Still bitter about losing his wedding ring, media baron and newspaper shaman Rupert Murdoch has suddenly found himself hedging his bets, rather than expanding his empire anywhere you can translate American Idol. While he has no problem doing big business with human rights running joke China and sinking $100 million into India, there is one place he isn't keen on dealing with: the Kremlin. Because they steal!

From yesterday's investor conference call, which Murdoch dialed in from China to report a 27 percent earning increase:

Eastern Europe, yes — no, this is really a slight change of strategy. We believe that our position in Bulgaria, which is extremely strong, can’t get any stronger. We thought we’d try and monetize that while it was at its top. We don’t quite know yet whether we scale back a bit in Poland, which is proving more difficult than we expected or whether we can sell that but basically it could be for a diversion of those resources elsewhere.

The sale of Russia is a different matter all together. We have great growing business there but just — this is purely me, I’m sorry, I’m — the more I read about investments in Russia, the less I like the feel of it. The more successful we’d be, the more vulnerable we’d be to have it stolen from us, so there we sell now.