Did I tell you that I was reading and just finishing it up when the controversial, activist Russian reporter (critical of Chechnya policy) Anna Politkovskaya was murdered on Putin’s birthday, or so an obituary said. She was shot, execution-style. I remembered she was mentioned in the book and looked her name up in the index–the authors said that Politkovskaya, the mother of three children, had received death threats, calling her a friend of the CIA and that she would pay.