Russia 100204 Basic Political Developments
Russia Today: Russia to protect children from Internet risks
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Russia Today: Russia to protect children from Internet riskshttp://rt.com/prime-time/2010-02-03/safer-internet-week-russia.html/print 03 February, 2010, 19:13 This week has been declared as “Safer Internet Week” by Russia, coinciding with the global “Safer Internet Day” which falls on February 9. Initially a puzzling entity in the early 1990s, the Internet has changed unrecognizably over the past decade. While it has brought revolutionary ways of interaction, it has also created a whole new set of risks – especially for children. The aim of the Safer Internet Week events is to promote a safer and more responsible use of online technology by today’s youth by educating children on the risks of child pornography, dangers of drug use, which is often promoted online, and threats of sites promoting violence.
“Anyone can publish anything – that, I would say, is one of the biggest risks,” Janice Richardson, InSafe network and European Schoolnet coordinator, told RT. “Young people don’t understand which data has real value and which does not.” “One more major risk is self-disclosure. Young people tend to say too much, to do too much, to give away too much information,” she added. Nowadays the Internet is obviously a very important part in every schoolchild’s daily routine. “I use the Internet every day to check my e-mail and my Vkontakte account,” said Marina, a student. “I spend about three hours a day on the Internet at weekends, and about an hour on schooldays.” Government statistics show that about 50% of children spend on the Internet up to three hours a day, and 9 out of 10 have access to online technology. For most of this time, parents are unable to monitor the sites their children visit or what sort of things they download or upload. What is more, Russian legislation does not help to make the Internet safer for children to use. “The law should be improved,” said Vladimir Ovchinsky, Constitutional Court advisor. “Russia has not yet ratified two fundamental conventions of the Council of Europe, coordinating the fight against human trafficking. including child pornography. I have no idea why our country has not joined these conventions.” Meanwhile, Russia boasts one of the fastest growing Internet populations in the world. In June 2009, 32% of Russians were online, and this figure is going up all the time. Therefore, once there is room for improvement regarding legislation in particular, Russia is very serious about Safer Internet week, so that children can go about online business safely.
03.02.2010, 22.17 MOSCOW, February 3 (Itar-Tass) -- A mandatory health insurance reform should improve the quality of medical services because this becomes the main funding criterion, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said, promising that the government would pay insurance expenses. “We are facing a very ambitious task of reforming the mandatory health insurance system,” Putin said. He recalled the decision of several years ago to support primary healthcare institutions and raise the salaries of their personnel. “But it’s absolutely obvious that we will have to use new forms, and these forms of medical services should be based on the fact that healthcare institutions get money not just for their existence but for the volume and quality of services they provide,” Putin said. “This is a painful process, because those who do not work as well as people would like them to will have to wind down and leave the market. You know that we have very many hospital beds, just as many as in European countries. But quality is not the same,” the prime minister said. He blamed this on the fact that healthcare institutions get funding for the very fact of their existence rather than for the number of people they have cured. When visiting Chuvashia last week, Putin urged all other regions to catch up with the republic that has gone further and set a good example for others to follow. When asked whether mandatory health insurance would mean that people would have to pay for medical services, Putin said, “No, this should be done at the expense of primary government resources, which, if used properly, should generate a sufficient amount of money in the system.” Itar-Tass: Russian doctors call for raising awareness of cancer prevention http://www.itar-tass.com/eng/level2.html?NewsID=14786143&PageNum=0 04.02.2010, 02.25 MOSCOW, February 4 (Itar-Tass) - People are urged to consult a physician about cancer risks to prevent the disease at an early stage. Every year 460,000 new cancer cases are registered in Russia, of them one third are diagnosed at a later stage. This statistics is cited by the Russian Health and Social Development Ministry on the eve of the World Cancer Day that is marked on Thursday. Finding cancer early is the main task of the cancer prevention program launched in the country in 2009. This year twenty-two regions joined the project. According to the Gersten Cancer Research Institute in Moscow, 290,000 Russian citizens die of cancer every year. Late last year the Ministry adopted a special program of medical assistance to cancer patients and launched a hotline to provide psychological support for people affected by the disease and their relatives. The World Health Organization forecasts that there will be 15 million cancer patients in the world by 2013. FT.com: Experts map route to disarmamenthttp://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/1826b010-1146-11df-a6d6-00144feab49a.html By James Blitz in London and Daniel Dombey in Washington Published: February 4 2010 02:00 | Last updated: February 4 2010 02:00 A group of leading arms-control experts will set out a route today by which the big nuclear powers could agree to abolish all atomic weapons by 2030. The plan envisages an international accord to ensure that no state can develop or possess such arsenals again. At a Paris conference, a group calling itself the Global Zero Commission - comprising several Russian and US arms-control policy-makers of recent decades - will outline a four-stage plan. The move comes at a time of mounting scepticism over nuclear disarmament. Despite progress in arms talks with Russia, President Barack Obama's weapons-control agenda is encountering increasing difficulties, with many measures the US administration had initially sought appearing out of reach. The Global Zero group will explain today that the first stage would be for the US and Russia - which possess 95 per cent of the world's nuclear weapons - to agree an accord to replace the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (Start) treaty in the next few weeks. The agreement would reduce the ceiling for deployed nuclear weapons to between 1,500 and 1,675 per side. This would need to be followed by a further accord by 2013 for both countries to reduce their total warheads to 1,000 each, while all other nuclear states freeze their arsenals. The group includes Richard Burt, the US chief negotiator in the original Start meetings with the former Soviet Union, and Mikhail Margelov, chairman of the foreign affairs committee of the Russian parliament. They argue that plans to eliminate nuclear arms face huge political and technical hurdles, but give warning that the use of such weapons in the next few years is a growing threat. Talks are not going smoothly. Mr Obama contacted Dmitry Medvedev, Russia's president, last month in an attempt to finalise negotiations over the post-Start treaty, and Washington hopes a text can be agreed in the coming weeks. But the treaty is already behind schedule. The US administration had hoped to agree if not ratify it by early December, when the old agreement expired. "There's a sense that the administration overestimated Russia's eagerness for a deal," said Jeffrey Lewis, a nuclear expert at the New America Foundation think-tank, who said US forces were now much more capable than Russia's. Furthermore, successor measures are now in doubt, including US ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, long sought by arms-control advocates. Mr Lewis said it would be hard to ratify the deal currently being negotiated before US mid-term elections in November. Ratification requires 67 votes in the 100-seat Senate. With an eye to Mr Obama's domestic political troubles, he added: "That's likely to mean that CTBT ratification is pushed off until later, when the Democrats could have a lot fewer votes."
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