November 20th, 2009

November 17th, 2009
Ukraine roundup: flu and politics - at What's Up, Ukraine? and at Jamestown Foundation Blog, here and here; the latest on the tense relationship between the Ukrainian president and PM - at Ukrainiana, as well as two posts - here and here - on one of the 18 presidential candidates, Vasyl Protyvsikh, head of Ivano-Frankivsk Chamber of Commerce and former head of Ivano-Frankivsk Customs, aka Vasyl Humenyuk, whose new last name translates as “against all”; Ukraine Today reports that Natalia Vitrenko of Ukraine's Progressive Socialist Party “has been excluded from the Presidential race for failing to pay the 2.5 million deposit”; Window on Eurasia highlights the views of Ukraine's ambassador to Russia on the Ukrainian-Russian relations.
More on the Hungarian reactions to Imre Kertész's Die Welt interview - at Hungarian Spectrum. (Marietta Le's GV post about it is here.)
On Nov. 17, the Czech Republic and Slovakia are celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution, and The Czech Daily Word lists “most frequent stupid arguments and errors” of those who believe that “the era of communism was better than the post-revolution times.”
Profy writes about the IT dimension of president Medvedev's annual address: “The draft speech was initially published online as a lengthy article by the president and he invited all the citizens to voice their opinions out via the Kremlin official website - and people were definitely very willing to participate given more than 18 thousand comments received.” NetEffect writes about “tweeting your way to Gulag”: turns out that in Russia, “the police are avid readers of ‘the Internet' and particularly of Twitter.”
Profy writes about the newly-launched ForbesRussia.ru website and “their obvious lack of interest in anything local and specific to the Russian market, in particular in the field of social media and social networking.”