Perri Nelson's Website 

Did Vladimir Putin have Alexander Litvinenko silenced?

That's what Litvinenko had to say in a written deathbed statement, as reported in the Seattle Post Intelligencer:

LONDON -- A rare radioactive substance killed an ex-KGB spy turned Kremlin critic, the British government said Friday. In a dramatic statement written before he died, the man called Russian President Vladimir Putin "barbaric and ruthless" and blamed him personally for the poisoning.

Putin, in Finland, offered his condolences for the death of Alexander Litvinenko and denied any involvement. He called the release of the deathbed statement a "political provocation" by his opponents.

Litvinenko died late Thursday at a London hospital after spending days in intensive care as doctors puzzled over what was causing his organs to fail and attacking his bone marrow and destroying his immune system.

Britain's Health Protection Agency said Friday that the radioactive element polonium-210 had been found in his urine, and the police said traces of radiation were found at Litvinenko's home and a ritzy hotel bar and sushi restaurant he visited on the day he became ill.

Poisonings seem to be a popular way to deal with political inconveniences in Russia. Back in 2004, Victor Yushchenko was poisoned with TCDD, or tetrachlorodibenzoparadioxin, the most powerful of the dioxins.

Polonium is a pretty rare element, and it takes a lot more than can be found laying about in nature to kill someone. The amount needed to kill Litvinenko could only be made in a particle accelerator or a nuclear reactor.

That's not something just anyone would have at hand. Governments on the other hand could easily obtain it in sufficient amounts. Even so, it would be a pretty expensive way to silence your critics.

I have no idea how Litvinenko could have been exposed to that much polonium unless it was deliberate. The fact that it was detected at his home seems interesting though. Could he have been poisoned with enough polonium to leave traces behind wherever he went? Or did he have access to large amounts of it and mishandle it?

Police said they were treating the case as an "unexplained death" - but not yet as a murder.

The 43-year-old Litvinenko, who fiercely criticized Putin's government from his refuge in London since 2000, told police he believed he was poisoned Nov. 1 while investigating the October slaying of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, another critic of Putin.

Linked at 123 Beta.

Comment UI Updates

I spent some time yesterday and today working on a new Comments module. I was using Haloscan for comments, but I always wanted to write my Comments UI and comment handler.

The new UI will show up on the post detail page. If you're using Internet Explorer there will be a link just after the post with the link text "Add your comment!". If you click on this link an inline comment form will appear where you can enter your comments. If you're using any other browser, the comments form will appear inline on the post detail page.

The new comments module replaces Haloscan. I exported all of the Haloscan comments and imported them into my back end. I will implement a sidebar widget similar to the Haloscan recent comments widget in the next couple of days.

The new UI should work for most of you. I've tried it on IE 6.0, IE 7.0, and Firefox 2.0 with success. I haven't gotten it working quite right for Opera, and I don't have Safari to test it with. I will probably implement a down-level comment box for those browsers this weekend.

Give it a try and let me know what you think!

Update: I've fixed the support for Opera and other browsers like Safari that don't support the rich UI. Hopefully now everyone can use the new UI.

I will have a recent comments widget added to the sidebar sometime this weekend. The five most recent comments will be listed in a fashion similar to the one provided by the Haloscan widget.

Shiite Barbarians burn Sunni worshippers alive

BAGHDAD, Iraq – Shiite militiamen doused six Sunni Arabs with kerosene and burned them alive as Iraqi soldiers stood by, and killed 19 other Sunnis in attacks on their mosques today, taking revenge for the slaughter of at least 215 Shiites in the Sadr City slum the day before.

...

In Baghdad, al-Sadr followers warned they would suspend their membership in parliament and the Cabinet if Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki meets with President Bush in Jordan next week, a member of parliament said. Bush and al-Maliki were scheduled to meet Wednesday and Thursday in Amman.

The al-Sadr bloc in parliament and government is the backbone of al-Maliki's political support, and its withdrawal, if only temporarily, would be a severe blow to the prime minister's already shaky hold on power.

Legislator Qusai Abdul-Wahab, an al-Sadr follower, blamed U.S. forces for Thursday's bombings in Sadr City because they failed to provide security.

...

The bloodshed underlined the impotence of the Iraqi army and police to quell determined sectarian extremists at a time when the United States appears to be considering a move to accelerate the handover of security responsibilities.

"We condemn such acts of senseless violence that are clearly aimed at undermining the Iraqi people's hopes for a peaceful and stable Iraq," said White House spokesman Jeanie Mamo.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan also condemned the violence and in a statement urged "the Iraqi people to heed the calls by political and religious leaders from all sides for calm and restraint to prevent an escalation of the situation."

So Kofi Annan actually has something useful to say about this, but that's all it is, talk. Meanwhile Democrats are calling for a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq. Our European "allies" talk about getting out of Iraq.

The problem with all of this is that we can't really leave until the Iraqi military is ready to provide security for all of the Iraqi people. If the Iraqi's can't take care of their own house then they'll fall to the terrorists on both sides of the sectarian violence as soon as we leave.

This continued violence is what comes from "negotiating" with terrorists like al-Sadr. Part of our focus should be to root them out and destroy them. Anything less, especially a "limited" fight will ultimately result in a fallen Iraq and a victory for the terrorists.

Linked at Rightwing Guy, Basil's Blog.

Update: It turns out that the A.P. article was false. According to CENTCOM the incident described did not take place.

Mayor Nickels ready to act like spoiled child

Northwest Cable news reports on the spoiled mayor of Seattle's plans for a tunnel.

Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels says the city "will not support" any option other than a multi-billion dollar tunnel to replace the aging Alaskan Way viaduct, regardless of what the governor decides. The mayor's alternative? Send all those viaduct drivers onto city streets.

...

A surface street option would mean diverting 103,000 trips per day through the waterfront and downtown, in a city already choked with traffic.

If Gregoire opts for anything other than the mayor's tunnel, he could try to block the plan by not approving permits, withholding funds or through legal action.

...

A Department of Transportation study found that diverting viaduct traffic onto surface streets could increase congestion downtown from four hours a day to 13 hours a day

It seems to me that it's long past time for Greg Nickels and the Seattle City Council to be replaced. The Alaskan Way viaduct can be repaired for a lot less than building a tunnel would cost or even replacing it. But if Mayor Nickels and the Seattle City Council get their way, it will be years before it's replaced.

Replacing the viaduct with a tunnel will mean 3 years of 13 hour per day congestion in downtown Seattle, and will cost at least $4.6 billion. Replacing it with another elevated structure will take considerably less time and only cost around $2.8 billion, provided the mayor and the city council don't act like spoiled children and try to block it. If these so-called leaders continue their childish actions it could cost over $5 billion.

Whose money do they think they're spending anyway? Every penny of the money that will go into this comes out of the taxpayers pockets. Some of it comes from taxpayers as far away as Florida or Hawaii, since the repairs are partly federally funded.

It's obvious that Mayor Nickels and the Seattle City Council don't give a damn about what the people want. They refused to put this up to a vote when they found out that things were going to cost more. Now they want their way regardless of what the governor decides, despite the fact that it means higher costs, and a longer period of inconvenience to Seattle.

It is not in Seattle's or the surrounding area's interests for these spoiled children to continue in power.

Cross posted at NWBloggers.com