In 2005, Vladimir Putin was relatively new into his Presidency. But he knew the power of the media. And a young Ahron Young was among the first journalists to work for Putin’s new news network, Russia Today.
In 2005, I sat down for a job interview at Camden Lock in London. After a 45 minute audition, where I spoke off the cuff about Michael Jackson as if he had died (a test to see my ad-libbing skills), a woman arrived at the interview, and quietly sat down.
“How would you feel about living in Moscow?” she asked. It was the only thing she said.
I’d never thought about Russia before, other than James Bond films. I’d applied for a job at a “new English language news channel”.
I’d soon be offered a job as a producer and presenter at something called Russia Today, now known simply as RT.
A week and a lot of paperwork later, I was one of 84 American, British and Australian journalists on a British Airways flight from London Heathrow to Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport.
Before I go on, I’d like to state to the reader that isn’t a “tell-all” piece designed to offend anyone. But given Russia is right now the aggressor in an invasion in Ukraine, it felt like the right time to shed some light on the early days of RT, from my perspective. Just one of many who worked there. RT has now been banned from the airwaves of many countries. So how did the adventure we optimistically started get to this point?
I like to think of myself as an opportunistic guy. But it was immediately clear to me that Russia was very different to anywhere I’d ever been before. A BBC correspondent put it this way: “It’s kind of like going to the moon. It’s round, but completely different to earth.”
The first thing we did when we got off the plane was visit a clinic to be tested for HIV. At one stage there was a mixup and they almost used the same needle on me that was used on the person before. We then spent our first 24 hours nervously waiting to find out if our adventure would be cut short.
I was just 23-years-old at the time and it felt like I was heading off to university. All these young, fun, opportunistic journalists from around the world getting set for an adventure. We partied hard and had no idea what to expect on day one. Some moved in together, I decided to rent a super cool but expensive apartment in Kievskaya. My real estate agent told me there were more billionaires living in my street than in all of Manhattan.
Admittedly, I’d never worked for a start-up before, and in hindsight my expectations probably far exceeded what my new employer could deliver. Our new offices were pretty basic. Our studios were luxurious compared to what the Russian journalists endured in other parts of the building. We called the dividing corridor the Berlin Wall.
The early days at Russia Today. Sasha Twining kicked off RT’s first ever bulletin.
In the weeks that followed, we met former CIA agents who told us how to survive living in Moscow, and how we could avoid paying police bribes. Never keep your wallet in your hand. Never smile at anyone you don’t know.
Management continually told us and international media that RT aspired to be Russia’s version of CNN or BBC News. But in their second breath, they’d criticise CNN and the BBC for pushing western values.
Late on air
We were due to go on air late 2005, but cold temperatures froze the satellite dish on the building’s roof on launch day. Management said it was a “cyber hack”., while a few of the engineers thought it might just need a bucket of hot water.
The place was uber-mysterious, but that just added to the excitement – that feeling you’d never know what would happen next. This was much better than being a suburban newspaper reporter back home in Melbourne, the normal career path for journos my age.
A few things stood out. We were divided into six teams. Three teams working 12 hour shifts, four days on and four days off.
Most of the Russian journalists were young and fresh out of university and were the sons and daughters of influential Russians. I loved the opportunity to work alongside people who could one day become influential Russians.
Editor-in-chief of RT and Rossiya Segodnya — Margarita Simonovna Simonyan
Is the Kremlin watching?
There was an ever-present feeling that the Kremlin was watching. We were told they had a live feed of our three month rehearsals. There was an “Output Editor” some of us were weary about, who watched everything we put to air. Our Russian colleagues told us he’d worked for the intelligence agency.
Our boss, the young Margarita Simonyan was polite and respected by the staff. She never suffered fools. I rarely saw her on the newsroom floor. Her office was upstairs, behind double security doors, just like M’s office in James Bond. Sound-proof and seemingly emotion-proof too.
Then there was Putin. He was never there but he was always there.
In the first few weeks, the adjustment to Russia’s limits on free journalism were laid bare. One British journalist was reprimanded for referring to extremists as “Chechen Rebels”. A rebel sounds sympathetic to the cause.
There were LGBT protests in Moscow, but I never saw them covered on RT’s news. I was once reprimanded for accidentally making a pro-gay gaffe. A sports story about a sack race and I said off the back “there’s nothing inappropriate about two men in a sack”.
Shortly after, Moscow’s mayor YuryLuzhkov told the BBC “there are no gays living in Moscow”, only to correct himself weeks later and thank “those who work in the airline and entertainment industries for their efforts”.
Vladimir Putin’s visit to RT
There were two studios at RT in those first few years. The main news studio was absolutely tiny. And the second studio was huge, devoted to one show that aired one hour a week.
I wondered why we didn’t swap studios, given the news was on 99% of the time and should therefore require a larger, grander space.
“Because if President Putin visits, he’ll be interviewed on the one hour show, so he needs the biggest studio,” came the response from a floor manager.
The first time I ever hosted rolling coverage was when Ariel Sharon went into a coma. Lucky RT had checked my ability to adlib before they hired me, because I had to talk continuously for 45 minutes about his history, and let’s just say that at 23 I was not an expert in Middle Eastern politics!
Then there was the hilarious moment a producer rushed into the studio to save me by handing over some background notes. But she was stopped from entering the studio because the paper was white, the machine had run out of pink paper, and scripts had to be printed on pink paper. But we got through!
Visiting the Kremlin
I toured the Kremlin three times, and was arrested four times. Three of them for not paying a bribe to the underpaid police who constantly demanded papers from tourists, and the other was a late night goose stepping episode with my mates at Red Square. I shall never apologise for that one.
I’d walk to work through the snow, wearing everything I owned, my nostril hairs spiking into my nose, my iPod earphone cables would snap if I moved direction too quickly. I’d call Dad back home in Queensland where it was the middle of summer. Everyone was happy… and smiling!
In Moscow, during that winter, it was easy for depression to set in. It’s daylight for about an hour a day, and that light feels like there’s a fluro on somewhere miles away. Many of my colleagues used sunbeds to help boost their moods, while others quit and headed home to the comparably pleasant English winter.
I discovered the best entertainment on a weekend was to hire a gypsy cab on the side of the road and see how far I could travel while negotiating for the lowest price. When I originally arrived in Moscow, it cost me 2000 Rubles to get to the city from the airport. I got it down to 150 after four months.
The cab drivers would give this young Westerner the same history lesson every time. They despised Gorbachev, were embarrassed by Yeltsin, and while they didn’t entirely trust Putin, they admired his self-made image as a strong leader.
This is a city where tourists could easily buy a bobbing head plastic figurine of Stalin. That’s right, the Soviet dictator who killed an estimated 40 million of his own citizens.
Whenever you questioned a Russian about something bad the country had recently done, they would immediately snap back – without flinching – with a catalog of similar, but not the same, failures by the United States. At that time, it was the invasion of Iraq and Bush’s failure to respond to Hurricane Katrina. Both valid points of course.
But my memory of the Iraq war was being a radio journalist in Melbourne three years earlier. As the US and allies were preparing to invade, there were massive protests in Melbourne and Sydney against the war. Over 200,000 marched in Melbourne every weekend alone. And I covered it live. It led the news on every network and splashed the front pages of newspapers.
In Moscow, unauthorised protests were illegal. Political experts say it’s the difference between western democracy and a managed democracy. It didn’t matter who votes, but who counts the votes.
Young Russians love the high life
Obsessed with the West
During that period, it felt like Russia was a country obsessed by the West.
I often wondered if anyone back home had ever referred to “the East” with the same eagerness to prove a point that no one else worries about.
Russia reminded me of Jan Brady, always looking up to her older, better known sister, shouting “Marcia Marcia Marcia”. Except in this world, Jan has nukes.
I made a few lifelong friends at Russia Today, and everyone was very open about their motivations for moving to Moscow and taking the job. For many, it was the higher pay than working for a news network in London. Some of them are still there. We all had different experiences.
RT was the first of its kind, but now just one of many English language news channels financially supported by governments around the world. During that first year, we never knew who was funding RT. The Kremlin said it wasn’t them. There were rumours it was a friend of Putin’s who received tax breaks.
Story first, safety last
There were several times I didn’t feel safe, and I was open about my editorial concerns. The Russia Focus segments, which we ran during the news, focused on happy stories about Russian animals mostly. I felt that the stories of the lives of every day Russians could be better told. Shouldn’t news shine a spotlight on homelessness and inequality in the hope that things will change?
By June, it was time to go. There had been knocks at my door at weird hours, and I never answered. One day I got on a plane, left all my possessions behind, and headed back to the UK.
I was 24, it had barely been a year, but I left Russia feeling like I’d had the best adventure ever. The most thrilling experience of my life. Sure, not everything was perfect, but I got to start something under unusual circumstances.
Seventeen years later, I fear that Russia has regressed back into its darker, inner self. A look around any democracy in the world shows you it isn’t perfect. But it’s like a harsh diet – you can’t quit it after three weeks and expect results.
I remember going to the Moscow Conservatory to watch a performance of Tchaikovsky. As we entered with our expensive tickets, a group of little old Russian ladies, known as babushkas, were arguing with the attendants as to why they could no longer get in for free. What was this paying business? Well, that’s the difference between communism and capitalism.
The young Russians
I remember the young Russians as friendly extraverts, who loved to visit super cool cafes and nightclubs, who frequently travelled to Europe and had the latest Motorola phone. They represented a stark contrast to the older generations and all those gypsy cab drivers who lamented for the Soviet Union.
The young Russians longed to be citizens of the world, and loved western and European culture. The most popular bootleg DVDs at the markets were Hollywood films. The handbags were fake Guccis and D&G.
This week, former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright remarked on her first meeting with Putin, and how the West completely misunderstood him in 1999.
Even if the West is somehow able to deter Mr. Putin from all-out war — which is far from assured right now — it’s important to remember that his competition of choice is not chess, as some assume, but rather judo.
Madeleine Albright, US Secretary of State
US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright meets Vladimir Putin
Ahron Young is an award winning journalist who has covered major news events around the world. Ahron is the Managing Editor and Founder of TICKER NEWS.
Making a call to triple zero (000) for a life threatening or time-critical emergency is something most of us learn how to do when we first use a phone.
But do you know how a Triple Zero call actually works?
While it might seem simple, there are many steps involved between you calling Triple Zero, and paramedics, police or firefighters arriving to help. And as the recent Optus Triple Zero outage that left multiple people dead highlights, there are also several points of potential failure.
A federal responsibility
First, some important background.
The federal government is responsible for telecommunications nationally. It has put in place legislation and regulations for the operation of Emergency Call Services – the technical term for Triple Zero.
The very first step in the process is, of course, a person making a call to Triple Zero – or the international emergency number (112). People with a speech or hearing impairment can also use the 106 text-based service, provided by the National Relay Service.
You don’t need a sim card to call Triple Zero – nor a plan with a mobile phone company. However, you do need to be within an area with some network coverage.
Mobile phones connect to phone towers using radio waves that oscillate at a frequency within one of the spectrum bands allocated for mobile networks. The transmission equipment located on the phone tower receive the signal being carried on the radio waves and convert it into digital data. This data is then carried across the mobile phone core network via optic fibres (or sometimes microwaves or satellite) to its destination.
Sometimes your network provider – for example, Optus, Vodafone/TPG or Telstra – may have no coverage where you are, but another network provider will. If this case, you will see an “Emergency calls only” message on your phone, and your call will be sent through an alternative network. This process is known as “camp-on”.
But this process can sometimes fail, as the recent Optus outage demonstrated. It was caused by an upgrade to a key system which only affected the Triple Zero network – not the regular network. Optus’s mobile towers did not stop transmitting – or, in technical terms “wilt”. This prevented Optus phones from connecting to the Telstra or Vodafone mobile networks to make Triple Zero calls.
This was similar to another Optus Triple Zero outage – one that thankfully didn’t have fatal consequences – that occurred in November 2023 that resulted in a national outage of the entire Optus network.
But if you find yourself within the 5 million square kilometres of Australia currently without any mobile coverage at all, you will not be able to make a Triple Zero call.
While it might seem simple, there are many steps involved between you calling Triple Zero, and paramedics, police or firefighters arriving to help. The Conversation, CC BY
What happens next?
The Triple Zero call (provided it goes through) then goes to the nominated emergency call service operator in Australia – currently Telstra. It is responsible for the system that connects calls from the telecommunication carrier networks to the state and territory emergency service organisations.
To fulfil this responsibility, Telstra has Triple Zero emergency service call centres located around Australia.
After answering the Triple Zero call, a call centre operator will ask the caller about the emergency at hand, then transfer them to the relevant emergency service organisation, such as the ambulance, fire or police.
Trained personnel will then handle the call and dispatch an emergency response team.
How is Triple Zero going to improve?
A review of the November 2023 Optus national outage identified the need for a Triple Zero custodian. The custodian would be responsible for overseeing the efficient functioning of the Triple Zero ecosystem, including monitoring the end-to-end performance of the ecosystem.
Earlier this week, the federal government introduced legislation to parliament to enshrine the powers of the custodian into law. Under this legislation, the custodian will be able to demand information from telecommunications companies such as Optus. This will enable it to not only monitor Triple Zero performance, but also identify risks and respond more quickly to outages.
Direct-to-device mobile technology is also currently being developed which will enable calls to Triple Zero that are connected through Low Earth Orbit satellites. This will be a major improvement to safety nationwide – particularly for people living in regional and remote areas, and during emergencies such as fires and floods.
Earlier this year, an amendment to the Telecommunications Act 1997 passed Parliament that enhances consumer safeguards. These safeguards include strengthening mobile network operator obligations.
Last month the federal government also released draft legislation for a universal outdoor mobile obligation. This would require mobile operators to provide reasonable and equitable access to outdoor mobile coverage across Australia.
So hopefully in the next couple of years, Australians should be able to make calls to Triple Zero – no matter where they find themselves.
After two years of violence and the deaths of 68,000 Palestinians and more than 1,200 Israelis, most of them civilians, it has been reported that Hamas and the Netanyahu government will sign a phase 1 ceasefire agreement.
This is the first part of a 20-point plan promoted by the US president, Donald Trump, and supported by the major Arab power brokers in the region.
What we know so far is that Israel will cease its military assault in Gaza. Hamas, meanwhile, has agreed to free the remaining 20 Israeli hostages still alive in Gaza.
The Conversation’s international affairs editor Jonathan Este spoke with Scott Lucas, a Middle East expert at University College Dublin, who addressed several key issues.
How is this different to previous ceasefire agreements?
Until we have details, this agreement is similar to the phase 1 60-day ceasefire at the start of 2025. There is a pause in the killing, particularly from the Israeli side, but lasting arrangements remain to be confirmed.
The key difference is that Hamas released only some hostages and bodies in the previous ceasefire. This time they are freeing all hostages and the bodies which can be collected, in return for a still unannounced number of Palestinian detainees released from Israeli prisons.
That gives up Hamas’s main leverage against not only Israeli attacks but also the Netanyahu government’s occupation and veto on aid to Gaza.
So key elements of a lasting deal – the extent of the Israeli military’s withdrawal, the restoration of aid, the establishment of governance and security in the Strip – will rest on guarantees and who provides them.
What are the possible sticking points for the rest of the deal?
The immediate “sticking points” are whether central provisions will be agreed in further discussions.
The Israelis will demand complete disarmament by Hamas and possibly the expulsion of some of its officials. Hamas is likely to respond with rejection of any forced removals and its retention of “defensive” weapons.
The make-up of the international “board” overseeing the strip is vague beyond Donald Trump declaring himself the chair and no provision for any Palestinian representation. Hamas will probably seek some Palestinian membership.
At this point, the International Stabilization Force for the Strip is a wish rather than a plan. Israeli agreement to a force replacing its military in Gaza is far from assured, especially as it is not clear who will contribute personnel. The Italian foreign minister, Antonio Tajani, has offered to send troops to contribute to the force.
The plan for a day-to-day government to administer the Strip is equally sketchy. While the presence of Palestinian technocrats is mentioned in Trump’s “plan”, we do not know who these will be. We know that Hamas is excluded. Israel is also likely to veto the Palestinian Authority in the short-term. And the release from imprisonment of potential Palestinian leaders – such as Marwan Barghouti, who has been held by Israel for more than 20 years – is not confirmed.
And before consideration of all of these, there is the question of the far-right in the Netanyahu cabinet. The finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, and national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, have yet to comment on the latest news, but have previously opposed any deal short of the “total” defeat of Hamas and a long-term Israeli occupation. Neither have threatened to block the agreement – so far – but they have expressed opposition.
How much of this is due to pressure from Arab states?
While many headlines are likely to give the credit to Trump and his envoys, son-in-law Jared Kushner and real estate developer Steve Witkoff, the role of Arab states has been vital.
A month after Israel shattered Qatar’s sovereignty with the airstrike trying to assassinate Hamas’s negotiators, the Gulf state and Egypt were the brokers of this Phase 1 agreement. Behind the scenes, other Arab states and Turkey were urging Hamas to accept the Trump “plan” in principle and to reach a deal to release the hostages.
Those states will be needed for the next phase, particularly if Trump threatens to return to his previous position of a blank cheque for Israeli military operations and cut-off of aid.
Is there a future for Palestinian civilians in Gaza?
I hope so. The immediate issue is survival. The Israeli attacks have been paused. The urgent issue is getting essential aid into the Strip. Then it is a matter of being able to return to what is left of homes. The Trump administration has dropped its talk of displacement, stemming the demand of Netanyahu’s far-right ministers for the removal of many Gazans.
However, after two years of scorched-earth tactics by Israel, little is left of many of those homes. The majority of the health sector has been destroyed, as have many schools and other public buildings. Rafah has been razed, and Gaza City’s high rises have been blown apart.
Recovery cannot just focus on the profits to be made – including for Trump, Kushner, and Gulf state business interests – from the “development” of Trump’s “Riviera of the Middle East”. It has to begin with day-to-day subsistence for the civilians who have paid the heaviest price in this mass killing.
Does Trump get his Nobel peace prize now?
I don’t care. Sometimes good things happen from a convergence of cynical and self-serving motives. Trump is desperate for the Nobel peace prize because Barack Obama received it in 2009. Kushner, whose investment fund is bankrolled by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and Gulf state entrepreneurs see the possibility of large profits. US-Gulf relations need to be repaired after the shock of Israel’s airstrike inside Qatar.
If that means lives are saved, fine. But those lives need to be saved not just for today or tomorrow. They need to be respected and supported with a lasting agreement for security and welfare.
And that would mean a two-state solution for both Palestinians and Israelis – something which the Netanyahu government and the Trump administration will not countenance. For Netanyahu and his ministers are devoted to expanding Israel’s illegal settlements, with the accompanying threat of violence, in the West Bank.
Celebrate phase 1 on the behalf of the Israeli hostages, their families, and Gaza’s civilians. And be clear about what is needed for phase 2, phase 3 and beyond.
President Donald Trump set the tone for his second term by issuing 26 executive orders, four proclamations and 12 memorandums on his first day back in office. The barrage of unilateral presidential actions has not yet let up.
These have included Trump’s efforts to remove thousands of government workers and fire several prominent officials, such as members of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the chair of the Commission on Civil Rights. He has also attempted to shut down entire agencies, such as the Department of Education and the U.S. Agency for International Development.
As a political science scholar who studies presidential power, I believe Trump’s recent actions mark the culmination of the unitary executive theory, which is perhaps the most contentious and consequential constitutional theory of the past several decades.
A prescription for a potent presidency
In 2017, Trump complained that the scope of his power as president was limited: “You know, the saddest thing is that because I’m the president of the United States, I am not supposed to be involved with the Justice Department. I am not supposed to be involved with the FBI, I’m not supposed to be doing the kind of things that I would love to be doing. And I’m very frustrated by it.”
The unitary executive theory suggests that such limits wrongly curtail the powers of the chief executive.
Formed by conservative legal theorists in the 1980s to help President Ronald Reagan roll back liberal policies, the unitary executive theory promises to radically expand presidential power.
There is no widely agreed upon definition of the theory. And even its proponents disagree about what it says and what it might justify. But in its most basic version, the unitary executive theory claims that whatever the federal government does that is executive in nature – from implementing and enforcing laws to managing most of what the federal government does – the president alone should personally control it.
This means the president should have total control over the entire executive branch, with its dozens of major governmental institutions and millions of employees. Put simply, the theory says the president should be able to issue orders to subordinates and to fire them at will.
President Donald Trump signs executive orders in the Oval Office next to a poster displaying the Trump Gold Card on Sept. 19, 2025. AP Photo/Alex Brandon
The president could boss around the FBI or order the U.S. attorney general to investigate his political opponents, as Trump has done. The president could issue signing statements – a written pronouncement – that reinterpret or ignore parts of the laws, like George W. Bush did in 2006 to circumvent a ban on torture. The president could control independent agencies such as the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Consumer Product Safety Commission. The president might be able to force the Federal Reserve to change interest rates, as Trump has suggested. And the president might possess inherent power to wage war as he sees fit without a formal authorization from Congress, as officials argued during Bush’s presidency.
A constitutionally questionable doctrine
A theory is one thing. But if it gains the official endorsement of the Supreme Court, it can become governing orthodoxy. It appears to many observers and scholars that Trump’s actions have intentionally invited court cases by which he hopes the judiciary will embrace the theory and thus permit him to do even more. And the current Supreme Court appears ready to grant that wish.
Until recently, the judiciary tended to indirectly address the claims that now appear more formally as the unitary executive theory.
During the country’s first two centuries, courts touched on aspects of the theory in cases such as Kendall v. U.S. in 1838, which limited presidential control of the postmaster general, and Myers v. U.S. in 1926, which held that the president could remove a postmaster in Oregon.
In 1935, in Humphrey’s Executor v. U.S., the high court unanimously held that Congress could limit the president’s ability to fire a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission. And in Morrison v. Olson the court in 1988 upheld the ability of Congress to limit the president’s ability to fire an independent counsel.
Some of those decisions aligned with some unitary executive claims, but others directly repudiated them.
These decisions clearly suggest that long-standing, anti-unitarian landmark decisions such as Humphrey’s are on increasingly thin ice. In fact, in Justice Clarence Thomas’ 2019 concurring opinion in Seila Law LLC v. CFPB, where the court ruled the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s leadership structure was unconstitutional, he articulated his desire to “repudiate” the “erroneous precedent” of Humphrey’s.
Several cases from the court’s emergency docket, or shadow docket, in recent months indicate that other justices share that desire. Such cases do not require full arguments but can indicate where the court is headed.
In Trump v. Wilcox, Trump v. Boyle and Trump v. Slaughter, all from 2025, the court upheld Trump’s firing of officials from the National Labor Relations Board, the Merit Systems Protection Board, the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the Federal Trade Commission.
Previously, these officials had appeared to be protected from political interference.
Remarks by conservative justices in those cases indicated that the court will soon reassess anti-unitary precedents.
In Trump v. Boyle, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote, “whether this Court will narrow or overrule a precedent … there is at least a fair prospect (not certainty, but at least a reasonable prospect) that we will do so.” And in her dissent in Trump v. Slaughter, Justice Elena Kagan said the conservative majority was “raring” to overturn Humphrey’s and finally officially embrace the unitary executive.
In short, the writing is on the wall, and Humphrey’s may soon go the way of Roe v. Wade and other landmark decisions that had guided American life for decades.
As for what judicial endorsement of the unitary executive theory could mean in practice, Trump seems to hope it will mean total control and hence the ability to eradicate the so-called “deep state.” Other conservatives hope it will diminish the government’s regulatory role.
Kagan recently warned it could mean the end of administrative governance – the ways that the federal government provides services, oversees businesses and enforces the law – as we know it:
“Humphrey’s undergirds a significant feature of American governance: bipartisan administrative bodies carrying out expertise-based functions with a measure of independence from presidential control. Congress created them … out of one basic vision. It thought that in certain spheres of government, a group of knowledgeable people from both parties – none of whom a President could remove without cause – would make decisions likely to advance the long-term public good.”
If the Supreme Court officially makes the chief executive a unitary executive, the advancement of the public good may depend on little more than the whims of the president, a state of affairs normally more characteristic of dictatorship than democracy.
