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By Amy Goodman, David Goodman
$9.58
By Michel Warschawski
$14.95
$22
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AP / Alexander Zemlianichenko
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The negative reactions are snowballing on multiple fronts against Israel’s highly controversial decision to build 1,600 new housing units in East Jerusalem, an announcement that put the kibosh on Vice President Joe Biden’s good-will visit last week. (continued)
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AP / Alexander Zemlianichenko
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Secretary of State Hillary Clinton winged her way to Moscow on Thursday to go over the nitty-gritty details of a new arms control agreement with Russian leaders that is targeted to replace the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) of 1991, but a successful outcome is by no means guaranteed in this round of negotiations.
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AP / Musa Sadulayev
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Call it reckless and/or call it propaganda: A Georgian newscast used footage of Russian troops crossing Georgia’s borders in 2008 to present a “simulation” of possible events, including Russian tanks en route to the capital and the killing of the nation’s president.
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AP / Mikhail Metzel
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By Mark Heisler — In the wake of the just-concluded Winter Games—aka They Can Even Sell This Stuff?—it’s amazing to think how little was left of the Olympic movement in 1984, when it crawled into Los Angeles on its last legs.
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nytimes.com
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In an announcement more apt for a dinner party than a defense memorandum, Romania has agreed to host a new U.S. missile shield in its territory aimed at protecting Western interests from the “emerging threat” of Iranian ballistic missiles.
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Flickr / KatЯ
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At a time of the year when alcohol consumption is traditionally up in Russia, a campaign against alcoholism launched recently by President Dmitry Medvedev will substantially raise the price of vodka. The cost of the cheapest half liter will increase to at least 89 rubles (about $3) from about 50 rubles.
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U.S. Navy
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Despite U.S.-Russian progress since Barack Obama’s inauguration on the sticky issue of the United States’ planned missile shield system, the two sides are not completely in agreement on the matter. In fact, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has brought it up again in conjunction with ... (continued)
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AP
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While the U.S. is by far the world’s largest arms supplier, Russia has reportedly signed a deal with Myanmar—against which many in the West have imposed sanctions—to provide the country formerly known as Burma with 20 MiG-29 fighter planes. For, you know, uh, defense.
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Flickr / AYC107
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Hugo Chavez muffler-rattled against the likes of Toyota, Ford, General Motors and Fiat in a speech to the country Thursday, attacking those companies for not sharing technology with local industry and threatening to kick them out of business if they did not comply.
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AP / Ivan Sekretarev
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Russian President (and Vladimir Putin stand-in) Dmitry Medvedev announced in a televised speech Thursday that his country would develop a new generation of nuclear weapons that would replace the old Cold War-era missiles that stock his arsenal.
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Original: U.S. Air Force / Master Sgt. Scott Reed
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The $4.5 million Predator unmanned aerial vehicle and its at least $10 million successor are considered the future of America’s Air Force and a big part of the president’s escalation in Afghanistan. Insurgents in Iraq (and probably Afghanistan) were able to track the planes and intercept video feeds using $26 software available on the Internet. (continued)
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Flickr / Eustaquio Santimano
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Vietnam is spending billions on Russian submarines and fighter jets. Calm down, Dick Cheney. Vietnam cares more about the prawn market than World War III. The real superpower fretting over this is China. ... (continued)
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Kremlin / Presidential Press and Information Office
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Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has found a way to stay in power this long, and, as he told his fellow countrymen and -women Thursday, retirement will not be high on his priority list anytime soon. In fact, he could be eyeing another run for the presidency in 2012.
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peopledaily.com.cn
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Iran has announced it will conduct a weeklong round of air defense war games centered on the country’s nuclear sites as Western powers, especially the U.S., turn up the heat over Tehran’s nuclear program.
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payvand.com
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President Barack Obama has signaled an escalation in the ongoing nuclear dispute with Iran, warning that punitive measures could come soon after Tehran rejected a proposal to send its enriched uranium to Russia or France for further processing.
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rian.ru
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A once-temporary ban on the death penalty is now set to be enshrined into Russian law, permanently banning the practice as Russia prepares to join the majority of the world’s countries in outlawing capital punishment.
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AP / Charles Dharapak
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By James Fergusson —
No invading army has ever “won” in Afghanistan, and nothing unites the people more than infidel soldiers on their holy soil: What Obama could learn from Gorbachev.
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AP / Herbert Knosowski
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By Robert Scheer — Mikhail Gorbachev is not honored enough for the example he set. His past practices and recent cautions about Afghanistan should be heeded by Barack Obama.
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YouTube
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A Russian police major lost his job after recording two YouTube videos’ worth of complaints about low pay, long hours and being promoted for arresting an innocent man. In one of the clips, the major invites Vladimir Putin himself to buddy up and investigate the problem. (video after the jump)
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radicalsforhappiness.com
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Two new biographies about the irascible and idiosyncratic Ayn Rand, objectivist philosopher and ham-fisted mistress of the capitalist morality tale, show how her rocky Russian childhood and her subsequent self-reinvention campaign in America (partly conducted in Hollywood, of course) influenced her work, and how her ideas led to her own undoing.
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payvand.com
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The IAEA announced it has received Iran’s reply to a U.N.-backed proposal to send that country’s enriched uranium abroad to be turned into fuel rods—not weapons. The reply, which remains secret, is expected to agree to the overall framework of the proposal while demanding significant changes.
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payvand.com
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Prodded by the U.S., Russia and France at talks in Vienna, Iranian negotiators have agreed to carry back to Tehran a proposed deal that would see Iran ship out most of its enriched uranium—the stuff of nuclear weapons—to Russia.
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Flickr / maocirpdsp
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A Russian historian faces four years in prison for having the nerve to research Stalin’s gulags, which Russian revisionists would have you believe either didn’t exist or were a form of forced vacation.
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Flickr / SEIU International
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Hillary Clinton is all the rage with American gays, but their Russian counterparts are disappointed that the secretary of state rubbed elbows with Moscow’s homophobic mayor, who, the AP reports, once said gays “can be described in no other way than as satanic.”
Posted on Oct 14, 2009
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White House / Pete Souza
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By William Pfaff — The world hungers for great men to liberate it from grief. They rarely arrive, and even more rarely are they appreciated at the time for what they are.
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AP / Gerald Herbert
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By Bill Boyarsky — In Obama’s nine months as president, he has put U.S. relations with Russia on a more constructive course; has seen Iran agree to open its nuclear facility near Qom to international inspection; and, despite Israeli and Palestinian intransigence, has kept the two sides negotiating with America’s dogged envoy, George Mitchell, who helped bring peace to Northern Ireland.
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Bill Maher couldn’t contain his glee on Friday night’s episode of “Real Time” while rattling off some alternative titles for Sarah Palin’s upcoming memoir, “Going Rogue: An American Life,” had it been ghostwritten by several famous writers—even some long-dead ones.
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By William Pfaff — President Barack Obama’s cancellation of his predecessor’s missile-defense scheme for Poland and the Czech Republic presumably brings to a close one of the least explicable and most dangerous American policy initiatives since the Cold War officially ended.
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Fan Jianping , Guangzhou, China —
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AP / Dmitry Lovetsky
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You’d think that Mikhail Gorbachev, having stood at several key historical junctions in the not-so-distant past, might have a few thoughts about his time in office and the turns of events that happened since—and Soviet Russia’s last leader does.
Posted on Sep 20, 2009
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Russia might be pleased with President Obama’s decision to nix Bush’s missile shield plans, but how about Eastern Europe? Meanwhile, Sen. Max Baucus’ health care reform plan foundered, and Obama made a play to get through to the powers on Wall Street. All this—plus the Glenn Becking of American political discourse—is part of this week’s discussion on “Left, Right & Center.”
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U.S. Navy
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Add this to the oft-forgotten list of things progressives can celebrate about the president: Obama’s decision to postpone the deployment of a missile shield in Eastern Europe has possibly averted a new arms race with Russia.
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Flickr / agitprop
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Is Vladimir Putin’s dictator chic to blame for Josef Stalin’s makeover? The Soviet tyrant who presided over the suffering of millions and helped launch World War II has been rebranded as a “competent manager” and, if Moscow’s deserted Gulag Museum is any indication, Russians appear to be lapping it up.
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AP pool / Alexei Druzhinin
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Superexecutive Vladimir Putin has strongly suggested that he plans to become president of Russia once again after his term as prime minister expires in 2012. That prospect and the current power-sharing deal between Putin and now-President Dmitry Medvedev has some talking about a “democratic deficit” in Moscow.
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AP / Musa Sadulayev
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Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, in Moscow shopping for military hardware, may have been fishing for a discount when he announced that Caracas would join Russia and Nicaragua in recognizing the independence of the breakaway Georgian provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. The U.S., of course, is a strong supporter and ally of Georgia.
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kremlin.ru
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Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has attempted to improve relations between his country and Poland by addressing some wrongs committed by the Soviet Union—and later Russia—against its Baltic neighbor in recent decades. He offered an apology in an article he penned for the Polish paper Gazeta Wyborcza that ran Tuesday.
Posted on Sep 1, 2009
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AP / Musa Sadulayev
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A suicide attack carried out at a police station in the northern Russian city of Nazran claimed 20 lives and wounded more than 130 Monday, spurring Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to fire the regional interior minister.
Posted on Aug 17, 2009
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defendamerica.mil
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The U.S. military has begun war games in the nation of Georgia, an exercise reportedly planned for months, but which comes just days after Russia announced it will spend half a billion dollars refurbishing its own military bases and strengthening its hold on Georgia’s breakaway region of Abkhazia.
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AP / Musa Sadulayev
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Russia has announced it will spend half a billion dollars upgrading its military presence—reinforcing bases, strengthening borders—in Abkhazia, the breakaway region of Georgia that, along with South Ossetia, was a focal point in last year’s war between the two countries.
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columbia.edu
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A significant Internet “denial of service” attack Thursday directed at popular Web sites such as Facebook and Twitter may have been carried out or instigated by the Russian government in an attempt to silence a dissident blogger in Georgia. At least so says the blogger.
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Flickr / squigglycircle
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Anna Politkovskaya was such a fine journalist, so brave in afflicting the comfortable, that she was shot. Probably by her political enemies, which included her government. She was the 13th journalistic critic of the government to be shot down by contract killers during Putin’s reign. After the first sham trial led to nothing, the Russian Supreme Court ordered a retrial of defendants in the case, a trial that is now under way and in a brief adjournment.
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AP / Musa Sadulayev
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It’s been a year since last summer’s military showdown between Russia and neighboring Georgia, but even though the Georgian president (and many Western media outlets) pointed to “Russian aggression” as the cause of the conflict, an international investigation team looking to get to the bottom of the matter is still working away at finding the answers.
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Flickr / DieselDemon
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The Russians are coming ... to Cuba. Moscow has inked a deal with Havana to hunt down and suck out what could be as much as 20 billion barrels of oil from Cuba’s share of the Gulf of Mexico. It’s just like old times.
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rferl.org
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Russia has announced it will take “concrete steps” to hinder any attempt by Georgia to rebuild its military capability, claiming it is “deeply worried” that its small neighbor might be preparing for yet another conflict. The stern words come as Vice President Joe Biden pays a visit to Georgia just ahead of the first anniversary of its war with Russia over South Ossetia.
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AP photo / RIA-Novosti, Vladimir Rodionov, Presidential Press Service
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Sure, some of the show of good will between President Barack Obama and his Russian counterpart, Dmitry Medvedev, was glad-handing for the cameras, and that whole missile-shield issue was swept under the rug for the time being, but some actual progress was made during their summit in Moscow on Monday.
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commons.wikimedia.org - Tej
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The Russian Supreme Court has ordered a retrial for the three men acquitted of murdering Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist who exposed human rights abuses in Chechnya. Politkovskaya, a leading critic of then-President Vladimir Putin, was one of many Russian journalists mysteriously silenced after speaking out against the government.
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Mike Keefe, The Denver Post —
Posted on May 31, 2009
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By William Pfaff — The basic question is whether the United States wishes to treat Russia as a permanent enemy, even if it is not. The result of treating states as enemies is that sooner or later they become them.
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interactive.usc.edu
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Jealous of Russia and China’s hacking prowess, the Pentagon is trying to beef up its cyberwarfare capabilities by developing a gadget that would enable a run-of-the-mill soldier to hop on your wireless network, take over a power plant and everything between.
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AP photo / Rich Pedroncelli
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By Chris Hedges — The embrace by any society of permanent war is a parasite that devours the heart and soul of a nation. Permanent war extinguishes liberal, democratic movements. It turns culture into nationalist cant. It degrades and corrupts education and the media, and wrecks the economy.
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