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 […]
Tag: russia
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
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Pussy Riot Member Freed By Appeals Court
AP, BBC NEWS (UK) Worldcrunch A Moscow appeals court has freed Yekaterina Samutsevich, one of the convicted women from the punk band Pussy Riot, but upheld two-year jail terms for the other two. The judge ruled that Yekaterina Samutsevich’s sentence should be suspended because she was thrown out of Moscow’s main cathedral by guards before […]
-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. […]
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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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
KOMMERSANT (Russia) Worldcrunch MOSCOW – The General Prosecutor’s Office has filed a suit to declare the recent anti-Islam film “Innocence of Muslims,” extremist, which could lead to the blocking of YouTube across all of Russia by November, Kommersant reports. A new law meant to protect children from exposure to information that will “interfere with their […]
MOSCOW – Just this past August, there have been three attacks on Muslims in a small region of Dagestan – two attacks on Imams and one attack on a Shiite mosque. The attack on the mosque was the first attack on Shiites in the Northern Caucasus. It appears that the fight between Sunnis and Shiites, […]
KOMMERSANT, BBC RUSSIA (Russia)

 Worldcrunch MOSCOW – The Russian Supreme Court has ruled that Gay Pride parades are not “homosexual propaganda,” Kommersant reports. Gay and Lesbian activists in Russia had turned to the courts after the Duma passed a law banning all “propaganda,” promoting same-sex relationships, with wording so broad that it could have outlawed […]
KOMMERSANT (Russia)


 Worldcrunch MOSCOW – There is a widely held misconception in Russia and abroad that Russian parents want their children to emigrate, hoping they will be able to find a better place to settle down outside of Russia. But it turns out, according to a recent survey, only 12% of parents would be happy […]
-Analysis- MOSCOW – The Russia Arctic Coast is one of the dirtiest places on earth. According to the most conservative estimates, the shores of the Arctic Ocean are littered with 4 million tons of industrial and construction waste, part of which is toxic. More than 20,000 pieces of electronics are strewn across the Russian Arctic […]
REUTERS, AP Worldcrunch Is it a bird? Or a plane? No, it’s just Vladimir Putin, taking time out of his busy Kremlin schedule to teach caged birds to fly. The Russian President’s latest publicity stunt involved him doning a white costume and flying a motorized hang glider to help introduce into the wild a flock […]
MOSCOW – Russia’s federal government, which has instituted its own new public order decrees, is starting to be concerned that the outer regions of the country are cracking down on civil society protests a little too enthusiastically. Regional leaders took part in a meeting last month of vice-governors with the presidential administration to discuss laws […]
FRANCE DIPLOMATIE, LE NOUVEL OBSERVATEUR (France), THE VOICE OF RUSSIA (Russia) Worldcrunch On August 17, when three members of the Russian punk rock band Pussy Riot were sentenced to two years in a penal colony, the verdict sparked outrage around the world: the U. S. State Department asked Russia to “review this case and to […]
MOSCOW – It has been another rough few weeks for religious understanding in Russia. Last week in the North Caucasian region of Dagestan, an influential Islamic cleric was killed in a suicide bomb attack at his home. In addition to Said Afandi Al-Chirkavi, 74, the bomb killed seven others, including the suicide bomber, and the […]
MOSCOW – Although the World Health Organization (WHO) has been monitoring the state of health in various countries for the past 60 years, it has never explicitly compared countries with one another. So Bloomberg news, using WHO data as well as other data from the World Bank and the United Nations, put together a rating […]
KOMMERSANT (Russia) LIFE NEWS (Russia) KAZAN – Investigators found the bodies of a 76-year-old retired woman and her 38-year-old daughter in an apartment in Kazan. Both women appeared to have been stabbed to death. Heinous as the crime was, it wouldn’t have bound to generate national press coverage, except for what police found on one […]
KOMMERSANT (Russia) KREMLIN NEWS (Russia) GAZETA.RU (Russia) NEWSRU (Russia) Worldcrunch SMOLENSK – A young mother and political activist, Taisiya Osipova was lucky enough that her case caught the attention of then Russian President Dimitry Medvedev, who came to her defense in January. But so far, at least, that has counted for little. Earlier this week, […]
TASHKENT – Fundamental changes are afoot in the relations between the United States and Uzbekistan — and Russia isn’t happy. Until recently, the central Asian country was on the U.S.’s black list of human rights offenders to whom it was forbidden to provide any sort of military technology. But with a special decree, Secretary of […]
KOMMERSANT (Russia) Worldcrunch MOSCOW – Russian President Vladimir Putin made official his control of state-controlled corportations and information outlets, including major telecommunications companies. Although Putin has informally had the power to control the top management at these companies, the companies will now formally have to answer to him and his administration, Kommersant reported. The change […]