The first Cyrillic Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) country-code Top Level Domain (ccTLD), .РФ is now approved and operational. The introduction of .РФ was lobbied for by both President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, both self-confessed keen internet users.
“I have just checked, the website президент.рф is up and running. The Cyrillic website of the [...]

The Moscow Times reports that domain names in Russia ending in the Cyrillic IDN ccTLD, .рф may be available as soon as this week. Representatives from ICANN may officially assign .рф to Russia at the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) meeting in Moscow starting this thursday.
“We’re really expecting it within days. As soon as the domain [...]

We can finally start to register complete domain names in non-latin characters as representatives of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) approves the first three internationalised domain name (IDN) country-code top level domain (ccTLD) to be placed in the DNS root zone.
The three IDN ccTLDs are:

Egypt: مصر (Egypt)
Saudi Arabia: السعودية (AlSaudiah)
United Arab [...]

ICANN revealed the proposed implementation plan for synchronized IDN ccTLDs on 22 March 2010.
Synchronized IDN ccTLDs are described by situations listed in the Fast Track Process by ICANN where:

IDN ccTLDs are requested in more than one official language or script in a country/territory,
the requests for corresponding multiple strings are considered equivalent and delegation would solve [...]

ICANN this week gave preliminary approval to four countries and two territories in five language scripts for additional internationalized domain name (IDN) country-code Top Level Domains (ccTLDs) as part of its IDN Fast Track Process.
This announcement sees Hong Kong receiving preliminary approval for ‘Hong Kong’ in Chinese. Others to gain preliminary approval were the Palestinian [...]