For decades in Turkey, the competing forces of the religious and secular, Christian and Muslim, east and west, were muted, as authorities scrubbed the country of differences while they built a modern state. But Turkey has become more democratic in recent years and those forces have burst into full view, creating a sort of modern-day identity crisis.
Lebanon and international human rights groups have accused Israel of war crimes related to the 34 days of fighting in July and August, saying that Israel fired into populated areas and that civilians accounted for the vast majority of the more than 1,000 Lebanese killed. Israel says it tried to avoid civilians, but Hezbollah fire from civilian areas, itself a war crime, made those areas legitimate targets. In a new report, an Israeli research group says that Hezbollah stored weapons in mosques, battled Israeli forces from inside empty schools, had its fighters fly white flags while transporting missiles and launched rockets from sites near United Nations monitoring posts.
A Russian spy lies in a hospital bed, fighting for his life as his body steadily disintegrates from the effects of a radioactive poison; the spy, an outspoken critic of the Russian regime, has recently defected to the West; someone in Moscow has decided that he must die, and the assassins have done their work with ferocious efficiency. The name of the spy is Nikolai Khokhlov, and the year is 1957.
Gazeta.ru menar att pensionerade veteraner ur FSB ligger bakom mordet.
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Mördarna anlände till London tillsammans med CSKA:s supportrar inför matchen mot Arsenal. Poloniumspår ska ha hittats på det flygplanet. Man understryker att dessa officerare inte kontrolleras av regimen utan agerar självständigt. Gazeta.ru hävdar att uppgifterna bygger på brittisk press. Teorin är väl inte sämre än någon annan som framförts men här finns ju inget konkret att gå på överhuvudtaget.
Commercially, Web sites and companies sell many products based on polonium 210, with labels warning of health dangers. By some estimates, a lethal dose might cost as little as $22.50, plus tax.
The Guardian has been told that the amount of polonium-210 found in the Russian's body could have killed him 100 times over, and would have cost as much as £20m to acquire.
The Lifeboat Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to helping humanity survive existential risks and possible misuse of increasingly powerful technologies, including genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and robotics/AI, as we move towards a technological singularity. Lifeboat Foundation is pursuing a variety of options, including helping to accelerate the development of technologies to defend humanity, including new methods to combat viruses (such as RNA interference and new vaccine methods), effective nanotechnological defensive strategies, and even self-sustaining space colonies in case the other defensive strategies fail.
Respondents who said 9/11 was unjustified (1 or 2 on a 5-point scale, where 1 is totally unjustified and 5 is completely justified) are classified as moderates. Respondents who said 9/11 was justified (4 or 5 on the same scale) are classified as radicals. The data for this poll were obtained during 2005-06 from Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia. Approximately 1,000 in-home interviews were conducted in each country. The sampling mix of urban and rural areas is the statistical equivalent of surveying each nation’s adult population, with a statistical sampling error rate of +/- 3 percent.
Ekaterina Genieva, who helped organise a conference at National University of Ireland where Gaidar had been due to speak, said he had looked pale when he appeared. Gaidar left the room after about 10 minutes. "I rushed after him and found him lying on the floor, unconscious. He was vomiting blood and also bleeding from the nose for about 35 minutes," the paper quoted her as saying.
Anatoly Chubais, his former associate and the head of Russia’s electricity monopoly, said he suspected Mr Gaidar may have been poisoned. However, he strongly ruled out that either Russia’s security services or the Kremlin could have had any involvement. There is no indication of radiation being the cause of his illness.
Already, China uses more coal than the United States, the European Union and Japan combined. Every week to 10 days, another coal- fired power plant opens somewhere in China.
"No individual could do this," said John Large, an independent nuclear consultant. "What you are talking about is the creation of a very clever little device, a designer poison pill, possibly created by nanotechnology. Without nanotechnology you would be talking about a fairly big pill, a pea-sized pill. Either way you are looking at intricate technology which is beyond the means and designs of a hired assassin without a state sponsor." He said the likely poison pill that killed Mr Litvinenko would have to have been manufactured in a special laboratory over two or three weeks and then used very quickly - possibly within 28 days - because the half-life of the isotope polonium is only 138 days.
The Russian weapons used by Hezbollah in the July fighting with Israel were new and routed through Syria. Intelligence sources say Bout was spotted in Beirut during the fighting, shortly before the sophisticated armor-piercing Fagot and Kornet anti-tank missiles were discovered. Interesting coincidence. When the Israelis presented the Russians with overwhelming evidence of the armament, it was publicly dismissed, but a senior official in the Russian arms export enterprise was reportedly dismissed to placate the outside world. Finally, there are Bout’s actions in the Horn of Africa where, again with official Russian support, his aircraft have been spotted delivering weapons to the Islamic Court militias in Somalia and arming the Islamist allies in Eritrea.
Polonium 210 does its damage by emitting alpha particles, which have enough energy to tear apart the genetic machinery of cells, killing them outright or causing them to mutate into tumor-producing forms. It gives off 5,000 times more alpha particles than does the same amount of radium.
...groups responsible for many of the insurgent and terrorist attacks are raising $70 million to $200 million a year from illegal activities. It says that $25 million to $100 million of the total comes from oil smuggling and other criminal activity involving the state-owned oil industry aided by “corrupt and complicit” Iraqi officials. As much as $36 million a year comes from ransoms paid to save hundreds of kidnap victims in Iraq, the report said.
Russia has begun delivery of Tor-M1 air defense missile systems to Iran, a Defense Ministry official said Friday, confirming that Moscow would proceed with arms deals with Tehran in spite of U.S. criticism.
Polonium is a highly radioactive and toxic element and is dangerous to handle. Even in milligram or microgram amounts, handling polonium-210 is very dangerous and requires special equipment used with strict procedures. Direct damage occurs from energy absorption into tissues from alpha particles. The maximum allowable body burden for ingested polonium is only 1100 becquerels (0.03 microcurie), which is equivalent to a particle weighing only 6.8 × 10-12 gram. Weight for weight polonium is approximately 2.5 × 1011 times as toxic as hydrogen cyanide. The maximum permissible concentration for airborne soluble polonium compounds is about 7,500 Bq/m3 (2 × 10-11 µCi/cm3). Polonium has been found in tobacco smoke from tobacco leaves grown at some specific places, as a contaminant [2] [3] and in uranium ores. Use as a poison At a committed effective dose equivalent (CEDE) of 5.14×10−7 Sieverts per Becquerel (1.9×103 mrem/microcurie) for ingested 210Po and a specific activity of 1.66×1014 Bq/gram (4.49×103 Curies/gram)[4] the amount of material required to produce a lethal dose of 10 Sieverts would be only .12 micrograms (1.17×10−7g).
he acquittal rate in Japan is less than 1 percent. [Source] (For a good study of the Japanese criminal prosecution system, see David Johnson, The Japanese Way of Justice: Prosecuting Crime in Japan (2002), reviewed here.) Interestingly, Taiwan's acquittal rate is 12% [source] - lower than the US but still in the same ballpark, while conspicuously higher than that of Japan or South Korea, to whose criminal justice systems its own bears a much higher formal resemblance.
The conclusions are dramatic: "I believe this paper will change forever the field of human genetics," commented Professor James R. Lupski, Vice Chair, Department of Molecular and Human Genetics, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas. "One can no longer consider human traits as resulting primarily from single base-pair changes or influenced only by SNPs. With all due respect to Watson and Crick, many Mendelian and complex traits, as well as sporadic diseases, may indeed result from structural variation of the genome."
Australia is the first non-European country in the democracy index coming in at number eight, followed by Canada and Switzerland.
The First Law of Petropolitics, in short, argues that the price of oil and the pace of freedom operate in an inverse correlation. As the price of oil goes up in what I call petroauthoritarian states—like Iran, Sudan, Venezuela—the pace of freedom goes down. These regimes can afford to be less responsive to their people and outside pressure. And as the price of oil goes down, the pace of freedom goes up because these regimes have to open up to the world if they want to deliver for their people, and they have to empower their people more. When oil was $30 a barrel, Iran was calling for a dialogue of civilizations. At $70 a barrel, Iran is calling for the destruction of Israel.