With A Whimper, Not A Bang

Yankees Bundled Out Of The Play-Offs
Predictably, the Yankees fell into a 4-0 hole behind Jaret Wright, and Cory Lidle served up another 3, while Yankees were 1-hit going into the 7th inning. Finally they scored 1 run, but it was too, too late. You sort of wonder why such a vaunted line-up has failed to produce much of anything in the last 3 games, but there you have it.

And so another winter of discontent and frustration begins in the Bronx. I could start writing what all this means but really, it's academic. For this year, I agree with Jeter; it's a total failure.
I guess I actually thought this year's team had something, but it didn't. Excuse me while I go off and smash an inanimate object.

Freedom Of Speech Dies With a Bang
Meanwhile in Russia I noticed this awful news.

Anna Politkovskaya, the veteran Russian journalist and author who made her name as a searing critic of the Kremlin and its policies in Chechnya, was found dead on Saturday in her apartment building, shot in the head with a pistol, the authorities and her colleagues said.

Ms. Politkovskaya, 48, was a journalist with few equals in Russia. She was a special correspondent for the Novaya Gazeta newspaper and had become one of the country’s most prominent human rights advocates.

In recent years, as the Russian news media faced intensifying pressure under the administration of President Vladimir V. Putin, she maintained her outspoken stance. And she became an international figure who often spoke abroad about a war she called “state versus group terrorism.”

She was a strident critic of Mr. Putin, whom she accused of stifling civil society and allowing a climate of official corruption and brutality.

She was found dead by a neighbor shortly after 5 p.m. A Makarov 9-millimeter pistol had been dropped at her side, the signature of a contract killing, Vitaly Yaroshevsky, the deputy editor of Novaya Gazeta, said in a telephone interview.

“We are certain that this is the horrible outcome of her journalistic activity,” he said. “No other versions are assumed.”

The former Soviet president Mikhail S. Gorbachev, a shareholder of the newspaper where Ms. Politkovskaya worked, called her killing “a savage crime.”

“It is a blow to the entire democratic, independent press,” Mr. Gorbachev told the Interfax news agency. “It is a grave crime against the country, against all of us.”

While it's got nothing to do with comings andd going here, it's depressing to read that journalists with spine and a sense of justice can get shot for it in Putin's Russia.