Free Talk Live

Garry Kasparov was speaking to reporters outside the Moscow courthouse where the sentencing of the band Pussy Riot was taking place. Suddenly he was violently seized by police and forced onto a bus. Later he was beaten by a group of police.

One jailed member of the punk band Pussy Riot unexpectedly walked free from a Moscow courtroom, but the other two now head toward a harsh punishment for their irreverent protest against President Vladimir Putin: a penal colony.

MOSCOW (AP) — The Russian Orthodox Church is asking for clemency for three jailed members of the rock band Pussy Riot if they repent for their "punk prayer" for deliverance from President Vladimir Putin at Moscow's main cathedral.

Moscow, Russia, August 18, 2012

The purpose of this statement is to make clear the facts of my unlawful arrest by the Moscow police on August 17, 2012, outside the courthouse where the trial of the band Pussy Riot was taking place. I need make no complicated arguments, as there is a large amount of professional video publicly available that shows the police violently seizing me while I was chatting with journalists and later physically assaulting me. I plan to file suit for this illegal arrest and against the officers who attacked me.

After being sentenced to two years in prison for “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred,” members of Russian feminist punk rock outfit Pussy Riot could very well be on the verge of being released, thanks to the country’s Prime Minister, Dmitry Medvedev.

Two members of the anti-Kremlin punk band Pussy Riot have been sent to remote prison camps to serve their sentences, the group has said.

Maria Alyokhina, 24, will serve the rest of her two-year term at a women's prison camp in Perm, a Siberian region notorious for hosting some of the Soviet Union's harshest camps. Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, 22, has been sent to Mordovia, a region that also hosts a high number of prisons.

It seems as if we are in a time of unprecedented struggle over the meaning of women's bodies and sexuality. Controversy is swirling about an American University professor who breast-fed a baby in class; topless photos of Kate Middleton have been released; and a Time magazine cover showing a mother breast-feeding her toddler sparked even more tittering in May. It is not just the breast that is contested: Pussy Riot, the punk band, was sentenced to two years in a Russian prison after a staged performance in which they did high kicks that showed too much of their bodies.

2 of pussy riots members have fled Russia, they cannot be located by state goons.

One of the jailed members of the punk band Pussy Riot has been moved into a solitary cell following tensions with other inmates, Russian prison officials said Friday.
Stanislav Volegov, a spokesman for the Federal Penitentiary Service in the Perm region in the Ural Mountains where Maria Alekhina is serving her sentence, said on Rain TV that she was moved into a "safe" cell on Wednesday at her own request.