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

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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.