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Monday's attacks on Moscow's subways provide an odious reminder of the Russian empire's post-Cold War instability and the Russian government's severe internal challenges. As this column goes to press, no organization has claimed responsibility for the attacks that left 39 dead and scores wounded, though Russian commentators and international analysts suspect Islamist-inspired separatists in the northern Caucasus region planned and executed the terror strikes. Russian security forces are fighting guerrilla and terrorist cells based in troubled Caucasus political fragments like Dagestan, Ingushetia and Chechnya. Islamist separatist groups from these areas have used "the woman-delivered weapon" in previous attacks on Russian...

MAKHACHKALA, Russia (AP) - Russian officials say two suicide bombings in the southern province of Dagestan have killed at least nine people including two policemen. The incident comes two days after a twin suicide bombing tore through the Moscow subway, killing 39. A regional Interior Ministry spokesman told The Associated Press that the blasts occurred Wednesday morning in the town of Kizlyar, near Dagestan's border with Chechnya. Police pulled over a suspicious-looking car, when the driver detonated explosives. As police officers and residents gathered at the scene there was a second blast. Rebels from the North Caucasus, which includes Dagestan...

At least 25 people are reported to have been killed in an explosion on the Metro system in central Moscow, with a second blast coming shortly afterwards. The first blast happened at the city's central Lubyanka station, reports quoting security sources said. A second explosion happened at the Park Kultury station, Russian news agency Tass reported. Ten people were injured in the first blast, Tass said, quoting the emergencies ministry. The number of casualties at the second blast is not yet clear.

US servicemen will participate in the Victory Day Parade on Red Square in Moscow on May 9, Alexander Vershbow, assistant defense secretary for international security affairs said. The Americans will celebrate the 65th anniversary of Victory in WWII, the official said. Vladimir Kozhin, an official spokesman for the administration of the Russian president, confirmed that Moscow had invited France, Britain and the United States for the parade. The French were the first to agree. They now decide soldiers of which troops will march in the heart of Moscow on May 9. If all is arranged as planned, it will be...

"Russian 'Bin Laden' killed by Moscow's special forces Russia exulted in the death of a terrorist dubbed "the Russian Bin Laden," yesterday claiming it has proof he was behind a deadly train bombing last November that left 28 people dead." By Andrew Osborn in Moscow Published: 7:11PM GMT 07 Mar 2010 SNIPPET: "The FSB intelligence service said a special forces operation had resulted in the death of Sheikh Said Buryatsky, an Islamist convert whose real name was Alexander Tikhomirov."

RUSSIAN investigators have confirmed that the derailment of a passenger train which killed dozens of people was caused by a "terrorist attack", the Interfax news agency reported. "We are indeed talking about a terrorist attack," Vladimir Markin, spokesman for Russia's federal investigative committee... Investigators have found "elements of an explosive device" at the site...

In last 24 hours, an unknown virus (presumed pneumonic plague) infected another 37 thousand and killed 12 more people. The authorities deny that this is pneumonic plague, and insist that people die from influenza, pneumonia and ARI. Meanwhile, an emergency message from the President of Ukraine to the international community to immediately help in the fight against the virus, only reinforces the suspicion that pneumonia and influenza is not the cause. "The current threat to national security of Ukraine, which we can not offset on our own, requires me to turn to our closest friends and strategic partners for emergency...

As the Ford Taurus slowly approached the signal site, hidden FBI agents readied for a possible arrest. For weeks they had been staking out a path in Foxstone Park in Vienna, Virginia, outside Washington, D.C. Their elusive quarry was a Soviet mole in the FBI, codenamed “Ramon Garcia.”  ver the course of more than two decades, “Ramon” had done incalculable damage to the United States’ security, selling Top Secret information to the Soviet GRU (military intelligence) and KGB, and to the KGB’s Russian successor agency, the FSB, and its foreign arm, the SVR. Would “Ramon” stop this time? More than...

The Russian parliament and media refer to him merely as a “Russian businessman.” But to much of the rest of the world, Viktor Bout is known as the “Merchant of Death,” the most notorious member of the dark fraternity of global weapons traffickers who arm terrorist organizations, as well as the tyrannical regimes and brutal warlords and militias responsible for horrendous genocidal slaughters over the past two decades. Since his March 2008 arrest in Bangkok, Thailand, in an elaborate U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration sting, Viktor Bout has been in Bangkok’s Klong Prem Special Prison awaiting trial. The U.S. Department of...

A proposed law could make comparing Soviet rule with that of the Nazis a crime. Intellectuals fear a manipulation of Russia’s past.A bitter joke from the Soviet-era has it that Russia is the world's only country with an unpredictable past. That jibe has come winging back in recent days, after the Kremlin announced the creation of a special 28-member panel tasked with examining and combating examples of "historical revisionism" that harm Russia's image. The committee, which has no legal power, is chaired by the head of President Dmitry Medvedev's administration, Sergei Naryshkin, and includes a sprinkling of historians but also...

IntroductionPresident Barack Obama recently set the wheels in motion to render the ultimate control of our large financial institutions, large insurance companies, large hedge funds and quite possibly our financial markets as well, to a foreign entity. A new international regulatory agency was created at the recent G-20 Summit in London, and all G-20 countries signed onto it. Sadly, you probably have not heard a word about it until now. Prepare to be outraged as you read what follows. And I will tell you how to confirm it on your own. Every freedom-loving American - whether conservative, moderate or liberal...

LONDON (Reuters) - Leaders of the G20 largest developed and emerging economies agreed on Thursday to a $1.1 trillion program to restore global growth and rebuild a financial system, ravaged by the worst financial crisis since the 1930s. Here are the key points in the final G20 communique. -- "To treble resources available to the IMF to $750 billion, to support a new SDR allocation of $250 billion, to support at least $100 billion of additional lending by the MDBs (multilateral development banks), to ensure $250 billion of support for trade finance, and to use the additional resources from agreed...

This is the CORRECT video for the thread.

MOSCOW, March 31 (RIA Novosti) - At least 67 militants have been killed and 233 detained in special operations in the North Caucasus since the beginning of 2009, the head of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) said on Tuesday. "At least 67 militants have been eliminated and 233 detained in antiterrorism operations in the North Caucasus in 2009," Alexander Bortnikov said at a meeting of Russia's National Anti-Terrorism Committee. The committee is meeting in Moscow to consider formally ending the anti-terrorist operation in Chechnya and begin the withdrawal of around 20,000 Russia's Interior Ministry troops from the North Caucasus...

MOSCOW: A Moscow jury ruled unanimously on Thursday to acquit three men in the 2006 murder of the investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya, frustrating state prosecutors' hopes of putting to rest a case that cast a shadow over Vladimir Putin's Russia. Politkovskaya was a strident critic of the Kremlin, and her killing in 2006 underlined the shrinking freedom allowed dissenters in Russian society. Investigators and colleagues concluded that someone had ordered her death to silence her, and some suspected the hand of state officials in the crime. But the three men who were tried on murder charges in a cramped courtroom...

Bombed apartment building in Moscow. Source: liveinternet.ru In 1999, a series of apartment bombings shook Russia and propelled the country headlong into the Second Chechen War. Nearly nine years after the attacks, which claimed 292 lives, many Russians remain unconvinced by the official version of events, which holds that Chechen separatists were responsible. Two sisters, who lost their mother in the attack, have written an open letter to President Dmitri Medvedev, urging him to mount a fully open, independent investigation. The sisters, Tatyana and Alyona Morozov, currently reside in Missouri. Their appeal (below) was published in the Wall Street...

MOSCOW, March 19 (Reuters) - Russian law enforcement agencies were on Wednesday searching the headquarters of Russian oil firm TNK-BP TNBPI.RTS, half owned by BP Plc (BP.L: Quote, Profile, Research), industry sources told Reuters. The company declined to comment. "Searches began this morning and are still continuing," one of the sources said. The reason for the searches was not immediately clear. One source said the searches were being conducted by the Federal Security Service, main successor agency to the Soviet-era KGB secret police. TNK-BP is half owned by a group of Russian billionaire shareholders. Many analysts have said they were...

WHEN Nikolai Patrushev, head of Russia's federal security service (FSB), spoke to his staff to mark the 90th anniversary of the Soviet secret service last year, he made an odd historic diversion. “Those who study history know that security existed before. Sophia Paleologue married Ivan III, and being a niece of the last Byzantine emperor, paid close attention to questions of security.” Few understood what he was talking about. The mystery was cleared up a few weeks later, when Russia's state television channel aired an hour-long film, “The Destruction of the Empire: a Byzantine Lesson”. It proved so popular that...

It was a typical December night in Moscow. The cold was biting, the snow thick and dry. In the Federal Security Service's headquarters on Lubyanskaya Ploshchad, hundreds of intelligence officers met as they did every year to celebrate the founding of the Cheka, the Soviet secret police. Champagne glasses tinkled as the officers spoke in jubilant tones. Classical music played softly in the background. The hall grew quiet as Vladimir Putin -- the former FSB director who had been appointed prime minister a few months earlier -- stood to speak. "Dear comrades," Putin said. "I would like to announce to...

MOSCOW — A man formerly held in the U.S. facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was killed Wednesday in a shootout with security agents in a restive North Caucasus republic, Russia's top security agency said. Ruslan Odizhev was killed amid gunfire that erupted when agents tried to arrest him and another man in Kabardino-Balkariya, a region near Chechnya that is plagued by violence linked both to crime and to religious tensions, the Federal Security Service said in a statement. The service, known by its Russian acronym FSB, said Odizhev had been held at Guantanamo Bay and was believed to have been...