Stripped of immunity from prosecution, the prime minister faced legal difficulties on two fronts on Friday, with an ally appealing against conviction on Mafia charges and an unrelated corruption case where he is accused of bribing a British lawyer.

Mafia "pentito," or mobster-turned-witness, Gaspare Spatuzza told a court in Turin that a Mafia clan leader later jailed for the attacks had named Berlusconi, who had not entered politics at the time, in connection with the bombings.

He recounted a meeting with clan boss Giuseppe Graviano -- later given multiple life sentences along with his brother for the bombings in Rome, Milan and Florence -- in a cafe on Rome's Via Veneto in early 1994, after the deadly bombing campaign.

"Graviano told me we had obtained everything, thanks to the seriousness of the people who'd helped with our affair ... he mentioned two names, he called Berlusconi 'the man from Channel 5'," said Spatuzza, referring to a Mediaset television channel.

He quoted Graviano saying: "We have everything thanks to the seriousness of these people, specifically Berlusconi ... they put the country in our hands."

"Look at how Romania is getting through the economic crisis. If this crisis had happened during the '90s, the shock would have been much too high for the population. We are starting to climb out of the downturn and we need to admit that Romania has got through the most difficult stage of the crisis pretty good", president Traian Basescu claimed on Friday during the electoral event organised in the Revolutiei Square from Bucharest, in front of nearly 10,000 people.

A meeting between French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, scheduled to take place in London on Friday (4 December), has been cancelled amid ongoing tensions surrounding recent EU appointments.

Both sides cited "diary constraints," with Mr Sarkozy also planning to lunch with the EU's newly appointed permanent president, Herman van Rompuy, on Friday.

The French president recently proposed the London visit as a means of defusing angst over last week's appointment of Frenchman Michel Barnier to the important internal market portfolio inside the European Commission.

The City of London greeted the job announcement with dismay. But subsequent comments from Mr Sarkozy that he had "out-manoeuvred" Mr Brown and that the appointment was a "triumph" for French ideas on financial regulation only added fuel to the fire and served to enrage Downing Street.

A tape recording of Kenneth Clarke's speech to a private meeting of the Tory Bow Group on Tuesday was "obtained" by The Times newspaper. It revealed that the shadow Business Secretary warned the Tory leadership not to be too specific about spending cuts before the general election.

Ring a bell? Six weeks before the 2005 election, the same newspaper obtained a tape recording of a much more explosive speech to a private meeting by Howard Flight, a Tory Treasury spokesman, who suggested his party had a secret agenda of unpopular spending cuts. He was dumped as an MP. The Flight recorder was John Woodcock, a rising Labour star, now a Downing Street communications strategist and Labour's candidate in Barrow-in-Furness.

So you can hardly blame the Tories for claiming that Labour was up to its old tricks at Mr Clarke's speech. Labour denies it, of course, but seems remarkably well-informed. "A reminder of Times past," quipped a Tory official. But the Tories are taking it seriously: they have issued instructions to organisers of such events to vet guest-lists very carefully.

German Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg has made an about-face in his assessement of the recent air strike in Kunduz, which led to the resignation of his predecessor Franz Josef Jung. Now Guttenberg has said the strike was "militarily inappropriate." The German parliament voted to extend the country's Afghanistan mission.

The deployment of the German military, the Bundeswehr, in Afghanistan has come in for more and more criticism during the past few weeks. The German populace overwhelmingly want the fastest possible withdrawal and fear that more German troops will be sent to Afghanistan.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - Nato ministers on Friday offered Montenegro a formal plan to join the alliance, just days after the EU announced it would lift visas for its citizens.

"With a sustained effort at further reform, today's invitation to join the Membership Action Plan (MAP) will be a stepping stone to the ultimate goal: full membership in Nato," the secretary-general of the military alliance, Anders Fogh Rasmussen said at a press conference in Brussels.

He added that Bosnia and Herzegovina, for which a similar request was rejected, will get the plan once it has achieved the "necessary progress in its reform efforts."

AFP - Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said Thursday he would consider running for a new term in 2012, after strongman Prime Minister Vladmir Putin refused to rule out the possibility of returning to the Kremlin.

"If Putin is not ruling it out, neither am I," Medvedev said at a press conference in Rome following talks with Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

"We are close to each other and work well together," he added. "We can come to an agreement. We will take a reasonable decision, as long as Medvedev and Putin have a chance of being elected."

That the affable former agriculture and foreign minister has become the bogeyman of the Square Mile is thanks largely to the gloating of Nicolas Sarkozy. The French president claimed the appointment of Mr Barnier - who is supposed to act independently of national interests - amounted to a "triumph" of French ideas over Anglo-Saxon capitalism. The British were "big losers" in the battle for top Brussels' jobs, Mr Sarkozy added, making clear that he had installed his man.

His comments triggered a furious backlash from Westminster and the City, where Mr Barnier's nomination to a job in which he will set the agenda for regulation was seen as a French-inspired plot to do down London as a financial centre.
...
A staunch Gaullist, Mr Barnier shares the general's mistrust of financial capitalism and free markets. As agriculture minister, he zealously defended the European Union's common agricultural policy.

He has adopted Mr Sarkozy's refrain of a "capitalism for entrepreneurs rather than a capitalism for speculators" but, like the president, has given little indication of what that means in practice. When proposing fresh EU financial regulation, Mr Barnier said he would stick to the "roadmap" of recommendations made by the Group of 20 leading economies, suggesting he did not wish to see Europe act unilaterally.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - The European Union took a big step towards creating a single Europe-wide patent system on Friday (4 December), a move that is expected to save businesses many millions in annual costs.

As part of the deal, industry ministers meeting in Brussels reached a political agreement on the setting up of a single EU-patent to replace the multitude of national patents that innovators are currently forced to acquire to protect their products.

The ministers also reached a deal on the establishment of a EU patent court system that would see the setting up of a single European appeals courts for patent infringement disputes.

This would help end the need for companies to take out parallel litigation proceedings in different member states, a costly procedure.

The Government has conceded one of its vital "red lines" in the agreement to set up new pan-European financial supervisory bodies - and lost its veto on paying for any future European banking rescue.

British ministers have long insisted that "fiscal responsibility" for European banking rescues should be "aligned" with national supervision, because national governments usually pay for such episodes.

State-controlled Areva plans to sell its power transmission and distribution network to Alstom and Schneider Electric, having rejected bids from Japanese and US firms.

"I read in the press that we were are being accused of economic patriotism," Fillon told workers at an Alstom plant in eastern France.

"I would like to clarify a few points. The selection process was perfectly transparent and non-discriminatory," he added.

Fillon said the deal will "create a new French champion and frankly I am not embarrassed to take part in the creation of a new French champion."

When nine former members of Siemens' executive board agreed to pay compensation for their role in the company's corruption scandal, they may have set the ball rolling for a brave new world of corporate governance.

At a meeting between the EU and Ukraine, Kiev vowed to avoid a repeat of fuel shortages in Europe this winter by keeping its gas pipelines open. One-fifth of EU gas supplies travel to Europe from Russia via Ukraine.

Among the most interesting developments in the wake of the credit meltdown are a few recent judicial rulings that come as creditors of companies in bankruptcy protection fight over corporate carcasses that by definition don't have enough value to go around.

Two recent judicial opinions rebuking the banks offer a window into the lending practices that fuelled the boom and the tactics that banks resorted to in a belated attempt to cut their losses. These cases highlight just how reckless the banks have been and how that recklessness may come back to haunt them - and their bottom lines.

Even as credit markets rally and the prices of the loans they carry on their books improve, the banks may yet have to give back some of the gains they have already booked - a warning for investors who think most banks offer considerable upside now that the worst of the downturn is over.

Reps. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) and Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) are close to resolving their disagreement over how to structure a new federal agency to regulate consumer financial products. The split emerged in late October with Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, favoring a single director for the new Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA). Meanwhile, Waxman, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, supports having a commission in charge.

Steve Adamske, Frank's spokesman, said that the two chairmen are working on a compromise to have a director in place for a period of time, possibly two years, while the commission gets up and running and commissioners are named. "We want to get the commission up and running," Adamske said.

The full House is planning next week to take up wide-ranging financial overhaul legislation, one of President Barack Obama's top domestic priorities. The structure of the new regulatory agency is one of several issues that Frank and other lawmakers are attempting to resolve before next week.

Waxman and other members of Energy and Commerce had argued that having a commission with members serving staggered terms would reduce the influence of the political party in power at the time. Frank has long supported a single director with a powerful role to sit at the same table as the nation's other regulatory bodies.

Frank has said he would like to see the agency run by Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard law professor who first started talking about the agency idea. Republicans and the financial industry have criticized Warren.

The US is keen to sign a successor to the START treaty with Russia that would slash both nations' nuclear arsenals. Significant for Obama is not so much the treaty itself, but its global and domestic implications.

...The basic framework of the successor to START was already agreed between President Obama and his Russian counterpart at a summit in Moscow in July. Both sides pledged to slash the number of nuclear warheads for each country to between 1,500 and 1,675 over the next seven years. The number of delivery vehicles for each side will be cut to between 500 and 1,100. The existing treaty limits each side to 6,000 warheads and 1,600 delivery vehicles.

AFP - In a confidential report obtained by AFP on Thursday, the European Union accused Israel of actively pursuing the annexation of Arab east Jerusalem and undermining hopes for peace with Palestinians.

The annual report drafted by the EU heads of missions in Jerusalem accused Israel of implementing in 2009 an intricate policy which includes expanding Jewish settlements and demolishing Palestinian homes in east Jerusalem.

Geoff Hoon held back military preparations for the Iraq invasion when he was Defence Secretary, because he wanted to keep the plans secret from the public, his armed forces chief has revealed.

Admiral Lord Boyce, the former Chief of the Defence Staff, said that he was blocked from ordering equipment and mobilising troops for several months in the run-up to the Iraq war. Instead, he was limited to top secret "high-level" planning within the Ministry of Defence, meaning he was left with "some very short timelines" in which to prepare troops for the invasion.

Final preparations for one army brigade were only completed the day before the invasion began. The 7th Armoured Brigade, also known as the Desert Rats, reached "full operational capability" on 19 March 2003.

Gordon Brown faced a diplomatic rift with Pakistan after its Prime Minister rejected British accusations that it was not doing enough to hunt down Osama bin Laden.

Yousuf Raza Gilani insisted his security forces had not been given any "actionable" intelligence about the al-Qa'ida leader's whereabouts and said he doubted whether bin Laden was even on Pakistani soil.

Following talks in Downing Street yesterday, Mr Gilani made no attempt to disguise his frustration with the British Prime Minister's comments. He told journalists: "I doubt the information which you are giving is correct, because I don't think Osama bin Laden is in Pakistan."

Gunmen stormed a mosque in Pakistan's garrison city of Rawalpindi, detonating bombs and shooting at worshipers gathered for Friday prayers. Officials say at least 40 people, mostly army officers, have been killed.

AFP - Philippine troops wearing body armour and carrying assault rifles on Friday stormed the homes of a powerful clan suspected of involvement in a massacre that left 57 people dead.

More than 100 soldiers and dozens of police raided the mansion of Andal Ampatuan Jnr, a local mayor in the southern Philippines who has been charged with 25 counts of murder so far over last week's slaughter.p> "They are looking for guns, bullets, everything. The warrant covers everything," regional military spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Jonathan Ponce told AFP.

HARADHEERE, Somalia (Reuters) - In Somalia's main pirate lair of Haradheere, the sea gangs have set up a cooperative to fund their hijackings offshore, a sort of stock exchange meets criminal syndicate.

Heavily armed pirates from the lawless Horn of Africa nation have terrorized shipping lanes in the Indian Ocean and strategic Gulf of Aden, which links Europe to Asia through the Red Sea. The gangs have made tens of millions of dollars from ransoms and a deployment by foreign navies in the area has only appeared to drive the attackers to hunt further from shore.

It is a lucrative business that has drawn financiers from the Somali diaspora and other nations -- and now the gangs in Haradheere have set up an exchange to manage their investments. One wealthy former pirate named Mohammed took Reuters around the small facility and said it had proved to be an important way for the pirates to win support from the local community for their operations, despite the dangers involved.

"Four months ago, during the monsoon rains, we decided to set up this stock exchange. We started with 15 'maritime companies' and now we are hosting 72. Ten of them have so far been successful at hijacking," Mohammed said. "The shares are open to all and everybody can take part, whether personally at sea or on land by providing cash, weapons or useful materials ... we've made piracy a community activity."

....

Piracy investor Sahra Ibrahim, a 22-year-old divorcee, was lined up with others waiting for her cut of a ransom pay-out after one of the gangs freed a Spanish tuna fishing vessel. "I am waiting for my share after I contributed a rocket-propelled grenade for the operation," she said, adding that she got the weapon from her ex-husband in alimony. "I am really happy and lucky. I have made $75,000 in only 38 days since I joined the 'company'."

In the United States, television psychics are merely mocked. In Saudi Arabia, they are executed.

The Saudi Arabian government is planning to execute Lebanese television psychic Ali Sibat. Sibat was found guilty of witchcraft by a Saudi court in November, a crime which carries the death sentence.

It appears that Sibat was targeted for arrest and trial while visiting Saudi Arabia for the Hajj. Saudi Arabia's special religious police, the Mutaween, grabbed him out of his hotel room and placed the host in custody. Sibat was then tried on charges related to his satellite television show:

Before his arrest, Sibat frequently gave advice on general life questions and predictions about the future on the Lebanese satellite television station Sheherazade, according to the Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar and the French newspaper Le Monde.

According to Sibat's supporters in Lebanon, he was denied a lawyer at his trial and "tricked" into making a confession. Sibat's Lebanese lawyer, May al-Khansa, stated that the television psychic was told he would be deported to Lebanon if he confessed to witchcraft. Instead, Saudi lawyers used Sibat's confession as proof he deserved the death penalty.

Fafblog

Let us never forget just what's at stake in the war in Afghanistan: nothing less than the success of the war in Afghanistan. This war may be a mistake, a blood-soaked blunder, an unholy charnel house mindlessly consuming the bodies and souls of untold thousands, an open sore on the pockmarked face of history and an abomination before the sight of God and men, but it is first and foremost a war, and wars must be won. If the United States doesn't win this war, then will it not lose it? And if the United States loses this war, then won't the Unites States have lost it? And if the United States has lost this war, will that not then make the United States a kind of thing that loses wars? And then where would we be?

(...) Indeed, it remains America's solemn duty as the leader of the free world to bring freedom and security to the Afghan people by hunting down and eliminating the Afghan people. Nor can America forget its own national security, and the dire threat posed by the Afghan people to our war against the Afghan people.

(...) It is long past time for the people of Afghanistan to step up their efforts to kill themselves, and not merely rely on American generosity to finish the job for them.

I'm minded to post the whole thing on the front page, it captures the absurdity of this war rather well. Go click the link.

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes

People in the West throw away millions of old computers every year. Hundreds of thousands of them end up in Africa, where children try to eke out a living by selling the scrap. But the toxic elements in the waste are slowly poisoning them.

AFP - Groundwater at the site of the world's worst industrial accident in India's Bhopal city is still toxic and making residents sick 25 years after a gas leak there killed thousands, studies said Tuesday.

An analysis conducted by the UK-based Bhopal Medical Appeal (BMA) also cast doubt upon government-sponsored research into the impact of the disaster at the Union Carbide pesticide plant, where methyl isocyanate gas spewed from a storage tank on December 3, 1984.

Activists say more than 350 tonnes of toxic waste strewn around the site still pollutes soil and groundwater in the area, leading to cancer, congenital defects, immunity problems and other illnesses.

The Conservative peer Lord Lawson, the Tory MP David Davis and other politicians who have been casting doubt on the science of global warming in advance of next week's Copenhagen climate conference were "climate saboteurs", Ed Miliband, the Energy and Climate Change Secretary, said yesterday.

With its massive glass dome, the Plantagon Greenhouse wouldn't look out of place in a sci-fi movie. And if all goes smoothly, one may soon crop up in a city near you. In these days of global warming, its creators argue, it's not a question of if it will become reality but, rather, when.

Nestled among the skyscrapers is a gigantic glass sphere housing a mysterious spiral pathway. At first glance, the structure may look like an alien spaceship or a modernist architectural fantasy. But, in fact, it is an unusual response to climate change and the challenges of urbanization.

This UFO look-a-like is an ambitious take on the classic backyard greenhouse. Towering up to 100 meters (328 feet), it is designed to grow plants on its carefully lit and heated spiral platform. Crops are planted at the bottom of the sphere and gradually climb higher before ultimately being harvested at the top. The idea for the Plantagon Greenhouse comes from a Swiss-American company of the same name -- and they are confident that their dramatic creation will one day become a reality.

A very large, 30-year study of just about everyone in Scandinavia shows no link between mobile phone use and brain tumours, researchers reported on Thursday.

Even though mobile telephone use soared in the 1990s and afterward, brain tumours did not become any more common during this time, the researchers reported in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

Some activist groups and a few researchers have raised concerns about a link between mobile phones and several kinds of cancer, including brain tumours, although years of research have failed to establish a connection.

"We did not detect any clear change in the long-term time trends in the incidence of brain tumours from 1998 to 2003 in any subgroup," Isabelle Deltour of the Danish Cancer Society and colleagues wrote.

San Francisco-based PG&E was also busy today signing a contract to buy and operate its first wind-energy project. Portland, Ore.-based Iberdrola Renewables Inc., the U.S. branch of Iberdrola SA in Spain, will develop and build the Manzana Wind Project for PG&E. The project, which will be spread across 7,000 acres in the Tehachapi region of eastern Kern County, will cost slightly more than $900 million, the utility said.

The facility will produce up to 246 megawatts, or 670 gigawatt-hours of electricity a year, enough to power roughly 100,000 average California homes. Manzana could go online as early as December 2011 if the project is approved by the PUC. To finance the effort, customers could see their rates increase 1.1% in 2012 compared with 2009 rates, or an average increase of 25 cents each month, the utility said.

Iberdrola has 3,500 megawatts from operating projects in the U.S., as well as four facilities under construction, said Jan Johnson, a spokeswoman with the company.

California regulators went out of this world today and gave the go-ahead to a power-purchase agreement involving the nation's first solar power plant in space.

Pacific Gas & Electric Co., the state's largest utility, will proceed with a 15-year contract with Manhattan Beach start-up Solaren Corp., after receiving approval from the California Public Utilities Commission.

The project, which is expected to go live in 2016, will use solar cells from Solaren on orbiting satellites to convert energy from the sun into radio-frequency waves. The waves will be transmitted to a receiving station near Fresno and reverted back into electricity.

The project should produce 1,700 gigawatt-hours of energy each year, according to the commission. The Japanese government said this summer that it intends to pursue a similar space-based solar program.
California hopes that utilities will pull 20% of their power from renewable sources by 2010. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a directive in September pushing for a 33% by 2020 goal.

Mohammad Eke was born and grew up in the German city of Essen. Until authorities found out that his parents had entered the country illegally, Germany was his home. Then Eke was deported to Turkey, even though he'd never visited the country and didn't speak the language. It's just another run-of-the-mill case of German immigration policy in action.

The young man sits with his bag in Istanbul's airport, as he often does when he doesn't know what to do with himself or his time.

The bag holds two towels, two pairs of jeans, three T-shirts, a pair of shoes, a jacket and his toiletries. It also contains a Turkish dictionary, a folder containing documents from a German Office of Alien Affairs and a bottle of antidepressant pills, which he needs to fall asleep. The bag is the size of a carry-on bag, and he could easily be mistaken for a tourist visiting Istanbul for a couple of days. Such tourists are eager to see the sights and do the things tourists do here: see the Bosporus, Topkapi Palace, the Blue Mosque or a game of Fenerbahçe, the city's famed football team -- and then return home.

Poll: Most Czechs believe Beneš decrees should remain valid

A poll by the CVVM agency released on Friday shows that 65 percent of Czechs believe the post-war Beneš decrees which legalised the expulsion of some three million ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia should remain valid. Two years ago, only about 50 percent of Czechs held the same opinion. 47 percent of Czechs also believe that the expulsion was just. The decrees put out by President Edvard Beneš still remains a sensitive issue in the Czech Republic.

In a reaction to Nazi atrocities during war, around three million German citizens of Czechoslovakia were stripped of their nationality and expelled from the country between 1945 and 1947, while their property was confiscated. It is estimated that between 15,000 and 20,000 Germans were killed in the process.

England will open their quest to lift the World Cup by tackling the United States in Rustenburg on Saturday, June 12.

Fabio Capello could not have hoped for much better from a group that will also see the Three Lions tackle Algeria and Slovenia in Group C.

Any clash with the United States is bound to revive memories of that shock defeat during the 1950 tournament in Brazil.

The mighty Rosenbergs left many a legend behind them when their lineage ended in the early 17th century. Among those is one that said the last of the line were not buried as normal, but had their bodies seated on golden thrones around an oak table, symbolically continuing their reign into the afterlife. The entrance to the tomb was then said to be sealed in such a way as for it never to be found. Now, nearly 400 years later, archaeologists (armed with drills against history's mysteries) found a much different situation in the floor of the Church Ascension of the Virgin Mary in the South Bohemian town of Vyšší Brod. Zuzana Thomová is the head of the study.

"The situation proved to be simpler and much more prosaic than legend suggests - the Rosenbergs are not sitting on golden armchairs. There is essentially a small space there where two tin caskets can be seen. One of them belongs to Petr Vok, and we haven't been able to determine who the second one belongs to. And then there is a number of broken wooden coffins according to written records, there should be ten generations of members of the Rosenberg dynasty in the tomb."

A UCLA School of Medicine professor of cardiothoracic surgery has settled a lawsuit brought by the state attorney general forcing him to repay $140,000 to a research charity he founded and removing him from multiple positions he held within the charity.

In the lawsuit filed in September, state Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown alleged that Dr. Gerald Buckberg and five officers of the nonprofit L.B. Research & Education Foundation used money from the charity to fund their personal business ventures and medical research activities.

Under the agreements of the settlement, Buckberg must return the diverted funds to the charity and will only be allowed to serve as the director - giving up his other positions as manager and chief executive officer.

Prostitutes offer free climate summit sex

COP15 guests are being offered free sex if they produce one of Lord Mayor Ritt Bjerregaard's `no sex' postcards.

Copenhagen Council and Lord Mayor Ritt Bjerregaard have sent postcards out to 160 Copenhagen hotels urging COP15 guests and delegates to `Be sustainable - don't buy sex'.

"Dear hotel owner, we would like to urge you not to arrange contacts between hotel guests and prostitutes," the approach to hotels says.

Copenhagen prostitutes are up in arms at the project saying that the council has no business meddling in their affairs, and have now offered free sex to anyone who can produce one of the offending postcards and their COP15 identity card, according to avisen.dk.

An Iraqi lawyer due to defend the first British man to face a murder trial in the country cannot get a visa to visit his client's family in the UK.

Daniel Fitzsimons, a former soldier suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, is due back in court in Baghdad tomorrow accused of murdering two fellow ArmorGroup security contractors. His family have been fighting to help him, convinced that the ill 29-year-old will not get a fair trial in Iraq and could face the death penalty if found guilty.

Tiger Woods may be known for his brilliant golf, but few people would have guessed that he was also a fan of physics. Photographs of his battered Cadillac Escalade revealed that he was reading Get a Grip on Physics by veteran science writer John Gribbin.

A paperback copy had fallen onto the floor of Woods' SUV among the fragments of glass caused by the back windows being smashed during the incident outside his home near Orlando, Florida last Friday.

...The book was 2,268th position on the Amazon sales list, up from 396,224th the previous day.

Fatih Akin, one of Germany's leading filmmakers, has decided he will not travel to Zurich for the Swiss premiere of his latest film, the award-winning Soul Kitchen.

French first lady and singer-songwriter, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, lent her considerable star power to the global fight against HIV/AIDS on World AIDS Day when she called for action on mother-child HIV transmission rates.

Actor Vyacheslav Tikhonov, star of the legendary Soviet-era Seventeen Moments of Spring spy serial, died on Friday in Moscow at the age of 81.

The actor was hospitalized on Saturday amid media reports that he had suffered a heart attack. The exact cause of death has not yet been made public.

Tikhonov was born near Moscow in the town of Pavlovsky Posad on February 8, 1928. After employment as a metal worker, he began his acting career in 1945.

His most famous role came in 1973, when he played Soviet spy Standartenfuhrer Stirlitz in the immensely popular World War II television serial, Seventeen Moments of Spring. The title refers to the seventeen days before the final capitulation of Nazi Germany and centers around attempts by the Soviet Union's man in Germany to thwart secret peace talks between the Nazis and the U.S. and Britain.