Thank the Lord someone out there isn't brainwashed =] To be honest I don't know all that much about Russia but after watching the news during the Russia v Georgia fiasco and seeing every British news channel condemning big bad Russia without any proof and then not even a ten second correction when it turned out Georgia were in the wrong... You can't trust the news especially when it comes to China & Russia.
Disregarding the Russia/China issue for a moment, here; You...realise she is your queen too, right? Queen Elizabeth is still the queen of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Jamaica, Barbados and eleven other countries including the UK. She holds each crown seperately, since all the nations are independent. It isn't Britain's queen on your coins, it's Canada's. It baffles me that so many Canadians and Australians etc don't know Queen Elizabeth is still not only queen of their country, but actually their head of state. The Prime Minister is only the head of government. And unfortunately, it seems you've made a rather common error here. Many people, in their attempts to not be "brainwashed by the media", immediately take to the internet to research why something is happening (or why it happened) and will take that information to mean that the media is once again lying to them if it even remotely contradaticts it. Yes, the media portrayed Russia as the big bad guy in this case, and yes, Georgia did "start it". Does that mean that the Western media is a big bad propaganda machine trying to brainwash everyone to hate Russia? Well...no. Because even if Georgia did "start it", Russia's reaction was overblown, unecessary. It was an overreaction that was entirely innappropriate given the situation, and (this is something you won't find in the news) was probably used only as an attempt at sabre-rattling from the Russians, I.E., a message to say "look at us, we still have one or two teeth left! watch us sucessfully invade a small part of this tiny third world country! GRAAARRRWWW RUSSIA MOTHERLAND" and so on. The western media, while wrong to withhold certain information about the conflict, and while certainly biased, was still right to condemn Russia's actions in this case, as were the governments of every major nation in the world (including, you might note, China.) As for wether or not China's government is particularly opressive or not is a matter of opinion. Frankly, I find the censorship there to be absurd (you should read about it, all TV channels and newspapers are operated by the government, there's no freedom of speech, and there's actually a Chinese law that says all Chinese TV shows must conform to a specific set of rules for what an episode must contain, such as pro-communist and pro-government propaganda.) and that speaking ill of the government (even just to a friend, not necessarily on TV or in a public place) is punishable by death to be ridiculously opressive. Religious freedom is nonexistant, the practice of religion is highly regulated. There's also a law that mandates news reporting in China be 80% positive to 20% negative. So, regardless of how many murders, rapes, kidnappings and wars are happening, you just hear about one or two of them and then the rest of the news is about how awesome the government is. Although, China is nowhere near as opressive as North Korea or Saudi Arabia or Iran, but that's an argument for another day. I will agree that many news sources overblow China's "opressive regime" though, because compared to some of the truly opressive regimes in the world, China's is actually quite forward thinking, and their government is remarkably and comendably open to criticism and suggestion from other nations and their people are getting more and more rights every day. Although still a long way behind western nations in terms of freedom, China's getting there.