Russia has little trouble making headlines — and March was no exception.
First, tens of thousands of Russians turned out to mourn opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who died in an Arctic penal colony in February. Then, in a coordinated protest, many lined up to vote against President Vladimir Putin in the recent presidential election — so that no one could mistake as truth the Kremlin’s inevitable declaration that Putin had won his fifth six-year term in a landslide. Finally, a horrifying terrorist attack on a concert venue outside of Moscow — attributed to the Islamic State Khorasan branch of the Islamic State group — killed at least 143 people and wounded more than 300.
Were it not for so many tragedies, another kind of Russia-related story might have received far more attention. The 93-year-old media mogul Rupert Murdoch — who owns Fox News, the New York Post and The Wall Street Journal in the United States, and The Times in the United Kingdom — is engaged to a Soviet-born molecular biologist 25 years his junior, Elena Zhukova.