Archive for September, 2010
Computers can go wrong, and everyone is used to it. But that's at home. We assume that the machines controlling the infrastructure that makes everything tick – power stations, chemical works, water purification plants – have rock-solid defences in place to deal with unexplained crashes or virus attacks by malicious strangers.
Now, though, a new kind of online sabotage has reached its zenith with a self-replicating "worm" that started on a single USB drive and has spread rapidly through industrial computer systems around the world.
So sophisticated that many analysts believe it can only be part of a state-sponsored attack, the Stuxnet worm - or "malware" – is the first such programming creation designed with the specific intention of causing real world damage. And if the experts are right, it could herald a new chapter in the history of cyber warfare.
The worm, designed to spy on and subsequently reprogramme industrial systems running a specific piece of industrial control software produced by German company Siemens, has now been detected on computers in Indonesia, India and Pakistan, but more significantly Iran; 60 per cent of current infections have taken place within the country, with some 30,000 internet-connected computers affected so far, including machines at the nuclear power plant in Bushehr, due to open in the next few weeks.
Yesterday Hamid Alipour, deputy head of Iran's Information Technology Company, warned that nearly four months after it was identified, "new versions of the virus are spreading". And he claimed that the hackers responsible must have been the result of "huge investment" by a group of hostile nations.
Despite intense scrutiny of the code by malware experts, they have so far been unable to discover exactly what the intended target of Stuxnet may be, or has been. But Alan Bentley, international vice president at security firm Lumension, is in no doubt that it's "the most refined piece of malware ever discovered".
The motive is certainly not, as is usual with such attacks, financial gain or simple tomfoolery; Stuxnet is intelligent enough to target specific kinds of industrial computer systems configured in a certain way and then, if it finds what it's looking for, seek new orders to disrupt them.
Two potential targets of the worm may have been nuclear facilities within Iran at Bushehr and Natanz; indeed, a document on the website Wikileaks suggests that a nuclear accident may have occurred at Natanz during early July 2009, followed shortly afterwards by the unexplained resignation of the head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organisation.
But if that was Stuxnet's intended target, it has continued to spread regardless, causing consternation at industrial facilities worldwide. Melissa Hathaway, a former US national cybersecurity coordinator, has expressed particular concern at the availability of Stuxnet's code and the techniques it employs to the wider internet community, saying: "We have about 90 days to fix this before some hacker begins using it."
Security software firm Symantec has estimated that Stuxnet would have taken between five and ten specialists around six months to compile – a resource not within the means of the average internet criminal. One of the engineers working on unpicking the code expressed his surprise at the sophistication of the project, adding: "This is what nation states build if their only other option would be to go to war."
Iran's deeply controversial nuclear ambitions throw up any number of likely suspects, but a number of fingers have pointed at Israel, and in particular its intelligence corps, Unit 8200. Last summer, Reuters reported on Israel's burgeoning cyber-warfare project, with a recently retired Israeli security cabinet member stating that Iran's computer networks were very vulnerable.
Scott Borg, director of the US Cyber Consequences Unit, added that "a contaminated USB stick would be enough" to commandeer the controls of sensitive sites such as uranium enrichment plants – a rather prescient prediction.
drive from www.independent.co.uk
Japan demanded today that China pay for repairs to coastguard vessels damaged in a recent collision with a Chinese trawler, a day after it rejected Beijing's request to apologise and pay compensation for detaining the fishing boat's captain.
Japan had hoped to draw a line under the debacle, and to begin repairing Sino-Japanese relations, by releasing the trawler's captain, Zhan Qixiong, from custody late last week on the southern island of Okinawa.
While Zhan returned to China to a hero's welcome on Saturday, the latest round of claims and counterclaims suggest the most damaging row between Tokyo and Beijing for years is far from over.
Japan's chief cabinet secretary, Yoshito Sengoku, said Beijing had been asked to pay for the damage to the two vessels. "Naturally, we will be asking for the boats to be returned to their original condition," he said.
He said the onus was on China to ease tensions in the relationship between the two countries, which is at its lowest point in years: "At this point, the ball is now in China's court."
Zhan was arrested on 8 September, a day after his ship collided with two Japanese patrol boats near the Senkakus, a group of uninhabited islands in the East China Sea which are claimed by both countries. The islands, known as the Diaoyu in China, are surrounded by fishing grounds and potentially huge oil and natural gas deposits.
Japan's prime minister, Naoto Kan, yesterday dismissed Chinese requests for compensation and an apology over the arrest. "Senkaku is a Japanese territory," he said. "From that point of view, an apology or compensation is unthinkable. I have no intention at all of meeting the demand." But he added: "Both sides should first become calm and deepen mutually beneficial strategic ties. What is necessary is for both to cool down and keep in mind the bigger picture."
Zhan's detention prompted China to suspend high-level contacts and call off talks on joint undersea gas exploration in disputed waters. Chinese commentators unleashed a stream of nationalist invective on the internet while travel agencies cancelled package tours to Japan. In addition, trading company officials believe that China last week imposed a de facto ban on exports to Japan of rare metals used in a range of hi-tech products.
Prof Feng Zhaokui, of the Japan Research Institute at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, blamed Japan for triggering the row by detaining the trawler and its crew rather than pursuing its usual policy of chasing boats out of the area. "Releasing the captain was Japan's first step towards correcting its wrongdoing, but it is not clear how this will develop," he said.
"Neither side is ever going to apologise or compensate. Maybe it will just be left like this, unsolved. But that is OK, because the Diaoyu issue has been there for a long time and Japan and China did not end their relations because of it."
Dr Shogo Suzuki, an expert on Sino-Japanese relations at the University of Manchester, said Japan could emerge the diplomatic victor, despite accusations it had caved in to pressure from Beijing. "Predictably, conservative elements have seen Kan as being too weak. But I think China has paid an enormously high price for one fisherman," he said.
"It has worsened China and Japan's relations, which were on the mend, it has brought Japan much closer to America again, and other countries – such as Korea – have been watching this closely and getting alarmed at how belligerent China can be over territorial issues. China's attempts to be seen as a benign rising power have been tarnished."
The decision not to prosecute Zhan has drawn criticism from Japanese conservatives.
A dozen parliamentarians from the governing Democratic party of Japan issued a statement today criticising Zhan's release and calling for troops to be stationed on the Senkakus.
Nobuteru Ishihara, secretary general of the opposition Liberal Democratic party, accused the government of engaging in "tone-deaf diplomacy".
In Beijing the People's Daily, the communist party paper, accused Japanese politicians of exaggerating the threat posed by China in the wake of the collision. "On issues of sovereignty and territorial unity and integrity, China's stance is unyielding and there can be no concessions or compromise," it said.
"Japan's development and prosperity cannot be divorced from China's development and prosperity, and Japan cannot afford the price of continued contention with China."
Japan has also called for the immediate release of four employees of a construction firm held in China's Hebei province since last Monday for allegedly filming a military installation.
Their employer, Fujita Corporation, said the men were in the area preparing a bid for a project to dispose of chemical weapons abandoned in China by the Japanese military at the end of the second world war.
It is not unusual for visitors to be arrested for inadvertently filming Chinese military facilities, but most are fined and released the same day.
drive from www.guardian.co.uk
Pyongyang is the showcase capital for a Stalinist experiment gone horribly wrong. Like the embalmed face of the nation's founder, Kim Il-sung, lying in a glass coffin in his mausoleum in the Kumsusan Memorial Palace, the city at night has an eerie waxy pallor that can't disguise its slow decomposition. From the 40th floor of the Yanggakdo hotel, the dim illumination from street lamps and low-watt bulbs in apartment buildings is a telltale sign of the city's lack of fuel and creaking electricity grid. The brightest lights shine on the architectural baubles, idolatrous murals and giant statues of Kim dotted all around the city.
But off the wide, main boulevards, stories abound of poverty and malnutrition following a botched currency revaluation last year. Food prices, which rose 10-fold after the revaluation, have reportedly fallen back to about twice their old level, bringing enormous hardship to an already crippled economy.
The guides treat visitors like antibodies around a virus, hustling them from one approved site to the next and isolating them in the hotel – dubbed Alcatraz because it's built on an island a mile south-east of the city centre.
Delegates have already begun gathering for the first conference of the ruling Workers' Party in decades. From tomorrow, they will meet in Mansudae Assembly Hall to discuss a successor to Kim's son, Kim Jong-il, who is recovering from a stroke suffered in 2008.
But our guides in Pyongyang, who surely know these facts, stay tight-lipped, swatting away questions about the transition or what it could mean for this crippled nation. "We are not politicians, only ordinary people," says one. The only way to see beyond the facade was to give the guides the slip by leaving the hotel at dawn, walking quickly across the bridge from Yanggak Island and ignoring the quizzical looks of North Koreans in probably the world's most isolated capital.
Many were just starting their day, going to work on foot, by bicycle or in the city's rusting electric tram system. Women crimped their hair as they hurried to the tram; men walked their daughters to school. A typical morning anywhere, except this is modern life stripped bare: no iPods, jeans, T-shirts or sneakers, which are banned as foreign affectations. Mobile phones are as rare as sparrows in winter.
As we walked into the backstreets, the mask began to slip. Here the roads were potholed, the people scruffier and more sullen and some appeared to live in slum-like conditions. Rounding a street we came across a group of maybe 200 huddled around a makeshift street market, our first concrete sign that even here, in North Korea's carefully cultivated Potemkin Village, the country's state-controlled distribution system is shot to pieces.
The crowd eyed us nervously – markets such as this are illegal because, among other things, they strike at the heart of the official claim that the Kim Jong-il dictatorship will provide all. And they allow people one of the few places outside official gatherings to meet and talk. Women on haunches rolled out slabs of meat, vegetables, apples, even underwear – a prized commodity here – ready to disperse at the first sign of trouble. As I raised my camera to take a picture, the crowd began furiously yelling and pointing, and several came for us.
A man in a scruffy army uniform demanded our cameras. We tried to walk away as our bags were violently tugged. My colleague, Richard Lloyd Parry of The Times stumbled and fell. We realised we simply had no choice if we were going to safely escape. We surrendered our cameras. Our interrogator then tried to march us to what looked like a police station and we shook him off, before making a wrong turn and walking straight into a phalanx of green uniforms – a local guard-post.
Foreign journalists have been locked up here before. US citizens Euna Lee and Laura Ling were accused of espionage after being captured reporting along the border, held for months and only freed after a rescue mission by Bill Clinton. Luckily for us, we aren't Americans, but we mentally rehearsed the possible consequences. The further that news of our excursion went up the chain of command, the more likely we would be subjected to a full background check. We had both come in disguised as ordinary tourists. Back in my hotel room were my press ID from Japan, business cards and a laptop with articles I'd written on Kim, including one called "Schooldays of a Tyrant". If the trouble stayed within this neighbourhood goon squad, we might get away with a ticking off from our guides. If not, who knows?
In broken English, we began explaining that we were in town as delegates to the Pyongyang International Film Festival and had simply gone for a stroll. As we talked, an army vehicle drove up and a soldier came in carrying our cameras, which he'd retrieved from the crowd. The men fiddled awkwardly with the unfamiliar technology before giving up and demanding we show our pictures.
drive from www.independent.co.uk
Bishop Eddie Long, the pastor of one of America's best-known "megachurches" who is facing sexual misconduct allegations, will make his first public comments on the claims of three young men during services on Sunday, in which he is expected to deny the accusations against him.
Yesterday Bishop Long cancelled an interview on a nationally syndicated radio programme. Instead, his lawyer went on the show to read a statement from the pastor, saying he wanted to respond to the allegations but had been legally advised to wait. "Let me be clear. The charges against me are false," the statement said.
The affair erupted on Tuesday, when three men who were members of Bishop Long's New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in the Atlanta suburb of Lithonia, claimed in separate lawsuits that he forced them into sexual relations with gifts including cars, cash and travel when they were aged 17 and 18.
Unusually, the three men – Maurice Robinson, Anthony Flagg and Jamal Parris – have allowed their names to be made public. In documents obtained by ABC News, Mr Parris claimed that the bishop would request he be nude in his presence and would request "sexual massages" and "oral sodomy" during trips together in the US and abroad.
Members of the New Birth church, whose membership has grown from 300 to over 25,000 since Bishop Long became pastor in 1987, include politicians, celebrities and the county sheriff. Four years ago, it played host to four US presidents during the funeral of Coretta Scott King, the widow of the Reverend Martin Luther King. Its complex includes a 10,000 seat cathedral, costing $50m [£31.8m].
Bishop Long, who is married with four children, has been a vociferous campaigner against same sex marriage, and in 2004 led a march with Rev King's daughter Bernice to her father's grave in Atlanta in support of a proposed constitutional amendment that defined marriage as "between one man and one woman."
The pastor's lawyer, Craig Gillen, said the trips with the young men were part of a "mentoring programme" in which other members of the congregation also took part. He said the three who had levelled the accusations of sexual impropriety were motivated by money – and one, he noted, had been accused of breaking into the pastor's office.
However the version of BJ Bernstein, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, was rather different, although she admitted she had little physical evidence to back up the allegations. Bishop Long had sent dozens of emails and phone calls to her clients, which were not "overly sexual." But she said she would subpoena records from Bishop Long that would show he travelled with the young men to New York, Las Vegas, New Zealand and elsewhere.
She also implied that the New Birth church was so influential that the local authorities could not be trusted to investigate the claims properly. "This is a really large church that's incredibly politically powerful, Ms Bernstein said. "There are pictures of this guy with every politician around. With something this important, how can I trust that word didn't get back to the bishop?"
Sexual and homosexual allegations against religious figures in the US are nothing new. In 2006, Ted Haggard, leader of a mega-church in Colorado and president of the National Evangelical Association, was revealed to have had a gay affair. This week Rev Haggard – who now says he is "completely heterosexual" – spoke out in support of Bishop Long, saying: "Nobody's guilty until the court says he's guilty."
drive from www.independent.co.uk
They have lived through a catastrophic mine collapse and survived for nearly two months underground, but now the trapped Chilean miners are preparing for a fresh ordeal: surviving the attention of the world's media above ground.
With efforts to free them advancing faster than expected, the 33 men are receiving media training and lessons in how to deal with any financial benefits they may receive.
Government officials have said that the miners will be freed before 1 November, but many on the rescue team believe this could happen days – or even weeks – earlier.
The men's survival has already brought them international fame, and updates on their condition dominate local news. The moment when they finally emerge from underground will be the culmination of one of the most highly publicised rescues in history.
As the rescue draws closer, the men are to receive media training via closed circuit TV from a psychologist and a former journalist. They will be given lessons on "remaining poised during an interview, asking the interviewer to repeat the question if they don't understand it, and how to say that they prefer not to answer", explained Alberto Iturra, the rescue team's lead psychologist, who has counselled the men for weeks.
The men, who have received more than 1,000 job offers, will also be taught to open bank accounts, and understand the basics of financial management.
Psychologists on the medical support team hope to shelter the men from the expected media onslaught after their rescue, which will involve them being strapped inside a torpedo-shaped capsule, winched up a 700-metre shaft then taken by helicopter to a nearby military base.
But a debate has erupted between the medical team, who want the miners to be taken to a private clinic, and the Chilean government, which wants to put the men in a public health clinic to showcase the country's much-maligned public health system.
As the rescue effort advances, the government is rushing to put the entire extraction plan in place. The capsules are being custom built at the Chilean navy shipyards and are due to be delivered to the mine in 10 days.
The steel device is designed to provide the miners with oxygen, video screens, wifi communications and a solid roof to deflect falling rock and debris. Although the men are currently in good health and follow a daily exercise programme, the capsules are designed to carry them even if they are unconscious. Sedatives will be used, if necessary, to help the men relax during the estimated six- to 20-minute journey to the surface.
Rescue teams want to try out the device to ensure it does not spin on the way up and that friction with the shaft walls is minimal, to avoid burning the men inside the steel chamber.
drive from www.guardian.co.uk
The BBC has been accused of failing to support one of its foreign correspondents after his report about a shoe being thrown at the Greek prime minister was temporarily removed from the BBC News website.
Malcolm Brabant, an award-winning BBC correspondent, filmed the shoe-throwing incident involving the Greek prime minister, George Papandreou, earlier this month.
The incident happened when Papandreou was visiting the city of Thessaloniki, where approximately 20,000 protesters were demonstrating against his government's swingeing austerity cuts.
The corporation took the footage down from the website after what it described as "supporters of the [Greek] government" complained about the video and made allegations about its authenticity.
The film was taken down despite, it is understood, protests by Brabant. Since the Guardian made inquiries, the BBC has put the video back online.
Colleagues of Brabant claimed that the fact the BBC took the footage down was seized upon by Greek government supporters and some of the country's media, who then publicly questioned Brabant's reputation. An anonymous opinion piece in the Greek daily newspaper To Vima – The Tribune – alleged: "There are more than a few people who consider that Mr Brabant, since he sank lower than the worst reporter on a cheap tabloid in his country, should not only apologise, but ask himself if he can continue to portray the serious correspondent in Athens."
The BBC World News editor, Jon Williams, went on Greek television to defend Brabant, who has won the Sony reporter of the year award for coverage of the siege of Sarajevo and an Amnesty International prize for coverage of the Russian bombardment of Grozny in Chechnya.
However, former BBC foreign correspondent Martin Bell questioned the BBC's handling of the incident.
"I worry a little about the spine that should have been there and was not shown," he said. "I think it's extraordinary that this can happen in a so-called democracy. It's not easy being a foreign correspondent. They should be allowed to operate without being intimidated."
Some of the BBC's foreign correspondents are understood to be concerned about the precedent of removing the report from the corporation's news website and are supporting Brabant.
A friend of Brabant's said: "The BBC's spinelessness has done immense damage to his reputation in Greece, so much so that he may not be able to operate there any more. He is furious."
One BBC News insider added: "'It looks as though the footage should have never been taken off the website. It sounds like people within the Greek government thought they'd try and divert attention."
A BBC spokesman said: "The shoe incident was covered as part of the BBC News Online article throughout the weekend. There were questions about the video showing the incident so the page featuring the clip was taken down, but it is now back up on the website given it is clear to us that the allegations were unfounded."
Brabant declined to comment.
drive from www.guardian.co.uk
Akhmed Zakayev, the Chechen leader living in exile in Britain, was arrested yesterday in Poland as he attended a meeting of Chechen exiles from across the world. Mr Zakayev is one of the most wanted men in Russia, where he is accused of involvement in kidnapping and terrorism, and Moscow has made several unsuccessful attempts to have him extradited.
A battlefield commander in the two Chechen wars in the 1990s, he was detained as he made his way voluntarily to the Polish prosecutor's office for questioning. He claims the charges against him are trumped up and said before his arrest that he had gone to Warsaw "absolutely legally" and would not be hiding from the authorities.
"Poland is a democratic and sovereign country. When I learned there would be no trouble, I just came," he said. Polish authorities said they were acting on an international arrest warrant issued by Interpol.
Russia's chief prosecutor, Yury Chaika, said that material supporting the extradition request had been forwarded to Warsaw yesterday. He insisted that Mr Zakayev would face a fair trial in Russia. The former actor was granted political asylum by the UK in 2003 after a judge ruled that he would not get a fair trial in Russia.
"It hadn't crossed our minds that we should abandon this enterprise [the congress] and that the Poles, who have always supported us, would turn their backs on us," Mr Zakayev told the Polish newspaper Rzeczpospolita.
Poland has always been seen as a safe haven for Chechen refugees and exiles and the decision of authorities there to carry out the arrest came as a surprise. But relations between Moscow and Warsaw have thawed in recent months. Polish officials said the decision whether to extradite the 51-year-old would be taken independently of political concerns. "We will not be trying to meet anybody's expectations," insisted Prime Minister Donald Tusk.
In 2002, Mr Zakayev was arrested by Danish police while in Copenhagen for a similar congress of Chechen exiles. That came just after the Nord-Ost theatre siege, when a group of suicide bombers took hundreds hostage in a Moscow theatre. The Russian authorities accused Mr Zakayev of helping to plan the attack, which he denied. He was released by the Danes after a month in custody.
Since being granted asylum in Britain he has fought off a number of extradition attempts from the Russians. He is one of several Russian exiles living in Britain – most of the others are businessmen – whom Moscow wants to see tried in a Russian court.
During the late Soviet period Mr Zakayev worked as an actor in Grozny, the Chechen capital. When war broke out in the 1990s, he became a field commander for the rebel forces who were fighting the Russian Army for independence. Later, he led peace negotiations with the Russians that brought Chechnya de facto independence for a few years; he was also made deputy prime minister.
When the Second Chechen War began in 1999, Mr Zakayev took to the battlefield again. In early 2002 he moved to the UK, where he won support from the actress Vanessa Redgrave.
There have been persistent rumours that Mr Zakayev might return to Chechnya and strike a deal with Ramzan Kadyrov, Chechnya's Kremlin-backed leader. Mr Kadyrov is himself a former rebel, and has been accused by human rights groups of presiding over widespread rights abuses and torture, which he denies. Mr Kadyrov has said in the past that Mr Zakayev would be welcomed back to Chechnya, while officials in Moscow have hinted that a deal could be made whereby charges were dropped. Yesterday, however, Mr Kadyrov said that Mr Zakayev should be tried in Russia and given a life sentence.
In an interview with The Independent in London last year, Mr Zakayev claimed he often met representatives sent "directly from [Russian Prime Minister Vladimir] Putin", but that the discussions focused on refugee issues and an amnesty for those who fought during the Chechen wars. He insisted the issue of his return was not up for discussion while the current power setup remained in place in Grozny, but refused to rule out a return completely.
drive from www.independent.co.uk
The official biography of France's first lady, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, has revealed the presidential couple used the secret services to find out who was spreading rumours of their alleged infidelity.
According to the authors of Carla and the Ambitious, Bruni-Sarkozy openly admitted she had obtained a police report identifying the culprits, including the former justice minister Rachida Dati.
The revelation comes as president Nicolas Sarkozy faces an embarrassing investigation into allegations the Elysée ordered France's intelligence services to spy on Le Monde journalists and identify the source of leaks in the political scandal surrounding L'Oréal heiress Liliane Bettencourt.
Unsubstantiated and vehemently denied rumours that both the president and his supermodel-turned-singer wife were having affairs spread around the world in March.
It was suggested at the time the couple had called on the security services to find out who was spreading the rumour but no evidence emerged.
Now, journalists Michaël Darmon and Yves Derai say the Elysée received a full police report suggesting there had been a plot by Dati, a former favourite of the president who was later sacked from the cabinet, and a second woman once married to the president's younger brother.
The authors say secret agents identified the plotters through their telephone calls and text messages and suggested the culprits tried to involve others, including a lobby group and a "VIP guru". Believing Bruni-Sarkozy was the president's "weak link" and an easy target, they aimed to persuade the president's previous wife, Cécilia Attias, from whom he split a few months after he was elected in 2007, to return.
Le Parisien newspaper said that as soon as she had the report in her hands, Bruni-Sarkozy called her predecessor, who now lives in New York, informing her: "Madam, I have to tell you that two people with who you are in contact are behaving in an unacceptable manner towards us … I am not talking about suspicious or malicious gossip. I have a police report that you are welcome to see. I know you have nothing to do with them but I suggest you keep away from them."
Darmon and Derai say police examined the phone records of several well-known "personalities" suspected of being involved in spreading the rumours.
This week, Le Monde announced a lawsuit for breach of confidentiality of sources, claiming the domestic intelligence agency, the DCRI – the equivalent of MI5 – broke the law by investigating the source of leaks from police interviews with witnesses in the Bettencourt party-funding scandal.
drive from www.guardian.co.uk
The two men who run Russia have been sketching varying visions of the future, in what passes for the party conference season. In Sochi a week ago, Vladimir Putin spent nearly three hours parrying questions from the Valdai Club, a group of foreign academics and journalists (including the Guardian) and told them that things would stay as they are. The prime minister looked tanned and fit. His nails were manicured and he turned out for the occasion in a glitzy suit and open linen shirt. If Franklin D Roosevelt had four terms of office, why could not he? Putin poured scorn on the idea of returning to elected regional governors and regaled the company with tales of how one of them bolted through the back door rather than face angry villagers after a disaster.
On Friday it was Dmitry Medvedev's turn to take the stage. The Russian president was flanked in Yaroslavl by South Korea's Lee Myung-bak on one side and Silvio Berlusconi on the other, but the annual gathering had some way to go before it could be called a Russian Davos. Medvedev wanted to knock on the head the notion that Russia was an autocracy – the description Putin seemed only too comfortable with in Sochi. "In Russia there is democracy. Yes it is young, immature, inexperienced but its democracy all the same. We are at the very start of the road."
Maybe, but Medvedev is not at the start of his. A year after his "Go Russia" article in which he tore into Russia's primitive raw-materials-based economy, its chronic corruption and the arbitrariness, lack of freedom and injustice to which its citizens were treated – all his phrases – the question can rightly be asked about when the president intends to set out on his long liberalising journey. By all accounts, not quite yet.
Both performances in Sochi and Yaroslavl are in marked contrast to how government actually functions in Russia. A glimpse into this will be provided at the end of the month by the publication of a book into the Federal Security Service (FSB) by two investigative journalists Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan. Their thesis is that under the aegis of Putin, a veteran KGB officer, the FSB has developed into something more powerful and more frightening that its predecessor. They call it the New Nobility and, significantly, the book will be published in English and outside Russia, before any attempt is made to sell it in Russia.
Soldatov and Borogan stick only to what they know and what they can prove. They discard claims they can not stand up, such as the allegations by Alexander Litvinenko, the former FSB lieutenant colonel poisoned in London, that Putin was behind two apartment bombings in Moscow, which killed over 200 people and were used to launch his career and a second war in Chechnya.
This approach makes their account all the more authoritative. The organisation they describe has grown into every facet of Russian life – the media, business, the internet – but it differs from the KGB in two respects: there is much less political control over the security service than there was under communism, and the generals who run it are now wealthy men, with both land and business interests.
drive from www.independent.co.uk
Two goals from Jamie Mackie extended Queens Park Rangers' lead to three points at the top of the Championship last night as they beat Ipswich 3-0 at Portman Road while Cardiff in second lost 2-1 at Leicester City.
Mackie struck in the 31st and 42nd minute to put Neil Warnock's side in charge at previously unbeaten Ipswich, who started the game in third place in the table. A Heidar Helguson penalty with 22 minutes to go rounded things off for QPR.
Leicester had Welsh midfielder Andy King to thank for their first league win of the season. Lee Naylor had put Cardiff in front at the Walkers Stadium but King scored twice to relieve the pressure on manager Paulo Sousa.
Scunthorpe under caretaker manager Ian Baraclough since Nigel Adkins' departure to Southampton earlier this week won 4-0 at Sheffield United. James Vaughan, on loan from Everton, hit a hat-trick to earn Crystal Palace a 4-1 win that leaves Portsmouth languishing on the bottom and Doncaster midfielder James Coppinger also scored three in Rovers' 3-1 win over Norwich. Meanwhile, Barnsley enjoyed a 5-2 win over Leeds in the Yorkshire derby at Oakwell.
drive from www.independent.co.uk
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