The most dramatic legacy of Dmitry Medvedev's presidency may have been his impact on Russia's clocks. In addition to dropping 2 of the country's 11 time zones, Medvedev also eliminated daylight savings time.

The move was never popular and current President Vladimir Putin has suggested changing it, but Medvedev is apparently digging in his heels. Bloomberg reports: 

“There is no clear conclusion about this issue, and this is proved by surveys,” Medvedev told a televised Cabinet meeting today. “That’s why the government believes that changing the system at the current time is not a good idea.”

Izvestia, a newspaper owned by Putin ally Yury Kovalchuk, reported earlier that an announcement would be made soon to switch permanently to winter time by turning the clocks back an hour. Putin said in December that Medvedev’s time switch bothered him and had been criticized by international sporting bodies for increasing the time difference in winter with London to four hours and with major European cities to three hours. Russia will host the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi.

Medvedev's decision was meant to benefit farmers, but as Masha Gessen explained a few months ago, the rollout didn't go so smoothly: 

The problem is, Medvedev stopped the clock in early autumn, while the country was still on summer time, or daylight saving time. That froze it one hour ahead of Russia’s standard time, which, in turn, in much of the country was an hour ahead of its astronomical time. So last winter the sun began rising after 9 a.m.; adults were already at work and children at school by the time daylight established itself. And it was dark when they left their respective buildings, not having seen the light all day.

Then there was the issue of electronics. Apple’s operating systems, for one, never recognized Russia’s new time. The publishing house where I worked kept all its Apple computers set back an hour otherwise they could not be synchronized with the server. To reflect Medvedev time, Muscovites had to set their smartphones to Baku or Yerevan  time zones — a politically uncomfortable gesture for some.

When antigovernment protests broke out in December, some of the participants carried signs demanding that winter time be brought back. As the dark winter dragged on, doctors and medical writers increasingly sounded the alarm on the risks of doing violence to the body’s quotidian clock. Medvedev’s decision came to symbolize Russian government work in general: ill-considered, dismissive of people’s needs and, ultimately, both pointless and dangerous. 

Government imposed time changes can be politically fraught. As I wrote recently for Smithsonian, when the U.S. adopted a national time standard in the late 19th century -- under pressure from railroads, who had been the first to adopt nationwide time -- local governments objected to be forced to change their clocks. “Let the people of Cincinnati stick to the truth as it is written by the sun, moon and stars,” one newspaper wrote.

More recently, Hugo Chavez moved Venezuela half an hour off the rest of the world's time zones in 2007, but initially provoked widespread confusion as to whether he was moving the clocks forward or backward. 

In Medvedev's case, an analyst quoted by Bloomberg says the keeping the time change in place is could be "psychologically crucial" for him as its one of the few tangible legacies of his presidency.

The most dramatic legacy of Dmitry Medvedev's presidency may have been his impact on Russia's clocks. In addition to dropping 2 of the country's 11 time zones, Medvedev also eliminated daylight savings time.

The move was never popular and current President Vladimir Putin has suggested changing it, but Medvedev is apparently digging in his heels. Bloomberg reports: 

“There is no clear conclusion about this issue, and this is proved by surveys,” Medvedev told a televised Cabinet meeting today. “That’s why the government believes that changing the system at the current time is not a good idea.”

Izvestia, a newspaper owned by Putin ally Yury Kovalchuk, reported earlier that an announcement would be made soon to switch permanently to winter time by turning the clocks back an hour. Putin said in December that Medvedev’s time switch bothered him and had been criticized by international sporting bodies for increasing the time difference in winter with London to four hours and with major European cities to three hours. Russia will host the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi.

Medvedev's decision was meant to benefit farmers, but as Masha Gessen explained a few months ago, the rollout didn't go so smoothly: 

The problem is, Medvedev stopped the clock in early autumn, while the country was still on summer time, or daylight saving time. That froze it one hour ahead of Russia’s standard time, which, in turn, in much of the country was an hour ahead of its astronomical time. So last winter the sun began rising after 9 a.m.; adults were already at work and children at school by the time daylight established itself. And it was dark when they left their respective buildings, not having seen the light all day.

Then there was the issue of electronics. Apple’s operating systems, for one, never recognized Russia’s new time. The publishing house where I worked kept all its Apple computers set back an hour otherwise they could not be synchronized with the server. To reflect Medvedev time, Muscovites had to set their smartphones to Baku or Yerevan  time zones — a politically uncomfortable gesture for some.

When antigovernment protests broke out in December, some of the participants carried signs demanding that winter time be brought back. As the dark winter dragged on, doctors and medical writers increasingly sounded the alarm on the risks of doing violence to the body’s quotidian clock. Medvedev’s decision came to symbolize Russian government work in general: ill-considered, dismissive of people’s needs and, ultimately, both pointless and dangerous. 

Government imposed time changes can be politically fraught. As I wrote recently for Smithsonian, when the U.S. adopted a national in the late 19th century -- under pressure from railroads, who had been the first to adopt nationwide time -- local governments objected to be forced to change their clocks. “Let the people of Cincinnati stick to the truth as it is written by the sun, moon and stars,” one newspaper wrote.

More recently, Hugo Chavez moved Venezuela half an hour off the rest of the world's time zones in 2007, but initially provoked widespread confusion as to whether he was moving the clocks forward or backward. 

In Medvedev's case, an analyst quoted by Bloomberg says the keeping the time change in place is could be "psychologically crucial" for him as its one of the few tangible legacies of his presidency.

While the debate over the use of drones overseas plays out in Washington, some groups in the U.S. are pushing for action on the local level. On Monday, the city of Charlotteville, VA became the first municipality in the country to pass legislation restricting the use of drones:

The resolution means that Charlottesville will be a no-drone zone and the use of drones for surveillance and other uses will not be allowed.

The law is based on model legislation prepared by the Rutherford Institute, a libertarian group based in the city. According to the Institute's website, the law places a 2-year moratorium on the use of drones in the city limits and "urges the Virginia General Assembly to prevent police agencies from utilizing drones outfitted with anti-personnel devices such as tasers and tear gas and prohibit the government from using data recorded via police spy drones in criminal prosecutions."

They didn't have long to wait. On Tuesday, the Virginia legislature passed a bill that would bar state and local agencies from using drones for two years. Governor and rising GOP star Bob McDonell, who has supported the use of drones by law enforcement in the past, has not yet decided whether he will sign the bill.

The obvious comparison here is to the "nuclear-free zone" ordinances passed by many left-leaning cities, including my old town of Oberlin, Ohio during the 1980s. The success of these was pretty mixed -- Berkeley's law, for instance, has done nothing to stop the nuclear research going on at the university in the city but has been criticized by some for putting onerous restrictions the city government's purchasing decisions.

Unlike nukes, of course, it's not hard to imagine applications for drones at a local level. The Virgina laws may be a prelude of political disputes to come. And in a state with stark political divisions, drone concerns also appear to be remarkably bipartisan.

Each year, Foreign Policy partners with the the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto to present the Gelber Prize, a literary award for the world's best non-fiction book in English on foreign affairs that seeks to deepen public debate on significant international issues. It was founded in 1989 in memory of Canadian diplomat Lionel Gelber (1907-1989). A prize of $15,000 is awarded to the winner.

The five jurors, including our own Daniel Drezner, have selected a longlist of 12 books. A shortlist of five titles will be announced on Feb. 19 and the winner will be announced on March 25. The winner will be invited to accept their award and deliver a free public lecture on Monday, April 15th at the Munk School of Global Affairs.

Here's the full longlist:

• Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu (Cambridge, Massachusetts) and James A. Robinson (Cambridge, Massachusetts), published by Random House.
• Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956 by Anne Applebaum (Washington, D.C. and Poland), published by Signal Editions.
• The Second Nuclear Age: Strategy, Danger, and the New Power Politics by Paul Bracken (Connecticut), published by Times Books.
• The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran by David Crist (Potomac, Maryland), published by The Penguin Press.
• Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else by Chrystia Freeland (New York, New York), published by The Penguin Press.
• The Endgame: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Iraq, from George W. Bush to Barack Obama by Michael R. Gordon (Washington, D.C.) and General Bernard E. Trainor (Potomac Falls, Virginia), published by Pantheon Books.
• Ghosts of Empire: Britain's Legacies in the Modern World by Kwasi Kwarteng (London, England), published by Public Affairs.
• Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam by Fredrik Logevall (Ithaca, NY), published by Random House.
• From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia by Pankaj Mishra (London, England), published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
• Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing and Dying by Sonke Neitzel (London, England) and Harald Welzer (Germany), published by Signal Editions.
• The Wars For Asia: 1911-1949 by S.C.M. Paine (Newport, Rhode Island), published by Cambridge University Press.
• Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy by Andrew Preston (Cambridge, England), published by Alfred A. Knopf.

Over the next few weeks, we're going to be featuring one interview per day with the authors of the books. The interviews are conducted by Rob Steiner, former Wall Street Journal correspondent and director of fellowships in international journalism at the Munk School.

First up is MIT economist and frequent FP contributor Daron Acemoglu. Here's the prize citation for Why Nations Fail:

"Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson brings a classically liberal perspective to the diverging fates of societies of similar potential over time. Ranging broadly in historic circumstance to illustrate their argument against the 'extractive state,' the authors bring fresh information and new analytical tools to bear on the dynamics of national development. The regressive role of colonial regimes competes with local values and ideologies for the black ribbon in this stimulating thesis."

Listen to the interview here.

As I wrote yesterday, it is next to impossible for a U.S. citizen to involuntarily lose their citizenship, even if they join an army or terrorist organization waging war against the United States. Legislative efforts to change this have met with little success. 

But with Canadian citizens implicated in both last year's attack on a bus carrying Israeli tourists in Bulgaria and last month's siege at a gas facility in Algeria, Ottawa is considering taking action to change their own laws on this topic: 

"Canadian citizenship is predicated on loyalty to this country, and I cannot think of a more obvious act of renouncing one's sense of loyalty than going and committing acts of terror," Immigration Minister Jason Kenney told reporters on Wednesday.

Kenney said citizenship can now be revoked only if it was shown to have been gained fraudulently.

[...]

 

Kenney endorsed a bill introduced by Conservative legislator Devinder Shory that would enable the citizenship of dual nationals to be revoked if they engage in war against Canada. He suggested expanding the bill to include acts of terrorism, even if they were not targeted at Canada.

In the U.S., the Supreme Court might find such a law to be a violation of the 14th Amendment, but it will be interesting to see if legislators look to give it a try in the wake of recent revelations.

Last August, I wrote on the epidemic of plagiarism scandals which have hit a number of prominent European politicians including Romania's prime minister and education minister and Hungary's former president. Two prominent German politicians -- Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg and European Parliament Vice Presdient Silvana Koch-Mehrin -- have already been forced to step down after they were found to have lifted past academic work from other sources.

The next casualty may be Education Minister Annette Schavan, who has been stripped of her doctorate by the University of Dusseldorf: 

Based on an internal university analysis of Schavan's doctoral thesis, which she submitted in 1980, and on her own statement regarding her work, the committee voted 12 to 2 to invalidate her academic title, Bleckmann said. There was one abstention. "As a doctoral candidate, she systematically and deliberately presented intellectual efforts throughout her entire dissertation that were not her own," Bleckmann said. Large sections of the work, he continued, had been taken from elsewhere without adequate attribution. As such, she was guilty of "intentional deception through plagiarism."

Schavan is fighting the decision, saying that citation standards were different at the time. If the charges stick, there's a good chance she will be dropped from Chancellor Angela Merkel's cabinet. Perhaps ironically, the paper was on "Person and conscience—Studies on conditions, need and requirements of today's consciences."

Though it's hard to tell what's going on in the video above, apparently it's footage of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad getting a shoe thrown at him outside Cairo's al-Hussein mosque. 

RT, citing Turkey's Anatolia news agency, reports that the alleged shoer was a Syrian who has been taken into custody: 

The attacker, who attempted to hit President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as he left a mosque, is reported to be a young man with “a Syrian accent”. Egyptian security forces managed to seize and arrest the man following the incident.

The attacker was heard chanting anti-Iranian slogans for supporting the Syrian government, the news agency noted.

This may not be be Iranian leader's first time getting hit with a shoe -- the gesture of protest made famous by Iraqi journalist Muntadhar al-Zaidi in 2008. An Iranian website reported in 2009 that Ahmadinejad had a shoe and a hat thrown at him while campaigning in the city of Urmia. There were no videos or images of that incident.

NBC News has revealed a 16-page Justice Department memo laying out the conditions under which the government can authorize the killing of a U.S. citizen. Mark Ambinder has a good summary of the memo, which essentially says the person must represent an "imminent threat" of an attack in the United States and must be in a place where capturing them must be infeasible. Spencer Ackerman looks into the increasingly flexible definition of "imminence" here. 

Some readers might be confused about why American al Qaeda members such as Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan are still U.S. citizens. You may have noticed text on your passport noting that you  "may lose your U.S. citizenship" by "serving in the armed forces of a foreign state." Why isn't joining a terrorist organization and advocating attacks against the United States grounds for losing your citizenship?

Ironically, it's thanks to a 1967 Supreme Court case involving an Israeli-American artist.  In a 2011 explainer on a somewhat related topic, I wrote: 

In the 1967 case Afroyim v. Rusk, the Supreme Court ruled that under the 14th amendment, U.S. citizens cannot be involuntarily stripped of their citizenship. (That case involved a dual U.S.-Israeli citizen who had his U.S. citizenship revoked after voting in an Israeli election, but the precedent applies to military service as well.)  

Since Afroyim, it's been nearly impossible for someone to be involuntarily stripped of U.S. citizenship. Even if you join a foreign army fighting against the United States, the law says you will only lose your citizenship if you do so "with the intention of relinquishing United States nationality." That intention can be tough to prove, and in Awlaki's case, the administration made no effort to do so. 

GOP House members have introduced legislation to investigate whether joining a terrorist organization constitutes a renunciation of citizenship. But frankly, given that U.S. citizenship doesn't seem to provide much protection when a drone has you in its sights, I'm not sure there would be any point.