Georgian Economy Minister posing in a nightclub

The Russian media has seized upon a raunchy photograph – of the Georgian Economy Minister posing in a nightclub – to release a fresh torrent of criticism at President Mikheil Saakashvili for appointing "strippers" to his cabinet.




(Economic Minister of Georgia-Gruzia is in the centre)

Mr Saakashvili appointed 28-year-old Vera Kobalia to the ministerial post this month. Ms Kobalia, an ethnic Georgian, had lived in Canada for 15 years and has no previous experience in politics. She is said to have met Mr Saakashvili during his trip to the Winter Olympics in Vancouver in February.

A photograph, apparently taken from Ms Kobalia's Facebook page, has been published by a newspaper in Georgia. It shows the minister, her sister and three friends posing. The Russian state-controlled media, which gives wide coverage to any story that paints President Saakashvili in a negative light, jumped on the story and insisted that the picture was taken in a Vancouver strip club.
Related articles

Ms Kobalia claimed the photo was taken almost 10 years while she was on holiday in Florida. "If the worst thing that the opposition or anyone else can find about me is my old picture from college than I don't see anything wrong with that," she said.

In the photograph, the minister is wearing a dress and there is no indication that she took part in a striptease. There is also no indication from the photograph that it was taken in a strip club, nor any idea in which city or when it was taken.

Ms Kobalia's biography indicates that before leaving Canada for Georgia she worked for a local TV channel and ran a business. This didn't stop the Russian tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda running a story yesterday headlined "From Strippers to Ministers" and other Russian news outlets followed with similar stories. The minister herself could not be reached for comment yesterday.

At the time of her appointment, many experts expressed amazement that such a key ministry could be entrusted to a political neophyte. "Think how ambitious a person has to be to take the position of the head of the main economic body in the country, without having either the necessary education or any experience whatsoever," said Nodar Dzhavakhishvili, the former head of the Georgian National Bank, at the time. "I think anyone could find someone in their family who was far more experienced and qualified in this field than Ms Kobalia."

But Mr Saakashvili, who was just 36 when he took over as Georgian President after the Rose Revolution in late 2003, has made a habit of appointing ministers in their twenties and thirties. He claims that catapulting the young generation into power is an integral part of his project to build a new type of country and wipe out the Soviet legacy. "The plan is to have nobody in government who served during the Soviet period," said Mr Saakashvili last autumn. "Some of them don't even remember the Soviet period."

In Tbilisi, observers say that Ms Kobalia has started positively in the job and during her first weeks has shown a ruthless streak. On visiting the Tbilisi tourism information centre, she discovered most of the employees had gone to a jazz festival in a Black Sea resort. She immediately fired the entire staff, according to one local news agency.

Spies Go Home

http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/video/spy-swap-us-russia-exchange-spies-vienna-11123936

Swap Done: Spies Go Home
The U.S. and Russia exchange 14 suspected spies on tarmac in Vienna, Austria.

Player booked for diving had suffered heart attack

http://uk.eurosport.yahoo.com/blogs/world-of-sport/article/1224/
Wed May 05 10:44AM

Referee yellow card A Croatian footballer booked for diving had actually dropped dead of a heart attack.
Goran Tunjic, a 32-year-old defender playing for the Mladost FC, collapsed in the 35th minute of the County League match against Hrvatski Sokola, prompting the referee to approach the player with yellow card in his hand.
Tragically, however, the player had suffered a fatal heart attack.
The official quickly realised what had happened and called for medical aid, but Tunjic died despite being rushed to a nearby hospital.
"Doctors tried to help him but there was nothing they could do," a club spokesman said of the player, who had no previous medical problems.
"He just fell dead on the spot."

We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/27/world/27powerpoint.html
We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
Published: April 26, 2010



WASHINGTON — Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was shown a PowerPoint slide in Kabul last summer that was meant to portray the complexity of American military strategy, but looked more like a bowl of spaghetti.
“When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war,” General McChrystal dryly remarked, one of his advisers recalled, as the room erupted in laughter.
The slide has since bounced around the Internet as an example of a military tool that has spun out of control. Like an insurgency, PowerPoint has crept into the daily lives of military commanders and reached the level of near obsession. The amount of time expended on PowerPoint, the Microsoft presentation program of computer-generated charts, graphs and bullet points, has made it a running joke in the Pentagon and in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“PowerPoint makes us stupid,” Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina. (He spoke without PowerPoint.) Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005, followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal threat.
“It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” General McMaster said in a telephone interview afterward. “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”
In General McMaster’s view, PowerPoint’s worst offense is not a chart like the spaghetti graphic, which was first uncovered by NBC’s Richard Engel, but rigid lists of bullet points (in, say, a presentation on a conflict’s causes) that take no account of interconnected political, economic and ethnic forces. “If you divorce war from all of that, it becomes a targeting exercise,” General McMaster said.
Commanders say that behind all the PowerPoint jokes are serious concerns that the program stifles discussion, critical thinking and thoughtful decision-making. Not least, it ties up junior officers — referred to as PowerPoint Rangers — in the daily preparation of slides, be it for a Joint Staff meeting in Washington or for a platoon leader’s pre-mission combat briefing in a remote pocket of Afghanistan.
Last year when a military Web site, Company Command, asked an Army platoon leader in Iraq, Lt. Sam Nuxoll, how he spent most of his time, he responded, “Making PowerPoint slides.” When pressed, he said he was serious.
“I have to make a storyboard complete with digital pictures, diagrams and text summaries on just about anything that happens,” Lieutenant Nuxoll told the Web site. “Conduct a key leader engagement? Make a storyboard. Award a microgrant? Make a storyboard.”
Despite such tales, “death by PowerPoint,” the phrase used to described the numbing sensation that accompanies a 30-slide briefing, seems here to stay. The program, which first went on sale in 1987 and was acquired by Microsoft soon afterward, is deeply embedded in a military culture that has come to rely on PowerPoint’s hierarchical ordering of a confused world.
“There’s a lot of PowerPoint backlash, but I don’t see it going away anytime soon,” said Capt. Crispin Burke, an Army operations officer at Fort Drum, N.Y., who under the name Starbuck wrote an essay about PowerPoint on the Web site Small Wars Journal that cited Lieutenant Nuxoll’s comment.
In a daytime telephone conversation, he estimated that he spent an hour each day making PowerPoint slides. In an initial e-mail message responding to the request for an interview, he wrote, “I would be free tonight, but unfortunately, I work kind of late (sadly enough, making PPT slides).”
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates reviews printed-out PowerPoint slides at his morning staff meeting, although he insists on getting them the night before so he can read ahead and cut back the briefing time.
Gen. David H. Petraeus, who oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and says that sitting through some PowerPoint briefings is “just agony,” nonetheless likes the program for the display of maps and statistics showing trends. He has also conducted more than a few PowerPoint presentations himself.
General McChrystal gets two PowerPoint briefings in Kabul per day, plus three more during the week. General Mattis, despite his dim view of the program, said a third of his briefings are by PowerPoint.
Richard C. Holbrooke, the Obama administration’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, was given PowerPoint briefings during a trip to Afghanistan last summer at each of three stops — Kandahar, Mazar-i-Sharif and Bagram Air Base. At a fourth stop, Herat, the Italian forces there not only provided Mr. Holbrooke with a PowerPoint briefing, but accompanied it with swelling orchestral music.
President Obama was shown PowerPoint slides, mostly maps and charts, in the White House Situation Room during the Afghan strategy review last fall.
Commanders say that the slides impart less information than a five-page paper can hold, and that they relieve the briefer of the need to polish writing to convey an analytic, persuasive point. Imagine lawyers presenting arguments before the Supreme Court in slides instead of legal briefs.
Captain Burke’s essay in the Small Wars Journal also cited a widely read attack on PowerPoint in Armed Forces Journal last summer by Thomas X. Hammes, a retired Marine colonel, whose title, “Dumb-Dumb Bullets,” underscored criticism of fuzzy bullet points; “accelerate the introduction of new weapons,” for instance, does not actually say who should do so.
No one is suggesting that PowerPoint is to blame for mistakes in the current wars, but the program did become notorious during the prelude to the invasion of Iraq. As recounted in the book “Fiasco” by Thomas E. Ricks (Penguin Press, 2006), Lt. Gen. David D. McKiernan, who led the allied ground forces in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, grew frustrated when he could not get Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the commander at the time of American forces in the Persian Gulf region, to issue orders that stated explicitly how he wanted the invasion conducted, and why. Instead, General Franks just passed on to General McKiernan the vague PowerPoint slides that he had already shown to Donald H. Rumsfeld, the defense secretary at the time.
Senior officers say the program does come in handy when the goal is not imparting information, as in briefings for reporters.
The news media sessions often last 25 minutes, with 5 minutes left at the end for questions from anyone still awake. Those types of PowerPoint presentations, Dr. Hammes said, are known as “hypnotizing chickens.”
Helene Cooper contributed reporting.

The St. Petersburg Times - Top Stories - University Dean Fired, Disputes Official Version

The St. Petersburg Times - Top Stories - University Dean Fired, Disputes Official Version

The St. Petersburg Times

Marina Shishkina, the dean of the journalism faculty of St. Petersburg State University, was fired this month by the university’s rector, Nikolai Kropachev.

During the past year, Shishkina had made statements critical of Kropachev, challenging what she described as “the authoritarian style of managing one of Russia’s oldest and most prestigious universities.”

According to the official version, voiced by Mikhail Kudilinsky, the university’s deputy rector for legal issues, Shishkina lost her job for “failing to perform her duties and violating the university’s charter.” A date for the election of a new dean will be set in the near future and held within the next two months, Kudilinsky added.

Anatoly Puyu, the first deputy dean of the journalism faculty, has been appointed acting dean until the election takes place.

Shishkina’s troubles began in September last year, when the Dzerzhinsky district court began reviewing cases against Shishkina and her husband Sergei Petrov, the former dean of the medical faculty.

Both cases were filed by the university’s president, Lyudmila Verbitskaya, who alleges that Petrov and Shishkina have made libelous statements discrediting one of Russia’s oldest and most respected academic institutions.

The investigators also allege that Shishkina embezzled university funds and abused her position. The investigation claims that at least half a million rubles ($17,000) have been misappropriated. Shishkina says that the prosecutors are trying to frame her, and that the real reasons behind the prosecution are entirely political.

Petrov began the conflict by publishing a revealing and critical interview on a popular web site, in which he accused the school’s management of authoritarian rule, rigid attitudes and the suppression of alternative opinions. Shishkina supported her husband’s crusade with a series of interviews in the media, in which she drew a sobering picture of what she described as the university’s “murky and non-transparent decision-making process” and “the oppressive rule of rector Nikolai Kropachev, who hides behind the facade of fighting corruption and instead uses all the administrative tools available to him to assert his personal power.”

Shishkina alleged that, having replaced Lyudmila Verbitskaya as the university’s rector in May 2008, Kropachev adopted a practice of launching vendettas against anyone who criticized his policies. The journalism dean said an atmosphere of fear and intimidation now reigns at the university, and that she and her husband are paying the price for being among the very few who dared to offer resistance.

The dismissed dean said the embezzlement charges were concocted using a bureaucratic trick. She insisted the journalism faculty has a transparent system of financial management.

“I was getting a salary of 80,000 rubles ($2,700); that figure was never a secret,” she said.”The investigators argue that I did not have the right to sign payslips for extra-budgetary earnings for myself and my staff — which is not true. This practice is legal and fully transparent and it existed for many years with no complaints — until I dared to tell the truth about the autocracy that reigns at the school.”

In December 2009, in the wake of the investigation, which has so far led nowhere, Shishkina was suspended from her job.

Shishkina said she had only found out about her dismissal from the media, and that she was considering taking the case to court.

In addition to her position as the journalism faculty dean, Shishkina was also deputy head of the university’s trade union. “I have met with the union’s representatives and discovered that Kropachev did not get their approval before firing me,” Shishkina said.

In order to illustrate her accusations of Kropachev acting like an authoritarian leader, Shishkina often mentioned in interviews the fact that the university’s rector had secured the right to personally dismiss any member of university staff, including faculty deans, despite the fact that the position of dean is an elected post.

“Now my own dismissal is a compelling enough illustration of the feudal principals of running the university that flourish under Kropachev,” Shishkina said, adding that she had not had a chance to discuss the situation with Kropachev face-to-face, though she would very much have liked to.

The End of an Era in Finance - by Dani Rodrik

The End of an Era in Finance
Dani Rodrik
2010-03-11

CAMBRIDGE – In the world of economics and finance, revolutions occur rarely and are often detected only in hindsight. But what happened on February 19 can safely be called the end of an era in global finance.

On that day, the International Monetary Fund published a policy note that reversed its long-held position on capital controls. Taxes and other restrictions on capital inflows, the IMF’s economists wrote, can be helpful, and they constitute a “legitimate part” of policymakers’ toolkit.

Rediscovering the common sense that had strangely eluded the Fund for two decades, the report noted: “logic suggests that appropriately designed controls on capital inflows could usefully complement” other policies. As late as November of last year, IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn had thrown cold water on Brazil’s efforts to stem inflows of speculative “hot money,” and said that he would not recommend such controls “as a standard prescription.”

So February’s policy note is a stunning reversal – as close as an institution can come to recanting without saying, “Sorry, we messed up.” But it parallels a general shift in economists’ opinion. It is telling, for example, that Simon Johnson, the IMF’s chief economist during 2007-2008, has turned into one of the most ardent supporters of strict controls on domestic and international finance.

The IMF’s policy note makes clear that controls on cross-border financial flows can be not only desirable, but also effective. This is important, because the traditional argument of last resort against capital controls has been that they could not be made to stick. Financial markets would always outsmart the policymakers.

Even if true, evading the controls requires incurring additional costs to move funds in and out of a country – which is precisely what the controls aim to achieve. Otherwise, why would investors and speculators cry bloody murder whenever capital controls are mentioned as a possibility? If they really couldn’t care less, then they shouldn’t care at all.

One justification for capital controls is to prevent inflows of hot money from boosting the value of the home currency excessively, thereby undermining competitiveness. Another is to reduce vulnerability to sudden changes in financial-market sentiment, which can wreak havoc with domestic growth and employment. To its credit, the IMF not only acknowledges this, but it also provides evidence that developing countries with capital controls were hit less badly by the fallout from the sub-prime mortgage meltdown.

The IMF’s change of heart is important, but it needs to be followed by further action. We currently don’t know much about designing capital-control regimes. The taboo that has attached to capital controls has discouraged practical, policy-oriented work that would help governments to manage capital flows directly. There is some empirical research on the consequences of capital controls in countries such as Chile, Colombia, and Malaysia, but very little systematic research on the appropriate menu of options. The IMF can help to fill the gap.

Emerging markets have resorted to a variety of instruments to limit private-sector borrowing abroad: taxes, unremunerated reserve requirements, quantitative restrictions, and verbal persuasion. In view of the sophisticated nature of financial markets, the devil is often in the details – and what works in one setting is unlikely to work well in others.

For example, Taiwan’s use of administrative measures that rely heavily on close monitoring of flows may be inappropriate in settings where bureaucratic capacity is more limited. Similarly, Chilean-style unremunerated reserve requirements may be easier to evade in countries with extensive trading in sophisticated derivatives.

With the stigma on capital controls gone, the IMF should now get to work on developing guidelines on what kind of controls work best and under what circumstances. The IMF provides countries with technical assistance in a wide range of areas: monetary policy, bank regulation, and fiscal consolidation. It is time to add managing the capital account to this list.

With this battle won, the next worthy goal is a global financial transaction tax. Set at a very low level – 0.05% is a commonly mentioned rate – such a tax would raise hundreds of billions of dollars for global public goods while discouraging short-term speculative activities in financial markets.

Support for a global financial-transaction tax is growing. A group of NGOs have rechristened it the “Robin Hood tax,” and have launched a global campaign to promote it, complete with a deliciously biting video clip featuring British actor Bill Nighy (www.robinhoodtax.org). Significantly, the European Union has thrown its weight behind the tax and urged the IMF to pursue it. The only major holdout is the United States, where Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner has made his distaste for the proposal clear.

What made finance so lethal in the past was the combination of economists’ ideas with the political power of banks. The bad news is that big banks retain significant political power. The good news is that the intellectual climate has shifted decisively against them. Shorn of support from economists, the financial industry will have a much harder time preventing the fetish of free finance from being tossed into the dustbin of history.

For a podcast of this commentary in English, please use this link: http://media.blubrry.com/ps/media.libsyn.com/media/ps/rodrik41.mp3

America, the fragile empire

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-ferguson28-2010feb28,0,7706980.story

Here today, gone tomorrow -- could the United States fall that fast?
By Niall Ferguson
February 28, 2010

For centuries, historians, political theorists, anthropologists and the public have tended to think about the political process in seasonal, cyclical terms. From Polybius to Paul Kennedy, from ancient Rome to imperial Britain, we discern a rhythm to history. Great powers, like great men, are born, rise, reign and then gradually wane. No matter whether civilizations decline culturally, economically or ecologically, their downfalls are protracted.

In the same way, the challenges that face the United States are often represented as slow-burning. It is the steady march of demographics -- which is driving up the ratio of retirees to workers -- not bad policy that condemns the public finances of the United States to sink deeper into the red. It is the inexorable growth of China's economy, not American stagnation, that will make the gross domestic product of the People's Republic larger than that of the United States by 2027.

As for climate change, the day of reckoning could be as much as a century away. These threats seem very remote compared with the time frame for the deployment of U.S. soldiers to Afghanistan, in which the unit of account is months, not years, much less decades.

But what if history is not cyclical and slow-moving but arrhythmic -- at times almost stationary but also capable of accelerating suddenly, like a sports car? What if collapse does not arrive over a number of centuries but comes suddenly, like a thief in the night?

Great powers are complex systems, made up of a very large number of interacting components that are asymmetrically organized, which means their construction more resembles a termite hill than an Egyptian pyramid. They operate somewhere between order and disorder. Such systems can appear to operate quite stably for some time; they seem to be in equilibrium but are, in fact, constantly adapting. But there comes a moment when complex systems "go critical." A very small trigger can set off a "phase transition" from a benign equilibrium to a crisis -- a single grain of sand causes a whole pile to collapse.

Not long after such crises happen, historians arrive on the scene. They are the scholars who specialize in the study of "fat tail" events -- the low-frequency, high-impact historical moments, the ones that are by definition outside the norm and that therefore inhabit the "tails" of probability distributions -- such as wars, revolutions, financial crashes and imperial collapses. But historians often misunderstand complexity in decoding these events. They are trained to explain calamity in terms of long-term causes, often dating back decades. This is what Nassim Taleb rightly condemned in "The Black Swan" as "the narrative fallacy."

In reality, most of the fat-tail phenomena that historians study are not the climaxes of prolonged and deterministic story lines; instead, they represent perturbations, and sometimes the complete breakdowns, of complex systems.

To understand complexity, it is helpful to examine how natural scientists use the concept. Think of the spontaneous organization of termites, which allows them to construct complex hills and nests, or the fractal geometry of water molecules as they form intricate snowflakes. Human intelligence itself is a complex system, a product of the interaction of billions of neurons in the central nervous system.

All these complex systems share certain characteristics. A small input to such a system can produce huge, often unanticipated changes -- what scientists call "the amplifier effect." Causal relationships are often nonlinear, which means that traditional methods of generalizing through observation are of little use. Thus, when things go wrong in a complex system, the scale of disruption is nearly impossible to anticipate.

There is no such thing as a typical or average forest fire, for example. To use the jargon of modern physics, a forest before a fire is in a state of "self-organized criticality": It is teetering on the verge of a breakdown, but the size of the breakdown is unknown. Will there be a small fire or a huge one? It is nearly impossible to predict. The key point is that in such systems, a relatively minor shock can cause a disproportionate disruption.

Any large-scale political unit is a complex system. Most great empires have a nominal central authority -- either a hereditary emperor or an elected president -- but in practice the power of any individual ruler is a function of the network of economic, social and political relations over which he or she presides. As such, empires exhibit many of the characteristics of other complex adaptive systems -- including the tendency to move from stability to instability quite suddenly.

The most recent and familiar example of precipitous decline is the collapse of the Soviet Union. With the benefit of hindsight, historians have traced all kinds of rot within the Soviet system back to the Brezhnev era and beyond. Perhaps, as the historian and political scientist Stephen Kotkin has argued, it was only the high oil prices of the 1970s that "averted Armageddon." But this did not seem to be the case at the time. The Soviet nuclear arsenal was larger than the U.S. stockpile. And governments in what was then called the Third World, from Vietnam to Nicaragua, had been tilting in the Soviets' favor for most of the previous 20 years.

Yet, less than five years after Mikhail Gorbachev took power, the Soviet imperium in central and Eastern Europe had fallen apart, followed by the Soviet Union itself in 1991. If ever an empire fell off a cliff, rather than gently declining, it was the one founded by Lenin.

If empires are complex systems that sooner or later succumb to sudden and catastrophic malfunctions, what are the implications for the United States today? First, debating the stages of decline may be a waste of time -- it is a precipitous and unexpected fall that should most concern policymakers and citizens. Second, most imperial falls are associated with fiscal crises. Alarm bells should therefore be ringing very loudly indeed as the United States contemplates a deficit for 2010 of more than $1.5 trillion -- about 11% of GDP, the biggest since World War II.

These numbers are bad, but in the realm of political entities, the role of perception is just as crucial. In imperial crises, it is not the material underpinnings of power that really matter but expectations about future power. The fiscal numbers cited above cannot erode U.S. strength on their own, but they can work to weaken a long-assumed faith in the United States' ability to weather any crisis.

One day, a seemingly random piece of bad news -- perhaps a negative report by a rating agency -- will make the headlines during an otherwise quiet news cycle. Suddenly, it will be not just a few policy wonks who worry about the sustainability of U.S. fiscal policy but the public at large, not to mention investors abroad. It is this shift that is crucial: A complex adaptive system is in big trouble when its component parts lose faith in its viability.

Over the last three years, the complex system of the global economy flipped from boom to bust -- all because a bunch of Americans started to default on their subprime mortgages, thereby blowing huge holes in the business models of thousands of highly leveraged financial institutions. The next phase of the current crisis may begin when the public begins to reassess the credibility of the radical monetary and fiscal steps that were taken in response.

Neither interest rates at zero nor fiscal stimulus can achieve a sustainable recovery if people in the United States and abroad collectively decide, overnight, that such measures will ultimately lead to much higher inflation rates or outright default. Bond yields can shoot up if expectations change about future government solvency, intensifying an already bad fiscal crisis by driving up the cost of interest payments on new debt. Just ask Greece.

Ask Russia too. Fighting a losing battle in the mountains of the Hindu Kush has long been a harbinger of imperial fall. What happened 20 years ago is a reminder that empires do not in fact appear, rise, reign, decline and fall according to some recurrent and predictable life cycle. It is historians who retrospectively portray the process of imperial dissolution as slow-acting. Rather, empires behave like all complex adaptive systems. They function in apparent equilibrium for some unknowable period. And then, quite abruptly, they collapse.

Washington, you have been warned.

Niall Ferguson is a professor at Harvard University and Harvard Business School, and a fellow of Jesus College, Oxford. His latest book is "The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World." A longer version of this essay appears in the March/April issue of Foreign Affairs.
Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Times

Aussie banker saved

Well Done Macquarie - Dave Saved
5 February 2010

Well done for Macquarie Bank for doing the right thing and keeping David Kiely, the client investment manager who was seen live on TV opening semi-nude pics of Australian supermodel Miranda Kerr.
The Herald Sun has reported that the bank has now completed its internal review of the affair and that Dave will not lose his job.
Macquarie has issued a statement, which confirmed: 'He will remain an employee of Macquarie. Macquarie and the employee apologise for the offense that he may have caused'.
Here Is The City started up a global campaign earlier this week to try and keep Dave in his job, and the response was overwhelming. Our campaign was picked up by the BBC, The Daily Mail, The Times, Reuters, CNN, Forbes, The Australian, CNBC, The Herald Sun and a raft of other local and national newspapers and websites. We were interviewed live on Brisbane's Nova Radio Breakfast Show Friday, and model Miranda Kerr herself even indicated that she would be happy to join the Save Dave campaign.
We asked readers to signal their support for Dave by sending a 'Don't Fire David Kiely' e-mail to a Macquarie corporate press relations e-mail address. The response was staggering. A big thank you to all those who took part.
One Australian banker told us: 'Here Is The City's campaign to Save Dave caught the imagination of bankers around the world, after what has been a difficult time for our industry. Macquarie will no doubt have been overwhelmed by the force of public opinion. I'm sure Dave would extend his thanks for the Save Dave initiative if he could, but he is understandably wanting to keep a low profile now!'.

Kaliningrad demonstration

Demonstration - Thousands call on Putin to quit
31/01 09:09 CET


Ten thousand people have attended a rally in the Russian Baltic enclave of Kaliningrad, calling for the resignation of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
Internet pictures have emerged of the demonstration in the city’s main square.
Exasperation over the rising cost of living coupled with unemployment led to the rare public show of anger, according to protest organisers.
Boris Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister and leader of the opposition Solidarity movement addressed the cheering crowd.
“How strong must the feelings of Kaliningrad be that here today, together, are the flags of the Communist Party, Yabloko, the Patriots of Russia Party, Solidarity and the supporters of Vladimir Zhirinovsky. We are all united,” he said.
Zhirinovsky is a nationalist hardliner whose backers are not normally associated with dissent or anti-government protests.
Despite signs of economic improvement, Russia remains mired in financial crisis. Unemployment reached 8.9 per cent in December.

Article re famous Russian economic blogger-greenmailer

Russia’s campaigner against corruption

Carl Schreck, Foreign Correspondent

• UAE / January 24. 2010 6:47PM GMT

Alexei Navalny has a small stake in almost every major state-owned company in Russia. Oxana Onipko for The National

MOSCOW // Alexei Navalny already had a reputation as a rabble-rouser when he showed up at the annual general meeting for Rosneft, a Russian oil firm, in Moscow in June.

With a small stake in the company, Mr Navalny, 33, wanted to question the Rosneft chairman, Igor Sechin, a confidant of Vladimir Putin, the prime minister, about management strategy and the lack of dividends for stockholders.

“I looked around and noticed a bunch of beefy-looking fellows sitting around me,” Mr Navalny said in an interview in his sparsely furnished offices in Moscow. “I’m well known in Rosneft, and they’re not always happy to see me.”

Mr Navalny said he approached Mr Sechin afterwards and asked why he had been surrounded by guards.

“He chuckled and said it was for my own safety,” Mr Navalny said.

It is, perhaps, no surprise that questions of personal safety arise wherever Mr Navalny goes. Cocksure and irrepressible, he has become Russia’s most vocal and obnoxious minority shareholder, hounding the country’s largest companies with muckraking campaigns against corporate malfeasance and incompetence.

Readers of his popular blog regularly post questions about whether he is scared of being killed for his crusades against Russia’s richest and most powerful. “I’ve never received any direct threats,” Mr Navalny said. “Maybe it’s something to think about, but for me that’s not a reason to halt my work.”

In contemporary Russia’s tightly managed political system, there is little room for renegades. Those who aspire to public office, or even to debate the issues of the day on state-controlled television, have few prospects of success without the consent of the Kremlin.

But in a country where politics and business are so intimately intertwined – and notoriously opaque – Mr Navalny is ruthlessly exploiting capitalism’s most basic building block to needle Russia’s political and financial overlords: the share.

Seeking capital injections and international legitimacy, dozens of Russian companies, including state-owned giants, have gone public in recent years. Among these were so-called “People’s IPOs” – promoted by officials as safe bets for small investors – of Rosneft and banks Sberbank and VTB.

Mr Navalny is among those small investors, with stakes – each worth around 50,000 roubles (Dh6,000) at the time of purchase – in almost every major state-owned company that is publicly listed.

Leveraging his status as part-owner, he has launched broadsides against the management of these companies, filing lawsuits over lack of transparency and complaining to prosecutors about alleged embezzlement by management. “While professional investors try to solve their problems quietly, this everyman without status or power is trying to fight the system,” the respected Russian business daily Vedomosti wrote of Mr Navalny last month after naming him “Private Individual of the Year” for 2009.

His attacks are ostensibly in the name of a better bottom line. Theft and mismanagement are hurting the performance of the companies in which he holds stock, he claims.

But Mr Navalny said it would be “stupid” to deny the political implications of his anti-corruption drives.

“My activities are directly aimed at changing the political situation in the country. I don’t participate anymore in politics. I don’t vote. But my battle for the oil export market to belong to our Russian companies – and not to a Swiss offshore company – is essentially politics.”

The company is a publicity-shy Geneva-based firm named Gunvor, the world’s fourth-largest oil trader, handling about one-third of Russia’s seaborne exports. It is co-owned by a Russian businessman, Gennady Timchenko, an acquaintance of Mr Putin.

Mr Navalny took an interest in Rosneft’s relationship with Gunvor after Mr Timchenko’s inclusion in the Forbes list of the world’s billionaires, and he began pressing for Rosneft to reveal to shareholders its dealings with the Swiss firm, eventually filing a lawsuit. A Moscow arbitration court rejected the suit in 2008, supporting Rosneft’s claim that its dealings with Gunvor are a commercial secret.

“We lost in all the courts in Russia. We knew that would happen,” Mr Navalny said. “But to go to [the European Court of Human Rights] in Strasbourg we had to go through the entire court system. In Strasbourg we’ve filed a complaint over violations of our property rights.”

In his most recent – and successful – campaign, Mr Navalny targeted VTB last month for what he calls a naked scam by employees of one of the bank’s subsidiaries, VTB-Leasing, to siphon off $150 million from the purchase of Chinese oil rigs. Mr Navalny travelled to northern Russia to track down the machinery, which he found collecting rust in a poorly guarded storage yard.

Using tip-offs from bank employees and disgruntled middlemen hired by VTB-Leasing, Mr Navalny claims to have almost completely documented the alleged swindle and has called on fellow investors to bombard authorities with requests for a criminal investigation.

The VTB chairman, Alexei Kostin, addressed Mr Navalny’s investigation at a meeting last month of the bank’s shareholders advisory board after the issue was raised by a board member, Oleg Anisimov, the editor-in-chief of the Russian business magazine Finans.

Mr Kostin explained that the VTB-Leasing director had been fired “not only for this, but in general fired”, according to a partial transcript of the meeting released by Mr Anisimov. Mr Kostin said the company was trying to sell the oil rigs and added that authorities had discovered no evidence of a crime, according to the transcript.

The amount of time, energy and money Mr Navalny pours into his muckraking has fuelled suspicion about his motives. He has been accused of digging up dirt on companies and threatening to go public if they refuse to pay him to keep quiet, a claim he calls ridiculous.

“It is simply impossible to [do this to] companies like Rosneft or Gazprom,” he said. “Any attempt by me to get some money out of them will end in the best case scenario with a few law enforcement agents jumping on me screaming ‘bribe!’ and immediately arresting me, or in the worst case scenario with someone quietly having me killed.”

He says he finances his anti-corruption activities himself thanks to his small corporate law practice. “I’m not saying I’m rich, but I’m relatively well off,” he said.

Mr Navalny’s admirers say that although some of his attacks may be misguided, the fastidiousness and force of his drives to weed out official and corporate graft can only benefit Russia.

“He is raising very legitimate questions,” said Sergei Guriev, an independent director on Sberbank’s supervisory board and the dean of Moscow’s New Economic School. “At times he may be mistaken, but it’s the responsibility of the company management to respond to his questions. My concern is that some of these guys may be pretty ruthless. In that sense, Mr Navalny is very courageous.”

360 degrees journalism

360-Degree Video and Journalism
From: Columbia University | By: John V. Pavlik

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION | Columbia journalism and new-media expert John V. Pavlik outlines the nature of 360-degree video and its implications for the transformation of the news. 360-degree cameraAlthough it is a technology more than two centuries in the making, 360-degree imaging has been slow to make its way into the storytelling of journalism. The reasons are many, including both the skeptical traditions of the newsroom toward anything "new" and the fact that 360-degree images shatter the long-held paradigm of photojournalism: framing an image is the best way to tell a story. But the problem with framing an image is that while it focuses attention, it also removes the object of attention from its surrounding context. 360-degree imaging allows both the continuation of framing and the inclusion of context.

We'll examine these historical origins in just a moment. The year 1996 saw the first commercial products in the omnidirectional market. Omniview introduced a product called PhotoBubbles, which were described as "spherical photographs." The company claimed that "PhotoBubbles capture the entire contents of any location in 180- or 360-degree immersive representations that can be reproduced for viewing on a computer or TV display." PhotoBubbles were used by a number of news organizations, including the New York Times on the Web and CNN interactive. A competing brand has described its product as "surround video."

In many ways, omnidirectional video represents a changing imaging paradigm, one fundamentally different from that of the Lumiere brothers a century before. PhotoBubbles are now called IPIX, and are now described as an "interactive photography technique that allows the user to be immersed inside a 360-degree digital image representing any environment that can be photographed. The user, via a mouse or keyboard input, is able to navigate in any desired direction in the interactive photograph, magnifying or exploring any part of the image."


To date, some of the problems leading to relatively limited use of omnidirectional imaging by news organizations have been the mandatory paradigmatic shift in news photography and videography; limitations in bandwidth, making pictures slow to download; and complications in installing the plug-ins that are used to view the pictures. In addition, the early products did not lend themselves to storytelling. Rather, the news organizations provided interesting 360-degree views of news events, frequently for features--but rarely did the images tell a story. Instead they were nice-to-look-at complements to an accompanying text report. Moreover, taking a good omnidirectional image is even more complex than taking a good still image, and a paradigm for omnidirectional storytelling is only beginning to emerge.

(an example can be found here or here)

"Russia and the world: challenges of the new decade."

Новости дня

Читать целиком

Россия выйдет на докризисный уровень ВВП в 2012 году

----------------

Finance Minster Kudrin's speech at the conference
http://www.vesti.ru/doc.html?id=337170&tid=76773

Russia after 2012 must decrease a budget deficit to levele less than 1% of GDP if the price per barrel of oil will be $60, - said Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin. He spoke at the conference "Russia and the world: challenges of the new decade." (http://www.vesti.ru/theme.html?tid=76773) for TV Channel "Russia 24" and the BBC News website broadcasting.

"Now we now need to put forward the efficiency programs in all areas, including structural reform. No time for thiking has left. Already at this spring, the preparation of the budget will be done for the next three years old - from 2011 to 2013/ It should include elements of the reforms, improving the expendetures, the return of each of the spent ruble, - Kudrin said. - We will announce these areas in the next two weeks."

According to Finance Minister, a meeting of the Working Group on the effectiveness of state spending will be held, whereby the Group is headed by Kudrin and Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Sobyanin. "Then, within two months we will finalize the program in its final form, which will take 1 - 1,5 year to materialize, to bring our appetites, program effectiveness in a more appropriate form", - said Alexei Kudrin.

"We will reach the pre-crisis level of GDP in 2012 - Finance Minister said. - This is a moderately optimistic." But the global crisis, he said, has not yet been completed. "Still it will bring us new surprises. Already thate yre locally obvious - in Dubai, Greece, as well as the situation in some large banks", - believes Alexei Kudrin.

Berlusconi returns to public wearing Russian national coat

Published 07 January, 2010, 23:14
http://rt.com/Top_News/2010-01-07/berlusconi-putin-present.html


Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi chose to wear a jacket with the Russian coat-of-arms during his first public appearance since being attacked in December.
The jacket is a memento from his visit to Russia in October and was a gift from Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
Berlusconi looked healthy and cheerful despite the attack that left him with a fractured nose and broken teeth. He was shopping in the French Riviera with his daughter Marina.

Year 2009 in Russian LiveJournal

Year 2009 in Russian LiveJournal (LJ)
commentator40 wrote:

A year ago, on Dec. 20, 2008, I began to make measurements of growth of LJ. I started doing it without any scientific or practical purposes. I just wondered how actively the network is developing, and I began to fix some parameters on monthly basis.

Last year growth was as follows:

The total number of LJ-accounts (“journals”) in Russian part of LJ grew from 1509251 to 2520621 (+67%).

The number of LJ-accounts, added to others friend-lists by ten or more LJ-users rose from 318,815 to 657,276 (+106%). As we can see, these accounts make only about a quarter of the total number of LJ-accounts. In my point of view these are the LJ-accounts that generally speaking it makes sense to speak about. They have some sort of content that at least someone seems worthy of attention. And the other 1.8 million-plus accounts - are mostly advertising accounts (robots - «bots»), abandoned resources and LJ-accounts of those users who do not spend efforts to maintain their own “journals”, and simply continue reading and commenting on other people's posts.

The number of LJ-users “journals”, added into the friend-lists by hundred and more LJ-users rose over the year from 53,010 to 88,507 (+67%). It's like a "salt of the earth", the middle class of LJ on which the social network is kept. These LJ make as we see, about 1 / 30 of the total number. Growth rate in this segment is approximately the same as in the whole LJ. And as for bots and "cheaters of the counter", which give a huge increment in some LJ-segments, normal people, of course, can not keep up.

Number of "thousand-ers," grew in a year 2009 from 1350 to 2984 (+121%). Here was rapid growth, at least half of which was provided according to my observations of the businessmen- «cheaters of the counter", i.e. users who try to earn through advertising on their blogs very straightforward. They by any means need need to secure a large number of “friends”, high attendance and high number of comments on their posts. Otherwise they would not be enough interesting for advertisers. So they try to reach this goal by means of mutual adding into “friends”, mutual "linking" and using other methods of artificial cheating the indicators. Due to their efforts of the concept of "thousand-ers," during the past year, virtually became worthless. With the help of two or three mass mutual friends campaigns it is possible in principle to become a technical "thousand-er," even when the specific LJ is completely empty.

But becoming a "Ten-thousand-er" (a LJ-user with 10.000+ friends) using such artifices is (so far) impossible. ”Ten-thousand-ers" are powerful and original LJ's targeted to their audience, which gives them the confidence to increase more rapidly than the average for LJ. It is due to the accuracy and quality, I guess. These users if they earn on their journals, do it using the more subtle methods than the mass of those who shove advertising in LJ's. Leading LJ's are the leaders at the sight/ Any promotional "artificiality" would be immediately noticeable. The number of ”Ten-thousand-ers" for the year 2009 increased from 11 to 29 (+164%). About them - a little more ...

Three leaders of the rating on LJ "zafrendu" for the year has not changed, only the second and third are reversed:
LJ user “drugoi», an increase from 26933 to 43004 (+60%).
LJ user “tema», an increase from 23422 to 42636 (+82%).
LJ user “e_grishkovets», an increase from 24298 to 33084 (+36%).

Of those who were a year ago in the list of first twenty, 14 remained there. These (in addition to the above-mentioned three) are “doctor_livsy” (old LJ of a writer Sergei Lukyanenko), «dolboeb», «katechkina», «stillavinsergei», «mi3ch», «kitya», «tanyant», «zhgun», «tebe_interesno», «shenderovich», «marta_ketro». Well, only some have changed their places.
The six newcomers into the top-20 - «sergeydolya», «pesen_net», «radulova», «vero4ka», «olegtinkov», «belonika».
It is particularly interesting phenomenon of two businessmen. LJ-account «sergeydolya» was established in November 2007 and, in general, initially did not attract much attention. However, over the past year, the owner-entrepreneur has made a giant leap. He began to post interesting photo reports on his travels around the world. He has enough money to get into very exotic places of the planet, the materials are really interesting, so that, in my opinion, the success of the magazine is well deserved. Now this account is at the 4 th position (approx. 21 thousands of “friends”) and it rapidly reduces the lag from the first three LJ's.
Journal «olegtinkov» a year ago did not yet exist at all (it was created February 2009). This LJ drew attention to itself almost immediately after the appearance, in September it broke into the top twenty, and now it reached the 15 th position in the rating (13850 of “friends”) and it steadily continues to rise. Oleg Tinkoff, in contrast to the "traveler" Sergei, writes about business, about money, and this is interesting.