It would not be the first time, Mr Putin
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posted by zaina19 on January, 2007 as ANALYSIS / OPINION
From: MSN NicknameEagle_wng (Original Message) Sent: 12/29/2006 3:01 AM It would not be the first time, Mr Putin Publication time: Today at 10:10 Djokhar time Who on earth could think the Kremlin was behind the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, the former Russian intelligence officer, poisoned by a dose of radioactive polonium-210? A few cold warriors, perhaps, buried in the bowels of MI5 and the FBI's counterintelligence department, and a handful of exiled enemies of Russia living the good life in London. Probably the sort of people Dmitry Peskov, a spokesman for President Vladimir Putin, had in mind this week when he said: "This is a completely new Russia, although some people are still thinking of the country as the empire of evil." The cold warriors are the sort who would point to the rocket Mr Putin is said to have given a year ago to the head of the Russian Federal Security Service for the agency's poor performance. Not to speak of the decision in July from the Duma, the ... >> full
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Ramzan Kadyrov: The warrior king of Chechnya
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posted by zaina19 on as ANALYSIS / OPINION
From: MSN NicknameEagle_wng (Original Message) Sent: 1/5/2007 8:57 AM 5 January 2007 Ramzan Kadyrov: The warrior king of Chechnya Ramzan Kadyrov pairs pinstripes with a Kalashnikov. He's a loving husband who praises polygamy. He counts Mike Tyson as a friend, and President Putin as his closest confidant. Adored by his war-weary countrymen, he's been accused of torture at home and murder abroad. Andrew Osborn gets a rare audience with the self-styled Che of Chechnya Published: 04 January 2007 "King Ramzan" swaggers into his Grozny office like a man with the world at his feet. He's making an odd smacking sound with his lips, but his courtiers - and there are plenty of them - pretend not to notice. The Russian-backed Prime Minister of Chechnya is not a man to be messed with, especially if you work for him. At the age of just 30, Ramzan Kadyrov counts the Russian President Vladimir Putin as a close ally, wields enormous power in his war-ravaged world-infamous republic, and is the object of a Stalin-style ... >> full
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THE ILLUSION OF VICTORY: KREMLIN PROXIES MOUNT YEAR-END PROPAGANDA DRIVE
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posted by zaina19 on as ANALYSIS / OPINION
From: MSN NicknameEagle_wng (Original Message) Sent: 1/7/2007 4:58 PM THE ILLUSION OF VICTORY: KREMLIN PROXIES MOUNT YEAR-END PROPAGANDA DRIVE January 04, 2007 By Andrei Smirnov On August 2 of last year, President Vladimir Putin issued a decree instructing the Russian military command to submit, by December 15, 2006, a plan for a stage-by-stage withdrawal of troops from Chechnya in 2007-2008 (Chechnya Weekly, August 10, 2006). However, continuing hostilities in the region have forced the Russian authorities to drop this idea. Last fall, Russian generals issued one statement after another pointing to the serious security problems in the Chechen Republic (Chechnya Weekly, November 9, 2006). When the deadline arrived on December 15, nothing was heard about the need for a withdrawal plan that was supposed to have been submitted to Vladimir Putin. The idea of the August 2 decree was to come up with a withdrawal plan by the end of the year as proof that the war in Chechnya had ended. This way, on the eve of the parliamentary and presidential ... >> full
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Polonium-210 perfect poison for assassins
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posted by zaina19 on as ANALYSIS / OPINION
Prev Discussion Next Discussion Send Replies to My Inbox Reply Recommend Message 1 of 1 in Discussion From: MSN NicknameEagle_wng (Original Message) Sent: 1/8/2007 7:09 AM Polonium-210 perfect poison for assassins Publication time: Today at 12:26 Djokhar time The first signs of contamination were the traces of radiation on the laboratory desk of Israeli physicist Dror Sadeh, who was experimenting with an exotic radioisotope called polonium-210. Sadeh, part of Israel's nuclear program in the 1950s, had taken what he thought were adequate precautions against the hyperactive element. But it wasn't enough: Radiation was discovered "in my private home, and on my hands too and on everything that I touched," he wrote in his diary. Within a month, one student who worked in Sadeh's lab at the Weizmann Institute of Science was dead from leukemia. When the lab's supervisor died a few years later, Sadeh suspected he, too, had been contaminated by the leaky polonium-210. In the century since its discovery by famed French scientists Marie and Pierre Curie, ... >> full
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The return of the iron fist.
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posted by zaina19 on as ANALYSIS / OPINION
From: MSN NicknameEagle_wng (Original Message) Sent: 1/9/2007 11:29 AM Putin's Russia by William F. Jasper January 22, 2007 The return of the iron fist. "KGB influence 'soars under Putin,'" blared the headline of a BBC online article for December 13, 2006. The following day, a similar headline echoed a similarly alarming story at the website of Der Spiegel, one of Germany's largest news magazines: "Putin's Russia: Kremlin Riddled with Former KGB Agents." In the opening sentences of Der Spiegel's article, readers are informed that: "Four out of five members of Russia's political and business elite have a KGB past, according to a new study by the prestigious [Russian] Academy of Sciences. The influence of ex-Soviet spies has ballooned under President Vladimir Putin." The study, which looked at 1,061 top Kremlin, regional, and corporate jobs, found that "78 percent of the Russian elite" are what are known in Russia as "siloviki," which is to say, former members of the KGB or its domestic successor, the FSB. The author of the study, Olga Kryshtanovskaya, ... >> full
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