Free Republic

How bad was his grandstanding opposite Miller at Wednesday’s briefing? Bad enough that even Trump-hater Joe Scarborough accused him this morning of having gone “off the rails.” Acosta has achieved the impossible, uniting the fractured American right via his preening wankery.He took a few minutes last night to prove to the skeptics how impartial and agenda-less he is by tweeting out Emma Lazarus’s poem as a rebuke to the White House: "Give me your tired, your poor,Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) August 3, 2017 The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.Send these, the homeless,...

President-elect Donald Trump exploded at media bigs in an off-the-record Trump Tower powow on Monday, sources told The Post. “It was like a f—ing firing squad,” said one source. “Trump started with Jeff Zucker and said I hate your network, everyone at CNN is a liar and you should be ashamed…. “The meeting was a total disaster. The TV execs and anchors went in there thinking they would be discussing the access they would get to the Trump administration, but instead they got a Trump-style dressing down,” the source added. A second source confirmed the encounter. “The meeting took place...

On New Year’s Day in 1988, Abdullah Ali, an Iraqi businessman who had been living in London for eight years, joined three compatriots for dinner at a restaurant called Cleopatra in Notting Hill.The next morning, he was taken ill with flu-like symptoms and was admitted to hospital. There his condition rapidly deteriorated — his hair fell out, he developed excruciating skin and joint pain, and paralysis and respiratory failure began to set in. Fifteen days later he was dead — but not before he had begun to wonder whether something had been added to his vodka. He was right: the...

“The language has become smaller by one, diminishing us. Now your words, like the feathers of dead birds, are in dictionaries. In heaven there are a thousand blank pages, pages you never finished...” It is almost as if Joseph Brodsky were not eulogizing W.H. Auden, but Anya. How many years have we been without Anna Politkovskaya... 2, 3, 4, 5? Yes, five years already. Still, strange as it sounds, in the early years it seemed easier than it is now. Back then, along with the pain, many still clenched their fists and were still courageous. But then there was the...

On the anniversary of the death of my colleague Anna Politkovskaya, I suddenly discovered that I had forgotten whether or not they ever caught her killers I only remember the pompous, yet bungled goings on. There were the prosecutors, rushing to calm a hysterical West (“We found them! We found the evil doers and now we’ll put them away!”), as well as the lawyers juggling myriads of dissonant theories all covered with unpronounceable Chechen surnames. Oh yes, I remember how, in the end, the jury decided that it was not the guilty who had been arrested, and how the public...

Some members of the European Parliament (MEPs) deemed yesterday’s resolution on Russian non-compliance with the rule of law to be much too soft, and now seek sanctions against Russian officials implicated in human rights abuses. As reported in the media, the European Parliament has three enumerations: there is the ‘Khodorkovsky list’, which includes those involved in imposing harsh sentences in the Yukos case; the ‘Magnitsky list’, with the names of those accused of the death in jail of the lawyer for Hermitage Capital Management; and the ‘Nemtsov list’, in which appear the persecutors of Russian opposition leaders. The latter list...

The lawyer representing the family of Anna Politkovskaya, the murdered Russian journalist, was recovering from an apparent attempt to poison her as the trial opened today of three men accused of involvement in the killing. A judge in Moscow rejected a request to postpone the preliminary hearing because Karinna Moskalenko was ill in France, where police are investigating the discovery of a large quantity of mercury in her car. Ms Moskalenko also represents Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the jailed former Yukos founder, who is appealing againts a refusal to release him on parole after serving more than half of an eight-year prison...

AN ALLEGED attempt to kill a former Russian spy who defected to Britain was being investigated by police last night. Oleg Gordievsky was admitted to a hospital in Guildford after falling ill in November last year. And yesterday he claimed he had been poisoned with the highly toxic metal thallium in a botched assassination attempt. Gordievsky, a KGB double agent who spied on Russia for British intelligence during the 1980s, claims he was targeted by a Russian assassin who visited him at his safe house in Surrey. The 69-year-old was unconscious for 34 hours after falling ill last year and...

Putin has done his best to remove Chechnya from the headlines, not by finding a solution to the conflict but by suppressing independent reporting. After Russian authorities protested, Anna Politkovskaya, an award-winning journalist who had written eloquently about Chechnya, even had her invitation to a panel discussion at the Frankfurt book fair canceled. The reality is that the war in Chechnya rages on. Human Rights Watch has reported that last year the number of disappearances was the highest since the second war began in 1999. Despite the destruction and loss of life, Putin remains intent on using force to subdue...

When the history of Vladimir Putin’s first decade in national politics is written, it will read like pulp fiction. One moment in the spring of 1997 he’s an unknown KGB spy plagiarizing his thesis at an obscure institute; the next he’s deputy chief of staff to Boris Yeltsin, and soon after that boss of the entire KGB. Within months of reaching that pinnacle, Russia’s leading human rights activist, legislator Galina Starovoitova, is shot dead, and a prosecutorial investigation into Kremlin corruption has been squashed by the revelation of the prosecutor, Yuri Skuratov, on secret sex tapes. No sooner has this...

Anna Politkovskaya arrests add to Russia row By Duncan Gardham and Helen Womack in Moscow Last Updated: 11:03pm BST 27/08/2007 Russian authorities have hinted that Boris Berezovsky, a leading critic of President Vladimir Putin who lives in London, was behind the murder of an investigative journalist in Moscow. Journalist Anna Politkovskaya was murdered October last year Anna Politkovskaya, who was investigating human rights abuses by the Russians in Chechnya, was shot in the lift of her apartment block on Oct 7 last year. Her death - the 13th murder of a journalist in Russia under Mr Putin's rule - provoked...

Part 1 "Forgive us, we remember you..." Published December 14th, 2006 by Vera Vasileva  Journalism in our country remains one of the most dangerous of professions. In Russia, more than 200 journalists have been killed during the last 15 years. Everyone, regardless of their ideological leaning, was shaken by the recent murder of Anna Politkovskaya. The practice of contract killings to silence objectionable voices has made more and more members of the media fear to write the truth. At Moscow's Novopushinsky Square, from 2-3 pm on December 17th, 2006, there will be a memorial rally in honor of these...

Alexander Litvinenko, who died horribly in a London hospital on Thursday, is only the latest critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin to meet a brutal death. On Oct. 7, another critic, the journalist Anna Politkovskaya was gunned down in the lobby of her Moscow apartment building. Two years earlier, in July 2004, the U.S. journalist Paul Klebnikov was murdered as he emerged from the offices of the Russian edition of Forbes magazine. These killings and many others are linked to the deepest mystery of the Russian state. The mystery is the rise of Vladimir Putin. In 1998, Vladimir Putin was...

It appears that the Kremlin has attempted to assassinate Russian defector Alexander Litvinenko, whose warnings to the West have been repeatedly cited in this column. A former lieutenant colonel of the KGB/FSB, Litvinenko wrote a book titled Blowing Up Russia: Terror From Within. During an interview with Rzeczpospolita in July 2005 he explained that al Qaeda’s number two man, Ayman al-Zawahiri was trained by the FSB (KGB) in Russia along with other al Qaeda leaders. According to Litvinenko, “[there is] only one organization which has made terrorism the main tool of solving political problems.” And that organization, he said, “is...

Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned on the direct orders of the Kremlin because of his biting mockery of President Putin, according to a former Soviet spy now living in Britain. Oleg Gordievsky, the most senior KGB agent to defect to Britain, said that the attempt to kill Mr Litvinenko had been state-sponsored. It was carried out by a Russian friend and former colleague who had been recruited secretly in prison by the FSB, the successor to the KGB. The Italian who allegedly put poison in Mr Litvinenko’s sushi “had nothing to do with it”. “Of course it is state-sponsored. He...

Excerpt - Scotland Yard is investigating the attempted murder of a top Russian defector poisoned by political enemies in London. Alexander Litvinenko, an ex-KGB colonel who fled the current Russian regime to claim asylum in Britain, is under armed police guard in hospital. Sources have confirmed that the Russian was taken suddenly and dangerously ill on November 1 while investigating the recent murder of dissident Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya. Mr Litvinenko was poisoned following a clandestine meeting with an associate at a sushi bar in London's Piccadilly. ~ snip ~

Vyacheslav Zhuravlyov, a militiaman from Nizhnevartovsk, suspected by the State Office of Public Prosecutor of implication in killing journalist Anna Politkovskaya, has stated in his interview to the "Komsomolskaya Pravda" newspaper that he had nothing to do with the murder, and moreover, in no case could have been its executor. Mr. Zhuravlyov told in his interview that he did not leave Nizhnevartovsk on October 7, when the murder was committed, and has numerous witnesses of the fact. Vyacheslav Zhuravlyov appeared in Politkovskaya's publications as the investigator who interrogated Chechen Zelimkhan Murdalov, suspected of storing drugs and arrested by Nizhnevartovsk militiamen,...

In reality, Politkovskaya was virtually unknown in Russia. The reaction of a wealthy Russian businessman dining in Brussels on the night of her murder was typical: ‘Politkovskaya? Never heard of her.’ [...] Some of these articles contained glancing references to the last journalist to have been killed in Moscow, the American editor of Forbes magazine, Paul Klebnikov, but none of them bothered to add the key rider that no one has ever suggested that the Russian government had Klebnikov murdered. On the contrary: whereas Politkovskaya was an anti-Putin militant, Klebnikov was an anti-oligarch militant. He wrote a brilliant book about...

ANNA POLITKOVSKAYA, the 48-year-old woman shot dead in the elevator of her apartment building in Moscow Oct. 7, was not a public official, a member of parliament, or a leader of an opposition party. But in the eyes of many people, the murder of this fearless journalist has become a symbol of the slow death of freedom in Russia -- a death evidenced by many other events large and small. For the past several years, the Russian state under Vladimir Putin has been steadily working to bring the media to heel. In this stifling and intimidating atmosphere, Politkovskaya, a correspondent...

Putin Gets Away with Murder It's time to confront the Russian leader. by Anders Åslund 10/23/2006, Volume 012, Issue 06 IN RUSSIA, gangsters have the macabre custom of making a birthday present of a murder. On Vladimir Putin's 54th birthday, one of his fiercest domestic critics, the journalist Anna Politkovskaya, was shot to death in her apartment building in central Moscow. She worked for the weekly Novaya Gazeta, Russia's last independent newspaper. Its deputy editor was murdered a couple of years ago, and the killer was never found. Although Politkovskaya had been tailed by the FSB for years and her...