November 8, 2007: The last Russian troops have left Georgia, the south Caucasus nation that used to be part of the Soviet Union (and was the homeland of dictator Joseph Stalin). Georgia is itself a conglomeration of several ethnic groups, and has proved unstable. But most Georgians wanted the Russian troops, kept there, by treaty, to man old Soviet bases, out.

November 7, 2007: The Russian parliament has approved the suspension of the 1990 Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty. This treaty was a Cold War effort, hammered out after years of negotiations in the 1980s, that limited the size and composition of Russian armed forces in western Russia (and thus able to threaten Western Europe.) The Treaty became moot about a year after it was signed, and is a largely useless relic of the Cold War. But now Russia is threatening to build up combat forces on its Western borders, in response to a government approved conspiracy theory that NATO is planning to eventually invade Russia. Senior Russian officials openly talk about this, and many Russians believe it as well.

November 6, 2007: Dead bodies are beginning to show up, as the result of a battle between corrupt officials in the FSB (the former KGB secret police, which now combine the powers of the FBI and CIA) and the Federal Drug Control Service, which is actually a large organization dedicated to cutting organized crime down to a manageable size.

November 5, 2007: Russia and China signed a series of economic agreements, which improve links between the economies of the two nations.

November 4, 2007: The bodies of nine hunters were found in the northern Caucasus (Kabardino-Balkaria). The hunting party is believed to stumbled on the hiding place for a band of Islamic terrorists believed operating in the area.

November 3, 2007: When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, many aspects of it continued. Take the annual November parade celebrating the communist revolution of 1917. That parade continued for three years after 1991. But the government got a lot of criticism for that, even though the communists still had many fans in the new Russia. So the government turned the November 4th holiday into one celebrating Russian nationalism, and now call it "National Unity Day". That turned out to be a mistake, as that celebration attracted a lot of violent nationalists and pro-fascist groups (including racist and neo-Nazi groups). Now there's pressure to dump the November holiday completely, even if some extremist groups will continue trying to celebrate it. These nationalist groups have been connected to several recent terrorist attacks (like bombings on trains last Summer), which were initially attributed to Islamic terrorists. But currently, the nationalist thugs are more numerous, and vicious, than many of the Islamic ones.

November 2, 2007: Police in the Dagestan (in the Caucasus) discovered a cache of bomb making materials in a village. Islamic terrorists have joined forces with some criminal gangs in the area, and are cooperating in criminal and terrorist activities.