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Former Spy Poisoned By Radiation In UK
An anonymous reader writes "BBC new is reporting the death of the ex-Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko with a major dose of radioactive polonium-210. But nobody knows how it got there. Suspicions have fallen upon the Russian security services (who deny involvement). The task of the pathologists now is to unpick what really killed him and how it was administered. Quite what techniques they will use to solve this puzzle is unclear." From the article: "A post-mortem examination on Mr Litvinenko has not been held yet. The delay is believed to be over concerns about the health implications for those present at the examination. But Roger Cox from the HPA said a large quantity of alpha radiation emitted from polonium-210 had been detected in Mr Litvinenko's urine."
In UK you get poisoned, in Soviet Russia poison finds you!!
Why UNIX?
you fail it!
......found this curious comment:
"Mr Putin himself has said Mr Litvinenko's death was a tragedy, but he saw no "definitive proof" it was a "violent death"."
Clearly the term "violent death" has a different definition in Russian than it does in English.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
Shades of Georgi Markov, a Soviet expatriate/dissident who was also assassinated in London. He was stabbed in the leg with a special spring-loaded umbrella that subcutaneously injected a metal pellet contaminated with ricin. They didn't even find the pellet until he was already dead, and it took some work to find out just what had killed him.
I wonder how they got the polonium into him. For a death this rapid, he'd pretty much have had to ingest it.
No matter how cool it may look traveling down that conveyor belt, never EVER eat the neon-green glowing sushi!
Monstar L
Joke Punches YOU!
You see 'em? They're EVERYWHERE!
In Putin's russia, the KGB poison you.
The wealth and reach of the Russian Mafia (Putin and his former KGB cronies) is terrifying and the UK government just love that dirty money.
The delay is believed to be over concerns about the health implications for those present at the examination.
If they're concerned, they're too ignorant about science to be qualified to do the exam. The rule of thumb is that alpas are stopped by air. Even if the guy's body fluids got on you, the alphas wouldn't get through your epidermis -- and I assume people doing autopsies are going to be wearing latex gloves, a mask, etc., since they don't want to get exposed to AIDS, etc.
Find free books.
Heartburn, Nausea, Indigestion
Upset Stomach, Diarrhea!
Trolling the trolls who troll the trolls since '92
Hands up who's not worried by this?
Lots of talk of what Al Qaeda might do, but these are the people with their hands on thousands of nukes, much of the energy supplies and they are now poisoning people with radioactive isotopes because they say they are scheming murdering psychopaths.
Do we really need another bunch of homicidal f*ckwits in the world?
no offence to ./ but I heard about this yesterday at around noon (australian time)....
bit late on the news I think
Who's the fool to risk importing that stuff in and get caught up? That would be stupid obviously.
Then again, obvious is used most frequently by the unimaginative.
Why would any governments condemn Russia for this? Isn't it now that extra-judicial killings of suspects without any trial are now acceptable to "civilized" nations? So why are people making a big deal out of it? Yes, of course I am being sarcastic.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident. That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights"
People just don't truly believe that crap anymore, so expect to see more of these types of evil acts.
When it comes to things to avoid eating, apparently, he forgot Polonium!
He's been labelled a heckler, when he may well have a genuine issue at hand. The same thing, perhaps a little more dramatic, happened at a press conference regarding the demise of the Kursk.
When Russia (yes, even modern-day Russia) gets its hands near an investigation, the result is usually indeterminate or irrelevant, never indisputable.
WANRING: This warning is misspelt.
Who's to blame? Poland, obviously.
The US or UK would kidnap you THEN kill you.
Let's not imagine that a high-ranking secret service officer from ANY country would be allowed to tell all they knew to another country's journalists, authors or government..
Oh and good timing with that new Bond film recently released..
What do they teach these guys? Didn't he ever see a Bond movie? Radioactive sushi? The first beautiful female spy or space based laser cannon this guy ran into he'd have been dead meat. It's a wonder he lived as long as he did.
You can't exactly buy Polonium-210 at every corner drugstore ... (but you will be able to in 1985).
-b.
Other than in nuclear weapons?
I don't understand why of all things, they were using Polonium-210 to kill him. Since that's not exactly something you buy over the counter, wouldn't there be "better" ways of killing him by poisoning without drawing as much attention? Only about 100 grams of Polonium, any isotope, is estimated to be produced yearly and it's extremely rare in nature. It's hard to imagine a better way of drawing attention to the government.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
...spying very danger-making
I'm unsure if all the above applies to this specific isotope, but further down there's this:
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Like many radioactive elements it is quite effective at killing people.
Ok here's a creepy thought.
What if this guy blaming Putin is a red herring and that ACTUALLY he managed to get his hands on radioactive material and managed to smuggle it and sell it to someone...sort of like the drug couriers who swallow condoms full of cocaine or heroin, and have an unfortunate accident. Scary eh?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
If this was a public example, "they" want any defectors to know that they can and will be dealt with.
to cover up most dishes: Curry. I had so much curry as a child I now need it to survive. Mmmm, kidney pie.
"She poisoned my with sci-ence"
If you thought that was bad I could have posted an obligatory Simpsons reference: "Mmmm, Polonium. D'OH!"
Oops, how did this get here?
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Red fox, this is blue panda. Please repeat your 3AS, over.
The maximum permissible body burden for ingested polonium is only 0.03 microcuries, which represents a particle weighing only 6.8 x 10-12 g. Weight for weight it is about 2.5 x 1011 times as toxic as hydrocyanic acid. The maximum allowable concentration for soluble polonium compounds in air is about 2 x 10-11 microcuries/cm3.
From: there
Soluble in acidic environment.
Apparently he was repeatedly invited by by an unkown russian person to drink tea....
A little sourness in tea with a few milligram of metal dissolved.
Bingo.
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
He wasn't poisoned by radiation in the UK, he was poisoned in the UK by radiation.
The former implies that it was the radiation present in the UK that poisoned him; the latter makes it clear that he happened to be in the UK when he was poisoned by radiation.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
If he was dying, don't you think he'd have dropped a hint so that doctors might be able to treat him? If he was truly a self-serving criminal, he'd likely value his life over protecting his "associates."
-b.
A couple of things are really, really strange.
First, if SVR/FSB wanted the death to look accidental, why would they use such deliberate method? Polonium poisoning just screams of a well-funded agency doing the job. Not covert at all. The only explanation is that they wanted it to be obvious, as a lesson to other guys. Then they might just admit "yeah, we did it", but they are denying everything.
Second, why it took so long for British to recognize obvious symptoms of radiation sickness? Nobody tried to check Litvinenko with a Geiger counter while he was alive, but after his death he was diagnosed instantly. This is just weird.
Both sides don't tell all they know. This is to be expected in a spy scandal, though.
Perhaps you are...I don't think anyone would willing choose to die of something as horrifically painful as radiation sickness.
Sounds like all our Russian "friends" needed to do was to visit the local camera store's going-out-of-business sale.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
You can actually buy small amounts of the stuff OTC, in the form of a "Staticmaster" brush for removing dust from film negatives or other sensitive surfaces.
l
http://www.2spi.com/catalog/photo/statmaster.shtm
The alpha particles emitted from the source ionize the surrounding air, and neutralize any electrostatic charge holding dust particles to a surface.
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
I've been wondering why his symptoms sounded so much like acute radiation poisoning since I first heard about this, and I don't even have any medical background. In a really suspicious case like this, one would think it would be obvious to test for radioactivity early on. It would have been really easy and completely non-invasive. Geiger counters sensitive enough to detect something like this are easy to come by, and hospitals have plenty of film badge dosimeters, etc. for ensuring the safety of radiomedicine workers. So why didn't they check him? It seems like this finally got discovered in a general urine test they conducted to try and identify the poison, rather than any attempt to measure radioactivity.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
http://unitednuclear.com/isotopes.htm
Sounds like a teaser for the local news.
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
If he was dying, don't you think he'd have dropped a hint so that doctors might be able to treat him?
;)
You can't save a patient that has this level of radiation poisoning. Impossible. Maybe he knew it, so he decided to play for the maximum political advantage. If people can fly aircraft into buildings, they can do this. Anyway it's just a creepy thought, probably not true at all - where would he get it? It will be interesting to see what the cause of the radiation is at the sushi bar. So long as it's not coming from the sewer
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Learnings of the Russian politics for make benefit the glorious nation of the United Kingdom.
Well, you only live twice.
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
He was an ex-KGB defector and therefore more likely to have the contacts to get Polonium-210 that most people. On the other hand, the suggestion that that may have happened does seem pretty wild.
I can't believe no one has said this. If this were a Dan Brown novel, the big mystical secret that it would take a university-trained "symbologist" to decipher is that the true culprit, the maleficent agent behind the poisoning was, not Russia, but ... (wait for it) ... Poland!
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
And it is a 1uCU of Po210. How many of these would you have to buy to get a dose that would be fatal in the a week or two?
Also the PO 210 in that is sealed. It would difficult to get it out.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Interesting question - what if he's found to have some other terminal disease at the autopsy? What if he knew he was going to die within a few months anyway and decided to suicide in a rather spectacular manner that would embarrass the fuck out of the Russian government? Wild speculation here of course.
-b.
Offcourse it might just as well be a setup. Someone who wants to make it look like it was Putin.
Frankly I don't know enough about the guy to make a guess wich one is the case but the use of an obvious method of execution is not that hard to explain. Because if it was Putin then so what. Will britain go to war over this? Even a mere trade war? Most likely not. If it was Putin this was a show of power. Basically saying,"we are still here and don't you forget it."
Offcourse the other option, that this is a setup to frame Putin is less likely but far more intresting. Russia is screwed up enough that Putin has lots of enemies in Russia itself and with its security system all messed up someone getting hold of a rare material is not that unimaginable.
So the question is, why would Putin want this guy dead so badly (more acuratly why would Putin want the world to know that he wanted this guy dead and succeeded) OR who wants to make it look like Putin killed this guy.
Ah, were is 007 when you need him?
Elect putin in 2008.
He's a guy i'd like to have a beer with.
And some polonium pretzels.
I could have thought of 200 better ways to off someone discretely just by watching the Sopranos or The Wire. With all the poisons in the world, they pick an exotic and rare poison yet whose symptoms are ubiquitous and unique. What is the cover story? He moonlights as a nuclear technician? I think the spies have watch too many James Bond films. It would have been better to have taken him to an abandon house, clipped him, and then pour lye over him to removed the evidence. Or here is a better thought, stop doing bad things. Russia should try to be more civil and stop offing dissidents and take a more American approach- brand them unpatriotic.
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6175424.stm
there's not much mention of these 'three objects' that they've found inside him.
i'm no expert - maybe they're not important? -- but i'm sure they'll get to find out when they do the post mortem.
Cool, they even take PayPal!
I'm pretty sure Po-210 is the isotope used in smoke detectors, so it's not as rare or exotic as the stories would suggest. The dose, as always, makes the poison.
I know you're making a joke but this isn't as far fetched as I bet you think it is....It COULD have been done that way. The CEDE for ingested polonium (comitted efective dose equivalent) is an astounding 2,000 mREM/microcurie or 2,000 REM/millicurie (a lethal dose of radiation to 50% of people is only ~500 rem). He would need to ingest only .5-1 millicurie of Po-210 to get a lethal dose and each anti-static brush contains how much Po? .2-.5 millicuries per brush apparently.... I'm not saying that's how it happened, I'm sure the KGB has access to far larger amounts of Po that they would have used but it does give an idea of just how incredibly tiny an amount is needed to do harm. Even a THOUSAND TIMES the lethal dose of .5 mCi would be a mere tenth of a milligram.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
assassins resource +1 informative at least
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
The 'three unknown objects' in his bowel were remnants of the barium used for medical imaging....old news....and over-sensationalized.
This sig contains a manual self-destruct. Kindly please put your foot through your monitor in 8 seconds.
http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/i_video/main500251 .shtml?id=1760111n
There's a video there of Putin kissing the 5 year old boy's stomach. This started a lot of speculation and I have read that the KGB gathered video from a hotel room proving that he was from years ago. When Putin headed the KGB all these videos obviously disappeared. There is stuff about it on teh web if anyone needs to do some research. I suspect it's true.
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
Yes, but a useful one.
"You saved 1968." - Ms. Valerie Pringle to the crew of Apollo 8
On the news here (one channel at least, I can't remember which - was around 6pm so the BBC iirc) in the UK they claimed that the statement read out on the news was dictated by Litvinenko as he was dying last night, however at the end of the statement the guy reading it quoted it as being dated 21st November 2006, last night was the 23rd. I'm not sure why the discrepancy and realistically I don't think it's related to any kind of conspiracy, I think the news editorial probably misunderstood and that the statement probably was put together on the 21st however all the same I just thought I'd point this out in case anyone could offer perhaps an alternative explanation ;) ?
Barbarians compared to the US of course who indulge in no such activites..
Like rigging elections, assasinating democractically elected heads of state they don't agree with, invading countries for suggesting they might prefer to sell oil in Euros thus causing a huge run on the already weak dollar, selling arms and torture equipment to countries with appalling human rights records, wire-tapping their own citizens on a scale undreamed of by the most autocratic of regimes, collaborating with despots for profit, operating an institutionally rascist judicial systm, atempting to deny women rights fundamentally accepted as basic by the entire western world, accepting graft as a proxy for politic.. yadda yadda yadda..
I'm not saying the rest of the western world's any better.. the brits, the french, the israelis.. they're all doing their bits to help out f ck it all up.. but really.. it's the sheer bare-faced hypocrisy of the US that disappoints the most.. still.. we seem to be growing up slowly..
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6180262.stm
What if rogue clowns from some other planet drove their flying space armadillo to the UK, abducted this guy and used an anal probe to implant the polonium in his ass?
Seriously, have you never heard of Occam's Razor?
that this is on /. is that a radioactive substance was involved in the assasination. Isn't that a little scary - the thought that the newsworthiness of the murder to nerds is supposed to be the polonium and not the human life or the state of the world today?
I feel uncomfortable.
What I do not understand is why kill him now?
Surely, if Russian secret services wanted to kill him, wouldn't it make more sense to kill him, say, several years ago, when he was on top of his anti-Russia campaign? Why kill now when has fallen in to obscurity and irrelevance? The same goes for that Russian whats-her-name reporter that also killed about a couple of months ago.
How is it in Russia's interests, if Russia is actually behind the murder(s)? It appears that those deaths are more profitable to the US propaganda machine then to Russia, and that can help one make some guesses with reference to who is behind the murders.
With the US influence in the world crumbling, the dollar sinking and the "(eternal) war on terror" hysteria losing its effectiveness, the US needs a new enemy to push its agenda. Note the similarities in the "free" US media's reporting between this ex-spy death and "Iraq has WMD" propaganda. Again "objective and balanced" US media has an obvious bias yet presents no proof.
It seems that US needs more enemies to sustain its "We are at war!" campaign. Russia fits that purpose perhaps even better than al Queda.
I've seen a few posts here asking "why use such an obvious method of killing someone?"
The answer is: it's very, very far from obvious. The mere fact that it's taken so long to work out what the poison was indicates how subtle Polonium poisoning is.
1. Based on the Wikipedia entry for Polonium, the dosage required is incredibly small. We're not talking milligrams, here; we're talking micrograms, or less. Just detecting such a tiny quantity distributed throughout the victim's body is going to be incredibly hard.
2. The poison won't produce discernable radiation outside the victim's body, either, because alpha radiation is so readily absorbed by tissue. (That's also what makes it such a good poison, of course.)
3. The thing with poisons is that you have to actually look for them. Polonium is such an unlikely poison - given its rarity and inherent handling hazards - that even considering it is far-fetched. The fact that the victim's urine contained helium was the only clue the pathologists had, and I think they deserve a huge amount of credit for getting from that result to polonium as the cause.
They most definitely do not use it in smoke detectors, the half-life is far too short to be useful.
In the West, Putin kills You!
In Soviet Russia, Putin Kills You!
What truly puzzles me here is why exactly any secret service such as the FSB would be stupid enough to poison some Kremlin critic with a really hard to acquire substance such as Polonium. It should be assumed that the British WILL find out what killed Litvinenko, and when it is something as obscure as Polonium, it's got to be the Russians. You're practically implicating yourself by being too good at what you do.
The guy is far more valuable to his cause as a confirmed martyr than some loud-mouthed expat living in Britain. If I were Putin, I probably wouldn't bother, and if I wanted to bother, I would want it to look like a traffic accident or a random mugging. The tinfoil hat guy in me actually is willing to believe this was a CIA job that wants to implicate the FSB. Let's face it, if you want to make Russia look bad, this is what you'd do.
Unless, of course, I REALLY wanted to make a point of Russia's reach, but in that case, Putin's guys are simply miscalculating...
I want to play Free Market with a drowning Libertarian.
You shouldn't object to them killing you either... because then they'll kill you twice.
Criticize Putin - die an agonizing death.
/.
/sheep getting hit over the head with reality.
Criticize Bush - get modded up on
The crickets you hear are the sheltered, BDS-afflicted
I don't know. The methodology sounds much more "George Smiley" than "James Bond".
...I think a lot more people would probably agree with you if you didn't intersperse sensible points with downright stupid ones.
"assasinating democractically elected heads of state they don't agree with" - absolutely
"selling arms and torture equipment to countries with appalling human rights records" - absolutely
"wire-tapping their own citizens on a scale undreamed of by the most autocratic of regimes" - gimme a break; they dream of it alright, and if they don't do it it's because they don't have the technology, not because they respect anyone's privacy
"invading countries for suggesting they might prefer to sell oil in Euros" - okay now that's just plain stupid
I'd really believe it was Putin who ordered someone's assasination if it was Mr. Berezowski who was all of a sudden dead... Seriously this guy has been a thorn in Putin's ass for much longer than either the journalist (of whom no one really knew or read anything by in Russia before her death) or this Litvinenko guy...
;)... admittedly the Russian's did mess up the extradition request... but alas... with all the hard talk about the anti-terrorist war from Tony Blair it still seems very strange.
I could of course believe that perhaps some secret service was involved... but believing that everything in Russia is done upon Putin's order is like saying that Bush is directly responsible for every law that is passed and every corporate deal in the US...
Anyways, Litvinenko is directly linked to Berezowski who is directly linked to the Chechen mafia (criminals aka terrorists)... so I wouldn't be too surprised if it's rather that group of people who are directly involved in his death. Btw, I still find it amazing that one of the Chechen terrorist leaders, who was directly responsible for recruiting and training British citizens to become terrorists on Chechen territory is still walking freely around London, especially in the post-London-tube-bombing situation. The guy's name is Zakaev and he is often shown on British TV
So what countries have the ability to produce Polonium-210?
Russia's current president is an ex kgb president. he is a thug, as well as the big-money who is now running the country are mobs, mafia and thugs, who are suppressing russian people and being harmful not only to russian citizens and to the world.
i see russia more dangerous than north korea while mafia placed presidents/governments, especially ones with kgb or such background at the helm.
Read radical news here
Even a THOUSAND TIMES the lethal dose of .5 mCi would be a mere tenth of a milligram.
At 9196 kg/m^3 ~= 9 mg / mm^3, that's about a hundredth of a cubic millimeter, assuming it was given in elemental form.
The sheer quantity of alpha radiation it produces also explains why it's used in satellites - "The power density of polonium is unique and made it attractive as a power source. One pound of polonium-210 occupies a volume of approximately 3 cubic inches and produces heat at the rate of 3.6 x 10^8 British Thermal Units (BTUs) per minute or about 64 kilowatts of electric power."
For some synthetic elements (like Pu, Np, etc.) the abundance of isotopes in the material can be an identifier of the production site, and in some cases, of the particular reactor that made the material. Is anyone here enough of a nuclear synthetic chemist to know if what is nominally Po210 actually has enough other minor Po isotopes that one might identify the production site by the mix, or secondarily, by looking at the decay product mix?
Wimp. I know who did it, and I plan to provide definitive evidence to authorities in three countries, as well as to various rival crime organizations (just to be sure of some action), but I'm darned if I'm going to post as an Anonymous Cow%.@# NO CARRIER
Why would I use polonium?
/. : the majority of the people seem to assume the Russians to be behind it, just for the reason that this kind of substance was used.
To make it seem like the Russians were the guilty ones.
As can be seen from
Qui bono, I mean really?
One side to benefit from making Putin seem bad, is USA&UK. We remember that in the Caspian and Caucasus area there is, surprise surprise, oil, on which both sides are eyeing. So it would be beneficial for the Bush&Blair to weaken the political power of Russia even a little.
Just thinking this for the sake of balance, and not to forget this possibility.
I'd blame Marie Curie. It's her stuff!
Well, sure, as long as it's boiled[*] or fried in batter! (And w'out any of that funny-flavored rice or wasabi, mind you.)
[*] Me gran calls it "poached"
The guy was ex-KGB. I think he could buy pretty much anything if he made a few phone calls.
The thing that's so weird about this is, why kill the guy in this way? As you said, it's not easy to get your hands on this stuff, so that narrows down the list of subjects considerably. Why not just a double tap with a Makarov to the head, like when they did that journalist a couple weeks ago?
Poster's theory is the first answer to that question that actually makes sense to me. Of course, it's just a theory...
Shawn
What's interesting about this is that it means that almost anyone could have committed the crime, not just people with close associations to governments with access to nuclear material. Even Litvinenko himself could have done it to embarrass Putin et al, if he were sufficiently mentally unbalanced, which isn't that far-fetched for an ex-KGB spy.
I just looked it up on my periodic table t-shirt with the radioative elements marked with glow-in-the-dark radioactivity symbols.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Sony only owns 20% of MGM. And MGM is resposible for Stargate. Which makes it better than 90% of Slashdot.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
Ltivinenko was involved with his ally/boss BAB in a number of issues with Russia and Ukraine (business, politics). now it's obvious that he was killed and that in some kind people from this governments and businesses are linked to this event. But there are to much possibilities that to say that Putin is behind this is to say nothing
already years is Litvinenko active in propaganda from London. nothing happened, until he was writing about the "truth" on russian special services nobody cared. but elections are soon now, and it looks like his activities became more subjective and he was in some kind involved in some new stuff.
the difference between how he told the story of his last contacts (something linked to Politkovskaya death) and how the person he met told this (some termination list) makes it look like as he was trying to make some loud accusations and was trying everything to produce a 'sensation'.
now this, and the fact that BAB financed the PR company around his poisoning and his death makes everything look very suspicious to me.
I would be very interested in facts that could be revealed during an investigations on his and BAB-s last activities
maybe another book, that would be written by someone like Paul Khlebnikov (now dead), but as always - this happens many-many years after this events took place
I didn't know the Queen read slashdot!
Smoke detectors do not use polonium. Smoke detectors use americium. Why do you hate Americium?
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
The thing that I can't understand is method of execution. One of the possible reasons cited for Litvinenko's murder is that he was speaking out on the murder of one of Putin's other critics, journalist Anna Politkovskaya. When she was killed, she was shot in the head with a Makarov pistol, which was then dropped next to her. Now, my extensive knowledge of espionage, gained by watching many hours of '24', tells me that this is how a pro commits a political hit. But to kill Litvinenko with an extremely had to get radioactive isotope means that the list of suspects is darn short. Is it possible that Litvinenko obtained the stuff himself, through the type of black market contacts that one would assume a former KGB agent has, and kill himself with it, just to give Putin a black eye? It's a somewhat nutty theory, but this is a nutty story. Can anyone else come up with a reason why this rather unusual method was employed? Shawn
It is indeed amazing how most of the slashdot crowd participating here is a perfect representation of how sheepish and easily brainwashable the majority of the populous in fact are.
An article is all it takes for people to go and grab their pitchforks and run out to chase an enemy they got scared about when watching Bond movies. Proof or awaiting at least proper and definite results of an investigation is not necessary because all you people seem to be interested in is to get a target to aim at. And how convenient if research and investigation of the subject is not even necessary because it is written in the NEWS. Oh I forgot - media are always speaking facts, are neither politically motivated nor trying to influence peoples opinion, right?
Maybe trying to understand grown-up issues are not for you and you should go back to playing with your XBox.
He was a KGB defector. Oh forget it you'll never figure it out.
... Standards and Practices !
PenGun
Do What Now ???
that if you kept chewing on that toy kaleidoscope you'de end up swallowing some stars?
I believe in this case Mr Putin used term "nasilstvennaya smert'" which basically means someone else killed that person. While "nasilstvennaya" has the same root as "nasilie" = violence, the meaning is "forced upon someone" versus "estestvennaya" (which would mean "natural causes" i.e. old age or an illness). Means of inflicting premature death could be violet (hacked with a saw) or not-so-violent (sleeping pills poisoning) but in both cases it would be an "unnatural cause of death"/"nasilstvennaya smert'".
Of course it's way more fun to use "violent" in articles, as it paints Russian President as a fierce person who doesn't think that deaths not involving excessive violence are worthy of an investigation.
Frankly I personally don't know what to think about this whole story. It's some sort of James Bond in real life. If it was really an evil plot, why did they use highly exotic means? Why not just shoot him during "robbery" or "accidentally" run him over with a car? To give him enough time to make an accusation? Did perpetrators they take into account his hate toward Russian government and simply used him for their own purposes? Or they knew we'd think that and reality is even more twisted? I don't think he'd do it on purpose -- sacrificing one's life is a very high price for a political statement to make.
So my only option is to wait for the final results of the autopsy and then hope that source of the radioactive material will be found quickly, to prevent any other radiation poisonings.
Hyperom.com
Polonium is gonna be tomorrows crisis dejour. The evolutionary luddites will be swarming about like an Alabama fire ant nest freshly run over with the lawn mower.
The Kremlin Pedophile
By Alexander Litvinenko
A few days ago, Russian President Vladimir Putin walked from the Big Kremlin Palace to his Residence. At one of the Kremlin squares, the president stopped to chat with the tourists. Among them was a boy aged 4 or 5.
'What is your name?' Putin asked.
'Nikita,' the boy replied.
Putin kneed, lifted the boy's T-shirt and kissed his stomach.
The world public is shocked. Nobody can understand why the Russian president did such a strange thing as kissing the stomach of an unfamiliar small boy.
The explanation may be found if we look carefully at the so-called "blank spots" in Putin's biography.
After graduating from the Andropov Institute, which prepares officers for the KGB intelligence service, Putin was not accepted into the foreign intelligence. Instead, he was sent to a junior position in KGB Leningrad Directorate. This was a very unusual twist for a career of an Andropov Institute's graduate with fluent German. Why did that happen with Putin?
Because, shortly before his graduation, his bosses learned that Putin was a pedophile. So say some people who knew Putin as a student at the Institute.
The Institute officials feared to report this to their own superiors, which would cause an unpleasant investigation. They decided it was easier just to avoid sending Putin abroad under some pretext. Such a solution is not unusual for the secret services.
Many years later, when Putin became the FSB director and was preparing for presidency, he began to seek and destroy any compromising materials collected against him by the secret services over earlier years. It was not difficult, provided he himself was the FSB director. Among other things, Putin found videotapes in the FSB Internal Security Directorate, which showed him having sex with some underage boys.
Interestingly, the video was recorded in the same conspiratorial flat in Polyanka Street in Moscow where Russian Prosecutor-General Yuri Skuratov was secretly video-taped with two prostitutes. Later, in the famous scandal, Putin (on Roman Abramovich's instructions) blackmailed Skuratov with these tapes and tried to persuade the Prosecutor-General to resign. In that conversation, Putin mentioned to Skuratov that he himself was also secretly video-taped making sex at the same bed. (But of course, he did not tell it was pedophilia rather than normal sex.) Later, Skuratov wrote about this in his book Variant Drakona.
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
Folks don't poison others with Polonium very often because 1) Po is exceedingly rare and 2) once it's determined that it was used, it really narrows down the range of suspects because of (1). If you want to obtain Po, you'll very likely need connections at a government laboratory like Oak Ridge or Los Alamos... or, say, a weapons lab in Russia.
Of course, any would-be assassin would also want to be very careful with the stuff since it is more than 10^11 times as toxic as hydrogen cyanide, which one might imagine makes it pretty dangerous to handle.
If he was diagnosed with the early signs of some type of cancer (leukaemia perhaps?) then surely the effects of the Po210 would cover this up in a post mortem?
Po 210 is the last steps of the U 238 decay cycle towards Lead 206, at least according to my old reference book. And higher energy then even U 238. Working backwards, Bismuth 210 has a low beta decay and short half life (5 days), Lead 210 has a long half life (22 years) and also a low beta decay. What are the chances that this was exposure and not poisoning? And why is a man in a black suit knocking at my door?
The Russian government has often assassinated enemies with stupidly obvious methods like exotic poisons delivered through micro-machines pellets. The whole point of killing with these methods is to send a signal and leave little doubt who was responsible.
o mbings#FSB_involvement) than before. The allegations seem quite credible. It's very much like a 911 conspiracy, i.e. Stage a terrorist outrage as an excuse to start a war. However, unlike 911 conspiracies, you find that you are not rolling your eyes with this one.
However, killing him has probably backfired since more people know about the FSB bombing allegations (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_apartment_b
And going out to buy some more weed doesn't count.
Your BDS is showing. What are you going to do in 2008? Try to get a life?
The funny thing is - you probably really think you're smarter than most people.
The Russians were stupid to use polonium-210. Its so rare and hard to get, it proves a government did it.
You need massive resources like a ton of uranium and a nuclear proccesing plant to get 100 micrograms of polonium. It also has a half-life of 138 days so you don't have too long to use it either.
I guess they were completely banking on the fact that no-one would think of looking for it in a post-mortem. Now the Brits found it, the Russians are completely in the sh1t.
For this reason, I strongly doubt that Putin ordered the assassination of Alexander Litvinenko. He was on Western soil (i.e., Great Britain), and, by the terms of gentleman's agreement, was in the "safe" zone. If he had been in Russia and continued to be a Russian citizen, then Putin would have killed him, regardless of whether he is a permanent resident of Britain.
Someone outside of the official Russian government killed him, but who would want to kill him?
Currently, many reports claim that the Russian government is in chaos. It has numerous renegade factions that actually support criminal elements and that coordinate assassinations. These factions operate outside of the control of the official Russian government lead by Putin. These factions are likely implicated in the murder of Anna Politkovskaya.
In my opinion, one of these factions orchestrated the murder of Litvinenko because he was aggressively investigating the murder of Politkovskaya. Putin would never have killed him; Putin is a veteran of the KGB and clearly understood the gentleman's agreement.
By the way, I despise Putin. This despot is currently broadcasting Russian propaganda via a satellite-delivered broadcast called "Russia Today". When Moscow tried to brutalize the Georgians, "Russia Today" omitted broadcasting the Georgian point of view. "Russia Today" is almost as biased as Al Jazeera.
It's not exactly hard to come buy. The public can buy it over the internet. http://www.unitednuclear.com/isotopes.htm A few hundred dollars buys you a nice lethal dosage.
I think someone might notice when you call up United Nuclear and try to order 1,000 of their 0.1 uCi Polonium sources. (And I'm not even sure if 1,000 of them would be enough to poison someone. That's a really minute amount they're selling.)
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
You know what they say if it isn't preparted properly...
Carey Sublette has calculated that several thousand anti static brushes would be needed to provide a sufficient dose.
Yes, I have heart of people visiting the "liquidators"(people who were sent to clean up the mess) from Chernobyl. Some had gotten so much radiation, that they got cooked alive -- their flesh had lost all feeling was just coming off the bone like you see on an overdone turkey. Pretty sick, doctors just prescribed wine and vodka and waited for them to die. All my mom's plants on the balcony turned yellow, I wonder if my children would have to heads...
Marie Sklodowska-Curie was Polish.
Do you want the answer ?
Because they can. (And because most others cannot).
It's as simple as that.
After heading for a democracy, Russia is falling back into old ways. When I was there one woman earnestly asked me what I thought of Putin, and: "He is a strong leader isn't he"? Perhaps there is something in the Russian pysche that wants a strong leader more than a moral leader.
Their treatment of Georgia and other nearby states is not good lately, and this suggests that there are powerful and nasty organisations still calling shots there.
Please, Russians, don't go down the same road again!
For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke
Here's another creepy thought.
What if someone is looking for a cheap scare and proposes a far-fetched and dangerous body-ingestion smuggling event for a poisonous product which is readily available off-the-shelf in every country in the world?
I think I'm more scared that this moron is alive (and presumably making decisions somewhere) that that the Russian Security Service are copying the Israelis and Americans and going for assasination as a normal part of their politics.
And what is it with the anti-script words for this topic? The last one I had was 'emitter', and now I've got 'radiates'!
The text of Putin's statement was published in English by official russian press agency
He said:
" Death is always tragic. I present my condolences to the friends and the family of Mr. Litvinenko. As far as I know, the postmortem report does not say it was a violent death. If that is so, there is no reason for such suggestions , he told a Friday press conference after the Russia-EU summit
If the note was really written before the death of Mr. Litvinenko, I wonder why they did not make it public while he was still alive, Putin said. If the note appeared after the death, what comments can be made? People who did that are not the Lord, while Mr. Litvinenko is not Lazarus. It is a pity that such tragic events as death are being used for political provocative acts, he said.
http://www.itar-tass.com/eng/level2.html?NewsID=1
" effects indistinguishable from cancer "
That I doubt. The effects of Polonium on human organs are well known
" From 1945 through 1947 Manhattan Project researchers injected
It could have escaped the attention of an average coroner, but it is not a good 'undetectable poison'
The physical half-life of d 210Po is 138.38 days
getting it is hard and it's choice points to state sponsored terrorism
http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?NewsID=1066031
Similar to the Anthrax Attacks, only thing we know for sure is that there is a group, or groups
with access to controlled substances, able and willing to kill
and that public reaction to their crimes are used to point fingers.
If that is the motive, or only motive, we do not know
I'm sorry, but Litvinenko was not a spy. He was not an AGENT of FSB, but a colonel. Although many newspapers dupe each other, the truth is - he had nothing to do with agents and espionage. He was "fighting" the organized crime inside Russia.
/. users is the last thing /. administrator should do. If he is not paid by someone, of course.
After all, why he is so much against Russian president? There are 2 reasons:
1. There is only one chance to stay in UK if you are FSB officer - say, that your life is in danger and Russian elite forces are hunting you.
2. Money of Mr. Berezovski, who is saying a lot shit about Putin because he can't return to Russia. Obviously, because all his millions were stolen.
Now, if you ask me, I think that death of Litvinenko and journalist Politkovskaja was the part of Berezovski master plan. Although I don't really care. I think that if this was done by Russian military that's even better, as traitors don't deserve to live. Any traitors - whether they are working for FSB, CIA or MI5, if they become renegades, they deserve to die.
And after all, I think that putting such "news" on Slashdot is a mistake, because a lot of Slashdot readers love Russia, and a lot of them hate Russia, for different reasons. Seeding hate between
statement from itsu (sushi bar branch of piccadilly) :
http://www.itsu.co.uk/press/litvinenko.htm
I disagree, George Smiley was a gentleman (even when his wife was having an affair). It was Karla that was the ruthless whatever and he was KGB in the books heading up a department at 'Moscow Centre'. Interestingly enough Karla is supposed to be based on Markus Wolf who headed the East German Stasi.
See my journal, I write things there
BTW communists were not gentleman - they might appear to follow agreement for their propaganda purposes. Communists are gone (mostly) now and there is no reason Putin would pursue old days agreements.
The Finnish Newspaper Helsingin Sanomat published yesterday a letter from the Russian film director Andrei Nekrasov. (Coincidentally, mr. Putin was also visiting Finland yesterday as part of the Russia-EU summit.) The letter is a scathing analysis of the present-day Russian society.
It is extremely unlikely that Po-210 killed Litveninko. It is in the oxygen family (Oxygen, Sulfur, Selenium, Tellurium, Polonium). No stable isotopes are known. There are two possibilities: Dose him enough to get chemical poisoning; and dose him with a radioactive sample that's hot enough to cause radiochemical poisoning. I really doubt if its the latter case. Any alpha emitter would do and there is no reason to choose Polonium. He would be extremely hot. This is notr consistenmt with styatements to the effect that "traces" of Po-210 were found. And as far as chemical poisoning with Po, Someone correct me but I really doubt if the chemical properties of Po make it a very good candidate for metabolic poisoning. My guess is that this is counterspy spin.
Russian Putin has an ex Russian spy killed and some doofus mentions GWB. All we need now is to find a way to bring up Microsoft in all this.
Polonium is not very hard to get. You can buy a device with, I think, a tenth of lethal dose for $71: http://www.osmolabstore.com/OsmoLabPage.dll?BuildP age&1&1&1005
I think perhaps in all the very, very politically correct talk about how the United States is really just the same morally as other countries like Syria, Uganda and Russia is how incredibly _evil_ the KGB was/is. It is just not politically correct to say bad things about the ex-Soviet Union.
However, having been to Berlin a few days after the Wall came down, and having talked to people from the former Soviet Union, I can tell you that this remote academic theorizing is so much ear's wax, and some people really need to get outside more. In some ways it is fitting that the last of the ugly huge Lenin posters, etc, are by Chernobyl.
Pretty much everyone knows that PC conceals truth. What's the truth?
Putin rose to head the KGB because he's the chief scum of some extremely evil scum. They were the enforcement arm of a political system that killed more people, and enslaved more people, than any other this world has ever known.
The Soviet Union, which crashed Dec. 25 1991, has become a Third World country. I have friends who have left that place because they were under death threats to pay up or be killed. Another friend tried to set up an export business but was stopped by the Russian Mafia. The Museum of Soviet Spaceflight was burned to the ground because it could not pay off two rival "protection" gangs. The Buran "Space Shuttle Clone" sits in a park as a plaything.
So, do I think Putin would off this guy with polonium? Yep. It had a good chance of not being detected.
Has the KGB offed other people who gave them a bad time in England? Yep. They whacked Georgi Markov in 1978. He had a radio show that intensely annoyed them.
Did the KGB try to whack the Pope with a Bulgarian hitman? Yep. The East Germans were notified of this pre-whack try to cover themselves; this was found in their files.
It is within a pattern of consistent behavior for Putin and his KGB/NKVD/FSB buddies to whack this guy. People on this list are supposed to be rational. Pattern recognizers. If a Unix system kept popping the same output at the same time of day each day, you'd say, "Cron is doing something". If the KGB keeps killing people, you'd say, "Gee, that KGB keeps killing people."
But amazingly, given the evidence, people keep saying, "Why, no, that KGB has changed from its institutional roots, from the sociopath Laventina Beria under Stalin to now, and is now peaceful, cuddly, and furry."
Crap. They're killers.
-- thank you, have a nice day.
David Small
Rare? Hard to get? Not really.
. shtml[/url]
Want 500 microcuries of Polonium 210? Got $36.58? Buy a few 3" antistatic elements.
[url]http://www.2spi.com/catalog/photo/statmaster
The fact that Polonium was used proves nothing. Maybe the guy's wife is a shutter bug - or if she has a lover, the lover is a shutter bug?
All of that is pure speculation. Putin, the Russian mafia, a wife's lover.
What it will take is an isotopic examination of the contamination in his body and even that may be inconclusive because of the time and low levels involved.
Most likely this will be more of a case where they track his whereabouts as best as possible and look for other traces of radioactive contamination. That is one thing about radiation - it is easy to detect it at extremely low levels - though alpha radiation is harder because so many things shield it.
One other thing about the Polonium decay series - if you don't see the alphas, you don't get any other chances. Polonium 210 decays direct to a stable lead isotope (Lead-206) through the emission of the alpha particle (a helium nucleus - which is why helium was spotted in the guy's urine). If there was another decay or two that gave off something more penetrating, it would be harder to hide.
From http://unitednuclear.com/about.htm:
United Nuclear was formed in 1986 by Los Alamos scientist, Bob Lazar.Bob Lazar? This Bob Lazar? Yes.
I think you're missing the point. The method of killing was obviously intentional -- nobody goes to that much work without thinking about it -- so what does it suggest? Not that they wanted to prevent him from giving up some key piece of information, because obviously he had time to sing like a canary on his deathbed.
So what's the benefit of killing someone in some excruciatingly slow, mysterious way? How about that it's scary as fuck? If you were someone in Russia, thinking about criticizing the Putin regime, the act that they managed to poison somebody who had basically defected and was living (ostensibly protected) in a Western country, ought to give you a lot of food for thought. It's basically saying "there's no place that you can run where we won't get you."
I don't see this killing as much of a threat to anyone outside Russia; it seems more like a way to scare dissidents within the country, by making it clear that they can't be protected by anyone on the outside.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
This article (in Bulgarian):= 907
http://www.monitor.bg/article?sid=&aid=102511&eid
says Litvinenko was muslim and had connections to terrorists in Chechnya. No wonder he's blaming Putin for his death in TFA.
I agree with you. I guess I meant the kind of story it would be in... and I couldn't think of who wrote Bond. The poisoning in this manner was a definite message, with enought subtlety that it would be more La Carre than the Bond author.
Alec Guinness's portrayal of Smiley - so superb!
Funnily enough, we saw Karla in the television adaptation of Smiley's People, when he is blackmailed into defecting and Karla is played by a much younger Patrick Stewart who was probably quite fresh out of playing a devious imperial guard, Sejanus in I, Claudius.
See my journal, I write things there
Took long? Geeze, wait until we have HillaryCare here in U.S. and A.
Everyone underestimates the ineptitude of socialized medicine except those who are prisoners of it.
You can't walk 10 meters without being filmed by one camera or two.
They get shoplifters with this for gods sakes, there is no way such actions would go unnoticed.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
One correction though. You certainly do NOT need anywhere around $3 billion to get Polonium-210, not even close. You can get Polonium-210 for $69, legally, you do not even need a license. The site states: "No NRC license required! All our radioactive isotopes are legal to purchase & own by the general public." See "Alpha-only radiation emitters" section if you want to buy Polonium-210.