There were no new accreditations of adoption agencies issued this week, but plenty of news in business, politics and sports. I'm going to start with the latter, because there was a sporting event in Russia this week that included children in orphanages.

According to the RIA-Novosti news agency, there was going to be a soccer tournament today in the western Siberian town of Nefteyugansk involving teams made up exclusively of orphans. City officials said 65 children would take place in the matches, which were to be held in a brand-new stadium in the city. The local games will be a precursor to a Russia-wide playoff, but I couldn't immediately find any information on when or where they would be held. Officials in Nefteyugansk said their goal was to "help the children with social adaptation, and to promote a healthy way of life".

It was Russia vs. Russia at one of the women's semi-finals at the U.S. Open tennis tournament in New York City. Fourth-seeded Svetlana Kuznetsova beat sixth-ranked Anna Chakvetadze. The women's final will take place on Saturday, with Kuznetsova going up against Venus Williams or Justine Henin.

In other news, the BBC, which is not in Russia's good graces right now, published a story this week on research by the Russian human rights group Sova on the extent of racist violence in Russia. According to the BBC, Sova found that 38 people have been murdered in racist killings in 2007 and more than 300 have been injured. The targets of this violence include ethnic minorities from the Caucasus and Central Asia regions, and gays. Most of the attacks have taken place in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Nizhny Novgorod.

Other British news sources reported a bit of muscle flexing by the Russian air force this week. Four jets from Britain's RAF intercepted eight Russian bombers over the Atlantic, in what the British newspaper The Telegraph called the "biggest operation to protect British airspace since the Cold War". There was also a Russian military flight near Norwegian airspace.

Two developments of note in the run-up to the December elections to Russia's Duma. The pro-Putin party United Russia missed a deadline for filing its list of candidates. The Moscow Times viewed it as a sign of disarray within the party, which is heavily favored to win the legislative elections. And separately, another left-leaning group called on voters to support the party A Just Russia and not the Communist Party. The leader of the Communists' Youth Left Front made his decision less than a month after the Communist Youth Union also decided to support A Just Russia.

According to the French news agency AFP, traces of the H5N1 bird flu virus were found at a chicken farm in Krasnodar krai. Officials in the area said 400 chickens had died at the farm and 414 had been killed. A quarantine has been imposed and officials said it was "unlikely" that meat from any affected chickens had gone to market.

And finally this intriguing bit of news from a Finnish newspaper: Former President Boris Yeltsin once calculated a price to sell Finland the parts of Karelia that the Soviet Union had taken from it at the end of World War II. The calculations were made in 1992, when Russia was facing a deep economic crisis brought on by perestroika. Yeltsin's economic advisors were looking at a price of $15 billion for Karelia and perhaps as much as $25 billion for the Kuril Islands. Those islands, which are south of Sakhalin, have been part of a long-running sovereignty dispute with Japan. Russia never sold either; Yeltsin died this April at 76.

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