Still no news on the news we all most want to see, the next round of accreditations, but plenty of other news in Russian business and politics this past week.

Let's start with the latter. On Friday, Russian prosecutors charged one of the country's deputy finance ministers with planning to embezzle $43.4 million. Sergei Storchak, described in news reports as one of Russia's leading liberals, had been arrested the week before. According to the story in The New York Times, Russian media are viewing Storchak’s arrest as an attempt by Russia's security services to influence the country's finance minister, Aleksei L. Kudrin.

World chess champion turned opposition politician Garry Kasparov was arrested in Moscow on Saturday after police broke up an anti-Kremlin rally. The protest march by supporters of Other Russia comes just eight days before Russia's parliamentary elections. Earlier this fall, Russian election officials denied Other Russia's request to run candidates in the election. According to Reuters, some 3,000 people had tried to march to the election commission's headquarters. Also on Saturday, an opposition party candidate who was shot in Dagestan on Wednesday died of his wounds. According to the Jerusalem Post, Farid Babayev, a Yabloko party candidate, was shot four times by unidentified gunmen.

The family of a former KGB officer killed one year ago in London by a radioactive poison is saying that Russia was the likely source of the poison. According to the Associated Press, a lawyer for the family of Alexander Litvinenko said the polonium-210 used to kill him came from a plant called Avangard, 250 miles east of Moscow. Before his death, Litvinenko had been sharply critical of President Vladimir Putin.

Russia has released more details of the manned space center it plans to build in the Russian Far East. Reuters quoted a Russian newspaper as saying that the new center in the Amur region will be called Vostochny. Russian officials said the first launches from the new base would be in 2015. The Russian government now rents the Baikonur space center built by the Soviet Union from the government of Kazakhstan, in which it is located. Russia's other existing launch sites have not been used for manned missions.

And, finally, this head-scratching headline from The Taipei Times: "Communist Party could be Russia's last democratic option".

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