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February 20, 2014 Marina Galperina

This is the new Pussy Riot for “Putin Will Teach You How to Love the Motherland,” starting with delicate music and some waves, until the bright balaclavas emerge triumphantly out of the water and hell breaks loose all over the Olympic International Committee’s fantasy of non-involvement. Though the IOC’s Mark Adam said “what happened wasn’t in the context […]

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February 18, 2014 Marina Galperina

A few hours ago, Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokonnikova and Masha Alekhina were walking down the street in Sochi when they were detained by the police for alleged hotel theft. Along with several activists and journalists who recently arrived to the Winter Olympics site, they were roughly shoved into vans. “We are not resisting arrest; they […]

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February 17, 2014 Andy Cush

The very bad Jamaican bobsled team has a very good promotional video courtesy of their country’s tourism board and the legendary music producer Sidney Mills, who has worked with the likes of Steel Pulse and Boogie Down Productions. Set to a bouncy reggae-flavored tune by Mills, we see 8-bit versions of the team cruising down […]

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Bucky Turco

Soft snow at the Winter Olympics in Sochi has led to international condemnation from athletes riding the half pipe, lots of injuries, and an emergency delivery of large grain salt from Switzerland to make the slopes icy enough to compete. But today, it wasn’t the snow that was keeping events from taking place, it was […]

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February 14, 2014 Marina Galperina

Yevgeny Vitishko, geologist and outspoken critic of the Sochi Winter Olympics’ devastating impact on the region’s environment and biodiversity, is being jailed for three years in a penal colony. In 2012, the 40-year-old environmental activist spray-painted ‘The forest is for everybody” on a corrugated metal fence around an illegal construction zone inside Sochi’s national park. Behind […]

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February 10, 2014 Marina Galperina

The Winter Olympics are in full swing in Sochi. ANIMAL is relaunching MedalCount.com, the micro-site that tracks the news that really matter — who is winning? But this year, we’re using our high-profile piece of internet real estate to aggregate and disseminate news that really really matters — all the stories that cover the enforcement of Putin’s discriminatory “anti-gay […]

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February 7, 2014 Bucky Turco

Have you met the mascots for the 2014 Winter Games? Introducing the Hare, the Leopard, and the Polar Bear. The latter two characters are male and based on this photo of the stuffed animals posted to the official Flickr account of the Sochi Olympics, they’re also very friendly. And potentially in violation of Russia’s strict, […]

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Andy Cush

In a show of protest against Russia’s oppressive anti-gay laws, Toronto is flying a rainbow above its city hall during the Sochi Winter Olympics, along with a host of other Canadian cities. Mayor Rob Ford, who never saw an issue he couldn’t make an ass of himself over, is upset about it. “This is about […]

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