Multiple electric train cancellations last week on the Octyabrskaya railway line including cancellations of the last trains, for which the administration was fully to blame, were bound to cause havoc. And this is exactly what happened as many people were forced to stay overnight on the platforms.

It's not a secret that the quality of education in Russia is falling every year. This year wasn't an exception. While the government was telling us about the new education reform, we found out that more than eight thousand graduates will not receive their high school diplomas.

On the 18th of May a Lithuanian court dismissed the case of administrative violation against four young people who came to a holiday demonstration on the 16 th of February (the Day of restitution of Lithuanian Independence) with posters showing swastikas.

A picket of solidarity with the miners of Kuzbas took place in Chernyshevsky park in Leningrad on May 22 from 3:00 o'clock to 4:00.

Much has already been said about the accident which occurred at Raspadskaya mine in the Kemerovo region on May 8 and which carried away the lives of more than 60 miners. It is difficult to to add anything except that similar accidents are not something outstanding in today's bourgeois society.

For many years now May 9 (Victory Day) has been portrayed by the government as "a day to show national unity" and a day of remembrance of our heroic past. However, this doesn't prevent the government from treating our veterans like criminals - here is the story of outrageous cynicism that was shown by he authorities on May 9 in Belgorod. All opposition organizations were denied permission to hold events on Victory Day and Revolution square was closed off. This may seem OK - the authorities were preparing for the parade, but together with the square they closed off the eternal flame. On May 9 veterans came to the square to place flowers at the eternal flame and remember their comrades who died in the war, but they couldn't pass to the memorial. The police disappointed everyone and especially, the veterans. Only several people from the Union of Soviet Officers were able to finally get through to the flame, but even they had to beg the police to let them pass for some time. The rest were forced to go back. After this incident the veterans didn't have any strength or desire left to watch the parade. Instead of placing flowers at the eternal flame they went to place flowers at the other monuments throughout the city, meanwhile the authorities' greetings and assurances that the veterans' heroic sacrifice during WWII will forever be remembered snowed from sound amplifiers on the square. But who will believe them now?

This definitely has to be included in the program of the next Olympic games! A race with a sack weighting 20 kilograms on the shoulders, speed-sweeping of a hundred-meter street area, a competition for collecting dog waste - five hundred happy inhabitants of free South Korea took part in these lovely games in order to get 14 cherished positions - the winners will be hired as janitors. They will put on long-desired work clothes and be rewarded with prize brooms! Evidently, the rest will have nothing else to do but look for something to eat in the rubbish…

As far back as the XIX century, British researchers had shown that there is no such crime which capitalists wouldn’t commit for a sufficiently high profit. Although it is the capitalists themselves who write laws and set down what constitutes a crime and what doesn’t, this rule is still true today. Up to now, this famous quote of a philosopher and economist has mostly been used by those hostile to capitalism. But now, according to the Financial Times article, Black economies shore up states, says study, Deutsche Bank experts came to the same conclusion. Experts researching the impact of the economic crisis on different countries’ economies found that countries where the share of the shadow economy in the GDP is especially big are less hit by the so called recession. This being said, drug trafficking was included in the shadow economy along with financial fraud, tax evasion and unofficial side jobs.

As all educated and liberally minded people have known for a long time, only in Stalin’s USSR did special services imprison people who were suspected in gross criminal actions against the state (terrorism, espionage, attempts of seizure of government power) without lawful grounds, tortured and forced verbal confessions out of them, then gave them biased trials or shot them right in the prison yard without a trial. Of course, the government suppressed all this information, because there was no freedom of speech at all. Sure, we can still find some relics of the Stalinist and totalitarian past in modern Russia, where capitalism has not been completely built yet and where no true institutions of a civil society yet exist. But what a difference we can see in some countries, which are citadels of democracy, human rights and other liberties! If they ever had anything similar to the Stalinist USSR it was back in the Middle Ages. But today, as is well known from crime TV shows like CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, incorruptible investigators using the newest scientific technology solve crimes with scientific soundness. Methods of the Middle Ages have no place there...

On October 13, 2009 a new verdict was announced for one of the Cuban Five, who were unjustly imprisoned in the USA. Antonio Herrero’s sentence was shortened by the latest decision of the Federal Court of Miami from life imprisonment to 21 years and 10 months.

It was a special form of grim humor to give the Nobel Prize to a person on whose conscience lies the blood of war victims of more than one war. Last year, Marty Ahtisaary got the Nobel Prize, a person who threatened to carpet bomb Belgrade to the state of a polished table and worked out the Kosovo plan. Today, Barak Obama, a man who called the war in Afghanistan one of the priorities of his policy.