Mr Nemtsov was shot on a bridge within sight of St Basil's Cathedral and the Kremlin
A
leading Russian opposition politician, former Deputy Prime Minister
Boris Nemtsov, has been shot dead in Moscow, Russian officials say.
An unidentified attacker in a car shot Mr Nemtsov four times
in the back as he crossed a bridge in view of the Kremlin, police say.
He died hours after appealing for support for a march on Sunday in Moscow against the war in Ukraine.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has condemned the murder, the Kremlin says.
President Putin has assumed "personal control" of the investigation into the killing, said his spokesman Dmitry Peskov.
Investigators said the murder could have been "a provocation aimed at destabilising the country".
The investigative committee said in a statement that several
motives for the killing were being considered including "Islamic
extremism".
US President Barack Obama condemned the "brutal murder" and called on the Russian government to conduct a "prompt, impartial and transparent investigation".
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko described Mr Nemtsov as a "bridge between Ukraine and Russia".
"The murderers' shot has destroyed it. I think it is not by
accident," he said in a statement published on his administration's
Facebook page.
Boris Nemtsov was one of Russia's leading economic reformers in the 1990s (file photo from 2009)
In a recent interview, Mr Nemtsov had said he feared Mr Putin
would have him killed because of his opposition to the war in Ukraine.
Mr Nemtsov, 55, served as first deputy prime minister under President Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s.
He had earned a reputation as an economic reformer while governor of one of Russia's biggest cities, Nizhny Novgorod.
Falling out of favour with Yeltsin's
The draft Ben Carson movement swarmed the first half of CPAC, but that doesn’t mean he’s the new Rand Paul.
Subjectively, Ben Carson might be the most popular
potential 2016 candidate at this year’s Conservative Political Action
Conference in National Harbor, Md.
Despite the empty seats at his Thursday morning speech, people were
crowding in the hallways trying to catch a glimpse of him at his smaller
appearances, including at a reception for activists Wednesday night and
a coffee reception Thursday morning.
Outside of the Thursday reception, Christine Klaserner, 52, said she
loves Carson, who was born in her hometown of Detroit. “He’s a real
American, like the people that we are around every day,” she said. “He’s
not a Washington insider and we like that, we need that.”
Meanwhile the Draft Ben Carson movement is a constant presence,
bombarding attendees with kind words about their favored candidate. For
the first two days of CPAC volunteers holding “Run Ben Run” signs and
wearing “Run Ben Run” shirts seemed to follow him wherever he went,
while regularly posting about him on the activity feed of the CPAC app,
urging him to run for the Republican nomination for president in 2016.
“They’ve asked me about 10 times for a sticker. They’re everywhere,”
Joey Gamrat, 17, said Thursday outside of Carson’s coffee reception.
That was intentional. Vernon Robinson, the campaign director of the
National Draft Ben Carson for President committee planned for Carson
supporters to swarm certain areas of the conference, so “it was
impossible for someone to walk in that door without a Carson supporter
trying to stick a sticker on them,” he said. This year the organization
brought approximately 210 volunteers and staff members to the
conference.
The draft movement’s immediate goal is to give Kentucky Senator Rand
Paul, who has won the last two CPAC straw polls, a run for his
money. Despite his popularity, Robinson argued that Paul’s foreign
policy positions and his past comments of strict voter ID laws might
hurt him. “There’s no one in this building, except for the media, that
doesn’t support voter ID laws,” he said. (Last spring, Paul said the GOP
shouldn’t emphasize voter ID laws because the strategy was “offending people,” though he later said he believes voter ID laws are up to each state to decide.)
The long-term goal is to get people to vote for Carson in the
primaries. “I think that a lot of folks are enthusiastic about Dr.
Carson,” he said. “Can we turn that enthusiasm into support so they
actually vote for him in Republican primaries and caucuses? We’re
working on it.
The question is, when you strip away the draft volunteers, and the
flocks of media, who’s left? Robinson argued that “there’s a lot of
enthusiasm here for Ben Carson,” noting that he finished third in the
2014 CPAC straw poll. He did—but
Paul won with only 31 votes, and Carson came in third with nine. And
some of his supporters aren’t sure if they’ll even vote for him. Gamrat
said he was supporting Paul, and Klaserner and her daughter hadn’t
decided.
“We haven’t voted yet,” Klaserner said. “So I don’t know yet. There’s
a lot of people here that we like.” That list includes Texas Senator
Ted Cruz, but it does not include Jeb Bush, whose Friday speech
Klaserner plans to skip.
“The problem is that the GOP establishment will pick for us and that,
unfortunately, is a problem,” she said. “We don’t need another Bush. We
don’t need another Clinton. We need an outsider, and someone like Ben
Carson.”
As gun shops report shortages of AR-15 ammunition
following the ATF’s proposal to prohibit the sale of steel-tipped
5.56-millimeter bullets, one reader contacted us to report that his
local Walmart had sold out of the ammo despite having substantial stocks
just two weeks ago.
Yesterday it was revealed that the ATF intends to ban
sales of the ammunition, typically used by sports shooters, in the name
of protecting law enforcement officers from “the threat posed by
ammunition capable of penetrating a protective vest.”
Gun stores immediately reported that people were panic
buying cases of the bullets, with Ryan Cook, manager of Eagle Armory in
Springfield, noting that suppliers were telling him “there was none available to order”.
It appears as though some Walmart stores are also beginning to sell out of the same ammunition.
Alex Jones Show listener Monte Bosak contacted us to
relate how his local Walmart in Anchorage, AK went from having “way too
much” of the ammo in question two weeks ago, according to the store
clerk, to completely selling out after yesterday’s announcement.
“Two weeks ago, I purchased a thousand rounds of
XM855 62 grain green tip ammo at this exact Walmart location for $350,”
writes Bosak. “While purchasing, I spoke to the lady who works the gun
counter and asked her if she had been selling a lot of it. $350/1k
rounds is extremely cheap. She said no they hadn’t been selling much of
it, and that they had many pallets in the back… “way too much” as she
put it.”
“So that leads us to today (2/26/15) when the Drudge
Report broke the story of the impending executive order to ban this
specific ammunition. Naturally, I went straight to this Walmart after
work to purchase what I could, only to find out that they had “sold
out”. I spoke to the same lady behind the counter, and I spoke to a
manager. Neither of which could look me square in the eye while telling
me they sold out,” adds Bosak, who suspects that Walmart may even have
deliberately “pulled their stock of the ammunition.”
“There’s no way possible in my mind that they sold all that ammunition,” writes Bosak.
Walmart has previously faced accusations that it has
restricted ammunition sales in accordance with the Obama
administration’s gun control agenda, but has denied them every time.
Shortly after the Sandy Hook massacre, reports circulated
that the retail giant had stopped ordering ammunition and would not be
making more sales in anticipation of expected curbs on the second
amendment. Other customers reported that they were told Walmart would
not stock ammunition for assault rifles, only for shotguns.
Mr Nemtsov was shot on a bridge within sight of St Basil's Cathedral and the Kremlin
Boris Nemtsov was one of Russia's leading economic reformers in the 1990s (file photo from 2009)
