Win One, Lose One

Elif Shafak has been acquitted of “insulting Turkishness” in her novel The Bastard of Istanbul. The judge took all of 90 minutes to dismiss the charges as baseless. Shafak did not bother to attend the trial, as she was giving birth in California at the time.

Go, her.

Russian investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya was shot to death in her apartment building in Moscow, just as she was about to deliver to her publisher a lengthy article on Russian atrocities in Chechnya. She was hit by four shots from a silenced Makarov pistol.

This is the second female Russian investigative dissident journalist to be shot in her apartment building in a couple years.

It is a hazardous undertaking to contradict the Tsar. Who said, by the way, that the government “will take every step to investigate objectively the tragic death of the journalist Politkovskaya.” First step in the investigation was to confiscate all her papers.

Said Salman Rushdie: “Like all great investigative reporters, Anna Politkovskaya brought forward human truths that rewrote the official story. We will continue to read her, and learn from her, for years.”

It has been a bleak year for democracy and human rights.