Haaretz - Israel News reports on a plan that sounds just a tad too ambitious:
The president of Russia's Kalmykia region plans to build an international chess city in Dubai with investments of around $2.6 billion, a joint statement said yesterday.Kalmykia's President Kirsan Ilyumzhinov and chief executive of Dubai Projects, Sulaiman al-Fahim, said the city would include 32 buildings shaped like chess pieces and cover an estimated area of 64,000 square meters.
"Dubai will play host to over 60 million amateur and professional chess followers from around the globe annually.
Brendan I. Koerner explains in Slate how Bobby Fischer can carry out his expressed desire to renounce his U.S. citizenship.
Fischer's apparent descent into mental illness, evidenced in part by his applauding the 9/11 attacks against the U.S. is sad, but few Americans will be sad to see him renounce his citizenship at this stage.
Now it's official: Chess is not sinful in and of itself. Daily Times reports:
A Russian Orthodox archbishop has laid to rest a young parishoner's concern about chess and reassured her that the centuries-old game is not the work of the devil, Russian media reported.Garry Khtmlarov, Anatoly Karpov and millions of other Russian chess champions and not-so-champions can sleep easier after Archbishop Vikenty of Yekaterinburg and Verkhneturyinsk in the Urals region dismissed a young woman's fears that chess was a "devilish game," the ITAR-TASS news agency said. The archbishop assured his questioner that there was no religious ban on chess.
In this morning's Washington Post Lubomir Kavalek points out that former World Championship Challenger Nigel Short's wins in the Commonwealth championship in India last month and the Gibraltar Masters last week indicate significant progress. Kavalek annotates one of Short's wins from the Gibraltar event, a Richter-Rauzer Sicilian featuring a mating queen sacrifice.
The Week in Chess has all the games of last month's match between Vishwanathan Anand and Judit Polgar in an 8-game rapid chess match in Mainz.