"Maybe the money was spent not on what was needed but instead on what someone wanted to spend it on," Putin told top sports officials that he summoned for a grilling Friday about Russia's worst-ever performance at the Winter Games. Putin, chairing a meeting to analyze the reasons behind the Olympic flop, said the government had spent about 3.5 billion rubles ($117 million) in three years to prepare for the Vancouver Games — a sum that he claimed was comparable with those spent by the nations that won the most medals. "I have got an impression that the more money we spend, the more modest the results are," he said, adding that the sum was five times the amount that Russia had spent on preparations for the 2006 Winter Games in Torino.
It was a week in which she was finally hoping to do everything right, for a change. She met with the new president of Ukraine on Monday and flew to Haiti the next day to visit earthquake victims. She had hardly recovered from jetlag after returning from the Caribbean before jetting to the Spanish city of Cordoba for a meeting of EU foreign ministers. And what did Catherine Ashton, 53, the EU's chief diplomat, come home to at the end of this busy week? More grumbling.
For my first post on Global Voices Advocacy I'd like to entertain a discussion on an issue that has been bothering me since news of the first censored political website in Algeria was broken. That is, how far would one go in defending the human rights, and most relevant the right to free speech, of one's political arch-rivals*. Picture in your mind your most hated group, a group that you think would definitely alter your life in extremely unpleasant ways were they to obtain power that you think your raison d'être would be to defeat them politically every possible way. I'll help you do that by explaining the background to this.
As elsewhere in the former Soviet Union, Georgians marked March 8 International Women’s Day with public displays of respect for women - offering flowers, congratulations or even giving up bus seats to female passengers. But while Georgian women pride themselves on their ability to handle both home-making and careers, some gender equality advocates worry that deep-rooted traditions and cultural mores are forcing women to juggle too many responsibilities. Forty-seven-year-old Naira Nebieridze has done it all: while raising a child, she danced professionally with the Georgian National Ballet Sukhishvili and toured internationally. Now a grandmother, she works as a Georgian dance instructor in Tbilisi and prides herself on being able to balance her love of dance with what she sees as her duties as a doting wife.
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