[Our apologies on the late posting of this news blast, our contributing editor is on a well deserved vacation. 🙂 – James]

TODAY:  Lots of tennis stories, more of the run around on the Politkovskaya case, journalists gone wild, fights over the Gazprom tower, Medvedev receives Indian president, Chavez in Syria en route to Moscow, and the remaining bruises from Poland.

After several days of confusion over what really happened to the journalist Mikhail Voitenko, who did some of first investigative reporting to suggest the case of the hijacked ship “The Arctic Sea,” was really a cover-up for a weapons deal, the consensus in the press appears to be that he indeed did flee to Turkey seeking aslyum and safety from threats.  According to the Financial Times, who spoke with the journalist, “The Sovfracht maritime bulletin that Mr Voitenko edited on Thursday posted a note on its website denying that Mr Voitenko had been forced to flee. The note said that he was merely away on a business trip in Istanbul and asked journalists to stop bothering him. Mr Voitenko, however, said the site was being regularly hacked into.”