Surprise Guest

Appears there were some surprise guest at the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday, February 3; Mikhail Brudno and Vladimir Dubov, two partners of Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Russia has been searching the world for these two men after getting on "Vladimir Putin's bad side".

The two partners, Mikhail Brudno and Vladimir Dubov, were allowed into the United States -- and the president's company -- despite Interpol notices filed at the request of the Russians.
The fugitive moguls' breakfast with the American president attracted the notice of the Russian press, which interpreted it as a slap against Putin on the day after Bush delivered a State of the Union address that renewed his vow to stand up for freedom around the world. In fact, Brudno and Dubov were just two of thousands of guests who packed the Washington Hilton Hotel ballroom at the invitation of the event's independent organizers, and Bush may not have even known they were there.
[…]
The Khodorkovsky case is viewed in both Washington and Moscow as a Kremlin political attack on a rival. As Russia's richest man and head of its biggest oil company, Khodorkovsky had angered the Kremlin by financing opposition parties and advancing his own policy ideas. He was arrested in October 2003 and remains on trial on charges of fraud and tax evasion, while his Yukos Oil Co. was dismantled in December, with its most valuable assets effectively renationalized.
The case has soured relations between Moscow and Washington. Putin delivered a testy lecture to Bush when the American president raised the issue of Russian democracy during a lunch in Santiago, Chile, in November, and the two then did not speak again until this week when they talked briefly by telephone about the Iraqi elections. Bush will meet with Putin in Bratislava, Slovakia, on Feb. 24, in what advisers see as the first test of the president's inaugural vision of confronting "every ruler and every nation" about domestic repression. [read the article here]

I just found this story interesting especially with a meeting scheduled this month between Putin and President Bush. Before some simply jump to the conclusion that the President is irritating the world, you might pay very close attention to Democratic representative's comments in the article.

Rep. Tom Lantos (Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the International Relations Committee, invited the two to an hour-long meeting Wednesday on Capitol Hill. "The proceedings against Khodorkovsky were outrageous," said Bob King, the committee's Democratic staff director. "By American legal standards, this is something that could never happen in the United States."