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Russian President Travels To Silicon Valley, Washington

In San Francisco yesterday, Dmitry Medvedev tweeted for the first time, with help from Twitter's co-founders, Evan Williams and Biz Stone.

TechCrunch provides a rough translation from the Russian: "Hello everyone, I'm now on Twitter and this is my first message."  (Since then, @KremlinRussia has accrued more than 24,000 followers, decided to follow @BarackObama and @whitehouse, and tweeted 13 more times.)

In nearby Cupertino, California, Apple CEO Steve Jobs rolled out the red carpet. (You can see a picture of the two of them, posted on Medvedev's new Twitpic account.)  According to BoingBoing, "Medvedev works on a MacBook, and recently began using an iPad."

The goal of the president's trip to California was, in part, to "convince investors that his country is a safe place to put their money," Bloomberg Businessweek reports.

His pitch led to commitments from Cisco Systems Inc., Twitter Inc. and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger -- and a maybe from Apple Inc. Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs.

Medvedev toured the Stanford University campus, and met with former secretaries of state Condoleezza Rice and George Shultz, and two deans.

Today, he will travel to Washington, for a meeting with President Obama.  The two leaders are expected to focus most of their attention on business and economic issues.  From here, they'll travel to Canada, for the G-20 meeting in Toronto.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

David Gura
Based in New York, David Gura is a correspondent on NPR's business desk. His stories are broadcast on NPR's newsmagazines, All Things Considered, Morning Edition and Weekend Edition, and he regularly guest hosts 1A, a co-production of NPR and WAMU.