Protests in Russia over the weekend, after a rigged Parliamentary election that still saw Vladimir Putin’s party lose ground, has led to an additional challenge for Putin in next year’s Presidential race. The near-term ramifications for this open dissent is that it offers an opportunity to potentially challenge Putin in the elections, and one Russian billionaire will take up that effort.

So there I was, doing my daily surfing of various news and web sites when I noticed this from CNN about folks in Russia protesting the recent election that returned Vladimir Putin to the Russian leadership…

The title, Who Are We, signals a questioning about identity and begins an exploration of its “vexed terrain.” Gary Younge, columnist for the Guardian and The Nation and the author of two previous books, lifts our understanding of identity from the taken-for-granted where it is too often treated as a fixed and done thing. Instead, Younge brings us into layers of our identities from micro to macro, from the personal to the political, revealing paradoxes both in how we know ourselves and how others (too often wrongly) ascribe identity to us.

You can see a kind of good cop-bad cop scenario emerging in Libya. The rebels have offered amnesty to any member of the Gadhafi regime who defects and joins the opposition. Given what we know about reports of brutality in Benghazi toward people connected with the regime, I’m not sure this offer is believable. But it’s out there. At the same time, British attack helicopters made a rare daytime raid, destroying guard towers at the Gadhafi compound. And they let leak the preparation of 2,000-pound bunker buster bombs for future attacks. So there’s this olive branch of reconciliation, amid the persistent destruction of airstrikes.

I’m willing to accept that mechanical failure was to blame. I’m no longer willing to accept the pleadings of those who want to defend this action that it’s not technically a war. This may have happened in a training exercise in the same place over the Mediterranean, but we know that it happens during a war.

Last week, Russian Ambassador to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin, told the organization that the computer worm Israel and the US devised to ruin Iran’s nuclear program could have led to a catastrophe with the Bushehr nuclear reactor like Chernobyl. Russia said on Wednesday that NATO should investigate last year’s computer virus attack on a Russian-built nuclear [...]

An explosion has been reported at Moscow’s busiest airport. The death toll reports continue to grow; over a hundred are believed injured. The blast is reported to have occurred in the bagage claim area of the international terminal.

The Senate is about to vote on the new START nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia, and all expectations are that the treaty will pass. This caps off a very productive lame duck session with a major foreign policy victory for the Obama Administration.

On Friday, Russia joined the growing list of country telling us to investigate our torture chambers. And on the subject of investigating torture, as we’ve been noting, the statute of limitations on the torture tape destruction expires today. Have we indicted anyone yet?

In a report released today, Transparency International ranks world governments on a corruption scale from least to most corrupt. For the first time, the United States is no longer among the twenty least corrupt nations, dropping to number twenty-two on the list. Despite this important news, the New York Times appears to be ignoring the report primarily, while the Washington Post is reporting on it only to point out how far Russia has fallen.