Novichok, meaning “new guy,” “newcomer, or “novice,” depending on the translation, the group name for deadly nerve agents created in the Soviet Union in the Seventies and developed into the early Nineties. Deployed in Salisbury, England, novichok has been used to poison ex-spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia. Rendering both comatose on a bench on March 4, the attack set off a furious response from emergency workers and chemical weapons experts from Britain’s premier lab on weapons of chemical and biologicla mass destruction, Porton Down. Porton Down subsequently identified the poison used on the Skripals, who were in critical condition, as novichok or a related compound, probably through analysis by gas chromatograph-mass spectrometry.
Who is responsible? It points to Russia, the attack order given from Moscow even though the government there has repeatedly denied involvement and that a program to produce novichok never existed. This was immediately exposed as untrue by scientists/employees of the program who came forward to give their thoughts.
Although the novichok name seems new to a lay audience, it’s been known for a long time …
The FBI says Betty Miller, 70, of Shelburne, was arrested for manufacturing ricin in her apartment. In an affidavit Friday, officials said Miller told them she wanted to harm herself and was testing the toxic poison by sprinkling it on the food and drinks of other Wake Robin residents.
Miller told authorities she found instructions on the internet and over the summer harvested 30-40 castor beans on the Wake Robin campus. She made a total of 2-3 tablespoons of the highly toxic powder and then placed it in multiple servings of other residents’ food and beverages over a period of weeks.
The case developed when “Miller drove herself to the hospital to be checked out.” Regardless of “instructions on the Internet,” no one has been sickened the state health department became “aware of one person who probably became ill with ricin poisoning.”
The update to Arsenic and Old Lace is flabbergasting. Dementia also comes to mind.
Updated — Dementia: “Miller, 70, made her first appearance in federal court on Friday. Judge John Conroy noted that she had a ‘lengthy mental health history’ but did not elaborate.”
Miller’s collection — bottles of “apple seed,” “cherry seed,” and “yew seed” — in addition to her castor seed powder, seem to indicate an ongoing interest iin poisons. Apple and cherry seeds contain minor amounts of amygdalin, a cyanide-group-containing compound. Yew contains an alkaloid.
SHELBURNE, Vt. (WCAX) The FBI is now investigating poison found at a Shelburne assisted-living facility.
Police say they responded Tuesday morning to Wake Robin in Shelburne. That’s when they called the hazmat team.
In a statement, state officials say ricin was found in an apartment…
All areas where the substance was found were evacuated and the FBI is assisting in the investigation. A Wake Robin spokeswoman said all the residents are safe.
The big question for police now– how did the poison get there? And why was it there?
Given my years of experience with the subject, you can still never predict incidences having to do with this particularly unique American fascination.
In only slightly related news, Newsweek reports a Europea “terror chief” warning of ISIS’ potetial use of drones to drop viruses, anthrax, or perhaps ricin.
Bet against. Castor powder is simply not toxic enough. Dispensing small amounts of it in the air would be ineffective. More effective is its use as a psychological weapon because of beliefs on how easy something like this is alleged to be to do.
And, historically, the only terrorist to put anthrax into powder form has been an American from within the biodefense research community — Bruce Ivins.
In addition, there have been no crimes involving the spread of castor powder containing ricin. Although at one time the US had a castor seed milling industry that produced tons of oil and the powder, called castor mash, or pomace.
A troubling thought for you: What if the Americans really did succeed in pressuring the Chinese to cut you off? Or what if somebody found a Stuxnet-type solution to cripple your only operational refinery or blow up the pipeline through which you import crude from China?
As with Tom Friedman a couple weeks ago, the opinion pages of the newspaper, trained to be receptive to the alleged magical power of the National Security Agency.
Consider, if left of launch works any better, the next thing you’ll see is a blinding flash of light.
Shannon Richardson, the original ricin mama, was sentenced to 18 years in prison for making castor powder containing the toxin. Richardson mailed the powder in three letters in 2013, one of which was sent to the president.
TEXARKANA, Texas – A Texas woman was sentenced Wednesday to 18 years in prison for sending ricin-laced letters to President Barack Obama and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
A federal judge gave Shannon Guess Richardson, 36, the maximum sentence under her plea deal on a charge of possessing and producing a biological toxin. She was also ordered to pay restitution. She pleaded guilty to the charge in December.
“I never intended for anybody to be hurt,” she told the court, adding later, “I’m not a bad person, I don’t have it in me to hurt anyone.”
Richardson said she thought security measures would prevent the letters from ever being opened.
Prosecutors say Richardson mailed three letters then went to police and claimed that her estranged husband, Nathan Richardson, had done it.
Richardson, who was trying to build a career as an actress had minor roles in The Walking Dead and The Blind Side.
Richardson has six children, one of whom was born after she was taken into custody in the case.
At the outset of the case she became known for a flurry of publicity pictures showing herself in a variety of fetching outfits.
Words do little to adequately describe such an unusual case. In review, then, here are pictures of Shannon Richardson and the castor powder-stained letter to the president, from “Ricin Mama:”
it appears our cybwewarriors tore down the goal posts and danced in the end zone in the first few minutes of the game only to find, [pause], they eventually lost. Again.
“Depending on how heavy a warhead it carries, this latest North Korean missile would easily reach the West Coast of the United States with a range of 9,000 to 10,000 kilometers,??? or 5,600 to 6,200 miles, said Kim Dong-yub, a defense analyst at the Institute for Far Eastern Studies at Kyungnam University in Seoul. “With this missile, North Korea leaves no doubt that its missile has a range that covers most of the United States.???
The United States has gone to extraordinary lengths to slow North Korea’s missile testing program — feeding flawed parts into the North Korean production system and attacking the missile program in cyberspace to cause test failures.
That’s two or three wars in cyberspace the NSA has lost after dancing in the endzone early.
Iran/Stuxnet, this, WannaCry. My interpretation on Stuxnet, and that of arms control agencies, was that Iran wound up with the capability to produce more Highly Enriched Uranium than if Stuxnet hadn’t happened. Negotiations eventually worked.
How old fashioned.
Message to American cyberwarriors. Stop talking/leaking to journalists. Stop drinking own Kool-Aid. Stop making world accelerate to bad places more quickly by surreptitiously antagonizing and attacking the presumed bad people.
Update:
One thing to keep in mind is that there is no reason to believe American cyberwar is immune to any of the problems that plague its conventional war operation.
US cyberwar, then, just may be incapable of decisive action. On the other hand, since it generates news it may just stimulate the weapons programs it’s designed to hinder in adversaries, making them only more determined to proceed because they know they are under attack.
Control Room, now streaming on Hulu, takes viewers back to 2004 and the rise of al Jazeera as the Arab world’s first top rank Western-style news organization covering Iraqi Freedom. Relevant 13 years later, the original is from 2004 because Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and a couple other American toady nations have demanded Qatar suppress the news channel. In Control Room, it’s Central Command in Doha, the President and the US military against it for having the temerity to transmit both sides of the conflict, not just a sanitized US-approved version.
It’s menacing footage. Al Jazeera’s control room witnessing from afar as a US A-10 begins a missile attack run.
The bombing closed al Jazeera’s office in Baghdad and effectively ends the documentary. Al Jazeera is a small tv station arrayed against the most powerful military on the planet and it made that military angry. Message sent.
Are there wars? Yes, certainly. Does the big American press cover them anymore? Not really. It takes too much effort to fight the war machine and the domestic audience doesn’t care.
At one point, one of al Jazeera’s editorial decision makers, a man who chain smokes like the character Nathan Thurm in old Saturday Night Live sketches, cynically notes that the pulling down of the statue of Saddam Hussein is (obviously to an Arab audience) an engineered stunt with an American-tanked in crowd of young men. Where are the women and neighbors another producer drily notes.
“David Kaye, the UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression, said in a statement that the demand ‘represents a serious threat to media freedom if states, under the pretext of a diplomatic crisis, take measures to force the dismantling of Al Jazeera,’ reads a news short today. At al Jazeera.
Other affairs that have now faded into a distant fog: the folly of the production of a deck of playing cards with the faces of wanted Hussein regime leaders. (There are none made available to the press.) The Jessica Lynch rescue that wasn’t. (“Her Iraqi guards had long fled, she was being well cared for – and doctors had already tried to free her.” — the Guardian). A military spokesman’s absurd insistence that as Baghdad was being looted and the US military stood by that Iraqis should rise themselves and protect stuff. And, at the end, Mission Accomplished.
By the end of Control Room, remember this was in 2004, there is the dawning recognition that we’d triggered an epic human catastrophe still to unfold.
A poignant documentary of William Powell, the author of The Anarchist Cookbook, is currently streaming on Netflix. American Anarchist traces Powell’s life in simple interview from the age of 19, when angered by the Vietnam War he set about to write it, to a long segment in which he expresses “remorse” over the bloody path of mayhem, plots and murder to which its pages may have contributed.
Anyone who has become familiar with American far-right anarchist listerature is also aware that Powell’s cookbook is the volume with the biggest footprint — 2 million copies sold world wide; uncountable copies now distributed by the web.
Indeed, The Anarchist Cookbook has had many offspring, some of which like the Mujahideen’s Poisons Handbook (contructed from the American volume, The Poisoner’s Handbook) have been dealt with quite closely on this blog.
And as everyone who walked the territory of the web in the mid-Nineties, the electronic versions were everywhere, to such an extent that they became things investigators looked for when prosecuting domestic as well as international cases of terrorism and murder.
What will stun the viewer is that Powell was largely unaware of it all. He took up a career in teaching in the far reaches of the world and with his wife, leading training couses on how to teach and reach children who aren’t motivated by traditional pedagogy. In so doing he spent much time in Africa, noting at one point that his family didn’t even have a television and so news from America was virtually non-existent.
This does not deter the interviewer who doggedy walks Powell through the laundry list of very bad people who were fond to be in possession of his book. As the documentary proceeds its clear that the black history of it in bombings and shootings have weighed heavily upon him and his wife.
In 2000 Powell disowned the book on Amazon. Thirteen years later, for the Guardian, he asked that those publishing it cease doing so. Did he, however, do enough? I think so but the answer is left to every viewer.
In the mid-Eighties Powell could not possibly have known what would happen with The Anarchist Cookbook. He believed it be a poorly written fad book on bomb-making, violence and sabotage that was fading in popularity. Powell, along with everyone else, didn’t see what cyberspace and the nascent web would do for the book: Make it easily available to everyone, not just to visitors of odd bookshops, survivalists and gun show anti-government fanatics. Digital existence bundled the book into its growing family of recipes-for-death literature and made the whole mix easily searchable on the web.
The majority of Powell’s life was spent in loving education of the world’s impoverished, very very far from the path taken by The Anarchist Cookbook in America. And American Anarchist leaves no room for doubt that this vocation was very dear to his heart.
As a good man and sadly, The Anarchist Cookbook trailed Powell into death, of which the world did not become aware until movie reviewers saw it as a note at the end of America’s Anarchist in March of this year, that its subject had died a short time after the interviews took place.
1. From the New York Times:
The book, a precursor to more recent publications like “The Mujahideen Poisons Handbook??? and “Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla,??? was at times angry, but it also came with cautionary notes (“This book is not for children or morons???)…
While some recent estimates have more than 90 percent of cyberespionage in the United States originating in China, the accusations relayed in the Pentagon’s annual report to Congress on Chinese military capabilities were remarkable in their directness. Until now the administration avoided directly accusing both the Chinese government and the People’s Liberation Army of using cyberweapons against the United States in a deliberate, government-developed strategy…
This from, The Nebulous Menace: Shoeshine at its Best, a piece onthe meme of the year, that US coporate intellectual property was being carted away en masse by Chinese cyberwarriors.
The passage of time always affords for the changing of boogeymen pointed out by the American national threat industry. Today it’s Russia and even fresher, maybe North Korea, as responsible for the now famous global ransomware attacks.
You might take North Korea as a convenient distraction for the root of the problem, the NSA’s malware industrial complex, ultimately responsible for the ETERNALBLUE vulnerability, a NOT NEBULOUS menace, at the heart of the problem.
More than 4,300 Chinese educational institutions were infected by the WannaCry ransomware that spread across the globe last Friday, according to Chinese cybersecurity giant Qihoo 360’s Threat Intelligence Centre. Almost 30,000 organisations across the country were affected in all.
But the Ministry of Education’s China Education and Research Network (Cernet) said just 66 out of 1,600 Chinese universities were affected, rejecting reports of widespread damage in higher-education computer systems as “malicious??? hype.
Cernet said the 66 universities were affected mainly because their operating systems were not regularly upgraded rather than any major security shortcomings …
Students in campuses affected by the ransomware, however, told of their horror finding their experiment data encrypted and half-completed theses files lost, which could affect their graduation, according to Chinese media reports.
Also from The Nebulous Menace, another wote illustrating why this blog was read:
American business ceded its property to the Chinese industrial base for immediate profit in pursuit of the very cheapest unprotected manpower. This was long before Chinese espionage became an issue the national security megaplex decided to exploit for the purpose of parasitic rent-seeking.
Who are you going to find on the street who cares if Chinese cyberwarriors from a building in Shanghai are into American businesses? They’ve already lost their jobs or much of their earning power. And their access to the Internet is a smartphone made in China.
Take a day off from the memes. Corporate America isn’t hiring, haven’t you heard? It’s not because of mass Chinese cyber-spying.
Then we sent in the the special cyberforce. Over there, over there!
“We are dropping cyberbombs,??? a man named Mr. Work, a deputy secretary of defense at the Pentagon, said. “We have never done that before.???
Actually, we have. We dropped cyberbombs on Iran.
But, anyway, A year or so ago: Cyberbombs! B-52 bombs! Bombs for cash money!
They’d surely need to quit amidst the rubble of Syria! V-ISIS Day was just around the corner.
The stuff really works, don’t it? What tactics and strategy, or lack of any, more likely. And recall the next time Trump orders a publicity stunt bombing, these were all the property of the Obama administration.
Apropos or not, here’s The Cyberwar Boogie which doesn’t sound much like cyberwar. The laughter is just right, though. Hee-hee-hee-h-h-hee-hee-hee-hee, oh yeah!
Would you help finance a custom run CD with this included?