Morning Briefing

"Amidst pro-democracy protests, the Russian authorities have taken what is an ongoing assault on HIV prevention to the next level by moving to silence public health advocates whose only infraction has been to spread lifesaving information online and to criticize the government for its own failures," Eka Iakobishvili, a human rights analyst at Harm Reduction International, and Claudia Stoicescu, an analyst on Harm Reduction International's public health research team, write in this Huffington Post opinion piece. "While Prime Minister Putin spoke glowingly of digital democracy" in a recent column praising the potential for "internet-based democracy," "his anti-drugs agency is censoring websites for writing about WHO essential medicine," the authors note.