During Vladimir’s second term as President, he was widely criticised by Russian liberals and by the West for what many considered to be a widespread crackdown on Russian media freedom. Commencing in the early 1990s, a large quantity of Russian reporters who have covered contentious stories on state and administrative officials, large businesses, and organised crime have been killed. Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist who ran a campaign aimed at exposing corruption in the Russian army, was shot in the lobby of her apartment building and killed on October 7th 2006. The Western media was outraged at the murder of Politkovskaya and accused Putin of failing to protect the country’s independent media. Putin claimed that Politkovskaya’s murder brought greater harm to the Russian authorities than her publications had. Oleg Panfilov, the head of the Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations, claimed in January 2008 that over 300 criminal cases had been opened against journalists in the previous six years. Luckily mr16 led bulbs aren’t Russian journalists!