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Online child pornography is under attack as the Russian Internet Safety League claims over 9,000 child-pornography websites were closed down in 2011 alone.

The activists are now going further than that: they now propose a new law to blacklist sites carrying child pornography.

According to the draft law, an independent company should be created to be in charge of drawing up a blacklist of websites containing child pornography. Among the company’s staff will be special experts whose decision will be sufficient for any website to be included on the list without extra legal procedures.

Once a website ends up on such a blacklist, a letter is sent to its host. The host has 24 hours to notify the website’s owner. If no reaction follows, the site is immediately turned off. The draft law is based on the experience of European countries, among them the UK.

“Just like Thailand, Russia is in the top three of the world’s leaders in child pornography distribution,” said the league’s head, Denis Davydov, as quoted by the Izvestia newspaper. “Russia’s porn market is immense – its volume is around $10 billion.”

The draft comes soon after Russia’s parliament passed a new law introducing chemical castration for convicted paedophiles.

The punishment will be mandatory for serial offenders. The decision on a convict’s obligatory chemical castration will be made through a forensic psychiatrist’s report requested by the court.

Going crabbing with RT

What can be better on a gloomy winter day than a good old Kamchatka crab sandwich with a bit of blue cheese, slices of red onion, fresh tomato and a sprinkle of olive oil? Join in the tasty fun with RT!

Last week, the Greek government passed new austerity measures, making even deeper cuts to the country’s public sector. Thousands of Greek citizens have taken to the streets to protest the plans, which will include more cuts to the education budget.

“The country is in a very deep crisis and, naturally, education is affected,” Panos Tsakloglou, a professor in the department of International and European Economic Studies at Athens University of Economics and Business, said in an email. “If we really believe that human capital is the most important factor associated with economic growth, these cuts are likely to have a lasting impact.”

Already this school year, the government has had trouble supplying textbooks to its students, and many schools are struggling to afford keeping the heat on throughout the day. Schools also haven’t been able to invest in new technologies, “an area where Greece was already lagging behind most European countries,” Tsakloglou said.

Nearly 2,000 Greek schools will be closed or forced to merge. Most of the schools were very small and in rural areas; students will be transferred to the nearest school that is still open. The decision was made for educational as well as budgetary reasons, according to Tsakloglou, over objections from local communities.

The country’s education budget has been falling for years, being cut by nearly 8 percent between 2010 and 2011 alone and an additional 2.9 percent between 2011 and 2012. Considering all of the factors, such as inflation, Tsakloglou estimated that “in real terms” the decline in education funding has been about 20 to 25 percent.

In 2005, Greece spent just over 4 percent of its GDP on education, placing it in the bottom third of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. It has now likely slipped further, Tsakloglou said.

Although the newest austerity measures do not specify which cuts will be made, public education will likely be hit once more. Still, the measures have coincided with an effort to reduce wasteful spending in education, meaning the impact of the cuts will be somewhat mitigated, Tsakoglou said.

“The main victim of the cuts was the investment budget,” he said. “A number of building programs were postponed or abandoned and, further, maintenance was kept to a minimum. At the same time, the number of new teacher appointments was cut rapidly.”

Prior to the Greek crisis, the country had some of the lowest student-to-teacher ratios of OECD countries. Many positions vacated by retiring teachers have not been filled, and some of those in non-teaching, administrative positions have ended up back in the classroom. There have been salary cuts across the board.

“It is still too early to have a full picture of the cuts and implications,” Harry Patrinos, a lead education economist at The World Bank, said in an email. He noted that financial crises in other countries reveal a pattern of the well-educated being hurt less than the poorly educated, and that such crises can deepen existing inequalities.

“The gap increases even after the recession and on into the recovery. Thus, inequality increases over time as a result of a crisis, and the beneficiaries tend to be the better-educated,” he said. “There will definitely be a lasting effect.”

Original Post: Tuesday | 8:41 p.m. A Syrian video blogger whose images of the fierce military assault in the city of Homs were broadcast around the world in recent weeks was killed on Tuesday, fellow activists said.

The devastation has caused an outcry but Wednesday’s carnage only showed how helpless Western powers are in their efforts to stop the bloodshed.
The United States, which so far has been against military intervention in Syria, hinted however that if a political solution to the crisis was impossible it might have to consider other options.
Residents fear Assad will subject the city to the same treatment as his late father Hafez inflicted on the rebellious town of Hama 30 years ago, when 10,000 were killed.
The worsening humanitarian situation in Homs and other embattled towns is bound to dominate “Friends of Syria” talks in Tunis on Friday involving the United Staes, European and Arab countries, Syria’s neighbour Turkey and other nations clamouring for Assad to halt the bloodshed and relinquish power.
In a chilling example of the repression, activists also said troops and militia loyal to Assad summarily executed 27 young men on Tuesday in northern villages.
Several YouTube videos taken by local activists in the northern Idlib area, which could not be independently confirmed, showed the bodies with bullet wounds to the head or chest and hands tied lying dead in streets.

PRESSURE FOR PAUSE
In an effort to bring relief to starving and bloodied civilians in Homs, the International Committee of the Red Cross was in talks with the Syrian government on Wednesday to arrange a pause in the fighting.
Russia, Assad’s main arms supplier and seen as retaining some leverage over him, said it was seeking safe passage of aid convoys to civilians trapped in the violence.
France also appealed to Assad to halt the onslaught to allow safe passage for aid.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy called the deaths of the two journalists, French photographer Remi Ochlik and American Marie Colvin of Britain’s Sunday Times, an assassination and said the Assad era had to end.
“That’s enough now,” Sarkozy said. “This regime must go and there is no reason that Syrians don’t have the right to live their lives and choose their destiny freely. If journalists were not there, the massacres would be a lot worse.”
The two foreign journalists were killed when the house in which they were staying after sneaking over the Lebanese border into Homs was hit by rockets.
The last despatch from Colvin — a veteran war reporter who wore a trademark black eye-patch since being wounded in Sri Lanka in 2001 — described the misery inside Babo Amro.
Women and children were crammed together into a basement, huddled in fear and a two-year-old child had died in front of her, she reported on British radio.
The Syrian Network for Human Rights said government forces killed a total of 21 civilians in Homs on Wednesday, mostly in bombardments on Baba Amro, a Sunni Muslim district opposed to Syria’s Alawite ruling class.
Several hundred people have been killed in the daily bombardments by the besieging forces using artillery, rockets, sniper fire and Soviet-built T-72 tanks.
Ground forces have held off from entering opposition areas as rebel fighters allied to the opposition are ready to take them on.
The army is preventing medical supplies from going in and electricity is cut off 15 hours a day, activists say. Hospitals, schools and most workplace and shops are shut and government offices have also closed.
As the Lebanese official explained it, Assad wants to batter Homs into submission before a referendum this Sunday on a new constitution leading to multi-party elections as a way to resolve the crisis.
His plan has the support of his allies Russia and China but Western powers have dismissed it as a joke under the present circumstances and the Syrian opposition have called for a boycott.

RED CROSS APPEAL
The ICRC issued a public appeal on Tuesday to Syrian authorities and rebels to agree on a two-hour truce each day to allow life-saving supplies to reach civilians and to evacuate the growing number of wounded from Homs and elsewhere.
ICRC spokeswoman Carla Hadda said she was unable to say if and when a deal might be clinched.
“The situation is difficult and we are worried it is deteriorating,” she told Reuters on Wednesday. “Everybody is focused on Homs but we shouldn’t turn a blind eye to what is happening in other areas.”
Army bombardments on the town of Khan Sheikhoun, north of Homs on the Damascus-Aleppo highway in Idlib province, killed two people on Wednesday, the London-based Syrian Network said.
Russian foreign ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich said Moscow has asked the U.N. secretary-general to send a representative to liaise with all sides for the safe transit of aid convoys.
The opposition Syrian National Council (SNC) said it was coming to the view that military intervention was the only solution to the crisis.
“There are two evils, military intervention or protracted civil war,” senior SNC official Basma Kodmani told a news conference in Paris.
In Washington, officials stressed the Obama administration was still seeking a negotiated solution but also hinted it could reconsider its stance on not arming Syria’s opposition.
“We don’t want to take actions that would contribute to the further militarisation of Syria, because that could take the country down a dangerous path. But we don’t rule out additional measures,” White House spokesman Jay Carney said on Tuesday.
Analysts says Assad sees himself as in a fight for survival. Although some say the support around him is crumbling and the military is tiring, others say he could hang on for many months more before joining Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and Tunisia’s Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali on the list of deposed Arab leaders, if at all.
There are also fears the revolt could flare into a religion-based civil war and spread across the volatile Middle East — considerations that make arming the rebels a tricky proposition.
(Additional reporting by Erika Solomon and Mariam Karouny in Beirut, John Irish in Paris; Editing by Peter Millership)

Hines Ward better stay out of trouble for the next 12 months … ’cause the Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver has been sentenced to a year of probation stemming from his 2011 DUI arrest.

TMZ broke the story … Ward was arrested for DUI in DeKalb County, Georgia on July 9 … after cops say he was driving his Aston Martin like a drunken maniac … weaving in and out of his lane and hitting a curb.

Now, Ward has struck a plea deal with prosecutors … in which he pled no contest to reckless driving and guilty to failure to stay in his lane … and in exchange, the DUI charge was dropped.

Ward was sentenced to 12 months probation, 80 hours of community service and ordered to submit to an alcohol evaluation and any treatment suggested by the evaluators.

He was also ordered to pay $2,000 in fines and court costs.

In this incredibly cute YouTube video, a pair of 9-day-old lion cubs attempt to climb out of a massive plastic cup they’re using as a play pin. But the two just don’t quite have the strength to propel themselves out into the wilderness before nap time.

The clip was filmed in Ukutula Lion Park and Lodge, located just an hours drive from Johannesburg and Pretoria in South Africa.

The footage reminds us of a recent viral video featuring a cute cub playing with a toddler in a crib.

Other not-to-be-missed adorable videos include these orphaned baby wombats playing in a sanctuary and this kitten snuggling up to a deer.

Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt delivers the government’s annual statement on foreign policy during a parliamentary session in Stockholm on February 15, 2012 (AFP Photo / Scanpix Sweden / Bertil Ericson)