| April 2012 |
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The recent sacking rampage by outgoing President Dmitry Medvedev was orchestrated by his successor Vladimir Putin, who is weeding out second-tier elites ahead of his third presidency, analysts said.
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From the moment of his inauguration in a glistening ceremony at the State Kremlin Palace in May 2008, the odds were always going to be stacked against Dmitry Medvedev and his attempt to leave his mark on a presidency that his critics saw as little more than a political convenience.
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Russia’s civil society has made a dramatic leap forward over the past three years and is doing much more to curb corruption than the authorities, Yelena Panfilova, a prominent, outgoing member of the presidential anti-corruption and human rights council, said on Wednesday.
Osama bin Laden’s death had little immediate impact on Russia’s own Islamist insurgency, which had occasional ties with al-Qaida, but a lot remains at stake for Moscow in Afghanistan, where a weakened al-Qaida is being sidelined by the Taliban, Russian foreign policy analysts said.
When sixteen-year old Margarita K. hurled herself from her the window of her 13th floor apartment in south-west Moscow on Thursday, she became the latest in a high-profile wave of teen suicides across Russia.
Billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov has been conspicuously absent from Russian politics - after an impressive debut at the presidential vote in March - because he is preparing to end his dependence on the Kremlin, pundits said.
“I don’t understand opera, but I like jazz,” Mikhail says as he trudges toward the bus. “Baroque jazz, and cosmic jazz, you know? They’ve got synthesizers and everything.”
In the rare silences during North Korea’s April 15 military parade, after innumerable divisions, tanks and rocket launchers had passed by, another sound rang out across the vast square in central Pyongyang: the hacking coughs of North Korea’s top military officers.
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April 19, Holocaust Remembrance Day, falls on the anniversary of the heroic Warsaw Ghetto uprising in 1943, when an armored brigade of Nazi SS that was herding its population to death camps paid a heavy price in blood for weeks at the hands of Jewish fighters armed with Molotov cocktails.
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President Dmitry Medvedev’s call for a new public television platform last December conjured visions of a Russian BBC for the country’s liberals. Yet worries are now growing that the president’s control over the new television station could prevent it from broadcasting opinions critical of the government.
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With Russia’s powerful Orthodox Church facing a wave of criticism from what it has called supporters of “radical liberal values,” a Christian publisher presented on Wednesday a book on the religious beliefs of stars of show business and film.
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Former Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who has been living in self-imposed exile since his government was overturned in a military coup in 2006, told RIA Novosti in Vientiane, the capital of Laos, that he would return home when the Thai people regain political unity.
The latest wave of attacks by the Taliban in Afghanistan was a mixed success, but it strengthened the movement’s position in talks with official Kabul and NATO forces ahead of their withdrawal, Russian analysts and politicians said.
The cement pavement on Kim Il-Sung square in Pyongyang shook as dozens of divisions of the Korean People’s Army goosestepped to a military brass band in perfect synchrony. Later came the big guns: Soviet-era military trucks drove in parade formations carrying missile launchers, drone airplanes and heavy rockets, the pride of the North Korean army.
Russia’s chief specialist on tackling drug abuse reiterated on Friday the country’s reluctance to introduce a Western-style system of needle exchanges for heroin addicts, saying it would do nothing to combat high HIV infection rates.
For dozens of foreign journalists gathered in Pyongyang to cover a much-hyped North Korean missile launch, it was over before it even began. With little fanfare this morning, North Korea launched – and crashed – an Unha-3 rocket in its latest attempt to solidify the legitimacy of its advanced weapons systems and bolster its nuclear threat.
Scientists and shipbuilders agree that the Titanic could have been saved or at least kept afloat for two or three hours longer. In this case the RMS Carpathia, which was the first to arrive at the scene of the disaster, would have had enough time to take all the passengers on board. How could the Titanic and the passengers have been saved? Russian naval engineer Yuri Sarukhanov suggests several solutions.
The Kremlin is keeping silent on a hunger strike over alleged electoral violations in Astrakhan, which is now in its fourth week, but this could allow the opposition to regroup and mount a new campaign in the provinces, political pundits said.
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