TODAY: Bomb threat forces train evacuation; is it really possible to ‘uncorrupt’ the police?; analysis of new crackdown on traffic-blocking protests; survey says Uzbeks main victims of race hate crimes.  Putin-Medvedev TV satire smoke screen: Georgia launches Russian language channel; Sochi delays.  Tolstoy – underrated among Russians?

A bomb threat, which proved to be false, has forced the evacuation of 400 passengers from a Russian train in the city of Orsha in Belarus.  ‘Everything is rotten to the core, from the top to the bottom’: RFE/RL has a disturbing feature on the difficulty of reforming law enforcement when a ministry drive for solved crimes means that some police officers regularly entrap innocent people to rack up brownie points.  ‘I am against blocking traffic; I don’t consider it a peaceful method of protest. But why are they forced to pass such a law? Because all the peaceful methods are prohibited, and this forces people to extremes‘: Lyudmila M. Alexeyeva gives her verdict on the road-protest crackdown in an in-depth analysis in the New York Times.  According to the Moscow-based Bureau on Human Rights, Uzbecks are the ethnic minority most frequently attacked by extreme nationalist groups.