Via Superchief.TV comes this unbelievably bleak series of photos from inside a Russian krokodil house. Krokodil, as you likely already know, is an incredibly destructive street drug infamous for eating the flesh of its users. Estimated life expectancy for a Krokodil user? Less than one year.
Check out the rest of the photos here. (NSFW)… Read the rest
Thanks to Trend Micro, you too can now have cheap, easy access to Russian cyber crime. Via Wired UK:
If you want to buy a botnet, it’ll cost you somewhere in the region of $700 (£433). If you just want to hire someone else’s for an hour, though, it can cost as little as $2 (£1.20) — that’s long enough to take down, say, a call centre, if that’s what you were in the mood for. Maybe you’d like to spy on an ex — for $350 (£217) you can purchase a trojan that lets you see all their incoming and outgoing texts. Or maybe you’re just in the market for some good, old-fashioned spamming — it’ll only cost you $10 (£6.19) for a million emails. That’s the hourly minimum wage in the UK.
This is the current state of Russia’s underground market in cybercrime — a vibrant community of ne’er-do-wells offering every conceivable kind of method for compromising computer security.
What is the punishment for compelling performance art? Two years to be spent in cramped, dirty, cold “corrective labor” camps, with possible abuse from guards or inmates, the Guardian reports:
Two members of the anti-Kremlin punk band Pussy Riot have been sent to remote prison camps to serve their sentences, the group has said. Maria Alyokhina, 24, will serve the rest of her two-year term at a women’s prison camp in Perm, a Siberian region notorious for hosting some of the Soviet Union’s harshest camps. Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, 22, has been sent to Mordovia, a region that also hosts a high number of prisons.
“These are the harshest camps of all the possible choices,” the band said via its Twitter accounty. They are expected to serve the rest of their sentences, which end in March 2014, in the camps, where conditions are reportedly dire.
Confusion reigned on Monday as relatives and lawyers tried to assess exactly where the women were sent.
Ancient stone strangeness via NBC News:
A huge geoglyph in the shape of an elk or deer discovered in Russia may predate Peru’s famous Nazca Lines by thousands of years. The style of stone-working called lithic chipping used on one artifact dates it to the Neolithic and Eneolithic (sixth to third millennia B.C.).
The animal-shaped stone structure, located near Lake Zjuratkul in the Ural Mountains, north of Kazakhstan, has an elongated muzzle, four legs and two antlers. The animal stretches for about 900 feet at its farthest points (northwest to southeast), the researchers estimate, equivalent to two American football fields.
Fieldwork carried out this past summer has shed more light on the glyph’s composition and date, suggesting it may be the product of a “megalithic culture,” researchers say. A man named Alexander Shestakov first discovered the glyphs using satellite images. He alerted researchers, who sent out a hydroplane and paraglider to survey the giant structure.
Basement Geographer on a lake in the Russian mountains which may be the single most concentrated spot of environmental desecration:
Imagine a lake so polluted and contaminated that spending just an hour on its shores would result in certain death, and the only way seen fit to deal with it is to fill the entire water body with concrete blocks to keep the toxic soil underneath from moving onshore. That lake is Lake Karachay in Russia’s Chelyabinsk Oblast, and it is considered by many to be the most polluted place on the planet.
Lake Karachay lies within the Mayak Production Association, one of Russia’s largest and oldest nuclear facilities and a major source of plutonium during the Soviet era. Built immediately following World War II, Mayak has been the site of numerous nuclear-related accidents throughout its history, some approaching the size of the Chernobyl meltdown but far more concentrated.
Statistics reveal that by the 1990s, there had been a 21% increase in the incidences of cancer, a 25% increase in birth defects, a 41% increase in leukaemia, and a rendering of 50% of the population of child bearing age sterile in the Mayak region.
Picture: zscout370 (CC)
In a recent Op-Ed for the Moscow Times, author and translator Richard Lourie updates Richard Hofstadter’s famous thesis about the role of paranoia in American Politics with a focus on current goings on in the Kremlin:
Is President Vladimir Putin the Russian Mitt Romney? He certainly seems to see the United States as Russia’s “No. 1 foe.” The question, as always, is how much of this is sincere and how much is an attempt to manipulate the populace for domestic political reasons? This may be one of the rare cases in which cynicism is preferable to sincerity.
. . .
Russia’s friends in the West — and it may have more than it sometimes thinks — must do what they can to prevent the Kremlin’s current paranoid style from producing negative foreign policy consequences in the real world. Americaphobia in Russia can easily spark Russophobia in the West, which, as Romney’s remarks demonstrate, still has its knee-jerk adherents.
It might be grandstanding by the Russians, but the issue of Roundup being carcinogenic is nonetheless alarming. From The Register:
Monsanto’s GM corn, the centre of a storm inspired by the now-notorious French “rat tumours” study, has been banned from Russia following a decision by consumer rights regulator Rospotrebnadzor.
The ban is more symbolic than anything else: Russia doesn’t allow its farmers to plant GM corn, and is a net exporter of grains.
According to TV-Novosti site RT, Rospotrebnadzor has asked Russia’s Institute of Nutrition to review the French study, which claimed that rats developed large tumours either when exposed to the “Roundup-resistant” crop or to concentrations of Roundup in their water as low as .1 parts per billion.
According to Bloomberg, Russia had already asked the European Commission to comment on the study.
The European Food Safety Authority expects to have a preliminary review of the study completed by next week…
[continues at The Register]… Read the rest
Can you imagine Stalin making this kind of public statement? Visitors to Lenin’s tomb in Moscow have probably seen him looking several shades redder than his normal white hue. Tom Parfitt reports on the Russian president’s rather unstatesmanlike comments for the Telegraph:
Mr Putin made the observation on Thursday in one of his trademark pithy remarks during his first interview since his inauguration in May, with the Kremlin-controlled, English-language RT television channel.
“Some fans of group sex say that it’s better than one-on-one because, as with any collective work, you can skive off,” he said.
The comment came after the Russian leader had spoken about an orgy that was staged in Moscow’s state biology museum in 2008 which involved Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, 22, one of three feminist activists of the Pussy Riot group who were jailed for two years for hooliganism last month after a politically charged trial…
Fascinating, is this only the beginning of the Pussy Riot saga? Who are the unrevealed members of the art-protest sleeper cell? Rolling Stone reports:
Russian police are searching for additional members of feminist punk band Pussy Riot involved in the February “punk prayer” protest against Russian President Vladimir Putin that resulted in prison sentences last week for three women who participated. Police haven’t said who or how many more people they’re looking for. Five masked protestors were part of the 40-second demonstration inside Moscow’s Christ the Savior Cathedral, though only three were arrested and tried. Pussy Riot is said to have more than 10 members.
Mark Feigin, a lawyer for Pussy Riot, believes authorities have surveillance footage from the February protest and are already aware of the other women’s identities. He said the search is a tool intended to put pressure on any members of the group who plan to continue protesting.
Pussy Riot are some of the most powerfully effective artist-dissidents of our era, so why does our news depict them as punkette Manic Pixie little girls lost? Michael Shean deconstructs:
The members of Pussy Riot have done something remarkable in modern Russia, both in their actions before their arrest and in their statements during trial and conviction: they have straight up called President Putin on this political floor show, and declared bluntly and loudly that the Emperor has no clothes.
What I did not expect was for the complete and utter marginalization of the three performers by the Western media. Perhaps it is naive of me to think that at least some major news outlets west of Moscow would try and handle the situation in a mature and factual manner, but from the very start these women have been pushed into the comfortable, sexualized box of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl.
