Jimmy Carter may be envious: One week after Russian President Vladimir Putin took complaints about inflation on a televised town hall-style show, Russia's top food companies agreed to a government plan to freeze prices. The store tab for bread, eggs, vegetable oil and sugar will be frozen through the end of January, along with the price of some cheese and milk products .The Kremlin called the producers' agreement voluntary, but some economists criticized the move as a return to Soviet policies. Then again, price freezes weren't terribly effective for the Carter administration either.

While the government worked to control inflation, a Switzerland-based commodities trading company has reportedly stepped into a battle for control of the Russian oil firm Russneft. A Russian billionaire, Oleg Deripaska, has been lobbying Moscow alone to buy Russneft since mid-summer. But a second bidder stepped into the fray this week. Reuters initially named the mystery bidder as either Russia's richest man, Roman Abramovich, who used to own an oil company, or Lakshmi Mittal, a steel magnate born in India. The Financial Times, however, says the bidder is the Swiss company Glencore. Russneft's former owner, Mikhail Gutseriyev, fled Russia in August after Moscow hit him with an $800 million bill for back taxes and an arrest warrant.

And problems in another oil patch: According to several news sources, the United States banned Russian company Lukoil from further developing Iran's Anaran field. Lukoil had bought a stake in the field from Norway's Norsk Hydro in 2003. But Lukoil later bought some 2,000 gas stations from Getty, which has opened the way for U.S. authorities to impose sanctions.

Better news in outer space, where one American woman has been piloting a Russian spacecraft to the International Space Station. The astronauts added a room to the space station and attended the birth of the first creatures conceived in space. The creatures--33 to be exact--were cockroaches. Mother and children were reportedly doing fine.

But alas, no movement on the inter-country adoption front.