following a long illness in support, a history maker, he becomes the spurs all time top square as his side beats manchester city in the english premier league. welcome to bbc news. iran s supreme leader is pardoning a large number of prisoners, including some of those arrested during the past months of protests. including some of those arrested the pardon by ayatollah khamenei comes on the eve of the anniversary of the islamic revolution in 1979 a date on which he regularly offers an amnesty to some prisoners. but the iranian state media says it excludes those facing charges of spying for foreign agencies, murder and bodily harm, as well as the destruction or arson of state property. taraneh stone, from the bbc s persian service, has been giving us more details. the supreme leader has agreed to pardon and commute sentences of tens of people who are imprisoned or who are waiting for sentences. the letter from the judiciary said that a considerable number of people who were a
Me the opportunity to teach as an adjunct professor for one year cementing my love for teaching and helping my teacher to further gradual work. It is no exaggeration to say i would not be a thriving phd student without the guidance and friendship of the brilliant and compassionate doctor farhat hawk. [applause] good morning. Thank you for that wonderful introduction. It is students like you that make our life worthwhile really. And so really excited to see that i have mostly students here. You are my kind of people. So what i am hoping their news to sort to sort of conduct this in a little bit more informal way, this, this presentation. So let me say a couple of things 1st. I just came back from pakistan a couple days ago. This is i am still getting over my jet lag. If you see me completely losing it, thats because im still recovering from jet lag. The 2nd thing i wanted to say was about professor Tobias Gipson who was instrumental in getting me invited. We are still really a little up
Political analysts and scholars working on russian politics today. Nikolai petrov, he is the head of the center of political geographic research. He was previously a chair, as many of you know of the carnegie Moscow Society and in regions program. Before before that he worked for the institute of geography and is authored of many publications. Most recently to books, the state of russia, what comes next. Just out in 2015, then a few years ago russia, 2025. Scenarios for the russian future. It should be an interesting discussion. Well start off with brian and turn it over to nikolai and then open for questions and answers. Please take it away brian. I will also mention that we are refill for cspan is covering us today. Thank you for that. Great, thank you henry it is a real privilege to be here with two old friends and colleagues to talk about putin and putin ism, two years after my don. We are not going to be talking a lot about ukraine, well mainly talk about russia and we can talk ab
Planes will be held by nikolai. So a brief outline, i will talk briefly about putin ism. It will be brief because of the time constraints. I will give an overview of the system generally and then ill say a bit about how it was evolving before youre my don, before 2013, 2014. Then well talk about how it has changed in the last few years after the ukrainian event. Well talk briefly about the implication and changes it has gone through since 2014. Nikolai will say more about that in his presentation. The big claim im going to make is that over the last two years russia has moved into a mobilization role in response to the quote, unquote emergency situation they find themselves in. This is a shortterm temptation and a mediumterm trap. The temptation is it is easier to rule them to govern and what i mean by that distinction, i hope will will become clear during the talk. The trap is that when you rely on ruling rather than governing you often are prone to make mistakes. State policy becomes
We do rely heavily on information from our state and local counterparts. In many instances, we have excellent reporting from those counterparts. In some instances it is not as robust as we need. And anything that could be done to improve that would be useful. Certainly you could consider legislation. We also have been working directly, speaking directly with those localities to encourage them to improve their reporting to the current system. One final question, madam attorney general. Congressman deutsche made remps to this. This challenging definition of engaged in the business of dealing firearms. Even the atf has said that this very vague standard frustrates prosecution, it allows people who sell guns to avoid the requirements of background checks and some have suggested that you could issue a regulation that would provide greater clarity and define that. We recognize legislation is also possible. But will you agree to at least look at whether or not you have the ability to issue cl