Russia needs fewer universities - Medvedev

Russia needs fewer universities - Medvedev

The quality of education in Russia has deteriorated, and the country needs to cut the number of universities and colleges, President Dmitry Medvedev said.

"Higher education has been devalued. We have a huge number of higher educational establishments some of which are worth nothing," Medvedev said at a meeting with employees of government daily Rossiiskaya Gazeta on its 20th anniversary.

"The optimum number of universities should be substantially fewer than now," he said.

The Russian leader said he is not calling for inferior universities to be completely shut down. "They need to either be strengthened or merged with others," Medvedev said.

"When I studied at the university, we, as far as I remember, had two educational establishments in Leningrad [now St. Petersburg] that trained legal experts," the Russian president, who had received a legal education in the 1980s, said.

"But when I was leaving St. Petersburg in 1999, there were already 50 of them," he said.

MOSCOW, November 11 (RIA Novosti)

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11.11.2010, 06.36

MOSCOW, November 11 (Itar-Tass) -- The presidium of the Russian government will meet on Thursday, November 11, to consider a draft federal target programme on the development of education in 2011-2015.

At a meeting with members of the governing council of Moscow’s School No. 1060 on Wednesday, November 10, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said of the 157 billion roubles to be disbursed for the programme, 53 billion roubles would be provided by the federal budget and 10.5 billion roubles would go to secondary schools.

He stressed that the programme should become the main tool for implementing the presidential initiative “Our New School”.

The programme calls for creating 100 retraining centres for teachers at big schools. They should enable 80,000 teachers to undergo retraining and advanced training. In addition, each federal district will set up permanent retraining centres at pedagogical institutes.

Sobyanin appoints Kalina as Moscow government minister

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11.11.2010, 10.05

MOSCOW, November 11 (Itar-Tass) -- Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin appointed Isaak Kalina as a Moscow government minister and the head of the Moscow education department, a source in the Moscow Mayor’s Office said on Thursday.

Alongside, Igor Sinitsyn was appointed as the first deputy chief of the department of land resources. Svetlana Kiryushina was appointed as a Moscow mayor’s aide from the Russian government staff.

Sobyanin decided to dismiss Pyotr Saprykin from the post of the head of the department of housing policy and the housing fund and to dismiss Igor Yeleferenko from the post of the deputy chairman of the Moscow public relations department. The first deputy chief of the press service of the Moscow mayor and the government, Alexander Khokhlov, filed his resignation.

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11.11.2010, 06.02

PYATIGORSK, November 11 (Itar-Tass) -- Two K-2 satellites will be used to bring Internet and e-government services to remote Russian regions where laying fibre optic cables would be loss-making, Rostelecom Voce President Andrei Nashchekin said.

“Around two million people living in remote places with a low density of the population will get access to the Internet for 300-400 roubles a month via satellites,” he said on Wednesday, November 10.

He believes that in other regions communication channels should be built using public-private partnership. “Currently only 30 percent of the country are covered by the broadband Internet connection,” he said.

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11.11.2010, 03.03

MOSCOW, November 11 (Itar-Tass) -- As many as 100,000 domains can be registered in the “.RF” zone by the end of the year, the director of the Coordination Centre for TLD .RU, Andrei Kolesnikov, said ahead of public registration of new domain names to begin on Thursday, November 11.

He believes that “several dozen thousand sites can be registered on the first day.”

“The average cost of registration for an .RF website is 500-600 roubles, the same as for the .RU zone,” he said on Wednesday, November 10.

He recalled that only Russian citizens and legal entities registered in Russia would have access to public registration. Eighteen Russian registrars will receive the applications.

The administrator of a domain cannot be changed for a year after registration. But “these restrictions will be temporary and will be lifted in the future,” Kolesnikov added.

He confirmed that “the Coordination Centre has decided to draw up a stop list for the .RF zone” to ban the use of obscene words in the domain names.

“There is already a list of 4,500-5,000 words and word combinations that cannot be used in the names of websites,” he said.

Initially it was planned to hold the so-called Dutch auction and gradually reduce the domain price within a month. But the Centre’s Coordination Council rejected this proposal on September 2.

According to Internet Technical Director Deputy Director Maria Nikerova, three options were considered for public registration. The simplest of them was to open the register to everyone.

“The main key to this option is total transparency. The minus is that we expect a tremendous influx of applications,” she said, adding that this could lead to technical failures and mass purchases of domain names for subsequent resale for profit.

The second option was public registration at an increased price of around 5,000 roubles. “This may prevent mass purchases of domain names, but the main problem – high price – will remain,” Nikerova said.

The third option was public registration with a limited number of domain names that can be registered by one administrator. “This will make it harder to buy domain names amass, but there is a high risk that fraudsters will bypass this rule,” she said.

“One should not forget that the ‘.RF’ is a non-commercial national domain and this imposes certain obligations on our citizens,” Nikerova said.

Priority registration that started in November 2009 ended in the middle of September 2010. During this period, governmental bodies, the owners of trademarks, mass media and some non-commercial organisations could register their domain names. More than 18,000 domain names were registered during that time.

The registration of websites of mass media and non-commercial organisations in the Cyrillic “.rf” domain zone resumed on July 26 after a ten-day pause.

The reception of applications for registration in the rf zone was suspended on July 15 following the introduction of tighter rules for mass media.

“During the first 20 minutes, more than a thousand domain names were registered, including about 300 for mass media,” Andrei Vorobyov, public relations director of RU-Centre, Russia’s biggest registrar of domain names, said.

The Coordination Centre for TLD .RU said only mass media registered before May 12, 2010 could get an address in the “.rf” domain zone. The decision was made after the Federal Service for Supervision in Mass Communications and Information Technologies had registered a considerable increase in the number of applications for registration of electronic mass media with names containing the “.rf” element. The service decided it was cybersquatting.

“The registration price is expected to decrease to the standard level of 600 roubles by the end of the year,” RU-Centre said.

Priority reservation of websites in the “.rf” domain zone began on November 15, 2009. Preference was given to holders of rights and government agencies in order to protect them from Internet fraud. The first websites for government needs appeared in the Russian-language section of the Internet on May 13.

Commercial companies’ websites started operating in the “.rf” domain zone from May 25.

The Coordination Centre said the delegation of the domain names had become possible after the start of the operation of the “.RF” domain zone itself. New domain names in the “.RF” zone will be delegated to those commercial companies that have gone through the process of priority reservation and trademark verification.

“Delegation is a technical process that can take some time. After its completion, a domain can start operating in the Cyrillic ‘.RF’ zone,” the Coordination Centre said.

Minister of Mass Communications Igor Shchegolev said earlier that priority reservation of domain names had been extended for commercial companies till autumn.

“A number of problems arose during the reservation of names for commercial companies. In particular, it turned out that some write the names using both Cyrillic and Latin characters. This complicated the work of registrars considerably, and priority reservation rules had to be changed several times,” the minister said.

Another problem impeding the introduction of Cyrillic domain names is search engines. “Search engines do not recognise Cyrillic characters. Something has to be done about that. We are working on this problem now,” he said.

Russia is the first country to have received a country code top-level domain on the Internet.

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11.11.2010, 04.31

MOSCOW, November 11 (Itar-Tass) -- A total of 95 percent of Moscow’s population, or 11.7 million people, took part in the national population census held on October 14-25, 2010.

“The final figure will be known in April 2011,” Moscow Deputy Mayor Valery Vinogradov said on Wednesday, November 10.

Vinogradov said Muscovites had been more active this time than during the previous census in 2002. “The activity of people increased. Almost 20 percent of people came to the census stations in Moscow, while in the rest of the country this figure is 4-5 percent,” he said.

“We are thankful to the census personnel of more than 47,000 people, including policemen, social sector workers, police support volunteers, and others who helped us with this challenging work,” Vinogradov said.

The main phase of the census was held on October 14-25. “The census was conducted in strict compliance with the schedule,” Rosstat deputy head Irina Zbarskaya told Itar-Tass earlier.

In some remote areas, the census started on March 1 and will continue till December. The census was also extended for several days in two districts of the Krasnodar Territory because of a devastating flood.

Population census will be extended up to December in several Russian regions having territories that are hardly reachable due to climatic conditions, remoteness, and the lack of transport infrastructure. These include the Far North, mountainous, steppe and taiga territories in the republics of Altai, Buryatia, Dagestan, Karelia, Komi, Yakutia, and Tyva, in the Baikal, Kamchatka, Krasnoyarsk and Khabarovsk territories, in the Amur, Arkhangelsk, Irkutsk, Kemerovo, Magadan, Murmansk, Sverdlovsk, Tyumen, and Yaroslavl region, in the Jeweish Autonomous Region, the Nenets, Khanty-Mansi, and Chukotka Autonomous Areas.

Rosstat is confident that the census has justified its motto: “Everyone is Important for Russia!” This is borne out by interim data announced by Rosstat officials in the middle of the campaign. As for October 19, around 70 million people had been registered, which is about half of the country's population.

This is the second census in the history of modern Russia. The previous one was held in 2002. According to that census, the population of the country was 147 million. Rosstat says now there are 141.9 million people in the country.

The first information on Russia's population will be summarised in April 2011, the final results will be available in the fourth quarter of 2012 and published by the end of 2013. For the first time Rosstat will post the data on its official website for free access.

The overall budget of the census is around 17 billion roubles.