Stories from and

Facebook Teams Up with Russia's Top Search Engine

RuNet Echo  16 January 2014

Scholars and researchers of the Russian Internet can rejoice this week, for Russia's leading search engine, Yandex.ru, is now the second website in the world, after Bing in the United States, to gain access to Facebook firehose data [ru]. This means that Yandex can now search Facebook's streaming API and provide live...

Chernobyl: “The Most Horrifying Phone Talk of the Century”

  26 April 2013

April 26, 2013, marks the 27th anniversary of the 1986 Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant disaster. Andriy Pryimachenko of peredova.com has created a video transcript [ru] of the audio recordings of the conversations that took place shortly after the blast between the dispatchers of the plant's firefighting unit and other firefighting...

The State of Torture in the World in 2013

  10 March 2013

On January 23, 2013, an excerpt from the annual report of l'ACAT-France, A World of Torture 2013, makes a fresh assessment of the state of torture in the world [fr]: “A report called A World of Torture in 2013, assesses torture practices that continue to be alarming, from Pakistan to...

World's Grumpiest Traveler Smiles Virtually :-)

  28 February 2013

It's not true that Vitaly Zelkovsky [ru], better known as “the world's grumpiest traveler,” never smiles. He does – virtually, at least. Reacting to the unexpected fame, Zelkovsky re-posted a Broken News Daily “report” about himself and exchanged a few words with two of his VKontakte friends. Both times, he...

Belarus: Parliamentary Elections Set for Sept. 23

  20 June 2012

Transitions Online (TOL.org, @TransitionsMag) reports that the parliamentary elections in Belarus have been scheduled to take place on September 23 – and tweets this question: “Will they be (un)free and (un)fair?”

Belarus: Running for Office or Not

RuNet Echo  11 January 2012

Sergei Balykin at Belorusski Partizan discusses [ru] the pros and cons of running for public office in the authoritarian regime of Lukashenko's Belarus, based on his own campaign experience from local elections in the Minsk region.

Belarus: Petition to Halt Execution of Minsk Subway Blast Convicts

  21 November 2011

Over 18,000 people have already signed the “Innocent until proven guilty! 15 days left to stop the Belarussian executions” petition, posted on The Petition Site, demanding to halt the Nov. 30 executions of two Belarusian men, Dzmitry Kanavalau and Uladzislau Kavalyou, who were found guilty of the April 11 explosion...