Global Voices Online

Belatedly, a mock review of the preparations for president Dmitry Medvedev's visit to Belgrade - at Belgraded: “He already was in Serbia once last year, but this time there’s a lot more fuss about his visit, presumably because we need to suck up to the East at least as much as we did to the West.”

Recent Links also in Eastern & Central Europe

Israpil Shovhalov and Abdulla Duduev, two journalists of the “Dosh” online magazine were kidnapped on March 9, 2010 in the Republic of Ingushetia, one of the most unstable regions in Russia, Kavkazky Uzel reported [RUS].

Igor Mihajlovski published [MKD] an interesting analysis of number of views of Macedonian pop songs on YouTube, sorting them by time periods (1945-1979, 1980-1999, 2000-2010). He included videos of the late international star Toshe Proeski, whose interpretation of folk song “Zajdi zajdi” is the ‘winner' with almost 4 million views. The results also show that duets with foreign artists definitely draw eyeballs, and point to the rise of popularity of hip hop.

A blogger posted a video address about a policeman who stopped regular cars on the Moscow belt-road to create a “live barrier” and stop an alleged criminal's car. In less than a day after the blog post, the policeman responsible for this unlawful action got a sever warning, expert.ru reported.