Who poisoned a dissident spy?

The week's news at a glance.

Russia

A Cold War spy novel has tragically come to life, said Cahal Milmo in London’s Independent. Alexander Litvinenko, a Russian intelligence agent who defected to Britain after accusing his bosses of hideous crimes, is fighting for his life in a London hospital, the victim of thallium poisoning. “He looks like a cancer patient who went through heavy chemotherapy,” said his friend Alex Goldfarb, a Briton who helped Litvinenko defect. “And just a month ago, he was a fit, young, handsome guy.” Litvinenko, 44, first angered the Kremlin with allegations that his superiors at the FSB—the new name for the KGB—had ordered him to assassinate oligarch Boris Berezovsky. In 2000, he defected to Britain and wrote a book claiming the FSB was behind the 1999 Moscow bombings that killed nearly 300 people. Those bombings were blamed on Chechens and provided President Vladimir Putin with the pretext for the second Chechen war.

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