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Gunman Kills Nun, Parishioner, Wounds 6 in Russian Cathedral

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Photo Credit: AP Photo/ Dmitriy SindyakovRussian investigators say a gunman opened fire in a cathedral on Sakhalin Island off the Pacific coast, killing a nun and a parishioner and wounding six others.

The federal Investigative Committee said law enforcement officers detained the man, who works as a security guard.

A man employed as a private security guard opened fire Sunday in a cathedral on Russia’s Sakhalin Island in the Pacific, killing a nun and a parishioner and wounding six others, investigators said.

Law enforcement officers detained the 24-year-old man at the scene and were trying to determine why he had attacked the Russian Orthodox cathedral in the city of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, the federal Investigative Committee said in a statement. The man worked for a private security firm in the city and was armed with a rifle. His name was not released.

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Olympic Threat: US Warns Airlines About Toothpaste Tube Bomb

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Photo Credit: Wong Maye-E/AP PhotoThe Department of Homeland Security has issued a warning to U.S. and some foreign airlines traveling to Russia for the Olympic Games to be on the lookout for toothpaste containers, which some intelligence indicates may actually hold ingredients that could be used to construct a bomb aboard a plane, a senior U.S. official told ABC News.

The official did not provide further details about the warning or the intelligence that prompted it, but an official with the Department of Homeland Security, while declining to discuss the specific warning, said the department “regularly shares relevant information with domestic and international partners, including those associated with international events such as the Sochi Olympics.”

“While we are not aware of a specific threat to the homeland at this time, this routine communication is an important part of our commitment to making sure we meet that priority,” the official said. “As always, our security apparatus includes a number of measures, both seen and unseen, and DHS will continue to adjust security measures to fit an ever evolving threat environment.”

A federal law enforcement source said the information is largely intended for foreign carriers and the generic threat is not directed at the U.S. homeland. The Russian government has been informed, the source said.

Still, Rep. Peter King, Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee’s Sub-Committee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence, said he has been briefed on the threat and said it should be taken seriously by American travelers, the airlines and officials at the Olympic Games.

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Russian Security Forces Searching Sochi for Suspected Terrorist

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Photo Credit: Telegraph

Photo Credit: Telegraph

Russian security forces are searching Sochi for a suspected terrorist who is feared to be planning to target the Olympic Games, according to a notice distributed throughout the city.

A description distributed to hotels in the area says that the FSB, Russia’s internal security service, has received information that Ruzanna Ibragimova, the widow of an insurgent “neutralised” by security forces, may have travelled from Dagestan to the Sochi area on January 11 or 12.

“According to our information Ms Ibragimova may be used by the ring leaders of illegal armed groups for the organisation of terrorist acts in the zone of the 2014 Olympics,” the notice says.

While the notice does not mention the term, the widows of fighters killed in the on-going conflict between Islamist separatists and Russian forces in the North Caucasus have been used in the past as suicide bombers.

Russia has deployed 40,000 police and security personnel in a “ring of steel” around Sochi to deter attacks by Islamist militants from the nearby North Caucasus republics.

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Investigators Believe Snowden May Have Stayed with a Russian in Hong Kong

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Photo Credit: Fox News

Photo Credit: Fox News

Investigators do not believe Edward Snowden stayed at the Mira hotel in Hong Kong as he travelled from Hawaii to Russia last summer, but rather at the residence of a non-Chinese national, possibly a Russian, who is suspected of facilitating his travel to Moscow, a source familiar with the case tells Fox News.

The new allegation about Snowden’s contacts in Hong Kong comes as the leadership of the House and Senate intelligence committees also claimed the NSA leaker may have had help.

On the Sunday talk shows, the CIA’s former deputy director, Mike Morrell, along with Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the Democratic head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, for the first time publicly weighed in on that possibility — though neither pointed to specific evidence.

“The disclosures that have been coming recently are very sophisticated in their content and sophisticated in their timing, almost too sophisticated for Mr. Snowden to be deciding on his own,” Morrell told “Face the Nation.”

“And it seems to me he might be getting some help.”

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17 Year-Old Russian Suspected of Recent Cyber-Attacks on US Stores (+video)

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Photo Credit: Fox

Photo Credit: Fox

It appears more credit card numbers may have been stolen in another string of cyber-attacks.

According to the cybercrime firm Intel Crawler, there are at least 6 ongoing attacks on US stores.

New York News

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Mitt Romney Says That if it Were His Choice, Russia Would Not Be Hosting the Olympics (+video)

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Former Gov. Mitt Romney said today “were it my choice,” Russia would never have been awarded next month’s Winter Olympics — let alone any future Summer Olympics — because of the political message it sends.

“But it’s not my choice. They are a player on the global stage. They have a right to make their bid. But, they do strain the view of people like myself as to their leadership and their characterization of the Olympic spirt,” Romney told FOX News Sunday host Chris Wallace.

Russia got the green light to host the games from the International Olympic Committee in 2007. Romney indicated his concerns are more the political message that was sent rather than the logistical success of the games, though he also questioned the cost.

Pointing out that the 2014 Winter Olympics’ $51 billion pricetag is more money than was spent on all previous winter games combined, and that Putin signed a law last summer empowering police to arrest anyone who shows tolerance toward gays, Wallace asked Romney, “At some point, does the country hosting the Olympics … does that country’s values undercut what the Olympics are supposed to be all about?”

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Vladimir Putin Vows ‘Total Annihilation’ of Terrorists (+video)

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Photo Credit: Reuters

Photo Credit: Reuters

Vladimir Putin has vowed to pursue terrorists to their “total annihilation”, in his first public comments since the Volgograd suicide bombings.

In his traditional New Year’s Eve address, which was broadcast at midnight from the Far Eastern city of Khabarovsk, (5pm in Moscow), he praised Russia’s unity in the face of both terrorism and natural disasters and promised to continue an unrelenting fight against the bombers.

“In the past year we have faced problems and serious challenges including the inhuman terror attacks in Volgograd and unprecedented disasters in the Far East,” he said.

“Dear friends, we bow our heads in memory of the victims of these terrible attacks. We will strongly and decisively continue the battle against terrorists until their total annihilation,” he said.

Mr Putin earlier provoked a storm of condemnation on the Russian internet on Sunday after the message broadcast an hour earlier in Kamchatka, Russia’s most easterly timezone, made no mention of the attacks.

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Suicide Bomber Strikes Russia. Another ‘Black Widow?’

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Photo Credit: Sergei Karpov/Reuters

Photo Credit: Sergei Karpov/Reuters

A suicide bomber detonated the equivalent of over 20 pounds of TNT near the entrance to a railway station in the central Russian city of Volgograd Sunday, killing at least 15 people and injuring dozens.

The blast, which blew out the front windows of the huge Stalin-era structure, was recorded by CCTV and rebroadcast by the state-funded RT network.

In a statement the Kremlin’s Investigative Committee, Russia’s top police body, said that the bombing was “according to available evidence” the work of a female suicide bomber who triggered the device, which was loaded with shrapnel, as she approached the metal detectors near the station’s entrance and became nervous when she spotted a police officer. According to the statement, the casualties might have been far greater if she had succeeded in penetrating into the inner waiting area, which was crammed with New Year’s travelers preparing to board trains.

No one has claimed responsibility.

A similar bombing barely two months ago, which demolished a Volgograd city bus and killed six people, was revealed to be the work of a female suicide bomber from Russia’s insurgency-wracked southern province of Dagestan. Such women have been dubbed “black widows” because they often turn out to be family members of Islamist rebels killed by Russian security forces, recruited to stage revenge attacks on “soft” Russian targets.

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Russian-Led Alliance to Spend $1 Billion on Weapons in 2014

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Photo Credit: Alexei Druzhinin/AP

Photo Credit: Alexei Druzhinin/AP

As Russia prepares to assume the rotating presidency of a military alliance of former Soviet states in 2014, a senior official announced plans Thursday to spend $1 billion on weapons for the bloc’s rapid-reaction force.

Headquartered in Moscow, the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) currently comprises Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, and is often described as a Russia-led rival to NATO – and a bulwark against the Western alliance’s eastward expansion.

Evolving out of a Commonwealth of Independent States’ security treaty, it was established in its current form in 2002, during President Vladimir Putin’s earlier term at the Kremlin, a period that saw Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania join NATO in 2004, and Georgia and Ukraine explore the possibility to doing so too, to Moscow’s ire.

Under its charter, member-states are committed to defend each other if attacked and may also not join other military alliances.

A major CSTO development was a 2009 agreement to establish a joint rapid-reaction force, “to repulse military aggression, conduct anti-terrorist operations, fight transnational crime and drug trafficking, and neutralize the effects of natural disasters,” according to the RIA Novosti state news agency.

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Russian Minister: We May Respond with Nukes to US Global Strike Program

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Russia May Answer Conventional Attack With Nukes

By VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV, Associated Press.

Russia reserves the right to use nuclear weapons in response to a conventional strike and sees them as a “great equalizer” reducing the likelihood of aggression, a senior Russian official said Wednesday.

While Russia amended its military doctrine years ago to allow for the possibility of using nuclear weapons first in retaliation to a non-nuclear attack, the statement by Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin reflected Moscow’s concern about prospective U.S. conventional weapons.

Weapons that have been developed in the United States under the so-called “prompt global strike” program would be capable of striking targets anywhere in the world in as little as an hour with deadly precision. Russia, which has lagged far behind in developing such weapons, has described them as destabilizing.

Without naming the U.S., Rogozin told lawmakers in comments carried by Russian news agencies said that those who “experiment with non-nuclear strategic weapons” should remember that “if we come under attack, we will undoubtedly use nuclear weapons in certain situations to defend our territory and state interests.”

He said that it should discourage any potential aggressor.

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Photo Credit: RIA Novosti/Sergei Kazak

Photo Credit: RIA Novosti/Sergei Kazak

Russia Warns of Nuclear Response to US Global Strike Program

By RIA Novosti.

A senior government minister warned Wednesday that Russia could retaliate with a nuclear strike if a new US military strategy threatened its security.

Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin said that Russia was “preparing a response” to plans by the United States to develop a new fast-strike weapons platform capable of hitting high-priority targets around the globe.

He told the State Duma that the development of a global strike program was “the most important new strategy being developed by the United States today.”

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