... colossal, caramel-colored Afro, Ilya Varlamov doesn't look like a typical Siberian mayor. Nor does he have the resume. An architect by training, Varlamov runs iCube, a creative advertising and development agency. But he's best known for his photo blog , one of the country's most popular, which features frequent criticism of the government spliced between pictures of luxury hotels in Singapore, race riots in Moscow and the office of former Kremlin spinmeister Vladislav Surkov. In a country mostly...

... opposition event at Bolotnaya Ploshchad have been herded away from the square by riot police and remain on surrounding streets only in groups of dozens of people, Moscow Times correspondent Roland Oliphant reported from the scene. This will wrap up the blog for now. Check our website later this evening for an article covering all the action from today's demonstrations, and for now you can read about the events in the blog below. 8:19 p.m., Bolotnaya Ploshchad Cleared of Demonstrators: Police have cleared...

... Medvedev spoke live on television Thursday to journalists in his last interview as president and spoke about his future in the United Russia party, his views on the country's struggles with corruption, the Pussy Riot case, and other topics. Read the blog below for highlights. 2:00 p.m., Interview Is Over: The interview with Dmitry Medvedev has come to an end after precisely two hours. 1:55 p.m., Medvedev on Elections Officials: Medvedev said elections officials should not be demonized, apparently...

Live updates on Vladimir Putin's presidential inauguration and his first actions as president, as well as on opposition demonstrations in central Moscow that began Monday morning. Vladimir Putin's presidential inauguration ceremony was held in the Kremlin on Monday. Opposition demonstrators gathered blocks away on Nikitsky Bulvar and Tverskoi Bulvar, after being blocked from their intended destination of Manezh Square next to the Kremlin. Police detained over 100 demonstrators, while other protesters...

... "The people don't fear detentions or riot police truncheons anymore," said Duma Deputy Dmitry Gudkov, of A Just Russia, who was detained at an opposition protest Tuesday. "The police are only fanning the flames," he said, writing on his blog. "Very soon the people who are angry right now will really get pissed off. We will have passed the point of no return." The middle-class Russians, who comprise the bulk of the protesters, said in interviews at rallies that they are acting...

... deputy chief of staff in the Kremlin. Fueling suspicions was the online appearance of an e-mail exchange, purportedly between Varlamov and Nashi spokeswoman Kristina Potupchik, that appears to show Varlamov accepting 400,000 rubles ($13,600) for writing blog posts looking flattering to the Kremlin. Varlamov has refused to discuss the e-mail exchange. He also denied any connections to Surkov in a recent interview with The Moscow Times. Varlamov, whose photo blog is consistently among the 15 most popular...

... contradict current legislation, in particular the law "On personal information." But the response on the Russian blogosphere was explosive, garnering Popov both copious praise and aggressive insults. An anonymous blogger commented on Popov's blog on the Komsomolskaya Pravda site: "Popov, take your family and go to the Caucasus. You'll get vaccinated against tolerance! The local wogs will slit your family's throats while you stand by saying, 'Don't yell, dear, be tolerant.'" Bloggers...

... appear that the authorities have also noticed the similarities with Cairo and thus have not decided to use force. But every day the camp exists, more and more people want to join in. As former State Duma Deputy Darya Mitina wrote on her Ekho Moskvy blog, for this reason almost everyone is discussing when the camp will be closed down — perhaps after the new Russian government is announced on May 15. But there may be other reasons for the standoff. Closing down the camp by Abai's statue won't...

... courts in the country. Dagir Khasavov canceled an interview with Ekho Moskvy and went to an undisclosed safe house Thursday after armed men thought to be from Chechnya appeared at the station's premises on Novy Arbat, Khasavov's son Arslan wrote on his blog . He said the men had identified themselves as members of Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov's security service. Kadyrov issued an angry statement earlier this week in which he accused Khasavov, who hails from Chechnya, of provoking Muslims and...

If you occasionally come to this blog space you may recall how a couple of weeks ago a twist of fate made me a player in a production created by Donatas Grudovich. If you occasionally come to this blog space you may recall how a couple of weeks ago a twist of fate made me a player...

... by powerful executive branches. "Other authoritarian powers—such as Russia, Iran, and Venezuela—resorted to a variety of techniques to maintain a tight grip on the media, detaining some press critics, closing down media outlets and blogs, and bringing libel or defa¬mation suits against journalists," the group said in the introduction to its rankings. The top three nations in the rankings, all tied for the first spot, were Finland, Norway and Sweden, which also made up the...

... at a fixed point about 36,000 kilometers above the equator. In contrast to NASA's iconic Blue Marble images, which were created by pasting together several smaller, true-color pictures, the Elektro-L picture is a single shot of the entire globe. Tech-blog Mashable explained that the pictures were produced by overlaying four pictures of the Earth — three taken at three wavelengths of visible light and one infrared image. The infrared light makes vegetation appear orange, showing a strangely unfamiliar...

... their two children, on the "Itogovaya Programma," of which she was chief editor, Gudkov said. "Sofya, I'm sorry that you had to leave television, a job that had been a part of your life for a long time," he said on his LiveJournal blog. "But you know that I can't abandon my convictions." Gudkov also confirmed a Gazeta.ru report that NTV is planning a documentary about the personal lives of opposition leaders. The film will feature anti-corruption blogger Alexei Navalny...

... went on for hours, leading the fire to intensify through early afternoon and preventing firefighters from getting near the storage facility. Residents of towns dozens of kilometers away could hear the explosions going off, Interfax reported, citing blogs of people living there. In early evening, a Defense Ministry spokesman told Interfax that the detonations appeared to have stopped. The Emergency Situations Ministry said an amphibious aircraft able to collect water from open sources had been sent...

... would not have time to collect the necessary 10,000 signatures to get on the ballot before the deadline, May 7. In a fitting end to the mayoral run by a candidate made popular by his online presence, Varlamov announced that he was quitting the race in a blog post on his LiveJournal page. "Unfortunately, today at 21:15 the Omsk headquarters and I decided to close the campaign," Varlamov wrote late Wednesday. (Read our feature on Varlamov's mayoral run.) He said his campaign had discovered...

... world in terms of malware production, up from 10th place last year, Symantec's annual Internet Security Threat Report said. Symantec said more than 60 percent of infected resources are normal sites that hackers have altered to distribute their viruses. Blogs and social networks were the largest sources of infection, representing 19.2 percent of infection sources. Infections in mobile devices also saw a sharp rise, increasing as much as 93 percent due to increasingly sophisticated attacks targeting...

... “putinjugend,” a comparison with Hitler Jugend, or Hitler Youth, although the initial Interfax report that they cited didn’t say that any pro-Kremlin youth would take part. A moderator of the Twitter page who requested anonymity because the blog was “collective” said the information was posted in parts “as soon as it appeared” and incorrect information was later deleted. The tweet about “putinjugend” led to several dozen angry comments on Twitter and beyond...

... aspects of VTB’s acquisition of Bank of Moscow. The banker, who has a personal fortune estimated by Forbes at $800 million, has connected President Dmitry Medvedev to the takeover and keeps a link to anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny’s blog on his personal website. VTB received a record $14 billion government bailout after its purchase of Bank of Moscow, the country’s fifth-largest bank, because of the bad loans it discovered in the portfolio. Bank of Moscow was set up to help...

... hooliganism charges. Several senior church officials said the protest amounted to desecration of a holy site and have demanded that the band members be severely punished. "Many of the protesters were organized," Gelman wrote on his LiveJournal blog, saying some of the protesters told him that they were acting on the orders of the local administration. Krasnodar region Governor Alexander Tkachyov, who is known for his conservative views, said last week that he warned Gelman not to "offend...

... quarreled and parted, fought and made friends, died from cold and heat, read poems, wrote poems, studied, worked, slept, ate, drank, hitchhiked and … even had a birthday once. In a word, I lived and grew up in that traffic jam,” he wrote in a blog post at the time. 417712 179742