From WaPo, based on a report by the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies:

ODESSA, Ukraine -- For 50 years under Soviet rule, nearly everything about the Odessa Antiplague Station was a state secret, down to the names of the deadly microbes its white-coated workers collected and stored in a pair of ordinary freezers.

Today, the Soviets are gone but the lab is still here, in this Black Sea port notorious for its criminal gangs and black markets. It is just one of more than 80 similar "antiplague" labs scattered across the former Soviet Union, from the turbulent Caucasus to Central Asian republics that share borders with Iran and Afghanistan. Each is a repository of knowledge, equipment and lethal pathogens that weapons experts have said could be useful to bioterrorists.[emphasis mine]

The article details the lack of security to prevent left at many of these plants, the lack of high-tech safety measures to protect those who work with these pathogens, and the paucity of programs to help these scientists.

On the heels of this article comes an announcement from the FSB (successors to the KGB) that Chechen terrorists are trying to secure WMD. Desire for such is nothing new. When Chechen terrorists took over the Nord-Ost theater in Moscow three years ago, the stage of the a prominent new Russian musical was not their first target; a nearby R.A.S. Institute had unexpectedly proven too well-guarded for their plan to take it over to succeed. FSB Director Nikolai Patrushev did not say where the recent terrorist attempts to gain WMDs took place, or when. He spoke as members of the Commonwealth of Independent States engaged in a counterterrorism exercise in the Caspian Sea.

As a recent film, Last Best Chance dramatizes, the steps to keep WMDs, particularly nukes, out of terrorist hands are clear: secure all existing weapons, secure key elements necessary for their production, and provide former weapons scientists with real alternatives to "going rogue." [this film is distributed as a free DVD by NTI, an NGO founded by Senator Nunn and Ted Turner]

As the WaPo article notes:

The obscurity of the antiplague stations is hampering their ability to fix the problems, the researchers said. The institutes were not officially part of the Soviet bioweapons complex, so they have been deemed ineligible for the tens of millions of dollars in aid given each year by U.S. and Western governments to keep former weapons scientists from selling their expertise.

Speak up. Become concerned. Raise awareness of this issue with your Senators and Representatives in Congress.

In 1981, when he was ten years old, Keith Beauchamp discovered copies of the original published photographs of Emmett Till's corpse in a box in his parents' house. His parents used the photographs as a warning, advising him that he must be careful not to do anything that could cause him to share Till's fate. In 1996, Beauchamp began to direct the documentary The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till, interviewing surviving witnesses and passing their statements on to the Department of Justice, which reopened the case last year.

It was 1981 when he discovered those photos, and he was in Baton Rouge, living in the city that is my home, the year before I was born. I hadn't heard of the documentary until I saw an ad for it as I was leaving the Film Forum with an old friend, also from Baton Rouge.

I was shocked---so recent, and at home---to read this, but should have known about this by now. Subtract the photos and deliberate imagery, and what the Beauchamp was told as a high school student, dating interracially, is the flip side of the message I know was given to white high school student, also dating interracially, about taking care as to which parts of towns she went with her boyfriend. It was always, though, in the back of my mind: surely the girl's parents didn't mean that; it was just a convenient excuse for parents who disliked the boyfriend (possibly because of his race) to use. Buffoons to be ignored.

I was back home in Baton Rouge last weekend, and as several of us gathered at Chimes, talking on topics that finally avoided all of the wedding talk that preceded the celebration we'd just attended, I brought up the story of the movie's creation. Again, my friends from home were shocked. The story of Emmett Till was known to us, had been known for years before, but as an element of the past; the reopened case was insufficient justice long overdue, but also an expected trend in the South, as with the Nazi hunters after the Holocaust and other searches begin once searchers can be mobilized, to find witnesses and convict the guilty before they all pass. Emmett Till had not been present in our lives, growing up, as a threat derived from the reality of the world around us, or as proof that the enough brave searchers had not yet met.

After reading, and after telling this story I sat in silence as the world grew a little darker, home a little less idyllic, and I a little more cognizant of my blindness. Brave and talented are those who bring this recognition.

NYT movie review