| April 2012 |
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On one of my recent trips to Italy, I was to take a bus from the quaint Tuscan town of Siena to Rome, and then catch a plane back to Moscow.
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I’ve been spending a lot of time recently at Moscow’s week-old opposition camp, the gathering of anti-Putin activists that sprang up overnight in the center of the capital, under the gaze of a 19th century Kazakh poet philosopher named Abai Kunanbayev (born Qunanbaiuli).
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking the same things I am thinking. You’re asking yourself: after the Sukhoi Superjet-100 crash - what exactly is it going to take to reform the Russian aviation sector?
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Right now it seems as if the leadership of the entire planet is coming up for election. At least that’s the impression I get from the news: there are changes of leadership everywhere, or at least in those places where the population is allowed to have a say in such matters.
Vladimir Putin, who was inaugurated as president of Russia on May 7, has instructed the Foreign Ministry to ensure compliance with the New START Treaty, focusing on the issue of ballistic missile defense.
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Does Vladimir Putin's return to the Kremlin mean more of the same Putin we know? Yes and no.
You know what it is to treat someone like a mushroom? Keep them in the dark and feed them bullshit. This is the best way to grow a mushroom and is an Australian colloquialism used when we want to keep the truth from someone, and in fact feed them disinformation.
Some 20,000 people gathered just off Red Square, screams of passion and rage, a heavy police presence, an air of abandon…No, that’s not a description of an out-of-control anti-Putin protest, but a free concert by the English techno/breakbeat group The Prodigy in Moscow in 1997.
Should one pick sides in a conflict between a pro-Kremlin youth group and the alleged relatives of a big-time Chechen government official? Or should one just reach for the popcorn?
What would it be like to be told at age 27 that for the next four decades you were going to have to kill, starve and oppress millions of people if you wanted to stay alive? A strange question you may think, and yet not an unreasonable one. It is after all, precisely what happened to Kim Jong-un, the son of Kim Jong-il and now leader of the world’s most oppressive state.
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Vladimir Putin is poised to take the oath of president of Russia for a third time. It was in August 1999 that he essentially began to run the country, having been appointed prime minister by an ailing President Boris Yeltsin. He served as president for eight years and then returned to the position of prime minister for four, but he continued to call the shots. After his third term as president, Putin will be 65, and he will have been in power for almost 19 years.
The audience was small and the location in central Moscow - a Christian cultural center - probably not the most glamorous. But that did not stop Mario Mauro from giving a sparkling performance on his favourite subjects: persecution of Christians around the world, aggressive secularism in Europe, and the way forward toward closer spiritual bonds between the Catholic and Orthodox churches.
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The 1920s are back.
Or, rather, we are back to the 1920s. Culture, fashion, social life – the “Roaring Twenties” nostalgia has been thriving on many fronts lately.
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I’ve been spending the short May holidays here in the Moscow countryside, but took an elektrichka – an electric suburban train - back into the capital this morning.
Getting Russians to agree on things is a bit like herding cats. Yet I think it’s fairly safe to say that most Russians hate cops and judges - a phenomenon directly responsible for the fact that criminal culture continues to endure, methinks.
Five years have passed since the death of the first Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, and twelve years have passed since he quit politics. Yet it’s still too soon to judge Yeltsin and his political era objectively.
“Of all CEOs among Fortune 500 companies, only 18 are women,” wrote Joanna Coles, Marie Claire USA editor-in-chief, in the magazine’s latest issue devoted entirely to career.
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Most of us understand that the real 21st century wars are economic.
Russia’s Orthodox Church has been at the center of a storm of controversy of late – from Pussy Riot’s anti-Putin “punk prayer” in Moscow’s largest cathedral to the comical “now you see it, now you don’t” saga of Patriarch Kirill’s luxury watch.
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