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CHICAGO — “Some folks might think that I’m just a paranoid old guy who feels that the world is coming to an end and we had a great ride…but there are major disruptive changes in health care on the horizon, and unless we understand them and respond, I think, personally, the future of our profession is in jeopardy,” Paul Berger, MD, chairman, Partners in the Imaging Enterprise, and past founder and former chairman of NightHawk Radiology, said at RSNA 2014. The disruption Berger was referring to specifically is the trend of population health. Population health is an idea with varying...

Bad news for the official authorities, television anchormen, and fascist ideologues: Russian culture became great, only after Russia became Europe It has already been six months since the victory of the Maidan (Ukrainian Independence Rallies)... CENSORED. TEXT TEMPORARILY HIDDEN AT THE REQUEST OF ROSKOMNADZOR (Russian FCC) - AWAITING DECISION OF THE COURT. ...In this context: what is this special "Russian culture"? There certainly is a Russian culture, and it gave the world great works of music, poetry and literature. The problem is that Russian culture became great, only when Russia became Europe. Tchaikovsky was not born of the balalaika, and...

Our country and the world marked a great moment: 50 years since the flight of the first woman in space: June 16th, 1963, by Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova. At the time of her space flight she was only 26. The first woman cosmonaut, Hero of the Soviet Union Tereshkova graduated from the Zhukovsky Air Force Engineering Academy with honors, and received a PhD in technical sciences. She was a professor and the author of over 50 scientific papers. She holds the rank of air force major general and was a deputy to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. Valentina Tereshkova has...

This week the U.S. Congress held hearings on human rights in Russia. The first remarks by Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), conducting the hearings, and they were pretty tough. This was not surprising, since long ago she signed a bill named for Sergey L. Magnitsky, a Russian attorney killed in police custody. This bill now has twenty-five senators supporting it in the upper house of the U.S. Congress, and may well be adopted. Further testimony was given Phillip H. Gordon, Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of European and Eurasian affairs, and Thomas O. Melia, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the...

Strasbourg reaches a decision on ‘Nord-Ost’. On December 20th, the European Court of Human Rights almost fully satisfied claims by victims and relatives of the deceased victims of the terrorist attack on the theatrical center at Dubrovka. The applicants themselves consider today’s decision by Strasbourg to be a real victory, and had been waiting for several years. Now they hope that an objective investigation into the incident will take place. The victims and relatives of the deceased hostages filed their claims with the European Court back in 2003. In their petitions, they demanded that those who planned the hostage rescue...

A small, but passionate group of Russian opposition activists is asking emigres in New York to deface their ballots in the Dec. 4 parliamentary elections in an act of symbolic resistance. The technique is called “Nacht-Nacht”: Voters mark their ballot with a large “X” or write an off-color word or phrase. In Russian, “Nacht-Nacht” is an obscene play on words intended to send a rude message to the ballot counters. “It is a way of saying, ‘Go to hell’ to those in power,” said Natalia Pelevine, a Russian activist based in New Jersey, “saying, ‘We are not voting for any...

Following shootings and explosions in the city of Taraz in South Kazakhstan, a criminal case was opened on two counts - murder and the commission of terrorist acts. According to ‘Interfax’, Deputy Attorney General of the Republic Nurmuhanbet Isayev made this statement on November 12th. The official stressed that the city had only suffered a single explosion, and not four as reported by some media sources. He also denied reports that there is a curfew in Taraz. According to prosecutors, on Saturday morning, 34-year-old M.K. Kariyev (previously identified as Kaliyev), a follower of jihadist ideas, robbed a Taraz resident and...

Original Title: "Word of mouth" On Friday, November 4th, it seemed as if the city of Karaganda, Kazakhstan was paralyzed. Life had come to a halt: cafes and restaurants were deserted, and almost no one ventured out into the streets. Parents came and took their children home from schools and kindergartens. People were afraid to ride the buses, and it was impossible to catch a taxi. But the main thing – there was information, by word of mouth, regarding alleged acts of terrorism, murders, and hostage taking... It was the first time ever that the coal-mining capital of Kazakhstan had...

“The language has become smaller by one, diminishing us. Now your words, like the feathers of dead birds, are in dictionaries. In heaven there are a thousand blank pages, pages you never finished...” It is almost as if Joseph Brodsky were not eulogizing W.H. Auden, but Anya. How many years have we been without Anna Politkovskaya... 2, 3, 4, 5? Yes, five years already. Still, strange as it sounds, in the early years it seemed easier than it is now. Back then, along with the pain, many still clenched their fists and were still courageous. But then there was the...

On the anniversary of the death of my colleague Anna Politkovskaya, I suddenly discovered that I had forgotten whether or not they ever caught her killers I only remember the pompous, yet bungled goings on. There were the prosecutors, rushing to calm a hysterical West (“We found them! We found the evil doers and now we’ll put them away!”), as well as the lawyers juggling myriads of dissonant theories all covered with unpronounceable Chechen surnames. Oh yes, I remember how, in the end, the jury decided that it was not the guilty who had been arrested, and how the public...

The terrorist attack on the Minsk subway has spawned many theories and presumptions about those who were behind this horrific event. Some observers believe that the attackers may be in Russia. According to independent political analyst Dmitry Oreshkin, there are several arguments in favor of this theory when viewed in the context of the upcoming 2012 elections. ‘Respublika’: Dmitry Borisovich (Oreshkin), the terrorist attack on the Minsk subway was a new phenomenon for Belarus, and very unexpected. Do you have any theories as to who might be behind this event? Dmitry Oreshkin: I rather doubt this was (the work of)...

(Full title: "She sank - the catastrophe of the riverboat 'Bulgaria', which sank on the Volga in broad daylight, reflects the horrors of Russia's technology and morality") In early 2001, Russian authorities were warning of a coming era of man-made disasters. Vladimir Putin set up the so-called 'Challenge 2003' presidential commission to study the series of man-made disasters that were threatening Russia because of the deterioration of technology in virtually every industry in the nation. Apparently he believed that it served its purpose, as did his successor, yet the commission's most pessimistic predictions, though somewhat delayed, were more than justified....

In Minsk they will long remember the evening of April 11th, 2011, when an explosion at the ‘October’ subway station took the lives of 11 people. The law enforcement bodies after their first examination of the scene now have no doubts as to what to label the explosion: this is an act of terrorism, the likes of which modern Belarus has never before known. How it was According to Minsk police, the explosion occurred at 17:55 on the platform of the ‘October’ subway station near the second car of a train that was heading in the direction of the Culture...

The U.S. government for the first time has released in full the evidence against the organizers of the September 11th, 2001, terrorist attacks, Agence France-Presse reported on Sunday, April 10th. The data was made public just as U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder was referring the case to the Defense Department. The terrorists will be judged by a military tribunal in Guantanamo, rather than in a civilian criminal court in the United States. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi Binalshibh, Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali, Wallid bin Attash, and Mustapha al-Hawsawi are considered the organizers of the September 11th, 2001, terrorist attacks. For a...

GROWTH FACTORS Religious extremism in Kazakhstan has always been present to a certain extent. As a geographic neighbor to Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, and in close proximity to Afghanistan, Kazakhstan is unable to remain above the fray as far as the extremist processes taking place with its neighbors. It is also no secret that religious extremism is gaining in popularity in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Kazakhstan has tried to wear the mantle of arbiter of Central Asia, but its title as a regional mediator has not always been justified. With enviable regularity, reports are...

The Liberal Democrat faction in the European Parliament has warned Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin about possible sanctions from the EU. The recent resolution on Russian human rights violations in the European Parliament “is the diplomatic equivalent to a football referee using his yellow card,” said the open letter to Putin, published on the eve of his visit to Brussels. Liberal Democrat leader Guy Verhofstadt and his colleague Christina Ojuland, the keynote speaker on Russia, signed the letter. “Continued violations of human rights, political interference in the judicial process and the murder or disappearances of critics and journalists in recent...

The Federal Parliament has adopted on its first reading a bill that, among other things, recognizes beer as an alcoholic product and introduces a nationwide ban on the sale of alcohol the night, according to ITAR-TASS. The bill fixes the notion of beer as an alcoholic beverage produced from malt, hops and yeast, with an ethanol content of at least 0.5 per cent in the finished product. In addition, beverages manufactured on the basis of beer, with ethanol contents of up to seven percent, are also to be classified as alcoholic beverages. The sales of alcoholic beverages will be banned...

Some members of the European Parliament (MEPs) deemed yesterday’s resolution on Russian non-compliance with the rule of law to be much too soft, and now seek sanctions against Russian officials implicated in human rights abuses. As reported in the media, the European Parliament has three enumerations: there is the ‘Khodorkovsky list’, which includes those involved in imposing harsh sentences in the Yukos case; the ‘Magnitsky list’, with the names of those accused of the death in jail of the lawyer for Hermitage Capital Management; and the ‘Nemtsov list’, in which appear the persecutors of Russian opposition leaders. The latter list...

“In the early stages of the disease this parasite enters the blood, while in the later stages its affects the central nervous system and leads to death.” – from Wikipedia Anyone living in a poor country that has a palace to be built for himself, such as (Putin’s palace) in Gelendzhik, should go to prison, and for a very long time. Judging by what we know today this is probably V.V. Putin, the Prime Minister. If not Putin, then show me - I want to see this man! It is not hard to find who did this. Other than Putin,...

Those responsible for the large-scale terrorist attack are named in a new criminal case The Moscow prosecutor’s office has canceled the order that terminated the criminal case concerning the terrorist attack on Dubrovka, which took place in October 2002. Igor Trunov, the attorney representing the victims’ interest, revealed this to ‘Svobodnaya Pressa’ (‘SP’). According to Trunov, the Moscow prosecutor’s office was instructed by the chief of the Russian Investigative Committee to carry out a supplementary investigation into the incident. Igor Trunov explains why prosecutors are once again investigating‘Nord-Ost’ ‘SP’: Igor Leonidovich (Trunov), the prosecutor’s decision to continue the investigation, what...