'Blowing Up Russia' contains the attacks of ex-spy Alexander Litvinenko against his former spymasters in Moscow which led to his being murdered in London by poisoning. Litvinenko and Yuri Felshtinsky detail how, since 1999, the secret service has been hatching a secret plot to return to the terror that was the hallmark of the KGB.

Butterfly ballots, balky machines, absentee ballot scandals, felons voting, Supreme Court intervention - all these made headlines during the infamous 2000 Florida recount. Could it happen again in this year's presidential election? The answer is yes, because not much has changed to improve our election systems, while both major parties are poised on a hair trigger to file lawsuits and challenge any close statewide vote. The issues may boil down to whether the margin of victory in any state exceeds the ''margin of litigation. John Fund offers a guided tour of our error-prone election systems, which nearly half of Americans say they don't trust. When some states have systems so flawed that you can't tell where incompetence ends and possible fraud begins, it isn't surprising that scandals have ranged from rural Texas to big cities such as Milwaukee and St. Louis. Fund dissects some anomalies of Florida 2000 and analyzes the bitterly protracted election for governor of Washington State in 2004. He spotlights the perils of ''provisional ballots, the flaws of the ''Motor Voter law that has allowed people to get absentee ballots for phantom voters, and the shady registration drives of the radical group ACORN. Meanwhile, the simple safeguard of a photo ID requirement is fiercely resisted on specious claims that it would disenfranchise poor and minority voters. Stealing Elections presents a chilling portrait of electoral vulnerability, as a combination of bureaucratic bungling and ballot rigging put our democracy at risk.

The first reports seemed absurd. A Russian dissident, formerly an employee of the KGB and its successor, the FSB, had seemingly been poisoned in a London hotel. As Alexander Litvinenko's condition worsened, however, and he was transferred to hospital and placed under armed guard, the story took a sinister turn. On 23 November 2006, Litvinenko died, apparently from polonium-210 radiation poisoning. He himself, in a dramatic statement from his deathbed, accused his former employers at the Kremlin of being responsible for his murder. Who was Alexander Litvinenko? What had happened in Russia since the end of the Cold War to make his life there untenable, and even in severe jeopardy in Britain? How did he really die, and who killed him? In his spokesman and close friend, Alex Goldfarb, and widow Marina, we have two people who know more than anyone about the real Sasha Litvinenko, and about his murder. Their riveting book sheds astonishing light not just on these strange and troubling events but also on the biggest crisis in relations with Russia since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Based on the author's 20 years of insider's knowledge of Russian spy campaigns, this title describes how the successor of the KGB fabricated terrorist attacks and launched war to have the unknown Putin - the author's former superior at the Russian secret service elected with a landslide victory.

In late November 2006 the world was shaken by the ruthless assassination in London of Alexander Litvinenko, a former Lt Col of the Russian security service (FSB). The murder was the most notorious crime committed by the Russian intelligence on foreign soil in over three decades. The author, Boris Volodarsky, who was consulted by the Metropolitan Police during the investigation and remains in close contact with Litvinenko’s widow, is a former Russian military intelligence officer and an international expert in special operations. His narrative reveals that since 1917 – beginning with Lenin and his Cheka – the Russian security services have regularly carried out bespoke poisoning operations all over the world to eliminate the enemies of the Kremlin. The author proves that the Litvinenko’s poisoning is just one episode in the chain of murders that continues until the present day. Some of these assassinations or attempted assassinations are already known, others are revealed here for the first time. Uniquely Volodarsky has had a personal involvement in almost every each of the 20 cases, from the radioactive thallium poisoning of the Soviet defector Nikolai Khokhlov in Frankfurt in September 1957 to the ricin ‘umbrella murder’ of the Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov in London in 1978. "Here, for the fan of murder thrillers and modern history alike, is a cracking good read. In brilliant light we see what lay for nearly a century behind the London polonium poisoning of British citizen Alexander Litvinenko, former Russian. It was just one recent hit by the world's most prolific serial killer -- the Russian state. With original research guided by his insider's eye and scholarly care, Boris Volodarsky recounts scores of murders. Assassination emerges as state policy, as institutionalized bureacracy, as day-to-day routine, as laboratory science, as a branch of medicine researching ways not to stave off death but to deliver it in apparently innocent or accidental forms, and as engineering technology, devising ever-new devices to meet each new requirement, from umbrella tips and cigarette cases and rolled-up newspapers -- to Litvinenko's teacup." Tennent H. Bagley, former CIA chief of Soviet Bloc counterintelligence.

Reads like a true crime investigation. Hard-hitting anti-communist slant by dissident critic of the communist regime.