A new Kremlin-backed English-language satellite TV channel was slated to begin broadcasts Saturday, as Moscow looks to polish its image abroad. Boasting a staff of 344 journalists and a US$30 million (¤25 million) budget, funded by the government, Russia Today will be broadcast 24 hours a day in North America, Europe and Asia. Margarita Simonyan, who was a Kremlin correspondent for the state-run Rossiya channel before being tapped to head the project, said the channel aimed to tell world news from a Russian point of view. "What you see sometimes does depend on where you stand and we want to tell the world about Russia from Russia. We want to show what we see with our own eyes. We want to give the background. We want to explain things," she told Associated Press Television News.
