Dmitri Tabachnik is the Minister of education in the new (Yanukovych team) government.
He is well-known for his anti-Ukrainian rhetoric and for the denial of everything Ukrainian.

The other day he canceled obligatory Ukrainian language university entrance exams, proving again with his actions that he does intend to enact his phobia of Ukrainian identity.

A social response website tabachnik.net.ua has a number of materials on the perception of Tabachnik’s assignment as a Minister of education. The video below is a nice artistic interpretation of the organic resentment of this assignment.

Support from Volodymyr Lytvyn fraction, the Party of Regions and the Communist party helped Dmitri Tabachnik to stay in the Minister’s seat for a while longer: his removal by the Parliament was short of only 24 votes.

Hopefully, sane representatives will keep pushing for the removal of Tabachnik from the position he should have never been to in the first place.

A total of 80k people were registered with respiratory infections (not classified by flu type). Several small samples tested for A/H1N1 (which is the cause of swine flu pandemic) indicate that 30-50% of all cases could be swine flu (with other cases being “seasonal flu” – that is, previously known influenza types and subtypes). It is reported that ~37 died since Monday, with symptoms matching those of swine flu. Most of the statistics come from the Western regions of Ukraine, which were the first to face rapid daily temperatures decrease – which could have been the trigger of massive infections.

Today I’ve seen a number of people in Kyiv’s underground railway wearing medical face masks (or just pulling their scarfs up to cover noses). Drug stores were literally stormed for anti-virus medications, immune system stimulators, medical face masks, vitamins, etc.

If not the virus, then panic is definitely in the air. I do not recollect seeing something like that before.

What is on offer (mirrors):

• backports.org
• cygwin
• deb.opera.com
• debian – stable, testing, sid
• debian-archive (starting from 1.1!)
• debian-multimedia
• installation media (CDs/DVDs)
• debian-security
• even debian-volatile is here!

All this goodness is only 3 hops away from my DSL modem…. (ISP UkrTelecom)

Gone editing /etc/apt/sources.list

P.S. For non-ukrainian IPs, access might be slow/bandwidth-limited; for Ukrainian IPs, speed might be up to 100MBit/sec.

Update: some time after publishing this post, debian.org.ua was down for some reason. When it was up, it was serving me packages with a mere 3 kb/sec . I found that ftp2.debian.org.ua mirror is faster at the moment.

In 2007 in Ukraine, there were over 62 000 road accidents with over 9 000 killed and 77 000 injured.
This is 20% increase comparing to 2006.
And this is also almost two people dead from road accidents per 10000 of population, and 16(!) people injured per 10000 of population.
Based on these numbers, every Ukrainian is (on average) at 0.16% risk of being injured and at 0.02% risk of being killed in a road accident.

(An increase in the number of new cars sold in 2007 relative to 2006 was 46.1%: from 371000 sold in 2006, up by 171000 to 542000 new cars sold in 2007.)

On average, road kill accidents take 3-8 times more lives in Ukraine, then in other European countries.

If you visit Ukraine – watch out for reckless, drunken, stupid, blind, ignorant drivers and violating, unpredictable, dummy pedestrians.

The further from the Kyiv’s downtown you are – the more watchful you should be.

This post used the numbers from this press-release (in Ukrainian).

First thing to think about: at least they did transfer all my emails to the new account.

Second: hey, they had given up their own email interface! Are they leaving the web-portal market of Ukraine? Was the part of their team (which later formed MI6) too important to handle their exodus with no consequences? Is that just a desire to give customers “better” interface and not invest anything into development?

I hope this won’t be a trend, for every service to have Google behind their servers. Or even just behind the name, to avoid extra complexity of having a server.

Finally, I think I’ll get used. But it was only yesterday, that I read the Google anti-utopia, where Big Brother‘s name is (evidently) Google, and it’s webcams and microphones and search history define each person’s future AND guilt. Scary…

And I wonder which will be the next service of bigmir.net, “outsourced” like their email.

On the other hand, Lytvyn’s block did jump the 3% barrier. By the way, if we take the absolute number of votes Lytvyn had in 2006 elections (619 905 votes), and the number he had at the 2007 snap elections (924 538), the difference is only 304633 votes. When multiplied by 20$, it gives 6 million USD – which isn’t too high a price for getting into the parliament, isn’t it?

Overall, I’m satisfied with these elections. Politicians this time were wise enough to avoid prolonged court trials over the miserable, non-differentiating numbers of votes in distinct voting districts. It saved both time and money. It’s also good to hear that immediately after the official results announcement, the Our Ukraine – Self Defence block and the Block of Yulia Tymoshenko agreed upon the coalition treaty. It’s not yet evident if the treaty will hold, or if it won’t be beaten by the PR – Lytvyn – Communists probable political block – but that is still a good sign of political agility, unseen since the end of 2004 between the two political forces.

I’m also glad that society intelligently handled these elections, which were unfavoured by many. Everything went overall smooth and with no troubles.

The only thing, which is not directly elections-related, is the fighting over the status and interpretation of the OUN-URA (Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists – Ukrainian Rebel Army) during the World War II. But I hope that in part with the help and actions by the President, this issue will be settled and finally resolved as soon as possible (I expect this to happen within 10 years from now).