Another Russian journalist silenced

Anna Politkovskaya, hostage negotiator and indefatigable journalist whose work spotlighted the horrors of the Chechen conflict, has been assassinated. She had survived many previous attempts on her life, including a poisoning while enroute to negotiate the Beslan hostage crisis, but was murdered by a hitman on October 7th in Moscow. The date of her assassination coincides with Putin's birthday. Politkovskaya's reporting from the midst of Russia's internal war is one of the reasons we know anything at all about the situation in Chechnya and the massacres that are routinely carried out there.

Jasmina Tesanovic has a short piece on Politkovskaya on boingboing. More on Politkovskaya's work at wikipedia, and on Novaya Gazeta's site.