Relatives of victims of the subway blasts cry outside a morgue in Moscow where they arrived to identify a body

Moscow paused to mourn its dead Tuesday, a day after suicide bombers struck a pair of subway stations in a deadly rush-hour attack.

Flags across the city were lowered to half staff as hundreds of thousands of commuters returned to the transit system where the bombings had claimed dozens of casualties. Authorities said the attacks have killed at least 39 people — an increase of one since Monday — and wounded more than 60 others.

Television stations canceled entertainment programs for the day, while some also pulled commercials.

After being closed most of the day, both stations reopened around 5 p.m. Monday, said Veronica Molskaya, a spokeswoman for the Russian Emergencies Ministry. A heavy security presense was apparent throughout the subway network as police officers were visible on train platforms.

Russian investigators think Chechen rebels may have been behind the deadly strike.

“Our preliminary assessment is that this act of terror was committed by a terrorist group from the North Caucasus region,” said Alexander Bortnikov of the Federal Security Service, in reference to the investigation at one of the blast sites.

Although nobody has claimed responsibility for the attacks, Bortnikov’s statement is a strong implication that Chechen rebels fighting for independence were behind the strike.

The Russia-Chechnya conflict dates back nearly 20 years, with Chechens having laid claim to land in the Caucasus Mountains region. Thousands have been killed and 500,000 Chechen people have been displaced from the fighting. The area is located in the North Caucasus region of Russia between the Black and Caspian seas.

Moscow fears ‘war unleashed on its streets’

Monday’s blasts tore through the Lubyanka and Park Kultury stations in central Moscow — the female bombers detonating their explosives about 40 minutes apart, starting just before 8 a.m. (0400 GMT).

In St. Petersburg — about 650 km (400 miles) northwest of the Russian capital — three metro stations were shut as the result of a bomb scare after the Moscow blasts.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said the “terrorists” responsible for the Moscow subway attacks “will be destroyed.”

“I am sure that law enforcement agencies will do everything to find and punish the criminals,” said Putin, who called for helping the families of the victims and bolstering transportation safety.

Millions of commuters use the Moscow metro system each day. An estimated 500,000 people were riding trains throughout the capital at the time of the attacks. It was unclear when the system would return to normal service and the incident generated fear among commuters.

The attacks reverberated across the globe.

U.S. President Barack Obama condemned the “outrageous acts” and passed along his condolences.

“The American people stand united with the people of Russia in opposition to violent extremism and heinous terrorist attacks that demonstrate such disregard for human life,” Obama said.

The federal Transportation Security Administration said there is “no specific or credible information indicating an imminent or current threat to U.S. transportation systems,” even though some local authorities have decided to beef up security measures in some cities.

Why no subway is safe from terror attacks

Link to article: Moscow mourns subway suicide bomb victims

Researchers have thawed ice estimated to be perhaps a million years old or more from above Lake Vostok, an ancient lake that lies hidden more than two miles beneath the frozen surface of Antarctica using novel genomic techniques to determine how tiny, living “time capsules” survived the ages in total darkness, in freezing cold, and without food and energy from the sun.

Lake Vostok is located beneath four kilometers of ice in East Antarctica. The lake is approximately 250 km long and 50 km wide. The overlying ice provides a continuous paleo-climatic record of 400,000 years, although the lake water itself may have been isolated for as long as 15 million years.

Because of the long isolation, it’s believed that Lake Vostok could contain new lifeforms, and unique geochemical processes. For five years, scientists in Russia and the United States have sought to probe the ancient lake to discover the secrets lying inside this pristine body of water.

A major issue is the reality that it is impossible to penetrate an isolated ecosystem without contaminating it. The catch 22 inherent in Lake Vostok is that the very thing that make it potentially unique: because of its millennia of isolation from the rest of the world, it cannot be explored without introduction of microbes from the outer world.

NASA has expressed interest in exploring the lake to search for microbes that might be similar to ones on other planets. How the bacteria get energy to survive is an important unanswered question. The lake could be an analog to Jupiter’s moon Europa or subsurface where conditions are similar.

The ice segments were cut from an 11,866-foot ice core drilled in 1998 through a joint effort involving the United States, Russia, and France. The core was taken from approximately two miles below the surface of Antarctica and 656 feet (200 meters) above the surface of the lake, and has since been stored at -35 degrees Celsius at the National Ice Core Laboratory, Denver, Colo.

“This lake may have been isolated for that long – 15 million years,” said Lanoil, the principal investigator of the research project. “After nearly a year of preparation and verifying protocols, we are now ready to process the samples, and will examine the DNA of these microorganisms to understand how they survived in such an extreme environment.”

Link to article: Secrets of Antarctica’s 15-Million Year-Old Lake

The Start treaty led to huge reductions in the Russian and US nuclear arsenals.

Russia and the US have both said it should soon be possible to conclude a new nuclear disarmament treaty.

Officials in Moscow and Washington said US President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev had a “good conversation” reviewing negotiations.

The two countries are trying to replace the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which expired last December.

The US says it has more than 2,000 nuclear weapons, while Russia is believed to have nearly 3,000.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is to discuss nuclear disarmament with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov later this week in Moscow.

In a telephone conversation on Saturday, the two presidents “expressed satisfaction with the high level of consensus on the basic lines” of the treaty negotiations, the Kremlin said in a statement.

The pair “stressed that it is already possible to set firm dates to submit the draft agreement to the heads of state for their signatures,” the statement added, without setting the timeframe.

Disagreements

A spokesman for the White House National Security Council said: “Both leaders are committed to concluding an agreement soon.”

US plans for a missile defence system in Eastern Europe have irked Russia.

The two presidents launched talks to replace the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (Start) last April with an original deadline of December.

It was part of a Washington-inspired attempt to “reset” relations with Moscow after years of frayed ties under the administration of former US President George W Bush.

The landmark Start pact was signed in 1991 and led to huge reductions in the two countries’ nuclear arsenals.

Both sides have agreed to cut the number of warheads they hold to between 1,500 and 1,675 each.

But there have been disagreements on verification measures, how to count weapons and launch systems.

Another bone of contention is the US plan for a missile defence system in Eastern Europe.

In their telephone call, the two leaders agreed to give their negotiators “additional instructions” for concluding a draft treaty, the Kremlin statement said.

US and Russian negotiators have been meeting in Geneva to discuss a successor to the Start treaty.

President Obama has said his goal is to have a nuclear-free world. He has promised to cut the number and role of nuclear weapons in US security strategy.

The US is hosting a nuclear non-proliferation summit in Washington in April.

• All numbers are estimates because exact numbers are top secret.
• Strategic nuclear warheads are designed to target cities, missile locations and military headquarters as part of a strategic plan.

Israel
Israeli authorities have never confirmed or denied the country has nuclear weapons.

North Korea
The highly secretive state claims it has nuclear weapons, but there is no information in the public domain that proves this.

Iran
The International Atomic Energy Agency reported in 2003 there had been covert nuclear activity to make fissile material and continues to monitor Tehran's nuclear programme.

Syria
US officials have claimed it is covertly seeking nuclear weapons.

Link to article: US and Russia ‘near’ new nuclear arms treaty

A 76-year-old retired Dutch maths teacher described yesterday how for more than 25 years he was feted by communist leaders around the world as the inspired head of a radical Marxist-Leninist party that never, in fact, existed.

As Chris Petersen, head of the supposedly 600-member Marxist-Leninist party of the Netherlands, Pieter Boevé travelled to Beijing more than two dozen times and met Mao Zedong. He was also welcomed with open arms in Albania by Enver Hoxha, and in the eastern bloc capitals of Europe.

“In fact we had at most a dozen members, none of whom had the faintest idea of the truth,” Mr Boevé said yesterday from his home in the seaside resort of Zandvoort. “The whole thing was a hoax, set up by the secret services to learn all they could about what was going on in Marxist Peking.”

The Mao regime was so impressed by the revolutionary zeal of Mr Petersen/Boevé and his MLPN that it gave him regular briefings on the chairman’s latest thinking at the Chinese mission in The Hague. Beijing even funded the non-existent party’s newspaper, De Kommunist, which was written entirely by Dutch secret service (BVD) agents.

“We took everybody in,” Mr Boevé said proudly yesterday. “As far as I know, the MLPN was the only wholly fake radical party to have existed, and certainly the only one to have really worked. We passed inside information on every Maoist policy nuance to all the western intelligence forces. It was a wonderful adventure.”

Mr Boevé was first recruited by the BVD in 1955 when he visited a World Student Congress in Moscow. Soon after, he was invited to China, then still the Soviet Union’s ally, for a similar communist youth junket. After the Sino-Soviet split of the early 1960s, the Chinese began courting western communists and, egged on by the BVD, Mr Boevé played along.

“I was invited to Peking for a month-long course on the wisdom of Chairman Mao,” he said. “It was quite a baptism of fire. I hadn’t read a great deal of Marx or Lenin at that stage, let alone Mao. But I soon got very proficient. I could spout for hours.”

The foundation of the MLPN was announced by De Kommunist in 1969. Its main role was to undermine the official Dutch Communist party, the KPN, by denouncing its deviant beliefs and unreliable conduct, and to garner information on – and gain access to – the Maoist elite in Beijing.

In the latter task, it was successful beyond the BVD’s wildest dreams. “They adored us,” Mr Boevé said. “I was invited to all the big events – Army Days, Anniversaries of the Republic, everything. There were feasts in the Great Hall of the People and long articles in the People’s Daily. And they gave us lots of money.”

Most European Maoist groups, unable to keep up with an endless string of purges and policy about-turns, had lost faith by the mid-1980s, and the MLPN gradually began winding down its activities. But as late as 1989, after the Tiananmen student uprising, Mr Boevé was invited to Beijing to praise the regime’s crackdown.

The existence of Project Mongol, as it was dubbed by the BVD, was successfully kept secret until this September, when another former agent, Frits Hoekstra, published a book about the service’s glory days. It caused something of an uproar in the Netherlands, a country where a fair few genuine former radicals now occupy leading positions in public life.

Mr Boevé, who was never a salaried spy and who, despite his extra-curricular activities, rose to become headteacher of a top Dutch grammar school, said he was at first unwilling to have his name revealed. “My family knew, but no one else,” he said. “As far as my friends and former colleagues were concerned, all my travel was to do with educational exchanges.”

Since the revelations about his former life as one of the west’s most productive spooks, Mr Boevé said reactions have varied from shock and disbelief – “How can we ever trust you again?” – to mild amusement. “My fellow members of the Zandvoort town council call me 007,” he said. “I don’t mind. I’m satisfied with what I’ve done with my life. I’ve travelled the world at someone else’s expense, and I feel did my bit. And it was certainly fun.”

Link to article: The fake communist party scam that fooled Mao Zedong

The incident happened on a major Moscow motorway

Russia has launched a criminal inquiry following claims that traffic police used civilian motorists as a “human shield” to stop suspected criminals.

Several drivers were reportedly ordered to use their cars to form a barrier on a major Moscow motorway last Friday.

A vehicle driven by the suspected robbers smashed through the blockade minutes later and kept going. No-one was hurt but several cars were damaged.

The traffic police commander in charge has already been sacked.

It is the latest in a series of reported incidents involving Russian police, who are seen by many Russians as corrupt and brutal.

Driver’s account

Russia’s investigative committee, under the prosecutor general’s office, announced on Wednesday that a criminal investigation into the abuse of office by the traffic police was now under way.

It said it would investigate every single officer involved.

Moscow police chief Vladimir Kolokoltsev has already fired traffic police commander Alexander Kozlov, whose subordinates conducted the operation.

Stanislav Sutyagin says he was he was one of the civilian motorists used in the blockade.

In a video posted on YouTube, he said the police had not informed the drivers about what was going on, including the fact that the suspects were armed.

He says that just minutes later the robbers’ car, a silver Audi, hit his Mercedes and a car of another motorist.

“We could have been killed. What if the criminals had stopped? We could have come under fire? Is it really the case that our lives are worthless in the Russian state?”

He added that the traffic police officers had parked their cars behind the civilian vehicles during the operation.

Youtube video of the story

Link to article: Russian police ‘used drivers as human shield’

At least 147 have been killed and nearly a quarter of the globe put on urgent tsunami alert after one of the most powerful earthquakes of modern times hit South America.

A tremor with a magnitude of 8.8 devastated large parts of southern Chile and sent huge waves racing at up to 400 miles an hour across the Pacific. Isolated ocean islands were reported to have suffered severe wave damage, and tsunami warnings were issued across a vast area stretching from Russia and Japan through to the Philippines and New Zealand.

In the Chilean capital, Santiago, some five million woke up to “hell” as the earthquake, which struck in the small hours of Saturday morning, collapsed tower blocks and bridges and swallowed cars as it ripped cracks in the roads. Rescue teams worked throughout the day to dig out people buried alive in the rubble.

Residents of Santiago’s many tower soaring blocks spoke of their terror as the buildings swayed and shook in the middle of the night.

“We are lucky to be alive,” said Lloyd Edmondson, 27, a British businessman resident in Santiago. “We live on the 19th floor, the top floor of our building, and it was swinging like crazy. All the glasses, cabinets, paintings were smashed to pieces and the lift in the building fell from the 6th floor to the bottom floor and is ruined. Thank goodness nobody was in it.

“The noise of the rumbling was the most surreal thing. We could hardly even make it to the emergency stairs because the building was moving so much.”

The Chilean government, which declared a state of “national catastrophe”, put the death toll at 147 people. But with large parts of the country cut off, that figure is expected to rise. There were also unconfirmed reports of tsunami-related deaths on the sparsely-populated Juan Fernandez islands, off Chile’s 2,700-mile long coastline. The archipelago, said to be the location that inspired Daniel Defoe’s castaway novel Robinson Crusoe, was right in the tsunami’s path and had little time to react to warnings.

“There is an enormous amount of damage (on the Juan Fernandez islands), but we don’t know exactly much, we are still evaluating it,” said Chile’s president Michelle Bachelet, who appealed for calm as panic-stricken crowds in Santiago filled the streets in the middle of the night, many in their nightclothes.

The Chilean coastal town of Talca Juano was also hit by a wall of water which flooded streets. Other Pacific islands, including Easter Island and Hawaii, were put on emergency alert and organised partial evacuations of coastal communities. New Zealand issued an official warning of a wall of water up to 10 feet high, while in Hawaii, waves predicted to reach 16 feet were expected to arrive by 9pm British time.

Although the earthquake was nearly as powerful as the 9.2 magnitude tremor that triggered the Asian tsunami of 2004, in which around 200,000 people died, it was hoped that adequate early warnings would prevent a high death toll.

The earthquake struck at around 3.34am local time (6.43GMT). Its epicentre was a spot in the Pacific seabed around 75 miles from the Chilean coastal city of Concepcion, although the shock waves were powerful enough to be felt 1,000 miles away in Argentina. “We were in the living room, when suddenly the big lamp hanging from the ceiling started to move very fast making circles,” said one Buenos Aires resident.

Sitting on one edge of what geologists call the Pacific “Ring of Fire”, volcano-speckled Chile has a long history of earthquakes, thanks to its position on the cusp of two vast tectonic plates. A 9.5 magnitude tremor on 1960 was registered as the most powerful on the planet since records began a century ago, and in Santiago, tremors that shake cutlery at the dinner table and oblige schools to undertake emergency evacuation drills are seen as a part of life.

However, yesterday’s quake, the result of faultline pressure that that been welling up for nearly two centuries, was one of the most violent in living memory. “It was like watching the end of the world,” said Vicente Acuña, a 76-year-old shopkeeper from Talca, 65 miles from the epicentre.

Mario Riveros, a security guard at an industrial plant in Santiago, was standing by a bridge when it collapsed like a cardboard model. “I saw the cars falling into the water, and I didn’t know what to do,” he said. “I wanted to just cry.”

Elba Carrizo, 81, crawled under the table of her house in the middle-class district of Maipu, while the building collapsed around her.

“I saved myself because I hid under the table, while everything came down on top of me,” she said.

As one of Latin America’s most modern and affluent cities, Santiago benefits from architecture that is designed to withstand earth tremors, with spring-loaded foundations that allow structures to sway and flex when the ground beneath them shakes. As a result, the city managed to escape the kind of wholesale destruction that took place in last month’s earthquake in Haiti, which is estimated to have claimed some 200,000 lives.

“All buildings have to comply with very strict building regulations so that the structures can withstand earthquakes,” said Chilean architect Monica Jarpa. “Our architects have to be real experts in building earthquake-resistant buildings. “An understanding of earthquakes is ingrained into our culture.”

All the same, many older buildings were badly damaged, including the historic Nuestra Senora de la Providencia church, whose bell tower collapsed. An apartment building’s two-level car park also flattened on to the ground floor, smashing about 50 cars whose alarms and horns rang incessantly. Several hospitals have been evacuated due to earthquake damage, and others were overwhelmed with injured people.

In the coastal city of Vina del Mar, the earthquake struck just as people were leaving a disco. “It was very bad, people were screaming, some people were running, others appeared paralysed,” Julio Alvarez told Radio Cooperativa in Santiago.

The damage was thought to be greatest in the Concepcion area, which has a long history of suffering from the area’s seismic volatility. The town was razed at least five times by earthquakes and tsunamis between the 16th and 18th centuries, with the naturalist, Charles Darwin, observing the “awful” aftermath of one devastating tremor in 1835.

Communications to the town were cut off, with local journalist Alejandra Gouet describing the situation as “chaos”.

“Everyone was running out of their houses in their pyjamas to the central parks in the town,” she said. “The chemistry department of the university was on fire, with huge flames in the sky visible all over the city.

“What surprised me most was that the newer buildings were badly damaged too. The streets are all damaged, with the pavements rising up at least one metre high and buckling.”

The Foreign Office said it was checking as to whether any of the 65,000 British tourists and backpackers who visit Chile every year had been killed or injured in the quake.

In London, the Chilean ambassador, Rafael Moreno, was helping British-based Chileans make contact with their families, and hoping to hear from his 72-year-old sister, who lives in Concepcion.

“One girl studying for a degree in London phoned me because her family is on the spot where the earthquake reached almost nine,” Mr Moreno said.

“She was in tears, so I told her I will personally do research about the family and I will call her as soon as I have information.”

Link to article: Chile earthquake: tsunami fears as death toll hits 147