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By James Baldwin
By Barbara Ehrenreich
$15.64
$18
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Flickr / PanARMENIAN_Photo
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Former United Nations secretary-general and current U.N. and Arab League envoy Kofi Annan said Tuesday that his bid to get Syrian President Bashar al-Assad (above) and his administration to accept a peace plan Annan proposed has been successful. Enacting it, however, is another matter.
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Flickr / World Economic Forum
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When American politicians have flashbacks to a Cold War mentality, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev is ready with a comeback and a friendly reminder to quit it with the ’70s nostalgia, as he did Tuesday in response to a comment Mitt Romney made the day before about Russia being America’s “No. 1 geopolitical foe.”
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AP / Pablo Martinez Monsivais
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During what he apparently thought was a private huddle with his Russian counterpart at a nuclear summit meeting in Seoul, South Korea, President Barack Obama was caught in a hot-mic moment, giving Dmitry Medvedev an election-year pointer on the delicate subject of missile defense.
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AP / Misha Japaridze
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On Tuesday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov signaled a shift in his country’s position vis-à-vis the ongoing crisis in Syria, indicating that Russia may be willing to cooperate more with the U.N. Security Council’s proposed plan, but with some stipulations.
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AP / Dmitry Lovetsky
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By Ivo Mijnssen — His opponents in last week’s presidential election did not stand a chance, but 12 years into the Putin regime, Russians are more demanding.
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AP / Richard Drew
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Secretary of State Hillary Clinton paid a visit to the United Nations Security Council on Monday to appeal once again to the international community about the crisis in Syria, making pointed remarks in the general direction of China and Russia as she urged all member nations to get with the regime change program, and soon.
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Gamma Man (CC-BY)
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By Ellen Brown, Truthout —
Conventional wisdom holds that government bureaucrats are bad businesspeople. But around the world, the many countries with strong public banking sectors generally have strong, stable economies.
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mobyhill (CC-BY)
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By Ann Jones, TomDispatch —
Since May 2007, 76 NATO soldiers have been killed and an undisclosed number wounded in 46 recorded “deliberate attacks” by members of the Afghan National Security Force. These figures suggest more than a recent “trend of Afghan treachery.”
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Kap, Cagle Cartoons, La Vanguardia, Spain —
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Wikimedia Commons / U.S. Department of Defense
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If Vladimir Putin, the expected winner of Russia’s upcoming presidential election, isn’t careful, he may face the kind of upsurge in revolt that occurred a year ago in Tunisia, Egypt and other nations when the regional sea change we now know as the Arab Spring took hold. So says Putin’s former ally and now rival, Sergei Mironov.
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Olle Johansson, Sweden —
Posted on Feb 28, 2012
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euronews.net
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Surprising no one, Russian strongman and current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is looking like the clear front-runner to become Russia’s next president, reclaiming the office from Dmitry Medvedev, who at times seemed mostly to fill the position of useful political backdrop to make Putin look good in his own office.
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NASA
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Fifty years ago, John Glenn sat in a little metal capsule rocketing around the Earth, while down on the ground NASA scientists thought his eyes might change shape. (more)
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AP / Alexander Natruskin
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After a protest against the Russian government composed entirely of plush toys and figurines captured the attention of the press and local authorities in Barnaul, Russia, last month, government officials have gone so far as to specify that inanimate playthings can’t assemble for public political gatherings.
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AP / Local Coordination Committees in Syria
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Bashar al-Assad’s government rained more than 200 bombs on the opposition-controlled city of Homs on Wednesday, killing an unconfirmed 27 people and demolishing homes. The Russian and Chinese governments maintained their policy of nonintervention while leaders of Western and Arab nations scrambled to decide how, if at all, to get involved.
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BBC
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Two days after Russia and China blocked a U.N. resolution calling for Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad to step down, violence in Homs stepped up a big notch, with near-constant shelling rocking the volatile Syrian city.
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AP / Muzaffar Salman
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By Ivo Mijnssen — The Kremlin risks international isolation with its uncompromising stance on Syria, but Russia has powerful incentives to protect Bashar al-Assad.
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Flickr / PanARMENIAN_Photo
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On Tuesday, the United Nations Security Council’s attempt to pass a resolution strongly encouraging regime change in Syria, which by definition would mean the end of President Bashar Assad’s tenure in office, was again met with resistance from Russia.
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AP / Local Coordination Committees in Syria
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As the crisis in Syria reached new levels of urgency Friday, the United Nations Security Council met to work up a resolution pressuring Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to step down. The U.N. group faced a formidable challenge, however, from a prominent and permanent member, according to the BBC.
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AP / Dmitry Lovetsky
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By Ivo Mijnssen — Representing oligarchs, playboys and the NBA, the billionaire is an unlikely candidate for president, but his and other campaigns may manage to embarrass Russia’s most powerful man.
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AP / Mikhail Metzel
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Two high profile figures associated with the Kremlin joined tens of thousands of Muscovites in the streets Saturday to once again protest Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s attempt to prolong his tenure as the nation’s leading figure in the upcoming presidential election.
Posted on Dec 24, 2011
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Bill Day, Cagle Cartoons —
Posted on Dec 18, 2011
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AP / Sergey Ponomarev
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By Ivo Mijnssen — The largest anti-government protests in more than a decade have created a new political dynamic in Russia, but there is no real alternative to Vladimir Putin.
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Wikimedia Commons / (CC-BY-SA)
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He’s a high-rolling billionaire bachelor who owns the New Jersey Nets, and now Mikhail Prokhorov says he’s aiming to take down the biggest player in Russian politics by running against Prime Minister Vladimir Putin for the presidency next March.
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White House / Pete Souza
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — It was gratifying to hear a despotic leader blame the United States for the rise of a democratic protest movement against his regime.
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AP / Mikhial Metzel
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Thousands of Russian youths, newly politicized by what they see as a violation of human rights, stood with a crowd of up to 50,000 people in central Moscow’s Bolotnaya Square to challenge election results that keep Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party in power.
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AP / RIA Novosti, Alexei Nikolsky
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Could martial arts enthusiast, tiger wrangler and Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin be losing his steely grip on power in his homeland? Could be, judging by the results of Sunday’s parliamentary election in Russia, which resulted in a shaky showing for Putin’s United Russia party.
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Wikimedia Commons / www.kremlin.ru (CC-BY)
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The competition included Bill Gates, Angela Merkel and Kofi Annan, among others, but this week a little-known organization called the China International Peace Research Center named Russia’s bombastic Prime Minister ... (more)
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Paresh Nath, Cagle Cartoons, The Khaleej Times, UAE —
Posted on Oct 5, 2011
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OMI/Aura/NASA
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Unusual weather ripped a sizable hole in the ozone layer above the Arctic last winter, exposing people in northern Russia, parts of Greenland and Norway to high levels of UV radiation. Human activity did not cause the hole’s sudden appearance, scientists said in a report released Monday. (more)
Posted on Oct 3, 2011
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Art exhibitions reveal the real Gertrude Stein; young American Jews are disagreeing with their parents’ views on Palestine; meanwhile, the battle over bin Laden postmortem photos continues. These discoveries and more after the jump.
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Flickr / ¡Que comunismo!
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Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has been busy courting countries from Latin America to Eastern Europe to the Middle East to the Far East to assemble a political and economic bulwark against American imperialism. (more)
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This week on Truthdig Radio, in collaboration with KPFK, we hear about the dark side of international freight; the downside of DSK’s dismissal; the power of journalism, and the fall of the Soviet Union.
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Photo illustration from an image by Colin Grey
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This week on Truthdig Radio, in collaboration with KPFK, we hear about the dark side of international freight; the downside of DSK’s dismissal; the power of journalism, and the fall of the Soviet Union.
Posted on Sep 1, 2011
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Richard Bitting (CC-BY)
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Correction: Back in 2007, a Russian official announced a scheme to build an underwater rail system linking Siberia to Alaska. Such a railway would require the longest tunnel ever built and expenditures of about $94 billion (by one estimate). More than four years later, the transcontinental railway was in the news again. (more)
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Kap, Cagle Cartoons, La Vanguardia, Spain —
Posted on Aug 27, 2011
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Kenny Louie (CC-BY)
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The Pentagon has decided to treat Internet-borne attacks on the United States as acts of war. The change is motivated in part by a brewing leet arms race with China and Russia. Essentially the U.S. is playing catch-up in what someone from the 1990s would call “cyberspace” and the military is buying time by creating, it hopes, a deterrent. (more)
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AP / Libyan state television via APTN
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Russian President Dmitry Medvedev recently joined the chorus of outsiders urging Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi to give up, but that suggestion isn’t hitting home with Gadhafi, according to yet another head of state, Jacob Zuma. The South African president returned from a visit to Tripoli with the news that Gadhafi isn’t planning to go anywhere anytime soon.
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AP / Carolyn Kaster
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An unexpected voice is joining the international chorus urging Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi to leave. On Friday, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev announced that he would use his country’s solid rapport with Libya to encourage Gadhafi to finally ...
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Nate Beeler, Cagle Cartoons, The Washington Examiner —
Posted on May 9, 2011
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AP / Jerome Delay
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Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin wasn’t thrilled with the U.N. Security Council’s go-ahead to let U.S. and European forces fire on Moammar Gadhafi’s troops in Libya, and he said so Monday. He wasn’t alone in his criticism of what began as ...
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AP / DigitalGlobe/dapd
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Corporate interests might have played a big part in the design and maintenance of Japan’s nuclear complex at Fukushima, according to Russian nuclear accident expert Iouli Andreev, who knows a thing or two from Chernobyl’s example ...
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AP / Ivan Sekretarev
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A suicide bomber set off a deadly explosion in the international terminal of Moscow’s highly trafficked Domodedovo Airport on Monday, killing 31 people and wounding close to 170, according to the Associated Press’ last update.
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Wikimedia Commons
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Last April’s plane crash in Smolensk, Russia, which claimed the lives of Polish President Lech Kaczynski and 95 other passengers, was due to error on the part of the Tu-154’s Polish pilots—or so say Russian investigators, drawing mixed reactions from the Polish side.
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flickr / deneyterrio
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Well, you may have to wait awhile, unless you’re among Goldman Sachs’ circle of elite customers who were given the investment opportunity Sunday night—an indication of other possible big moves that Goldman and Facebook might make down the line.
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AP / Dmitry Lovetsky
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He knows a thing or two about the nuances of U.S.-Russian relations, not to mention nuclear disarmament, and former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev flexed his knowledge in a New York Times op-ed piece about the New START treaty this week ...
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AP / Ivan Sekretarev
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The Russian government would like certain of its Western counterparts, particularly Germany and the U.S., to know that their critiques of the Russian justice system’s approach to the trial of sometime Putin antagonist and oil magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky are unwelcome at this time.
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AP / Park Ji-ho, Yonhap
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North Korea was at the ready with disquieting talk about a “sacred war of justice” on Thursday after South Korea executed elaborate military exercises to demonstrate its prowess near the feuding nations’ shared border.
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Wikimedia Commons / United States Senate
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Atop Wednesday’s to-do list in the Senate was a vote on the proposed and revised version of the U.S.’ Strategic Nuclear Arms Reduction treaty with Russia, which was running up against resistance from some Republicans in the chamber but still seemed likely to pass.
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Truthdigger of the Week: Medea Benjamin
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