I assume this article is one of those pre-obits they've been sitting on for years. He was overwhelmed by what he saw at a Houston supermarket, by the kaleidoscopic variety of meats and vegetables available to ordinary Americans.
The irony is killing me: Under a government decree that took effect April 1, only Russian citizens can sell vegetables at any of Russia’s 5,200 markets.
I wonder which side of the "50% positive" ledger this falls on. From Gorby's view, it seems to be a bit of both: "I express the very deepest condolences to the family of the deceased on whose shoulders rest major events for the good of the country and serious mistakes," former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev told Interfax.
But if you go to the article linked above, then it's clearly negative: “When we talk of death, violence or poverty, for example, this is not positive,” said one editor at the station who did not want to be identified for fear of retribution. “If the stock market is up, that is positive. The weather can also be positive.”
So, to counterbalance, I offer you a pair of happy stories -- first from April 6, and then from today: Martha Stewart Picks Space Pal's Menu Martha Stewart, the apostle of the cozy and the quaint, came Friday to the bleak space town of Baikonur to watch a billionaire friend blast off for the international space station. Stewart, who parlayed her vision of gracious living into a business empire, is a longtime friend of Charles Simonyi, a software engineer and developer of Microsoft Word who paid $20-25 million for a 13-day trip to the international space station. He will lift off Saturday, aboard a Soyuz space capsule with two Russian cosmonauts.
Billionaire Space Tourist Back on Earth An American billionaire who paid $25 million for a 13-day trip to outer space returned to Earth on Saturday in a space capsule that also carried a cosmonaut and a U.S. astronaut, making a soft landing on the Kazakh steppe. The capsule carrying Charles Simonyi, a Hungarian-born software engineer who helped develop Microsoft Word and Excel, touched down after a more than three-hour return trip from the orbital station, a spokesman said at Mission Control outside Moscow. Simonyi looked ecstatic after rescuers removed him from the capsule, which lay askew on the bleak grassland. He smiled and grinned as he spoke with the support crew. He then bit enthusiastically into a green apple -- a traditional offering for space crews touching down in Kazakhstan, which is famous for the fruit.
It's a good thing the capsule comes down in Kazakhstan, or that apple would have been a Russian potato. Boris Yeltsin Is Dead | 
