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Ukraine: Netizens React to Popular File-Sharing Website's Shutdown

Russia: Day of Protests Divides Citizens

Global Voices Podcast: Occupy This!

Welcome to another edition of the Global Voices podcast. In this episode we talk through some of the ideas and issues surrounding the global Occupy movement and protests, as we listen to recordings from our team in different parts of the world.

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Russia: The Fake Political Twitter Account Phenomenon 25 January 2012
Russia: Overview of Top RuNet Trends and Events in 2011 16 January 2012
Global Voices Most Read Posts in 2011 6 January 2012
Russia: Demographic Crisis Means “No One Left To Draft” 5 January 2012
Global Voices Podcast: Brave New Year 2012 1 January 2012

Latest stories about SPECIAL

10 February 2012

Russia: “Anti-Gay Propaganda Bill” Passes Second Reading

Written by Veronica Khokhlova · Eastern & Central Europe

St. Petersburg is getting closer to signing into law the notorious "anti-gay propaganda bill." "Will talking about Tchaikovsky be banned?" tweets British writer and actor Stephen Fry. Some of the Russian netizens' reactions are translated below.

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6 February 2012

Russia: Practice of Compulsory Military Service Comes Under Attack

Written by Donna Welles · Eastern & Central Europe

Russia's compulsory military service practices are under attack due to a variety of reasons, including economic inefficiency, governmental corruption, and brutal hazing rituals that incite young conscripts to take their own lives. Donna Welles reports.

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25 January 2012

Elizabeth Rivera, Global Voices Author and Translator

Written by Juan Arellano · Translated by Dan Cooper · Latin America

In this interview, Elizabeth Rivera, Global Voices author and translator, tells us a little bit about her life and the motives that drive her to voluntarily collaborate with Global Voices. She also discusses the Chilean student movement and other current events.

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24 January 2012

Russia: “Mikhail Dmitrievich Prokhorov: An Unpredictable Kremlin Project”

Written by Donna Welles · Eastern & Central Europe

Although some believe the 2012 Russian presidential election's outcome to be pre-scripted, the complexities surrounding Mikhail Prokhorov's candidacy should not be overlooked. Donna Welles reports.

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18 January 2012

Russia: Obama's McFaul Sworn in as U.S. Ambassador

Written by Donna Welles · Eastern & Central Europe, North America

President Obama's closest adviser on affairs of state of the Former Soviet Union and architect of the 'reset' in the U.S.-Russia relations, Michael McFaul, has officially replaced President Bush's appointment as the United States' Ambassador to Russia.

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13 January 2012

Russia: Social Networks Mobilise Society

Written by Marina Litvinovich · Translated by Siân Sinnott · Russia

Facebook, the possibility to calculate numbers of protest participants, slogans from the Internet, a wide variety of gadgets - these are four new important factors in the analysis of demonstrations in Russia. Marina Litvinovich reports.

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Updates about SPECIAL

9 February 2012

Russia

On February 9, 2012, following the widely-discussed leaks of pro-Kremlin mailboxes, LiveJournal, where the leaks were published, became temporarily unavailable, Lenta.ru reported [ru]. Russian representative of Anonymous group @OP_Russia, suggested [ru] that it was a DDoS attack to hide the evidence of massive wrongdoings (including corruption, thievery, political provocations, and cybercrime) [ru] by Nashi youth movement. Later that day @OP_Russia took responsibility for taking down 3 websites of United Russia party: mos-partya.ru, er-region.ru, and er-kaluga.ru.

• Alexey Sidorenko

Russia

At OpenDemocracy.net, Olesya Gerasimenko talks to the parents of three young neo-Nazi men who were convicted of race murders: “One has adopted the views of their only child and says that violence is necessary. One blames the politicians that have incited adolescents to street fighting. One cries, convinced of the innocence of his son. They are all different, but they have all asked themselves one and the same question: ‘am I to blame for what happened?’”

• Veronica Khokhlova

8 February 2012

Russia

Andrey Rylkov Foundation writes about the first case of enforcement of the domain seizure rules in the “.ru” and “.рф” domain zones. The rules [ru] (Article 5, point 5.5) , updated on November 11, 2011 allow any law enforcement agency (like police, Federal Security Service, Prosecutor's office or Federal Drug Control Services (FDCS)) to request domain seizure without a court order. On February 3, 2012 FDCS successfully seized the domain of rylkov-fond.ru, a website of Rylkov Foundation that had severely criticized situation with drug trafficking.

• Alexey Sidorenko

Russia

Read The Guardian's take on the so-called “Potupchik-gate,” a series of scandals surfaced as a result of hacking and publishing of private inbox of Kristina Potupchik [ru], press-secretary of Nashi, notorious pro-Kremlin youth group. All hacks were published by twitter-user @OP_Russia who uses Anonymous symbolics. Representatives of Anonymous, previously never seen involved in Russian online politics, had also issued an Russian/English statement on the issue.

• Alexey Sidorenko

3 February 2012

Ukraine

Ex.ua, a file-sharing site that the authorities shut down two days ago, is now back online [uk], though its content is still inaccessible. @bl4ka tweets [ru]: “The DDoS revolution has won! […]” @VsemPohuy tweets [ru] about the DDoS attacks that followed the shutdown, and the situation in the country in general: “Ex.ua's back, it's now okay to stop DDoS-ing the sites of [the Interior Ministry], the president, etc. That students continue to be killed at police stations, that's [no big deal].” Journalist Pavel Sheremet writes [ru] about “the hackers' revolution”: “There was [Orange Maidan], then [“Tax Maidan”] […]. Now there's a Maidan on the internet.”

• Veronica Khokhlova

2 February 2012

Russia

Anonymous hackers had allegedly hacked an inbox of pro-Kremlin activist Kristina Potupchik and publicised [ru] a ‘price-list' of posts of the most popular Russian bloggers. Government-sponsored Nashi were caught several times on organizing paid campaigns aimed to influence blogosphere's opinion. The prices vary from 130 to 1000 US dollars per post.

• Alexey Sidorenko

1 February 2012

Russia

RosMiting.ru (Russian meeting), a community portal of protest actions, had launched. The portal accumulates information about protest events in various cities of Russia. It was created by the same team which started other interactive portals such as RosYama, RosPil, RosAgit, and RosVybory, politically-engaged crowdsourced communities and interactive portals developed in 2010-2012.

• Alexey Sidorenko

Comments on "SPECIAL"

Russia: Who is Restricting the Russian Internet?

Strongly disagree. There's plenty of freedom, you can criticise anyone but 282 is meant to protect people from hatred. It...

Thanks so much for the translation, I find the conclusions about what Russian security consider to be "safe" particularly interesting....

good day, may i take this opportunity to stress that global logistics company like where i m working are approached...
Abdoulaye, Many citizens of our respective countries don't believe in transparency initiatives because it has not demonstrated palatable punishment...
Reading this post gave me the impression that I was dealing with the situation in Guinea. Im my own native...