Britain's inquiry into the murder of ex-KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko has lead to further political anguish for Vladimir Putin as the report indicates a high probability that Putin was directly responsible for ordering the assassination.

There has been some strong reaction to the report, the shadow home secretary at the time of the murder, David Davis has commented;

“We need to go after the financial assets of Putin in the Bahamas and in Cyprus. Eventually you get to a point when with a dictator you have to draw a line as we did in the Thirties”.

The former Labour culture secretary Ben Bradshaw reiterated this view;

“When is the government going to take meaningful action against the dirty Russian money and property here in London that sustains the Putin kleptocracy, and when is the government going to implement the will of this House - passed overwhelmingly in 2012 - in favour of a Magnitsky-type legislation”.

Alexander Litvinenko was born in December 1962 in the Russian city of Voronezh. He went to military college, in the footsteps of his grandfather who fought in the Second World War. He was quickly recruited into the KGB – training in Siberia then posted to Moscow in the late '80s.
He focused on combating organised crime, and became convinced of collusion between officials of the FSB – including Vladimir Putin and Nikolai Patrushev – and the "Tambov" criminal group that smuggled heroin from Afghanistan to western Europe.
In 1998 he held a press conference denouncing the FSB, Russia's Federal Security Service and successor organisation to the KGB (of which Mr Putin was then the director), calling it corrupt, criminalised and a "system from which people needed to be protected".
He was subsequently arrested several times, and finally left Russia in October 2000 with his family. He landed at Heathrow, walked up to the first police officer in the arrivals hall and said: "I am KGB officer and I'm asking for political asylum."

In 2006 the family were naturalised as British citizens. Litvinenko was working as a journalist and adviser on Russian individuals and organisations (and almost certainly working for, or at least advising MI6).
On November 1st 2006 Litvinenko was admitted to hospital after he began vomiting over and over. On November 21 a hospital pharmacist suggested a radioisotope could have been used to poison Litvinenko. Blood and urine samples were sent to the British Atomic Weapons Establishment, which revealed the presence of polonium-210. He died on November 23rd after his third cardiac arrest.

Litvinenko had no doubt that Putin had orchestrated this attack on him, an attack which cost him his life, on his deathbed he signed a statement accusing the Russian President of this terrible act;

"As I lie here I can distinctly hear the beating of wings of the angel of death ... you have shown yourself to be as barbaric and ruthless as your most hostile critics have claimed ... you may succeed in silencing one man but the howl of protest from around the world will reverberate, Mr Putin, in your ears for the rest of your life."

Part of this post was taken from the following article in The Sunday Morning Herald which contains more details on how the murder happened. 

http://www.smh.com.au/world/alexander-litvinenko-exkgb-agents-death-by-polonium210-leaves-long-trail-20160120-gma0lb.html

The following extract is from an article written by Mehdi Hasan, the political director of the Huffington Post UK.

You and I didn't like George W Bush. Remember his puerile declaration after 9/11 that "either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists"? Yet now, in the wake of another horrific terrorist attack, you appear to have updated Dubya's slogan: either you are with free speech... or you are against it. Either vous êtes Charlie Hebdo... or you're a freedom-hating fanatic.

Yes, the attack was an act of unquantifiable evil; an inexcusable and merciless murder of innocents. But was it really a "bid to assassinate" free speech

Please get a grip. None of us believes in an untrammelled right to free speech. We all agree there are always going to be lines that, for the purposes of law and order, cannot be crossed; or for the purposes of taste and decency, should not be crossed. We differ only on where those lines should be drawn.

Has your publication, for example, run cartoons mocking the Holocaust? No? How about caricatures of the 9/11 victims falling from the twin towers? I didn't think so (and I am glad it hasn't). Consider also the "thought experiment" offered by the Oxford philosopher Brian Klug. Imagine, he writes, if a man had joined the "unity rally" in Paris on 11 January "wearing a badge that said 'Je suis Chérif'" - the first name of one of the Charlie Hebdo gunmen. Suppose, Klug adds, he carried a placard with a cartoon mocking the murdered journalists. "How would the crowd have reacted?... Would they have seen this lone individual as a hero, standing up for liberty and freedom of speech? Or would they have been profoundly offended?" Do you disagree with Klug's conclusion that the man "would have been lucky to get away with his life"?

Let's be clear: I agree there is no justification whatsoever for gunning down journalists or cartoonists. I disagree with your seeming view that the right to offend comes with no corresponding responsibility; and I do not believe that a right to offend automatically translates into a duty to offend.

The former Charlie Hebdo journalist Olivier Cyran argued in 2013, an "Islamophobic neurosis gradually took over" the magazine after 9/11, which then effectively endorsed attacks on "members of a minority religion with no influence in the corridors of power"

As the novelist Teju Cole has observed, "It is possible to defend the right to obscene... speech without promoting or sponsoring the content of that speech."

And why have you been so silent on the glaring double standards? Did you not know that Charlie Hebdo sacked the veteran French cartoonist Maurice Sinet in 2008 for making an allegedly anti-Semitic remark? Were you not aware that Jyllands-Posten, the Danish newspaper that published caricatures of the Prophet in 2005, reportedly rejected cartoons mocking Christ because they would "provoke an outcry" and proudly declared it would "in no circumstances... publish Holocaust cartoons"?

Muslims, I guess, are expected to have thicker skins than their Christian and Jewish brethren.

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/mehdi-hasan/charlie-hebdo-free-speech_b_6462584.html

Too often we see reports of the horrors of war in the middle east, we feel the threat of its presence, a threat born out of the shadows of 9/11 and echoes from the sirens of the ‘War on TERROR’

This extract is pulled from an article in the New York Times by Thomas L Friedman, titled ‘ISIS and Vietnam’ the article gives an insight into the mind of ISIS as well as helping us understand some of the reasons behind the war and how it will be won.

The North Vietnamese were both communists and nationalists — and still are. The key reason we (America) failed in Vietnam was that the communists managed to harness the Vietnamese nationalist narrative much more effectively than our South Vietnamese allies, who were too often seen as corrupt or illegitimate.

I believe something loosely akin to this is afoot in Iraq. The Islamic State, or ISIS, with its small core of jihadists, was able to seize so much non-jihadist Sunni territory in Syria and Iraq almost overnight — not because most Iraqi and Syrian Sunnis suddenly bought into the Islamist narrative of ISIS’s self-appointed caliph. Most Iraqi and Syrian Sunnis don’t want to marry off their daughters to a bearded Chechen fanatic, and more than a few of them pray five times a day and like to wash it down with a good Scotch. They have embraced or resigned themselves to ISIS because they were systematically abused by the pro-Shiite, pro-Iranian regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria and Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki in Iraq — and because they see ISIS as a vehicle to revive Sunni nationalism and end Shiite oppression.

I wonder what would have happened had ISIS not engaged in barbarism and declared: “We are the Islamic State. We represent the interests of Syrian and Iraqi Sunnis who have been brutalized by Persian-directed regimes of Damascus and Baghdad. If you think we’re murderous, then just Google ‘Bashar al-Assad and barrel bombs’ or ‘Iraqi Shiite militias and the use of power drills to kill Sunnis.’ You’ll see what we faced after you Americans left. Our goal is to secure the interests of Sunnis in Iraq and Syria. We want an autonomous ‘Sunnistan’ in Iraq just like the Kurds have a Kurdistan — with our own cut of Iraq’s oil wealth.”

Then why did ISIS behead two American journalists? Because ISIS is a coalition of foreign jihadists, local Sunni tribes and former Iraqi Baath Party military officers. I suspect the jihadists in charge want to draw the U.S. into another “crusade” against Muslims

You can read the full article here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/29/opinion/thomas-friedman-isis-and-vietnam.html&asset&_r=1