Russia

As 2009 fades into history the urge for anyone with access to a media outlet is to compile some sort of year-end list. I am not going to put together a list of top stories or year end awards, but in the column below I am going to highlight seven stories that I think deserved more attention than they received, either because they challenged the conventional wisdom in international affairs, help to explain where our world is or where it may be heading, or, in the case of the science story at the end, because it is just too bizarre not to note. So without further ado, here is my humble year-end collection:

The US Navy, Climate Change Believers

Hi everyone,

I can’t tell you how excited I am to be joining the talented team of bloggers that Shaun Randol has assembled here at The Mantle. Although I’ll mainly comment on things happening in South Asia, I also intend to make use of the freedom provided by the “-ish” in the title to discuss other issues, generally related somehow to something in South Asia (no, I can’t be more specific – that’s how great the “-ish” is).

It’s winter in Europe, time for snow, St. Nicholas, and the annual Russia-Ukraine dispute over natural gas supplies. On Wednesday, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev warned his counterparts in Ukraine not to try to modify a 10-year gas supply contract between the two countries.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev covered a lot of ground in his annual state-of-the-nation address on Thursday, but the after-speech reports were dominated by talk of time zones, YouTube clips and the body language of Vladimir Putin.

It was all suppose to turn out so differently.  The Orange Revolution, was suppose to be the birth of a true and lasting democracy in Ukraine, a peaceful uprising in late 2004 against what were widely seen as rigged presidential elections.  Tens of thousands of Ukrainians took to Kiev’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti (“Independence Square”) and in similar places around the country with a simple demand – to have their votes fairly counted.  A young, Western-leaning president was swept into office in what has held up as an example of people power to all the pseudo-democracies o

Last Monday, Yahoo pulled the plug on their once-popular GeoCities network.  If you surfed the web in the late 1990s, then you probably visited your share of GeoCities sites, a big part of the reason Yahoo paid $3 billion for GeoCities back in 1999 (GeoCities were once the third most-popular Web destination).  The idea of GeoCities was that individual sites were grouped by theme into virtual “cities” – for example, Wall Street was the “city” for business-themed pages – it was a forerunner to the social networking sites that would eventually replace it.

According to the Guardian, director Renny Harlin (Die Hard 2, Cliffhanger) has begun filming a movie about last year's Russian/Georgian conflict. The film will chroncile the lives of a journalist played by Rupert Friend, and his cameraman as they try to both cover and survive the war at hand. Georgia President Mikheil Saakashvili who has apprarently already lent his office and a few tanks to the production, will be played by award winning actor Andy Garcia.

As you can see from the photos above, the resemblence is pretty close.

The media in Russia won a rare victory on Tuesday when a judge in a Moscow courtroom struck down the claim of Josef Stalin’s grandson, Yevgeny Dzhugashvili, that the newspaper Novaya Gazeta had damaged Stalin's “honor and dignity” by claiming in April that the former Soviet leader was, among other things, “a bloodthirsty cannibal” for ordering numerous purges of his enemies, both real and imagined (“Stalin” by the way, was the nom de guerre of Iosef Dzhugashvili, and means “steel” in Russian). Grandson Yevgeny was suing Novaya Gazeta for libel on behalf of the memory of his grandfather.

Expect to see Afghanistan in the headlines a lot during the next few weeks as President Obama meets with Congressional and military leaders to plot the next step of America’s Afghan strategy. That means you’ll also likely hear your fair share of pundits weighing in on the topic and more than a few of them are sure to refer to Afghanistan, perhaps in ominous tones, as “the graveyard of empires.”