Russia may soon liberate Georgia

[Colon™]

Apparently, state terrorism does exist:

Russian President Vladimir Putin has said Georgia's arrest of four Russian army officers for spying was "an act of state terrorism with hostage-taking".

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/5397102.stm

[Bill3000]

Okay, would someone mind telling me whether Comrade Tassadar is a DL or not? Because I cannot believe at all that he would come back.

[Heresson]

Originally posted by Brachy-Pride
I suport Mother Russia and Armenia against those devilish georgians from hell

Destroying Georgia
Armenia getting access to the sea
Armenia getting access to the sea by destroying Georgia

[Nubclear]

[Barnabas]

Tassadar
, why do you want a landlocked armenia?


Even if Armenia gets access to the sea Turkey would not let armenian ships sail thru bosforus methinks

[Nubclear]

[Jon Miller]

Several people in my group are Armenian.

Armenians

JM

[Dinner]

Armenian women are very hairy. Hair all over their backs.

[Barnabas]

Greece, Turkey, the caucasus and Iran are the world center of hairness


The closer to that area the hairier you are, the more distance the less hairy

[snoopy369]

Originally posted by Jon Miller


I gave the evidence for my statment. My experience with google maps tells me that their numbers are more precise than they are accurate. A very important distinction.

So while I used their data, I modified the statement based upon my understanding of their accuracy.

The difference between precision and accuracy is something every scientist should know.

JM

Further supporting my initial proposition

"About" to physicists means one thing. "About" to people not of the physicist mentality means another...

[lord of the mark]

Russia: Arresting spies is state terrorism, worthy of a complete economic boycott.

US: Precedent duly noted.

[LordShiva]

In Soviet Georgia, spy arrests YOU.

[Blaupanzer]

Comrade Tassader wishes for the return of the Soviet Union, piece by piece. This is a nefarious plot to complete the economic collapse of all 17 republics?

Arresting spies is only state terrorism in the minds of former heads of the KGB. The rest of us recognize that occupying powers ALWAYS spy on the occupied. So the question wasn't if to make an arrest but when to arrest them. Apparently now was a good time.

[Nubclear]

[Saras]

fancy Balitic nazi democracies
Clueless neoimperialist Russians

Getting It Right

By taking risks on everything from economic management to technology, Estonia has become the little country that can

BY PETER GUMBEL | TALLINN

With its 2-m-thick walls and squalid cells, the Patarei sea fortress on the edge of Tallinn, capital of the Baltic republic of Estonia, has long borne witness to the brutality of occupation. Built in 1840 by Russian Czar Nicholas I, it was used as a prison and execution site by the two powers that marched into Estonia in the 20th century, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. But Estonia is once again an independent country, the last prisoners have gone, and one Friday night last month, the fortress was literally pulsating with a new kind of energy as hundreds of Tallinn youngsters, some speaking Russian, others Estonian, packed into the place for an ear-splitting all-night techno rave. "It was an experiment, the first time we've done this," says Andrus Villem, the Patarei's project manager, who wants to exorcise the ghosts of the past by turning the fortress into an impromptu arts center.

The party is a tailor-made metaphor for Estonia itself: freed from the confines of a half-century of totalitarian rule, it's having a blast experimenting with unorthodox ideas as it races to make up for lost time. Estonia has been a frontier state throughout its history, bumping up against Russia to the east and facing Finland across a narrow gulf. Since the three Baltic republics regained their independence in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the tiny nation (pop. 1.35 million) has managed to put itself on the edge of far more than just geography. It was the first former Soviet republic to introduce its own currency, and the first European country to adopt a flat tax system, now widely copied in the rest of Eastern Europe. It has also become one of the most technologically advanced places on the planet. You can use your mobile phone to pay for parking your car, buy bus tickets and check your children's school grades. More than 80% of taxpayers file their declarations online, wi-fi hot spots are ubiquitous — and free — and the nation's most famous start-up is Skype, the Internet phone titan, which was acquired last year by eBay for $2.6 billion. That amount is slightly more than the annual output of the entire Estonian economy 15 years ago.

The economy, once a basket case, is now one of Europe's most dynamic, racing along at a 12% growth clip — faster than China. Estonia is one of only two new European Union members to have a budget surplus, and its national debt will have all but disappeared by the end of the decade. Naturally, there are growing pains: the unemployment rate has fallen so sharply, from 14% in 2000 to about 4% today, that businesses are scrambling to find workers. But even if growth slows a little to a more sustainable rate, Estonia could catch up with Portugal and Greece on a per-capita basis in about a decade. "This is the best time in our history," says Sten Tamkivi, Skype's Estonian head of operations.

So much so that the country's tech employers are hugely grateful for the workers they have. "Every evening I'm almost standing at the door and asking everyone as they leave: Did you enjoy yourself and can I expect to see you tomorrow?" says Teet Jagomägi, not entirely joking. He runs a mapping software company in Tartu, the second largest city. It's doing good business in partnership with Swedish telecommunications giant Ericsson, and has 70 employees. Jagomägi says he would like it to grow to about 150, but he's already lost a few of his people to the two other big technology firms in the country, Skype and Playtech, which develops the software for online casinos. Skype has 250 people in Estonia and reckons it will have exhausted the local job market once it gets up to 350. Thanks to its hip reputation — and the package of eBay options offered to staff — it has managed to lure about 50 people from abroad. But other firms have a tougher time following suit.

Allan Martinson, who ran an IT firm and has now set up shop as a venture capitalist, reckons that Estonia's true innovative edge has more to do with the willingness of the public to use technology than with any particular national skill at developing it. "We're fast early adopters. We're very good at getting innovation to work," he says. For example, the whole financial system leapfrogged into electronic banking in the mid-1990s, bypassing all messy dealings with checks and other paper transactions. And the government has done its best to boost computer literacy, including running free two-day classes that have been attended by 100,000 people. It now issues national ID cards with a computer chip that contains the owner's digital signature. That enables Estonians to gain access to an ever growing range of electronic services, by networked computers and even mobile phones. Sitting in an Irish bar in Tartu, Jagomägi flicks at his phone and accesses the information provided by the school attended by his younger son Vootele, 10. It lists Vootele's schedule, his grades and his absences. Jagomägi scrolls down and clicks on homework. "Monday," it reads. "English: Page 14, Exercises 1 and 2." So is Estonia an unalloyed financial and technological utopia? Not quite. Oddly, the country's economic coherence of the past 15 years has gone hand-in-hand with political fractiousness. There have been 12 governments since 1991, and increasingly there's a polarization between those who insist it's vital for Estonia to stick to its current successful model and those who argue it's time for serious tinkering.

The tax system, widely seen as a cornerstone of Estonia's success to date, faces the biggest threat. A 26% flat income tax was introduced in 1994. The rate has since dropped to 23% and the official plan — depending on the outcome of the next parliamentary election, in March next year — is to keep lowering it by 1% per year until 2011. It was the first of two striking tax initiatives. In the late 1990s, Estonia startled the business community and many of its European neighbors with the second: the decision not to tax corporate profits at all if they are reinvested rather than paid out in dividends. "Lots of foreigners were shopping around for special tax regimes. We wanted to say that we are a country that treats everyone rather well," recalls Kersti Kaljulaid, at the time an economic-policy adviser to the government and now Estonia's representative at the E.U. court of auditors.

But Economics Minister Edgar Savisaar, an erstwhile hero of Estonia's independence movement and leader of one of the biggest political parties, wants to scrap the flat tax and use a more conventional progressive system that taxes the rich at higher rates than the less well-off. "Our system is too simple," he says. "We have too much inequality." Arguing that rural areas, old people and young families have lost out, he recently began calling for massive wage increases for all. Savisaar's reformist opponents, including those in the same coalition government, denounce his call as irresponsible demagoguery; they worry about Estonian competitiveness being harmed if wages outstrip productivity. The polarization grew particularly acute in the run-up to the recent presidential election, a bruising contest between the incumbent Arnold Rüütel, a grandfatherly former communist official who is 78 and fluent in Russian, and the challenger, Toomas Hendrik Ilves, a slick American-educated foreign-policy specialist who is 26 years Rüütel's junior and claims to speak for "the 65% of Estonians who are pro-Western and forward looking." Ilves narrowly won the vote, by electoral college.

But a bigger challenge for Estonia's future may be the past. The nation still nurses deep wounds. Ethnic Russians comprise about one-quarter of Estonia's population, many of them the families of people shipped in during the Soviet period as part of a program to tame the country's irredentism. Since Estonian independence, thousands of these Russians have passed an exam to become naturalized Estonians. But some 130,000, almost 10% of the population, haven't, and officials reckon that about half of them don't want to.

Open interethnic conflict is rare, but relations with Russia itself are uneasy; a border treaty that both sides signed last year after long negotiations remains open because Moscow now says it wants new terms. In this charged atmosphere, even small disputes sometimes assume oversized importance. Scuffles broke out at a Soviet-era war memorial in Tallinn this year on May 9, the anniversary of the end of World War II, after Russian veterans unfurled Soviet flags. That prompted an outraged reaction, including a threat by one Estonian nationalist leader to blow up the monument. The park where the memorial is situated has since been cordoned off and remains under 24-hour police guard. Ask Heiki Ahonen, director of a museum dedicated to the Nazi and Soviet occupations, how Estonia is faring as it seeks to construct an integrated society, and he snorts: "This is not nation building; it's more like putting out fires."

Perhaps the next generation will work out such tricky issues. Galja Burnakova, 29, taps the side of her head with her index finger. "The biggest problem is here," she says. She's an interior decorator who was born in the Siberian town of Abakan but has lived in Tallinn for a decade and speaks near-flawless Estonian. Like many Russian-born residents, she says she'd much rather live in Estonia than back in Russia. She's nibbling shrimp sandwiches in a hip private club called Noku with her friend Kertu Lukas, 25, the editor of an Estonian food magazine. For a while, Lukas had a Russian boyfriend. He spoke Estonian, but some of his family didn't; she speaks some Russian, but many of her friends don't. That was awkward sometimes and, she admits: "It was a problem for my father." This generation finds ethnic rivalries far less interesting than the economic boom. It's one of Estonia's characteristics that many of the top jobs in politics and business are held by people under 40, who were too young to have been tainted by the Soviet past. They are also the ones building the new homes that are shooting up on the outskirts of Tallinn, and refurbishing their apartments. Much of this is being done on credit; banks report that their lending is up by a startling 50% this year, leading some to worry about a bubble economy, especially in real estate. "Some people think they have discovered the never-ending hockey stick," frets Erkki Raasuke, 35, chief executive of Hansabank, the country's biggest bank. Estonia's current torrid growth took him by surprise; he thought it would calm down once the country joined the E.U. in May 2004. Instead, it has accelerated, from an annual rate of 7.1% in 2003, to 8.1% in 2004 and 10.5% in 2005, according to revised figures published by the national statistics office last month. "If we keep going like this," Raasuke worries, "we'll hit a wall in the next 18 to 24 months."

There's still a lot of catching up to do. Productivity remains below the E.U. average, as does the average monthly wage of $650. "We're just halfway," says Prime Minister Andrus Ansip, whose aim is for Estonia to become one of the five wealthiest E.U. nations on a per-capita basis in the next 15 years. He heads a different party from that of Economics Minister Savisaar and doesn't see why anybody should take issue with the current policies. "When the economy is growing so fast it's very difficult to complain," he says, describing life in the country as being "like a fairy tale."

Even fairy tales can have bad scenes, of course. Savisaar is currently negotiating for the government to buy back the national railway, which it privatized in 2001 — a decision it now regrets. Plans to sell the state-owned energy company collapsed in 2002 when the acquiring U.S. firm couldn't obtain financing in the wake of Enron's bankruptcy. Estonia went through a brief recession and the government had to slash spending when Russia's financial crisis hit in 1998. The birthrate collapsed in the 1990s and has only now begun to turn upward again, helped by incentives including 15 months' maternity leave on full pay. And while the nation has prospered by linking its currency to the German mark in the 1990s and to the euro this decade, it is paying a price for not having a monetary policy of its own: it is very limited in its ability to bring inflation down from its current 5%. That rate is the only remaining impediment to Estonia adopting the euro as its currency.

None of this has deterred investors. Foreign money is pouring in and now totals more than $12 billion. Companies partly or wholly owned by foreigners account for one-third of Estonia's total economy and more than 50% of exports. About three-quarters of the funds have come from just two countries, Finland and Sweden. Can the money continue flowing? Most seem to think it can, with at least one key caveat: Estonia needs to resolve its shortage of labor. "We are running out of people," says Craig Rawlings, president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Tallinn. He recounts a tale of two foreign-owned machinery factories, now in a mad fight for each other's engineers. And it's not just foreigners who are feeling the pinch. Estonian doctors, nurses, construction workers and bus drivers are all being lured to higher-paid jobs abroad, leaving some gaping holes at home.

Still, for 15 years, Estonia has shown that it can improvise and adapt. "We're a very small country and the No. 1 question is always: Do we have the resources?" says Skype's Tamkivi. "That means we just have to be efficient." They've managed so far.

©TIME. Printed on Wednesday, October 4, 2006