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2 articles
The Poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko: Polonium in a London Teapot
On 1 November 2006, Alexander Litvinenko, a former officer of Russia's FSB security service who had defected to Britain and become one of the Kremlin's most outspoken critics, met two Russian contacts for tea at the Pine Bar of the Millennium Hotel in London's Mayfair. Within hours he was violently ill; over the following three weeks he wasted away in a hospital bed, his hair falling out, his organs failing, as doctors struggled to identify what was killing him. Only as he lay dying did they discover the cause: polonium-210, a rare and extraordinarily radioactive isotope, which had been slipped into his teapot. He died on 23 November 2006, aged forty-four, but not before dictating a statement accusing President Vladimir Putin directly of ordering his murder. The polonium had left a faint radioactive trail across London — through the hotel, restaurants, offices, and aircraft — which investigators followed to two Russian men, and, they concluded, back to the Russian state itself. A decade later, a British public inquiry found that Litvinenko had been killed in an operation carried out by the FSB and 'probably approved' by Putin himself. It was an assassination by radiation on the streets of a Western capital, and one of the most brazen acts of state murder of the twenty-first century. This is the story of the polonium poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko.
The Panama Papers
At approximately 6:00 p.m. Central European Time on Sunday, April 3, 2016, news organizations on six continents simultaneously published the first results of an 18-month coordinated investigation into 11.5 million leaked documents from a single Panama-based law firm. The firm was Mossack Fonseca. The documents — totaling 2.6 terabytes, the largest single data leak in journalism history at that time — exposed the operations of 214,488 offshore corporations and the identities of their ultimate owners. The owners included 12 sitting heads of state, 128 senior politicians and government officials, members of the inner circles of Vladimir Putin and the Saudi Royal Family, the families of Xi Jinping and David Cameron, the President of Iceland (who resigned within 48 hours), Lionel Messi, Pedro Almodóvar, and dozens of others. The leaking source — known only as 'John Doe' and never identified — had delivered the documents over a period of approximately 12 months to two reporters at the Munich newspaper *Süddeutsche Zeitung*. The investigation was coordinated by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), based in Washington, D.C. 376 reporters at more than 100 news organizations in 76 countries worked on the documents in shared secure infrastructure for the entire 18 months without any pre-publication leak. The story won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting and triggered approximately $1.36 billion in unpaid-tax recoveries by governments worldwide between 2016 and 2024.
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