A Russian blogger who was jailed after traveling to a breakaway place of Azerbaijan has petitioned to be extradited to Israel, his lawyer said on July 26.

Aleksandr Lapshin was detained in Belarus last 12 months and extradited to Azerbaijan. He was charged with illegally journeying Nagorno-Karabakh, which he entered through Armenia without Baku’s permission in 2011 and 2012. He changed into sentenced to a few years in jail in advance this month. Lapshin has maintained his innocence, announcing his visit to the breakaway vicinity no longer has any political reasons, and he considers Nagorno-Karabakh to be Azerbaijani territory.

Defense lawyer Eduard Chernin stated that his client has met with an Israeli consul in prison and petitioned to be extradited. Lapshin holds Russian, Ukrainian, and Israeli citizenship. Since separatist warfare resulted in 1994, Nagorno-Karabakh has been under the management of ethnic Armenian forces, which Azerbaijan says include troops furnished using Armenia.

Russian Web 2.0 Explodes with Content – 10 Million Blogs by way of 2008

I become a fortunate youngster. Since I was seven, I waited with terrific anticipation for lunchtime, while my mother, who labored at a huge publishing house, could bring a freshly revealed % of Soviet newspapers, like “Izvestiya,” “Pravda,” “Trud,” “Komsomolskaya Pravda,” “Krasnaya Zvezda,” “Sovetsky Sport,” all in all, up to 10+ newspapers. There was not anything greater than to chomp on a juicy apple and study all today’s news in one percent! I even used to fight with my older brother, who gets “Sovetsky Sport” and “Komsomolskaya Pravda” first.

Despite the abundance of patterns, from the stiff and reliable “Pravda” to the extra cozy and youthful “Komsomolskaya Pravda,” the reviews expressed have been trimmed to the guidelines the reigning Soviet propaganda system. Only after the genie of glasnost came out of Gorbachev’s bottle, I noticed a few strangely crucial articles inside the Soviet press. Even then, humans nonetheless couldn’t sincerely communicate up or relate their reviews to specific occasions, except discussing it with pals or spouse and children in their tiny kitchens, where people should talk anything and everything at small kitchen tables with the help of vodka and pickles…

Alas, inside the early Yeltsin generation, the newly minted Democratic Russian media advanced in a motley group of the yellow press, scandals, and cleaning soap operas. Often it changed into hard to sift through this drift and find some real pearls of genuine truth and compelling critic. In the past, due to the ’90s, the Internet gave a start to the blogging universe. It quickly received reputation from mass customers, journalists, politicians, and critics, growing a gigantic Russian salad of critiques and philosophies by no means tasted earlier than.

Today Russian running blog services are in their manner up. The latest studies by using Yandex, the Russian seek engine No. 1, confirmed that the two maximum popular services within the Russian Internet (RUNET) are LiveJournal’s Russian language community (RULJ) and LiveInternet (LI). On June 6, 2007, the RULJ proudly recorded 1 million registered users and blogs. The lengthy-status #2 blogging website LI is unexpectedly reaching its most important rival, RULJ, in phrases of recent blogs and regular notes.

However, the gap continues to be extensive: LI has 170,000 day-by-day traffic, while there are 600,000 site visitors at RULJ. LI’s General Director German Klimenko said to CNews that the number of energetic blogs at LI would exceed LJ using the stop of 2007. Yandex research suggests that the overall increase of the Russian blogging sphere is 74% (forty-one% global). However, the overall number of Russian blogs accounts for the handiest three% of worldwide blogs. Analysts agree that using 2008 will be at least 10 million blogs in Russian a part of the global blogosphere.

Let’s make a quick assessment between LI and RULJ. Once you check or check in to both, one thing turns clear without delay: RULJ is surely greater mature and garners an older target audience. LI, boasting a kaleidoscope of services, is crafted for young adults and teens. Naturally, LI’s target market is developing faster than that of RULJ. After all, children are craving for enterprise and socializing. The massive difference is inside the great of content and blogs, where at LI bored teens spill out their fresh half of mind and dreams, while the best ol’ RULJ crowd is plenty more content material with severe subjects and informative content. There is a first-rate wide variety of exciting blogs and boards at RULJ. Nevertheless, both weblog areas cover well for his or her kind of audiences.

Depressed Russians and Football Widows

Well, sure, when you are getting into the Moscow Sheremetyevo Airport, the first Russians who you see aren’t smiling and appear quite gloomy. But genuinely associating Russians with depression – that sounds funny to me. Little did I recognize that a brand new term “a Russian” means just that! Here is what one RULJ person, http://mi3ch.Livejournal.Com/1131649.Html, presented to speak about to the Russian blogging community. Under the topic “presenteeism,” this user shared newly coined English language terms that hadn’t yet come to Russia. These are the first 3 phrases:

Apparently, the Russian spies within the USA were performing similarly to different Americans. Are spies from other international locations doing the identical? After all, Russia is infrequently the simplest state with spies in the US; there should be at the least 50 nations with spies right here in America. Who are they, what are they doing, and are they also mixing amongst us? How many of them will come to love America, what number of will flip themselves, how many will carry out a future undertaking after they’ve been under the deep cowl for decades?

There changed into a fascinating editorial article in the opinion segment of the Wall Street Journal after the FBI announced it had captured 10-Russian Spies; the article identifies “Spies (All Too Much) Like Us,” and inside the article, through Thomas Frank [The Tilting Yard Column] he spoke of the forms of covers they used. Namely, pretending to work for a “Leading Business Think Tank,” others “accountant for a mission capital firm,” and still others claimed to work for investment banks and in actual estate. All the ones are rather typical kind jobs for an upscale suburban middle elegance New Jersey Neighborhood.

I assume you ought to appear up his article, study it, consider it, and then return to this text for some of my feedback. You see, because these Russian Spies claimed to be running in those forms of jobs, and had blogs, and combined so properly, it is near as if they install the American People to be spied on just for being everyday folks. After all, if that is the new MO for Russian spies or spies from any other u. S ., then our DHS, NSA, FBI, CIA, and so forth, all need to be on the lookout for? People who look and act like Americans!

You see, in my opinion, I’ve had sufficient harassment, sufficient regulators, enough bureaucratic obstacles, and sufficient suspicion for one lifetime. If we are purported to be a unfastened-kingdom, then we had higher begin performing adore it. As a business consultant, retired entrepreneur, online article creator, blogger, and Think Tank coordinator, I trouble the Russians copying my business version. I take exception to destiny invasions of my privateness using a paranoid government. If they have a hassle, I can get a keep-off, so too are maximum “Real” Americans.