This is about somebody I was lucky to meet a few years back. Now she’s been murdered. If you don’t like to hear about it, you can go off and read something else. 

I don’t know what the solar plexus is, but I am told that when you are thumped in it you gasp for air. Yesterday, while flitting though channels on the TV to see how many goals France had scored against Scotland, my solar plexus went concave. The air disappeared. The tears and the vomit came forth. I think that it was the solar plexus that had been hit square on.

Saturday’s TV news said that a leading Russian journalist had been shot dead  in the elevator of her flat in Moscow. One word, ‘her’, said who it was. Anya.

Anna Politkovskaya - 'Anya' - leaves a hole so big that I can’t fill it for her. I met her once and so can’t claim to be a friend of hers but she leaves two kids, and I can’t possibly fill in their mum's life for them. If you can’t be bothered to find out who she was and what she did then I curse you (she would never have done); if you have a brain, maybe it is time you found out the responsibility that comes with it (your brain) and read her works.

As a Russian, Anna Politkovskaya challenged the most powerful people in the land. Read “A Dirty War” or “Putin’s Russia”, her most important books. These were open and honest and may have sentenced her to death.

Russia’s economy... including telecom... is now a kleptocracy. People like Anya stood against that. To the shame of us all, she stood against far greater betrayals of human rights than we might stomach. And now? She’s murdered.
Jim Chalmers