HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVISTS SPEAK OUT….

Over a thousand activists courageously gathered in Moscow for the All-Russian Emergency Congress in Defense of Human Rights. Sergei Kovalev, a Soviet-era dissident who now sits in the Duma, cited the war in Chechnya, politically directed prosecutors, intimidation of the media, and a “rapprochement with nondemocratic regimes” as evidence of a sharply deteriorating situation. And he tweaked the Kremlin’s Orwellian language: “Tell me please: what is a ‘guided democracy’? Or… what is ‘information security’? … In normal language you would have to say, ‘Control of the press.'” In a nice turn of phrase of his own, he said the country seemed headed not toward totalitarianism but toward “precision repression.”