Reuters reports: “Russia’s paramount leader, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, hinted he would return to the presidency in 2012 for six more years and said democracy protesters marching without permission deserved to be beaten.

Asked by the Kommersant daily newspaper in an interview whether Russia’s 2012 presidential election did not worry him because he had already decided it, Putin replied:

‘No, it interests me like…I wanted to say like everyone, but in fact more than everyone else. But I don’t want to make a fetish out of it.’

Putin ruled as president from 2000 to 2008 before handing the presidency to his chosen successor Dmitry Medvedev, in order to observe a law banning a third consecutive term.

However Putin will be free to run again in 2012 for a newly extended term of six years.

‘The most important thing is that these problems of 2012 don’t derail us from the path of stable development,’ Putin added in the interview.

Kommersant said it was conducted during a 180-km (110-mile) drive in his bright yellow Lada Kalina car between the cities of Khabarovsk and Chita in Russia’s Far East.

Putin’s remarks in the extended interview with his longtime favourite journalist Andrei Kolesnikov were immediately seized upon by some Moscow commentators as further evidence that he would return to the Kremlin in two years time…” (Will Putin become the “Gog of Magog” who leads Russia in the first invasion of Israel? Time will tell – Ezekiel 38:1, 2, 8, 11, and 16.)

SpaceDaily.com reports: “It has been of one of Europe’s worst nightmares: traffickers obtaining highly-radioactive materials on the loose in the former Soviet Union with the help of corrupt officials and passing them on to rogue groups looking to make a dirty bomb.

The seizure of two kilogrammes of uranium in Moldova, an impoverished ex-Soviet nation bordering the EU member Romania, is a stark reminder of just how available and poorly guarded nuclear materials can be, analysts said.

Moldovan police said they had seized a container with 1.8 kilogrammes of highly-radioactive Uranium-238 and arrested a group of suspected traffickers who had sought to sell it for nine million euros (11 million dollars).

The United States has said it provided technical assistance to Moldova in the case, which the US State Department described as a ‘serious smuggling attempt’.

‘Hundreds of thousands of tonnes of uranium lie in storage at industrial sites, one can take bagfuls of them,’ independent Russian military expert Pavel Felgenhauer told AFP…” (The non-proliferation treaty signed by presidents Obama and Medvedev will fail – perhaps when and if Putin returns in 2012.)