Assassination by Polonium

Assassination by Polonium: "Everyone has probably caught the bits and pieces of headlines on the former Russian spy, Alexander Litvinenko, who was poisoned and died last week. There is little conclusive information and the assassination has been linked in the press both to the murder of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya and the Yukos affair. It's a James Bond style mystery, but in that great BBC news voice.

The interesting part is that he was poisoned with polonium-210, an extremely rare and highly radioactive element. It is even rarer in quantities that could be used for poisoning, since they would have to be manmade. Most of the news sources are quoting experts as saying that the Po-210 could have only been produced in major laboratory. This point makes the theories (which I will describe below) about Litvinenko's death very troubling from the standpoint of securing access to radioactive materials"

(Via ArmsControlWonk.com.)