Anissa Naouai, chief executive of Maffick, a company with RT links and one of Putin’s staunchest defenders for years, announced Tuesday she was “cutting all ties with RT,” posting a black banner on Twitter with the words “Russia without Putin.”

"There's no top-down editorial memo that goes out, nothing like that," says J Ray Sparks, an American who is chief operating officer of Maffick, the German company that produces In The NOW.

Photograph: Thomas Coex/AFP/Getty Images From the relief of Mafikeng in 1900 came a new word: to maffick, which means to celebrate unduly.

At World Cups you have to maffick while you can.

An example of a word which was at first used as slang not many years ago, and is now, if not the most elegant English, at least a quite respectable word for newspaper use, is maffick.