Thanks for posting this. I think it would be valuable to the general tech community to hear your opinion and experiences. Please consider writing an article or giving a talk at a future conference.
How is it nuttery to have suspicions about an oddly-timed death with a motive? It's nuttery to draw conclusions I suppose, but not to have suspicions. The hastings case was fairly obvious, I mean, they wouldn't even let Mercedes examine the car...
Nice! interesting read. I searched online for some photos and more information and there is some confusion between actual blue people and people who turned blue due to some chemical (silver colloid) action.
Also, there seems to be a lack of trustworthy photographs of people with the inherited severe methemoglobinemia condition. I searched for about 5-6 minutes and couldn't find a good source.
I agree with Stephen. A while ago I came to the conclusion that widespread use of social media such as FB, tumblr and Twitter (especially twitter), has caused a severe degradation in public discourse and conversation.
Take hard copies of those pictures and also consider having them transferred to film/negative. (I wonder if there will be a demand for this in the future)
Aeropress user here as well. I skip the bean step and use Café Bustelo. It's inexpensive, the grind is just right for both Aero methods (normal or inverted), and tastes great.
At a high level, because it would have been directly counterproductive; at a low level, because her cover as an attaché of the US embassy came with diplomatic immunity. This doesn't leave the host country totally unable to respond in the case where a foreign intelligence officer is detected, but it does strictly limit the scope of such response; in practice, the most they can do, and from the sound of it what they did in this case, is declare the offender persona non grata, and put her on the next jet out of Sheremetyevo.
Of course, there's nothing that says the host country can't put a captured foreign intelligence officer in prison, or even execute such a person outright, beyond a simple reciprocal convention that such things aren't done. The reason why that generally doesn't happen is the same reason why civilized nations rarely visit atrocities on prisoners of war: a country which unilaterally abrogates such a convention risks having its own personnel treated just as badly.
In the case of espionage, there's the further, and major, consideration that any abrogation of diplomatic immunity risks a general breakdown of diplomatic relations, a state of affairs which between civilized nations generally presages the outbreak of warfare. Aside perhaps from a few madmen who never approached real power, no one on either side of the Cold War ever wanted it to turn hot, and the entire edifice of Cold War-era espionage existed precisely to help prevent that misfortune from ever coming to pass. Imprisoning foreign intelligence officers would, therefore, have been actively detrimental to the purposes of the nations which might have done so.
So, the way we as citizens are subject to the law of our respective governments, is the monopoly of violence. Obviously, a similar mechanism doesn't exist for international law[1], but violating a diplomat is technically casus belli.
Anyway, you're right in that the main sanction is the breakdown of diplomatic relations, but that doesn't mean that the ground rules are vague gentlemen's agreements and handshakes.
1: at least formally -- only a few countries would be able to get away with executing US diplomats without being treated to something resembling a monopoly on violence, yet the Vienna Convention is also respected among countries that could not do that
The article title is a misnomer: she wasn't a spy, she was an intelligence officer under diplomatic cover, handling the people who were doing the actual spying.
Actually, its a differentiation that most journalist and editors fail to make primarily because their publications sell better using the term "spy" instead of "(case) officer" for the intelligence agency employee and "agent" or "asset" for the actual spy that is being run.
Unfortunately, that disservice has existed for decades and is probably difficult if not impossible to break.
The diplomatic immunity is what mattered in this case. If it was someone with American citizenship but no other special status it probably would have gone differently.
Could it have been a thick stray cloud combined with some light reflection/refraction effects from the ground or maybe stars/planets in the background ?
I respect the skepticism. I do not subscribe to the 'UFOs are aliens' idea myself. Though in this case I believe the OP did see what he claims. There's a longstanding rumor that some branch of the armed forces is in possession of a 'stealth blimp'. Exactly what a 'stealth blimp' is, I don't know. But there have been numerous sightings over the previous 20 years that match very closely with that OP saw.
I think most "credible" UFO sightings (especially those in the western US) are Government owned aircraft. For the most part, Humans are just bad at interpreting what they have seen. One of my favorite examples is the rumored "flying artichoke" that was likely just a sighting of an F-117A Stealth Fighter ( http://i.imgur.com/D22OrQ1.jpg )
