(Russia Beyond the Headlines – rbth.ru – By Dan Pototsky, RBTH – January 24, 2014) Experts at the company Group-IB have officially disproved reports identifying Sergey Tarasov, purportedly 17 and a resident of St. Petersburg, as the author of the malicious software known as Kaptoxa, which was used in one of the largest successful attacks on U.S. Internet stores. “Over […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – January 24, 2014) The Moscow News, an English-language Moscow weekly that recently became an insert in the Russian-language Moskovskiye Novosti, has been told to shut down its print edition. Editor Natalia Antonova wrote on the news agency’s website that “the print edition of The Moscow News has been shut down by order of the management.” […]
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(Moscow News – themoscownews.com – Natalia Antonova – January 23, 2014) Dear readers, the print edition of The Moscow News has been shut down by order of the management. The January 23 issue, which came out today as part of Moskovskiye Novosti, was our last print publication until further notice. Our website remains active, and we will continue bringing you […]
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MOSCOW, January 22 (RIA Novosti) A bill that would have branded Russian media outlets that receive more than 50 percent of their funding from abroad as “foreign agents” was withdrawn from consideration in the State Duma on Tuesday. The bill’s authors said they had decided to reintroduce the legislation at a later date with a lower threshold for qualification […]
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MOSCOW, January 14 (RIA Novosti) The Russian defense industry will create its own “news factory” to offset the “Russophobic” produce of state-owned television channels, a senior official said. Russian television revels in vulgarity and sensationalism, and its makers show “disdain for everything created by domestic labor and Russia’s great culture,” said Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, who is responsible […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Ivan Nechepurenko – January 14, 2014) Russia has barred a U.S. journalist for five years in a move that has triggered a frenzy between Russian authorities and Western media on Tuesday, signaling possible heightened tensions ahead of upcoming Winter Olympic Games in Sochi. It was not clear whether David Satter, 66, was banned entry into […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – January 13, 2014) Though he may lack the Twitter following of his tech-obsessed Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, President Vladimir Putin was social media star over the weekend, as a “selfie” photo of the president and a young boy made the rounds on the Internet. [https://twitter.com/koffboy/status/422411344927653888] The picture of an unidentified boy and Putin was published […]
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MOSCOW, January 10 (RIA Novosti) People living in more than a third of Russia’s small towns and villages have no access to the Internet, a new government study shows. Despite the boom in Internet use in Russia, some 6,700 localities have no opportunity to get online, the Ministry of Communications and Mass Media said on its website. The figure […]
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MOSCOW, January 10 (RIA Novosti) Russian TV celebrity and socialite Ksenia Sobchak has said she was strip-searched at Miami Airport after a security check wrongly detected explosives on her fingers, a claim the US authorities have denied. Sobchak, 32, formerly the host of a long-running reality show and now an anchor at an independent TV channel, claimed on Twitter […]
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(Secrecy News – blogs.fas.org/secrecy – Steven Aftergood – January 8, 2014) Beginning in 1974, the U.S. intelligence community provided the public with a broad selection of foreign news reports, updated daily. These were collected and translated by the Central Intelligence Agency’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS), which was reconstituted in 2004 as the Open Source Center (OSC). But the CIA […]
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(Secrecy News – blogs.fas.org/secrecy – Steven Aftergood – December 23, 2013) More than a dozen professional societies and public interest groups wrote to the Director of National Intelligence last week to ask him to preserve public access to foreign news reports gathered, translated and published by the Open Source Center and marketed to subscribers through the NTIS World News Connection. […]
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(Moscow News – themoscownews.com – David Burghardt – December 31, 2013) Margarita Simonyan has been named editor-in-chief of the newly founded Rossiya Segodnya, previously called RIA Novosti, the news agency’s general director, Dmitry Kiselyov, announced on Tuesday. Simonyan was appointed editor-in-chief of the Moscow-based English-language television station RT in 2005. “This key position could only be held by a person […]
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MOSCOW, December 30 (RIA Novosti) Russian leader Vladimir Putin has been named International Person of the Year by Britain’s The Times newspaper for succeeding in his ambition of bringing Moscow back to the international top table. The paper said Putin, 61, a judo black belt, has hip-flipped US President Barack Obama on the Syrian crisis, wrestled the EU to […]
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(RIA Novosti – December 23, 2013) Editor in Chief of Moskovskiy Komsomolets daily Pavel Gusev, TV presenter Kseniya Sobchak and Editor in Chief of Ekho Moskvy radio Aleksey Venediktov have been named as Russia’s most frequently quoted journalists, RIA Novosti news agency reported on 23 December quoting media monitoring service Medialogiya. They were followed by TV journalists Nikolay Svanidze and […]
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(Moscow News – themoscownews.com – Anna Arutunyan – December 20, 2013) The Kremlin’s drastic overhaul of state-owned media, which would see RIA Novosti, Russia’s biggest news agency, dissolved and absorbed into a new holding, has left industry insiders and experts wondering what, exactly, would arise in its place and how deeply the national media landscape will be affected. “The time […]
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(RFE/RL – rferl.org – Claire Bigg – December 9, 2013) Russia’s state-run television channels are not known for their impartiality. Their coverage of the massive pro-European protests that have engulfed Ukraine is no exception, analysts say. Russian state television has been churning out what critics describe as misleading, at times downright odd reports since protests erupted almost two weeks ago […]
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(RFE/RL – rferl.org – Daisy Sindelar – December 10, 2013) A popular clip circulating on the Internet shows just how much a journalist can change in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. In 1999, as Putin was coming to power, Dmitry Kiselyov was a promising television broadcaster with strong opinions about the difference between journalism and propaganda. “A journalist cannot be separated from […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Gabrielle Tétrault-Farber – December 10, 2013) Dmitry Kiselyov, the ultraconservative television host who was appointed Monday to head a new global news service on the base of RIA Novosti, said Tuesday that parts of the news agency would be preserved and that its staff would remain “in demand.” Kiselyov also said he would meet soon […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Gabrielle Tétrault-Farber – December 10, 2013) President Vladimir Putin on Monday issued a decree ordering the liquidation of RIA Novosti, the massive state-owned news agency, and mandated the creation of a new global news agency to be headed by an aggressively pro-Kremlin television host. In its own article about the news, RIA Novosti’s English-language service […]
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[Putin dissolves state news agency, tightens grip on Russia media – Reuters – Timothy Heritage – December 9 – http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/12/09/us-russia-media-idUSBRE9B80I120131209] Reuters covers Russia President Vladimir Putin’s decision to dissolve RIA Novosti and absorb its operations into new entity called Rossiya Segodnya, with a mission of promoting Russia abroad: President Vladimir Putin tightened his control over Russia’s media on Monday by […]
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(Government.ru – December 6, 2013) [Complete transcript in Russian here: http://government.ru/news/8790] The traditional annual live interview with Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev on the round-up of the Government’s work over the year. Asking the questions were Irada Zeinalova (Channel One), Sergei Brilyov (VGTRK), Marianna Maksimovskaya (Ren TV), Vadim Takmenyov (NTV) and Mikhail Zygar (TV Rain). Transcript: Sergei Brilyov: Good afternoon. TV […]
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KYIV. Dec 5 (Interfax) – Moscow supports the idea of the Internet’s international regulation, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said. “I think our organization should think about its role in ensuring the people’s rights in cyberspace,” Lavrov said at a ministerial session of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) in Kyiv on Thursday. “This concerns the problem […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Guennadi Moukine – November 28, 2013) PERESLAVL-ZALESSKY, Yaroslavl Region Russia is lagging five and a half years behind the U.S. in supercomputing technology and closing the gap is essential for the competitiveness of the Russian economy, an Academy of Sciences computing expert said. Supercomputers, which are ranked according to their speed of calculation measured […]
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(Moscow News – moscownews.com – Maria Stambler – November 28, 2013) Sharing, liking, posting, clicking, browsing – these actions are ubiquitous and have firmly cemented themselves into our existence with the rise of YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. New forms of communication emerge every day, and there is fairly little doubt that our lives are affected by the way we use […]
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MOSCOW. Nov 26 (Interfax) – Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev will sum up the results of the year 2013 on December 6 in the traditional live televised interview, titled “A Conversation with the Prime Minister,” the government’s spokesperson Natalya Timakova announced. “The interview will proceed in the traditional format,” she said. “The main themes to be covered are the government’s performance […]
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Subject: No. 139: Governors and Mayors Date: Tue, 26 Nov 2013 From: “Russian Analytical Digest (RAD)” <newslist@isn.ch> RUSSIAN ANALYTICAL DIGEST Newsletter 18 November 2013/No. 139 GOVERNORS AND MAYORS To download this issue please click here: http://www.css.ethz.ch/publications/DetailansichtPubDB_EN?rec_id=2781 Analyses Dynamics of Regional Inequality in the Russian Federation: Circular and Cumulative Causality, by David Lane, Cambridge The Revival of Russia’s Gubernatorial Elections: Liberalization […]
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MOSCOW. Nov 21 (Interfax) – U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul said he was angry with mass media reports on Washington supporting the Russian opposition. McFaul said at a public meeting in Moscow on Wednesday that nothing made him angrier about the Russian media than propaganda about the U.S. government sponsoring Russian opposition. According to the ambassador, he saw Russian […]
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(Russia Beyond the Headlines – rbth.ru – Alexey Mosko, RBTH – November 20, 2013) Contrary to previous media reports, journalists at the Sochi Games will be allowed to use mobile phones to photograph sportspeople and spectators during the Olympics. Journalists at the 2014 Olympic Games in Sochi will be able to take photographs and shoot videos for their own personal […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Delphine d’Amora – November 15, 2013) President Vladimir Putin has reprimanded officials for discussing government issues in the mass media and suggested that those who oppose government policy had better leave their posts. The president was speaking Thursday at a meeting of the Strategic Initiatives Advisory Board when he was asked about a contentious bill […]
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NOVO-OGARYOVO, near Moscow. Nov 14 (Interfax) – Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned it is unacceptable for senior government figures to discuss a planned decision with the media before it has been discussed in government. At a meeting of the supervisory board of the Strategic Initiatives Agency on Thursday, the president of the Russian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Sergei […]
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(Pravda.ru – Anton Kulikov – November 12, 2013) The Russian State Duma deputies proposed an introduction of the “Separatist Propaganda” article in the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation and establishing a prison sentence of three to six years for said propaganda. So far this is only a draft bill, and its future is unclear. The document was proposed for […]
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(Russia Beyond the Headlines – rbth.ru – Dmitriy Romendik, RBTH – November 12, 2013) A growing number of Russian journalists are writing on the Internet to reach their readers directly, without intermediaries in the shape of investors, publishers or editors. While this mode of professional existence has not generated large financial dividends so far, it has given them editorial independence. […]
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MOSCOW. Nov 11 (Interfax) – Secretary of the Russian Public Chamber Yevgeny Velikhov has asked head of the federal communications, information technology and mass media oversight service Roskomnadzor Alexander Zharov to check several websites suspected of engaging in the propaganda of xenophobia and racial hatred. The websites in question are “Sputnik i Pogrom” and “Pravoviye Novosti”, according to Velikhov’ letter […]
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MOSCOW, November 12 (RIA Novosti) Russian President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday that being labeled the world’s most powerful person by Forbes magazine this year has made him “more cautious,” his first-ever public comment on the issue. “I appreciate Forbes experts’ opinion, but I personally believe that, first, it always makes you cautious because it limits you a little bit […]
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(opendemocracy.net – Daniil Kotsyubinsky – November 5, 2013) Daniil Kotsyubinsky is a Russian historian and journalist based in St. Petersburg On Friday, a Russian news agency had its publishing licence revoked, supposedly for publishing two ‘profane’ Youtube clips. For Daniil Kotsyubinsky, however, the episode was but the latest example of a ‘summary execution’ intended as a warning to any […]
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MOSCOW. Oct 31 (Interfax) – Russian political scientists believe that U.S. business magazine Forbes decided to place Russia’s President Vladimir Putin at the top of its Most Powerful People rating largely thanks to his influence and the effectiveness of his initiative aimed at tackling problems linked to the conflict in Syria “The reasons why Putin was chosen to head this […]
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MOSCOW, October 30 (RIA Novosti) – Russian President Vladimir Putin was named the most powerful person on the planet by Forbes magazine Wednesday, knocking US President Barack Obama off the number one spot. Forbes said that Putin, who ranked third last year, showed his dominance in diplomatic maneuvring during the international crisis over Syria, and the fate of fugitive US […]
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From: Paul Richardson <paulr@russianlife.com> Subject: The New Issue of Russian Life Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2013 RUSSIAN LIFE MAGAZINE NOV/DEC 2013 ISSUE 557, Vol 56, No. 6 http://www.russianlife.com/russianlife/magazine/ Science Wars MARIA ANTONOVA The government wants to reform the Russian Academy of Sciences. Scientists are having none of it. All a-Twitter MARIA ANTONOVA In our Trends section, editor Maria Antonova looks […]
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(Russia Beyond the Headlines – rbth.ru – Yaroslava Kiryukhina, RBTH – October 23, 2013) Just several months after granting temporary asylum to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, Russia prepares to implement electronic surveillance that looks similar to the infamous PRISM. But is it actually the same? Russia’s Communications Ministry has drafted an order that would require Internet providers to install monitoring […]
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(Russia Beyond the Headlines – rbth.ru – Dmitry Babich, special to RBTH – October 21, 2013) Dmitry Babich is a columnist for Voice of Russia radio. Is the former NSA analyst a modern-day dissident? There are many interesting similarities between Edward Snowden and the famous Russian dissident writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008). The most recent example of these is the interview […]
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(RIA Novosti – October 21, 2013) Russian State Duma MPs have downplayed the significance of the Communications Ministry’s draft decree requiring internet service providers to install equipment for storing internet traffic and sharing it with the Federal Security Service (FSB), Russian news agencies reported on 21 October. The Russian heavyweight liberal newspaper Kommersant reported earlier on the same day that […]
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(RIA Novosti – MOSCOW, October 21, 2013) A Russian telecommunications giant has slammed government plans to give security services complete access to all Internet traffic by the middle of 2014, calling them unconstitutional, Kommersant newspaper reported Monday. The daily cited a letter submitted by mobile operator Vimpelcom to the Press and Communications Ministry as saying the proposed legislation violated fundamental […]
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(Interfax – MOSCOW, October 21, 2013) The Communications Ministry’s draft decree on the special services’ access to Internet traffic is not a novelty and does not contradict Russian legislation,” the ministry press service told Interfax on Monday. “This decree is not new. Besides, it doesn’t regulate the procedure governing the provision of Internet users’ data to the special services,” the […]
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(Interfax – October 20, 2013) The proportion of Russia’s adult population that accesses the internet on a daily basis is continuing to grow steadily, with almost half now going online at least once a day, according to research from one of the country’s leading polling organizations. In remarks reported by the privately-owned Interfax agency on 17 October, the head of […]
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(Interfax – MOSCOW, October 17, 2013) The monthly Internet audience in Russia reached 66.1 million people aged 18 or older, or, 57% of the country’s population in fall 2013, Svetlana Borisova, the head of the FOM-RUNET project of the Public Opinion Foundation, told a conference RIW (Russian Internet Week) 2013. “The average daily audience of the Russian segment of the […]
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(Window on Eurasia – Paul Goble – Staunton, October 16, 2013) The Kremlin’s moves against the principles of the Russian Constitution and basic human rights are currently coming at such a rapid pace that it is difficult to keep up with its assault on what remains of democracy in that country. This week alone featured three initiatives that are particularly […]
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(Interfax – MOSCOW, October 11, 2013) Russia’s Internet economy will continue to grow at a rate of 3-6% annually even if there is a global crisis, the head of the Russian Association for Electronic Communications (RAEC), Sergei Plugotarenko told reporters. “In preparing the study Runet Economy 2012-2013, we prepared four scenarios for the Internet economy’s development: innovation, stabilization, negative and […]
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(Interfax – MOSCOW, October 7, 2013) Forty-seven percent of Russians polled in September still have queries about who could benefit from the killing of Novaya Gazeta reporter Anna Politkovskaya seven years ago. Fifteen percent of respondents said the opposition forces, “interested in destabilization” could have been behind the killing, according to Levada Center pollster, and 12% said “Ramzan Kadyrov” and […]
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On Monday, Oct. 7, we invite you to participate in a short focus group in Washington, D.C. with Russia Direct editors who will be coming in from Moscow. This is your chance to provide feedback on our website and also learn about upcoming editorial plans. A catered lunch will be provided as well as a $25 American Express gift certificate […]
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Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2013 Subject: Re: Current History’s October issue From: Joshua Lustig [Managing Editor] <JoshuaLustig@currenthistory.com> Current History’s October 2013 issue, devoted to Russia and Eurasia, is available at www.currenthistory.com, in print, and via Kindle. It includes the following essays: Can Putin Keep His Grip on Power? by Daniel Treisman Moscow’s Soft Power Strategy, by Andrei P. Tsygankov Russia’s […]
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