1. http://www.vedomosti.ru/tech/news/1782872/obognal_televizor Yandex’s daily audience has surpassed the daily audience of Channel One (Russia’s main state TV channel). Obviously, that daily audience includes people who use Yandex services (Maps/Money/Mail) but still get their news from the zombie box, but it’s still pretty cool. 2. Our wonderful anti-corruption crusader Medvedev, by special decree, handed over some very juicy Moscow road contracts worth several tens of billions of rubles without any tender to Putin’s buddy Arkady Rotenberg. The law does allow this, and RosPil cannot challenge it, but the idea is that awarding contracts without a tender should be an exceptional practice — when you need to build or buy something unique: a spaceport / a synchrophasotron / a myelophone. But here we’re talking about roads, bridges, interchanges. What exactly is unique about that? They’ve been building these for centuries in every major city on the planet.
Once again, for our own money, we’ll get the most expensive roads in the world, of very poor quality (here’s the story of how these guys did such a “great” job as contractors for Gazprom). And Rotenberg will stash another couple of billion of our hard-earned rubles in his Swiss piggy bank. The Vedomosti editorial today is devoted to this subject: Under Putin’s third term, governing the country by the principle of “everything for friends, the law for enemies” is being carried out without even the pretense of decency (before, there were at least tenders and auctions, even if the winner was known in advance). While naive citizens are drafting Strategy 2020 and “road maps” to raise Russia in the Doing Business rankings, the real guys are already doing that very business without any imperialist rankings compiled by enemies. 3. You’ve probably seen the teaser for Rastorguyev/Kostomarov/Pivovarov’s film The Term, with footage of my detention (my being detained?) on May 6:
http://youtu.be/RupZW2Zcfwg New episodes of the film are being posted here: http://srok-doc.livejournal.com/. Recommended.