Author: Emily Liedel
MOSCOW – It’s hard to shake the feeling that the idea of reinstating mandatory school uniforms has been discussed on and off ever since school uniforms were abandoned two decades ago. To recall the discussion last spring: The Duma came to the conclusion that uniforms could ease tensions between social classes at school, and even […]
KOMMERSANT, 36ON.RU, MOSCOW TIMES (Russia)

 Worldcrunch VORONEZH – Russian Billionaire (and owner of the Brooklyn Nets) Mikhail Prokhorov has announced that he will open a “School for Citizen Leaders,” in this city of nearly one million, some 500 kilometers due south of Moscow, 36on.ru reports. The stated goal of the school will be to find […]
The first well-known person who dared buy an island was the shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, with his famous Skorpios, in the emerald waters of the Ionian Sea off the Greek coast. Then there was Marlon Brando, who made a new life on Te’tiarao after being captivated by French Polynesia. Until recently, only the bulging bank […]
MOSCOW – Patriarch Kirill, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, is calling on all members of the clergy to carefully watch what they say and how they live their lives, especially in light of the way modern information travels fast. Without naming names, he referred to some recent cases where the actions of clergy members […]
MOSCOW – On the evening of October 10th, Turkish Air Force jets forced Syrian Air flight 442, a civilian passenger plane, to land at the airport in Ankara, Turkey. They suspected that the plane, which was carrying 35 passengers from Moscow to Damascus, contained cargo not allowed under the rules of civilian aviation. After searching […]
-Op Ed- SANTIAGO – The most urgent problem for the second term of President Barack Obama or the first term of President Mitt Romney will be a problem that neither of them created. We are talking about the cryptically dubbed ‘fiscal cliff,’ which, if it is not solved, will push the United States into another […]
MOSCOW – “At the time of transition, there were hopes that Russia would transform itself into a high-skilled, high-income economy with strong social protection programs inherited from the Soviet Union era…” So starts the Credit Suisse report on Russia as part of its 2012 Global Wealth Report. According to the bank’s experts, since 2000 the […]
KOMMERSANT (Russia) Worldcrunch MOSCOW – The government in Chechnya, Russia’s Caucasian republic that has tried twice to gain independence in bloody wars of secession, has decided to start teaching the basics of Islam in preschools, Kommersant reports. Chechnya is predominantly Muslim. The initiative comes directly from the Chechen leader, Ramzan Kadirov, who has already appointed […]
EL OBSERVADOR (Uruguay) CLARIN (Argentina)

 Worldcrunch MONTEVIDEO – As the Southern Hemisphere’s summer vacation season approaches, the tourism industry in Uruguay is already sweating Argentina’s new restrictions on changing money to dollars and using it for travel abroad. The Association of Hotels and Restaurants of Uruguay has taken extra steps to attract Argentines, including publishing […]
BUENOS AIRES – Many people think of it as an illness of the past, something you see only in books and historical movies. Wrong: Leprosy is a reality in modern Argentina, and the passage of time has not eradicated the stigma of the disease. Lepers are discriminated against at work and even by their own […]
KIEV – “If we don’t stop Yanukovych, we will lose Ukraine…” Speaking in perfect Russian, one of Yulia Tymoshenko’s young supporters is talking about the upcoming election while working a shift at one of the protest tents set up along Kiev’s main street, Khreshchatyk. The stakes she sees in Sunday’s election are high indeed. “We […]
RIA NOVOSTI (Russia) KOMMERSANT (Russia) Worldcrunch MOSCOW – Smokers, so much for the wild East. The public smoking bans already in place in Western Europe look set to expand to Russia by 2015, RIA Novosti reports. The Russian Duma will be voting on new smoking legislation that includes restrictions on advertising and sales of cigarettes, […]
MOSCOW – With winter coming, and the end of this year’s bicycling season, it is worth looking at Russian cities’ relationship with two-wheel transportation. First of all, the number of people choosing to get around by bike has actually become noticeable. In response, Moscow’s city government has started to think seriously for the first time […]
DOMODEDOVO – I first met with the leaders of this town’s independence movement in a small Azeri cafe. Domodedovo is barely a town, really, more like just a street; and when I arrived, there was a Muscovite photographer obviously on the same story. We were waiting for the members of the independence movement led by […]
CLARIN (Argentina) NEW YORK TIMES (U.S.) Worldcrunch BUENOS AIRES – To combat violence in soccer, both on and off the field, a new law in Argentina will require each top league team to have a security chief who reports directly to the Ministry of Defense, Clarin reports. The role must be filled by someone who […]
MOSCOW – The first third of Srdzhan Dragoevich’s new film, The Parade, will bring a smile to even the gloomiest of faces. It’s a silly, rude comedy that is meant to be fun for the viewers. It is also very much a film with a message about tolerance for homosexuals, as well as for those […]
BUENOS AIRES – Steak sushi (a sushi roll filled with cooked steak), served with grape leaves, quinoa and Malbec barbecue sauce. From the very first pages, the new authority on Argentine cuisine, entitled New Argentine Cooking, is provocative, to say the least. In this book of 224 recipes from 31 Argentine chefs, mountain empanadas made […]
MOSCOW – The traffic jams in Russia’s capital have become world-famous in the last several years, so bad that in 2010 the Federal Government decided to address the problem directly. At the time, then-President Dimitri Medvedev commissioned a plan for the development of Moscow’s transportation system through the year 2020 that aims to get Muscovites […]
MOSCOW – Russia is going through a home-grown adoption boom. In the changing landscape of adoption, 6,700 children were adopted or placed with foster parents inside of Russia last year. It is a marked change since the mid-2000s, when most adoptive parents were foreigners. Now the majority of Russian adoptees are adopted by Russian parents. […]
SANTIAGO – It’s July of 1990, and the two Germany’s have just united, marking the end of the Cold War, and capped with West Germany’s soccer World Cup victory over Argentina. As the images of the defeated players travelled the world (who can forget Diego Maradona’s tears?), in New York, a Latin American company was […]
MOSCOW – While much has been made of a “reset” in the relationship between the United States and Russia, Pakistan is also trying to find a new starting point in its relationship with Russia, which has yet to recover from Pakistan’s cold-war alliance with the United States. This would-be reset has had both setbacks and […]
MOSCOW – In a new twist in the case of Anna Politkovskaya, the prominent Russian investigative journalist murdered in 2006, her children are filing a petition to rescind a plea bargain reached with one of the men involved in their mother’s assassination. Politkovskaya was a well-known investigative journalist who reported extensively for the Russian paper […]
–Editorial– In spite of what the polls say and the voting urns told us – Hugo Chavez has indeed won another term, which will keep him in power until 2019 – it is also true that the true triumph in Venezuela’s election yesterday lay elsewhere: in the support for the young Henrique Capriles Radonski, the […]
-Op-Ed- MOSCOW – The reality of our lives in Russia is that the beginning of the 21st century is being dominated by the political leadership of Vladimir Putin. But it is perfectly obvious that the next couple of years will be the most difficult, and for Russian society these years will be the most important. […]
CARACAS – After the tunnel that bores through one of the rocky hills that surround Caracas, the road bends, lined on either side with colorfully-painted homes, ending in one of the plazas of the 23 de Enero neighborhood. This corner of the capital is a bastion of support for incumbent Hugo Chavez, and one of […]
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Signs Of A New US-Russia Spy War?
VOICE OF RUSSIA, KOMMERSANT (Russia) HOUSTON PRESS, (US) MOSCOW – Russian authorities are staying mostly mum since the United States accused 11 people this week, all from countries in the former Soviet Union, of illegal export of high-tech military equipment and money laundering. Moscow-based daily Kommersant reports that seven of the 11 accused were arrested […]
MOSCOW – Rattled by a horrific traffic accident in Moscow, Russian authorities have finally turned their attention to strengthening the country’s laws against drunk driving. Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said Russia needed to implement a stricter penalty for drunk driving and called it the biggest issue in Russia. On September 22, a man was driving […]
MOSCOW – The question of whether or not citizens in Russia have the right to defend themselves if they are being beaten by police was taken up by the Supreme Court in June. The case came just after a large protest on May 6 that was marred by several police beatings. In regulations released soon […]
BOGOTA – In the middle of July, as the Colombian government was presenting a bundle of measures to reform the health-care industry, 5,000 people congregated in the Plaza de Bolivar in Bogota to hold a “White March.” One block away from the president’s office, the protest was led by a group of women in black, […]
KOMMERSANT (Russia) RADIO SVOBODA (Russia) TBILISI – Celebrations continued into Tuesday morning in the capital as the opposition coalition “Georgian Dream” led by billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, scored a surprise victory in Georgian parliamentary elections. Pro-government forces conceded defeat, saying the opposition obtained 51% of the vote. According to the opposition television channel, the results were […]
KOMMERSANT (Russia), FACEBOOK, TWITTER Worldcrunch MOSCOW – Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg met with Russian Prime Minister Dimitry Medvedev to discuss the possibility that the social network’s presence in Russia expand from the virtual to physical world. The two talked business development at the Skolkovo Innovation Center, a Silicon-Valleyesque tech center near the city of Samara, […]
KOMMERSANT, RT (Russia) Worldcrunch MOSCOW – Mitt Romney turned heads in both Moscow and Washington diplomatic circles last month when he called Russia the “No. 1 geopolitical foe” of the United States. Despite ongoing tensions between the two countries, the assertion surprised many in light of other, more hostile standoffs around the world. But now, […]
MOSCOW – The Russian government has made quite clear its desire to protect the national light manufacturing and textile industry. A thick packet of documents from the Ministry of Economic Development (MED) lays out how the government intends to change the law regarding procurement of materials for federal agencies, including the military. MED essentially wants […]
CLARIN (Argentina) Worldcrunch BUENOS AIRES – Olives and its oil have been one of Argentina’s boom industries in recent years, but farmers are now begging the government for help to stay afloat, Clarin reports. The olives produced in Argentina are mostly exported, and currency fluctuations have made the price paid for the olives abroad shrink […]
KOMMERSANT (Russia) Worldcrunch MOSCOW – The three things that Russians find the most “immoral” are child abandonment, suicide and homosexuality, reports Kommersant. In a survey by the Levada Center, a non-governmental sociological research center, a majority of Russians polled also found sexual relationships between non-married individuals to be immoral. That is more than double the […]
ASTANA – Earlier this month, Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev rolled out his new project for cooperation between the East and West — and it lacked neither ambition nor a healthy supply of alphabet-soup acronyms . A person close to President Nazarbayev’s administration said this was the most audacious of Kazakhstan’s recent foreign policy projects, unveiled […]
KOMMERSANT (Russia) BBC Worldcrunch MOSCOW – Russian President Vladimir Putin is back in the middle of the oil business. Putin met this week with the head of Rosneft, a partially state-owned oil company, as well as the president of BP and a representative from the British multinational’s board of directors to see if a partnership […]
MOSCOW – U.S. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland has announced that Washington would close the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) offices in Russia. Nuland said that it was the Russian government forcing the closure, a charge the Kremlin denies. “Like all foreign agencies that provide financing to Russian NGOs, USAID needs to follow […]
SANTIAGO – The number, $7.9 billion, brings a smile to faces. That number corresponds to the amount of exports from Brazil to China in the first trimester of this year. The joy is reduced a little when you learn that 80 percent of that number comes from only three exports: soy, iron ore and petroleum. […]