EqualShot principal Barbara Becker had the honor of working with Anna Politkovskaya, the Russian journalist whose dispatches from the war in Chechnya famously led to death threats and poisoning.

As Anna knew from experience, much of her writing would never appear in Russia, where reporting on democracy efforts is forbidden. For a country of 145 million, there is only one independent radio station and two independent newspapers.

EqualShot was able to gain high-visibility in the U.S. for Anna's latest findings about government-fabricated "Islamic terrorism" cases targeting innocent civilians.

But Anna's story has a tragic ending. Anna Politkovskaya was shot to death in the elevator of her Moscow apartment on Oct 7, 2006, in what many call a politically motivated attempt to further squelch freedom of the press in Russia. In the days before her death, Politkovskaya had been working on a story about torture in Chechnya.

The former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev called her killing "a savage crime." "It is a blow to the entire democratic, independent press," he told the Interfax news agency. "It is a grave crime against the country, against all of us."