· July, 2010

Stories about Eastern & Central Europe from July, 2010

Georgia: Frozen conflicts, frozen happiness

With a little over a week to go before the second anniversary of the short war fought between Russia and Georgia over the breakaway territory of South Ossetia, Evolutsia turns its attention to another one of the country's two frozen conflicts, Abkhazia.

Bulgaria: Government's Pressure on the Media

  30 July 2010

Veni Markovski writes about the Bulgarian government's most recent attack on the independent media: “This latest pressure on the free media comes after a number of worrisome cases, involving journalists in the last years. […] Every government in the last 20 years has come to power at the promise of...

Russia Tops Aggressive Internet Traffic Rating

RuNet Echo  30 July 2010

Habrahabr users discuss [RUS] the latest Akamai‘s “State of the Internet” report. According to the research, 12 percent of all the Internet-attacks in the first quarter of 2010 were carried out from the territory of Russia, while the U.S. hackers took the “second prize” for 10 percent of the world's...

Russia: Prosecutor That Banned Youtube Gives Interview

RuNet Echo  30 July 2010

Marker.ru publishes an interview with Vladimir Pakhomov, city prosecutor that obliged the local Internet provider to block Youtube, Web.archive.org and other websites [EN]. Pakhomov expressed Chinese-government-style philosophy on Internet-filtering: “Provider is obliged to filter the information that goes through its channels to the Worldwide Web”, and didn't exclude probable filtering...

Ukraine: Simferopol Graffiti

  29 July 2010

At Russia! blog, Tatyana Bokova-Foley re-posts photos of the graffiti in the Crimean capital of Simferopol and writes about the possible identity of the artist who created them.

Serbia: “Punishing ‘Bad Culture'”

  29 July 2010

Belgraded writes about a 1980s Serbian pop star's idea to introduce “extra taxes for authors of those works of media that fall under the category of ‘kitsch‘.”

Russia: LiveJournal Under Fire Of Criticism for “Innovations”

RuNet Echo  29 July 2010

LiveJournal, Russia's still most popular blog platform, recently fell under severe criticism for several “innovations”: purging suspended and “inactive” accounts [EN] and closing OpenID registration [RUS] (allowed LJ-users to comment in other blog-platforms). Blogger sviridenkov observes [RUS] more and more bloggers switching to stand-alone blogs, while Artur Welf says [RUS] disappointed users...

Russia: Forest Park Defenders Attack Khimki City Administration

RuNet Echo  29 July 2010

User berillii posts [RUS] a footage of the storming of the Khimki city administration [EN] by anarchists and antifascists that took side of the Khimki forest park defenders. LJ-user mmet supplies photos of the event. A peaceful meeting grew to a chaotic demonstration, after authorities once again detained [RUS] the...

About our Eastern & Central Europe coverage

Filip Stojanovski
Filip Stojanovski is the Central Europe editor. Email him story ideas or volunteer to write.

Daria Dergacheva
Daria Dergacheva is the Eastern Europe editor. Email her story ideas or volunteer to write.