an exploration agreement in Russia with the world's other biggest diamond company, De Beers. According to one news report the deal could help De Beers get around a European Commission antitrust ruling that would have banned it from buying rough diamonds from Alrosa after 2008. Russia accounts for about 20% of the world's rough diamonds.

Here's one for the kids, especially if you have a dinosaur lover in your house. Russian authorities revealed this week that, this past May, a Russian hunter in the Arctic Yamalo-Nenetsk region discovered a 40,000-year-old baby mammoth. According to National Georgraphic, the six-month-old female baby is the most well-preserved example yet found of a mammoth.

And while many people in Sochi are celebrating the Krasnodar city's selection as the site of the 2014 Olympics, at least one group is voicing concern. The New York Times reported that a colony of so-called Old Believers, people who broke with the Russian Orthodox church 300 years ago, are worried that their quiet way of life may be altered by the development needed to host the games.