Drink Your Tea, Gordon

Things were apparently a little tense between Gordon Brown and Dmitry Medvedev on the sidelines of the G8 summit in Japan. They discussed the issues that have bedeviled relations between the two countries: the battle over BP and the 2006 poisoning death of Aleksandr Litvinenko in London.

Britain doesn't seem to want to let the latter go. A British security service agent told the BBC yesterday that the Russian state was most likely involved in Litvinenko's death. (The poison that killed him was allegedly in his tea.) Russia today hit back.

At an editorial meeting earlier, the director of our Russian Service told a story that just sounds too good to be true. At their meeting yesterday, apparently both Brown and Medvedev were served tea. Medvedev drunk his down, but Brown, ever the cautious Presbyterian, refused to touch his.

-- Luke Allnutt