Travel, Fun and Business in Russia

Senior Russian government figures have rebelled against a deal between President Dmitry Medvedev and Vladimir Putin, the prime minister, to switch jobs next year.
The rebellion indicates that the handover arrangement will not be as smooth as the two leaders had anticipated.

After Saturday’s announcement that Mr Medvedev would take over as prime minister, while backing Mr Putin to return to the presidency in March 2012 elections, Alexei Kudrin, finance minister, announced during a meeting in Washington that he would “definitely refuse” to work with Mr Medvedev in the cabinet.

“I don’t see myself in the new government. Nobody has offered me a position, but I think that the disagreements I have will not allow me to be a part of the new government,” he told journalists on the sidelines of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank meetings.

Four stunning recent events showed how the wheels are coming off the dictatorial regime of Vladimir Putin.

First, Putin was humiliated by being denied Germany’s annual Quadriga award after international pressure forced the Germans with publicly withdraw it.

Then, a new public opinion poll revealed that Putin is becoming just as unpopular at home as he is abroad.

Then it got much worse.

Next, Putin came in for extremely intense pressure from the United States. The U.S. Senate passed a resolution demanding that Russia withdraw from Abkhazia and Ossetia, and the State Department implemented a ban on more than 60 Kremlin officials from entering the U.S. because of their complicity in the torture and murder of Sergei Magnitsky.

Finally, Putin was utterly humiliated by a brilliant bit of reporting from the Moscow Times, which showed that Putin’s efforts to discipline corrupt cops were entirely fraudulent, since the dismissed officers waltzed right back into cushy positions in the government.

The only question now is whether the craven people of Russia and the equally cowardly leaders of the NATO countries will somehow manage to find the courage to act in response to these developments, act in a meaningful way to directly challenge Putin’s authority. The notion that Putin is an unassailably popular and/or successful leader has been shattered, and the malignant consequences of his evil regime have been exposed. But so long as Puitn is allowed to act with impunity, with only superficial gestures like Quadriga and Magnitsky to obstruct him, Putin will continue to butcher his own people and undermine world security.

If the West needed any reminding of how horrifyingly evil Putin really is, that was delivered when Putin appeared before his answer to the Hitler-Jugend, Nashi, and declared that the United States was a nation of parasites and when it was revealed that Putin’s KGB henchmen had bombed the U.S. Embassy in Georgia. The world should have learned its lesson with the expansion of the USSR that it is not possible to wait when confronted with evil.

The world must act decisively against Putin today, or it will pay dearly for its failure tomorrow.

A nursery school in Sweden has prohibited teachers to use words that would indicate a child’s gender. Since “he” and “she” can’t be used, children must be defined by the neutral gender. Completely making a mockery of both grammar and common sense, Sweden has taken political correctness to a new level of absurdity.

I could not even imagine Russia taking such absurd measures. Political correctness is not something I would tend to associate with Russia. What do you all think?

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has recently confirmed that Lady Gaga’s recent appearance at the gay pride parade in Rome on June 11 was organized by the US State Department. During her speech in Rome, the singer cracked down on Russia for the country’s discrimination of the right of sexual minorities.