This breaking of this story has been a bit... odd...

The poisoning happened on Nov 1st, and I first read about it on BBC News last Monday or Tuesday when they interviewed Litvinenko in hospital, the story was buried somewhere in the BBCRussian news section, and was evidently deamed so unimportant that it only appeared in English around the middle of the week, still buried in the European News section. Then suddenly on Sunday it became headline, frontpage news in all the Sunday papers, who all used the BBC story as their only source of info, and some sort of feedback loop kicked in and the BBC started running it as their main news headline. The story on BBCNews.com suddenly got bumped up to World News Headline event, and the week-old story that started it all disappeared completely.

So, it seems to me that someone with an agenda and a lot of influence decided the story wasn't getting enough airtime and nudged it forward a bit.

That's to say nothing of the frankly shameless propagandising and join-the-dots-for-the-great-unwashed leaps of logic the BBC used in their report (KGB Spy... Assassination... Soviet Union... Putin... Anna Polistovskaya... Georgi Markov... Chechnya) even inviting Litinkenko's lawyer on for a rant during which he directly accused the FSB of trying to kill his client. They even asked Boris Flippin' Berezovsky for a quote on the matter for Chrissakes, how's that for balanced? And even that was no doubt still far more restrained than what appeared in any of the papers.

I find myself a whole lot less concerned about the story itself than about the agendas of those bringing it to our attention, the means by which they are so doing, and the downright dishonest manner in which it is being reported.

That's not to say I don't believe that it really happened, I just hate being propagandised to.

On days like today I am bloody glad I haven't payed my BBC license fee in about 12 years