BBC team under attack in southern Russia - BBC News
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BBC team under attack in southern Russia
BBC News The team's cameraman was beaten up and the camera smashed during the attack. The recorded material left in the car had been deleted, the team found after returning from the police station. The BBC has lodged a formal protest with Russia over the ... BBC Journalists Attacked Investigating Servicemen Deaths in RussiaWall Street Journal Ukraine crisis: three BBC journalists 'badly beaten' in Russia, find recording ...ABC Online BBC Journalists Attacked In Russia While Investigating Reports Of Russian ...International Business Times The Guardian-Sky News Australia all 41 news articles » |
Yesterday’s liveblog can be found here. An archive of our liveblogs can be found here. For an overview and analysis of this developing story see our latest podcast.
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For the latest summary of evidence surrounding the shooting down of flight MH17 see our separate article:Evidence Review: Who Shot Down MH17?
Below we will be making regular updates so check back often.
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Azerbaijan's Opinion-Shaping Campaign Reaches 'The New York Times' by noreply@rferl.org (Robert Coalson)
Just days after reporting about Azerbaijan's efforts to influence Western think tanks to advance Baku's interests in the United States, "The New York Times" itself published an opinion piece by an Israeli professor who did not disclose her affiliation with Azerbaijan's state oil company.
Formal complaint to Russian authorities after co-ordinated attack on team working on story about deadsoldier
Cameraman treated for concussion and other injuries
Cameraman treated for concussion and other injuries
The BBC has made a formal complaint to Russian authorities after journalists from its Moscow bureau were attacked and had their camera equipment smashed.
The incident happened after Steve Rosenberg, the BBCs Moscow correspondent, and a newsgathering team had interviewed the sister of a Russian soldier who had been told he was killed in military exercises on the border with Ukraine.
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Renovations at Latvia's Academy of Sciences have uncovered a secret "KGB room," where agents of the Soviet secret police could surreptitiously monitor visitors at a concert hall during conferences and performances.
The formula for saving any dictatorship is universal: create an enemy, start a war. We are back in Soviet times of total lies
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I remember that as a child I read about black holes in a popular science magazine about space and it scared me. The idea of our world being sucked into these breaks in the universe kept bothering me until I realised that it all was so far away that it would not reach us. But then a black hole tore our world very close to us. It started sucking in houses, roads, cars, planes, people and whole countries. Russia and Ukraine have already fallen into this black hole. And it is now sucking in Europe in front of our eyes.
This hole in the universe is the soul of one very lonely ageing man. The black hole is his fear.
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In an essay for the Guardian, Mikhail Shishkin describes president as an 'insipid colonel' terrified of losing power
Russia's pre-eminent literary novelist today warns that Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine amounts to a "black hole" that threatens to suck in the whole of Europe.
In an essay for the Guardian, Mikhail Shishkin says that Russia's aggression in Ukraine has left the unsuspecting European continent in a state of "pre-war". He says that unlike Russians conditioned to expect violence by remorseless state propaganda Europeans have not yet grasped "the new reality that has set in".
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 BBC News |
Russia to extend media controls to keep out foreigners
BBC News A bill to restrict foreign ownership in Russia's media will soon go before the parliament, which is dominated by MPs loyal to President Vladimir Putin. If made law, the measure will put a 20% ceiling on any foreign stakes in Russian media, including ... Russian lawmakers offer to cut foreign stakes in mass media Russia September ...ITAR-TASS Russia eyes tighter ownership rulesBroadband TV News all 10 news articles » |
Window on Eurasia: Russian Government Pushing New Law Allowing Jailers to Use Force Against Prisonersby paul goble (noreply@blogger.com)
Paul Goble
Staunton, September 18 – The Russian government is about to introduce a bill that would allow jailers to use more force, including in some cases lethal force, against prisoners and to avoid being held accountable by the courts, an action that led Russian ombudsman Ella Pamfilova to appeal to Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev to kill the measure.
But her appeal, reported today by “Kommersant” may not be crowned with success because Presidential Human Rights Council earlier denounced the justice ministry draft and nonetheless the government’s commission on legislative initiatives subsequently approved its dispatch to the Duma (kommersant.ru/doc/2569394and grani.ru/Society/Law/m.233112.html).
According to Panfilova, the new measure would harm the reputation of Russia by opening the way for jailers to use greater physical force, including in some instances lethal force, against prisoners if lesser means do not work and to escape any judicial oversight of what they are doing. But of course, it would have more immediate consequences for Russian prisoners.
If the government-backed measure goes forward and is approved, that will almost certainly untie the hands of many Russian jailers, lead to more abuses of the rights of prisoners, increase the chances for intimidation and the spread of fear, and mark a return to some of the worst days of the penal system of the Soviet past.
According to Vladimir Osechkin, the coordinator of the Gulagu.net project, the government-backed measures, which take the form of amendments to Article 286 of the Criminal Code will make it very difficult to bring charges against jailers and thus open the way to more “beatings and torture” of prisoners.
The Russian government’s response to these observations makes them even more disturbing. The Justice Ministry told “Kommersant” that the amendments “only systematize already existing rulers on the application of force and special measures on prisoners.” In short, they are nothing new but rather more of the same.
And the Justice Ministry insisted that in it view, “the draft law corresponds to the Russian Constitution and the European Convention on Human Rights and Basic Freedoms according to which the loss of life is not considered a violation of law when it is the result of an absolutely necessary application of force.”
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 НТВ.ru |
Москаля губернатором Луганской области
ИА REGNUM Президент Украины Петр Порошенко сегодня, 18 сентября, назначил Геннадия Москаля председателем Луганской областной государственной администрации, передает корреспондент ИА REGNUM. Другим указом президент уволил достаточно продолжительное время исполняющую ... Москаля назначили губернатором Луганской областиНТВ.ru Порошенко назначил Москаля главой Луганской обладминистрацииВзгляд Губернатором Луганской области стал МоскальГазета Труд Правда.Ру -Ура-Информ Все похожие статьи: 123 » |
The BBC has formally complained to the Russian authorities after a news team was beaten and a camera destroyed in an assault by “unidentified men” on the Russia/Ukraine border.
Paul Goble
Staunton, September 18 – Having earlier been forced to end contract with the Russian people of loyalty in exchange for economic growth, Vladimir Putin as a result of his invasion of Ukraine and the exchange of sanctions has been forced to tear up his contract with business of “security in exchange for loyalty,” according to Vladimir Pastukhov.
That is the political meaning of the arrest of oligarch Vladimir Yevtushenkov, the St. Antony’s College Russian historian says, and it will trigger a new round of struggles among various clans which in the Russian context will take the form of a Hobbesian “war of all against all” (novayagazeta.ru/columns/65314.html).
The reason Putin was forced into taking this potentially dangerous step is the looming budget deficit which he is going to find it hard to make up. Putin’s system, Pastukhov says, is nothing other than “a modernized and stylized for the Internet era of the medieval system of ‘feeding’” in which only those who are loyal are allowed to share in the wealth of the state.
As long as the budget is in balance and the amounts that can be shared out are growing, the commentator says, everything is fine; “but if the size of the pie declines … then the struggle for access sharply intensifies” and someone or even many someones have to be driven away from the table or the system has to be transformed if the state is to survive.
With the rising costs of the war in Ukraine and the sanctions both those imposed by the West and those imposed by the Kremlin, the pie in Moscow is getting smaller, and thus “in definite sense, Yevtushenko became the first really serious victim of Western sanctions.” But his arrest sends a signal to all the other oligarchs, and it is unlikely to be the last.
Not surprisingly, the Russian historian continues, many have compared the arrest of Yevtushenkov with the earlier arrest of Khodorkovsky. Both are political, but “the politics of today is entirely different than it was ten years ago. The Yukos affair “preceded the flowering of the regime; the Yevtushenko case presages its end.
With Khodorkovsky’s arrest, Putin sent a message to all the other oligarchs that “if you do not want the same thing to happen to you than has happened to [him], then conclude a contract with the authorities: ‘loyalty and part of the profits in exchange for security,’” an arrangement that led to the appearance of “’systemic business.’”
With the arrest of Yevtushenkov, Pastukhov argues, what has happened is something very different: the Putin regime itself has torn up the contract it had with the oligarchs because it can’t afford to allow them to keep making money at a time when the state, as a result of Ukraine, is becoming impoverished.
Put in crudest terms, what Putin has signaled is that “the time of ‘arbitrary action for others’ is ending. The new time of ‘arbitrariness for all’ is beginning,” and in that new era, the oligarchs are not exempt.
But they are not the only ones who are now at risk, Pastukhov says. The force structures on whom Putin has relied are also in a new position. Given budgetary shortfalls, the Kremlin isn’t going to be able to “look through its fingers” at the enormous diversion and theft of public resources by them.
Thus, “what has begun with Yevtushenkov will not end with him. Vicious clan wars lie ahead for Russia … and that will continue until the Russian elite … finally recognizes that ‘a state of laws’ [a Rechtstaat] is not just something liberals want. It is something that [the elite itself] can deal with more cheaply than with a war of all against all.”
In a commentary published yesterday in “Vzglyad,” Petr Akopov expands on this idea. He also says that Yevtushenkov’s arrest marks “a change of eras,” but in contrast to Pastukhov, he argues that what the Kremlin is likely to do is to reverse privatization and restore a statist economy (vz.ru/politics/2014/9/17/706177.html).
Although Putin has pledged not to so that, he may not have any choice not only because of the deficits Pastukhov points to but also because the Russian people unlike the oligarchs have not accepted either the manner or the results of privatization and are now quite prepared to support a reversal of that process.
“The economic war with the West,” Akopov says, “is forcing the authorities to recognize the need for an acceleration of the process of consolidating strategic branches into the hands of the state and inevitably raises issues not only about the role of the oligarchate in Russian life but also of the relationship of state capitalism and large private property, about the social state and cooperative property, about the free hand of the market, and yes, about capitalism as such.”
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Russian police say they have seized more than 1,000 kilograms of Afghan-produced heroin and arrested more than 30 suspected drug traffickers in an operation targeting a criminal group with ties in Tajikistan.
Unidentified men attacked BBC journalists who were investigating reports of Russian servicemen being killed near the border with Ukraine, the broadcaster said.
Inmate suicides have nothing to do with coalition government policies: we are doing more to help prisoners than Labour did
Prison is not meant to be comfortable. Its not meant to be somewhere anyone would ever want to go back to. But the language being used by some pressure groups and commentators to talk about prisons bears little relation to reality.
I visit prisons regularly and get feedback from staff and inmates. I see a system which is adapting to deal with a much lower budget like almost every other part of the public sector. The approach it is taking to deal with that pressure has been designed by governors and staff themselves it seeks to find out where things are being done more cost-effectively across the prison estate and then to replicate that.
Continue reading...How to set a honey trap by Olivia Goldhill
Seductive spies aren't simply James Bond fantasies - femmes fatales have been a key feature of espionage for centuries
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An anonymous investigator offers $30m for indisputable evidence on who shot down Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 as it flew over the Ukraine-Russia border
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Vladimir Markin, the Russian Investigative Committee spokesman, discussed the investigation of the Sistema chairman Vladimir Yevtushenkov on charges of money laundering.
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KIEV, UKRAINE — Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko arrives in Washington on Thursday with a simple demand: more economic and military aid for a nation that is reeling from an insurgency in the east.
But amid concerns about Ukraine’s commitment to anti-corruption reforms and Western caution about escalating a military conflict with Russia, it remained far from clear that Ukraine’s leader would leave Washington with substantial new pledges of support. The Ukrainian candy magnate-turned-politician will meet President Obama at the White House and will address a joint meeting of Congress.
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Just over three months after taking office, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko is facing some increased opposition based largely on controversial decisions he has made in the country’s conflict with Russia. But as the president heads to Washington and New York to seek more help in the fight, he still commands significant support at home. VOA’s Al Pessin reports from Kyiv.
Oligarch's arrest deepens fears over Russian economyby Shaun Walker in Moscow
Vladimir Yevtushenkov under arrest and facing prospect of selling Sistema company in what critics call 'undisguised theft' and 'Yukos 2.0'
The arrest of one of Russia's richest men, whose empire spans oil production to the country's largest mobile phone network, could send further shockwaves through an economy already reeling from western sanctions.
Analysts said the moves against Vladimir Yevtushenkov this week looked like a raid on his business by Kremlin-connected forces, and is a sign of an intensifying battle for a "shrinking pie" of resources. Yevtushenkov, Russia's 15th richest businessman with a fortune of around £5.5bn according to Forbes magazine, has been placed under house arrest after allegations of money laundering.
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