Targeting Bloggers

This is certainly scary to read.  RFE/RL has an article quoting a new report from the Committee to Protect Journalists citing than almost half of the world’s imprisoned journalists are bloggers or online editors/reporters.  Russia doesn’t have nearly as many jailed journalists as China or Cuba (although they sometimes meet other fates), and a bill was just recently knocked down in the Duma which proposed to give the government powers to arbitrarily shut down any websites that it deemed “extremist.”

Although it appears there may be token efforts to revive perestroika light (the bill was apparently pulled because of pressure from Medvedev, and we also have the coincidental acquittal of Andrei Piontkovsky), I’m not relaxing any time soon.