Internet censorship in Russia

On Friday the Russian government sought to shut down a popular, independent news Web site (http://bankfax.ru/) in Siberia for publishing extremist views of an anonymous reader who insulted Islam. This came the day after the government warned a different website (http://gazeta.ru/) over its decision to post on its site caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad that were first published in a Danish newspaper last September and inflamed violent Muslim protests when European and other newspapers reprinted them this year.