A joint investigation between Bellingcat and The Insider, in cooperation with Der Spiegel and CNN, has discovered voluminous telecom and travel data that implicates Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) in the poisoning of Alexey Navalny.

The August 2020 poisoning in the Siberian city of Tomsk appears to have happened after years of surveillance, which began in 2017 shortly after Navalny first announced his intention to run for president of Russia.
Data shows that operatives from a clandestine FSB unit, specialized in working with poisonous substances, shadowed Navalny during his trips across Russia in 2017, 2019 and 2020, traveling alongside him on more than 30 overlapping flights to the same destinations.
Navalny also believes he was victim of previous poisoning attempts, including one in the Western Russian city of Kaliningrad only a month before the near-fatal Novichok poisoning in Siberia.
Our investigation identified three FSB operatives from this clandestine unit who traveled alongside Navalny to Novosibirsk and then followed him to the city of Tomsk where he was ultimately poisoned.
These operatives, two of whom traveled under cover identities, are Alexey Alexandrov (40), Ivan Osipov (44) - both medical doctors - and Vladimir Panyaev (40).
These three were supported and supervised by at least five more FSB operatives, some of whom also traveled to Omsk, where Navalny had been hospitalized. Members of the unit communicated with one another throughout the trip.
There were sudden peaks of communication just before the poisoning as well as during the night-time hours (Moscow time) when Navalny left his hotel and headed to the Tomsk airport.
In the course of this investigation, Bellingcat and its partners also uncovered data pointing to the existence of a clandestine chemical weapons program operated by this sub-unit of the FSB.
The unit appears to report to a scientist who previously worked in Russia’s military chemical weapons program in Shikhany, where nerve agents from the Novichok family were originally developed. This scientist is Col. Stanislav Makshakov
Our investigation also unearthed telecoms and travel data that strongly suggests the August poisoning attempt on Navalny’s life was mandated at the highest echelons of the Kremlin.
This investigation is particularly important due to the legal vacuum in which no country other than Russia – the country implicated in the assassination attempt – has offered its jurisdiction for an official investigation into Navalny’s near-fatal poisoning.
Read the full article here: https://t.co/ACbA2gkV2H
And read this piece on how we conducted the investigation here: https://t.co/0FXY6ln00F

More from Science

"NO LONGER BEST IN THE WORLD"
UNEP's new Human Development Index includes a new (separate) index: Planetary pressures-adjusted HDI (PHDI). News in Norway is that its position drops from #1 to #16 because of this, while Ireland rises from #2 to #1.
Why?

https://t.co/aVraIEzRfh


Check out Norway's 'Domestic Material Consumption'. Fossil fuels are no different here to Ireland's. What's different is this huge 'non-metallic minerals' category.
(Note also the jump in 1998, suggesting data problems.)
https://t.co/5QvzONbqmN


In Norway's case, it looks like the apparent consumption equation (production+imports-exports) for non-metal minerals is dominated by production: extraction of material in Norway.
https://t.co/5QvzONbqmN


And here we see that this production of non-metallic minerals is sand, gravel and crushed rock for construction. So it's about Norway's geology.
https://t.co/y6rqWmFVWc


Norway drops 15 places on the PHDI list not because of its CO₂ emissions (fairly high at 41st highest in the world per capita), but because of its geology, because it shifts a lot of rock whenever it builds anything.
Hard agree. And if this is useful, let me share something that often gets omitted (not by @kakape).

Variants always emerge, & are not good or bad, but expected. The challenge is figuring out which variants are bad, and that can't be done with sequence alone.


You can't just look at a sequence and say, "Aha! A mutation in spike. This must be more transmissible or can evade antibody neutralization." Sure, we can use computational models to try and predict the functional consequence of a given mutation, but models are often wrong.

The virus acquires mutations randomly every time it replicates. Many mutations don't change the virus at all. Others may change it in a way that have no consequences for human transmission or disease. But you can't tell just looking at sequence alone.

In order to determine the functional impact of a mutation, you need to actually do experiments. You can look at some effects in cell culture, but to address questions relating to transmission or disease, you have to use animal models.

The reason people were concerned initially about B.1.1.7 is because of epidemiological evidence showing that it rapidly became dominant in one area. More rapidly that could be explained unless it had some kind of advantage that allowed it to outcompete other circulating variants.
💥and so it begins..💥
It's time, my friends 🤩🤩

[Thread] #ProjectOdin


https://t.co/fO90N78fta


new quantum-based internet #ElonMusk #QVS #QFS

Political justification ⏬⏬
#ProjectOdin


#ProjectOdin #Starlink #ElonMusk #QuantumInternet

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