BY OLIVER WISEMAN

 On the letters page of the new issue of Standpoint, two leading historians debate the state of history in schools today.

In a letter to Standpoint, published in the latest issue of the magazine, Nigel Lawson reveals the Cabinet's unanimous support for Special Branch protection of Salman Rushdie when, in 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, issued a fatwa against the Satanic Verses author and offered a bounty for his death.

BY JULIA PETTENGILL 

The recently-established lobby group Conservative Friends of Russia (CFOR) is doing little to dispel suspicions that its sympathies lie with the Russian government. 

BY JULIA PETTENGILL 

One week after Russia's fraud-ridden local elections, Russian opposition parties have achieved an anomaly in that country's politics by holding what appear to have been free and fair elections to the Coordination Council new decision-making body of the opposition movement.

BY JULIA PETTENGILL 

This week, the Moscow City Court released Yakaterina Samutsevich, one of the convicted members of the anti-Putin punk collective Pussy Riot. Samutsevich was given a suspended sentence on appeal, while the two-year sentences of Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alkhina were upheld.