Archive - July 2005

CXW posts some amusing speculation about who might become Russia’s next President at registan.net and comes up with a surprising candidate – Boris Yeltsin. WTF?  Well, quoting Sergei Markov in RIA...

Two weeks after the first bombing, four more terrorist bombs have exploded in London, three on the tube, one on a bus.  Only, this time, the explosions seem to have been only detonators, with no actual explosive...

Ukraine’s President Yushchenko has entirely abolished the country’s traffic police.  Yes, that’s right, there are no traffic police on the roads of Kiev today.  Konstantin reports: For what I...

Despite an international arms embargo affecting both government and rebel forces, it appears that military equipment from the Former Soviet Union is still managing to make its way into the Ivory Coast, the Telegraph...

Buy to let is a craze that has swept the United Kingdom over the last few years, as the economy has boomed.  Buy a house or flat (apartment), let it out at enough to cover the interest only mortgage, then after a...

No sooner do I finish posting the last entry (HIV abuses in Russia’s Medical System) than I come across this Moscow Times article about Russian Army concerns about the high level of draftees that are being...

Despite making the reform of corrupt business and attracting foreign investment central to his public policy pronouncements, Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko must be more than a little worried by the...

David McDuff points to what he sees as a trend towards censorship of English language translations of Russian media reports. With the Kremlin’s increasing stranglehold on the flow of information out of Russia...

Intel Dump has a post about US basing strategy which, as part of its argument repeats a claim that the US base in Manas, Kyrgyzstan, contributes so heavily to the local economy that it is worth around 5% of...

Former Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov is the subject of a criminal investigation over an illegal property purchase.  Kasyanov, who was Prime Minister through almost all of Putin’s first term, has...