{"id":218,"date":"2006-10-09T04:43:42","date_gmt":"2006-10-09T00:43:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/?p=218"},"modified":"2006-10-09T04:46:48","modified_gmt":"2006-10-09T00:46:48","slug":"anna-politkovskaya","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/218\/","title":{"rendered":"Anna Politkovskaya"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As <a href=\"http:\/\/timworstall.typepad.com\/timworstall\/2006\/10\/anna_politkovsk.html\" target=\"_blank\">Mr Worstall<\/a> has said already, the <a href=\"http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/2\/hi\/europe\/5416218.stm\" target=\"_blank\">murder<\/a> of Anna Politkovskaya was always likely.<\/p>\n<p>When I was in Ukraine last year I took with me her book <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Putins-Russia-Life-Failing-Democracy\/dp\/0805079300\/sr=8-2\/qid=1160354210\/ref=pd_bbs_2\/102-0181518-6811377?ie=UTF8&#038;s=books\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Putin&#8217;s Russia<\/em><\/a>, and found it to be both very interesting and utterly depressing at the same time.\u00a0 Although I thought she laid too much of the blame for the state of Russia at the feet of Putin and implied that the problem was more to do with him as an individual than Russia as a whole, she did an excellent job of highlighting exactly what is going wrong in Russia today and describing the appalling state of affairs with which ordinary Russians have to live.\u00a0 Sadly, people like her willing to\u00a0criticise what is happening in\u00a0Russia are all too few and her murder will do nothing to encourage others to follow in her footsteps.<\/p>\n<p>Her death is a tragedy for Russia.\u00a0 If somehow the government was involved, it represents a disaster.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As Mr Worstall has said already, the murder of Anna Politkovskaya was always likely. When I was in Ukraine last year I took with me her book Putin&#8217;s Russia, and found it to be both very interesting and utterly depressing &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/218\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=218"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}