Vladimir Putin's Unintentional Gift to the Opposition

INDIANAPOLIS — An Indiana law that bans registered sex offenders from using Facebook and other social networking sites that can be accessed by children is unconstitutional, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday. The 7th U.S. Circuit of Appeals in Chicago overturned a federal judge’s decision upholding the law, saying the state was justified in trying to protect children but that the “blanket ban” went too far by restricting free speech.

REYKJAVIK, Iceland — In the age of instant information, globe-spanning viral videos and the World Wide Web, can a thoroughly wired country become a porn-free zone? Authorities in Iceland want to find out. The government of the tiny North Atlantic nation is drafting plans to ban pornography, in print and online, in an attempt to protect children from a tide of violent sexual imagery.

The Deputy Prime Minister of Russia, Vladislav Surkov — also known by his nickname, the "gray cardinal" — has formally stepped down today, the Moscow Times reports. 

In an annual Q+A session today, Russian President Vladimir Putin made his first public comments on the Boston Marathon bombings, believed to have been perpetrated by two Chechen Russians immigrants.

Today marks the one year anniversary of Putin's return to the Russian Presidency, and it's worth taking another look at the closest thing Russia has been able to come to Theodore Roosevelt. The President has aggressively worked to develop a macho image.

From a littering ticket to the Supreme Court, via a Heterosexual Family Pride Parade that got him mocked as a closeted gay on the Daily Show, William “Bill” Whatcott of Regina has always been an awkward revolutionary. But when the Court of Appeal for Saskatchewan ruled in 2010 that his anti-gay fliers were not hate speech, as the province’s human rights tribunal had found, but rather a “polemical and impolite” contribution to a matter of public interest, he became the Supreme Court’s modern test case for Canada’s legal approach to hate.

Earlier today, Vladimir Pekhtin, a senior lawmaker within Russia's ruling United Russia party, announced his resignation. Pekhtin was not only one of the co-founders of United Russia, one of the key drivers of support for Vladimir Putin, he was also on the State Duma's Credentials and Ethics Commission.