• OPINION

  Secretive Russian billionaire vents to US conservatives

  News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 13/03/2018

  » It's not every day that a Russian billionaire submits a op-ed piece to the Daily Caller, the conservative US website. When the billionaire in question is as media-shy as Oleg Deripaska, something extraordinary is going on. As the unfortunate recipient of an oversized role in the "Trump-Russia" scandal, he has had enough and is not quite sure how to defend himself.

• OPINION

  What's scary about Facebook's new troll findings

  News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 03/08/2018

  » Facebook's widely publicised discovery of a possible influence operation through "inauthentic" accounts warrants some scrutiny -- and some reflection about the difference between a genuine political debate on social networks versus its simulated version.

• OPINION

  Twitter struggling to engineer healthy conversation

  News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 05/03/2018

  » Facebook's self-regulatory contortions in the wake of fake news and trolling scandals have gone on, with little visible effect, for months. Now Twitter founder and Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey has announced his company is going to try a different tack -- but Mr Dorsey's approach is arguably even more far-fetched than his Facebook peer Mark Zuckerberg's: It's an attempt to view Twitter's social mess as an engineering problem.

• OPINION

  Putin struggles to keep wars separate

  News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 16/02/2018

  » Late on Feb 7 and early on Feb 8, US forces in Syria likely killed the greatest number of Russians since the end of the Cold War -- more than 200 soldiers. There will, however, be no international repercussions, nor will any of the Russians get posthumous medals like Roman Filipov, the fighter pilot who was shot down over Syria earlier this year and resisted capture until he was forced to blow himself up with a hand grenade.

• OPINION

  Safer vehicles can make terrorist strikes much harder

  News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 07/06/2017

  » 'Enough is enough," UK Prime Minister Theresa May declared after the London terror attack on Saturday night, the third one this year. But what she proposed to counter the terrorist attacks was, essentially, some freedom of speech restrictions, more powers for law enforcement and longer sentences for terror-related offenses -- the same old toolbox that has been used for almost two decades.

• OPINION

  Blockchain test could change Russia

  News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 08/06/2017

  » Russian President Vladimir Putin and his economic team have long been under the impression that, to wean the country off its oil dependence, they needed a major leap in some specific area of technology that wasn't yet dominated by Western, Chinese or Japanese tech giants. Their latest hopes are being pegged to the Ethereum blockchain platform.

• OPINION

  Forcing the EU to make a bold move

  News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 03/03/2017

  » In trademark EU style, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker outlined a vision for the bloc's future on Wednesday by presenting five of them. While some will see an attempt to shape the agenda without taking responsibility, it sounded more like an impatient call for members to find the courage to rally around an actual strategic decision.

• OPINION

  Why Putin won't admit the truth about Russia doping

  News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 21/07/2016

  » Russian President Vladimir Putin is changing his tune about the doping scandal that has engulfed Russian Olympic and paralympic athletes. As proof mounts that the use of performance-enhancing drugs is a state-sponsored system in Russia, Mr Putin appears less and less willing to cooperate with international sports organisations and increasingly inclined to complain about political conspiracies against his country.

• OPINION

  There is no rule book for doing away with corruption

  News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 16/05/2016

  » UK Prime Minister David Cameron's anti-corruption summit coincided with the release of an International Monetary Fund staff paper that explains why corruption is bad for economies and suggests ways to eradicate it. But neither these recommendations nor those expressed at the forum will do much to fix the developing world's problems. That would require much more than better anti-graft laws and dogged enforcement.

• OPINION

  How countries play the World Bank's rankings

  News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 03/11/2015

  » For some governments, improving their country's standing in the World Bank's Doing Business survey has become a national priority. Yet the results of such efforts sometimes are deceptive. 

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