cryptogon.com

Whether the Georgian oligarch and opposition leader died naturally of a heart attack or from foul play is now for British detectives to determine.

They tested for radioactivity yesterday but found none.

“Badri”, as he was known, spent his final day in the company of Lord Goldsmith, the former Attorney-General; Lord Bell, Margaret Thatcher’s PR man; and a handful of Russian exiles. There was no security man in Lord Goldsmith’s offices and the Georgian seemed far from paranoid.

…

Since late last year Mr Patarkatsishvili, protected by 120 bodyguards, had been saying that he feared he would be assassinated in London by the Georgian authorities. In December he said he had been the target of at least two assassination attempts in Britain. The Georgian authorities had accused him of plotting a coup.

A covertly recorded audiotape purporting to be a conversation between a Chechen hitman and an official from the Georgian Interior Ministry was played in December to The Sunday Times. The voices suggested killing the Georgian in England or arranging for a helicopter or aircraft crash. “Even if he had 100 people guarding him, well that’s not a problem,” the official is heard to say. “Our issue is such that we’ll destroy these guards.”

There was every reason for Mr Patarkatsishvili to be frightened. His friend and colleague Alexander Litvinenko had been murdered in London in a suspected Russian poison plot using radioactive polonium-210. The Georgian had even sheltered the dissident former KGB man as he fled from President Putin’s clutches.

The web does not end there. The suspect wanted by Britain to be tried for murdering Mr Litvinenko is a former employee of Mr Patarkatsishvili and Mr Berezovsky. Andrei Lugovoy was security chief at their television station.

Mr Lugovoy, who denies anything to do with the poisoning, has a further link to Mr Patarkatsishvili’s final hours. Mr Lugovoy was jailed in 2001 for a failed attempt to free Nikolai Glushkov, the deputy director of Aeroflot, who was being held for alleged fraud. Mr Patarkatsishvili was accused by Russia of plotting that foiled escape. And who did the Georgian spend four hours with in Lord Goldsmith’s office on Tuesday? Mr Glushkov, now safely in London.

Plots, real and imagined, are all too easy to spot in the world of spies, politicians, financiers and gangsters into which the old Soviet Union descended. Mr Patarkatsishvili was far from above suspicion. He was regarded as little better than a mobster by General Aleksandr Korzhakov, former head of the Russian Presidential Security Service. “Badri”, Boris Yeltsin’s one-time bodyguard told the author Paul Klebnikov for his book Godfather of the Kremlin, “has an alias, like any gangster. In the criminal underworld he is known as ‘Badar’.” Klebnikov claimed that police sources saw Mr Patarkatsishvili as a go-between to Russian organised crime groups. The writer is unavailable for comment — he was shot four times as he left work as editor of Forbes Russia in Moscow in 2004.

Mr Patarkatsishvili was a business associate of Mr Berezovsky and Roman Abramovich, the Chelsea Football Club owner. The clique were said to be behind the choice of Vladimir Putin as president. When Mr Putin turned on Mr Berezovsky, Mr Patarkatsishvili stuck with his business partner and Mr Abramovich chose the Kremlin.

Recently Mr Patarkatsishvili’s prominent financing of the opposition to Georgia’s pro-Western leadership, even standing as a candidate in last month’s presidential election, is said to have pleased Russia.

The Georgian oligarch’s final day of business began with a prolonged meeting with Lord Goldsmith. The former Labour politician had been advising him on numerous disputes with the Georgian authorities over assets and withdrawal of licences. Also present were Mr Glushkov and Yuli Dubov, wanted for fraud in Russia but given asylum by Britain. After four hours of private talks, they were joined by Mr Berezovsky and his PR man, Lord Bell, for another two-hour session.

Mr Patarkatsiskvili was said by Lord Bell to have left the room to get some fresh air but seemed fine and full of energy when he returned. The Georgian then joined Mr Berezovsky at his Mayfair offices and, at 7pm, took his chauffeur-driven limousine home to his home, Downside Manor, near Leatherhead, Surrey.

It is unclear whether the family had their servants prepare a meal or sent out for a takeaway, but after eating, Mr Patarkatsishvili, worth an estimated £6 billion, went upstairs and collapsed in his bedroom. His wife and children called an ambulance.

Mr Berezovsky was woken at 3am to learn that another of his friends had died. He rushed to the manor but police had secured the windows and doors to preserve it as a crime scene and the Russian was refused entry.

Lord, boyish and enthusiastic, is a new kind of Air Force warrior — the provisional chief of the service’s first new major command since the early 1990s, the Cyber Command. With thousands of posts and enough bandwidth to choke a horse, the Cyber Command is dedicated to the proposition that the next war will be fought in the electromagnetic spectrum, and that computers are military weapons. In a windowless building across the base, Lord’s cyber warriors are already perched 24 hours a day before banks of monitors, scanning Air Force networks for signs of hostile incursion.

“We have to change the way we think about warriors of the future,” Lord enthuses, raising his jaw while a B-52 traces the sky outside his windows. “So if they can’t run three miles with a pack on their backs but they can shut down a SCADA system, we need to have a culture where they fit in.”

But before Lord and his geek warriors can settle in for the wars of the future, the general has to survive a battle of a decidedly different nature: a political and cultural tug of war over where the Cyber Command will set up its permanent headquarters. And that, for Lord and the Air Force, is where things get trickier than a Chinese Trojan horse.

The Obama campaign is not the vehicle of a leftward movement in the United States—as proclaimed by liberal groups such as MoveOn.org and publications like The Nation. It is a preemptive attack by the ruling class against such a movement. Its function is to delude the American people and divert their growing opposition to war, economic crisis and attacks on democratic rights back into the dead-end of the Democratic Party.

While the American people will cast ballots on November 4, the real decisions are made long before then, in the selection of candidates and framing of the election by the media and the corporate bosses and billionaires who finance and politically screen the candidates.

It was millions in “startup money” from wealthy backers that made it possible for a very junior senator from Illinois, a man who four years ago was serving in the Illinois state legislature and unknown nationally, to become a viable presidential candidate.

The largely flattering treatment of the Obama campaign, not only in the liberal sections of the media but in the right-wing press as well—Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post endorsed him in the February 5 primary in that state—demonstrates a broader agreement in the ruling elite that some sort of new departure in US politics may be required. This, of course, will be a cosmetic and not a fundamental shift.

Virtually all sections of the US ruling elite have now drawn the conclusion that the Bush administration is a disastrous failure. The world standing of America has declined catastrophically, while the base for imperialist policies has eroded within the United States itself, as the vast majority of the American people rejects the war in Iraq and opposes its extension into Iran, Syria, Pakistan or other potential targets.

The president who enters the White House in January 2009 will face immense crises both at home and abroad. To address these crises from the standpoint of the needs of the financial aristocracy will require the imposition of unprecedented sacrifices on the American people. That in turn will require a new political approach—a turn to the Democratic Party, which has always been relied upon by big business to use its image as the “party of the people” to defend the profit system.

The huge swing to the Democratic Party in campaign contributions from big business reflects this emerging consensus. According to recent financial reports to the Federal Election Commission, investment bankers have tilted their financial support overwhelmingly to the Democratic Party, giving roughly equal amounts to Clinton and Obama. In total contributions, both Clinton and Obama collected more than $100 million apiece in 2007, more than twice the largest amount raised by any Republican, while Obama raised an additional $32.6 million in January 2008 alone.

So far, the H5N1 strain has mainly infected birds and poultry workers, but experts fear the virus could mutate to pass easily from human to human.

However, Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that to enter human respiratory cells the virus must first pick a very specific type of lock.

The study appears in the journal Nature Biotechnology.

The researchers say their discovery may help scientists better monitor changes in H5N1 – and find better ways to fight it.

Flu viruses attack by binding sugar chains, called glycans, that line the airways and lungs.

Latching on

The chemical linkages between the sugar molecules in these chains differ between humans and birds.

Until now it has been assumed that bird flu viruses would be adapt to humans simply by acquiring mutations that enable them to attach to the human types.

But Dr Ram Sasisekharan and colleagues found this step depends on the shape assumed by the flexible sugar chains rather than the type of linkage.

Bird flu viruses currently require cone-shaped glycans to infect birds, so the umbrella shape found in humans has protected most of us from avian flu.

This suggests that for the H5N1 bird flu virus to become pandemic it must adapt so that it can latch onto the umbrella-shaped glycans of the human upper respiratory tract.

Dr Jeremy Berg of the National Institutes of Health which funded the work said: “Sasisekharan’s team has changed our view of flu viruses and how they must adapt to infect us.

“The work may also improve our ability to monitor the evolution of the H5N1 virus and thwart potential outbreaks.”

Professor Ian Jones, professor of virology at the University of Reading, said: “This new work shows that there are sublevels of sugar that the virus prefers to use to get into cells and the authors suggest this is a significant factor in why H5N1 has not yet spread to humans.

The nation’s largest automaker announced the latest round of buyouts as it reported another loss on its core auto operations in the fourth quarter, which combined with charges taken earlier in the year left GM (GM, Fortune 500) with a company-record $38.7 billion net loss for 2007.

To try to stem automotive losses that have dogged the company since 2005, the company is making a range of offers, up to cash payments of $140,000 to the remaining 74,000 GM workers represented by the United Auto Workers union.

The goal is not to reduce headcount but rather to bring in new workers at a lower cost.

About 46,000 of the GM employees are eligible to retire today and they can take pension incentives worth between $45,000 to $62,500 to retire.

In addition there are inducements for those who are within five years of retirement to leave early and receive benefits.

They’ve announced that Deputy Charlette Jones has been relieved of her duties without pay pending the outcome of an investigation. She has not officially been terminated.

Jones has been employed by the Hillsborough Co. Sheriff’s Office since 1996.

Chief Deputy Joe Docobo watched the video for the first time last night and said he found himself in “disgust” and was “appalled at every level.”

Docobo also announced that two corporals and a sergeant involved are now on administrative leave with pay, and the jail supervisor on duty did not have knowledge of the incident.

Brian Sterner broke his neck almost 14 years ago and is a quadriplegic.

Sterner, who can drive, was arrested on a traffic violation. When he was booked into the Orient Road Jail last month, Sterner couldn’t believe what happened.

He says a deputy looked at him and didn’t believe he was a quadriplegic. She walked behind him, took the handles on the back of the hospital-grade wheel chair and dumped it forward.

Sterner says he tried to roll as he was going down, but hit so hard he thought he had broken two ribs. Then, while he was on the floor, deputies frisked him and tried to get him back into the chair.

Sterner says he told them how to pick him up and put him back into the chair, but because he can’t feel anything from his breastbone down, he says he was injured and didn’t know it. Sterner thought he had broken two ribs, but jail x-rays showed that wasn’t true.

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said that aggressive interrogation could be appropriate to learn where a bomb was hidden shortly before it was set to explode or to discover the plans or whereabouts of a terrorist group.

“It seems to me you have to say, as unlikely as that is, it would be absurd to say you couldn’t, I don’t know, stick something under the fingernail, smack him in the face. It would be absurd to say you couldn’t do that,” Scalia told British Broadcasting Radio Corp.

Scalia said that determining when physical coercion could come into play was a difficult question. “How close does the threat have to be? And how severe can the infliction of pain be? I don’t think these are easy questions at all, in either direction,” he told the BBC’s “Law in Action” program.

U.S. interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, have been the subject of growing debate in the United States, and could play a role in the military trials of six men charged in connection with the Sept. 11, attacks. The issue also could find its way to the Supreme Court.

Scalia, visiting London during a break in the court’s calendar, referred generally to those methods as “so-called torture,” and said practices prohibited by the Constitution in the context of the criminal justice system — including indefinite detention — are readily allowed in other situations, such as when a witness refuses to answer a question in court.

“I suppose it’s the same thing about so-called torture,” he said in the interview. “Is it really so easy to determine that smacking someone in the face to find out where he has hidden the bomb that is about to blow up Los Angeles is prohibited by the Constitution?

The plans – arguably the biggest shake-up of border management in Europe since the creation of an internal travel zone – would apply to citizens of the United States and all other countries that now enjoy visa-free status.

They would, however, allow EU citizens and “low risk” frequent travelers from outside the bloc to pass through automated, fast-track frontier checkpoints without coming into contact with border guards. Voluntary programs for prescreening such visitors, who would register fingerprints and other data, would be stepped up.

The proposals, contained in draft documents examined by the International Herald Tribune and scheduled to go to the European Commission on Wednesday, were designed to bring the EU visa regime into line with a new era in which passports include biometric data.

The commission, the EU executive, argues that migratory pressure, organized crime and terrorism are obvious challenges to the Union and that the bloc’s border and visa policy needs to be brought up to date.