The last several weeks have seen two important developments in Russian politics. The first involves the Kremlins position on homosexuality. The second involves Putin’s relationship with the church and how he is using it to assist his imperial project.

Approximately a year has passed when so-called “Anti-Terrorist Sweeping Operation” was conducted in Lafankuri highland village in Telavi district, Eastern Georgia, in the Lopota Gorge. The site of the firefight is in close proximity to the international border between Georgia and the Russian Federation.
The much acclaimed human tragedy occurred in the Lopota Gorge at the end of August 2012, and many questions are still unanswered as to whether this was an antiterrorist operation or a staged ambush planned to clear up loose ends in the alleged government support for Chechen fighters.

The latest data on telecom data services indicates that recent nine months from the date of birth Tango service got 13 million users in 212 countries and localized in 35 languages. You need just to download from www.tango.me to your Smartphone free of charge software. Eric Setton, one of the founders of Tango looks quite optimistic as the forecast is 60 billion USD. The segment of free video calls competing with paid video calls in 3G networks. Skype launched in August, 2003 got in the first year only 9 million 500 thousand users.Tango video call quality is not perfect, you can switch video camera from front to rear panel to show the picture of surrounding landscape. Users can import their profile from Facebook to Tango. The bottom-line is to introduce soon paid value added services on Tango platform.

Under the old system, the policy of the government, the new plans or programs they implanted came directly from the president. Or if they came from the leadership team then they needed to be repackaged so that they somehow belonged to him. There weren’t too many ideas that came from outside of the leadership team that ended up being implemented.

Will American Embassy make Comment?

Nine years were more than enough for Georgia’s population to get used to odd statements of President Saakashvili. Nevertheless, the latest one was something out of this world, destined to insult many Georgians. I can’t be sure of others, but I took it as an insult.
For readers of our newspaper and especially, representatives of diplomatic corps, I would like to remind these notorious words of the president. He claimed that during the bloody crackdown on the rally on the Rustaveli Avenue of Tbilisi in the night of 26 May, which resulted in killing and maiming of the scores of protestors, FBI agents were sitting in one of the offices in Tbilisi watching the event.

“Euro parliament members want to protect Vano Merabishvili?”

Many interesting and curious events are happening in the world, even today, and many more unheard and otherwise fantastic stories are being heard. They are so outrageous that they are hard to believe. One of them is a story of state-sanctioned tortures and cold bloodied murders. One of such events took place on July 12, 2013 when Jacek Protasiewicz, Vice President of European Parliament and four other members of Europarliament, including some famous and well-known figures - Krzysztof Lisek, member of the European People’s Party, visited Vano Merabishvili, ex-MIA Minister in a Georgia prison, officially called Prison No 9, to personally familiarize himself with the dire condition in the jail and the plight of a specific inmate.

Earlier this week, one of the Silicon Valley’s, USA most steady high-growth technology companies held its first-ever developer conference — DBX — marking a potentially historical turning point for an already large company with the potential to become even larger.  The company — Dropbox — has all the ingredients for the breakout status it has earnestly earned. The initial idea looked so simple (perhaps, only a feature) that some of today’s savviest investors passed  early, the company took root inside Y Innovator, perfectly timed its cloud storage offering, differentiated against incumbent solutions on speed and efficacy, fine-tuned and arbitraged a wickedly clever business model against declining storage fees and increasing rates of device obsolescence, famously spurned an acquisition offer by Steve Jobs, a multi-billion dollar valuation, and now, with a feature in WIRED and from 2013 looking ahead, is embarking on a path very few companies get the opportunity to experience: to potentially be a great, independent, standalone technology company.

For those who have not heard, the US is swimming in hand guns. The US has by far the highest murder rate among wealthy countries and that is because the way the laws are currently enacted and interpreted makes it easy for anybody to buy and keep hand guns and ammunition.

Amir of the Caucasian Islamic Emirate came out with a special statement at the end of June of 2013. He dwelt on suspension of moratorium on carrying out combat operations and clandestine and subversive activities on the entire territory of the Russian Federation. Doku Ummarov declared about his intention to target the 2014 Sochi Olympics as part of the global Jihad (holy war) against not only the Kremlin but also against all so-called Kafirs (infidels).

Mobile security startup Bluebox Security has unearthed vulnerability in Android’s security model which it says means that the nearly 900 million Android phones released in the past four years worldwide could be exploited, or some 99% of Android devices. The vulnerability has apparently been around since Android v1.6 (Donut), and was disclosed by the firm to Google back in February. The Samsung Galaxy S4 has already apparently been patched.

The Ministry of Education is writing a new plan that will step back from its work and look at goals and what it wants to do. Often these documents are very vague and are simply a list of nice abstractions with not much thought into how these wishes interconnect or which is more important than the others. It would be great if there were some specifics on what education should look like in six or seven years. How many schools, students and teachers, studying what, that sort of thing; a specific direction.

Cheese has a surprising number of health benefits. No matter what type of cheese you eat, you are doing well for your body.

Leading telecom experts say that Mobile Carriers need to put data caps on their LTE –Long Term Evolution services due to excessive traffic causing massive engineering challenges, the major reason carriers are placing data caps on their LTE services is to prevent users from going exclusively with wireless data services and ditching their landline connections. Telecom industry has already faced cannibalization of “old” telecom services in Georgia, Skype cannibalized ICQ and videoconferencing, Viber is eating mobile roaming, pagers and street payphones died due to rollout of GSM networks, LTE is blowing down fixed phone landlines.

The two main political forces in Georgia are talking across each other and it is beginning to cause problems. From 2004 until 2012 some very good things happened and some very bad things happened. Georgian Dream won the elections because of those bad things, but the former government doesn't want to discuss them. It doesn't want to apologize and it will for the most part not admit they happened. In fact they complain that Georigan Dream people don't spend enough time talking about the good things they did.

It’s been just half a year since Nokia revealed its first Windows Phone 8 device, and I’ve already got another flagship to review. The Lumia 925 marks a departure in design for Nokia — it looks nothing like its predecessors, barring an expanse of screen and some capacitive Windows buttons. This time around, the phone is housed in an aluminum frame, making it Nokia’s first metal smartphone since those heady Symbian days. This, alongside some hardware repositioning and (minor) specification changes has been enough for the Lumia 925 to weigh notably less than its 920 forebear — and I think it’s enough to feel in your hand. As I juggled the two Windows Phones ahead of this review, my first impressions were that the 925 was also much easier to hold, despite only a negligible difference in thickness.

The UN Special Commission for Human Rights had set up ad-hoc international working group on investigating severe cases of human right violations in Chile during General Pinochet’s Junta rule in the 1970’s. The group concluded that many prisoners and other detainees had been tortured by the Junta’s special service, DINA. Some of the detainees were murdered. The much dreaded organ of terror made use of a variety of methods of physical abuses, including rape and psychological tortures. These forms were described in the group’s findings and have since become a report in cases of systematic human rights violation, and they are now widely recognized as a violation of international law and norms of human rights:

Having read this article, trust me you will never look at banana the same way again after discovering so many health benefits coming from it, and lots of other reasons for adding them into your diet. Banana is a caloric dense fruit which can do a lot of good things for us the humans, and animals too. It can:

On Saturday, I walked from Rustaveli down Gia Chanturia Street with an international journalist to Alexandres Park. There were so many cars parked on the sidewalk above the Literature Museum, we had to walk in the street. When we arrived in the park and sat on a bench to talk, two security police came by and said interviews are forbidden unless we have approval. It all served to show me once again how vulnerable we are when in public space and how vulnerable public space is in Georgia.
For some reason, probably having to do with the residue of Soviet mentality, there is a feeling that people in a park can be told what to do and what not to do, with no control on that.

Georgian society is caught up in a multitude of internal political problems and this affacts its foreign policy. Key issues are not in the limelight any longer, as they once were, albeit still omnipotent and strategic. In spite of the range of issues that remain important to Georgia, the region, and the international community, NATO integration and gaining EU membership remains paramount to Georgia’s policy direction. All other issues, even collectively – on the domestic level are less important – and issues of so called “cohabitation” of former regime and current democratically elected government draws attention away from a larger and more pressing discussion. It is a matter of not being able to see the forest for the trees.

Hands-free technologies might make it easier for drivers to text, talk on the phone, or even use Facebook while they drive, but new findings from Traffic Safety Research show dangerous mental distractions exist even when drivers keep their hands on the wheel and their eyes on the road.