The Westernization of Russia.

The latest issue of the Russian Reform Monitor from the American Foreign Policy Council includes the following: "THE SAVAGE ARM OF THE RUSSIAN LAW. Writing in Novaya Gazeta about recent incidents of police brutality, Yulia Latynina notes that one method police use to extract confessions, called “zvonok Putinu,” or “a phone call to Putin,” consists of electric shocks adminstered via wires attached to the earlobes. “There is not a single Western country in which people flinch when they see a policeman,” she writes. “We flinch. We relate to cops not as citizens to guardians of law and order, but as prisoners to prison guards.” A Moscow metro policeman recently shot a 20-year-old Tajik national through the jaw after apprehending him for jumping a turnstile. The victim survived and the policeman has been charged with attempted murder."

What's this world coming to? Things have got to be bad when Moscow is almost as bad as Chicago.