• 'Spirit of the Cold War': Russia says US diplomat was trying to recruit for CIA

    Ryan Fogle, a 29-year-old U.S. Embassy employee, was reportedly caught trying to recruit a Russian intelligence official to work for the CIA.  NBC's Andrea Mitchell reports.

    Anna Nemtsova, Robert Windrem, Alastair Jamieson and Erin McClam, NBC News writes

    Evoking the spy games of the Cold War, Russia said Tuesday that it had detained an American diplomat who was carrying cash, two wigs and technical equipment and was trying to recruit a Russian intelligence official to work for the CIA.

    Russia ordered the expulsion of the American diplomat, whom it identified as Ryan Christopher Fogle, third secretary of the political division of the U.S. Embassy. The State Department said only that an officer at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow had been detained and released.

    American officials said they did not expect a rift in U.S.-Russian relations. U.S. officials are trying to improve those relations, and to persuade Russia to help resolve a civil war in Syria.

    FSB via AP

    Wigs and spy gadgets that the Russian Federal Security Service says were carried by American diplomat Ryan Fogle.

    Russia used stronger language, calling the matter provocative and in the spirit of the Cold War.

    A statement by the Russian Federal Security Service, the successor agency to the Soviet-era KGB, said that Fogle was taken to the service’s headquarters and then to the U.S. embassy after his arrest Monday night.

    The security service, known as the FSB, released to Russian media photographs of the American’s arrest and what it said were items he had with him, including the wigs, a torch, a compass and a wad of 500-euro notes, each worth $650.

    Russian television also displayed a letter it said was found on Fogle, printed in Russian and addressed “Dear friend.” The letter offered a $100,000 payment as “an advance from someone who has been highly impressed by your professionalism, and who would highly value your cooperation in the future.”

    The statement from the security service said that the U.S. had “repeatedly attempted to recruit employees of Russian law enforcement bodies and special departments” recently.

    The U.S. ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, was participating in a question-and-answer session on Twitter when the detention was announced. He was summoned to Russia’s foreign ministry, The Associated Press reported.

    Experts expressed surprise at the old-school nature of the alleged espionage, but they noted that intelligence-gathering had not stopped just because the Cold War ended more than two decades ago.

    FSB via AP

    In this photo provided by Russian Federal Security Service, a man claimed by the service to be Ryan Fogle is seen at the service's offices in Moscow.

    “If anything, it has increased,” said James Nixey, head of the Russia and Eurasia Programme at the British think tank Chatham House. “The methods have changed — or so we thought — because it’s more about industrial espionage and corruption these days.”

    Besides the diplomacy over Syria, there have been questions about whether Russia gave the United States enough information about Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the suspects in the attack on the Boston Marathon.

    Russian officials asked the U.S. for more information about Tsarnaev, who was born in what is now Russia and traveled to Russia early last year. Russia suspected that Tsarnaev was becoming radicalized, American officials have said.

    The FBI interviewed him in 2011 and turned up nothing, and when the FBI asked Russia twice for more information about its concern, Russia failed to respond, the American officials said. Tsarnaev was killed April 19 in a shootout with police.

    President Barack Obama later said Russia had cooperated since the attack but noted: “Old habits die hard. There are still suspicions sometimes between our intelligence and law enforcement agencies that date back 10, 20, 30 years, back to the Cold War.”

    The incident would not be the only intelligence blunder in Russia. Britain admitted bugging a Moscow park in 2006 by disguising a recording device as a big rock. The FSB saw a British diplomat picking it up and walking away with it.

    Related: 

    Full Russia coverage from NBC News

    Editor’s note: This story includes a correction.

    This story was originally published on Tue May 14, 2013 7:59 PM EDT

  • U.S. intelligence chief orders review of Boston Marathon case

    Win Mcnamee / Getty Images file

    Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has ordered a broad review of how the U.S. handled information before the Boston Marathon bombing.

    Andrea Mitchell, Michael Isikoff and Tracy Connor, NBC News writes

    The nation's top intelligence official has ordered a review of the Boston Marathon bombing case amid questions about whether the U.S. should have known one of the suspects posed a threat.

    Retired Gen. James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, has asked the inspector general who oversees the intelligence community to take a broad look at various agencies' handling of information they received long before the bombing.


    “Based on what I've seen so far, the FBI performed its duties, Department of Homeland Security did what it was supposed to be doing, but this is hard stuff,'' President Obama said at a Tuesday news conference.

    In 2011, Russia asked the U.S. to check into Tamerlan Tsarnaev because they suspected he was becoming radicalized. The FBI interviewed him but found no sign of terrorist activity.

    His name and the name of his mother were put into intelligence databases that track possible terrorist ties, and U.S. agents were "pinged" when Tsarnaev flew last year to Russia, a trip that included time in the militant outpost of Dagestan.

    Less than a year after he returned to the U.S., the 26-year-old ethnic Chechen and his younger brother, Dzhokhar Tsarneav, planted two bombs near the finish line of the April 15 marathon, killing three and wounding more than 200 more people, authorities said.

    Since then, there's been debate about whether Russia gave the U.S. enough information about Tsarnaev and whether the FBI and CIA should have been more thorough in vetting Tsarnaev.

    “It’s not as if the FBI did nothing,” Obama said. “They not only investigated the older brother, they interviewed him.”Obama said that while there were “no signs” of terrorist tendencies then, investigators want to know if something happened later to trigger Tsarnaev’s radicalization and what the U.S. can do to detect such shifts in the future.

    He said Russia has been “very cooperative” since the attack, but also noted that “old habits die hard” and that some suspicion between between the two countries’ intelligence agencies, dating back decades, has survived.

    He portrayed the review as an effort to improve intelligence, not find fault with anyone.

    “What Director Clapper is doing is standard procedure around here,” Obama said.

    Still, one U.S. counter-terrorism official said some in the intelligence community are "furious" about Clapper's probe, because it suggests that mistakes were made.

    Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed during a shootout with police. His brother was arrested after a manhunt that shut down Boston for a day and has been charged with using a weapon of mass destruction.

    Related:

    Cambridge Police Dept.

    Tamerlan Tsarnaev is seen in a booking photo from a 2009 arrest in Cambridge, Mass.

     

     

    This story was originally published on Tue Apr 30, 2013 10:54 AM EDT

  • Expert: US in cyberwar arms race with China, Russia

    Rick Wilking / Reuters file

    First Lt Michael Newman examines a server rack that is isolated from the Internet at the Air Force Space Command Network Operations & Security Center at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, Colo., in July 2010.

    Robert Windrem, Senior Investigative Producer, NBC News writes

    The United States is locked in a tight race with China and Russia to build destructive cyberweapons capable of seriously damaging other nations’ critical infrastructure, according to a leading expert on hostilities waged via the Internet.

    Scott Borg, CEO of the U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit, a nonprofit institute that advises the U.S. government and businesses on cybersecurity, said all three nations have built arsenals of sophisticated computer viruses, worms, Trojan horses and other tools that place them atop the rest of the world in the ability to inflict serious damage on one another, or lesser powers.

    Ranked just below the Big Three, he said, are four U.S. allies: Great Britain, Germany, Israel and perhaps Taiwan.

    But in testament to the uncertain risk/reward ratio in cyberwarfare, Iran has used attacks on its nuclear program to bolster its offensive capabilities and is now developing its own "cyberarmy," Borg said.

    Borg offered his assessment of the current state of cyberwar capabilities Tuesday in the wake of a report by the American computer security company Mandiant linking hacking attacks and cyber espionage against the U.S. to a sophisticated Chinese group known as “Peoples Liberation Army Unit 61398.

    According to a new White House report released today, cyber spying and other forms of economic espionage are a growing national security threat – especially from China, where hackers are able to quietly and discreetly acquire source code from U.S. companies. NBC's Andrea Mitchell reports.

    In today’s brave new interconnected world, hackers who can defeat security defenses are capable of disrupting an array of critical services, including delivery of water, electricity and heat, or bringing transportation to a grinding halt. U.S. senators last year received a closed-door briefing at which experts demonstrated how a power company employee could take down the New York City electrical grid by clicking on a single email attachment, the New York Times reported.

    U.S. officials rarely discuss offensive capability when discussing cyberwar, though several privately told NBC News recently that the U.S. could "shut down" the electrical grid of a smaller nation -- Iran, for example – if it chose to do so.

    Borg echoed that assessment, saying the U.S. cyberwarriors, who work within the National Security Agency, are “very good across the board. … There is a formidable capability.”

    “Stuxnet and Flame (malware used to disrupt and gather intelligence on Iran's nuclear program) are demonstrations of that,” he said. “… (The U.S.) could shut down most critical infrastructure in potential adversaries relatively quickly.”

    China, Russia have different priorities
    Borg said China and Russia have similar capacity to cause mayhem, but have different priorities and skill sets.

    usccu.us

    Scott Borg says the U.S. possesses a 'formidable capability' to wage cyberwar.

    “Russia is best at military espionage and operations,” he said. “That's what they have focused on for a long time. China is looking for crucial business information and technology. China's main focus is stealing technology. These things quite separate. You use different tools on critical infrastructure than you use for military espionage and different tools again on stealing technology."

    Borg said that each has its strong suit. "The Russians are technically advanced. The Chinese just have more people dedicated to the effort, by a wide margin,” he said. “They are not as innovative or creative as the U.S. and Russia. China has the greatest quantity, if not quality."

    Borg said the group featured in Mandiant’s report, the People’s Liberation Army Unit 61398, may be one of the most important groups working in China, but not necessarily the most important.

    "There are at least two dozen groups carrying out aggressive operations against the U.S.,” he said. “They get in each other’s way and trip over one another, but they are all operating with the tacit approval of the Chinese government.

    "They're not cooperating with each other because they don’t share capabilities," he added. "One group has good programming, but is bad at access or targeting." 

    The Chinese hacking efforts are so broad, Borg said, that the highest-ranking Chinese officials “almost certainly do not know what all the groups are doing,” or the consequences. As a result, he added, they have been embarrassed by reports like the one in Tuesday’s New York Times, which first reported on the Mandiant assessment.

    China is the most likely of the superpowers to leave a calling card, making their work the easiest to track. "China is very arrogant in its authorship of cyberweapons,” Borg said. “It does little to conceal its identity."


    That’s in sharp contrast to the Russians, who he noted are not above writing code in Chinese to throw off investigators.

    While the U.S. could respond to ongoing cyberattacks from China and Russia by shutting down the power grid of "any of its adversaries” and causing severe physical damage, Borg said it is encumbered by several factors.

    One is its vulnerability to cyberwarfare as the world’s most networked nation, he said.

    And from a geopolitical standpoint, Borg said, the U.S. would not want to badly damage the economy of either China or Russia. In fact, he said, the U.S. would almost certainly have to incorporate protections for critical systems like the power grid in any cyberattack.

    Also, detecting the source of hostilities is not always easy, Borg said, as cybertracks are not as easy to follow as missile tracks. That means “mutually assured destruction,” the main strategic tenet of the Cold War, is problematic at best when talking about cyberwar, he said.

    "It might be difficult to determine proportionate response,” he said. “It might not be simple to attack the attacker.”

    For example, policymakers may think an attack has been carried out by the Chinese, when it was actually the work of the Russians or a rising power in the cyber world, like Iran. That is why intelligence -- getting insight into these operations -- is more important in a crisis than cyberforensics, which can take longer and not be as certain.

    "There is no MAD in the Cold War sense," he said, "You can’t be 'assured' of attribution. The attack can be anonymous. It can be spoofed," or disguised as coming from another source. 

    Iran developing 'serious capability'
    The U.S. first began to develop its own offensive capabilities 20 years ago when several strategic thinkers, particularly at the Naval Post-Graduate School, began to see the possibilities. It was not so much a strategic priority, but more "people familiar with electronics and hackers exercising their imagination." (Borg says one of those thinkers, Winn Schwartau, used fiction to discuss the threat and the possibilities, in a 1991 book, "Terminal Compromise.")

    While the U.S. has the means to respond and to defend itself, Borg notes that some countries have no recourse. He cited the Russian invasion of the Republic of Georgia in August 2008, when the Georgian government and media infrastructure was quickly compromised.

    What was particularly interesting, Borg said, was that the Russian military and intelligence services weren’t directly involved.

    "The first wave was carried by organized crime," he noted. "The second wave was carried out by a (hacker) group organized though social media.” He said Russian hackers could download the attack software from a variety of popular sites, including dating and gun-collecting websites.

    In both cases, Borg concluded, the organizers apparently were tipped off early about the timing of Russian military operations, he said.

    The attack on Georgia also illustrated another aspect of cyberwarfare, Borg said, noting that Georgia, Estonia and Lithuania afterward formed a cyberalliance, leaving them in a better position to deal with future assaults.

    That also appears to be the case with Iran, which recently announced that it decided to establish cyber army and claimed to have 4,000 to 5,000 military personnel involved in defensive and offensive operations. That isn’t all bluster, Borg said, noting that when the U.S. leveled new sanctions on Iranian banks last year, U.S. banks suddenly came under attack.

    "Iran is developing a serious capability," said Borg. “It's exaggerating the present capabilities, but it’s working toward the future."

    That’s especially troubling because the risk of smaller nations waging cyberwar against one other may be higher than with the online superpowers, he said.

    He cited reports indicating that Iran may have been behind what he called one of the more serious cyberattacks to date -- an assault last August on the Saudi Aramco computer network that disabled more than 30,000 computers used to control the flow of Saudi oil. The Saudi Interior Ministry blamed "foreign countries" for the attack.

    Borg said he believes the attack was an "Iranian fundamentalist attack ... at some point loosely the under auspices of Iran, and blessed by Iran. The fundamentalist group made a claim of responsibility. ... “Based on technical analysis, the claim has credibility."

    For that reason, Borg says he is less worried about the possibility of China or Russia launching a catastrophic attack against the U.S. than he is about the emerging cyberpowers.

    “What I’m really concerned about isn’t Russia or China, but attacks from Iran or terrorist groups working with state actors,” he said.

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  • Nuclear-like in its intensity, Russian meteor blast is the largest since 1908

    A massive meteor hit the Earth's atmosphere, creating a giant shock wave that injured more than 1,000 people. On the same day, an asteroid half the size of a football field came within 17,200 miles from Earth. NBC's Tom Costello reports.

    Alan Boyle and Matthew DeLuca, NBC News writes

    A meteor flared through the skies over Russia's Chelyabinsk region early Friday, triggering an atomic bomb-sized shock wave that injured more than a thousand people, blew out windows and caused some Russians to fear the end of the world.

    NASA said it was the largest reported fireball since the Tunguska event in 1908 — an asteroid explosion that flattened millions of trees over 820 square miles of remote Siberian forest.

    Friday's event was witnessed by throngs of Russians in Chelyabinsk, a city of 1.1 million in western Siberia. Multiple amateur videos posted online showed the meteor’s flaring arc stretching hundreds of miles across the sky. Other videos from the scene captured the sound of a loud boom, followed by a cacophony of car alarms. One video showed the hurried evacuation of an office building in Chelyabinsk.

    “There was panic. People had no idea what was happening. Everyone was going around to people’s houses to check if they were OK,” Chelyabinsk resident Sergey Hametov told The Associated Press. “We saw a big burst of light then went outside to see what it was and we heard a really loud thundering sound.”

    Another resident described the meteorite's flash.

    "I was standing at a bus stop, seeing off my girlfriend," Andrei, a local resident who did not give his second name, told Reuters. "Then there was a flash and I saw a trail of smoke across the sky and felt a shock wave that smashed windows."

    The impact involved a 50-foot-wide (15-meter-wide), 7,000-ton asteroid that zoomed in from space at a velocity of 40,000 mph (18 kilometers per second), NASA officials said. They said the shock of atmospheric entry blasted the rock apart at a height of 12 to 15 miles (20 to 25 kilometers), releasing the energy equivalent of 300 to 500 kilotons of TNT. That's more than 10 times the energy released by the atom bombs that exploded over Japan at the end of World War II. In fact, NASA said its estimates were based on readings from infrasound sensors that were set up by the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization to detect nuclear blasts.

    The fireball hit just hours before a 150-foot-wide asteroid, known as 2012 DA14, came within 17,200 miles of Earth during an unusually close but harmless flyby. NASA officials said there was no connection between the two events. "It's simply a coincidence," said Paul Chodas, an asteroid researcher at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

    NASA said the flash momentarily shone brighter than the sun — an assessment that was echoed by eyewitnesses in Chelyabinsk.

    "I was driving to work, it was quite dark, but it suddenly became as bright as if it was day," Viktor Prokofiev told Reuters. "I felt like I was blinded by headlights.”

    No fatalities were reported, but Russia's Interior Ministry said about 1,100 people sought medical care after the shock wave. About 50 were hospitalized. Most of the injured were cut by glass from windows that were shattered by the blast's shock wave. More than 200 children at Chelyabinsk schools were said to be among the injured.

    Chelyabinsk resident Marat Lobkovsky's experience was typical: "I went to see what that flash in the sky was about," he told AP. "And then the window glass shattered, bouncing back on me. My beard was cut open, but not deep. They patched me up, it’s OK now."

    Another city resident, Valya Kazakov, said the brilliant flare and loud explosion caused older women in his neighborhood to fear that the world was ending.

    City officials told AP that 3,000 buildings in the Chelyabinsk region were damaged, including a zinc factory warehouse that lost its roof and part of a wall because of the shock wave's battering. Russia's Itar-Tass news agency said as many as 10,000 police were mobilized to aid in the recovery and remove debris.

    There were no significant disturbances to public utilities or communications, Vladimir Stepanov of the Emergency Situation Ministry told Itar-Tass. "No serious consequences have been so far recorded," Stepanov said. "There has been no disruption in the rail and air transport work."

    A search was conducted to find any fragments that survived when the space rock blew itself apart. A photo provided by the Chelyabinsk regional police department showed a 20-foot-wide (6-meter-wide) hole in the ice covering a lake near the town of Chebakul where some of the fragments reportedly fell.

    Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium, speaks to NBC's Lester Holt about the meteor and asteroid that approached Earth on Friday.

    The shallow angle at which the meteor crossed the sky over Chelyabinsk contributed to the amount of damage, according to Margaret Campbell-Brown, an astronomer and physicist at the University of Western Ontario. “It’s like a sonic boom,” Campbell-Brown said of the shock wave. “A sonic boom from a plane can shatter windows, but this sonic boom was much stronger than a plane."

    It was a once-in-a-decade event, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson told TODAY on Friday. He explained that the meteor impact was the physics equivalent of hitting a brick wall. “When you hit a brick wall, you basically explode, and that’s what happened here, and it exploded in midair,” Tyson said.

    Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin said the incident showed the need for the world's nations to develop a system to intercept objects falling from space. "At the moment, neither we nor the Americans have such technologies" to shoot down meteors or asteroids, he said, according to the Interfax news agency.

    Coincidentally, experts from NASA and other agencies were at a U.N. space conference in Vienna on Friday to discuss strategies for developing an asteroid early warning system.

    Slideshow: Meteorite showers in Siberia

    Yekaterina Pustynnikova / Chelyabinsk.ru via AP

    A huge meteor flared through the skies over Russia's Chelyabinsk region, triggering a powerful shock wave that injured nearly a thousand people, blew out windows and reportedly caused the roof of a factory to collapse.

    Launch slideshow

    More about cosmic impacts:

    This report includes information from The Associated Press and Reuters.

    The videos just keep streaming in from Chelyabinsk. You'll find lots of great clips and stills on this Live Journal page and this WBVF wrap-up. Thanks to my Twitter pals for passing them along.  

    Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

    This story was originally published on Fri Feb 15, 2013 5:05 AM EST

  • Putin signs law banning American adoptions

    Those already undergoing the costly process of adopting a child from Russia found out Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a law barring any future adoptions, canceling the ones in progress. NBC's Kerry Sanders reports.

    NBC News staff and wire reports writes

    President Vladimir Putin signed a law on Friday that bans Americans from adopting Russian children and imposes other measures in retaliation for new U.S. legislation meant to punish Russian human rights abusers.

    The law, which has ignited outrage among Russian liberals and children's rights advocates, enters into force on Jan. 1 and is likely to strain U.S.-Russia relations.

    As well as banning U.S. adoptions, it will also outlaw some non-governmental organizations that receive U.S. funding and impose a visa ban and asset freeze on Americans accused of violating the rights of Russians abroad.

    The law could block dozens of Russian children expected to be adopted by American families from leaving the country and cut off one of the main international routes for Russian children to leave orphanages that are often dismal. Russia is the single biggest source of adopted children in the United States, with more than 60,000 Russian children being taken in by Americans over the past two decades.

    The bill is retaliation for an American law that calls for sanctions against Russians deemed to be human rights violators and part of an increasingly confrontational stance by the Kremlin against the West.

    Related: Americans may lose right to adopt Russian children


    Putin said U.S. authorities routinely let Americans suspected of violence toward Russian adoptees go unpunished — a clear reference to Dima Yakovlev, a Russian toddler for whom the bill is named. The child was adopted by Americans and then died in 2008 after his father left him in a car in broiling heat for hours. The father was found not guilty of involuntary manslaughter.

    Children's rights ombudsman Pavel Astakhov on Wednesday said that 46 children who were about to be adopted in the United States would remain in Russia if the bill came into effect. On Thursday, he petitioned the president to extend the ban to other countries.

    Courtesy Thomas family

    John and Renee Thomas with their son, Jack, 7, who was adopted from Russia at the age of 3. Jack is hoping for his brother, Nikoly, now in a Russian orphanage, to join him in the United States.

    Would-be adoptive parents in the United States are left hanging by Putin's signing of the bill, which was passed by Russian lawmakers last week.

    Among them are John and Renee Thomas of Minnetonka, Minn., Kari Huus of NBC News reported. The Thomases have already adopted Jack, 7, from Russia. When they found out he had a little brother, they began the process to try to adopt him, too. The wait has stretched to four years, and now the adoption may be in danger. 

    "When Jack is asked about his family, he talks about his brother," John Thomas said. "He always asks, 'When is he coming home?' We just tell him we’re waiting for the call."

    More: Adoption of little brother caught in US-Russia spat

    UNICEF estimates that there are about 740,000 children without parental custody in Russia, while only 18,000 Russians are now waiting to adopt a child.

    Russian President Vladamir Putin has said he'll sign a proposed law that would halt adoptions of Russian children to Americans. NBC's Duncan Golestani reports.

    The U.S. State Department on Thursday repeated its opposition to the Russian measure.

    "The welfare of children is simply too important to tie to the political aspects of our relationship," State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell said. "Additionally, we are deeply troubled by the provisions in the bill that would restrict the ability of Russian civil society organizations to work with American partners."  

    Critics of the bill left dozens of stuffed toys and candles outside the parliament's lower and upper houses to express solidarity with Russian orphans. 

    An online petition urging the Kremlin to scrap the bill garnered more than 100,000 Russian signatures. 

    The Associated Press contributed to this report.

    More world stories from NBC News:

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  • Syria crisis: Russia warns Obama against 'violation' of international law

    Activists release amateur video reportedly showing the shelling of Aleppo by Syrian government forces while Japan confirms a war correspondent, Maya Yamamoto, was killed by gunfire in Syria. NBCNews.com's Dara Brown reports.

    NBC News and wire reports writes

    Updated at 12:00 p.m. ET: Russia rebuffed President Barack Obama's threat of unilateral action against Syria Tuesday, as officials said 2,500 refugees fled across the border into Turkey in just 24 hours – one of the highest daily refugee flows of recent weeks.

    Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, speaking after meeting China's top diplomat, said Moscow and Beijing were committed to "the need to strictly adhere to the norms of international law ... and not to allow their violation".

    Obama draws 'red line' for Syria on chemical and biological weapons

    Obama on Monday threatened "enormous consequences" if his Syrian counterpart used chemical or biological arms or even moved them in a menacing way.

    The president used some of his strongest language yet to warn Assad not to use chemical or biological weapons – after Syria acknowledged for the first time that it had such weapons and could use them if foreign countries attacked it.

    At an impromptu White House news conference, President Obama comments on GOP Mo., Senate candidate Todd Akin's remarks about rape, Mitt Romney's refusal to release more than two years' worth of tax returns, and the unrest in Syria. Watch the entire news conference.

    "We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground, that a red line for us is (if) we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized," he said. "That would change my calculus."

    Syria 'ready to discuss' Assad's resignation, deputy PM says

    "We cannot have a situation where chemical or biological weapons are falling into the hands of the wrong people," Obama said, perhaps referring to Lebanon's Shiite Hezbollah group, an Iranian-backed ally of Assad, or to Islamist militants.

    Turkey's foreign minister has warned it can accommodate no more than 100,000 refugees and that the United Nations may need to create a "safe zone" within Syria to shelter any beyond that number.

    Slideshow: Syria uprising

    Goran Tomasevic / Reuters

    After months of protests and violent crackdowns, a look back at the violence that has overtaken the country.

    Launch slideshow

    Thousands of refugees
    A Turkish official told Reuters on Tuesday that about 2,500 people fleeing violence in Syria had entered Turkey in the preceding 24 hours, most of them entering the southeastern Turkish province of Hatay.

    Turkish journalist Mahir Zeynalov reported on Twitter that four Syrian colonels and two captains crossed the border early Wednesday.

    PhotoBlog: Clashes over Syrian conflict in Lebanon leave ten dead

    Turkey is now sheltering close to 70,000 Syrian refugees and is struggling to accommodate the influx, which rose after a bomb attack near the border killed eight, spreading panic.

    In Lebanon, street battles between Sunnis and Alawites continued for a second night running, fueled by conflicting loyalties in the conflict across the border. The BBC reported that seven were killed and more than 70 wounded in the country's second-largest city, Tripoli.

    Syrian President Bashar Assad, an Alawite, is battling largely Sunni opposition fighters. Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati, himself a Sunni, appealed to both sides to end the "absurd battle" in Tripoli.

    In Syria itself, the army deployed tanks on a ring road surrounding Damascus on Wednesday and shelled southern neighborhoods where rebels operate, in the heaviest bombardment on the capital since the army reasserted control last month, residents said.

    At least eight people were killed in the shelling, which was accompanied by an aerial bombardment, on the Kfar Souseh, Daraya, Qadam and Nahr Aisheh neighborhoods, they told Reuters.


    Regional news channel Al-Jazeera reported that at least 24 people were killed across the country on Tuesday, among them women and children in Aleppo - the city over which the rebel Free Syrian Army (FSA) claims two-thirds control, and where a Japanese journalist was killed on Monday.

    Activists: Japanese journalist killed in Aleppo

    "We now control more than 60 per cent of the city of Aleppo, and each day we take control of new districts," said Abdel Jabbar al-Okaidi, a colonel with the FSA. He went on to list some 30 districts which he claimed were under FSA control, including about half of the embattled neighborhood of Salaheddin.

    But a security source in Damascus rejected the claims, according to the AFP news agency, calling them "completely false".

    Syrian President Bashar Assad makes a rare public appearance for the Muslim holiday of Eid on Sunday. NBC's Ayman Mohyeldin reports.

    Likened to Iraq invasion
    Syrian soldiers killed a journalist sympathetic to the rebels during a raid in Damascus on Wednesday. Mosaab al-Odaallah, who worked for the state-run Tishreen newspaper, was shot at point-blank range at his home by troops conducting house-to-house raids in the southern Nahr Eisha district of the capital, opposition activists said.

    Massoud Akko, head of the public freedoms committee at the underground Syrian Journalists Association, said Odaallah's death brought to 54 the number of Syrian journalists, bloggers and writers killed by security forces during the uprising.

    "Most have been killed with shots to the head. The regime appears to have adopted a systematic policy of killing journalists and social media activists," Akko told Reuters by telephone from Berlin.

    Earlier, Syria's deputy Prime Minister Qadri Jamil said Obama's talk of action against Syria was media fodder.

    Speaking after the news conference held by Russia's Lavrov, Jamil said the West was seeking an excuse to intervene, likening the focus on Syria's chemical weapons with the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq by U.S.-led forces and the focus on what proved to be groundless suspicions that Saddam Hussein was concealing weapons of mass destruction.

    "Direct military intervention in Syria is impossible because whoever thinks about it ... is heading towards a confrontation wider than Syria's borders," he told a news conference in Damascus.

    Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times reported the concerns of Christians, who make up about 10 per cent of Syria's population. It said Christians fleeing the fighting have detected an increasingly radicalized Islamist strain among the rebels that makes them fear for their future.

    Reuters contributed to this report.

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  • Texan teen to become first American to graduate from premier Russian ballet school

    When Joy Womack arrived at Moscow's elite Bolshoi Ballet Academy at 15, she spoke limited Russian and was one of a number of foreigners allowed to train at the school. Now 17, she is poised to become the first American to graduate from the Russian academy.

    By Irina Tkachenko
    NBC News

    MOSCOW -- Like many of her high school peers in the U.S., Joy Womack keeps an Internet blog and chats with her family on Skype. The 17-year-old devours books on Kindle, listens to music and stresses about end-of-year exams. But this is where the similarities end.

    By the end of May she will become the first American to graduate from the Bolshoi Ballet Academy, arguably the most enviable and demanding choreography school in the world.

    Clad in jeans and a puffer jacket -- too skinny for this blustery Russian spring -- she looks impossibly delicate and long-limbed, even for a dancer, and speaks with sincerity, focus and poise that would be impressive in an adult. And if she is a tad nervous, small wonder. Having lived by herself for three years in Moscow, Russia, some 6,000 miles away from her home in Austin, Texas, Joy is preparing to take her final exams.  

    “Nothing can compare to the rigor and the mental strength it takes to train at the top of our school,” Joy told NBC News.

    Ballet dancers are never late bloomers. By age 15 Joy had already put away years of preparation in prestigious American ballet schools like the Austin School of Classical Ballet and Kirov Academy of Ballet, when she was hand-picked by the Bolshoi Ballet Academy teachers to train in the Russian dancers department for tuition of $18,000 a year. That in itself was a special and unusual honor since the academy has a separate course for foreign students.

    Barely believing her luck -- after all, her love of ballet began with YouTube videos of Russian ballerinas -- Joy left her parents and siblings and boarded a plane for Moscow, in awe of the opportunity of a lifetime.  Little could have prepared her for the change she was about to make.

    “When I first arrived here, nobody had heard of me. Everybody thought, ‘Here is this new American coming into the Russian class,’” she said. “I was put with the graduation class in repertoire ahead of the other girls in my class … that had created a lot of jealousy and a lot of questions.”

    Joy, who did not speak Russian at the time, said she needed the instructors to repeat themselves again and again.

    “It was hard the first six months, because the girls did not want to talk to me, did not want to be my friends,” she said.

    A far cry from America

    The Bolshoi Ballet Academy, also known in Russia as the Moscow State Academy of Choreography, launched in the late 18th century on the order of Russian empress Catherine the Great. Originally conceived as an orphanage, the school has long since established itself as an institution and feeder school for the Bolshoi Ballet troupe, a premier training ground for classical Russian ballet dancers that emphasizes technique and artistic expression. It is rooted in structure and tradition that have outlasted political regimes and many a revolution.

    For Joy, life at the academy quickly proved a far cry from her American routine.  Instruction exclusively in Russian all but assured a language and culture gap too big to tackle quickly. The school's focus on discipline meant dancing up to 10 hours a day, six days a week. It did not matter if you were hurting or sick: you showed up and you danced through the pain.

    A measure of the school's ethos is its strict caps on the students' weight: 96 pounds for those who are 5'6", for instance. Ballerinas tipping the scale at 110 pounds are not allowed to participate in a duet class, but are required to observe it.  In a country that spends most of the year waiting for winter to pass, this schedule meant rarely seeing the light of day. In the middle of December in Moscow, the "day" lasts barely six hours.

    Asked when she saw her family last, Joy paused before replying, “Ten months ago.” That was the only time her dad had been able to come.

    Driven to dance

    Then, of course, there were injuries. Joy had surgery on her foot. She broke her wrist. A torqued back once confined her to bed for two weeks, only to make her write in her WordPress blog.

    "I feel miserable," she wrote, adding that she could not wait to get back to the studio.

    When asked what keeps her going, Joy didn’t wait to consider the answer.

    “In order to cope with my rigorous training schedule, my long days I mostly depend on good food and … really the knowledge that after I get through this, I’ll be able to take on anything,” she said. “Of course, there are always those hard moments, especially here in Russia, where in winter it’s really hard … It seems so difficult to keep going. In those moments I rely on God, I rely on Jesus.”

    She does not mention passion. But then, you can see it in her dance.

    To connect to the outside world and to hold herself "accountable" Joy answers dozens of queries from American fans on her blog. “What do you do not to lose trust in yourself when you think you're no good...?” asked one in an obvious moment of self-doubt.

    And from across the Atlantic came the answer from Joy, meant, it seemed, as much for herself as for the person asking:

    "Instead of getting upset or depressed if something does not go as you thought it would, God always opens another door. Even if it takes you awhile to find a light switch.”

    Blood, sweat, tears, fatigue: 'it is worth it!'

    Last December the Bolshoi Ballet Academy showed "La Fille Mal Gardee," one of its signature productions, on the venerable stage of the Bolshoi. It was pronounced best student show in the theatre and landed the school an award from the Russian government (Prime Minister Vladimir Putin was on hand to honor the occasion). And Joy? She danced the lead. A month before she had won the "Youth America Grand Prix" in Paris. 

    Today Joy speaks fluent and lively, if a bit accented, Russian. She treasures the bond she formed with her Russian ballet teachers and adores them for their "tough love" and dedication to her.  She has found her friends, though she once wrote the best one of them may still be the Internet.

    Time is a precious commodity, and free time almost nonexistent. 

    After she completes her state exams in all subjects: acting, classical ballet, character dance, and duet, Joy will dance in one final performance with the Bolshoi Ballet Academy, the lead in "Paquita." Then, after graduation in May, the nerve-wracking wait: will the Bolshoi come calling to invite her to its regular troupe? Joy will find out the answer having barely turned 18. 

    "A dancer is honest with themselves and faces their flaws and imperfections in the mirror and chips away at them,” she wrote online. “Behind the love is blood, sweat, tears, stress, fatigue! But it is worth it!" 

     

     

  • NBC's Jim Maceda in Moscow answers questions about the Russian elections

    Russians head to the polls on Sunday to vote in presidential elections most expect Vladimir Putin to win handily. If Putin wins, he was previously president from 2000-2008, he will return to the Kremlin after a four-year stint as prime minister. But, support for Putin’s return is not universal – a vocal opposition has been protesting the election for months.

    NBC’s Jim Maceda, who has covered Russia since the days of the Soviet Union, is in Moscow following the elections. He answered reader questions about the elections, Putin’s hold on power, the opposition, etc.

    Please replay the chat below.

     

     

    Related links: Could Vladimir Putin be in power until 2024? 10 key questions about Russia's elections
    Anti-Putin activists pay high price, but refuse to back down
    U.S. Ambassador Michael McFaul, a laid-back Yankee in trouble in Putin's court
    Anti-Putin protesters: Coping with bitter cold and big questions

     

  • Anti-Putin protesters: Coping with bitter cold and big questions

    Kirill Kudryavtsev / AFP - Getty Images

    Two of the organisers of the upcoming opposition rally "For Fair Elections," anti-Kremlin blogger Alexei Navalny (R) and former chess champion Garry Kasparov (L), speak as they attend a meeting of the rally organisers in Moscow, on Jan. 31, 2012.

    Jim Maceda writes

    MOSCOW – By any standard, it was an impressive array of individuals. Seated under a large poster of a young Andrei Sakharov – the Soviet nuclear physicist, dissident, 1975 Nobel Peace Prize recipient and spiritual father of their movement – the brain trust of Moscow's anti-Putin opposition sat at card tables debating their next move.  

    The group was putting the finishing touches on the plan for this Saturday's protest – an hour march through central Moscow and a short rally across the Moskva River from the Kremlin. It will be the third mass opposition demonstration in Moscow since the December 4 parliamentary polls that were widely criticized for voter fraud in favor of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s party.  

    Six weeks ago, more than 100,000 protesters took to the streets to vent their anger with the corruption and stagnation of the Putin regime. But since then, the end-of-year Russian holidays, followed by a Siberian cold snap with record-breaking temperatures, has undeniably sapped the protest movement's energy. The organizers collective fatigue was palpable.

    Garry Kasparov, the former world chess champion, led the meeting. Not because he's so smart he almost beat a super computer at chess, but because his countless arrests and beatings at the hands of Russian riot police had earned him the mantle. Seated beside him were the two young stars of the new generation of Russian dissidents, the right-of-center blogger Alexei Navalny and socialist activist Sergei Udaltsov. 

    Str / AFP - Getty Images

    Opposition activists hang their banner reading: "Putin, go!" atop a bulding's roof, just over the Moskva River river from the Kremlin (foreground) in Moscow, on Feb. 1.

    Both men, in their 30's, had recently spent weeks in jail on charges of organizing illegal protests. Now they were subdued, speaking occasionally, but more often just listening, scrolling through their iPhone messages or tweeting.

    Opposite Kasparov, sat Vladimir Ryzhkov.  He too had paid his dues. Once the youngest MP elected to Boris Yeltsin's parliament at age 27, Ryzhkov, broad-minded and articulate, was seen rather differently by Putin's Kremlin. The “dangerous” reformer has effectively been ostracized from mainstream politics. 

    “No doubt the Russian Winter is not as inviting as the Arab Spring,” Kasparov quipped. “But I would say that 30, 40 or 50,000 in this weather will send a message across the river to the Kremlin.''

    But what message will that be? Putin's propaganda machine will likely jump on any smaller turn-out, proving, they will no doubt say, that the protest is petering out.

    By the end of their two hour meeting the protest organizers were clearly divided over what to do next to regain some momentum.

    Navalny argued that the mass protests of December needed to grow bigger and more frequent to pressure the Kremlin. But author Boris Akunin argued that the days of the big protests were over. They were too costly, too time-consuming, and had already peaked. It was time, he said, to focus on smaller, flash mob-generated actions.

    Misha Japaridze / AP

    Russian opposition leader Sergei Udaltsov shows a V sign after he was released from a detention center in Moscow, Russia, Wednesday, Jan. 4, 2012. Udaltsov, whose jailing became a rallying point for the Russian opposition, has been freed after a month in custody.

    Indeed, across Moscow, such “attacks” are growing in number. On any given day, small groups of protesters walk out of the city's many subway stations, their mouths covered with strips of masking tape, on which is written “We Have No Voice.” They're arrested almost as soon as they walk into the street. They also have tried cyber-attacks on the Kremlin's Internet. Within hours of the launch of Putin's own website, it was jammed by thousands of emails calling on him to resign.

    And in arguably the most startling “protest,” several activists managed to hang a giant banner on the top of a building directly opposite the Kremlin for all to see. Painted on the banner, both Putin’s likeness covered by a huge “X,” and beneath it, the words, “Go Away!” in Russian. Amazingly it took an hour for the police to spot it and tear it down. But, while often hilarious, none of these flash mob tactics are likely to keep Putin from winning a six-year term in the March 4 presidential elections.

    Kremlin's photo-doctoring backfires big time

    Putin himself seems to have come to that conclusion. Creating massive traffic jams in central Moscow today as his convoy skidded over the icy snow from one campaign stop to another, he's got his swagger back. His camp believes the protest movement is too divided to coalesce around one opposition candidate. And, besides, the other official candidates – Communist Gennady Zyuganov, Nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, Social Democrat Sergei Mironov and billionaire owner of the New Jersey Nets Mikhail Prokhorov – are all Kremlin-approved because they pose no real threat.

    Andrey Smirnov / AFP - Getty Images

    A police officer braves the cold as he detains a demonstrator wearing a carnival costume of death who tried to take part in an unauthorized stage protest just outside the Interior Ministry headquarters in Moscow on Friday. The sign on the protester's chest says "Corruption."

    So what happens to the movement if Putin wins? Ryzhkov painted a dark picture: “There will be mass protests starting March 5th,” he said in his Moscow home and office following the meeting. “And then we stay in the streets until reforms start and Putin promises new legislative and presidential elections.”
     
    “You mean Tent Cities,” I asked?

    “Yes,” he replied. “Like the Orange Revolution in Ukraine.”

    And what if Putin doesn't reform, but instead cracks down?

    “Unfortunately Putin is a dangerous man. He can start some violence like [Syria’s] Bashar al-Assad or [Libya’s] Moammar Ghadafi. But I hope that if he sees a half million people in the streets, he will start reforms instead of violence.”

    Many middle-class, well-educated Russians are calling the protests a turning point. But is it the beginning of the end of Putin's political career? Or rather the beginning of an unprecedented second 12-year run of power for the only real leader Russians have known this century?

    The answer is blowing in a bone-chilling, Siberian wind.

    Jim Maceda is an NBC News foreign correspondent based in London who has covered Russia and the former Soviet Union since the 1980's.

  • Prehistoric bones: A cottage industry in Siberia

    By Jim Maceda
    NBC News

    Dmitry Solovyov/NBC News

    Siberian sunset.

    It’s hard to imagine, looking out at the frozen expanses of Yakutia, in North Eastern Siberia, that 30,000 or so years ago, so many animal species, now extinct, roamed the Pleistocene grasslands. From 12-foot tall, five-ton wooly mammoth bulls to tiny rodents, an Ice Age hunter would have found as many as 100 animals in each square mile he tracked, at least according to Sergei Zimov, our Ice Age expert, geo-physicist and guide during our recent visit.

    Today, Siberia’s thick icy crust, or permafrost, which has held the remains of predators and herbivores alike in an epochal deep freeze, is beginning to melt. And the bones of prehistoric rhinos, bison, reindeer, horses – and yes, mammoths – are rising to Yakutia’s surface at an amazing rate. One literally trips over bones on a short stroll along the banks of the Kolyma River. The downside, of course, is the attendant release of so much CO2 – a greenhouse gas - as this melting permafrost exposes a 150-foot thick layer of plant and animal remains. But there is an upside: a burgeoning cottage industry in the finding and selling of prehistoric bones.

    Zimov says that 30 years ago, only a handful of Russian "bone" men – serious businessmen - were attracted to the adventurous lifestyle, spending their summers combing Pleistocene beaches and valleys. Today, at least 1,000 bone hunters work throughout Russia, with several dozen focusing on Siberia’s permafrost zone, where the best prizes are to be found.

    Dmitry Solovyov/NBC News

    One of Zimov's prized mammoth tusks.

    Professional hunters like Feodor Shidlovsky and Alexander Votagin are at the top of the bone chain. Shidlovsky has arguably the biggest mammoth bone collection in Russia, displaying them in his own natural history museum in Moscow. The money he makes from the sale of mammoth bones goes into his exhibitions, the funding of artists who fashion jewelry from the ancient bone, and scientific expeditions.

    Every summer, Votagin leads his team to Dvarii Yar – or Windy Cliffs – a remote stretch of Kolyma riverbank that has given up the richest finds of prehistoric bones over the past decade. Located about 400 miles north of Zimov’s isolated science station in Cherskiy - Yakutia’s main airport and hub - the so-called New Siberian Islands (all underwater in Pleistocene times) are now a treasure trove of bones. Local hunters collect more than 20 tons of mammoth, rhino and bison bones a year, selling most of them to local dealers in Cherskiy – presumably to sell them to tourists like us, though the Russian government bans the export abroad.

    And here’s why: prehistoric bones can be a very lucrative catch. While fishermen and hunters now augment their meager incomes with up to $10 per mammoth tooth or ivory shard, the more professional - and lucky – hunters can fetch more than $80,000 for a pair of mammoth tusks in good condition. Zimov keeps such a pair in the living room of his science station cum abode – but isn’t tempted to sell them.

    Dmitry Solovyov/NBC News

    Prehistoric bones along the beach.

    "These are like my family," he told us. "Would you sell your brothers for $80,000?" In fact, Zimov has never sold any bones he’s collected over his decades of combing Yakutia for clues to global warming. On one such outing, he and his son Nikita collected some 1,200  bones – which he thinks is a world record - all which remained of a pack of mammoths and all within a few hundred yards of beach. For amusement, they arranged their bone hoard into the shapes of mammoths, horses and bison.

    Until the mass, mysterious extinction of so many Ice Age animals took place - triggered, probably, by extreme change of climate and habitat - the so-called "Mammoth Steppe Eco-system" chugged along like a glacier, both efficient and self-sustaining. Mammoths knocked over heat-absorbing trees, grasses grew, and dozens of herbivore species not only grazed on those grasses, but fertilized them too.

    Though that eco-system died some 15,000 years ago, mammoths and other Pleistocene throwbacks are helping to maintain today’s human population, with a $5 prehistoric bison jaw here, a $10 wooly rhino knee bone there or $1,000 piece of wooly mammoth tusk, buried right under your feet.