The New York Times debated on Russia's international relations in an article entitled 'Western Relations Frosty, Russia Warms to North Korea'. The author claims that Russia’s relations with many Western nations, including the United States, may today be at their worst levels since the Cold War. On the contrast of this, its relationship with North Korea “is blooming faster than the famously lush flower beds of Moscow’s Alexander Garden”. On Wednesday, the Russian Foreign Ministry announced an agreement to designate 2015 a “Year of Friendship” with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. “North Korea, meanwhile, has taken at least one step to reduce its own isolation. Last week, the country said it was reopening its borders, which had been closed to foreigners for four months over fears of Ebola, just in time to allow international participants in the Pyongyang marathon next month. It is only the second year that foreigners have been allowed to participate in the race in the North Korean capital”, the article reads.
The Washington Post published an interview with Carnegie Corporation of New York’s Deana Arsenian on U.S. entitled “Russia relations, and making scholarly expertise more accessibleongoing efforts”. Carnegie Corporation of New York is providing a forum designed to spread insight from scholars regarding current U.S.-Russia relations. Deana Arsenian, who is a vice president of the International Program at Carnegie Corporation of New York, oversees Carnegie’s work concerning Russia and Eurasia, gave an interviw about the forum, its goals, and what’s she learned from it on the subject of U.S.-Russian relations. Arsenian stated that “the Corporation’s history and interest in Russia date back to the end of the Second World War. Our current Russia-focused work aims to advance three specific objectives: help sustain the U.S. analytical communities’ Russia-relevant work; create venues for serious and results-oriented discussions of policies and interests between U.S. and Russian experts; and facilitate academic networks between younger U.S. and Russian academics working on critical global challenges. The Corporation is dedicated to helping bridge the academic-policy divide across international peace and security issues. It is a challenge that must be addressed since so much of the expertise that resides in universities does not get to policy communities, largely because it is not easily usable. There are also few incentives for academics to produce policy-relevant products. On the demand side as well, while attempts have been made by policy officials to draw on academic expertise, these efforts have not been systematic”, stated the interviewee.
The Bloomber View developed the topic of safety of information that appears online and the intrusion of intelligence service in an article entitled 'Russia Is Hacking Your News Feed'. The authors remind that “now that most of our information -- and the information that news organizations use as raw material -- is delivered by technology platforms such as social networks, what we know about the world is potentially hackable”. The article claims that the propagandists no longer have to convince professional news organizations to spread their stories, what they need is to incorporate them into social media news feeds”. Employees of the Russian propaganda machine, according to the author, are making obvious progress in this direction. The article reports on a recent post on Medium.com, by “John Borthwick and Gilad Lotan of Betaworks, the New York City-based startup studio, detailed two cases in which hackers -- apparently originating from Russia in both instances -- attempted to mess with the flow of news in the West. One of the two operations succeeded and the other failed. 'Take advantage of the decontextualized structure of real time news feeds -- you see a Tweet from a known news site, with a provocative headline and maybe the infographic image included -- you retweet it', Betaworks chief executive Borthwick wrote”. The news and opinions published in the news feed of social networks do become target for intelligence services surveillance more often today, stated in the article.
