Human Rights in Russia:

In the most politically charged case Russia has seen in years, jailed oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky and co-defendant Platon Lebedev have been found guilty of stealing from Khodorkovsky’s own company, former oil giant Yukos, in the second case filed against them by the Russian government. As presiding Judge Viktor Danilkin speeds along to read the verdict aloud – a process that lawyers say will hopefully be completed before the end of the year – analysts, experts, and commentators speculate as to what the sentence is going to be – and what the whole process says about the state of democracy in Russia.

The U.S. embassy in Moscow reported in its cables about the murder of a Democratic journalist Politkovskaya by KGB-FSB on Putin's order, The Guardian writes. The cables were published by WikiLeaks. The paper points outs:

Sen. John McCain delivered yesterday a lengthy speech in Senate on Khodorkovsky, Lebedev and US-Russian relations, journalist Daniel Halper said in a blog of the website The Weekly Standard. The full text of McCain's speech is also published on the same page.

McCain noted that during this period, the Senate is discussing the START-3, and expressed a desire in the coming days to speak on this important issue and make his own amendments.