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Medvedev Gets Wish For .đô Domain
MOSCOW — The world’s governing body for Internet domain names voted Friday to allow the use of non-Latin characters, clearing the way for the .đô suffix and web sites named in Cyrillic. The first step in a long effort to make the Internet less reliant on the Latin alphabet allows “nations and territories to apply for Internet extensions … made up of characters from their national language,” the not-for-profit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, said in a statement following a weeklong summit in Seoul, South Korea. President Dmitry Medvedev — who has his own video blog and claims to be conversant in Russian web slang, known as Olbanian — made acquiring Cyrillic web addresses an early priority of his administration. But commercial web site operators in Russia shrugged off the changes, saying they would provide more flexibility but were unlikely to attract masses of new users. “This is only the first step, but it is an incredibly big one and a historic move toward the internationalization of the Internet,” Rod Beckstrom, ICANN’s president and CEO, said in the statement. “We just made the Internet much more accessible to millions of people in regions such as Asia, the Middle East and Russia.” ICANN chairman Peter Dengate Thrush called it “the biggest technical change to the Internet since it was created four decades ago.” The U.S. Commerce Department opened the U.S.-based ICANN to broader international oversight on Sept. 30, after years of criticism that Washington had a stranglehold on Internet regulation. Russia will submit its .đô application Nov. 16, the first day ICANN starts accepting them, said Andrei Kolesnikov, president of the Coordination Center for Top Level Domain RU, the organization tasked with overseeing Russian domain names. There ... |
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| A blustery wind blows the leaves by the Clock Tower in Vyborg, 150 kilometers to the north of St. Petersburg. Forecasters are predicting snow toward the end of the week. |
Federal Migration Service Busts Anti-Racism Marchers
The March Against Hatred, an annual rally against neo-Nazi and racist violence held on Saturday, was raided by the Federal Migration Service. Officers started to single out participants of African descent and check their residency permits as the demonstration reached Ploshchad Sakharova, where the platform for the speakers had been installed. Ella Polyakova, the local head of the Soldiers’ Mothers organization climbed the platform to demand that immigration officers, who left a minibus marked “Immigration Control” parked on the square, stop harassing rally participants. “It appears that tolerance doesn’t exist in this city, while racism is flourishing,” she said. “As we were marching with our friends, whose skin happens to be a different color, grey-jacketed men tried to drag them out and […] check their passports. We said, ‘Check everyone’s passports then.’” She invited protesters to demand that the immigration officers either leave or join the rally and “protest hatred with us.” The crowd ... |
Miliband Calls For Lugovoi’s Delivery
 MOSCOW — Britain’s visiting foreign secretary pressed Russia on Monday to turn over the main suspect in the 2006 killing of former Russian security agent Alexander Litvinenko, who died from radioactive polonium poisoning in a London hospital. Russia has refused to extradite ex-KGB officer-turned-businessman Andrei Lugovoi, saying its constitution forbids extraditing its citizens. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov used the same argument Monday in refusing the request from UK counterpart David Miliband, who said Britain would continue to demand justice in the “horrific murder.” “I suspect that our British counterparts are aware of the fact that a demand to change our constitution is not realistic,” Lavrov said, referring to the Russian law forbidding the extradition of Russian citizens. Lavrov said Russia was willing to prosecute any suspect if Britain provides the evidence. Miliband said Britain has already provided such evidence — which Lavrov denies. Before his death, Litvinenko recorded a searing message from his hospital bed blaming Russian authorities, including then-President Vladimir Putin, for his killing. The Litvinenko case pushed British-Russian ... |
